The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

Central School. They’d been shocked and unhappy: hurt she’d gone behind their backs to audition, adamant she was too young to leave home, worried she wasn’t going to finish school and get her A levels. They’d sat with her around the kitchen table, taking it in turns to make reasonable arguments in exaggeratedly calm voices. Laurel tried to look bored, and when they’d finally finished she said, ‘I’m still going,’ with all the sulky vehemence one might expect from a confused and resentful teenager. ‘Nothing you say will change my mind. It’s what I want.’
    ‘You’re too young to know what you really want,’ her mother had said. ‘People change, they grow up, they make better decisions. I know you, Laurel—’
    ‘You don’t.’
    ‘I know you’re headstrong. I know you’re stubborn and determined to be different, that you’re full of dreams, just like I was—’
    ‘I’m not a bit like you,’ Laurel had said then, her pointed words cutting like a blade through her mother’s already shaky composure. ‘I’d never do the things you do.’
    ‘That’s enough!’ Stephen Nicolson put his arms around his wife. He signalled to Laurel that she should go upstairs to bed, but warned her that the conversation was far from over.
    Laurel lay in bed fuming as the hours passed; she wasn’t sure where her sisters were, only that they’d been put some-where else so as not to break her quarantine. It was the first time she could remember fighting with her parents and she was in equal parts exhilarated and crushed. It didn’t feel as if life could ever go back to how it had been before.
    She was still there, lying in the dark, when the door opened and someone walked carefully towards her. Laurel felt the edge of the bed depress when the person sat and then she heard Ma’s voice. She’d been crying, Laurel could tell, and the realisation, the knowledge that she was the cause, made her want to wrap her arms around her mother’s neck and never let go.
    ‘I’m sorry we fought,’ said Dorothy, a wash of moonlight falling through the window to illuminate her face; ‘It’s funny how things turn out. I never thought I’d argue with my daughter. I used to get in trouble when I was young—I always felt different from my parents. I loved them, of course, but I’m not sure they knew quite what to make of me. I thought I knew best and didn’t listen to a word they said.’
    Laurel smiled faintly, unsure where the conversation was headed, but glad her insides were no longer roiling like hot lava.
    ‘We’re similar, you and I,’ her mother continued. ‘I expect that’s why I’m so anxious you shouldn’t make the same mistakes I did.’
    ‘I’m not making a mistake, though.’ Laurel had sat up tall against her pillows. ‘Can’t you see that? I want to be an actress—drama school is the perfect place for someone like me.’
    ‘Laurel—’
    ‘Imagine you were seventeen, Ma, and your whole life was ahead of you. Can you think of anywhere else you’d rather go than London?’ It was the wrong thing to say—Ma had never shown the least interest in going up to London.
    There was a pause and a blackbird called to his friends out-side. ‘No,’ Dorothy had said eventually, softly and a little sadly as she reached to stroke the ends of Laurel’s hair. ‘No, I don’t suppose I can.’
    It struck Laurel now, that even then she’d been too self-absorbed to wonder or ask what her mother was actually like at seventeen, what it was she’d longed for, and what mistakes she’d made that she was so anxious her daughter should not repeat.
     
    Laurel held up the book Rose had given her and said, more shakily than she’d have liked, ‘It’s strange to see something of hers from before, isn’t it?’
    ‘Before what?’
    ‘Before us. Before this place. Before she was our mother. Just imag- ine—when she was given this book, when that photograph with Vivien was taken, she had no idea that we were out