The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

  We stopped by the little marble Apollo, peering out over the nut garden. Charlotte put her gloved hands on his feet.

  ‘The more you know, the more intimidating it becomes, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘When we were little, all Inigo and I did in the garden was stuff ourselves with fruit,’ I said. ‘And the yews and the box hedges — they were perfect for games and hideouts. There wasn’t anywhere in the garden that we didn’t make our own.’ I pulled at the branch of an apple tree and an inch of snow slithered onto the ground with a soft plop. ‘The ladies from the WI were up here all the time during the war, picking fruit. Mama stood about issuing orders but she was never much good at getting her hands dirty. She kept on saying that no war was going to turn her into a dowdy old woman with rough hands.’

  I felt disloyal saying it, but at the same time, talking like this came as a relief.

  Charlotte exclaimed at everything — at the snaky boughs of the apple and cherry trees still laden with snow, at Mark Antony, our cockerel, crowing fit to burst from the roof of the hen house —yet all the while succeeded in creating a strange impression of having planned everything herself. Her face suited the cold weather; when her nose shone red and her cheeks glowed pink, she looked like a model from the front of the knitting patterns that Mary was always sending off for.

  I led us into the fairy wood.

  ‘Gosh!’ said Charlotte, picking up a handful of snow and moulding it into a ball. We ducked under the first cluster of branches, then followed the path that weaved through the wood and would eventually lead us out at the top of the drive. The world was cast in white and silver with the occasional burst of colour from the scarlet berries of the holly trees. I couldn’t have planned a more spectacular morning if I had tried.

  ‘I suppose Harry’s shown you the invitation,’ said Charlotte at last. ‘I tried to persuade him that you would have far better things to do than hang around with him at some dumb party of Marina’s — but he just said that anything was worth a try and you looked like the sort of girl who would get under Marina’s skin. I think that’s a compliment, by the way.’

  I laughed, embarrassed. ‘I must admit that I’d love to see what they’ve done to Dorset House.’

  ‘Harry’s pretty good company at parties,’ said Charlotte, throwing her snowball into the air and catching it again. ‘He’s one of those rare characters who improves with drink.’

  ‘Do you think he’s wasting his time trying to get her back?’

  ‘Who knows? Being as dedicated to oneself as Marina is leaves so little time to focus on anyone else. I think she did love him, though,’ she added unexpectedly. ‘I only saw them together a couple of times. He claims he made her laugh. Girls love that, don’t they?’ There was that regretful tone to her voice that she had had when she talked about the mysterious Andrew. She cleared her throat and threw her snowball away. ‘You wait till you meet her! Harry was never good-looking enough for a girl like Marina,’ she said. ‘Too short, and way too different. I can’t imagine the Hamilton family settling for someone as asymmetrical as Harry.’

  ‘What — what happened to his eyes? Was he born like that?’

  Charlotte groaned. ‘Oh don’t! I was dreading your asking me that question.’ She bit her lip and took a deep breath. ‘His eyes are odd because I stabbed him in the eye with a pencil when I was only two years old. He used to have two blue eyes. After my attack, one of them turned brown. Aunt Clare was horrified and convinced that he was going blind, which he wasn’t — though his vision in his brown eye isn’t entirely twenty-twenty.

  I squirmed. ‘Poor Harry!’

  ‘But isn’t it appropriate, for a magician?’

  ‘He’s certainly got the right look for the job,’ I admitted.

  ‘I’m always telling Aunt Clare that he couldn’t possibly be anything else because his eyes are too fairground for anything sensible. Would you honestly put your faith in a banker with one blue eye and one brown? It looks so indecisive, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s sort of like Johnnie Ray’s’ story,’ I said eagerly. ‘Dropped on the ground and losing his hearing as a little boy yet remaining even more determined to succeed—’

  ‘Like Johnnie Ray only not quite as successful,’ said Charlotte drily. ‘Aunt Clare despairs of him, as you know. She wanted him to be the sort of son who would make a fortune in the city and buy her a wonderful house in Mayfair. She considers herself extremely unfortunate that Harry’s ended up the way he has.’

  ‘My mother’s terrified that Inigo will bomb off to America and try his luck at a career in music,’ I said. ‘She’s more frightened of that than of him having to do National Service.’

  ‘All mothers are terrified of their sons, I think,’ said Charlotte. ‘I hope I have nothing but daughters myself.’

  ‘My mother doesn’t think much of me, most of the time. She can’t understand why I’m not already married. My father fainted when he first saw her.’’

  ‘No! Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s one of Mama’s Great Truths. You should only ever stick with a man who’s prepared to pass out when he first claps eyes on you.

  ‘Jolly sensible if you ask me. Andrew never fainted,’ said Charlotte. ‘He wouldn’t have dreamed of it. Still, he liked me enough to ask me to marry him.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘Oh yes. He wanted to marry me.’ She kicked at the snow. ‘It ruined everything.’

  ‘What did you say?’ I demanded.

  ‘No, of course.’

  The stillness of the morning gave her words resonance; her voice hung thickly in the frozen air.

  ‘Aunt Clare would have gone crackers,’ she said, ‘and I wouldn’t have blamed her. He’s utterly and totally wrong in every way except for one.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked her, knowing the answer.

  ‘I was mad for him,’ she said simply. ‘Still am. Mad for A the T.’ Then she changed the subject so fast that it could not have been more clear to me that I shouldn’t ask any more. ‘Where did your parents meet?’ she asked.

  ‘Here, at Magna. It was mid-June.’

  ‘June! It sounds like another country!’ said Charlotte.

  Yet even in the grip of winter, I could sense the heady fertility of that minty summer night in 1937. Under the diamond-hard November earth, another soft summer lurked, with its time-old promises, and heavy bees and love at first sight.

  ‘What’s your favourite one of Johnnie’s songs, anyway?’ asked Charlotte, swerving on to a different subject yet again.

  ‘Oh, you can’t possibly ask me that!’ I wailed. ‘I’d feel awful picking a favourite.’

  Charlotte laughed. ‘Don’t be so jolly wet, Penelope.’

  Just after Charlotte and I returned from the Fairy Wood, I found Harry in the library absorbed in Keats.

  ‘The train leaves in an hour,’ I announced. ‘Would you like something to eat before you go?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  I turned to leave him, sensing he wanted some time on his own.

  ‘The Long Gallery,’ he said suddenly. ‘Could you show it to me before we go?’’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, surprised and not at all pleased. ‘It’s all boarded up, I’m afraid.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We can’t get in.’

  ‘But you live here!’

  ‘I know.’

  Harry shrugged and went back to his book. I hovered, livid. ‘Oh all right then,’ I said ungraciously. ‘Just five minutes. And don’t come running to me if you crash through the floorboards and never walk again.’

  ‘How could I come running to you if I—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I interrupted him crossly.

  The Long Gallery is one of the oldest rooms in the house. Originally, it was used as a sort of exercise pen for the ladies who wanted to stretch their legs of an afternoon, but didn’t want to venture outside in the cold or rain (or snow, as the case may have been). Inigo and I used to spend hour upon
hour up there, because it is the perfect room for children — ideal for any number of games and far away enough to make as much noise as we liked. We loved the Long Gallery then. The black oak floor shone from centuries of footsteps swaying on the uneven boards. The barrel-vaulted ceiling gave us the exact sensation of being on a ship, and when the wind blew, one could almost feel the vessel under one’s feet creaking and careering over the waves.

  But I didn’t like to spend time in the Long Gallery any more. You see, we were up there, Inigo and I, playing a variation on marbles (the variation being that we didn’t know the rules but simply whizzed the glass balls along the floor and challenged each other to get to the end of the room without zooming off course) when Mary came upstairs to tell us that Papa had been killed. The Long Gallery died after that; became haunted. Its door remained locked; Mama admitted defeat and said that it was the one room that she simply couldn’t cope with any longer. Inigo and I were glad, though at eighteen I felt a kick of shame whenever I thought of it languishing away on the top floor — a room for centuries so full of life, so spectacular — left to the mice and spiders and woodworm. I felt too old to be afraid of it now.

  ‘Follow me,’ I instructed Harry, and he did — all the way up the stairs, four flights of them getting thinner and thinner with each ascending floor — until we were outside the Long Gallery. I turned the rusting key in the door and creaked it open as though Hitchcock was directing me; I half expected the world to turn black and white in that moment. I stood impatiently in the doorway while Harry stepped carefully inside the room. Today wasn’t the day for me to overcome my Long Gallery demons. I felt angry out of all proportion to this situation. In that moment, I thoroughly disliked Harry for making me open the door.

  And off he went with his first question.

  ‘What year does this room date from?’ he asked, running his hands along the wall.

  ‘It’s medieval, much like the rest,’ I said breezily. He shook his head.

  ‘The medieval period was pretty long,’ he said. ‘Any idea which decade within which century?’

  ‘Thirteen twenty-eight,’ I said wildly.

  He lay down on the floor and closed his eyes, which I found intensely irritating. He was doing it to annoy me, I thought.

  ‘Have you ever slept a night up here?’ he demanded horizontally. Always he was demanding, and every question that he asked me sounded like an accusation heavy with the assumption that my answer would always be wrong.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Too cold and scary.

  He closed his eyes again, with the annoying smirk back on his face. He thinks I’m pathetic, I thought.

  ‘Actually, I don’t like to come up here any more,’ I said defiantly. ‘I was up here when’ I heard that my father had been killed. It’s not a room that makes me feel very happy.’

  ‘How strange,’ Harry said simply. I hated him for it, and I hated myself for telling him the story, because it weakened me, and, more important, I realised that I had only told him to make him feel bad. ‘You shouldn’t waste a room like this,’ he said. He stood up and blinked and crossed the room to one of the windows and stared out at the snow-covered lawn. ‘What a place to look at the planets!’

  I felt myself heavy with melancholy and the soft romance of ages past — I could even hear the church bells tolling into the sharp air reminding me of Papa’s memorial service and Mama’s tears.

  ‘We’d better go,’ I said, not liking the sound of my own voice. ‘You don’t want to miss your train.’

  Harry turned to me with a burst of laughter. ‘You can’t wait to get rid of me, can you?’’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘You know what you should do?’

  ‘What?’

  He pushed back his hair. ‘Come up to London. I got myself into this whole silly mess with Marina, but at the very least it got me out of my mother’s clutches and into the dark corners of the Jazz Cafe. I think you need to do the same.

  For a moment I glared at him. At least I think I glared. My glares are pretty ineffectual as a general rule. Inigo says they make me look as though I’m sitting on a thistle.

  ‘You’re eighteen, for God’s sake,’ went on Harry. ‘If you don’t get out now, you never will.’

  ‘Get out?’

  ‘Yes, get out. I can only imagine the kind of pull that a house like this has on one, but you’ll never find Johnnie Ray out in the sticks.’

  ‘I’ll certainly come with you to the party, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ I said pertly.

  Harry laughed. ‘That’s a start. Oh, and don’t worry: if you get bored, Dorset House is stuffed full of the most amazing new paintings. Perfect for someone as interested in art as you,’ he added. He just couldn’t help himself, I thought sourly. I chose to keep a dignified silence as we made our way back downstairs.

  If we had been outside, I would have stuffed a snowball down his neck.

  Chapter 7

  ME AND THE IN CROWD

  If Mama sensed the change that had taken place at Magna after the snowy weekend, she didn’t show it. She arrived back from her three-day sojourn with Belinda weighed down with her usual selection of baffling presents — a fir cone dressed as a hedgehog dressed as a nurse for me, a pair of hideous lime-green slippers for Inigo, a woollen toothbrush holder for Mary — and announced that she had never had such a jolly time with anyone as she had with my godmother.’

  ‘She’s such a darling, but she really has become the most plain woman,’ she announced gleefully. ‘Such a shame. Goodness, when I think of her when we first met! She was such a beautiful girl, the longest eyelashes you had ever seen.’ This was another one of my mother’s classic devices: give praise to good looks that are long gone. I felt rather sorry for poor Belinda.

  ‘She surrounds herself with extraordinary men, of course,’ she said. ‘All of them closer to seventy than forty, but quite fascinating. The food was inedible, but then when is it ever not? All the men were too busy gassing away to care much. Oh! I must talk to Johns about the dining-room table.’

  I don’t think this was true. I don’t believe that she needed to talk to Johns in the slightest, but she obviously had no plans to ask us about our weekend. I was both relieved and highly irritated. Inigo did not seem to notice. I brought the subject up with him later that night after Mama had gone to bed.

  ‘Odd that Mama didn’t mention Charlotte and Harry,’ I said, poking at the fire. ‘You’d have thought she’d be dying to know how it went.’

  ‘Of course she is,’ said Inigo in surprise. ‘You are slow sometimes, Penelope. She wants to appear nonchalant, but inside she’s boiling over with curiosity and general what-happenedness. I wouldn’t bother telling her a thing. She’ll crack, sooner or later, mark my words.’

  ‘Why does everything have to be so complicated?’ I asked crossly. ‘You know, sometimes I get the distinct impression Mama’s keeping something to herself.’

  ‘Concerning what?’

  ‘Concerning Clare Delancy.’

  ‘Where did you get that idea?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just feel it, like a Thing from Space.’ Naturally, I didn’t want to admit that I’d been snooping around in Mama’s diary. ‘Why can’t she just be normal?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t wish that on anyone,’ said Inigo with a shudder. ‘And don’t be silly. Mama’s incapable of keeping anything to herself.’

  I went to bed after that. There seemed to be no point in arguing. Mama didn’t crack the next day, or the next. Nor did she crack when Harry telephoned me to make arrangements for the party. So in the end, of course, it was me who buckled under the pressure.

  ‘It’s Marina Hamilton’s party tonight, Mama,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s talking about it.’’

  Are they?’

  ‘Well — yes. I think so.’

  ‘If you only think so, there can’t be too much to talk about.’

  ‘I’ve heard they’ve flown a chef over from P
aris who’s going to cook omelettes at dawn,’ I said determinedly.

  ‘How revolting.’

  ‘Apparently Marina designed her dress herself.’

  ‘If she looks anything like her mother, it would be more accurate to tell me that she has designed her own tepee. Tania Hamilton has a frame like the figurehead of a pirate ship.’

  I played my trump card. ‘Well anyway. I shan’t be home tonight. I’m going to stay with Clare Delancy after the party.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Mama, looking genuinely baffled.

  ‘Oh, Mama, I asked you about her at our last duck supper. She said that she knew you and — and Papa. She’s my friend Charlotte’s aunt—’

  ‘Ah yes. Charlotte’s aunt. The cat lover.’

  ‘Amongst other things. She likes cakes too, and writing. She’s—’

  But Mama had moved on. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said irritatedly. ‘Do remember to tell Johns what time you want collecting from the station tomorrow. Oh, and Penelope, for goodness’ sake put your hair up. You can’t have it hanging round your face tonight like spaniels’ ears. And tell Mary to give your shoes a quick rub before you go.’

  ‘Yes Mama.’

  There was no doubt in my mind that she knew exactly who Aunt Clare was.

  That afternoon I climbed onto the train to London and fretted for most of the journey — was my hair really better up? what if I could find nothing to talk to anyone about? — so that by the time the train pulled up to the platform in London, I quite felt like running for the hills. At Paddington I was met by Charlotte in her green coat, carrying, of all things, a wire bird cage.

  ‘Parakeets,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Harry’s giving them to Marina as a wedding present. I imagine he sees some dark irony in it. I think he’s just plain cruel. I was thinking of setting them free in Hyde Park. What do you think?’

  I giggled. ‘Harry would never forgive you.’