The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

  That evening, Inigo took a copy of the New Musical Express to bed and Charlotte and I made ourselves mugs of cocoa in the kitchen and, deciding that we were not a bit tired, set up camp in the ballroom with a stack of records and a pile of rugs to keep us from freezing to death. Listening to Johnnie and talking about Rocky was an odd sensation — like overdosing on delight — and I was relieved that Charlotte was staying because without her to share how I was feeling I felt I might well have exploded with the effort of keeping it to myself.

  ‘Why do you think he’s never married?’ asked Charlotte, opening a packet of chocolate sandwich biscuits and dipping one into her cocoa.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s never been in love. Maybe he was let down. Though who could let him down?’ I sighed.

  ‘He was wearing the most beautiful clothes,’ said Charlotte. ‘He must have more money than he knows what to do with.’

  ‘Imagine if he married Mama and saved Magna,’ I said idly. I don’t know what made me say Mama and not me but there it was; something in me had made me say it. Was it Rocky’s age, or the fact that he made me feel just how Papa had made me feel when we said goodbye? I didn’t know.

  Charlotte raised her eyes at me. ‘Not such a silly plan,’ she said seriously.

  We let the idea hang in the air for a moment and I felt the whole universe suspended. The pale moon was nearly full and shone through the ballroom windows like a silver ghost. It was a clear, clear spring night and the sky was peppered with stars and possibilities.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Charlotte suddenly. A shooting star!’ We clambered to our feet and opened the window. ‘It’s a sign,’ she whispered. ‘We must find another one. Make a wish.’

  We stared out at the stars for the entire duration of ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ and then, just as Johnnie sang the last line, we caught one. I closed my eyes and breathed in. What to wish for? I wanted to wish for a man as beautiful as Rocky to love me, but something stopped me. Instead, I wished for the one thing that seemed even less likely than a marriage proposal. I wished for Mama to be happy again.

  The next morning, Charlotte left on the early train and I telephoned Harry to tell him that there was no need for him to come and collect Marina as the job had already been completed by somebody else.

  ‘Who?’ demanded Harry.

  ‘Oh, just Rocky Dakota,’ I said breezily. I could hear Harry’s sharp intake of breath.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rocky came down here to get Marina so you don’t need to bother. She’s back in London so I expect she’ll come knocking on your door any moment now.

  ‘Why the hell does he need to go sticking his nose into other people’s business,’ snarled Harry. ‘Why didn’t you tell him that I would be down to get Marina?’

  ‘Because I didn’t know that for certain!’ I snapped back. ‘You told me to let her sweat for a while. When were you planning on coming to get her, anyway? Next week? Next month?’

  ‘I was going to take the train to Westbury this afternoon.’

  ‘Well, as I say. no need. Rocky swept her off in his Chevrolet.’ I hoped Harry couldn’t hear my jealousy.

  ‘No doubt you wished it was you in the bloody car with him.’

  ‘That’s neither here nor there,’ I said, unable to issue a denial. ‘Marina was drunk and mad, and she hates me.

  ‘She doesn’t hate you,’ said Harry. ‘She only thinks she does.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I demanded, but I thought about Rocky and how he had said exactly the same thing about Marina’s love for Harry. How I hated talking to Harry on the. telephone! I don’t think we had ever managed a civilised conversation in all the time we had known one another.

  ‘Do you still want her to hurt a bit?’ I asked him.

  He sighed. ‘Of course not. I’m not that much of a bastard, Penelope. It’s been pretty hellish trying to pretend that I don’t want her, I can tell you. I’ve been terrified she’ll move on again. Perhaps she already has,’ he added ominously.

  There was a short silence, then, on cue, I heard a distant, persistent ringing noise. ‘The doorbell,’ said Harry needlessly.

  ‘Off you go then. That’ll be her, won’t it?’

  ‘I should think so. Nobody else would be crazy enough to leave their bed in this weather.’

  ‘Goodbye, then,’ I said stiffly.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  There was a pause while both of us waited for the other to put the receiver down.

  ‘Before you go,’ said Harry quickly. ‘I just wanted to say thank you. You know, for everything really. I can’t deny that this whole thing has rattled rather out of control. You’ve been pretty marvellous, Penelope Wallace, actress extraordinaire.’

  ‘I’ve got my Johnnie Ray tickets,’ I said, embarrassed. Praise from Harry was not something I was very used to.

  ‘Front row,’ he said.

  ‘Front row,’ I echoed.

  ‘Not long to go, now,’ said Harry.

  His words stuck in my mind long after I had replaced the telephone. It was how I had always felt but had never really believed until then. Not long to go. Until something, anything,. everything happened to me.

  Later that night, Mama arrived home and Inigo was driven back to school.

  ‘Please, darling, make it through to the end of term, at least,’ said Mama, kissing him goodbye. ‘No more Radio Luxembourg,’ she added sternly. There was not much grumbling from Inigo. In fact, he even managed a cheerful wave from the car window as Johns lurched off down the drive and I realised that meeting Rocky had made him impervious to the outside world. The short time he had spent talking to him had replaced his restlessness with a steely calm and a wilful determination. Mama seemed unsettled by his lack of resistance.

  ‘Do you think he’s feeling quite normal?’ she asked me.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, Mama. When is Inigo ever normal?’

  ‘I trust he’s getting over this silly pop music bug.’

  She didn’t need me to respond to this. She knew there wasn’t a hope.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon weeding the fruit cage. Mama stood about watching me. (She did a great deal of watching in the garden.) I didn’t mention Rocky and Marina’s visit to Mama because I knew she would have been horrified by the idea of not one but two Americans in the house. There was a part of me that hated keeping anything from Mama — I would nearly always prefer her to know everything rather than rattle on in ignorance — but my feelings for Rocky outweighed my honesty. I didn’t want her to poison my mind with her prejudice, and I use that word in the truest sense. She was afraid of America and Americans. They represented change, and the modern world, and Inigo leaving us. If that wasn’t a good enough reason to hate the place and the people, then what was? As I weeded I kept half an eye on Mama, trying to guess what was going through her mind. I wondered if she trusted me. I wondered sometimes how much she actually liked me at all. In the past few months, I had felt more and more distant from her, less and less able to understand her. There were only seventeen years between us. When I was growing up, it had felt like only seven. It felt like seventy now. I reached for a trowel and began digging away at the border round the kitchen garden.

  ‘Careful!’ ordered Mama. ‘There’s no need to hack away, Penelope. The garden is a living thing, you know.’

  She liked saying this. When she stood up to straighten her back a few minutes later, some of her gypsy-black hair had broken free from the headscarf she always wore when she stepped into the- garden. Her cheeks were flushed pink from the energetic March breeze and there was a smudge of earth on the end of her nose. She could have been photographed right there and then for the front cover of Country Life and she would have had every bachelor in England swooning at the newspaper stands.

  ‘You’re so lucky, Mama,’ I said suddenly. ‘You never get watery eyes and a red nose in the cold.’

  She laughed.

  ‘It’s true,’ I protested. ‘You suit th
e cold.’

  ‘Oh, Penelope,’ she said, shaking her head.

  We stood together not saying anything for a short while and all the time the wind roared around us and the daffodils blew and skidded about like drunk dancers at a Dorset House party.

  ‘I’ve been thinking …’ began Mama.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mama said restlessly. She pulled off her gloves and knotted her fingers together, looking worried. Framed against racing grey clouds with the dizzying swoop of the back lawn and the pond behind her, Mama looked like a beautiful Agatha Christie heroine about to break down and confess that yes, she did it, she killed the vicar.

  ‘What is it, Mama?’

  ‘Sometimes I feel so small, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Especially at Magna. As if the house is too big for us, as if it’s swamping us. I have these odd nightmares, you know. I dream that the walls of the house just get wider and wider, until all of us are quite lost. I look for the front door, but it’s grown so tall, I can’t reach to let myself out.’ She had to talk quite loudly as the wind was so strong, which seemed fitting with what she was saying. She closed her eyes.

  ‘Funny,’ I said. ‘With me, it’s quite the opposite. I dream that Magna closes in on us, lower and lower. Inigo and I have to run and hide under our beds because the ceilings are falling down on our heads.’

  ‘Where am I when this is going on?’ demanded Mama.

  ‘Oh, you’re with us, too,’ I said, but I lied, because oddly, Mama was never in my dreams about Magna.

  Mama took out her powder compact and cried out in horror. ‘What a sight!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me I had a great splodge on my nose, Penelope?’

  ‘I rather liked it,’ I admitted.

  Mama dug around for her handkerchief to wipe the splodge off her face, but a sudden gust of wind took it out of her hands and off across the lawn. I lumbered after it, hearing the thud, thud, squelch of my wellingtons on the grass. On and on went the hanky, cheerful and light as a child’s balloon. Every time I nearly had it, it took off again. It was heading towards the pond.

  ‘Hurry!’ yelled Mama, mildly hysterical. ‘That was one of the embroidered set of five Archie gave to me on my wedding day!’

  But I was too late. A strong surge of wind sent the small square of lace straight into the pond. I waded in after it but it floated off, out of reach. I looked around for a large stick but by the time I had found one it was too late and the hanky was irretrievably floating towards the centre of the lake.

  Mama looked distressed. ‘Can’t we do something?’

  ‘With any luck it will float into the reeds and get stuck somewhere we can reach it.’

  ‘Oh, what does it matter?’ asked Mama bleakly, and on cue, the heavens opened.

  The sudden burst of energy had inspired me. ‘Race you back to the house, Mama.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly. Penelope.’

  But once I started to run, she couldn’t resist the challenge — it was the competitive child in her that she had tried her hardest to squash but never quite succeeded in destroying entirely. We ran from the pond to the back door — which was quite a distance, I might add — drenched within seconds as the rain fell harder and harder. Mama won because I slipped over at the last moment.

  ‘And I’ve got shorter legs than you!’ she cried triumphantly. whipping off her sodden headscarf She was quite cheerful for the rest of the day after that. At tea time, she brought up the subject of Marina the guinea pig.

  ‘I thought we could ask Johns to build some sort of outdoor hutch for your rodent,’ she said. ‘It really isn’t on keeping her upstairs. Not in a house like Magna, darling. Queen Victoria herself slept a night in your room, you know. December 1878, I think.’ The roof is falling off and you’re worried about the guinea pig in my bedroom?’ I wanted to scream.

  ‘I bet she froze to death,’ I said sulkily.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. She was a plain woman. Plain women don’t tend to feel the cold.’

  ‘Plain but powerful,’ I said, buttering a stale crust of bread.

  Four days later, I went for tea with Charlotte and Aunt Clare. I had not heard from Harry since our last phone call, which had left me puzzled rather than relieved. After all that conspiring and discussion, the lack of communication felt odd, although there had been times over the months that had passed when I would have given my eye teeth not to talk to him. I half expected him to answer the door to Aunt Clare’s flat and bundle me into the kitchen to talk about our next move. But there was no need for that any more. He had got her back. He had won. We had won.

  As it happened, Charlotte answered the door.

  ‘We’re mid-paragraph,’ she said wearily. ‘Come in.’

  Until that afternoon, I don’t think that I had ever seen Charlotte look tired. Her long hair fell lank and greasy over her hunched shoulders and one could have packed enough kit for a two-week holiday in the bags under her eyes. I realised then how much of her appeal was in the glow of her skin and the brightness of her gaze. Without this, she almost looked ordinary. I don’t think I completely understood how hard she had been working until I saw her then and I felt suddenly ashamed. Charlotte was doing something substantial, something important. She was recording her aunt’s stories for her, keeping them perfect, intact, for ever. Whether or not the book went on sale for the rest of us seemed somehow irrelevant.

  ‘We’ve been up since six,’ she explained, thudding back onto her seat and staring at the paper she had just fed into the mouth of the typewriter. ‘Aunt Clare wants to finish by tomorrow night.’

  I sat down quietly. Aunt Clare was lying on the day bed, her eyes tight shut, her arms stretched up into the air. Despite the fact that she had the gramophone playing softly in the corner, the room seemed quieter than usual.

  ‘He was to become the only man I was ever to love with all my heart,’ said Aunt Clare. ‘No. Scrub that. He was the only man I ever loved. That’s enough, isn’t it? I mean, one can’t state it more clearly than that.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Half an hour, Charlotte, ‘she said. ‘Then we’ll carry on. Oh, good afternoon, Penelope, ‘she said, giving a start. ‘I didn’t hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.’ She sat up. ‘What a strain this book is becoming,’ she sighed. ‘I can’t think how anyone writes more than one of the damn things in a lifetime.’ She gave me a small smile. ‘I suppose it’s rather like childbirth — the mind chooses to forget the pain the body has gone through,’ she added.

  ‘One would never write a single word if one knew the horrors that lay ahead,’ agreed Charlotte.

  ‘But if you sell copies by the sackload, you may well forget the horrors,’ I said quickly.

  Aunt Clare smiled. ‘You are encouraging!’ she said. ‘Let’s have tea, shall we?’

  ‘Is — is Harry at home?’ I asked falteringly.

  Aunt Clare’s face softened and I am certain her eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh! You poor child!’ she said, pulling out her handkerchief. ‘You poor child!’

  ‘Has something happened to him?’ I demanded, suddenly frightened.

  ‘Who knows?’ Charlotte shrugged. ‘He and Marina have vanished without trace.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, as long as he’s alive and well—”

  ‘Hear how brave the dear girl is!’ said Aunt Clare. She pulled out her handkerchief. ‘I could murder him for what he’s done to you, truly I could, Penelope.’ She stretched out her hand to me. I felt uncomfortable.

  ‘I suppose he’s always loved Marina,’ I mumbled. ‘I was never going to be more than a friend to him—”

  ‘Nonsense!’ snapped Aunt Clare, suddenly animated. ‘I never knew Harry as happy as he was with you, never knew him to be himself the way he was with you. I knew from the moment you first walked into this room, I said to myself — there she is! The girl I never thought would appear has — has—”

  ‘Appeared?’ suggested Charlotte, stuffing a crumpet in
to her mouth.

  ‘You agree with me, don’t you, Charlotte?’ demanded Aunt Clare.

  ‘Oh yes, Aunt. Of course. But you know, the only thing that really matters now is that Penelope realises that she mustn’t lose him.’

  I gave Charlotte a kick under the table, but she didn’t respond. ‘I have lost him,’ I said, hoping I sounded woebegone enough for Aunt Clare and practical enough for Charlotte.

  ‘You haven’t,’ said Charlotte. ‘But there’s no point in running after him unless you know that he’s the one.’

  ‘The one?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘Yes. The one.’

  ‘The one what?’

  ‘The one you’ll love for ever. The one you can’t imagine ever being without,’ said Aunt Clare. She stood up. I noticed that her neat suit, usually such a snug fit, was almost hanging off her that afternoon. She had lost a great deal of weight recently, I noticed with surprise.

  ‘Oh, Charlotte, cut me another slice of Battenburg, won’t you?’ she sighed.

  ‘Goodness, Aunt Clare. you do look slim,’ I said.

  She looked down at her hands. ‘Do I? You see what this book is doing to me?’

  ‘They should- suggest writing one’s autobiography as a solution for the overweight,’ said Charlotte. ‘And as for Harry —he’s vanished with Miss Hamilton. She rolled up here on Sunday morning—”

  ‘High as a kite, I might add,’ interjected Aunt Clare through a mouthful of cake.