The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets Read online

  ‘You won’t?’

  ‘I’m going to Salisbury to stay with your godmother. Three nights, I’ll be gone.’

  ‘Aunt Belinda? But we haven’t seen her for years!’

  ‘Exactly. Too, too long. You’re quite capable of looking after your guests yourself You must have a word with Mary about food.’

  At that moment, Inigo’s new record blasted out from the drawing room.

  ‘Tell him to turn it down, Penelope,’ groaned Mama. ‘My poor head!’

  Inigo and I sat up for two hours that night listening to the new record after Mama had gone to bed. We kept the volume so low that it was hard to hear at all. Inigo was in raptures, studying the sleeve, trying to make out every word Guy Mitchell was singing, occasionally even imitating his voice. He was remarkably good.

  Chapter 5

  SNOWFALL AND 45s

  My mother kept to her word and set off for my godmother’s house in Salisbury on Friday morning. She seemed anxious to get away, hardly bothering with the usual lectures about not using the telephone for too long and remembering to walk Fido and hose him down if he rolled in anything that had conked (dead sheep were his favourites, or the occasional late badger).

  ‘Mary will be keeping an eye on you,’ was her parting threat. I noticed her diary stuffed into the outside compartment of her travelling case. She, like Gwendoline, obviously liked something sensational to read on the train.

  ‘When will you be back, Mama?’ I asked her, wrestling with the conflicting emotions of panic and excitement that swamped me when we had Magna to ourselves.

  ‘Oh, Sunday night, Monday morning. I’ll telephone and let you know. Goodbye, darlings.’

  We watched her climb into the car next to Johns. He would be off to the station again in a matter of hours to collect Charlotte and Harry. Inigo pranced round the hall.

  ‘I think I might go to the pictures later,’ he said, skidding to a halt beside me. ‘I can take the bus into town this afternoon and be back before supper.

  ‘Oh no, please. I need you here to help when they arrive,’ I bleated.

  ‘I’ll be back by the time they arrive.’

  ‘But what if you’re not? I need you, Inigo.’

  He snorted with laughter. ‘What is it about these people? I’ve never known you get yourself so worked up.’

  I scowled at him. ‘I’m not worked up. I just want everything to be right, that’s all. Oh, and please don’t play your new record the second they walk through the door. I thought we could play some jazz after supper for Harry.’

  ‘Oh, stop. The excitement’s killing me.

  Inigo hated jazz, as did anyone who had embraced American popular music. I used to feel myself torn between the two; jazz seemed so much easier to deal with, being much more academic, much less confrontational. Then I went with a school friend to see There’s No Business Like Show Business at the pictures and Johnnie Ray seeped into my consciousness for the first time. It is true to say that those two hours in the velvet seats of the Odeon, Leicester Square, changed everything, ‘and I didn’t care who knew it. I don’t think that it was just because Johnnie made me want to faint and fall over (for that was just symptomatic of the power of the man); it was more to do with the spark of his performance, the newness of his movements. He looked to me like the man I wanted to marry, and when he opened his mouth and sang — the whole world could have stopped and I would not have noticed. I left the cinema in a daze, stirred with yearning and desire for the first time, jittery and disorientated by the sudden, stomach-flipping onset of adoration for a real man, and not one of Inigo’s friends could compete with’ Johnnie, this vision of loveliness, this American dreamboat. It took me time to admit it to Inigo, but nothing in my half-hearted collection of jazz records matched up to one night watching Johnnie Ray on celluloid. When it came down to it, his emotion, his heartache, was something that I understood, where jazz was something that I just pretended to understand. Knowing that Charlotte felt the same way about him was like discovering that we both spoke the same secret language, but I had enough sense to realise that boys like Harry would have no time for him at all. I dusted down my Humphrey Lyttelton records and propped them up beside the gramophone.

  It was nearly lunchtime. Mary, who last week had reached her seventy-fourth birthday, was sitting in the kitchen, flipping through my mother’s copy of The Lady. On the back of an unpaid bill from the grocer’s in town were Mama’s instructions written in her splashy royal blue handwriting: Friday night —Tomato soup, boiled ham and potatoes roasted in their jackets. See Penelope for vegetables. Saturday morning — Toast and marmalade (new jar in dresser), boiled eggs. Saturday lunch — Leftover ham and bread with pickled onions and tomatoes. Saturday night — Chicken pie with mashed potatoes, fruit salad. Sunday morning — Boiled eggs. Let them have a pot of Mrs Daunton’s gooseberry jam for toast. Sunday lunch — Chicken soup, boiled ham and bread, fruit salad.

  I gulped, thinking of Charlotte’s vast appetite. Despite her ability to cook at astonishing speed, Mary failed time and time again to produce food that tasted of anything. Once, my mother hinted at the need to flavour one’s ingredients when cooking. Mary had over salted her next fish pie to such an extent that even Fido spat it out in disgust.

  ‘She did it on purpose,’ I said. ‘She couldn’t take your interfering.’

  ‘Yet she’s such a dear,’ my mother would say. ‘Your father was so fond of her.’ (Women over sixty-five made it to ‘dear’ status, no longer seen as a threat.)

  ‘She’s useless,’ Inigo would retort. ‘And she smells of mince.’

  But it was no good. For as long as Mary could brandish a rolling pin, she was in. My mother nearly had a blue fit when the prettiest girl at the bakery in town asked if there was any cooking she could do up at the big house. I don’t think that the greatest chef on earth could have shifted Mary from her throne.

  ‘Mrs Wallace has left her instructions,’ she said now, picking up the list.

  ‘Yes. Has rationing actually ended?’ I asked cheekily.

  ‘Get away with you! Most folk’d never set eyes on a chicken pie during the war. And get your hands off those apples. I need those for the fruit salad.’

  ‘Mary, can we do a cake today? And perhaps some biscuits or scones?’ I pleaded.

  ‘I’d do a trifle,’ she sniffed, ‘only there’s no jelly.’ She closed the magazine. ‘Terrible pains I’ve had these past few days. Oh, it’s the cold, you know. Never known wind like it, not since before the war.’

  ‘It is chilly.’

  ‘Snow’s due,’ she said gloomily. ‘Johns says so.’

  ‘I’ll cycle to the shop and get you some jelly,’ I said impatiently. ‘Anything else you need? Couldn’t we do something a bit different today? I don’t know — a coconut cake or something?’

  Mary snorted. ‘Where do you think you’ll find a coconut round here, dearie? They don’t grow on trees, you know.’

  I glanced out of the kitchen window at the pregnant grey sky. Two magpies were fighting over the last of the nuts on the bird table under the stark skeleton of the cherry tree.

  ‘Two for joy,’ cackled Mary. ‘I’ll do you a nice magpie flan if you want.

  By the time Inigo and I had finished our cheese sandwiches at lunchtime, I was starting to panic about keeping the house warm and giving our guests such terminally dull food. We would be considered one of those ghastly families that invited people to stay then watched them slowly freeze to death over the fruit salad — and who wanted fruit salad in this weather? We needed hot food — apple crumble and cocoa, I thought. I was about to bolt upstairs and put extra rugs in the guest rooms when the snow started to fall: great powdery flakes that had covered the window sill in the drawing room within minutes.

  ‘It’s going to settle!’ cried Inigo, opening the drawing-room window and jumping onto the lawn. Fido leapt out next, barking with joy and going ridiculous as dogs do when humans behave like dogs. Inigo scraped the first fla
kes of snow off the top of the gardening fork that Johns (no doubt warming himself up with a double brandy in the Fox and Pheasant) had not bothered to put away. I couldn’t resist clambering outside too. I stared upwards at the falling snow until I was dizzy, laughing as I caught the biggest flakes on the end of my tongue. Within minutes, the garden and fields beyond had their winter drear hidden, and became enchanted. Of course it was going to snow for Charlotte and Harry, I thought, then started to fret in case their train would be delayed. I needn’t have worried.

  They were two hours early, something that my ‘mother would never have forgiven them for were she ever to find out. I opened the front door, the empty log basket under my arm, and they were standing there, poised to ring the bell.

  ‘We were about to knock.’ Charlotte grinned. ‘You must be psychic.’

  Incongruously carrying a tennis racket and a bottle of champagne, she was wearing her green coat again; but this time her thick, mousy hair was tied back in a long plait. Without the swinging curtains of heavy hair, her face was considerably altered; she seemed less Alice in Wonderland, more heroine of the Upper Sixth.

  ‘You’re early!’ I cried accusingly. ‘Gosh! And I was about to send Johns off to meet you!’

  ‘I know. I expect you think we’re the depths. We heard that the snow had started out here so we took the earlier train, then caught a bus from the station. It dropped us just at the top of your drive. We only just made it — we were sliding all over the road. Hello, Penelope,’ she added, kissing me on the cheek. Their footprints up the drive were already nearly covered.

  ‘Isn’t it just dreamy? Everything’s pure Narnia,’ she sighed.

  ‘Come in then,’ I said awkwardly. ‘The logs can wait while I show you to your rooms.

  Harry, his nose fire-engine red with cold, was not wearing enough clothes. He still had that I’ve-seen-it-all-before amused look on his face (a pretty hard expression to carry off in the hall at Magna, I might add) and his hair had been flattened by the dirty-looking tweed cap he clutched in his left hand. Were it not for his shoes (stylish-looking brown leather brogues, the sort that all jazz fans like to wear) he could quite easily have been mistaken for an eccentric traveller, the kind who had miles to go before he slept and all that. I half expected to see his horse snorting in the shadows behind him.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked him idiotically. ‘Shall I take your coat?’

  ‘No thanks,’ he said, walking into the hall. He nodded at Inigo. ‘Like the rug. Did you shoot it?’

  ‘Oh, strangled it with my bare hands,’ Inigo drawled.

  Charlotte giggled. ‘Bear hands,’ she said. ‘Very funny.’ She was staring at the bookcase. ‘The Great Gatsby!’ she breathed, taking it from the shelf. ‘Oh help, it’s a first edition! Oh double-help! It’s signed by the author! Harry, it’s actually signed!’

  ‘My great-aunt knew the Fitzgeralds,’ I said. Oh dear, I hope I wasn’t boasting.

  Charlotte shook her head in wonder. ‘That’s blissful. Isn’t it just your favourite book of all time?’

  ‘I — it’s — I haven’t read it for a while,’ I admitted.

  ‘She’s never read it!’ revealed Inigo. ‘Penelope loves books, as long as she doesn’t have to open them. Hurry up with the log basket, my toes are about to drop off.’

  I could have cheerfully murdered him. ‘Charlotte and Harry, this is my brother Inigo,’ I said, through gritted teeth.

  Harry stuck out his hand. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  I crossed my fingers behind my back. Please let Inigo like him, I prayed. (Inigo tended to make split-second decisions about people that were quite irreversible. He loathed my school friend Hannah after ten minutes of conversation, despite or perhaps because of her unrequited crush on him. Conversely, he admired our local vicar, even after he was caught gulping from a bottle of brandy in the vestry. ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Inigo kept saying, which baffled Mama and me.)

  ‘How was your journey?’ he asked Harry conversationally. ‘It was packed,’ Charlotte interrupted, ‘and so slow. I was like a wound-up spring all journey, waiting to get here. I’ve heard from everyone that Milton Magna is one of the most amazing houses ever built, and now I can see that it is. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to a visit so much.’

  None of our friends tended to wax lyrical about Magna — they were too stuck up perhaps, or too accustomed to being in beautiful houses. Inigo’s face softened when she had finished her little speech.

  ‘You must be Charlotte,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘Penelope was right, for once.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Charlotte asked him.

  ‘Oh nothing, nothing. Come on then, Penelope will show you upstairs and I’ll try to keep the drawing room fractionally above freezing. No mean feat, I can tell you.’

  By the time he had finished this sentence, he had spoken more to Charlotte than he had spoken to anyone else I had ever invited home. He shot me a defiant look, as if to say, You see! I can be nice to people when they merit it!

  ‘You’re in the blue room, Charlotte,’ I said. ‘Shut up, Inigo, and show Harry where he’s sleeping.’

  The blue room was part of the East Wing, at the far end of the corridor with a view of the chapel from one window and Mamas ducks from the other. It was one of the few rooms in the house that still looked reasonably presentable after the war — which is to say that the ceiling wasn’t about to collapse, and the carpet hadn’t worn through yet. Being a room stuck out on its own, it had been unused by the army, which had saved it from the tramping of boots and the heavy presence of lingering soldiers. It was haunted, of course, but that had never bothered me. I opened my mouth to tell Charlotte about the way the windows rattled on the stillest of summer afternoons, and shut it again. There was never any telling how people were going to react to ghosts. said Charlotte, looking around. ‘Why is this the blue room?’

  It was a fair question. The blue room was in fact wallpapered in faded pink and white flowers that Mama had chosen shortly after she moved into Magna with Papa before talk of war had even begun. It had been the first room in the house that she had chosen to refurbish, and as it turned out it was the only room that she was to redecorate before Papa left to fight and we moved to the Dower House.

  ‘It was blue in my grandparents’ day,’ I explained. ‘Mama tried to get us. calling it the pink room, but of course that never stuck.’

  Charlotte hurried over to the window. ‘The snow,’ she breathed. ‘It’s not ever going to stop.

  Indeed the snow did seem to be falling faster and faster; great silent flakes careering down from a pale grey sky that pressed down on the house like a vast pillow.

  ‘Isn’t it lucky we got the early train? There’s no way we would have made it, had we waited,’ she said, turning back to me, her green eyes shining.

  It was amazing how easy I felt with her, despite all my worrying. She was so utterly familiar to me, like a character from a favourite book come to life. I joined her by the window. The kitchen garden lay still under its white blanket, which gave me an odd sense of freedom. Silently, I thanked God for giving me temporary respite from the location I associated so strongly with the night my parents met. Turning back to the room to check that Mary had dusted the chest of drawers, I noticed with horror one of Lavinia’s mousetraps under the dressing table. Mercifully minus pauvre papa souris, it was all set to go with a piece of moulding Cheddar sitting as bait. Charlotte looked at me, then followed my eyes down to the floor.

  ‘Oh, mice are snidge!’ she said. ‘There’s no need for that in here.’

  ‘Snidge?’

  Charlotte grinned. ‘Sweet, of course. I never mind mice.’

  ‘It’s my cousin. She thinks that they follow her, wherever she goes.

  ‘Nice to think I’m not the only one with odd relations,’ said Charlotte, sitting down on the bed. ‘Don’t mind Harry though, will you? He was so pleased to be asked here.’

  I nearly pointed
out that it was she who had asked him, but instead I just smiled.

  ‘Where’s your lovely mother?’ Charlotte asked, looking round as if she expected her to leap out of the wardrobe.

  ‘Away this weekend.’

  ‘Oh, how disappointing. I was so looking forward to meeting her.’

  ‘She’s gone to visit my godmother,’ I said.

  ‘How strange, in this weather. Gosh, I feel exactly like Anna Karenina, don’t you?’

  I laughed and thought please don’t make me admit that I haven’t read that, either.

  ‘This is the most romantic house I’ve ever seen,’ she went on. ‘Oh! Do look, is that a dovecote?’ (She pronounced it ‘doocut’, which Mama always used to insist was the correct way to say it.)

  ‘Yes. Actually, we call it the pigeon house. Mama adores anything with wings and feathers. It was a twenty-first birthday present. Papa gave it to her.’

  ‘How romantic!’ exclaimed Charlotte. She turned back into the room and scanned the objects beside her bed. I had picked some winter roses for her. A scattering of white petals had already fallen onto the table. She didn’t comment on the flowers, reaching instead for Good Housekeeping.

  ‘Ooh. “How to be the perfect hostess”,’ she read. ‘I trust you’ve been studying this, Penelope?’

  I blushed. I had. I changed the subject. ‘I bumped into your aunt the other day.’

  ‘She said. In Selfridges, wasn’t it? Apparently you sent something flying and she came to your rescue.

  ‘It was quite funny, actually.’ I told her all about her buying the cricket cap for Inigo.

  ‘How typical,’ said Charlotte with a grin when I had finished the tale. ‘Never was there anyone so unsuited to being poor as Aunt Clare. The sooner she remarries, the better.’

  I couldn’t tell if she was joking. ‘Do you think she might?’

  ‘Possibly. She has no shortage of admirers.’