The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

  Charlotte was sitting by the gramophone in the drawing room, changed into black trousers and a thick white jersey. She had pulled the sleeves down over her hands.

  ‘You got my requests then,’ she said with a grin.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Snowfall and forty-fives.’

  I could put up with Harry, I thought, as long as it meant I could spend more time with Charlotte.

  Chapter 6

  HOW TO LIVE AT HOME AND LIKE IT

  Although Inigo and I always had wine with Mama at supper (she refused to drink on her own), neither of us had ever consumed the amount of alcohol that we did that first weekend with Charlotte and Harry. Inigo raided the cellar and stripped it of the last few bottles of Moët (Mama only ever pretended to like champagne) and Charlotte produced a large bottle of brandy that she had stolen from her mother’s drinks cabinet. Both she and Harry drank like adults, without much fuss and without seeming to be terribly affected by the amount that they were putting away. I tried my best to keep up. The dining room, with its dark wood and even darker carvings, made one feel twenty times more fizzy than one actually was.

  ‘Fancy eating in here every night!’ exclaimed Charlotte, eyes widening at the portrait of a set-faced Isabelle Wallace over the fireplace. ‘Gosh, who’s she? I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of her.’

  ‘That was my grandmother,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember her. Mama says she was very fierce.’

  ‘Looks it. Good nose, though.’

  ‘She used to call our mother the Moaner.’

  ‘What does she moan about?’ demanded Charlotte, champagne spilling over her fingers as she refilled her glass.

  ‘Oh, everything,’ I said. ‘It’s easier to list what she doesn’t moan about. Mostly it’s to do with the house, the garden, not having enough help, no heating, no electricity in the East Wing.’

  ‘Couldn’t you two do something about alt those things?’ said Charlotte. ‘Put together some kind of fail-safe moneymaking scheme?’

  ‘Funny, we hadn’t thought of that,’ said Inigo coldly. ‘Hadn’t you?’ said Charlotte in surprise, not registering the sarcasm. ‘The second I finish working for Aunt Clare, I’m off I’ve got it all worked out.’

  ‘What?’ asked Inigo.

  ‘I’m going to make and sell clothes. Rent a shop somewhere and make a fortune.’

  ‘What makes you so sure people will want what you sell?’ asked Inigo. Why was it that Inigo never seemed to worry about that sort of thing, just said what he was thinking at all times?

  ‘Oh, they’ll want my clothes, all right,’ said Charlotte. ‘Only I have to act quickly. There are a stack of other girls out there wanting to do the same thing.’

  Are there?’ I asked doubtfully.

  Charlotte nodded. ‘This girl I knew from school, she’s getting together her own clothing business,’ she said, biting into a piece of bread. ‘I couldn’t bear it if she sold her first pair of shoes before I did.’

  ‘Will you be part of this empire, too?’ I asked Harry. ‘Not likely.’ He looked at me speculatively. ‘What are you going to do with your life, then? Marry Johnnie Ray, I suppose.’

  ‘Ideally,’ I said, taking on board the snub, ‘but just in case he doesn’t, fall for me, I’m going to Italy next summer.

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Harry. ‘Speaking of art, who painted the little watercolour in the corridor outside my bedroom — the snow scene?’

  I nearly gasped. He was challenging me, without a doubt, and I didn’t like it one bit — mainly because (inevitably and infuriatingly) I didn’t have a clue who painted the wretched picture.

  ‘It’s a Van Ruisdael,’ said Inigo, eager to show off rather than rescue me, ‘one of Mama’s favourites. She says she’d rather sell her soul than that painting. I think it was a present from Papa.’

  ‘God, I love the Dutch. Such emotional use of colour,’’ proclaimed Harry irritatingly.

  ‘Why can’t I meet some amazing man who’ll buy me paintings?’ said Charlotte dreamily. (I might mention at this point that she had slurped through her tomato soup and was now dipping her bread into what remained in my bowl. She did all this so coolly that no one batted an eyelid. That was the thing about Charlotte. She managed to turn’ her bad table manners into a bit of an art form.)

  ‘Not much good if you end up having to sell every painting you’re given,’ I commented.

  ‘But just to know that there was a man who was prepared to buy them for you. That would be enough for me, I think,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Have you had lots of boyfriends?’ Inigo asked her.

  ‘Inigo!’ I said furiously. ‘For goodness’ sake!’

  ‘Oh, it’s quite all right,’ said Charlotte, grinning. ‘That’s what little brothers are for, isn’t it? Asking questions like that?’

  ‘Not so little,’ growled Inigo. ‘I was sixteen last month.’

  There was a pause. I noticed Harry shoot me an edgy look that I was at a loss to decipher. Well, answer the question, Charlotte! I thought. For all that Inigo shouldn’t have asked it, I was as keen as he was to know the answer.

  ‘I’m mad about a boy called Andrew,’ she said calmly. ‘A the T, Harry calls him. Andrew the Ted. According to my mother and Aunt Clare, he’s very unsuitable. I think it’s about the only thing they’ve agreed on in years.’ She laughed loudly.

  ‘Why don’t they like him?’ persisted Inigo and this time I said nothing.

  Charlotte took a big gulp of champagne. ‘Oh, he’s a Teddy boy, nothing more than that,’ she said. ‘Drape jacket, skinny trousers, perfect Duck’s Arse hair, radiates discontent. Aunt Clare thought it was all fine at first. She kept on saying how good it was to meet boys who were a bit different — then when I showed no sign at all of getting bored with him, she got a bit worried. “I was out with a different boy every week when I was your age!” she kept saying. As if that made any difference to me. Charlotte stared at Inigo as she talked. ‘Everyone became nervous because A the T had no money and no real prospects. Standard stuff, really. In the end it wore me out. I needed Aunt Clare more than I needed him, I suppose, and I’ve never been much good at deceiving people. I told Andrew it was no good, that we had to stop seeing each other, that it wouldn’t ever work out.’ Her long hair fell forward and brushed the side of her empty soup bowl. ‘Romeo and Juliet eat your heart out,’ she added ironically.

  I felt a wave of pity for Andrew who I imagined would never be entirely free from the spell that Charlotte cast. I also felt envy — to have a boy fall in love with me was a great ambition of mine. Harry caught my eye and gave a brief shake of the head. I cleared my throat.

  ‘What have you seen at the pictures lately?’ I asked no one in particular.

  ‘Rear Window,’ said Inigo loudly.

  That first weekend with Charlotte and Harry at Magna came as something of a revelation. Without the overwhelming weight of Mama’s presence, it felt as if the house was shaking itself out of a long sleep. For the first time in my whole life, the weekend actually meant freedom. We had just three nights with Charlotte and Harry, but it may as well have been thirty. I can see Charlotte and me now, drunk on champagne, dancing powdered snowy footprints over the dining-room floor and shouting to make ourselves heard above the intoxicating sounds of Johnnie Ray and America. Always America. I had worried that Charlotte and Harry would be bored at Magna, would need entertaining as many of my friends from school had done. In my mind I had a long list of distractions for them —backgammon, the wireless, books. I needn’t have bothered. Not one jazz record got past Charlotte’s insatiable desire for Inigo’s rock ‘n’ roll collection. And backgammon? Who needed backgammon when we had a magician and a pack of perfectly good playing cards?

  After dinner, we lit the fire in the ballroom and turned up the volume on the gramophone. Charlotte told me about her father, Aunt Clare’s only brother, ‘Willie, who had fought in the Great War and died of a heart attack at the very start of the last one, a
nd more about her mother Sophia and her string of unsuitable suitors.

  ‘The conductor is allergic to everything,’ said Charlotte. ‘Even wine,’ she said, ‘which strikes me as just plain selfish.’

  Harry told me to pick a card from the pack I had unearthed from a kitchen drawer. I hugged it to my chest.

  ‘Now what?’ I asked him. ‘Do I have to tell you my favourite colour or what day of the week I was born so you can work it out?’

  ‘Four of clubs,’ yawned Harry. ‘Saves time.

  I tossed the card out onto the table with a cry of amazement. ‘Do it on me,’ demanded Inigo, inspecting the card. Harry, deadpan as ever, performed the same trick seven times on both of us. Next he made a huge red silk handkerchief vanish before our eyes, re-producing it two minutes later from Inigo’s jacket pocket on the other side of the room. He was wonderful as a magician and the more he practised his act on us, the more the tension seemed to drain out of his body, replaced by an air of engaging insolence that seemed to say, I’m going to fool you again, but only because I like you. He seemed much older than the rest of us — which he was — but it wasn’t just his age that gave me this impression; his whole persona had an old-fashioned drama about it. Another thing that set him apart from the rest of us was his ability to drink and not get drunk. After only half a glass of champagne, my head started to fizz and spin. Everything became hysterically funny, nothing seemed impossible.’

  ‘How is it that you’re still standing?’ I asked Harry as he drained his fifth glass.

  ‘Practice,’ he replied.

  At five in the morning, Inigo said he had a terrible craving for eggs with soldiers, but we left them in the water too long while Harry showed us a trick involving a vanishing soup spoon and they ended up hard-boiled. We peeled off the shells (difficult when we had all drunk more than we ever had before) and dipped the eggs in the salt jar, and I cut us uneven doorsteps of white bread, and buttered them in the sort of way that Mary would have described as liberal. Charlotte made us all scalding mugs of strong, sweet coffee and Harry impressed me by tipping the remains of his brandy into his with a sigh of despair. Then we pulled on our boots and crunched over the snow towards the bench that overlooks the duck pond, armed with travelling rugs and scarves.

  ‘What a place to live!’ Charlotte kept saying. ‘Who skulks about in the house at the bottom of the drive? We passed it on the way here.’

  ‘The Dower House? That was where we lived during the war. When we moved back to Magna we used to get lost the whole time,’ said Inigo. ‘The Dower House isn’t small but you can hear someone shout to you wherever you are in the place. At Magna, you’re practically in another time zone in the East Wing.’

  Charlotte giggled. ‘We spent most of the war in Essex at my great-aunt’s place. All we wanted to do was get back to London. Everything sounded so bloody exciting up there and we were stuck out in the middle of nowhere.’

  I murmured in agreement.

  ‘I felt cheated by the end of it all. Aunt Clare stayed up in town and, as far as I can tell, had a ball. She was forever lunching at Fortnum’s with falling rubble in her hair. She said the war was drunk-making stuff’

  The garden sat so still in front of us, listening carefully to every word, I thought. As the grey dawn began to break, I ran up to the house and put Johnnie Ray on again, throwing open the ballroom windows so that the cold air was suddenly full of that voice, and America, and we all sat perfectly still, not speaking, barely daring to breathe, so it seemed to me. I trembled on the bench and clamped my teeth together to stop them from chattering. It felt as if there were sparks coming out of my fingertips; everything was most reverently alive. My head buzzed with caffeine; I felt dizzy from lack of sleep and the coldness of the sharp, frosty morning in my smoky lungs. When the song finished, two and a half minutes later, something was different. I think we all felt it separately, each of us alone with our own little reasons for why the balance of the earth had shifted.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Charlotte eventually.

  ‘Better than good,’ I said.

  As day broke, the sunlight broke through the clouds, and diamonds danced on the snow. Magna, and everything that surrounded it, glittered.

  After one weekend with Charlotte, I could not imagine that there had ever been a time when I had not known her. I became aware of the aura of chaos that surrounded her (she only had to sit down to upset something — a cup of tea, the marmalade jar, the sugar bowl — and she never put anything away after she’d looked at it) yet these aspects of her character, which would in any normal person be considered flaws, only added to her charm. The reason that she spilt things was because she gestured wildly whenever she told a story. The reason she never put anything away was because she was so easily distracted — the sunset over the fairy wood, or a book she had just noticed in the library, would absorb her completely so that whatever she had been doing was forgotten. She never stopped talking, and though she didn’t eat much at mealtimes, her sweet tooth continued to be as fervent as it had been that afternoon at Aunt Clare’s. While we chatted after lunch and dinner, I was always aware of her monitoring Mary’s loud footsteps around the kitchen and pantry, so that a sort of game between the two started to emerge.

  ‘Penelope, I think Mary’s popped out — do you think we could sneak into the kitchen for something to fill the gap?’ she would hiss at top speed in the middle of a conversation. She possessed the pastry chef’s flair for detail, making everything that she was going to eat look mouth-watering to the onlooker. Mary’s fruit salad, after Charlotte had soused it in brown sugar, squeezed the juice of a lemon over it and dipped her spoon in honey, seemed positively ambrosial. Open and shut went the door of the pantry at all hours of the day and night. There was a nasty moment on Sunday evening.

  ‘Someone’s been at my pineapple tart,’ Mary said ominously. ‘There was half of it left when I put out the lights last night. Not enough for one helping this morning.’

  ‘Bats,’ Charlotte said solemnly. ‘They’ll eat anything.’ Mary didn’t quite know what to make of Charlotte.

  On Monday morning, before we set off for the station, I took Charlotte to see Banjo. I found a couple of squares of cooking chocolate for us to suck, and we leant over his stall in a satisfyingly horsy way. Charlotte told me that she was not much of a rider, but she certainly charmed my pony, who was usually very sniffy with strangers, by filling him up with carrots stolen from Mary’s supplies in the larder.

  ‘Don’t you just adore the way he crunches them?’ she said, offering him the carrot like an ice-cream cone. ‘I spent all of my formative years begging my parents for a pony of my own. I never much liked the idea of actually riding, but what heaven, to groom them and decorate them. I had to make do with a rather plain-looking rocking horse. Not the same thing at all.’

  ‘I used to make my own rosettes, out of ribbons and cardboard from the back of cereal boxes,’ I admitted. ‘I never won anything myself. Banjo was too strong and too naughty. At the county show one year he carted me out of the ring when I was supposed to be performing my individual display.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have argued that was your individual display?’

  I laughed. ‘Can’t say I got the chance to. I was disqualified.’

  ‘How shaming,’ said Charlotte. ‘The torture of childhood. Aren’t you glad to be out of that hell?’

  ‘I don’t really feel I am out of it. That day I saw Aunt Clare in Selfridges, and I knocked over their display, I felt about twelve.’

  ‘That’s the beauty of being eighteen. You can blame everything on not knowing what on earth you’re doing. I do, the whole time.’

  This struck me as odd as Charlotte seemed to me to be someone who knew exactly what she was doing at all times. She bit the top off the one remaining carrot.

  ‘My mother thinks I should find a rich man to marry. She’s always talking about how I’ll “come good” once I’ve found a husband. She hates having me a
t home — ploughing through the books in her library and kicking my heels up at night. She thinks I’m lazy.’

  Are you?’

  ‘Of course. Any sensible person is. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, thinking of my studies. ‘I never did very well at school. I like writing, though, making up stories,’ I went on lamely. ‘We weren’t encouraged to make up anything at school.’

  ‘School has nothing to do with anything,’ said Charlotte scornfully. She blew air into her gloved hands. ‘Shall we have a walk around the garden now?

  The glare of the sun on the snow bruised our eyes.

  We walked back across the field, climbed over the fence, crossed the drive and entered the walled garden through what is known as Johns’ Gate because at eleven o’clock every morning he’s always to be found standing there, smoking his pipe, Fido at his feet waiting for the crusts from his cheese sandwich. He doffed his cap to Charlotte and me.

  ‘Lovely day!’ said Charlotte, bending down to pat Fido.

  ‘Beautiful,’ agreed Johns, nodding at Charlotte — Gabriel Oak to Bathsheba — as he opened the gate for us.

  The walled garden is not perhaps what you would expect from a house of Magna’s austerity. It is all curves and romance, and in the snow, especially so. We threaded our way round the outermost path, crunching our boots in the snow.

  ‘How odd,’ said Charlotte. ‘To find such a picturesque garden here. Is it William Kent? It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Um, yes,’ I said brightly. The name rang a bell, at least. ‘Gosh, Charlotte, how do you know all this stuff? You’re shaming me by knowing more about Magna’s history than I do.’

  ‘People who live in great houses either know everything or nothing about them. I can see arguments for both, actually. There’s something very grand about living in a place this size and not having a clue what year the first brick was laid.’