The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets Read online

  ‘Me!’

  ‘Yeah, you. I know Marina better than I know myself. She’s far more concerned with the fact that the jazz fan finds you so darn pretty than she is with the fact that she really loves him after all. You’ve got right under her skin.’

  ‘It was never meant to be like this,’ I said awkwardly. I clenched my teeth together to stop myself from running into his arms and yelping out that he was the only one I could ever want.

  ‘I kinda understand the way she feels, you know,’ he said slowly. ‘I always want what I can’t have.’

  ‘You do?’ I whispered.

  ‘All the time,’ he said.

  The blissful tension of our eyes locking and my blush spreading up my neck and into my cheeks was broken when Inigo ploughed into the room.

  ‘Marina says Rocky Dakota’s here!’ he hissed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me he was turning up?’

  ‘She didn’t know it herself,’ drawled Rocky, standing up and offering his hand to Inigo. I had to hand it to my little brother. He composed himself without turning scarlet and without stammering.

  ‘You ever met Elvis Presley?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘What does an English kid like you know about Elvis Presley?’ asked Rocky, genuinely surprised.

  ‘Everything,’ said Inigo, taking out his comb.

  Marina collapsed into bed and Inigo monopolised Rocky all afternoon with his incessant Elvis Presley chat, and Rocky responded by firing questions at Inigo. How long had he been listening to Elvis? Did he feel Elvis was going to make it in England? How many records had he in his collection? Did he like Johnnie Ray like me? Why not? Charlotte and I arranged ourselves prettily by the drawing-room fire and pretended to play Monopoly, but their dialogue was too thrilling not to be a part of. Inigo, after all, must have been the only boy in England dyeing his hair to be like Elvis and able to sing ‘Mystery Train in perfect imitation of the man. For both I felt it was a sort of dream meeting; it was impossible to tell to what extent each was using the other. What they had in common was their passion, Inigo’s for Elvis and escape and Rocky’s for making money.

  ‘So you girls, how do you feel when you look at Johnnie Ray?’ Rocky asked us, taking it upon himself to haul us into the conversation while he poured himself another double whisky. ‘You wanna mother the guy? Is it because he wears a hearing aid? You feel sorry for him?’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘It never even entered my head that we might feel like that.’

  ‘Oh no,’ agreed Charlotte breezily. ‘It’s all about sex, isn’t it, Penelope?’

  I went scarlet. Rocky raised his eyebrows at me and I wriggled my toes frantically.

  ‘Is it, kid? You feel that pull towards him? Like you wanna get close to him? Close to him like that?’

  ‘Of course,’ I admitted, and Charlotte and I collapsed giggling.

  ‘Gee,’ said Rocky. ‘Does the magician know how you feel?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘He knows absolutely everything.’ As usual, the champagne confused me with that giddy feeling that I could say or do what would normally stay firmly inside my head.

  We sat down to supper that night, a curious party of five, but the force of Rocky and Marina’s presence meant it felt as if there were many more of us in the room. Mary had polished and set the best silver; I held my breath wondering how everything was going to taste. Marina had slept all afternoon and had joined us for drinks before dinner in a green and white sequin gown that would not have looked out of place at the Opera House. For someone who had drunk a bottle of champagne, she had thought awfully hard about what to bring. She slid into her chair, between Rocky and Inigo, not meeting my eye in a very deliberate way. We were only a few minutes into our prawn cocktails (like bits of India rubber in a watery pink glue) when the sparks began to fly. Marina, unsettled by the fact that Rocky was still deep in conversation with Inigo and not concentrating on her, cleared her throat. If she could have tapped her glass with her fork and not looked absurd, I think she would have done.

  ‘So I suppose we’re all going to sit here and act like nothing’s wrong,’ she said loudly. We all fell silent and I noticed a spark in Charlotte’s eyes. She loved a bit of a scene.

  ‘Sure,’ said Rocky lightly. ‘We’re having dinner, right? Charlotte, would you pass me the water?’ He pronounced it ‘wah-der’. I felt my heart jump a bit.

  ‘So you’re quite happy to watch me falling apart at the seams?’ asked Marina with a bark of her famous sob-laughter. She abandoned her food and reached for her cigarettes. Inigo flipped open his lighter.

  ‘What the hell else do you expect us to do?’ said Rocky quietly. ‘You wanna go make it up with George? We can be with him in a couple of hours if we leave now.

  For a second, I sensed Marina flipping this option over in her mind.

  ‘No!’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want to see George. I’ve left George. I can’t ever see him again. I need to see Harry. I need Harry!’ Her voice rose hysterically. As if taking cue from some invisible director, she stood up and crossed the room. Staring out of the window she clutched her hand to her chest. ‘I never, ever imagined anything could hurt so much,’ she said. Rocky continued to spoon up the last of his prawn cocktail.

  ‘Really?’ he said absent-mindedly. Charlotte stifled a giggle and he caught her eye and grinned. Marina turned back to us, her eyes full of fire.

  ‘You!’ she said, pointing a red fingernail at me. ‘You! This is all your doing! You seduced him! You tricked him into believing he loved you! You stole his heart! You. Stole. His. Heart!’ This last phrase was uttered with Cleopatran passion, every word a statement within itself. Charlotte actually leaned forward in her chair as if she were at the theatre, and Rocky began to clap slowly.

  ‘Very good,’ he said in a bored sort of voice. ‘Do you do a matinee tomorrow afternoon?’ He was devastating when he was sticking the knife in, I thought.

  Marina, cued up for tears, decided to change tack. ‘You know nothing,’ she said simply. ‘Nothing at all. You’re just some rich guy with an empty heart! You can’t bear the fact that I’m aching for Harry and not for you. You can’t conceive of how I could love someone who can’t offer me what you think you could. What the hell are you doing here anyway?’ she taunted. ‘I don’t believe you give a damn about George. This is all about you. You wanting me.’

  ‘On the contrary, Marina, I couldn’t afford you,’ said Rocky idly, stretching across the table for the remains of my prawn cocktail. ‘Excuse me, kid. May I?’ I nodded. Rocky scooped up the rest of my starter. ‘Damn good,’ he said. ‘Where’s Mary? I like the sound of her.’

  Possibly because she had been lurking outside the door, ears flapping, Mary appeared only seconds later. ‘Shall I clear?’ she asked, looking straight at Rocky.

  ‘Oh, sure, Mary. That was delicious. You have quite a talent.’ She blushed and mumbled something about ‘never feeling appreciated’ until Inigo glared at her.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down, Marina?’ suggested Charlotte. ‘It’s pork and carrots from the garden next.

  Marina ignored her and stubbed out her cigarette. Mary ignored Inigo and lurked around the back of the room, pretending to polish something.

  ‘You still haven’t told us why you’re here,’ Marina said to Rocky.

  ‘Right now, I just want to enjoy my dinner. If you’re determined to upstage I think you should do so elsewhere.’

  Marina frowned as if she hadn’t quite heard right. ‘Are you asking me to leave the room?’

  ‘Just a suggestion,’ said Rocky.

  Marina gave a strangled sob and fled upstairs, taking with her a full wine glass and Inigo’s remaining cigarettes. Mary ambled out after Marina, her face bright red with excitement. Oh well, I thought. That may have quelled Mary’s admiration for her.

  ‘Oughtn’t we follow her?’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘Ah, leave her to stew,’ said Rocky. ‘You can always tell the ones who were never spanked as a child. Spoilt little bi
tch.’

  ‘But she looks amazing,’ sighed Inigo.

  ‘The crazy ones usually do, kid,’ said Rocky. ‘It’s a cunning disguise. You better get used to it if you’re gonna make it in the music business.’

  Inigo picked up his glass and pretended not to look thrilled, but I could see he was, and I felt half excited too, and half afraid that Rocky was raising false hopes. What on earth would Mama think if she were here? Having Rocky to supper was a revelation to me. I realised that he was the first man to hold centre stage in the dining room since Papa died. It was something that I could see was not lost on Inigo either. Instinctively, he sat up straight, he used his knife and fork, he dropped his exaggerated chewing routine — in short, he behaved. I wanted to scream with laughter, it Was so strange. The focus of the room seemed to revolve around Rocky, even when he was not leading what was being said. He filled the room with something that I thought had been lost years ago, after Papa died. No, that’s not right. He filled the room with something that I did not even realise was missing.

  ‘Tell me, Penelope,’ he said. ‘Your family been here since the dawn of time?’

  ‘My father’s family,’ I said.

  ‘Who was your farther?’ asked Rocky, imitating my accent.

  It was a funny question. Who was Papa? He was a million things that I would never know, and a million things that I had made him as a result of never knowing. ‘His name was Archie Wallace,’ I said, as ever his name feeling high and strange in my throat.

  ‘What did he do? Before the war, I mean.’ Rocky spread a thick layer of butter on his bread, which struck me as terribly cavalier.

  ‘He worked in the city,’ I said. ‘Stocks and shares.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘He wasn’t frightfully good at it,’ I went on, faltering slightly. Charlotte gave me a whisper of a smile and I spoke a little louder. ‘He — he hated wearing a suit. He only did it for us. Well, for the family, just because it was what he felt he should do. Really, he was suited to being outside.’

  ‘And war’s always been a great excuse to get the hell outside,’ said Rocky without irony.

  ‘He was very brave,’ said Inigo suddenly. sounding about twelve. Unthinkingly. I stretched out my hand to him.

  ‘He was very brave,’ I repeated in a whisper. Why couldn’t I learn to talk about Papa the way other people talked about their fathers? My heart crashed against my chest and Rocky, to his eternal credit, sensed my unease.

  ‘I couldn’t have done it myself,’ he said. ‘I got this awful knee injury in a car smash when I was nineteen. Woulda been no good to anyone in a battle. So I figured that I could do something for the ones who weren’t fighting, but hoping — the women, the kids, the injured. It made me feel better about not being out there. So I started making radio shows, TV shows. Got rich so quick I was blowing my nose on twenny dollar bills.’

  Inigo laughed loudly.

  ‘Doesn’t it make you feel guilty?’ blurted Charlotte, which was something that I was wondering but would never have had the nerve to ask. ‘Making money that way? When people are dying by the thousand?’

  ‘Not one little bit,’ said Rocky cheerfully. ‘If I could take people out of their heads for a little while, if I could give them a dose of fantasy, that was all that mattered. You can’t put a price on escape.

  In my head I could hear Johnnie sighing with agreement.

  ‘That’s why I want to get out of here,’ Inigo said restlessly.

  Charlotte looked from Inigo to the ceiling. ‘You should be careful what you wish for,’ she said. ‘This place — Magna — I sometimes feel that it knows you want to get out.’

  ‘Goodness, Charlotte! Whatever do you mean?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose what I mean is that I’d sell my soul for good shoes and a stack of good pop records. Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘And?’ asked Inigo, baffled.

  ‘Well, maybe we’re just too modern,’ said Charlotte. ‘This perpetual craving we have — music, and the cinema and good clothes — when this house is the most triumphant work of art any of us will ever know.’ She picked up her wine glass, uncharacteristically self-conscious. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s just how it strikes me sometimes.

  ‘Hear hear,’ said Rocky and he raised his glass. ‘To Milton Magna. May her pretty ghosts haunt us long after we leave her gates.

  ‘To Magna.” we repeated, and sloshed our glasses into the air and into each other’s glasses.

  After dinner, Charlotte, Inigo and I showed Rocky round the rest of the house. Like Charlotte, he had a beady eye for a good book and an interesting, painting, but he was unafraid of admitting to not knowing things, too. He fired questions at us, and I am ashamed to say that Charlotte stepped in and answered more than Inigo and I.

  ‘Tell me about the carvings on the staircase,’ he said, examining the detail on the horses’ hooves.

  ‘They’re medieval,’ I said with the usual flourish.

  ‘They’re unusual. Why are they so ornate?’

  ‘Um …’ I didn’t want to tell him that I had ceased to notice the carvings a long time ago and that to me it was simply the staircase, part of the familiar route from my bedroom to the hall. I remember being very hard on myself later that night as I lay in bed and recalled Rocky’s questions and my half-hearted answers, but now I see that it would have been odd for me to have been any other way. Magna to me aged eighteen was my home, and what I loved about it was not what anyone else would love about it, after all. What Charlotte had was a newly developed eye for beauty.

  ‘Oh! I wondered that, the first time I came here,’ she said in answer to Rocky. ‘I looked it all up in this wonderful book my aunt has called Great English Houses. The ornamental design was commissioned by Wittersnake, the original owner of the house, who apparently had seen a similar design in a Dutch palace.’

  Rocky looked impressed and Charlotte gave me a pleading look. ‘Do let’s show him the tapestry room!’ she cried. She turned to Rocky. ‘When I have my own house one day, an entire floor is to he based on the tapestry room. You’ve never seen anything quite so delicious.’

  Rocky grinned. ‘You should charge people for the tour,’ he said. Charlotte tossed her hair over her shoulders.

  ‘How much have you got?’ she asked, spinning off in the direction of the East Wing. Rocky and I lingered behind her at a slower pace.

  ‘Don’t you think someone should make sure Marina’s recovered?’ I said. ‘After all, she hasn’t had anything to eat this evening. Do you think we were rather cruel to her?’

  ‘Not nearly cruel enough,’ said Rocky cheerfully. ‘When we’ve finished looking round the house, I shall pack her into my car and take her back to London with me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think she’ll be very pleased about that,’ I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

  ‘That is of no consequence whatsoever. She’s got away with far too much already. I came here to get her out of your hair and to give her a plain talking to. Both of these things can be achieved by putting her in the car and driving back to town.

  How I hated Marina! Now she had the pleasure of sitting in Rocky’s wonderful car all the way back to London, something that I would have happily given my right arm to do. ‘She came to find Harry,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she wanted to leave until she had talked to him.’

  ‘Gee, Penelope, you sound as if you want her to get back with him!’ said Rocky, looking at me from under his sooty eyelashes and smiling softly, and I felt the whole world swaying around me.

  ‘N-no!’ I stuttered. ‘I just think that I — oh, I don’t know what to think any more.

  ‘She won’t take him from you. That much I can promise you.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve already told you. She doesn’t really love him and he doesn’t really love her.’

  I bit my lip to stop myself from saying anything.

  ‘He loves you,’ said Rocky. �
�The magician, I mean. I could see it. At the Ritz that night. She’s lost him but she’s damned if she’s gonna accept it.’

  ‘This is the tapestry room,’ I said, thoroughly disturbed.

  An hour later, Rocky and Marina left Magna. She left without much fuss at all, climbing meekly into the passenger seat and waiting for Rocky to bid farewell to us all. Once inside the car, she opened her handbag and fished around frantically for something, and everything spilled out all over the seat of the car. She rescued her hip flask before anything else, her hands trembling. I think it was only then that I realised that Marina was a drunk. In that moment, she seemed to shrink in front of me.

  ‘Goodbye, girls!’ called Rocky to Charlotte and me. ‘Keep sweet and beautiful!’

  ‘Look after Marina,’ I called out suddenly.

  ‘Oh, she’ll be fine,’ said Rocky. I was glad that he said that. He could say anything and I would believe it. I didn’t want him to go. I wanted to throw myself, sobbing, into his arms to stop him from leaving, but instead I smiled and waved and tried to push memories of waving goodbye to Papa out of my mind.

  ‘Well!’ said Charlotte as the glorious car roared off into the night, lighting up the drive and scattering rabbits into the hedges. ‘I can see what you mean about him!’

  ‘I can see what you mean about her,’ added Inigo dreamily.

  ‘Oh shut up, Inigo,’ I said.

  You see, it didn’t really matter if Marina was a fool, or a drunk, or a silly pain in the neck. Boys just simply didn’t mind. She was that powerful. You had to admire her for that.

  Chapter 18

  IN THE GARDEN AND OUT OF TOUCH

  For the rest of the weekend I had to keep asking Charlotte whether Marina had really been at Magna, for after she left the memory of her arrival seemed nothing short of absurd. By contrast, the memory of Rocky at Magna felt entirely plausible. He had left evidence of his fleeting visit that filled me with longing — his whisky glass in the library, his forgotten cashmere scarf on the hall table — yet all the time I found it impossible to place exactly what the longing was for. It wasn’t as if I felt drawn to Rocky in the same way that I was drawn to Johnnie, which was, if I may be frank, utterly to do with Johnnie’s monumental sex appeal. With Rocky it was more that I just liked being near him. I wanted to be close to him yet I wasn’t sure how I would feel if he tried to kiss me. He made me feel like a little girl and something in me adored that.