The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets Page 14

  ‘What on earth are you doing, Mary?’ I demanded, curiosity forcing me to abandon my copy of Housewife in the middle of an article called ‘Is Mother Ever Wrong?’ (Yes, frequently. in my view.)

  ‘Yer mother wants this up here,’ Mary announced, brandishing an armful of mistletoe at me. ‘Johns brought a whole load back with ‘im from Hereford last week, the socking great Romeo. ‘Old the ladder for me, won’t ye?’ she huffed.

  ‘Who would you like to kiss you under the mistletoe, Mary?’ I teased.

  ‘Marlon Brando,’ she answered promptly. her face reddening as she struggled with the branches.

  ‘Mary!’ I was genuinely astonished.

  ‘Good arms,’ she said. ‘Nice to see a man with good arms.’

  There was a pause as she concentrated on knotting the mistletoe to the moth-eaten antlers of the stag above the door.

  ‘Well hung,’ I observed, and I think I saw a twitch of a smile on Mary’s thin lips.

  On Christmas Day. Inigo and I linked arms with Mama and walked through the garden to church. It was one of those rare December mornings of cloudless blue sky and bright white sunlight, when the grass scrunched frostily underfoot and the church bells really did seem to peal with tidings of great joy for all the world, but especially for us, in our corner of the world, our piece of little England. Being of a romantic disposition, I had always liked attending church, but since the war the family pew (as uncomfortable now as it must have been when it was first carved in 1654) had felt too big for just the three of us. I had a sudden wave of longing for Papa, for the presence of a man to protect us.

  ‘A very Happy Christmas to you,’ came a low voice from the pew behind and I turned round to see Mrs Daunton, rosy with the cold morning, smiling at Inigo and me. Next to her sat the vicar’s beautiful daughter, who seemed to me to be wearing an awful lot of pancake and pink lipstick for a Christmas service. She gave me a small smile that seemed to unite us in something I couldn’t quite explain but probably had something to do with being younger than everyone else. Her father spoke about John the Baptist and how he prepared the people for the coming of Christ and I tried hard not to think about clothes and music, and all the other things that just seemed to pop into my head at the wrong time. We sang ‘0 Come All Ye Faithful’ and Inigo and I nudged each other during the ‘now in flesh appearing’ line because the way that it was phased made it sound as if Jesus was starring in a film. Mama looked down at her hands during the service, and I thought about her thinking about Papa and wondered if Aunt Clare was thinking of him too. When we filed out into the churchyard an hour later, Mama stood and talked to people about the village, and the gymkhana and the proposed expansion of the village stores. There was no denying it, Mama’s star quality was her great gift. She had fame in the village, and there was great public sympathy for her in the big house, ‘rattling around like a pin in a trunk’ as I once heard her situation described.’

  ‘Penelope thinks another gymkhana is a wonderful idea, don’t you?’ said Mama, cueing me up for a long conversation with Mary’s sister, Lucy, who was fifteen years younger than Mary and lacked her sister’s woeful outlook on the world.

  ‘Weren’t we lucky with the weather last year?’ she began. ‘I can’t think what we would have done had it rained…’

  I nodded and smiled and tried not to tune in to Inigo’s conversation with Helen ‘Williams that included words like cinema and ‘Marlon Brando’ and finally ‘Palladium’ and ‘Johnnie Ray’. By the time we waved goodbye and set off for Magna half an hour later, I was fairly bursting at the seams with wanting to know what Helen Williams knew, and I didn’t.

  ‘She says Johnnie’s coming to London again next year,’ said Inigo casually.

  ‘I don’t think you should have been discussing John Ray in church,’ Mama reproved him.

  ‘Johnnie, Mama, Johnnie!’ I snapped in exasperation.

  ‘And we weren’t in church, we were standing outside,’ said Inigo, maddening as ever.

  Throughout all of that Christmas, the Duck Supper of the previous month hung over the three of us, and with it the incomprehensible, unthinkable notion that we couldn’t afford to be where we were any longer. That we had nothing left to offer Magna except for ourselves — and what use were we? In the back of my mind I felt we were being cruel to the house — it was suffering because of our lack of money and our romantic convictions that something would come right in the end. One evening, I caught Mama rummaging through a crate of old junk from the cupboard in the blue room. For a wild moment, I wondered if she was looking for something of Charlotte’s, for she was the last person to have slept there.

  ‘What are you doing, Mama?’ I asked her.

  ‘Searching for hidden treasure,’ she said without the slightest trace of irony.

  I wanted to tell her not to be so stupid, and what on earth was she expecting to find, but I hadn’t the heart. And of course, there was always the hope inside me that perhaps the answer to our prayers would reveal itself amongst a box of moth-eaten blankets, crumpled newspapers and broken toys. Could it also contain a teddy bear worth thousands of pounds? Or the discarded necklace of a long-forgotten ancestor? We dreamed on, but I was horribly aware that dreaming was getting us nowhere.

  A week later, after lunch, Luke and Loretta arrived. They had set sail from America on Boxing Day and, after five days at sea, stood in the hall and marvelled at us. Inigo and I couldn’t have been more excited had they sailed in from Mars.

  ‘My word!’ exclaimed Luke in his delicious Southern drawl. ‘Who on earth are these two, Lolly?’ (Mama despised Luke’s calling her sister ‘Lolly’; nicknames were to be avoided at all costs, which makes one wonder why she named me Penelope.) ‘You two are grown so tall!’

  Inigo and I both adored Uncle Luke who was six foot five with a wide, smiling face and huge yellow-green eyes; the sort of man who looked as though he was perpetually making hay while the sun shone. It would be disloyal to my mother and my aunt to say that Loretta was a much easier, sweeter, less beautiful version of Mama, but I thought it just the same.

  ‘The image of Archie, isn’t she, Luke?’ she whispered; shaking her head in wonder.

  ‘The very image!’ agreed Luke, enveloping me in a bear hug. ‘Your daddy was the very best man I ever met,’ he went on. ‘An’ I only met him the three times, didn’t I, Lolly? Funniest man I ever did meet. Biggest feet an’ all.’ Papa was never more real than he was through Luke’s memories of him.

  ‘An’ you, young man,’ he went on, addressing Inigo and his duck-arse hair this time. ‘Well bless my soul. You look like a young Elvis Presley to me.

  ‘Who?’ I giggled.

  Charlotte and Harry arrived two hours later. Mama received them in the morning room and Charlotte plied her with presents — a huge ham, a box of violet creams from Harrods, a bottle of lavender bath oil from Swan and Edgar that I intended to swipe as soon as possible, and a fruit cake that weighed almost as much as Mary.

  ‘How wonderful!’ Mama cried. ‘You are clever. Oh, Penelope! Do save the ribbon on that ham — it’s too wonderful to throw away.

  Dear Mama. She was wearing a new pair of cream trousers with a high-necked black sweater. With her black hair swept into a perfect chignon, she looked the epitome of style, yet the room she sat in shamed us all. The curtains hung sorry as teardrops, ripped and faded beyond any kind of chic; the mauve wallpaper — unchanged since my great-grandmother’s era —peeled miserably around the once beautiful Inigo Jones cornices. The ceiling was stained yellow with age and dry rot, and Mary had not removed a bucket that had caught water from a serious leak on the floor above a week ago. Sensitive as a heat rash to my friends’ reactions to my mother, I noticed Charlotte’s jaw drop and Harry’s face become strangely watchful. I knew precisely what they were thinking: we knew she was young but we didn’t expect her to be this staggering. Why on earth doesn’t she do something about the house?

  ‘Penelope, show Charlotte and Harry to their
rooms,’ said Mama with a soft smile. ‘How delightful to have the house full of beautiful youth. It’s how it should be, you know.’

  I wanted to gnash my teeth, but I wasn’t sure how, so I let her go on.

  ‘Dinner will be at eight o’clock,’ she said. She looked suddenly tired. ‘I’m not sure I have the energy to stay awake until midnight, but you young ones can celebrate. My sister Loretta and her husband Luke are here from America.’ She paused to allow the force of her disdain to sink in. ‘They’re recovering before dinner.’ Her eyes shifted to Mary’s bucket on the floor.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ she said quietly. ‘I meant to get rid of that.’

  I stepped forward and picked it up. ‘Charlotte and I will be down at the stables this afternoon,’ I said. Mama took a cigarette from the silver case that Papa gave her for her eighteenth birthday.

  ‘And what about you, Harry?’ she asked. ‘Do you ride?’ She asked the question perfectly innocently. but it hung in the air so evocatively that he actually blushed.

  ‘I don’t,’ he admitted finally.

  ‘Ah well. I hear you’re a magician?’

  ‘I hope to be one day.’

  There was a short silence, then a strange and spooky thing happened. Harry glanced up at the ceiling and the lights in the morning room flickered and went out, and we would have been plunged into blackness were it not for the amber glow from the dying embers in the fireplace. Mama gasped and pressed her hand to her chest and Charlotte and I cried out at the same time and grabbed each other in that instinctive yet altogether undignified way that girls do when this sort of thing happens. Power cuts were par for the course in a house like Magna, but the timing of this one seemed a little too appropriate to be true.

  ‘Harry! Stop it!’ hissed Charlotte, her face livid with dancing shadows, and miraculously the lights came back on again, and the fire looked cold and small once more.

  ‘It wasn’t me, for goodness’ sake,’ said Harry innocently. ‘though I’m very happy for you to believe that I can pull off stunts like that. It can only be a good thing for my reputation.’

  ‘Well!’ said Mama slowly. ‘That was quite something. Whatever can we expect next? Books flying off the shelves? Wardrobes spontaneously combusting?’

  ‘Oh, please, no,’ I whimpered in alarm.

  ‘I don’t go in for anything like that,’ said Harry. ‘I’m rather a traditional sort of magician, in fact.’

  ‘Sounds like a contradiction in terms,’ said Mama. She didn’t look tired any longer. She liked this sort of thing.

  ‘Would you like me to take a look at your fuse box, Lady Wallace?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Oh, would you? And please, you must call me Talitha.’

  The next minute, Inigo exploded into the room brandishing the dust pan and brush. ‘The lights went out and I knocked this off the halt table and the frame’s smashed.’ In his hand was the photograph of Papa in his uniform. I braced myself for tears from Mama who usually considered this sort of thing a Bad Omen. Instead, she smiled at Inigo.

  ‘Well, it can’t be helped. Leave the photograph for Johns; he can take it into town and have it reframed.’

  ‘That’s it?’ asked Inigo suspiciously.

  ‘Whatever do you mean, darling? Accidents happen. ‘Not round here they don’t, I thought.

  My mother was dynamite by candlelight; she used it like an actress to enhance her mystique, her gypsy-green eyes and her film-star vulnerability; against the backdrop of the dining room in all its medieval glory, she looked even more bewitching. She placed herself between Harry and Uncle Luke. Mary, set-faced with the effort of catering for more than the usual total of three, whisked us through our prawn cocktails and I fancied I could read Harry thinking well why on earth not serve something comforting like soup on such a cold night?

  ‘So you’re a magician?’ Loretta asked Harry. Here we go again, I thought.

  ‘I’m training,’ explained Harry. ‘It’s a long process. It’s not the sort of thing that there’s any point in being just halfway good at.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Mama. ‘No good making someone disappear, then not knowing how to get them back again!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered to myself.

  ‘And how about you, Charlotte? And you, darling Penelope? What do girls like you do with yourselves nowadays?’ asked Loretta, turning her kind eyes towards me.

  ‘Now that’s a question.’ I sighed.

  Charlotte paused and glanced around the table to assess whose attention she had. This sort of behaviour from her made me slightly nervous. Charlotte was still an unknown quantity to me, someone capable of saying almost anything. I chewed hard on a rubbery prawn and hoped that she wouldn’t be too outrageous.

  ‘Girls like me,’ she said slowly. ‘Well, most of us spend a few months in Europe learning to speak beautiful French or Italian. Then when we arrive back in England, we go to plenty of smart parties where we hope and pray that some nice, rich young man will see us standing on the edge of the dance floor. Then I suppose we marry him and have children.’ She gave me a glittery little grin. ‘Well, that’s what I’ve heard, anyway. It’s all the rage among the girls I went to school with. Personally. it leaves me a little bit cold. I want to earn my own money. I’m intent on making a great deal of it. Then perhaps marrying Johnnie Ray. if Penelope hasn’t got there first.’

  Uncle Luke gave a shout of laughter.

  ‘Penelope’s off to Rome in September,’ said Mama quickly. I think she felt slightly surprised that someone other than herself was capable of being the centre of attention. ‘She’s been desperate to see the Sistine chapel in the flesh for as long as I can remember.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said automatically. but found myself thinking, have I? It was hard to cast my mind back to a time when I felt desperate over anything but Johnnie and music and waltzing off to parties and eating chips. Yet Mama was right: a few years ago and after reading a dire romantic novel set in seventeenth-century Rome, I had longed to go to Italy.

  ‘I adore the thought of Italy,’ said Charlotte dreamily. ‘My aunt refuses to let me go. She thinks I’ll fall in love with a foreigner and never return.

  ‘She’s absolutely right,’ said Harry.

  ‘And what may I ask is wrong with falling in love with a foreigner?’ asked Loretta, pretending to be shocked. ‘Good gracious, I married one!’

  ‘Uncle Luke’s not foreign, he’s American!’ said Inigo indignantly. Luke threw back his head and roared at this; a great rumble of rich noise with the odd high squawk thrown in for good measure, and it set us all off, though I couldn’t really see what was so amusing.

  ‘I can’t see Penelope marrying an Italian. She’s far too in love with England,’ said Harry idly.

  ‘More’s the pity,’ said Mama.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked Harry, but my heart was beating faster because it wasn’t often that people said things about me that I had not even realised myself until that moment.

  ‘I’ve never known anyone as English as you,’ agreed Charlotte. ‘The way you look, for a start, like something out of an Enid Blyton story. Gosh, your freckles are so perfectly placed that after our first tea I had a bet with Harry that you drew them on with a pencil.’

  ‘So that’s why you told me—’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I still don’t see why that makes me terribly English. Just having freckles—’

  ‘Oh, but it’s not just that, is it?’ said Charlotte. ‘It’s the way you talk, the things you say. the sort of stuff that shocks you, like some of the things Marina was saying the other day. the stuff that doesn’t shock you, like getting into a cab and having tea with me at Aunt Clare’s when you’d never met me before—’

  ‘Ahem!’ I coughed loudly. Mama was still unaware of how I had met Charlotte.

  ‘Don’t sound ashamed of it,’ said Harry, ‘I think it’s a very very good thing. I wish I was like you.’

  ‘You’re the worst,’ said
Charlotte. ‘You’re an English eccentric. Nothing could be more tiresome.’

  ‘December the thirty-first 1954,’ announced Inigo, who was hot on proclaiming times and dates.

  ‘Just two minutes of 1954 left. Farewell, sweet rationing,’ he added with glee.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ said Harry.

  ‘It’s odd,’ said Mama, ‘but when I heard that meat was coming off rationing, I felt sort of empty. Frightened that we might start to forget, I suppose. Oh, I’m being silly. I’m sorry.’ She picked up her glass and her hand was shaking and I knew that she hadn’t really meant to say what she had just said. Papa was the one being that she never used for effect. Luke reached out and touched her arm.

  ‘Nothin’ silly ‘bout that,’ he said softly. ‘Ah know just how you feel.’ He smiled at Charlotte and me. ‘You young ones have honey days ahead. And thank the Lord for that.’

  ‘Amen!’ I cried.

  ‘May the new year bring us all the honey we can eat!’ added Charlotte.

  ‘All the honey!’ we repeated and raised our glasses and Inigo ran to the gramophone and put Frankie Laine on. When the grandfather clock in the hall struck bleakly at midnight I sensed its surprise and resentment at being drowned out by the American pop music that blasted from the hall. Inigo grabbed me and Charlotte by the hand and we danced out of the dining room, kicking off our shoes and spilling champagne down our fingers.

  Chapter 9

  MODERN BOYS AND GUINEA PIGS

  1 January 1955 was the first time that I can remember feeling hot in the hall. Hot from dancing and laughing, hot from the quivery, odd anticipation for the new year. Inigo ran upstairs and came down with his guitar and played along with every single record that we put on. Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, Johnnie of course — he knew all of them, and though Charlotte and I sang along with everything (like the fans we were), it was Inigo who had every groove of the vinyl ingrained in his being. He approached pop music like a scholar, cursing himself on the rare occasions when Luke asked him a question he could not answer. The mathematics of the records enthralled him as much as the music — what colour was the label? How many minutes and seconds, precisely. did each song last? Then, at half-past one in the morning, Luke slipped upstairs and came down carrying two records on a label that none of us had ever seen before.