The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (16 page)

But
Mama had moved on. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said irritatedly. ‘Do remember to tell Johns
what time you want collecting from the station tomorrow. Oh, and Penelope, for
goodness’ sake put your hair up. You can’t have it hanging round your face
tonight like spaniels’ ears. And tell Mary to give your shoes a quick rub before
you go.’

‘Yes
Mama.’

There
was no doubt in my mind that she knew exactly who Aunt Clare was.

That afternoon I climbed
onto the train to London and fretted for most of the journey — was my hair
really
better up? what if I could find nothing to talk to anyone about? — so that
by the time the train pulled up to the platform in London, I quite felt like
running for the hills. At Paddington I was met by Charlotte in her green coat,
carrying, of all things, a wire bird cage.

‘Parakeets,’
she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Harry’s giving them to Marina as a wedding
present. I imagine he sees some dark irony in it. I think he’s just plain
cruel. I was thinking of setting them free in Hyde Park. What do you think?’

I
giggled. ‘Harry would never forgive you.’

‘I
wonder to myself— do I actually care? Come on, we’ll get a cab back to
Kensington Court.’

Phoebe,
marginally more unfriendly than the last time we had met, showed Charlotte and
me into Aunt Clare’s study where Harry was reading the paper. He jumped up when
we walked in.

‘Your
birds have arrived,’ said Charlotte sardonically, balancing the cage
precariously on top of a book called
Wild Animals I Have Known
on Aunt
Clare’s desk. One of them squawked incredibly loudly and I jumped.

‘Penelope.
You look princessish,’ said Harry, yawning.

‘I
haven’t dressed yet.’

‘Didn’t
say you had. Would you like a drink? I’ve asked Phoebe to open some champagne
for us before we leave.’

‘Where’s
Aunt Clare?’

‘Upstairs
on the telephone,’ said Harry. ‘She’s delighted with herself for refusing to
come tonight. I think it’s the first invitation she hasn’t accepted all year.’

‘I’m
surprised she’s not coming, if only for the free drink,’ said Charlotte. ‘Apparently,
they’re making real American cocktails. There have been so many rumours circulating
about this party, it can’t fail to be anything other than the most enormous
disappointment.’

‘Nothing
Marina does is ever a disappointment, unfortunately.’ Harry peered at the
birds. ‘They need a drink.’

‘So do
we,’ said Charlotte. ‘Phoebe gets more and more hopeless.’

On cue,
Phoebe clattered into the room with a bottle and some dusty-looking glasses.
She was the most joyless girl I had ever seen, even succeeding in making the
pop of the champagne cork sound melancholy. I took an enormous gulp, and my
eyes watered.

‘It’s
warm,’ shuddered Charlotte in disgust. ‘Nothing worse. I think I shall save
myself for the daiquiris tonight.’

‘The
Daiquiris? Aren’t they that terribly nice couple who breed Norwich terriers?’
came a voice from the doorway. Aunt Clare bustled into the room. ‘Penelope
dear, how delightful.’ She kissed me on both cheeks. ‘How are your cricketing
skills?’

‘Oh —
the cap. Gosh, I still feel bad about that.’

She
gave me a wink. ‘Don’t, darling. Don’t ever feel guilty about anything — such a
waste of time. Now, I’ll have some champagne please, Phoebe. Mercy! What on
earth are those poor birds doing on my desk?’ She clasped a hand to her chest.

‘They’re
off to the party with us, Aunt. They’re part of the
Marina Don’t Do It
campaign.’

‘No wonder
they’re green.

‘Sick
as parakeets.’ Charlotte giggled.

Phoebe took me to my room
to change. It was a nice room —clean and plain with a fire dancing in the
grate, and someone had arranged some flowers on the dresser. I washed my face
and changed quickly into my green velvet Selfridges number. Up and down, up and
down, went my spaniel’s ears, as I struggled to make sense of my hair. Why. oh
why couldn’t I be one of those naturally stylish women, like Charlotte or Mama?
After twenty minutes, I knocked on Charlotte’s door to ask her what to do.

‘Mama
says I should put it up.’

‘Which,
of course, you should. Here.’ Charlotte grabbed my hairbrush and some pins. She
looked beautiful in the most understated way possible. All she had done was
brush her hair and change into a blue silk dress, but her natural style meant
that she could have worn anything and looked right. Her height was a great
relief to me too, for I had spent most of my school days slouching next to
girls of five foot, embarrassed by my conspicuousness. Charlotte stood just an
inch smaller than me, and she carried herself utterly without
self-consciousness.

‘I like
your dress,’ she said.

‘It’s a
bit tight,’ I admitted. ‘Mama refused to buy me the bigger size. I feel a bit
nervous, Charlotte.’

Are
you?’ she asked in surprise. ‘Lucky you. Nervous is exactly the right approach
to any party.’

‘I don’t
know how I’m supposed to act,’ I admitted humbly.

‘Don’t
do anything except smile and look as though you’re having a good time,’ she
instructed.

‘I hardly
know Harry. The whole thing feels jolly awkward.’

‘You
know his name and he knows there’s a van Ruisdael hanging outside your bedroom
at Magna. I should think that fact alone would be enough to send Marina into
orbit.’

‘The
van Ruisdael or the fact that Harry knows it’s there?’

‘Both.’
Charlotte grimaced as she concentrated on my hair. ‘To be quite frank, I’m
bored witless by the whole Marina Hamilton saga,’ she said through a mouthful
of hairpins. ‘Still, events that take months to develop in the cold light of
day can be whizzed through in just a few hours at the right party. I’m hoping
that Harry will go through the lot: anger, despair, humiliation — followed by
revelation, hope and finally triumph. It’s the mix of drink and cigarette smoke
that does it. There you go, just as your mother requested.’ She swung me round
to look in the mirror.

‘Oooh,
gosh, it’s lovely!’ For it
really
was. Charlotte dabbed a powder puff
over my nose, swished a soft brush of rouge over my cheeks and stood back to
admire her handiwork.

‘Pretty
good, if I may say so. Not that you needed much. I’d do anything for your
freckles.’ She frowned into the mirror at her creamy pale face. ‘When I was
little, I used to paint them onto my nose with brown ink swiped from Mummy’s
best pen.

‘Oh,
shut up.’

‘She
thought I was quite mad,
comme d’habitude,
poor old Mummy. Aunt Clare
thought it was funny which annoyed her even more.

But I
had something now, something that Charlotte had given me when she had put up my
hair and made me look just how I always imagined I could look. For the first
time in my life, I was going out with a quality that had hitherto dodged me. I
had caught a large dose of confidence.

‘Idiots!’ said Charlotte
under her breath, as a bank of camera lenses opened fire on us. ‘Do you think
any of them realise that the building behind them is far more fascinating than
any of the fools inside it?’

Despite
the rain, the crowds had gathered behind the railings of Dorset House to watch
the guests arriving for the party, hoping for a glimpse of ‘Princess Margaret,
I supposed. As we stepped out of our taxi, one or two of the photographers had
shouted out Charlotte’s name and asked her what she was carrying.

‘Parakeets,’
she said solemnly. A moment later, an efficient looking man had swept up and
taken the cage from Charlotte.

‘Oh!
They’re a present!’ she cried.

‘For
Miss Marina? Will she know who they’re from?’

‘I
doubt it.

The man
took ‘out a pen and card and handed them to Charlotte who handed them to Harry.
From me,
he wrote, and the rain smudged the ink.

‘How on
earth will she know who “me” is?’ I asked him, slightly irritated.

‘Because
no one else will give her anything that can’t be worn, sprayed, eaten, drunk or
sat on.

It was
entrancing to view Dorset House again with adult eyes. I noticed with a surge
of surprise that it looked Italian to me now, like a Roman villa with its three
storeys of long arched windows, pale stone and long, level low-pitched roof.
The portico was ablaze with torchlight, and a string quartet played bravely under
its shelter.

‘Doesn’t
it look romantic in the rain?’ I sighed.

‘Everything
looks romantic in the rain,’ observed Charlotte. ‘Except
cricket pitches and occupied taxis,’ said Harry.

When I was little, Mama
used to take me to Dorset House for tea with Theodore FitzWilliam who was two
years my junior and a very wet blanket. Tonight there was nothing of the chilly
atmosphere of those miserable childhood visits. The first thing that I noticed
was the warmth in the place — every room had been properly
heated
(something
that would surely have killed old Lord FitzWilliam stone dead had he walked
in), and the faded, pinched nobility of the war years had vanished, replaced by
an all-consuming, glittery American glamour.

‘Get me
a drink,’ demanded Charlotte.

Like
everyone else, we had arrived fashionably late. All around us people surged
forward into the glorious hall, shaking off their coats and hats and filling
the house with a deafening roar of chatter, while in front of us, a gay throng
crowded the grand staircase in all its newly restored, white-marbled glory. As
a child, I recalled the vast columns that stretched up to the first-floor
gallery looking frightening and ghostly. as though they might collapse at any
moment. Now they gave the impression of having been dipped in Californian
sunlight. My ears were full of fascinating conversation.

Well
how are you? You look soaked to the skin, poor thing. Of course, this weather’s
been a terrible shock for Vernon, he’s grown so used to the temperatures in
LA… I don’t believe I’ve seen you since the Governor’s Ball!…. Borrowed the
earrings, but not the necklace. Aspreys, such kind people… Oh I received
flowers from Marilyn last week with a note that simply read
‘Joy’…
I found her such a sweet thing, such a talented actress,
my dear, and so very vulnerable.

Charlotte
and I giggled and I worried for half a minute that I should have worn better
shoes, then realised that everyone else was far too concerned with their own
appearance to bother about mine. We followed the crowd up the staircase and
into the saloon, and I thought how odd it was that usually when one returns to
a place one has known as a child it seems to have shrunk, yet Dorset House felt
ten times larger than it ever had before. Automatically. Harry gravitated
towards the long line of windows.

‘Typical,’
said Charlotte. ‘Here we are, in one of the most spectacular rooms in the whole
country, and all he wants to do is stare outside. Oh, yes, I’ll have one of
those, thank you!’ she added, stealing a cocktail sausage from a passing
waiter.

‘You’re
welcome, miss,’ he said, bowing his head, his face as serious as a surgeon.

The
saloon had
not
been ruined by the Hamiltons, I realised, rather it had
been revived with extreme consideration. They had drawn attention to things
that I had never noticed before — the nymphs and unicorns that frolicked along
the curve of the ceiling and the five candelabras that lit the room with the
sort of soft glow that makes everyone look twenty times more seductive than
they really are. Charlotte read my mind.

‘Beware
of good lighting,’ she warned, as full of wise advise as I expected her to be. ‘It’s
almost as dangerous as alcohol.’

Harry
returned from the window and stuck close by to give the impression of being
with us, but he seemed to know an awful lot of people, and they all seemed very
pleased to see him. Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation, he would
look my way and grin, though I supposed this was all part of the act — for the
benefit of Marina, were she ever to appear. Charlotte knew plenty of people
too, including the infamous Wentworth twins, Kate and Helena, who struck me as
too beautiful and scary by half. They smoked thin cigars and were never out of
the gossip pages. Kate was the cover girl of this month’s
Tatler.

‘How
are
you, Charlotte?’ demanded Helena.

‘More
to the point, how’s your darling aunt?’ asked Kate.

At that
moment, Hope Allen, the least fashionable girl from my Italian class, with the
skin of a rhinoceros, spotted me and hurried across the room to say hello. She
was dressed in an unflattering off-white crinoline, a heat rash creeping over
her plump shoulders, and I would have felt sorry for her were it not for two
things that made her unbearable to me. First, she had borrowed my best Italian
dictionary last year, dropped it in the bath and returned it to me with
crinkled pages and minus the whole of the letter Z. Second, she had an awful
habit of sniffing during lectures. She never carried a handkerchief.