The Secret Keeper

by Kate Morton

She knew quite certainly that her parents had never felt love, no matter the stories they liked to tell about the way they met. Oh, they loved each other well enough, but it was a safe, old-person’s love, the sort expressed in shoulder rubs and endless cups of tea. No—Laurel sighed heatedly. It was safe to say that neither had ever known the other sort of love, the sort with fireworks and racing hearts and physical—she blushed—desires.

In some indescribable way it seemed kinder to deceive a person who took pride in runner beans than it was to force her to accept the fact that the world had changed.

The problem was the war. It had been over for sixteen years—all her life—and the world had moved on. Everything was different now; gas masks, uniforms, ration cards, and all the rest of it belonged only in the big old khaki trunk her father kept in the attic. Sadly, though, some people didn’t seem to realize it—namely, the entire population over the age of twenty-five.

adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

Children could be self-centered like that, especially the happy ones. And the Nicolson children had been happier than most.

“Don’t be like I was, Laurel. Don’t wait too long to realize what’s important. Your family might drive you mad sometimes, but they’re worth more to you than you could ever imagine.”

Children don’t require of their parents a past, and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

Laurel knew quite a bit about keeping secrets. She also knew that was where the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.

The landscape of one’s childhood was more vibrant than any other. It didn’t matter where it was or what it looked like, the sights and sounds imprinted differently from those encountered later. They became part of a person, inescapable.

It was unsettling, Laurel thought, suppressing a shiver, how quickly a person’s presence could be erased, how easily civilization gave way to wilderness.

Fairness might be the great sticking point for all siblings, but it was an obsession for those in the middle.

It was her mother’s lack of understanding on the matter of Dolly’s future that vexed her most of all.

It was perfect. She was going to marry Jimmy. How had it not been the first thing she thought of when her mother asked her what she wanted to do instead of starting work at Father’s factory? It was the only thing she wanted to do. The very thing she must do.

Best of all was the way she’d kissed him back; there was a future in that kiss. They might come from opposite sides of town, but they weren’t so different, not where it counted, not in the way they felt about each other.

Jimmy walked a pretty steady emotional line, and Dolly’s passions caught him off guard sometimes. They were intoxicating, though: she was never pleased if she could be delighted, never annoyed if she could be furious.

He loved the way she could take a simple truth and turn it into something wonderful with the gleaming threads of her incredible imagination.

He loved Dolly’s dreams, her infectious spirit; Jimmy had never felt so alive as he had since he met her. But it was up to him to be sensible about their future, to be wise enough for the two of them. They couldn’t both fall prey to fancies and dreams; no good would come of that.

A lesser woman would’ve gone stark raving mad.”

Because people who’d led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

“My mother was a survivor; she’s a survivor still. If I’ve inherited half her courage, I can count myself a very lucky woman.”

“Oh, now look—here’s a cheerier one. Lord Dumphee has become engaged to the Honourable Eva Hastings.” “Nothing cheery about an engagement.” “Of course not, Lady Gwendolyn.”

“All very well for a dull sort of girl to hitch her wheel to a man’s wagon, but consider yourself warned, Dorothy—men enjoy a bit of sport, and they all like to catch the brightest prize, but once they do? That’s when the fun and games end. His games, her fun.”

The whole thing had amused her at first, but now she couldn’t think why: it seemed absolutely the right way for the girls to act.

Jimmy was glad she’d found someone to help her with her grief, of course he was; he just wished it could have been him.

Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.

No, Dolly wasn’t one bit frightened anymore, not of being hit by the bombers—it was difficult to explain, but somehow she just knew it wasn’t her fate.

He’d thought there’d never be another woman he could love that much. And then he’d met Dolly.

Dolly Smitham loved him, they were going to be married, and nothing would ever be wrong again.

“You just have to look for the pictures,”

“If you ever find yourself alone in the dark, they’ll show you the way back.”

“But I can’t see any ...

“That’s because you’re looking at the stars themselves,”

“instead of the spaces in between. You have to draw lines in your mind; that’s when you’ll begin to see the whole picture.”

Jimmy sometimes thought, concealing the essence of a person, the very things that made her vulnerable and real and therefore most beautiful to him. Dolly’s complexities and imperfections were part of what he loved about her.

I should add that there is an uncanny quiet about her. She chooses, when other children might be running and larking about the decks, to hide herself away and sit almost entirely still. It is an unnatural stillness, and one for which I had not been prepared.

“I fell asleep beside the creek back home and I haven’t woken up yet.”

“When I open my eyes and see that I’m home again.”

What disturbs me more is Vivien’s seeming gladness in the face of punishment. Or if not gladness, because that is not it precisely, her resignation, almost relief, when met with reprimand.

The expression in her eyes as she was scolded was one almost of relief.

Why, I wondered, would a child willingly accept punishment, particularly for a crime they hadn’t committed?

she has come to believe the death of her family was her fault in some way.

“The sound of the wheels turning.”

“I can’t hear them anymore.”

Despite myself, and against the best theories of my chosen career—to observe but not absorb—I have developed strong personal feelings for her.

Vivien is at risk of disappearing deep inside the safety of the dream world she’s created, remaining a stranger to the real world of human beings, and thus becoming easy prey, as she grows to adulthood, to those who would look to gain by her ill treatment. One wonders (suspicious-mindedly perhaps) as to the uncle’s reason for accepting the child as his ward. Duty? It is possible. A fondness for children? Afearedly not. With the beauty she is sure to attain, and the vast wealth I have learned she will inherit at maturity, I worry there is much she will possess that others may seek to take.

“I worry there is much she will possess that others may seek to take.”

nobody likes a girl who always expects more than the others?

The power of suggestion is a tremendous thing. If we all say we can see the fairy, then the audience will too.”

He’d started to perceive a growing—well, not a warmth but at least an increasing thaw between them, and one day in mid-April, when the children had run off to lunch and he and Vivien were left packing up the ship, he’d asked her whether she had any of her own.

Jimmy loved Dolly, that would never change—for Jimmy, loyalty was like breathing—but as he looked across the table at her, he thought that he didn’t really like her much right then.