The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets Read online

  ‘Send our love to Indigo!’ yelled Sarah.

  Charlotte and I decided not to congregate at Aunt Clare’s before we went to see Johnnie. Instead, we arranged to meet at the Lyon’s tea shop before the show. Johns was driving to London to fetch some spare parts for the car, so I had a lift all the way there and arrived twenty minutes before Charlotte. The whole of London seemed to be on fire that night. It was as if everything had altered because the city knew that I, Penelope Wallace, was going to see Johnnie Ray in the flesh for the first time. I had agonised over what to wear, taking into consideration the fact that I wanted Johnnie to notice me over every other girl in the audience, but also that I was not confident in anything very different from what every girl of my age liked to wear — a neat little blouse and stacks of lipstick and a full skirt, nipped in as tight as you dared at the waist. At the last minute, I decided to wear the pearls that my great-grandmother had left me in her will and Mama had stipulated were only to be worn on special occasions. If this wasn’t a special occasion, then nothing was. I carried the little evening bag that my fairy godmother had left me for my night at the Ritz, which made me think of Harry, and I smiled, knowing that wherever he was, and whatever he was doing with Marina, he would be thinking of me tonight, and wondering how my seats were and if I cried when Johnnie walked on stage. I fancied that Harry would have given anything to be with Charlotte and me. He so admired our devotion to Johnnie. It utterly fascinated him.

  I ordered chips and ice cream and waited for Charlotte to arrive. The room was full of girls, some so young that they were accompanied by their mothers, and many of them wearing the Fan Club badges. The air was stifling hot — hot with steam and pots of tea and chatter and anticipation. I remember having to force my lips inward to try to stop smiling like a fool. The only thing that I could think was that this was it!’ This was the night I had been waiting for, and in less than an hour, I would see Johnnie for real. The whole room seemed to breathe in when Charlotte arrived looking like the only girl that Johnnie would ever want to kiss. She wore a pale blue dress, belted high, and made demure by a sugar-pink cardigan, and she was wearing her painted shoes, the gold and green spotted pair that she had designed at Magna. She had shaken off the tired eyes and weary shoulders of my last tea at Aunt Clare’s and was pure dynamite once again, her long hair looking thicker than ever and lying loose down her back. Since every other girl in the room had piled their hair on top of their heads in a chignon of some sort, and no one had ever seen anything like the green and gold splodges of paint on Charlotte’s feet, she was pretty well stared at when she sat down. As usual, she looked entirely oblivious.

  ‘Goodness, I’m too nervous to eat!’ she wailed, but her green eyes widened as my chips arrived. ‘Well, maybe I could squeeze in something,’ she conceded, and ordered a glass of wine and a hamburger.

  ‘Where are the tickets?’ she demanded and I pulled them out of my bag like pieces of priceless treasure.

  ‘Do you think everyone in this room is in love with Johnnie?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. But no one else has seats as good as ours.

  I had never been to the Palladium before. Charlotte had been once to see Cinderella with Aunt Clare and Harry two years before, and had fallen asleep halfway through the performance.

  ‘I only woke up because Harry was making such a racket in the seat next to me. He got the giggles over the man playing the pumpkin and that was that,’ said Charlotte as we followed the stream of girls down the street towards the front entrance of the theatre. I had never seen anything like the crowds, and judging by the faces of the policemen, neither had they. There looked to me to be thousands of us. The most electrifying thing was knowing that everywhere I looked, people were there for Johnnie, and no one else; it was like meeting a long lost branch of the family that one had always known existed, but had never actually encountered in the flesh before. We stood in neat groups, grinning from ear to ear because we just couldn’t not, and wondering whether the girls in line ahead of us were prettier than we were, and if Johnnie would fall in love with them, and not us. Just as we were nearing the entrance of the building, a tall girl with thick spectacles standing just behind us whirled round and hissed, ‘Papers! Over there!’

  Charlotte and I turned round, and sure enough, two men with cameras and another two with thick notepads lingered at the edge of the throng, talking to two fans and scribbling furiously.

  ‘Stupid, they are, talkin’ to them,’ said the girl with glasses. ‘They’ll only make them sound silly.’

  He’s just like no one else, I heard one of the fans saying to the reporters. I won’t marry until I marry Johnnie.

  ‘She’s in for a long bloody wait,’ giggled our new friend.

  ‘Everyone knows Johnnie likes blondes.’ She had an unbelievable accent.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked her, full of curiosity. ‘Lancashire,’ she said. ‘I hitched my way here.’

  ‘Hitched?’

  She laughed at me. ‘Yes. Stuck out my thumb and hitched.’

  I opened my mouth to reply but there was a great surge forward and Charlotte and I found ourselves propelled up the steps of the building and into the entrance where we stood blinking for a moment, our eyes adjusting from the bright April sunlight to the seasonless gloom of the foyer. Charlotte moved ahead of me, taking me by the hand.

  ‘Follow me!’ she commanded, and I surged forward again, my legs following automatically. I have never held anything as close as I did those tickets. The girls around me, while sweet as pie in their skirts and sweaters, had wild glitter in their eyes. It was quite clear to me that they would steal, push, punch, collapse and hitch for Johnnie — and I knew this because I would too.

  Charlotte and I sank into our seats and stared up at the ceiling then back at the crowd behind us, and, giggling nervously, opened a bag of pear drops and listened to the low hum of excitement growing more and more urgent. Several girls came right up to us and asked how we had got such good seats and could they buy our tickets off us? One girl, who looked no more than thirteen, asked if she could exchange her coat and shoes for my ticket. I shook my head and she ran off and up the aisle without another word, a crowd of her friends pressing around her and staring back at Charlotte and me. There were boys there too (as there were wherever there was pop music), but it was the girls who had the power, the girls who defined the atmosphere that night, and we jittered for Johnnie’s arrival with the blissful, magical urgency that one can only feel when one is young and modern and full of desire. Desire! It was the only word for it. Occasionally. an adult face swam into view — an usherette or someone selling ice cream — and I felt the gap between us, the brilliant youthquakers, the teenmob, and them, the sufferers and the forty-somethings, open up like a great chasm separating one species from another. They might as well have been three hundred years old — they might as well have been from another time entirely. They were nothing like us.

  By the time the curtain rose for Johnnie, the excitement had reached fever pitch and Charlotte and I had become creatures I had never known before. As the piano became visible on the smooth blackness of the stage, the screaming accelerated and I felt a wave of energy that had started in the soles of my feet rise up through my body like mercury and set the tips of my fingers on fire so that I had to throw my hands into the air as if they were separate from the rest of me. I had no choice — it was simply happening, and I was watching and following.

  ‘Johnnie!’ yelled Charlotte, the word lost in the greatness of the noise from the crowd behind us.

  ‘JOHNNIE!’ I screamed, really screamed. It was like shouting against the roar of a tidal wave but we couldn’t stop. For there he was, beautiful, unreal, skinny as a rake, trembling as if he had been shot through with electricity — Johnnie Ray. He smiled, and we felt weak; he spoke to us and we nearly collapsed. He started to sing ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’, and I would not have been surprised if the roof of the Palladium had caved in under
the strain of such need for him. I looked at Charlotte and saw her cheeks soaked with tears, and she looked at me and we both yelled with laughter for neither of us, for all that we had longed for this evening, could have prepared for the way that we felt at that moment. All around us, in the great velvet womb of the Palladium, girls stood up and screamed as if possessed with a religious fervour; if Elvis was to become the King, then here was our John the Baptist, wailing and proclaiming on the stark wilderness of that stage, honey, locusts and all. He held us in the palm of his hand, and there was no place in the world that we would rather have been. When Johnnie stood on top of the piano and beat the keys like a madman, unleashing his demons and driving us on to want more, more, more — I closed my eyes and framed the image for ever.

  Charlotte turned to me at the end of the song. . ‘Bloody amazing!’ she said.

  ‘Oh help, I love him.’

  ‘I know,’ said Charlotte. ‘Isn’t his suit divine?’

  (To be truthful, I had barely noticed what Johnnie was wearing — it simply wasn’t important to me — but Charlotte’s eye for detail had missed nothing. She even remarked on the colour of his shoes on the way home — why on earth she spent any time studying his footwear instead of his glorious face, I do not know.) As he started ‘Whisky and Gin’ and the cheering and the shrieking filled my senses, I thought of Mama, shattered and torn by the war and Papa’s death, and I wished with all my heart that she could understand how it felt to be us that night — how it felt to feel eighteen and unbeaten, eighteen and alive.

  ‘He’s coming down!’ yelled the girl behind me, and sure enough, halfway through ‘Walking My Baby’ Johnnie descended from the stage and the noise grew so great that for a moment I felt almost afraid. Charlotte and I stood, transfixed, hands halfway up to our faces, waiting to see what he would do next. He came closer to us, closer and closer, until he was right beside us, then, without warning, he leaned down and kissed me on the cheek.

  ‘Hey, kid,’ he said, smiling. I said nothing, just stared, my mouth wide open, while all around us the crowd roared and girls fell over each other trying to get to him, ripping the place apart with their screams.

  ‘JOHNNIE!’ filled my ears and my chest, and he smiled at the girls behind us, winked and then, just as quickly as he had come down and spent that split second inside my life, breathing my air, being my Johnnie, he was back up on the stage again, wailing into the microphone, wringing his hands and shuddering with the emotion of the song.

  ‘It happened!’ Charlotte muttered, over and over again. ‘He found us! He kissed you!’

  ‘I don’t-believe it!’ was all I could manage in reply.

  ‘Harry must have known,’ said Charlotte. ‘He must have known that these seats — well, that’s why all those girls were so desperate to sit here …’ She trailed off.

  I knew she was right. Harry had known all along that if we sat where we sat, Johnnie would come right over and kiss us. He arranged it for us. It was then that the oddest feeling came over me. Johnnie started to sing ‘Cry’ and my head was suddenly filled with the oddest, most jumbled up feelings I had ever felt, and the more they jumped around inside my head, the more I struggled to join them up to make a proper picture.

  On the way out of the theatre, much to my astonishment, I heard someone calling my name.

  ‘Hey! Penelope!’ I turned round to see Deborah and Sarah, two of the girls from the episode on the village green.

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Hello!’

  Charlotte raised her eyebrows at me questioningly. ‘We’re going to hang around and wait for him,’ explained Deborah in a low voice. ‘You want to come too?’

  I opened my mouth and Charlotte spoke. ‘Yes.’ She stuck out her hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. Charlotte Ferris.’

  Deborah glanced down at her shoes. ‘Are you the girl who makes the dresses?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.

  They looked at her with new respect.

  ‘Come on,’ ordered Sarah.

  Chapter 20

  MY AMERICAN HEROES

  We stood outside the stage entrance for what felt like an hour, but in fact was no more than about ten minutes. There were a large number of girls out there with us, all of whom looked as if they had done this sort of thing a million times before; some had 78s and posters for Johnnie to sign while others were just singing his songs and swaying, smoking and giggling in groups. Johnnie had fired everyone up; some of the girls actually pushed through the barriers and a number of policemen appeared and pulled them away. I stood back, my mouth slightly open, amazed. Johnnie had unleashed something wild in us, something that had been there all along but had been squashed down by the war and our parents. He made us unafraid. All of us girls made a curious collection that night — all of us dressed up to the nines in what we imagined Johnnie would like best, filling the city night with the smell of cheap scent (Yardley’s Fern on forty or so girls was asphyxiating beyond belief) and even cheaper lipstick — all of us desperate for something that we didn’t know all that much about, a man, and love, and to feel grown up and beautiful. Every so often the door would open and some unfortunate sound engineer or stagehand would venture out prompting hopeful yells followed by wails of disappointment.

  ‘Maybe he’ll come out round the front,’ suggested Charlotte.

  ‘We’ve sent Lorraine to check,’ said Deborah, who had an answer for everything. ‘If he comes out, she whistles, high as you like, and we bomb round the front in time to catch him. Personally, I think we’re going to be lucky out here.’

  I had my doubts. Sarah, who had plastered herself in so much pancake powder and rouge that her unquestionable good looks had been entirely destroyed, was rustling around in her handbag. At length, she pulled out a bottle of gin.

  ‘Swiped it from Nan’s bag,’ she giggled, unscrewing the lid. ‘You want some? It keeps out the cold.’ She took a big swig herself, carefully so as not to smudge her lips, then wiped the top of the bottle with her coat sleeve and passed it to Charlotte. Naturally enough, Charlotte accepted the offer.

  ‘When in Rome,’ she muttered under her breath to me, taking a large gulp. ‘Ugh! Gin really is the most hideous sin of a spirit. What I’d do for a brandy,’ she muttered.

  ‘You want some?’ Deborah asked me. ‘Or do you not do gin? Not posh enough for you, eh?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, idiotically, and grabbed the bottle. Goodness, it was strong! I nearly choked, and my eyes watered, but I looked away so that none of them noticed. I passed the bottle back to Deborah who passed it to Sarah, and before long nearly all of it had gone, because honestly, it was the only thing to do. I agreed with Charlotte. It was a horrible drink with the most insufferable aftertaste. Of course it was also addictive. After another ten minutes, Lorraine appeared, striding towards us in a cream trench coat. They may have been girls from the village, but they certainly knew how to dress up. Lorraine looked at Charlotte and me with amusement.

  ‘Oh, you made it!’ she said. ‘Where were you sitting?’

  ‘Front row,’ said Charlotte promptly. ‘Johnnie kissed Penelope.’

  There was a stunned silence.

  ‘That was you?’ wailed Sarah. ‘In “Walking My Baby”? Why didn’t you tell us you had that seat when we asked you the other day?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was any different from any other seat,’ I confessed.

  ‘Bloody hell, and you call yourself a fan!’ exclaimed Deborah infuriatingly.

  ‘How did you get your tickets, then?’ asked Lorraine, full of curiosity.

  ‘A friend,’ I said quickly. ‘He — er — got them to thank me for doing something for him.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll do whatever it is, next time,’ sniggered Sarah.

  ‘Yeah, how far did you have to go?’ demanded Deborah to gales of laughter.

  I grinned. ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Aw, come on!’ Lorraine looked at me with new respect and offered me another swig of gin. As I drank,
I felt like Marina. I suddenly wished that Harry was here to see all of this — to see me standing in my heels, gin-drunk on the corner of Argyll Street, waiting for Johnnie Ray under the dirty glow of the starless London night sky, my mind dizzy with the thrill of Johnnie’s kiss, my heart surprised by the sudden swell of the incoming summer. That April night there was already cherry blossom under our feet. Harry would have loved it, I thought, because although he had never understood our love for Johnnie, he understood what it meant to feel so strongly for something that it nearly sent you berserk. I pushed aside the feeling of missing Harry that had swamped me during Johnnie’s songs that I associated with our afternoon in the Long Gallery and hoped that he was happy with Marina. What was it about that afternoon that I guarded so preciously? It wasn’t as if either of us had mentioned it since …

  ‘I don’t think he’s coming,’ moaned Deborah, after another five minutes had passed. Several of the other groups of girls had given up already, some of them sobbing quietly.

  ‘He has to leave the building somehow,’ said Sarah impatiently. ‘Let’s open another bottle, Deb.’

  We were the last group of girls left, an hour later, and certainly we were the most drunk. Charlotte and I flopped onto the pavement, and the others followed suit, crashing on top of each other in fits of laughter.

  ‘Ow!’ moaned Deborah. ‘You’re on me foot, Lorraine!’

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Charlotte.

  ‘Go home, I suppose,’ said Sarah gloomily. ‘Bloody long way home, too.

  ‘Hey, I’ll swap you your shoes for me coat,’ said Deborah, prodding Charlotte’s arm. Charlotte grinned.

  ‘You can have them, darling,’ she said. ‘I don’t want your coat, thanks awfully.’

  ‘Whass wrong with me coat?’ slurred Deborah. Charlotte gave her one of her most shattering looks.