The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets Read online

  I didn’t say anything, but I wasn’t convinced and neither was she.

  We sat in silence for a while, listening to the tick-ticking of the clock. Charlotte stared straight ahead of her, frowning, knotting her fingers together. It was the first time I had felt cold in Aunt Clare’s study. Eventually. I spoke up. ‘Mary thinks Marion Brando has good arms.’

  Charlotte stared at me as though I was mad. Then she started to laugh and suddenly we were all right again.

  Harry arrived back soon afterwards. He jumped with surprise to see Charlotte and me still up.

  ‘What on earth are you two doing?’ he demanded. ‘Waiting for Godot?’

  ‘No, just you,’ said Charlotte. ‘We’ve heard from reliable sources that you’ve been whooping it up chez the nouveau-riche.’

  ‘I nouveau-wishe,’ snapped Harry. ‘It’s been a painful day. I got stuck with the Wentworth twins for longer than is healthy for any man.

  Charlotte looked at me and grinned. ‘We just had dinner with them.’

  ‘You did? Well you’re gluttons for punishment, then.’

  ‘Gluttons, certainly.’ said Charlotte. ‘We went to Sheekey’s.’

  ‘They paid?’

  ‘Naturellement.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s something. I don’t know what it is about those two, but every party I’ve been to in the past year has involved sitting next to one of them. People obviously think we’re kindred spirits.’

  ‘Kate seems rather keen on you,’ I said slyly.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Harry coldly.

  ‘She’s jolly beautiful,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Until she opens that letterbox of a mouth.’

  ‘Did you make enough money to justify the whole grisly experience?’ asked Charlotte.

  ‘Just about. I was booked for another two lunch parties this week so it’s not all bad.’ He looked tired suddenly.

  ‘So you’re in it for something other than the thrill?’ I asked, rather surprised. ‘I always imagined that the money was a secondary consideration.’

  ‘Money is never a secondary consideration, Penelope,’ said Harry irritatedly. ‘Do you really think I’d hang around girls like Sophia and Kate for my own amusement? They’re enough to send anyone running for the hills.’

  ‘Why do you do it then?’ I said.

  ‘Because I love magic, I’m good at it and I can put up with all of it when I’m paid as much as I was paid tonight.’ He pulled out a stack of crumpled pound notes from the inside pocket of his jacket and tossed them onto the table. Charlotte gave a low whistle.

  ‘Nice work,’ she said. ‘I expect it’ll all be gone by tomorrow evening.’

  ‘It won’t,’ said Harry sharply. I had never seen him so agitated.

  He looked at me and sighed. ‘How’s the founder of the Johnnie Ray Fan Club tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘Very well thank you,’ I said firmly. ‘And if only I were the founder! We’ve missed out on tickets to his Palladium shows. Mama threw my fan club letter away before I read it,’ I went on, aware of the sourness in my voice. ‘We could have had discount tickets. As it happens, we’re left with none at all.’

  ‘Shame.’ Harry yawned, picking up last week’s Country Life. I wanted to scream at him.

  ‘I don’t suppose we can expect you to understand a tragedy of this proportion,’ said Charlotte irritatedly.

  ‘You’re right, I don’t. If you’d missed out on tickets to see George Melly. or Humphrey Lyttelton, yes, I could muster up something that resembled sympathy. But not getting to see Johnnie Ray? I should consider it a narrow escape.

  Charlotte threw a cushion at him, which missed and knocked a little ornament of a rather ugly milkmaid off Aunt Clare’s table and onto the floor where it broke. For some reason, this seemed to annoy Harry very much.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ he snapped, picking up the pieces. ‘You’re not thirteen any more, Charlotte.’ He stared at the bits, trying to work out how it had smashed. ‘I suppose I could try to fix this—’

  ‘Oh, just wave your wand over it,’ suggested Charlotte airily.

  Harry glared at her. ‘When are you going to stop being so bloody thoughtless? It’s so typical of you not to give a damn about anyone else’s things.’

  Even I was amazed at the vehemence of his tone. Charlotte recovered fast. ‘Well! Since when have you cared about Aunt Clare’s china collection! I’ve heard you say yourself that that milkmaid was a hideous piece of tat she should never have bought. And as for thoughtless! Talk about the pot calling the kettle—’

  ‘Oh, shut up. Just shut up!’

  Harry put the broken milkmaid into his top hat and for a moment I thought he really was going to magic it back together. Instead, he looked straight at me with those ever-changing magic eyes.

  ‘You look good in black,’ he said softly.

  ‘Goes with the mood,’ I said, rattled.

  He sauntered off to bed, taking his top hat and wand with him. The next morning the milkmaid was back on the table, smiling blithely. as good as new. Charlotte and I examined her under the light and couldn’t see a single crack. You had to hand it to Harry. He had style.

  Chapter 11

  MY BEAUTIFUL YOUTH

  When I was eighteen, I spent a great deal of time absorbed in magazines. My favourites were Vanity Fair (which Mama ordered and I read feverishly as soon as she put it down), and Woman and Beauty, which was aimed exclusively at young housewives. Even though housewives represented a section of society as alien to me as the creatures in the outer-space comics that Inigo devoured, I was quite addicted to reading about them. I kept a stack of magazines in my bedroom, and another downstairs in the morning room for flicking through while waiting for Mama or Inigo to appear, and their pages worked their magic on me more effectively than even I was aware. By the time I had whizzed through ‘The ABC of Unusual Holidays’ I felt desperate for a hill climbing trip to Austria. ‘Tartan, Tartan, Everywhere!’ found me rummaging through the mothy depths of my great-grandmother’s old trunk in search of a kilt I could fashion into ‘this season’s look’. I was quite overcome (and more than a little bit ashamed) of my need to spend money. When, oh when would I be ‘Free as Air in my Loveliest Clothes’?

  In between the boredom of my studies, I did everything I could to make money. and tried to keep a strict policy of giving fifty per cent of all that I earned to Mama, and therefore to Magna. Once the excitement of Christmas and New Year was over, I went back to working for Christopher once a week in his shop in Bath. The shop was placed between New Sounds, the best record shop in Bath, and Coffee On The Hill, the best café, which meant that I frequently ended up out of pocket before I had even left the town centre, and very little found its way back to Magna. Inigo, who was away at school much of the time, was even worse than me. He sold comics, chocolates and even cigarettes to his fellow pupils on the black market. I confronted him about it one weekend.

  ‘Don’t you think you should stop spending so much money on yourself and give something to Mama?’ I asked, drowning in guilt myself as I had just spent five shillings on a slap-up tea with a school friend in the café after my Tuesday shift.

  ‘I don’t want to give Mama my dirty cash,’ said Inigo gravely. ‘It’s black money. Penelope; everything I do at school is illegal. It wouldn’t be right to pour it into Magna. It would be like cursing the place.’

  ‘Whereas spending it on yourself is quite acceptable.’

  ‘I’ve already sold my soul to the devil for the sake of rock ‘n’ roll.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve got an answer for everything,’ I said crossly.

  One thing that I did start to do at this time was writing stories and sending them off to the magazines I so adored. It was the one thing in my life that I did without considering payment; all I wanted was the thrill of seeing my name in print. I ransacked my imagination for romantic tales of good-looking heroes and beautiful women and frequently stayed up late writing into the night, eating Cadbur
y’s Chocolate Sandwich biscuits (which like all biscuits tasted especially good after midnight), with Marina the guinea pig snuggled into the crook of my arm. I had some letters back from friendly enough editors, all saying that they liked my style, but that I was not quite right for their magazine, and perhaps I could send them something when my writing had matured? At the time, I felt rather stung by this but a few months later when I wrote a story that came right from my heart onto the page, I realised how right they had been. But I am going too far ahead.

  I told myself that I was making a difference to Magna — perhaps the money I earned would go towards Mary’s salary, or a new spade for Johns, or new candles for the dining room? It was a gesture that made me feel better, but it scarcely touched the surface of the problems we faced. I was horribly aware of the yawning chasm of debt that we were sinking into, and I felt helpless. Since the night of our Duck Supper before Christmas, Mama had not mentioned money. The odd thing about Mama was that she liked to think of herself as a doomy sort of person, but there was a natural optimism in her that refused to be defeated, however hard she squashed it down, and I know that she never lost faith completely. She scoured the cellars for buried treasure and had the Watteau outside my bedroom and the few remaining paintings in the library valued by a dealer in London; perhaps Aunt Sarah’s pesky oil of the lake was worth millions after all? No, said the dealer, no more than a couple of hundred pounds, and he winced when he heard that Mama had let a Stubbs go for a fifth of its value three years after the end of the war. In the back of her mind, Mama clung fast to the hope that Inigo would find a rich girl to marry. She had more or less given up on me. The fate of other big houses did not augur well. My childhood rang out with the names of great, lost houses. Broxmore, Draycott, Erlestoke and Roundway — Wiltshire houses all — each reduced to rubble through tax or fire or death. Houses like ours were a rare breed, but not quite rare enough. Each loss struck Magna like a blow upon a bruise.

  When I thought of it I felt dizzy with worry, and the fastest way to forget was to go shopping. I craved new shampoos and lipstick (Gala of London did the most delicious make-up), cigarettes (I didn’t really like smoking but as things in their bright, squashy packets, cigarettes were the last word in essential style), coffee and the cinema. After rationing, this new life was intoxicating, and there to be revelled in before it was taken away again.

  Of course, all this time I was thinking about Johnnie and the fact that he was going to be coming to England in April, and how on earth Charlotte and I were going to get tickets to his sold-out shows. Every time I thought about the mere fact of his being in England, my knees felt weak; once, when I imagined being in the same room as him, I actually had to sit down and have a glass of water. I played his records as often as I dared at home — it was not Mama who objected so much as Inigo, who had moved on to Elvis Presley and saw little point in listening to Johnnie Ray any more. Despite the fact that I was still living at home (and of course we had no money to make living at home any easier than it had been in the previous years), there was a sense of something uprising, a feeling gathering momentum that had started in America and was making its way to our shores. I was a teenager, and even if this was nothing more than a label for a section of the population that had always been there, it somehow felt as if it meant more now than it had done the year before.

  Before I met Charlotte, I had done nothing but stare out of windows. She was unafraid of most things and most people; she thought nothing of bunking a train fare, but she would make sure that she did so with a ham sandwich and chocolate éclair from Fortnum’s about her person. If ever she was caught, she would turn out her pockets to reveal the most extravagant packed lunch imaginable in the smartest of bags and the ticket collector always let her off I recognised pieces of myself in her and she encouraged the ‘rebel in me to emerge. Certainly. I would be happy to sneak into the cinema after the film had started. But in those shoes? Never!

  London intoxicated us both, and in the first weeks of 1955, whenever we could, Charlotte and I would take a trip into the West End where we would stare at beautiful hats in Swan and Edgar and talk about what we would sell if we had our own shop. Charlotte was drawn like a magpie to bright colours and sparkly window displays, and her eye was second to none.

  ‘I wouldn’t have dressed that mannequin in that drear trench coat.

  ‘Oh, I rather like it.’

  ‘Typical you. Penelope, you must try to develop better taste.’

  ‘My taste is impeccable, thank you very much!’

  ‘You’re too trad by far.’

  ‘Just because I like to look vaguely respectable—’

  ‘Don’t use that word in my presence.

  I put on my worshipping voice. ‘Oh, Charlotte, you’re so weird, you’re so different… wish I was like you!’

  In response to this, she pulled the ribbon out of my hair and ran off down Oxford Street. She was good at being teased, and the better we knew each other, the more we played up to our differences. My conscientious following of all the latest trends complemented her refusal to conform, and we battered the seriousness out of each other. She also had a habit of nudging me violently when nice-looking boys walked past us. They were confused by Charlotte, with her eccentric clothes and her height and her confidence. She did not radiate the faint-worthy. womanly atmosphere of Mama, rather she threw something completely different at them — sex, I suppose — and they weren’t used to getting that from someone with such class.

  I don’t mean to create the impression that Charlotte and I spent all our time swanning around London and buying clothes, for quite apart from my lectures and endless round of essays, I had my job with Christopher. Charlotte liked visiting me in the shop, and Christopher became defensive and offhand in her presence, which was, I felt, a sure-fire sign of his fascination with her. As an old Etonian he was of very little interest to Charlotte. She said that men who had been to boarding school never understood women, but she admired the way he ran his shop and she liked to watch him talking to customers. She constantly fired questions at him (why did he put that particular bowl in the window? what was the difference between running the business in the winter and the summer? why didn’t he play music in the shop?) until he was groaning with irritation. I wondered what Christopher would say if he knew that Charlotte was Clare Delancy’s niece — I still hadn’t summoned the courage to mention her to him.

  For most of the week, Charlotte was entirely at the mercy of Aunt Clare and her memoirs. During January, Aunt Clare got into the amiable habit of inviting me over to Kensington once a week, for tea. These teas usually. though not always, took place at three-thirty on a Friday when she and Charlotte had finished working, and they never went on beyond five o’clock. They were an hour and a half of pure fascination. Her study itself remained a valuable insight into the life of a woman who never ceased to surprise me. One of the most curious aspects of the room was how the level of chaos — the number of books, the state of perpetual disarray — never altered. No one ever seemed to tidy up or put anything away, yet there was never a visible increase in dust or clutter, which gave one the odd sensation of walking onto the same film set every week. On The Origin of Species never moved from the place I had noted it in on my first visit, and every Friday I ran my eye over the same postcard to Richard about Wootton Bassett. As a result, the room seemed preserved in amber, which would have been quite disconcerting were it not for the variety in atmosphere each week that ranged from high elation at the completion of an exciting chapter (and so began a lifelong friendship with the art of keeping secrets was a favourite of mine) to bitter irritation when Aunt Clare was ‘lost for adjectives’.

  ‘One can only use so many words to describe the heat of the Far East,’ she complained one afternoon, ‘and I believe I have ransacked the English language for every one of them.’

  ‘Dry, oppressive, stifling, overwhelming?’ I suggested with all the flourish of one who had never been east of Paris.
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br />   ‘Already used all of those,’ said Aunt Clare dismissively. ‘Except for overwhelming. I was never overwhelmed. Perhaps we should make that point, Charlotte? Despite the intensity of the heat, I was never overwhelmed.’

  Tap, tap, tap went Charlotte’s long fingers at the typewriter. She typed enviably quickly. much faster, I am sure, than any of the girls on the popular secretarial courses, and she rarely messed up the manuscript with any mistakes. Never overwhelmed, indeed. I could believe that, for the harder Aunt Clare worked, the younger and brighter she looked. (Charlotte said it was all to do with the therapeutic nature of writing one’s autobiography and that we should try it too. I said I was quite keen on this idea but if anyone ever read it, I should age seventy years overnight out of sheer nerves.) ‘That will do for today. Charlotte,’ Aunt Clare would say when Charlotte started to sag. ‘Cover that machine up at once —I can’t bear to look at it any longer — and send Phoebe in with tea.

  Ah, tea. I became as greedy as Charlotte when it came to tea in that house. There was something about the taste of hot buttered toast with gooseberry jam in Aunt Clare’s study that could never be replicated anywhere else. On a couple of occasions, Harry joined us just as I was stuffing a second piece of chocolate cake into my mouth, or reaching for a third ginger scone. He never seemed to notice, and he never ate much himself, but boys, I have noticed, don’t get as fanatical about sweet things as girls. The more time that I spent with Harry, the younger he seemed to become, and I revised my view of him as having always seemed a man. Twenty-five did not seem so jolly old after all, and although he still refused to accept my fixation with Johnnie Ray and pop music, I realised that like Charlotte and me he was just beginning to live. The war had scuppered most of his teenage years, and for that I felt desperately sorry. Then, one Thursday afternoon, Aunt Clare and Charlotte had not arrived back from a trip to Barkers to buy more ribbon for the typewriter, and Harry and I found ourselves alone for the first half an hour of tea. He stood by the fireplace, smoking a cigarette, murky eyes as amused as ever. Sometimes I felt quite easy with Harry; other times, I felt crippled with shyness.