The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

  Christopher, for one, I thought.

  ‘I find her impossible to fathom,’ Charlotte went on. ‘She’s so frightening sometimes; she thinks like a man, you know. That’s perhaps what they like about her, I suppose. Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that before.’ Charlotte frowned.

  ‘Mama doesn’t understand money, either,’ I confessed. ‘She gets terribly worked up about preserving energy and not using too much electricity, then she’ll whizz up to London and spend a fortune in Dior.’

  ‘My mother only spends other people’s money,’ said Charlotte. ‘She was out with the conductor again last night. She’s got into the most hideous habit of telephoning me every time she’s seen him to report on how they spent their evening.’

  ‘And how did they spend last night?’ I asked.

  ‘He took her to Sheekey’s, lucky thing.’

  ‘Oh.’ What and where was Sheekey’s?

  ‘I asked her what Mr Hollowman was conducting at the moment and she said, “Electricity, darling”, which made me feel ill.’

  I laughed. ‘At least she’s enjoying herself. I worry for my mother. She seems so lost sometimes.’

  ‘At least if she’s lost you know where she is,’ said Charlotte grimly. ‘My mother never stays in one place for longer than three days at a time. Gosh, Penelope, I must have a pee.’

  The blue room had a poky little bathroom with a small window, but the bath was ocean deep and long so that you could stretch your legs right out and still not touch the end of it, and that, in my view, made up for the tiny basin and yet more peeling pink flowery wallpaper. Charlotte peered into the cracked looking-glass.

  ‘I look like the captain of the lacrosse team,’ she said ruefully. ‘I used to be captain of the lacrosse team,’ I said. ‘It’s a lethal game.’ I pulled my cardigan off my right shoulder. ‘See?’

  ‘Oh, Penelope, that’s horrible,’ cried Charlotte.

  I grinned. I liked showing people my scar. It wasn’t very big, but it was there all right, and it had hurt like hell when Nora Henderson — an Amazon among sixteen-year-old girls — had crashed the chipped wooden edge of her lacrosse stick down on my shoulder.

  ‘I didn’t have you down as the sporty type,’ said Charlotte. ‘As I said, it’s greatly to my disadvantage that I didn’t go to boarding school. I think it would have done me the world of good. Knocked off all my edges and all that. I’m just the type who would have benefited from a bit of discipline on the playing fields.’

  I blinked. Charlotte said the oddest things. It was hard to know whether to laugh or not. ‘I play a bit of tennis now, but not much else. Inigo and I used to ride all the time,’ I said.

  ‘Ride?’ Charlotte looked as though she had never heard of the concept.

  ‘Horses. Well, ponies really. Look, there’s Banjo.’ I pointed out of the window. Johns, buoyed up with brandy, was leading my reluctant pony through the orchard towards the stables. With the snow swirling around them, and Johns in his thick overcoat and hat, they looked like something out of Thomas Hardy.

  ‘Isn’t he sweet?’ cried Charlotte. ‘Can we go and give him an apple later? The horse, I mean — not your man.

  Not likely, I thought, remembering Mary’s fruit salad. ‘Banjo’s a bit snappy with people he doesn’t know,’ I said. ‘He took a chunk out of my great-aunt’s twinset last spring.’

  Charlotte looked alarmed.

  ‘I must change,’ I said, aware of my scruffiness.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m always fine. ‘I absolutely believed her.

  On the way back to my bedroom I passed the Wellington room where Harry was staying. I hesitated outside the door, then panicked, thinking that he would have heard my footsteps stopping, so decided to knock and check that he was settling in. He opened the door, still wearing his coat.

  ‘Oh, you poor thing. I know how cold it can get up here,’ I said. ‘I’ve got hot-water bottles for us all, so you should survive the night.’ Why did he make me feel so stupid? I only had to look at him and I felt about eleven years old.

  ‘Please don’t worry. I don’t really feel the cold at all. I just like to pretend I do to annoy my mother. It’s become something of a habit.’

  I must have looked confused. ‘Do you like annoying her?’ I asked him.

  Harry laughed. ‘I read somewhere that only very ordinary men adore their mothers.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘But funnily enough, it’s true.’

  ‘I thought your mother was wonderful.’

  ‘Of course she is. But wonderful people nearly always combine their wonderfulness with other characteristics that drive one utterly crazy.

  I liked the way he said ‘crazy’. He couldn’t completely pronounce his Rs and the echo of a W sound hung there instead. Any more than the echo and it would have sounded absurd, but as it happens it gave him a vulnerability, a humanness under the magician’s cloak. He looked at me thoughtfully.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ he said.

  ‘Of course.

  ‘Won’t you come in?’ he asked, suddenly serious. I suppressed the urge to laugh out loud.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said instead.

  The Wellington room suited a magician, being dark and spooky and filled with grisly portraits of the most alarming of ancestors. In the corner of the room stood a suit of armour that I was convinced I had seen perambulating around the nut garden at midnight a few years ago. Normally, I would have housed a guest in any room but this, yet in Harry’s case it seemed the perfect fit. He certainly looked at home; his suitcase spilled heavy books, jazz records and ink-stained pieces of writing paper onto the faded ochre and russet rug on the wooden floor.

  ‘I hope you like it in here,’ I said. ‘It’s kind of different.’

  Harry looked around in surprise. ‘Like it? It’s like something out of a horror film, only slightly more scary.’ He stretched a hand out to touch the bat’s head carvings around the fireplace. ‘I love it,’ he added simply. “What self-respecting magician wouldn’t?’

  ‘I’ve always felt that any ghosts at Magna are pretty friendly, by and large,’ I said, awkwardly. Harry pulled a packet of cigarettes apparently out of thin air and sighed. There was something distinctly feminine about him, I decided, though I was certain he’d be horrified if anyone ever told him so.

  ‘Do you miss her terribly?’ I was amazed to hear myself asking. Oh help, I thought two seconds later, I shouldn’t have asked that. Harry glared at me for a moment.

  ‘I don’t like being without her,’ he said at last.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘None of mine any more,’ said Harry lightly. His glare had been replaced by that steadfastly amused look once again so I ploughed on.

  ‘Do you think her the most beautiful girl in the world?’

  Harry laughed this time. ‘Have you ever met her?’

  ‘No,’ I confessed, ‘but I’ve seen her in the magazines.’

  ‘She’s not a very nice person,’ said Harry. ‘She’s like a fox — she kills for the hell of it. It’s like being in a terrible motor accident — one never imagines that it’s something that might actually happen to you.

  ‘Where did you meet her?’

  ‘The Jazz Café.’ Harry picked up a silver cigarette box from the bedside table. ‘Oh, it’s engraved. How touching. To my dearest Lindsay with all my love Sarah. Who are they, please?’

  ‘Oh, Great-Aunt Sarah,’ I muttered impatiently. ‘I never knew her.’ Now was not the time to get into that story. ‘So you met at the Jazz Cafe?’ I prompted him. Marijuana, espressos and jazz, oh my! I thought.

  ‘She was talking to a friend of mine,’ went on Harry. ‘This guy from school I’d never liked but I went up and said hello anyway. He introduced me to Marina and that was it. The spell was cast. For a whole month we met every night — but I never once saw her during the day. Well, it never seemed stran
ge to me at the time, but it was, of course. You have to see your lover during the day at some point, don’t you? Otherwise the whole thing remains a dream. Perhaps that’s what she wanted.’ He stared at me, as if he had only just considered this. ‘She was absolutely hooked on magic,’ he went on, ‘and she never wanted me to explain how I had done anything. She said that nothing in her life ever surprised her any more except for watching me. And I’m a sucker for that sort of flattery —everyone is, aren’t they? — so I carried on trying to surprise her. I got addicted to the way her eyes lit up at the end of a trick. She knew so many people — Americans, Italian counts, Indian princesses — and they would crowd round the table to watch me. I suppose I got addicted to that, too, idiot that I am. At the end of every night I drove her back to her parents’ place. She never invited me in.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘I wasn’t exactly what they had in mind for Marina. She never said, but she didn’t need to. But she liked me, I know that much. I was uncharted territory for her.’

  ‘Why? Because you were a magician?’

  ‘Oh no!’ Harry grinned at me. ‘Because I was poor, of course. Rich girls always go through a phase of lusting after men with no money. Haven’t you?’

  I flushed. His directness unnerved me. ‘I’m not rich,’ I said pertly.

  Harry looked at me as though I was mad. ‘Anyway, all this was six months ago now,’ he said. ‘Just when I realised that I was in it up to my neck, she told me she couldn’t see me any more.

  ‘In what up to your neck?’

  ‘Love, sweetheart. Love.’

  ‘Oh that. I see what you mean,’ I said, sounding absurd. ‘How did she tell you?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. She cried a lot, as girls do, and told me that I would be better off without her — which is true — then a couple of months later I pick up the paper and read that she’s engaged to George Rogerson. The least magical man on the planet.’

  ‘Why is she marrying him then?’

  ‘He’s loaded and has lots of important friends. I hear he’s a wonder on the golf course. Irresistible, don’t you think?’

  ‘So why did you go to dinner with them the other day? Wouldn’t it be easier not to see her, to try to forget her?’

  Harry sat down on the bed and offered me a cigarette from Aunt Sarah’s silver box. I had filled the box earlier that day so at least I knew they were fresh. It wouldn’t do to refuse one; I could see that Harry wanted me to join him.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, taking one.

  ‘I had to see her with him,’ he explained, flicking open his lighter for me, ‘even if it was only to make sure it was really happening. She sat at the other end of the table giving me these odd looks. I couldn’t make out what she was trying to say.

  ‘Couldn’t you — I don’t know — turn George Rogerson into a toad, or something?’ I asked.

  ‘I thought of that. But then of course someone else got there before me.

  I giggled.

  ‘I’m going to get her back,’ he said calmly.

  ‘How?’

  Harry stood up and wandered over to the window. From the back, I could see that the ends of his trousers had been trodden down by the heels of his shoes. He looked as though he could have done with a Selfridges session with Mama. Yet for all his dishevelled appearance, he remained peculiarly stylish. He was, like Charlotte, the sort of person who could wear a cardboard box and make it look right.

  ‘Well, it’s like this,’ he said. ‘There’s one characteristic Marina has that she could never hide whenever we were together — her Achilles heel, if you like. I want to play on it until she breaks. Use it until she comes back to me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, imagining Marina with a fearful stutter or an inability to read.

  ‘Jealousy,’ said Harry. ‘The green-eyed monster. She could never relax when other women were around. She used to say that if she ever saw me with another girl, she’d curl up and die.’

  ‘And you want her to do that? She wouldn’t be much use to you dead.’

  He looked surprised by my insolence and frowned. ‘What she meant is that she’d find it very hard to take,’ he said as though speaking to a small child. ‘Do you understand? She needs to think that I’ve moved on, that I’ve found someone even more fascinating and thrilling than her.’ He inhaled very deeply. ‘Good God, it’s an English smoke, of course. How stupid of me. Wills, is it?’ he said lightly, opening the window and crushing it to a’ pulp on the virginal snow on the window pane.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘It’s all right. I would never have noticed that sort of thing before I met Marina. She taught me the most infuriating habits that I just can’t shake. I can’t smoke anything but Lucky Strike, I can’t sleep without a dose of Southern Comfort, I call men “guys” and I have this awful suspicion that without the Americans we might not have won the war. It’s hell, I tell you.’

  I laughed, though I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to. Harry grinned and carried on talking. ‘But what does that matter? The point is that when Charlotte turned up at tea with you in tow, I just knew you were the one. Everything about you — it’s perfect. Your height, your hair, your house. All three fit together to make the perfect nightmare.’

  ‘Hang on a minute! I don’t think I know what you mean,’ I spluttered.

  ‘You can help me, Penelope.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I asked suspiciously, picturing myself sideways in a wooden box, about to be sawn in two.

  Harry stretched out his arm and pulled something out of his suitcase. It was a large cream envelope with Harry’s name on the front. ‘Open it,’ he said, handing it to me.

  I pulled out a thick piece of card. It was an invitation.

  Mr and Mrs Hamilton request the pleasure of your company at a party to celebrate George and Marina’s engagement, I read. 7p.m. Dorset House, W1. Carriages at dawn. Cocktails and dancing. 3 December. ‘Gosh! That’s in two weeks’ time!’ I handed it back to him. ‘Well, I hope you have a good time.

  Harry shoved the envelope back into his bag. ‘You’ll do it, won’t you?’ he asked softly. He didn’t look at me this time; he kept his eyes to the floor and his hair fell forward as he waited for my reaction. I took my time before speaking again because I still wasn’t quite sure what to say.

  ‘So you want me to go with you, to get her to realise how much she really loves you?’ I asked slowly.

  ‘Something like that. You know, you’re just the sort of girl she would really hate,’ said Harry with feeling.

  ‘Charmed,’ I said icily. I wasn’t at all sure about this boy. First, what he was suggesting seemed ridiculous. And rude. And thrilling. Second, he had found one of his own wretched American cigarettes in his coat pocket and was using the silver cup I had won for Best Cleaned Tack aged nine as an ashtray.

  ‘She can’t stand tall, blonde girls like you — and you’re younger than her, too. If anyone’s going to get her back up, you’re the one to do it. That’s what I thought when I first saw you. You were just too perfect for the job.’

  I opened my mouth to say that it was an extraordinary idea and really, who on earth did he think he was, rolling up to my house and asking me to go around pretending to be madly in love with him, but I was interrupted by Inigo yelling up the stairs that there was a bat in the library, and could I come and deal with it? Off I went, leaving Harry hanging.

  Although I am adept at getting bats out of a house, it took quite some time to rid the library of this one. Rushing upstairs and changing for dinner at breakneck speed to avoid freezing to death, I felt strange knowing that Charlotte and Harry were in the house too. I had imagined the moment of their arrival ever since I had replaced the phone to Charlotte ten days ago and had pictured myself chic in my mother’s scent, drifting downstairs carrying a vase of flowers or a small pile of relevant books, while Mary opened the door to them both and took their coats. As it happened, Mary seemed t
o have vanished off the face of the earth, Inigo had made a fool of me and I had been caught out in a knitted cardigan with a huge hole under the arm.

  I sat down on my bed and stared out of the window, thinking of Harry and Marina Hamilton in the Jazz Café (which required quite a lot of imagination as I had never been to the place myself, nor had I ever even drunk an espresso), and wondering if this was one of those Key Moments in life where you are offered a chance to do something out of the ordinary that will mean nothing is Ever The Same Again. I wondered if he had said anything to Charlotte about his idea — perhaps it was her suggestion? If I was entirely honest with myself, there was a greater proportion of me that was flattered and excited to be asked to help Harry than there was irritated by the idea. Yet extending that honesty further, this excitement came much more from the possibility of seeing Dorset House again and attending a truly marvellous American-style party than it did from spending time with Harry. Perhaps Johnnie would be there, I thought, then scolded myself for being so silly. It was starting to get dark now; the branches of the lime trees at the top of the drive glowed ghostly pale. The snowfall had altered the scenery for our weekend, had opened up more possibilities, made memories of it before the first nightfall. I would take Charlotte to meet Banjo tomorrow. I smudged on the tiniest bit of lipstick and slid into my new Selfridges shoes. They were already bitterly uncomfortable. My mother was always talking about ‘wearing shoes in’, but what she really meant was breaking through the pain barrier so that you no longer notice how much they are pinching. I wondered how she was, and whether she was regretting her hasty exit from Magna.

  ‘Snow on snow,’ I muttered to myself.

  ‘Are you ever coming down?’ yelled Inigo.

  I wobbled dangerously in my heels and thought how lost the effect would be now that my guests had seen me at my scruffiest. I paused for a moment, then kicked them off and pulled on my usual scuffed red flats. Racing down the stairs, three at a time, I forgot about carrying flowers and looking intellectual and smelling grown up. There would never be any point in pretending in front of Charlotte. What’s more, I thought wryly, Harry was a magician so he was always going to be able to see through me.