The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (10 page)

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 flakes 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.’