The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets Read online

  The next half an hour was a bit of a blur as Rocky talked about James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and the film he was working on for a big film studio, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Marina and Harry. Eventually I stood up.

  ‘I must find the bathroom,’ I muttered. ‘Please excuse me.

  I was very drunk indeed and it took all my self-control to walk sensibly across the room and out into the corridor.

  ‘Ladies’ room is down the stairs, turn left, madam,’ said the man on the door of the private room.

  ‘Oh, thank you so much.’

  Grabbing hold of the banister, I took the downward journey gingerly. Such was the extent of my concentration that I did not hear the pounding of feet behind me until they were right upon me. Someone grabbed me by the waist and I yelped.

  ‘Penelope!’ It was Harry.

  ‘Help!’ I cried weakly, collapsing against him.

  ‘You’re drunk and you’re flirting disgustingly with Rocky Dakota.’

  I giggled. ‘I wasn’t flirting. I don’t know how to flirt. Gosh. Was I flirting?’

  ‘You’re not funny.’

  ‘But you’re right, I am drunk. Help, Harry, what shall I do?’ I leaned my weight on the door of the ladies’ bathroom and, finding it not as heavy as I had anticipated, hurtled inside, heels skidding all over the polished floor. I collapsed into giggles, made worse by the distinctly unfazed face of the lavatory attendant, all smiles, soap pump at the ready. Harry followed me in.

  ‘Sir, the gentlemen’s room is next door—’

  ‘I am quite aware of that,’ said Harry, taking a crisp note out of his pocket and handing it to her. ‘Get this girl a glass of water, please.’

  ‘No. I want to go back to the table. I want to talk to Rocky again.’ I stood up and lurched forward.

  ‘Not on your life. We’re going to sit here until you’re sober.’

  I collapsed onto a brocaded chair next to the basin, head between my hands. ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ said Harry ominously.

  His tone must have been pretty severe because I decided against it. We sat together in the ladies’ room at the Ritz for twenty minutes while I waited for the world to stop spinning and sipped at a glass of water. I can’t recall exactly what we talked about, Harry and I, but I know that I felt an odd relief that he was with me.

  ‘I hope Mama’s OK,’ I found myself saying, apropos of nothing.

  ‘Why on earth wouldn’t she be?’

  ‘I don’t know. She would be appalled if she could see me now.

  ‘So would my dear mother,’ admitted Harry. ‘She thinks you’re the most wonderful creature ever to have entered our lives.’

  ‘Can’t think why—’

  ‘Neither can I,’ said Harry, utterly without humour.

  ‘Thank you very much! I’m the voice of sanity in your houshhold I mean housh-shold I mean household,’ I spluttered.

  He didn’t need to respond, but when I fell forward he held me for a few minutes, absent-mindedly stroking my hair and sighing occasionally. I closed my eyes and felt as though I could fall asleep for ever.

  ‘Come on then,’ Harry said eventually. ‘Please, Penelope, for the sake of my pride and your Johnnie Ray tickets, can’t you just make the smallest effort to pretend that you find me even a fraction as attractive as that bloody American?’

  ‘Bloody Marina is a bloody American!’ I cried.

  Harry shook his head. ‘We’d better get back.’ He looked sad in that moment, sad and small but so very familiar. I reached out and took his hand; I just couldn’t help it.

  ‘Everything will work out, you know,’ I said earnestly. For, a second Harry gripped my hand so hard I opened my mouth to howl in pain. He stared at me.

  ‘Do you really think so? Do you believe that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think so—’ ‘I’m a fool.’

  ‘But you’re good at magic.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  When we walked back through the door, people had started to move around the room. The voices were louder, the smoke was thicker, the atmosphere hotter. Marina was sitting on some young mans lap, shredding petals from a rose. Charlotte was talking to Rocky and eating chocolates from a silver bowl.

  ‘He loves me not!’ exclaimed Marina loudly.

  ‘Don’t you believe it, darling,’ said the young man. They looked up at Harry and me.

  ‘Well!’ said Marina. ‘Where have you two been? We were about to send out a search party.’

  ‘Penelope was feeling a little faint,’ said Harry, stifling a yawn. Crikey. I thought. He can’t be bored. I looked at Marina, my dislike for her growing with every moment that passed. She was looking at Harry in that horrible, challenging way again. Her eyes mocked us. I was now at that liberating stage that comes after the room has stopped spinning, but before all sense of self-awareness has been regained. I caught sight of Harry and me in the long mirror that ran along the back of the room. We were up to her poxy challenge, I thought. We sat down together, and I poured us a cup of coffee to share.

  Charlotte crouched down next to me for a moment. ‘Well done,’ she said in an undertone. ‘That was a stroke of genius, vanishing for as long as you did. You got Marina pretty cross. Where were you, anyway?’

  ‘Powdering my nose.’ I giggled. ‘What do you think of Rocky?’

  ‘The least boring man in the room,’ said Charlotte finally, and coming from her, I recognised this as a huge compliment. ‘He’s also the best dressed,’ she added. ‘You see the cut of his trousers? I’ve never seen anything so wonderfully crafted in all my born days. And his tie!’

  ‘You talked about nothing but clothes?’

  ‘Art, Penelope. The suit that Rocky Dakota is wearing is nothing short of art. It’ll be hanging, framed, in Dorset House in a hundred years’ time, alongside that painting of the orange squares.’

  I could believe it, absolutely. Everything about Rocky looked as though it should be framed. Harry slid up to me and handed me another glass of water.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said. Against Rocky, Harry with his careless hair and odd eyes appeared even more chaotic than usual. Imagine you’re crazy about him, I told myself firmly. Imagine he’s not just your friend.

  ‘Darling,’ I whispered, ‘thank you for looking after me.’ I glanced at Marina who was pretending not to look at us. ‘Move closer,’ I instructed. ‘Marina’s looking.’

  Harry shifted forward in his chair, and I wrapped my hand over his. We stared at each other and tried not to laugh. He moved even closer.

  ‘What can we do,’ I whispered, ‘to get her really annoyed?’

  Harry smiled at me and pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. For a moment, that something that had floated in the air in the Long Gallery was back again and I didn’t want to move away. Ever.

  ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. I’m wondering whether I really care any more.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think perhaps if I kissed you…’

  He didn’t need to say anything more.

  I stumbled into my bedroom at Aunt Clare’s, three hours later, and found an envelope on my chest of drawers. Ripping it open, I found my precious tickets inside with a note from Harry. Thank you. I think it worked.

  On the floor above me, I heard him crashing about in his room. I pulled off my lovely heels and my dress and my stockings and, being the good girl that I am, wiped off my makeup with some cold cream. My head was spinning again. Before Harry and I had left the Ritz, Rocky had taken me aside.

  ‘Perhaps I should take you out some time. You English kids, you and the magician boy and your friend Charlotte. When I was a teenager in America, I had a very clear idea of how English kids should be. You lot come pretty close.’

  I climbed into bed, my mind full of the Ritz and Rocky and Harry and Marina and champagne and blistered feet and kissed-off Yardley lipstick. Acting had been so very easy, I said to myself, effortless in fact. There
was another thought that kept on coming back to me, another thought that couldn’t be pushed away but that I didn’t fully understand until the next day at breakfast when Harry emerged, rubbing his eyes and smiling. The other thought said that acting was only ever easy when you weren’t acting at all.

  Chapter 15

  MARINA TRAPPED

  I don’t think that I have ever felt so wretched as when I awoke the morning after the night at the Ritz. At six o’clock I had a headache so terrible that I felt certain I should die within the hour. When seven o’clock slouched around and I was still alive, I decided that I had to leave London as quickly as possible. The thought of seeing Harry over the breakfast table and answering Aunt Clare’s inevitable machine-gun fire of questions later filled me with horror. I brushed my teeth and packed — sighing and stuffing my beautiful dress into my case any old how in the way that one does after something has been worn to unpredictable effect — and hurried downstairs, tripping over the cat and cursing the squeaky floorboards outside Charlotte’s room. Goodness, I was thirsty. I simply had to have a glass of water before I left. I creaked open the kitchen door (funny. I had never been into the kitchen before, and very smart it was too, all modern and shiny and not at all like the rest of the house —Phoebe obviously ran a tight ship) and padded across the room. Running the water under my hand for a minute, I closed my eyes and tried my hardest not to think too hard about the night before. It was just too confusing, too awful to have been used like that in front of Marina, and yet it had been me who had encouraged him… Or had I? I groaned to myself, wishing that events of last night would sort themselves out into chronological order in my hurting head. Two full glasses of water later, I was about to turn round and leave the room when I froze in horror at the sound of footsteps thudding down the stairs. Please go away, I wished silently. The footsteps got closer. Quite without thinking, I opened the nearest door, which happened to lead to the pantry, and hid inside. I couldn’t say exactly what made me do this, only that I felt strongly that the desire not to see anyone outweighed the possibility of being caught somewhere stupid. The footsteps followed the precise route that I had taken. I could hear the tap being turned on, a glass being selected, and, moments later, the contents being consumed. It could only be Harry, I decided. Charlotte always carried water upstairs with her at night, and Aunt Clare would never gulp like that. Please can he not feel hungry, I prayed, only too aware of the cold apple pie above my head. Please can he not think to open the— ‘What on earth! Penelope!’ Harry nearly jumped out of his skin.

  ‘I was getting a bit of apple pie!’ I barked, voice croaking, hating myself for minding about my knotted hair and deathly complexion in front of him.

  ‘You were hiding!’

  ‘No! I didn’t realise you were in the kitchen.’

  ‘You little liar!’

  I squeezed out of my hiding place. ‘I thought you might be Charlotte. I didn’t want to answer any questions about last night,’ I wailed. ‘I’ve hardly slept. I thought I’d take the first train home.’

  ‘How convenient.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. You’ve got your tickets; I suppose the job’s done.’

  ‘Well — yes. I don’t think I could have given you a better performance,’ I snapped, anger at being caught in the pantry making me sound more sarcastic than I had intended.

  ‘Indeed. Oscar-winning, I’d say. Rocky Dakota obviously thought so.

  ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’

  ‘I heard him asking you if he could take you out some time—’

  ‘So what? Don’t I deserve some fun?’

  Harry considered for a moment. ‘Not really. Anyway, he’s all wrong for you. He’ll spit you out when he gets bored.’

  ‘You should know,’ I hissed.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Marina. She obviously works on that premise. Get bored, move on— Harry gave me a look of pure loathing, grabbed the apple pie out of the pantry and walked towards the door. ‘Enjoy Johnnie Ray,’ he said. ‘Oh, and Penelope?’

  ‘Yes?’ I said sulkily.

  ‘Your blouse. It’s open.’

  Horrified, I looked down to see that Harry was quite right, my blouse had come open almost to the waist, revealing nothing more than the black brassiere I had been wearing under my dress the night before. I was too annoyed to think of anything snappy to say, and Harry stalked off without looking back. Oh, how infuriating it was that he always seemed to have the last word.

  Two minutes later I was clear of Aunt Clare’s and marching towards Paddington. I wanted very badly to stay wretched and furious, it seemed the only sensible thing to be feeling — but London sparkled after a light shower of rain and the first buds were appearing on the cherry trees down Westbourne Grove and Whiteleys had just changed their windows to display all kinds of delicious things — a lemonade set with ice crushers, huge plastic beach bags in gay colours, and a portable Roberts radio. You were kissed, kissed in the Ritz, I said to myself as I walked, and it made me smile, because even if it had been staged for Marina Hamilton, and even if neither of us was remotely in love with the other, I had still been kissed in the Ritz. It was more than most people could wish for, I thought. Even if Harry and I had rowed in the pantry and he had seen me in my underwear.

  When I got home, I found Magna empty (Mama had left me a note explaining that she had gone into town with Mary to buy supplies for the weekend), so I rushed to the gramophone and played my Johnnie Ray records over and over again. I flung him and Rocky around in my mind — whom would I rather dance with (Rocky), whom would I rather sit up all night talking poetry and dreams with (Johnnie) — yet all the time Harry’s face rattled me more than either of them. My excitement at the thrill of being kissed turned to irritation and a black cloud descended over me. How dare he, I thought, over and over again, remembering the way he had kissed me, so slowly and deliberately, in front of Marina. And how dare I have been so drunk and so hopeless? He had gone too far, and I should have run from the room there and then. Instead, I had allowed him to kiss me again in the cab on the way home, then — horrors! —I recalled him kissing me again as he said goodnight to me outside my bedroom door. I was a silly little girl, I decided. By the time Mama arrived home, I had made up my mind that I should not talk to Harry ever again — he had made me act like a fool and he hadn’t even the good sense to apologise. Mama, being Mama, did not even ask me about the party until lunch, by which time I was so tired I felt ready to collapse into my ham and eggs.

  ‘I suppose you’ve had too much champagne, too little sleep and too much to think about today,’ she said, hitting the nail on the head with unnerving accuracy. Mama was amazing like that; I spent most of my teenage years assuming that she knew nothing about me, and all of my twenties realising that she knew everything.

  ‘It was a late night,’ I admitted, then, knowing how she hated silences at meal times, I ventured a little more information. ‘The Ritz was beautiful and the food was heaven.’

  ‘Well that goes without saying, darling. Really, can’t you tell me something I don’t already know? Like whom you talked to, and whether there were any nice young men present?’

  Usually I dreaded this line of questioning from my mother, but that afternoon the urge to forget about Harry and talk about the dreaminess of Rocky was too strong.

  ‘There was someone rather nice,’ I began falteringly. Mama looked up, startled.

  ‘Goodness, Penelope,’ she said, astonished. ‘Who on earth is he?’

  ‘Oh, some man,’ I said, blushing furiously and thoroughly uncertain that I should go on.

  ‘So much information, darling, I can’t keep up.’

  ‘He’s very successful.’

  ‘Good. What does he do?’

  ‘He works in entertainment,’ I began haltingly. regretting my use of the word straight away. ‘Hollywood films, that sort of thing.’

  Mama frowned and I could se
e her wrestling with the fact that he sounded rich but worked in an industry she feared so was therefore, by definition, ultimately unsatisfactory.

  ‘He’s written a film that James Dean’s going to be in,’ I said. ‘Gracious. He must be terribly pleased with himself. Where does he live?’

  ‘America most of the time.’

  ‘I see.’ Mama’s lips tightened. ‘So he’s American?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, but Mama, you’d think him most charming.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t say. Perhaps forty?’

  ‘Forty?’

  ‘Y-yes.’

  ‘Has he been married before? Did he lose a wife to some appropriate disease?’

  ‘N-no.’

  ‘Never married,’ confirmed Mama. ‘Forty years old and never married. Well, it’s a very good thing that you had the good sense to tell me about this gentleman, Penelope. You certainly should not see him again.’

  ‘But why, Mama?’

  She put down her fork and stretched out to me. ‘Take my hand, darling.’ She was well aware that physical contact made disagreeing with her virtually impossible. I took her hand in mine, feeling it small and hot and heavy with the exquisite beauty of her ruby engagement ring.

  ‘There are some things that I just know, aren’t there? Things that I have a bare instinct about. The woman who worked for a while in the village shop, for example — I was the only person for miles around who could see that she was no good. Well, it’s the same here. I don’t trust this man, and I don’t think you should, either.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ I muttered, feeling tears pricking behind my eyelids.

  ‘Penelope, he’s unmarried at forty. I’m afraid that says all we need to know. The fact that he works in the films is another factor that can hardly be seen as counting in his favour.’

  ‘But he’s rich, Mama! I thought you wanted me to meet a rich man!’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ said Mama sadly, ‘not an American.’

  ‘But he only wanted to take me out for dinner,’ I said weakly. Loudly. and on cue, the telephone bell sounded. Mama and I sat tight, awaiting Mary.