The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

  ‘Oughtn’t we do that now?’

  ‘No. Let me deal with them.’ Inigo was raring to go.

  ‘All right. I’ll wait here,’ I said.

  ‘No, come to the landing. That way you can look out for me from a safe distance. If they give chase, run into the Wellington room and bolt the door.’

  I pulled on my dressing gown.

  We crept downstairs to the landing, barely daring to breathe, and Inigo signalled that I should stay where I was while he went on to investigate. From our vantage point we could see that a lamp in the hall had been knocked over. The bearskin rug growled up at us threateningly. If I were a burglar, I wouldn’t be too happy to wind up in a place like Magna, I thought. I gripped Inigo’s arm.

  ‘There!’ I whispered. ‘There’s a light coming from under the library door!’

  ‘I hope they take Aunt Sarah’s painting.’

  ‘Oh, I hope not!’ I said in alarm.

  Inigo’s face took on a determined look. ‘They aren’t very professional. I just heard one of them knocking into something and saying “Ouch” like a girl. Right. I’m going in,’ he said.

  ‘I’m coming too!’ I whimpered, fear of being left alone outweighing the fear of what Inigo and I were going to find. I would love to have seen us both that night, as we stole down to the hall, Inigo’s cricket bat raised out before us, eyes straining in the half-gloom. The hall was spooky at night, the familiar faces in the portraits on the walls too knowing, the low windows dark with shadows and secrets, the animal heads all breathing. We hovered outside the library. Inigo pressed his ear to the door.

  ‘I can hear pages being turned,’ he whispered incredulously. ‘Of all the cheek! Right, that does it!’

  ‘No, you—’

  But he had marched forward.

  ‘Right! The game’s up! Hand over what you’ve taken and nothing more will be said of this!’ he ordered, sounding jolly grown up. I quivered outside the door, heart crashing, hands sweating—’

  ‘Good God, put that thing down, will you?’

  It was a girl’s voice. An American voice. Slowly, I stuck my head round the door and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. Sitting in Mama’s chair, a battered copy of Philip Miller’s Gardener’s and Botanist’s Dictionary on her lap and an overnight bag on the floor beside her, was Marina Hamilton. She was beautifully dressed, as ever, but I noticed that her pert heels had trailed mud into the room, her stockings were ripped and her skirt was crumpled. Fido lay at her feet, and looked up at us as we came in with a sort of what-on-earth-are-you-two-doing expression. Traitor, I thought, thinking, irrationally, that Marina wasn’t the sort one would expect to be good with dogs. But then, after this episode, I didn’t think that I would ever try to predict anything about anyone ever again. I decided to stay out of her line of vision for a moment. Inigo could find out what on earth she was doing.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  Marina stood up and wobbled slightly, her eyes wild and slightly crossed, and I realised, with a rush of glee, that she was very drunk.

  ‘I’ve come to see Harry,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Yes! Don’t pretend he’s not here! Where is he? Where is she?’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Penelope, of course!’

  ‘By Penelope, I presume you mean my sister Penelope?’ It took a minute for the meaning of these words to sink in. ‘Oh, you’re Penelope’s brother? Well! I would never have guessed. Goodness, but you’re divine! You don’t have your sister’s nose, do you?’ She stood up and crossed the room towards him, catching her right foot on a rug and tripping slightly as she went. ‘It’s a pretty uncommon way to meet, but it shurtainly is my pleasure.’ She grinned broadly. Inigo, bewildered, shook her hand.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘What are you doing breaking in like this? You know, I could call the police—”

  ‘No. Oh, no, please!’ Marina held her hand to her chest, her red lipstick quivering. It was a sensational show, and from behind the door I was starting to enjoy myself, in spite of everything.

  ‘Do you have a cigarette?’ she asked Inigo huskily. He reached into the pocket of his pyjamas and pulled out a packet. Stepping up to the fireplace, he flicked open his lighter and lit it for her. ‘Oh, thank you so much. You are a sweet thing.’

  I decided it was about time I said something so I pushed myself out from behind the door into the room.

  ‘Oh, Penelope!’ Marina reeled and nearly fell over for the second time.

  ‘Hello, Marina.’

  ‘You know this girl?’ asked Inigo.

  Marina composed herself and wobbled up to me. With the sort of high class drama that one would expect from an actress of her calibre, she reached out and touched my cheek. Her hands were cold. ‘Heartbreaker,’ she said softly.

  Inigo coughed and she turned back to him.

  ‘Do I see whisky on that tray?’ she asked.

  Inigo was already pouring her a double. ‘Water?’ he asked her.

  ‘No thank you.’ She took a generous gulp of the stuff, then staggered back into Mama’s chair. ‘Where is he? Where’s my love?’

  ‘Your love?’ repeated Inigo, looking at me in bewildered irritation. Marina ignored him.

  ‘Oh! My poor darling shoes!’ she wailed, noticing the mud for the first time. She pulled out a handkerchief and stretched down to try to wipe them clean but lost her balance and fell off the chair and into a heap on the floor. ‘Gracious!’ she giggled. ‘I fell!’

  Inigo and I hauled her back up onto the chair. We could be here till dawn waiting for an explanation, I thought.

  ‘I think I’ll have a whisky, Inigo.’

  He poured us both a drink and poked at the fire and got it going a bit, so that after five minutes we were sitting in relative comfort. I flopped onto the sofa and wrapped an ancient travelling rug round my knees.

  Despite (or perhaps because of) her inebriated state, Marina’s hair looked magnificent. She resembled a flame-haired version of Natalie Wood at the end of Rebel Without A Cause. Her elegantly cut wide-legged trousers were soaked and muddy at the bottom, but nothing could distract from the narrow curve of her tiny waist. Her generous bosom spilled out of a low-cut red blouse that had come unbuttoned to a degree verging on indecent, resulting in an overall effect that was, naturally enough, pure sex. Unlike Charlotte, whose appeal came from her very English brand of stylised chaos and breathless excitement, Marina was pure, unapologetic Los Angeles swish, even after too much to drink and a night walk on a muddy grass verge. Inigo gave me a look as if to say, well she’s your friend! You ask the questions! I sensed that he was frustrated to have been caught looking about twelve in his glasses and pyjamas, but then who dresses up to confront intruders? Marina would, I supposed.

  ‘What are you doing here, Marina?’ I asked sensibly. It seemed like the right place to start, though I was fairly sure that I already knew the answer.

  ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’

  ‘Eden set to succeed Churchill?’ suggested Inigo. Marina giggled loudly.

  ‘You’re a doll, aren’t you? No, my news, silly. It’s all off The wedding. George and I. I’ve called it off. Off, off, off, off, off Don’t you just adore the word “off”! So expressive. So off’

  ‘Off?’ repeated Inigo, dumbly. I supposed I should stop imagining that I would get any sense out of him now.

  ‘So I’ve come to find Harry, to tell him that the whole engagement was an awful’ — she pronounced it ‘are-full’ —’mistake.’

  ‘Harry?’ exclaimed Inigo.

  Oh help, here we go, I thought.

  Marina loaded her eyes and fixed me with her siren’s gaze. ‘I can’t bear it any more,’ she said.

  ‘What’s all this?’ interrupted Inigo. Marina ignored him.

  ‘Harry and Penelope! Penelope and Harry! Oh! Even your names sound romantic together!’ She started laughing again, but it was hollow, mirthless laughter tha
t made me a little afraid. She shook her head in wonder. ‘Who would have thought that I could be jealous of someone like you.’

  In her defence, I don’t think that she meant this unkindly. It was, in fact, a perfectly reasonable question and I half admired her for speaking it out loud. She stood up again and started to pace the room, her feet creaking over the library’s ancient floorboards. I sensed the ghost of Aunt Sarah looking on, gripped.

  ‘I can’t marry George because when I saw you with Harry the other night, I nearly died,’ she said simply.

  ‘You and Harry?’ spluttered Inigo in my direction. I glared at him.

  ‘The way he kept looking at you when Rocky was talking to you — the way his eyes lit up when you walked into the room, the way you sneaked off together after coffee, the way he kissed you, oh!’ She covered her eyes with her hands as if the scene was being replayed on a screen in front of her. ‘It was too much. I realised then, that if I didn’t get him back, I might as well stop living. You’ll never guess what I did?’ she added, looking a little bit guilty.

  ‘What?’ demanded Inigo.

  ‘I set the birds free,’ she whispered dramatically.

  ‘The birds?’ Inigo was thrown.

  ‘Oh my word, the birds!’ I cried, suddenly realising exactly what she was talking about.

  ‘The parakeets Harry gave me for my engagement. I just couldn’t bear to see them locked up any more. I set them free on the way out of town.’

  ‘Where?’ I demanded.

  ‘Richmond somewhere. I don’t know. I asked the driver to stop where he thought the birds would be happy and I just opened the cage and off they flew. They were kinda confused to start with — didn’t understand that they were free. I guess they’re not used to it. It made me so happy for about five minutes. Then I got back into the cab and we drove off again and I thought how silly! They probably won’t last a day in this weather.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t bank on it,’ said Inigo comfortingly. ‘Who knows, maybe there’ll be thousands of wild parakeets all over London in fifty years’ time.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Marina, pressing a hand to her heaving bosom. ‘Oh! That makes me feel so much happier! D’you really think they might survive?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I said witheringly. I felt cross with Marina. Those birds would have been marvellous in the nut garden aviary.

  ‘He doesn’t want me any more,’ she moaned dully. swiftly returning to the topic of Harry.

  I opened my mouth to tell her that there was nothing to worry about, that he had never stopped loving her and that I had been nothing more than a pawn in his game, but stopped myself. Let her think that he loved me, I decided. It was rather fun. Harry had got himself into this, so he could provide all the explanations. So instead of confessing I said, ‘Don’t you think you’re being a tiny bit over-dramatic?’

  She stared at me, incredulous. ‘Can you imagine the horror of losing the man you love to another woman?’ she demanded.

  ‘But how do you think he felt when you ran off with George? You can’t have loved him that much, to agree to marry another,’ I said indignantly.

  ‘I was blind!’ cried Marina, flinging her hands up into the air this time. ‘Blinded by what I thought I wanted: money, success, a rich man — someone to pick up the bills and open doors and adore me. George is a sweetie, but he’s not Harry. He doesn’t spark like Harry. He doesn’t fill me with passion like Harry. He doesn’t make me want to take off my clothes and fling myself at his feet like Harry.’

  Even I was taken aback by these words, and Inigo, who clearly had no trouble accessing his imagination for this image, blushed to his very roots. Despite my role in the affair, and the fact that I was supposed to know the answer, I couldn’t help asking: ‘Just what is it about Harry that you find so irresistible?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Marina miserably. ‘He’s the most alluring man I’ve ever met. He has that certain something that very few people have. I suppose I have it, so I recognise it in other people,’ she added, entirely without irony. Tally ho! I thought, back to the old Marina. ‘I’d been tearing myself to pieces ever since I heard that he had taken up with you. Everyone said how well suited you were, how charming you were, how pretty and sweet.

  Well! I thought. At least she won’t have my intelligence. Then I hear that you’re studying Shakespeare and that you and Charlotte can’t get enough of Tennyson!’ (Gosh! I thought. I like that rumour!) Marina was rattling on now, stopping only to drain her whisky. ‘The worst thing of all was hearing about this place, Milton Magna. I heard that Harry came here for an afternoon and he — I heard he — heard he — he — performed for you.

  ‘Performed?’’

  ‘Magic,’ whispered Marina. She was certainly enjoying herself now. ‘Magic,’ she repeated. ‘It’s how he seduced me. And he did it to you too. Here at Milton Magna — the very name of this house has haunted my soul. The place where you first kissed, the place where you first laughed together. I couldn’t stop torturing myself, so I decided I had to see you with him again, one more time. I made sure that you were invited to the Ritz. I needed to convince myself that he really. really loved you. So you were. And he does.’ She sat down again and absent-mindedly opened a box of After Eight mints that had been sitting by Mama’s reading lamp since Christmas.

  ‘How did George take the news?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, calm as a cucumber. He won’t talk to me, of course. In a few months he’ll be thanking his lucky stars that he didn’t marry me. I’d have ruined him,’ she said simply. ‘even if I hadn’t been in love with another man.’ She bit into a mint. Funny, I thought idly, she chews just like the guinea pig.

  ‘Do you want to explain why you’re here?’ managed Inigo, removing his specs and pulling forward his hair. Marina looked down at her hands.

  ‘Where else was I to go? This afternoon — heavens, was it only today? it feels like another century — I turned up at Harry’s mother’s house in Kensington again, and was told that he wasn’t at home. Charlotte was a darling; she plied me with tea — I couldn’t eat a thing — and invited me to spend the evening with her. By eleven o’clock, Harry was still out and I had a vision, a sudden flash of realisation that he was with you at Milton Magna. I told Charlotte I was going back to Dorset House, but first I went to Claridges and ordered myself a bottle of Moet and drank the lot. Then I went back home, threw a few things into a bag, collected the parakeets and took a taxi all the way here. It cost me fourteen pounds’ — Inigo gasped admiringly at this — ‘and the paparazzi followed me nearly all the way, vultures that they are. My nice taxi driver threw them off the scent when we got close to your place. He dropped me at the bottom of your drive. I had to walk up to the house alone, and I’m afraid I wasn’t wearing the right shoes.’ She started to weep again. ‘When I got to the front door, I found it wasn’t locked, so I just walked in. I suppose I thought I would find myself another drink then go and find Harry.’

  ‘But you got distracted by The Gardener’s Dictionary,’ I couldn’t resist saying.

  Marina ignored me and picked up another book from the shelf in front of her. ‘The Constant Nymph,’ she whispered. ‘H-H-Harry used to call me his nymph. I’m afraid I wasn’t very constant.’ She pulled out a handkerchief. ‘Now he’s lost. I am undone.’

  ‘Well, he’s not here,’ I said frankly.

  ‘Don’t pretend! I know he’s here!’ Marina stood up and lurched again and steadied herself with her mint-free hand.

  ‘Why would I have to pretend to you?’ I said. ‘I promise he’s not here. I have no idea where he is but I expect we can find him tomorrow.

  ‘Why isn’t he here?’ wept Marina. ‘I came all this way, all this way!’

  ‘In a taxi,’ added Inigo.

  ‘In a taxi!’ agreed Marina. ‘And I tore the hem of my pants fighting my way up your driveway. I’ve ruined my shoes! I don’t do this sort of thing, do you understand what I’m saying, Penelope? It’s not usual. It’s not
like me.’ She looked genuinely distressed.

  ‘Sometimes doing things we don’t normally do can be great fun,’ I observed.

  ‘And sometimes doing things we don’t normally do can be a pain in the ass — don’t patronise me just because you’ve got the guy.

  Inigo’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘Lucky Mama’s not here,’ I muttered, nearly swooning with the horror of imagining Talitha waking up to the sound of Marina’s shrill American tones echoing through the house.

  ‘Your mother? I’ve heard she’s one of the great beauties of all time,’ said Marina.

  ‘Apparently,’ I said.

  ‘Do you take after her?’ she asked Inigo.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. People say that there’s a slight resemblance.’

  ‘They’re identical,’ I said wearily.

  ‘You’re a doll,’ said Marina. ‘I like your hair.’

  Inigo blushed again. Please no, I thought. Spare Inigo.

  ‘Do you think perhaps it would be a good idea if we showed you upstairs?’ I asked her, bracing myself for another outburst. To my surprise, her eyes drooped.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ she admitted. ‘I came all this way! I came to find him!’

  ‘We can all look for him in the morning,’ I said, mother to infant.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked again, her voice slurring. She closed her eyes and her head lolled onto the back of the chair.

  ‘Inigo, I’ll show her to the red room,’ I said in a low voice. ‘I don’t think she’s going to remember much of this conversation in the morning.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,’ said Inigo, draining his whisky.

  So had bloody Harry, I thought, leading Marina upstairs. ‘Whoops!’ she giggled, catching her foot on the rug on the way out of the room, and grabbing at the back of my nightdress on her way to the floor. She bought me down with her and for a moment we struggled together on the rug, Marina giggling so hard that I found it virtually impossible not to join in, in spite of myself. I clambered to my feet.

  ‘Oh, I’ve torn your nightdress! she wailed.