The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (13 page)

HOW TO
LIVE AT HOME AND LIKE IT

Although Inigo and I
always had wine with Mama at supper (she refused to drink on her own), neither
of us had ever consumed the amount of alcohol that we did that first weekend
with Charlotte and Harry. Inigo raided the cellar and stripped it of the last
few bottles of Moët (Mama only ever pretended to like champagne) and Charlotte
produced a large bottle of brandy that she had stolen from her mother’s drinks
cabinet. Both she and Harry drank like adults, without much fuss and without
seeming to be terribly affected by the amount that they were putting away. I
tried my best to keep up. The dining room, with its dark wood and even darker
carvings, made one feel twenty times more fizzy than one actually was.

‘Fancy
eating in here every night!’ exclaimed Charlotte, eyes widening at the portrait
of a set-faced Isabelle Wallace over the fireplace. ‘Gosh, who’s
she?
I
wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of
her.’

‘That
was my grandmother,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember her. Mama says she was very
fierce.’

‘Looks
it. Good nose, though.’

‘She
used to call our mother the Moaner.’

‘What
does she moan about?’ demanded Charlotte, champagne spilling over her fingers
as she refilled her glass.

‘Oh,
everything,’ I said. ‘It’s easier to list what she doesn’t moan about. Mostly
it’s to do with the house, the garden, not having enough help, no heating, no
electricity in the East Wing.’

‘Couldn’t
you two do something about alt those things?’ said Charlotte. ‘Put together
some kind of fail-safe moneymaking scheme?’

‘Funny,
we hadn’t thought of that,’ said Inigo coldly. ‘Hadn’t you?’ said Charlotte in
surprise, not registering the sarcasm. ‘The second I finish working for Aunt
Clare, I’m
off
I’ve got it all worked out.’

‘What?’
asked Inigo.

‘I’m
going to make and sell clothes. Rent a shop somewhere and make a fortune.’

‘What
makes you so sure people will want what you sell?’ asked Inigo. Why was it that
Inigo never seemed to worry about that sort of thing, just said what he was
thinking at all times?

‘Oh,
they’ll want my clothes, all right,’ said Charlotte. ‘Only I have to act
quickly. There are a stack of other girls out there wanting to do the same
thing.’

Are
there?’ I asked doubtfully.

Charlotte
nodded. ‘This girl I knew from school, she’s getting together her own clothing
business,’ she said, biting into a piece of bread. ‘I couldn’t
bear
it
if she sold her first pair of shoes before I did.’

‘Will
you be part of this empire, too?’ I asked Harry. ‘Not likely.’ He looked at me
speculatively. ‘What are you going to do with your life, then? Marry Johnnie
Ray, I suppose.’

‘Ideally,’
I said, taking on board the snub, ‘but just in case he doesn’t, fall for me, I’m
going to Italy next summer.

‘Fascinating,’
said Harry. ‘Speaking of art, who painted the little watercolour in the
corridor outside my bedroom — the snow scene?’

I
nearly gasped. He was challenging me, without a doubt, and I didn’t like it one
bit — mainly because (inevitably and infuriatingly) I didn’t have a clue who
painted the wretched picture.

‘It’s a
Van Ruisdael,’ said Inigo, eager to show off rather than rescue me, ‘one of
Mama’s favourites. She says she’d rather sell her soul than that painting. I
think it was a present from Papa.’

‘God, I
love the Dutch. Such emotional use of colour,’’ proclaimed Harry irritatingly.

‘Why
can’t I meet some amazing man who’ll buy me paintings?’ said Charlotte
dreamily. (I might mention at this point that she had slurped through her
tomato soup and was now dipping her bread into what remained in my bowl. She
did all this so coolly that no one batted an eyelid. That was the thing about
Charlotte. She managed to turn’ her bad table manners into a bit of an art
form.)

‘Not
much good if you end up having to sell every painting you’re given,’ I
commented.

‘But
just to know that there was a man who was prepared to buy them for you. That
would be enough for me, I think,’ said Charlotte.

‘Have
you had lots of boyfriends?’ Inigo asked her.

‘Inigo!’
I said furiously. ‘For goodness’ sake!’

‘Oh, it’s
quite all right,’ said Charlotte, grinning. ‘That’s what little brothers are
for, isn’t it? Asking questions like that?’

‘Not so
little,’ growled Inigo. ‘I was sixteen last month.’

There
was a pause. I noticed Harry shoot me an edgy look that I was at a loss to
decipher.
Well, answer the question, Charlotte!
I thought. For all that
Inigo shouldn’t have asked it, I was as keen as he was to know the answer.

‘I’m
mad about a boy called Andrew,’ she said calmly. ‘A the T, Harry calls him.
Andrew the Ted. According to my mother and Aunt Clare, he’s very unsuitable. I
think it’s about the only thing they’ve agreed on in years.’ She laughed
loudly.

‘Why
don’t they like him?’ persisted Inigo and this time I said nothing.

Charlotte
took a big gulp of champagne. ‘Oh, he’s a Teddy boy, nothing more than that,’
she said. ‘Drape jacket, skinny trousers, perfect Duck’s Arse hair, radiates
discontent. Aunt Clare thought it was all fine at first. She kept on saying how
good it was to meet boys who were a bit different — then when I showed no sign
at all of getting bored with him, she got a bit worried. “I was out with a
different boy every week when I was your age!” she kept saying. As if that made
any difference to me. Charlotte stared at Inigo as she talked. ‘Everyone became
nervous because A the T had no money and no real prospects. Standard stuff,
really. In the end it wore me out. I needed Aunt Clare more than I needed him,
I suppose, and I’ve never been much good at deceiving people. I told Andrew it
was no good, that we had to stop seeing each other, that it wouldn’t ever work
out.’ Her long hair fell forward and brushed the side of her empty soup bowl. ‘Romeo
and Juliet eat your heart out,’ she added ironically.

I felt
a wave of pity for Andrew who I imagined would never be entirely free from the
spell that Charlotte cast. I also felt envy — to have a boy fall in love with
me was a great ambition of mine. Harry caught my eye and gave a brief shake of
the head. I cleared my throat.

‘What
have you seen at the pictures lately?’ I asked no one in particular.

‘Rear
Window,’
said Inigo loudly.

That first weekend with
Charlotte and Harry at Magna came as something of a revelation. Without the overwhelming
weight of Mama’s presence, it felt as if the house was shaking itself out of a
long sleep. For the first time in my whole life, the weekend actually meant
freedom. We had just three nights with Charlotte and Harry, but it may as well
have been thirty. I can see Charlotte and me now, drunk on champagne, dancing
powdered snowy footprints over the dining-room floor and shouting to make
ourselves heard above the intoxicating sounds of Johnnie Ray and America.
Always America. I had worried that Charlotte and Harry would be bored at Magna,
would need entertaining as many of my friends from school had done. In my mind
I had a long list of distractions for them —backgammon, the wireless, books. I
needn’t have bothered. Not one jazz record got past Charlotte’s insatiable
desire for Inigo’s rock ‘n’ roll collection. And backgammon? Who needed backgammon
when we had a magician and a pack of perfectly good playing cards?

After dinner, we lit the
fire in the ballroom and turned up the volume on the gramophone. Charlotte told
me about her father, Aunt Clare’s only brother, ‘Willie, who had fought in the
Great War and died of a heart attack at the very start of the last one, and
more about her mother Sophia and her string of unsuitable suitors.

‘The
conductor is allergic to everything,’ said Charlotte. ‘Even wine,’ she said, ‘which
strikes me as just plain selfish.’

Harry
told me to pick a card from the pack I had unearthed from a kitchen drawer. I
hugged it to my chest.

‘Now
what?’ I asked him. ‘Do I have to tell you my favourite colour or what day of
the week I was born so you can work it out?’

‘Four
of clubs,’ yawned Harry. ‘Saves time.

I
tossed the card out onto the table with a cry of amazement. ‘Do it on me,’
demanded Inigo, inspecting the card. Harry, deadpan as ever, performed the same
trick seven times on both of us. Next he made a huge red silk handkerchief
vanish before our eyes, re-producing it two minutes later from Inigo’s jacket
pocket on the other side of the room. He was wonderful as a magician and the
more he practised his act on us, the more the tension seemed to drain out of
his body, replaced by an air of engaging insolence that seemed to say,
I’m
going to fool you again, but only because I like you.
He seemed much older
than the rest of us — which he was — but it wasn’t just his age that gave me
this impression; his whole persona had an old-fashioned drama about it. Another
thing that set him apart from the rest of us was his ability to drink and
not
get drunk. After only half a glass of champagne, my head started to fizz
and spin. Everything became hysterically funny, nothing seemed impossible.’

‘How is
it that you’re still standing?’ I asked Harry as he drained his fifth glass.

‘Practice,’
he replied.

At five in the morning,
Inigo said he had a terrible craving for eggs with soldiers, but we left them
in the water too long while Harry showed us a trick involving a vanishing soup
spoon and they ended up hard-boiled. We peeled off the shells (difficult when
we had all drunk more than we ever had before) and dipped the eggs in the salt
jar, and I cut us uneven doorsteps of white bread, and buttered them in the
sort of way that Mary would have described as liberal. Charlotte made us all
scalding mugs of strong, sweet coffee and Harry impressed me by tipping the
remains of his brandy into his with a sigh of despair. Then we pulled on our
boots and crunched over the snow towards the bench that overlooks the duck
pond, armed with travelling rugs and scarves.

‘What a
place to live!’ Charlotte kept saying. ‘Who skulks about in the house at the
bottom of the drive? We passed it on the way here.’

‘The
Dower House? That was where we lived during the war. When we moved back to
Magna we used to get lost the whole time,’ said Inigo. ‘The Dower House isn’t
small but you can hear someone shout to you wherever you are in the place. At
Magna, you’re practically in another time zone in the East Wing.’

Charlotte
giggled. ‘We spent most of the war in Essex at my great-aunt’s place. All we
wanted to do was get back to London. Everything sounded so bloody exciting up
there and we were stuck out in the middle of nowhere.’

I
murmured in agreement.

‘I felt
cheated by the end of it all. Aunt Clare stayed up in town and, as far as I can
tell, had a ball. She was forever lunching at Fortnum’s with falling rubble in
her hair. She said the war was drunk-making stuff’

The
garden sat so still in front of us, listening carefully to every word, I
thought. As the grey dawn began to break, I ran up to the house and put Johnnie
Ray on again, throwing open the ballroom windows so that the cold air was
suddenly full of that voice, and America, and we all sat perfectly still, not
speaking, barely daring to breathe, so it seemed to me. I trembled on the bench
and clamped my teeth together to stop them from chattering. It felt as if there
were sparks coming out of my fingertips; everything was most reverently alive.
My head buzzed with caffeine; I felt dizzy from lack of sleep and the coldness
of the sharp, frosty morning in my smoky lungs. When the song finished, two and
a half minutes later, something was different. I think we all felt it
separately, each of us alone with our own little reasons for why the balance of
the earth had shifted.

‘It’s
good, isn’t it?’ said Charlotte eventually.

‘Better
than good,’ I said.

As day
broke, the sunlight broke through the clouds, and diamonds danced on the snow.
Magna, and everything that surrounded it, glittered.