The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

  ‘Mary!’ I gasped. ‘Oh, Mary!’’

  ‘Miss Penelope!’ she cried. ‘Oh, it’s terrible! Terrible!’

  ‘Where’s Mama?’ I cried. ‘Mary! Where’s Mama?”

  ‘She’s in London. She telephoned me only a few hours ago to say she was staying with friends and would be back tomorrow. Back to this,’ went on Mary. She coughed so hard that she actually staggered and I leaned forward to catch her. ‘How can she come back to this?’ she gasped. ‘There’ll be nothin’ left of the place by mornin’. Nothin’ at all!’

  ‘She’s in London?’ I shouted. ‘Mary, are you quite sure?’

  ‘As sure as I’ve ever been. I came over five o’clock as usual. She’d gone then. Johns had taken her to the station. She’d given ‘im the rest of the weekend off.’

  ‘So she’s not inside?’

  Mary shook her head. ‘I can promise you she’s not inside.’

  ‘Oh my goodness! Fido!’ I shouted. ‘Where’s Fido?’

  ‘Johns has ‘im!’ said Mary. ‘Yer mother suggested ‘e take ‘im home with ‘im since she was goin’ to be in London for the night. Said you were staying away too, she added, not without a note of accusation in her voice.

  ‘I was,’ I whispered. ‘I just got this feeling I should come home.’

  We were interrupted by another policeman. ‘Think you two ladies should stay clear,’ he said firmly. I didn’t hear what he said next. I stared straight ahead at Magna, watching the flames shoot out of the downstairs windows, transfixed with the same dumb sense of the smallness of self that I had felt while watching for shooting stars with Charlotte. My eyes burned with the red hot power of it all, and I stepped back with the shock of it. I saw figures dancing on the lawn in front of me, Mama and Papa as they were on the summer evening that they first met; I saw Inigo and me as children, running towards Magna on the day the war was over, shouting with excitement for the end of something that we couldn’t conceive of living without; I saw Charlotte and me walking through the orchard and dreaming of Johnnie and I saw Harry and me lying on the floor in the Long Gallery listening to the wind and the rain bashing against the East Wing. Then I thought that I saw Rocky coming towards me, and I felt something in my head shut down, and a light-headedness soothed me with the idea that this was all a dream.

  Chapter 22

  THE OCCASIONAL FLICKER

  When I awoke, I was in the Dower House, in the bedroom that Inigo and I had shared during the war. For a moment I wondered if I was eight again, and if the war had ended at all.

  ‘Mama?’ I croaked.

  ‘Penelope!’ came her voice from the bedside. ‘You’re awake at last!’

  I was awake all right. Daylight streamed through the window. I sat up.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘You fainted,’ she explained. ‘Mary and a kind policeman helped you walk up here. You slept through the night. It’s seven o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Magna! The fire!’ I flung myself from the bed and ran to the window.

  ‘Darling, you must slow down — the shock—’

  ‘It’s still burning!’ I cried. ‘Can’t they do something?’ Mama sat down on the end of my bed. She was desperately pale and wearing her best frock with a fur shrug round her shoulders. She had obviously not changed from the night before.

  ‘How did you hear about it?’ I asked her, my throat dry, the smell of smoke thick in my hair.

  ‘I was in London,’ said Mama. ‘I decided that I couldn’t bear to be in the house on my own for another night. I called Johns and he drove me to the station.’’

  ‘Who were you going to see?’

  Mama flushed. ‘He called me just after you left. He said he would love to take me out for dinner, but he quite understood if I never wanted to see him again.’

  ‘Rocky?’

  Mama looked away from me, her fingers pleating the quilt Mary had made for us during what she described as ‘the long, dark evenings of 1943’. I had not seen the quilt since we moved out, and it filled me with childish memories to see it now. Inigo and I snuggled up in it listening for bombs overhead, Mama wrapping her legs in its warm coverings on the nights when fuel was rationed. Mama saw me staring.

  ‘The quilt,’ she began, ‘remember how you loved it?’

  I realised then how Mama still saw the war years. There was fear, but always, always hope. It wasn’t until the very end, when Papa had been killed, that hope died. Everything before that was clouded in romance, and giddy anticipation of seeing him again. It wasn’t until we had moved back to Magna that we had word of Papa’s death. The Dower House, to her, would for ever be a place of cocooned dreams.

  ‘Rocky telephoned?’ I asked again. She nodded.

  ‘I decided that I should go for dinner, if only to say that I was sorry about the way I treated him the other night. Now I can’t imagine what would have happened if I had not gone,’ said Mama. ‘I would — I would have been killed.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I said, horror at the truth of what she was saying sinking in. ‘I think you would have escaped all right, Mama.’

  ‘But perhaps not,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘How did you hear what had happened?’ I asked her.

  She looked at me, eyes tired and smudged with mascara; ‘Well, it was a funny thing,’ she admitted. ‘Rocky and I went to dinner at Claridges — such a treat,’ she couldn’t resist adding, ‘and afterwards, we decided to take a walk. London was so beautiful last night, you know,’ she added, forgetting that I had been there too. ‘It must have been after midnight when I realised that I was too late for the last train home. Rocky said that he would drive me back to Magna. We arrived at half-past two. What a sight greeted us as we came up the drive!’

  I was struck by Mama’s choice of words here. There seemed little horror in her voice, more incredulity than anything else. There were none of Mary’s ‘It’s terribles’! from her, no fainting like me.

  ‘I had no idea that you were going to be here,’ she went on. She crossed the room and straightened the photograph of Inigo and me on the chimneypiece. ‘It must have been the most awful shock, darling.’

  ‘And not for you, Mama?’

  ‘Of course!’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘It is — it was Papa’s house. He would never have let this happen—’

  ‘What about Inigo? He must be told,’ I said, pulling on my shoes.

  ‘Rocky drove straight to school to break the news to him,’ said Mama. ‘He left an hour ago. He should be there by now.’

  I said nothing, but I had to admit to myself that Rocky was the right person to tell Inigo.

  ‘What will be left of the house?’ I whispered. ‘Oh gosh!’ I said with a sob. ‘Marina!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guinea pig!’ I felt tears stinging my eyes. Marina, the pet Harry had given me to look after, the closest thing I had to him — what had happened to her last night?

  ‘Oh, darling, don’t worry about her,’ said Mama with a smile. ‘Funnily enough, I decided yesterday that it was time for her to move outside permanently. I put her in a box and handed her to Johns just before I left for London. He was to take her home with him to show her the new cage he’s been making.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ I muttered, and it wasn’t until later that I thought how odd this was. Why on earth did Marina need to leave my bedroom while Johns finished her new hutch?

  ‘You were right about Rocky,’ said Mama quietly. and I think it was the first time that she had ever admitted to me that I was right about anything.

  ‘What do you mean.

  ‘He is wonderful. Of course, I knew it from the moment I first met him, but I was afraid, Penelope. So afraid of— of—’

  ‘Being happy?’ I asked her.

  ‘Happiness can be frightening when one is not accustomed to the sensation.’

  ‘So now Magna’s burnt to the ground, you think you might be happy?’ I sounded harsher than I meant
to. ‘What about Papa? His home! Our family home. Mama! Now it’s over, it’s gone!’

  ‘Just as your father is gone!’ shouted Mama, animation turning her face whiter still. ‘I never wanted the place to die like this! But I couldn’t go on living there, either. Your father would never, ever have wanted me to. He used to say to me that Magna only felt real to him when I was there with him.’

  ‘He would have done something,’ I cried. ‘He would have fought the flames, he would have done anything to save it! It was in his blood, Mama. It’s in our blood!’

  ‘No!’ screamed Mama. ‘We were his blood, not the house! The hose trapped him, owned him, frightened him as it did me. Oh, he loved Magna,’ she went on, her voice rattling now, ‘but he would have done anything to get away. He never said anything to prove it, but sometimes there was something in his eyes, just the occasional flicker of doubt as to whether he had taken on something too big for him. You understand that, don’t you? Something had to change,’ she said. ‘Something had to change.’

  It was the first time I had heard her sound certain about anything for years. But none of it would be true unless I saw it for myself. Nothing about the fire would be real until I saw what had happened to Magna. I shot out of the bedroom and down the stairs. Mama rushed to the door and shouted after me, but her voice sounded like something unreal, like a sound from a wireless, ghostly. detached. I turned out of the Dower House and ran and ran towards Magna. I heard my feet thumping rhythmically on the solid earth beneath my feet, and it gave me strength. I looked down at my feet as I ran, and I saw the glowing patches of bluebells swim into focus as I raced up the drive. I felt the sun warm on the back of my head, and the unexpected brightness of the morning hurt my eyes. I rounded the bend into the courtyard and reached the bench by the pond where we had sat that winter’s night — Inigo, Charlotte, Harry and I, eating hard-boiled eggs and drinking champagne in the snow. Now the air was soft, too warm for my thin woolly. I pulled it over my head, and walked slowly. slowly. towards the house.

  How could it have only taken one night to change everything? I had read of houses being destroyed by fire overnight, but had never believed it was possible. Surely someone should be able to put those infernos out before they took hold? Yet the fire at Magna was still going. It looked smaller now than it had last night, yet there it was; I could see it calmly smouldering through the blackened windows of the morning room. I walked, without any thought, up to the front of the house, and stood where the front door had been. No more. It had caved in to reveal the hall, or what had been the hall, indistinguishable from the chaos of the rest of the ground floor. Knowing I shouldn’t, I stepped inside. There was a rumble in front of me, and a huge chunk of the hall ceiling crashed to the floor, still red with heat, still hot with the exertion of damage.

  I stepped back. I could see the sky through the hall ceiling, the blue and white spring morning laughing down on the blackened shell of Magna. It felt as though the house, for the first time ever, was naked, ashamed, unable to hide anywhere. Last night it had seemed to burn with a cackle of laughter under the midnight sky. Now it looked — there was the word! It looked hungover.

  Three firemen were loitering about, one of them drinking from a Thermos flask. Just behind them was a huge pile of objects that had obviously been salvaged from the house. Mama’s desk from the morning room was stacked with stuff from the kitchen — a whisk, a blackened saucepan and Mary’s singed copy of The Lady. Ironically. Mama’s WI calendar for 1955 had flapped open to December to reveal a photograph of a blazing Christmas pudding sitting above a fireplace. We would never see another Christmas at Magna now.

  ‘Miss Penelope?’

  I swung round to see Johns, his pipe in one hand, and a weeding fork in the other. I stepped back and he nodded slowly and walked away from the house, towards the pond. I followed behind him, wondering if he was real. It seemed impossible that Johns could exist now, on this morning of all mornings. Was there a Johns without Magna? As if reading my mind, he bent down and started to fork out the weeds around the bench. Without thinking, I knelt down and started to help him, knotting the tough stems round my fingers, listening to the resistance of the roots in the earth as they were pulled from the ground.

  ‘You leave these too long, you’ll ‘ave nothin’ but trouble in no time,’ muttered Johns. ‘Best keep on top of the garden, specially this time of year, what with new shoots all over the place.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said in a whisper.

  How long we worked together I don’t know. It felt like no more than five minutes, but it could have been an hour. Occasionally. we looked up when another police car or fire engine swept up the drive, but I said nothing. My throat was dry. I felt afraid of trying to talk.

  ‘Won’t be much good they can do now,’ was all that Johns said. No one bothered us. I don’t know that they even noticed us. The more time that passed, the harder it became for me to talk. I didn’t know what to say. didn’t know how to begin. I took my lead from Johns, and Johns, it seemed, was equally unwilling to say anything. Until I stood up and announced that I had to go, that I had been out for long enough and that Mama would be waiting for me at the Dower Hose.

  ‘Won’t you help me with sommat, just for a minute, Miss Penelope?’

  ‘Of course, Johns. What is it?’

  ‘Won’t you come with me, just to the pigeon hose? There’s a coupla birds need checkin’ in there. Frightened last night, they were. I’d like you to be able to tell your mother they’re all right.’

  ‘Certainly. Johns.’

  I followed him silently. through the gate and into the garden. The sunlight blasted on the path, white blossom exploded from the apple trees. In the garden, not one shoot, not one petal or new bud cared whether the house stood or not. It was another country altogether. Johns tidied as we walked, as he had always done. He had gone from seeming absurd to seeming the most sensible of all of us. Getting on with his job, and his job had always been outside.

  Harry’s doves perched together in a line in the pigeon house, a little away from the rest of Mama’s doves. How like Harry they seemed, and I swallowed, imagining what he would have to say if he could see what had happened to the Long Gallery. None of the birds seemed any more flustered than usual — Johns filled their trays with seed and they all flapped around his hands making the usual racket.

  ‘They seem to be fine, Johns,’ I said, relieved.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I really should get back—’ I began again.

  ‘One more thing, Miss Penelope,’ said Johns. ‘Just one more thing.’

  I said nothing, but stood and watched as he bent over and pulled a small box out from under the seed bins.

  ‘Found this ‘ere this mornin,’ he said simply.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You take it. You see fer yerself.’

  It had been tied up with several pieces of string and ribbon, some of which I recognised as the ribbon from the Fortnum’s ham that Charlotte and Harry had brought with them on New Year’s Eve. I heard Mama’s voice. Oh, do save the ribbon — it’s too wonderful to throw away.

  ‘That’ll be something of Mama’s,’ I said to Johns, feeling uneasy. ‘Something she probably tied up and forgot about—’

  ‘Sure to be,’ said Johns. ‘You just take it back to ‘er, won’t ye? Shouldn’t leave these sortsa things hangin’ about in the pigeon house fer too long.’

  ‘Thank you, Johns,’ I said. And I knew.

  I don’t know how I knew, except that perhaps I had known all along. I hurried back through the garden and out of the gate, clutching the box to my chest. It wasn’t very heavy. It’ rattled a little as I ran. When I got to the clearing at the top of the drive, when Magna was all but obscured by the lime avenue, I crouched under the copper beach tree.

  The layer of tissue paper on top of the contents of the box blew away when I opened it and I was too late to catch it. Underneath was something soft, something neatly folded, something tha
t was so familiar to me that I would have known it merely from its touch or smell. Mama’s wedding dress. With shaking hands, I pulled it out of the box and held it up. The sunlight gleamed on the thin, pink material, making it translucent, a fairy’s dress. Carefully. I placed it beside me on the ground and pulled out what had been packed away underneath it. Everything was quintessentially Mama. She had saved last year’s ration book, her Pirates of Penzance records, several photographs of Papa and, discarded from its ugly frame, and lining the bottom of the box, Aunt Sarah’s watercolour. Funny. I thought. Away from the majesty of Magna’s ancient tapestries and Inigo Jones ceilings, it looked rather good. I balanced it against the trunk of the tree and reached into the box again. There was a letter in. the bottom. A letter whose handwriting I recognised instantly. Aunt Clare. Yet it was addressed not to Papa, as I expected, but to my mother. Talitha Wallace, Milton Magna, Westbury Wiltshire. The date on the envelope was just a month ago. March 1955. I sat quite still for a second, my mind whirring. Then I read. Slowly and carefully. and hearing Aunt Clare’s voice in my head all the time.

  My dear Talitha

  I can’t tell you how relieved I was to hear from you. Since meeting Penelope it has been bothering me very much — how you’ve been since the war, how on earth you’ve managed Milton Magna on your own. It must have been hard for you to write to me, and I thank you very much. We should have de-Rebecca’d each other years ago. It is never too late, not even now.