The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (15 page)

‘Here,
at Magna. It was mid-June.’

‘June!
It sounds like another country!’ said Charlotte.

Yet
even in the grip of winter, I could sense the heady fertility of that minty
summer night in 1937. Under the diamond-hard November earth, another soft
summer lurked, with its time-old promises, and heavy bees and love at first
sight.

‘What’s
your favourite one of Johnnie’s songs, anyway?’ asked Charlotte, swerving on to
a different subject yet again.

‘Oh,
you can’t possibly ask me that!’ I wailed. ‘I’d feel awful picking a favourite.’

Charlotte
laughed. ‘Don’t be so jolly wet, Penelope.’

Just after Charlotte and I
returned from the Fairy Wood, I found Harry in the library absorbed in Keats.

‘The
train leaves in an hour,’ I announced. ‘Would you like something to eat before
you go?’

‘No,
thank you.’

I
turned to leave him, sensing he wanted some time on his own.

‘The
Long Gallery,’ he said suddenly. ‘Could you show it to me before we go?’’

‘Oh,’ I
said, surprised and not at all pleased. ‘It’s all boarded up, I’m afraid.’

‘So?’

‘We can’t
get in.’

‘But
you live here!’

‘I
know.’

Harry
shrugged and went back to his book. I hovered, livid. ‘Oh all right then,’ I
said ungraciously. ‘Just five minutes. And don’t come running to me if you
crash through the floorboards and never walk again.’

‘How
could I come running to you if I—’

‘I
know, I know,’ I interrupted him crossly.

The Long Gallery is one of
the oldest rooms in the house. Originally, it was used as a sort of exercise
pen for the ladies who wanted to stretch their legs of an afternoon, but didn’t
want to venture outside in the cold or rain (or snow, as the case may have
been). Inigo and I used to spend hour upon hour up there, because it is the
perfect room for children — ideal for any number of games and far away enough
to make as much noise as we liked. We loved the Long Gallery then. The black
oak floor shone from centuries of footsteps swaying on the uneven boards. The
barrel-vaulted ceiling gave us the exact sensation of being on a ship, and when
the wind blew, one could almost feel the vessel under one’s feet creaking and
careering over the waves.

But I
didn’t like to spend time in the Long Gallery any more. You see, we were up
there, Inigo and I, playing a variation on marbles (the variation being that we
didn’t know the rules but simply whizzed the glass balls along the floor and
challenged each other to get to the end of the room without zooming off course)
when Mary came upstairs to tell us that Papa had been killed. The Long Gallery
died after that; became haunted. Its door remained locked; Mama admitted defeat
and said that it was the one room that she simply couldn’t cope with any
longer. Inigo and I were glad, though at eighteen I felt a kick of shame
whenever I thought of it languishing away on the top floor — a room for
centuries so full of life, so spectacular — left to the mice and spiders and
woodworm. I felt too old to be afraid of it now.

‘Follow
me,’ I instructed Harry, and he did — all the way up the stairs, four flights
of them getting thinner and thinner with each ascending floor — until we were
outside the Long Gallery. I turned the rusting key in the door and creaked it
open as though Hitchcock was directing me; I half expected the world to turn
black and white in that moment. I stood impatiently in the doorway while Harry
stepped carefully inside the room. Today wasn’t the day for me to overcome my
Long Gallery demons. I felt angry out of all proportion to this situation. In
that moment, I thoroughly disliked Harry for making me open the door.

And off
he went with his first question.

‘What
year does this room date from?’ he asked, running his hands along the wall.

‘It’s
medieval, much like the rest,’ I said breezily. He shook his head.

‘The
medieval period was pretty long,’ he said. ‘Any idea which decade within which
century?’

‘Thirteen
twenty-eight,’ I said wildly.

He lay
down on the floor and closed his eyes, which I found intensely irritating. He
was doing it to annoy me, I thought.

‘Have
you ever slept a night up here?’ he demanded horizontally. Always he was
demanding, and every question that he asked me sounded like an accusation heavy
with the assumption that my answer would always be wrong.

‘No,’ I
said. ‘Too cold and scary.

He
closed his eyes again, with the annoying smirk back on his face.
He thinks I’m
pathetic,
I thought.

‘Actually,
I don’t like to come up here any more,’ I said defiantly. ‘I was up here when’
I heard that my father had been killed. It’s not a room that makes me feel very
happy.’

‘How
strange,’ Harry said simply. I hated him for it, and I hated myself for telling
him the story, because it weakened me, and, more important, I realised that I
had only told him to make him feel bad. ‘You shouldn’t waste a room like this,’
he said. He stood up and blinked and crossed the room to one of the windows and
stared out at the snow-covered lawn. ‘What a place to look at the planets!’

I felt
myself heavy with melancholy and the soft romance of ages past — I could even
hear the church bells tolling into the sharp air reminding me of Papa’s
memorial service and Mama’s tears.

‘We’d
better go,’ I said, not liking the sound of my own voice. ‘You don’t want to
miss your train.’

Harry
turned to me with a burst of laughter. ‘You can’t wait to get rid of me, can
you?’’

‘No,
not at all.’

‘You
know what you should do?’

‘What?’

He
pushed back his hair. ‘Come up to London. I got myself into this whole silly
mess with Marina, but at the very least it got me out of my mother’s clutches
and into the dark corners of the Jazz Cafe. I think you need to do the same.

For a
moment I glared at him. At least I
think
I glared. My glares are pretty
ineffectual as a general rule. Inigo says they make me look as though I’m
sitting on a thistle.

‘You’re
eighteen, for God’s sake,’ went on Harry. ‘If you don’t get out now, you never will.’

‘Get
out?’

‘Yes,
get out. I can only imagine the kind of pull that a house like this has on one,
but you’ll never find Johnnie Ray out in the sticks.’

‘I’ll
certainly come with you to the party, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ I
said pertly.

Harry
laughed. ‘That’s a start. Oh, and don’t worry: if you get bored, Dorset House
is stuffed full of the most amazing new paintings. Perfect for someone as
interested in art as you,’ he added. He just couldn’t help himself, I thought
sourly. I chose to keep a dignified silence as we made our way back downstairs.

If we
had been outside, I would have stuffed a snowball down his neck.

Chapter
7

ME AND
THE IN CROWD

If Mama sensed the change
that had taken place at Magna after the snowy weekend, she didn’t show it. She
arrived back from her three-day sojourn with Belinda weighed down with her
usual selection of baffling presents — a fir cone dressed as a hedgehog dressed
as a nurse for me, a pair of hideous lime-green slippers for Inigo, a woollen
toothbrush holder for Mary — and announced that she had never had such a jolly
time with
anyone
as she had with my godmother.’

‘She’s
such a darling, but she really has become the most plain woman,’ she announced
gleefully. ‘Such a shame. Goodness, when I think of her when we first met! She
was such a beautiful girl, the longest eyelashes you had ever seen.’ This was
another one of my mother’s classic devices: give praise to good looks that are
long gone. I felt rather sorry for poor Belinda.

‘She
surrounds herself with extraordinary men, of course,’ she said. ‘All of them
closer to seventy than forty, but quite fascinating. The food was inedible, but
then when is it ever
not?
All the men were too busy gassing away to care
much. Oh! I must talk to Johns about the dining-room table.’

I don’t
think this was true. I don’t believe that she needed to talk to Johns in the
slightest, but she obviously had no plans to ask us about our weekend. I was
both relieved and highly irritated. Inigo did not seem to notice. I brought the
subject up with him later that night after Mama had gone to bed.

‘Odd
that Mama didn’t mention Charlotte and Harry,’ I said, poking at the fire. ‘You’d
have thought she’d be dying to know how it went.’

‘Of
course she is,’ said Inigo in surprise. ‘You are
slow
sometimes,
Penelope. She wants to appear nonchalant, but inside she’s boiling over with
curiosity and general what-happenedness. I wouldn’t bother telling her a thing.
She’ll crack, sooner or later, mark my words.’

‘Why
does everything have to be so complicated?’ I asked crossly. ‘You know,
sometimes I get the distinct impression Mama’s keeping something to herself.’

‘Concerning
what?’

‘Concerning
Clare Delancy.’

‘Where
did you get that idea?’

‘Oh, I
don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just feel it, like a Thing from Space.’ Naturally, I
didn’t want to admit that I’d been snooping around in Mama’s diary. ‘Why can’t
she just be normal?’ I said.

‘Don’t
wish that on anyone,’ said Inigo with a shudder. ‘And don’t be silly. Mama’s
incapable of keeping anything to herself.’

I went
to bed after that. There seemed to be no point in arguing. Mama didn’t crack
the next day, or the next. Nor did she crack when Harry telephoned me to make
arrangements for the party. So in the end, of course, it was me who buckled
under the pressure.

‘It’s
Marina Hamilton’s party tonight, Mama,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s talking about it.’’

Are
they?’

‘Well —
yes. I think so.’

‘If you
only
think so,
there can’t be too much to talk about.’

‘I’ve
heard they’ve flown a chef over from Paris who’s going to cook omelettes at
dawn,’ I said determinedly.

‘How
revolting.’

‘Apparently
Marina designed her dress herself.’

‘If she
looks anything like her mother, it would be more accurate to tell me that she
has designed her own tepee. Tania Hamilton has a frame like the figurehead of a
pirate ship.’

I
played my trump card. ‘Well anyway. I shan’t be home tonight. I’m going to stay
with Clare Delancy after the party.’

‘Who?’
asked Mama, looking genuinely baffled.

‘Oh,
Mama, I asked you about her at our last duck supper. She said that she knew you
and — and Papa. She’s my friend Charlotte’s aunt—’

‘Ah
yes. Charlotte’s aunt. The cat lover.’

 
‘Amongst other things. She likes cakes
too, and writing. She’s—’