The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (20 page)

‘So how
will you explain the fact that we’re not engaged in a year’s time?’ I said. ‘And
what will she think if the plan works and you go running back to Marina after
all?’

‘Oh,
don’t worry about that,’ said Harry breezily. ‘She has very little faith in me;
she’s already convinced I’m going to mess things up. When I do, it will come as
no surprise at all.’

‘Wonderful,’
I said sardonically.

‘I made
forty pounds last night.’

‘Forty
pounds!’ I gasped, momentarily full of admiration.

‘Indeed.
It was this great little trick with a piece of string and a passport that did
it. Incredibly simple, but people can be
so
stupid and
so
drunk.
I must take you out to dinner to thank you for your sterling work so far.’

‘So
far!’
I cried, forgetting to keep my voice down. ‘I’m
not sure that this is going to be going any further.’

‘Why
were you calling, anyway?’ asked Harry idly. ‘Want to invite us to stay for the
New Year?’

‘Well —
yes, actually. How did you know?’

‘Wild
guess. And we’d love to come. And don’t worry about my mother. She travels to
Paris every New Year to stay with my Uncle Cedric. At least that’s
her
story.’
I heard the sound of Aunt Clare re-entering the room. ‘I must go, sweetheart. I’ll
pass on your invitation to Charlotte.’

‘I’m
not sure you should be calling me that—’ I began, but he had already hung up.

When I
replaced the receiver, Mama was straightening the zebra rug and trying not to
look as though she’d been listening.

‘All
organised, darling? Are they coming to stay?’

‘Yes,’
I said heavily. ‘They’re coming to stay.

‘I must
telephone Fortnum’s tomorrow. We’ll need all kinds of everything if we’re
having guests.’ (You may think that this kind of chat suggests that we were
never out of the place, but in fact I don’t think that Mama had ordered food
from Fortnum’s since before the war. I wanted to say that we couldn’t possibly
afford it, and what on earth was wrong with the village shop and Mrs Daunton’s
mince pies, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. Anything that distracted Mama
from our dire financial crisis was a good thing, even if it meant spending yet
more money we didn’t have.)

My mother, when she put
her mind to it, had a flair for decorating and an eye for detail. Since Papa
left us, her efforts to create a festive atmosphere at Magna had been
half-hearted, and phrases like ‘I’m at a low ebb, darlings’ and ‘I simply don’t
have the energy’ echoed around the house even more during December than at any
other time of the year. We all slumped, and the house felt silent and sad and
weary. But the end of 1954 was a different story altogether. The morning after
the phone call, Mama ordered Johns to cut down huge armfuls of holly from the
Fairy Wood, and the next day she specified the tree that she wanted for the
hall. A week later, Inigo returned from school, bursting with energy and
getting under everyone’s feet.

‘Do put
something cheerful on the gramophone while we dress the tree, Inigo,’ ordered
Mama, and some kind of spirit of goodwill must have descended upon Inigo for he
chose a scratchy recording of
HMS Pinafore
instead of his new Bill Haley
disc.

‘This
is music,’ sighed Mama, and the wind snaked under
the front door and the dark night spat hailstones against the windows, and
Buttercup lamented and the sailors roared, and Magna felt far out at sea. I
pricked my fingers on pine needles and thought of all the other men like Papa
who would never see their family decorating the tree, and arguing over records.
Papa would never hear Johnnie Ray. I thought, and this fact, for reasons that
were not quite clear to me, shocked me very much.

Mama
dusted down the ancient Nativity scene for the hall table. ‘I remember the second
year we were married, your grandmother nearly losing her mind with worry when
the Angel Gabriel was dropped and his halo broke,’ said Mama in that high voice
she reserved for telling stories about things that still bothered her. ‘She
made me feel so small, like a blasphemous child. I heard her saying to Archie, “Well
of course, you’ve married a child, so this sort of thing is bound to happen.”
She never got over it.’

‘Silly
woman,’ I said automatically.

‘The
thing that she never knew was that it was
Penelope
who broke it,’ went
on Mama, taking my hand. ‘I could never have told her that. I couldn’t bear the
thought of that awful, condescending voice ticking off
my
daughter.’

‘No,
Mama,
you
were the only one allowed to do that,’ said Inigo.

There
was a silence. I don’t know where those words came from, for normally the
blame-me-for-breaking-the-halo story filled Inigo’s heart with adoration for
Mama, the beautiful young misfit condemned for my babyish carelessness, but
this year he had thrown down the script. Mama looked puzzled, more than
anything, by his unexpected response.

‘Darling,
I hope you’re not going to go through one of those awkward phases I’ve been
reading about in this month’s
Vanity Fair.’

‘If it’s
in
Vanity Fair,
then I’m very much hoping to go through it.’

‘You
need an early night, darling. You’re obviously overtired.’

‘I’m
not tired.’

‘Oh,
Inigo, please don’t exhaust me with answering back.’

‘I’m
not answering back.’

There
was a pause, then Mama said something that raised a lump in my throat. ‘Funny.’
She laughed softly. ‘I rather miss the old boot now.

Mary, entering into the
spirit of things with uncharacteristic good cheer, hung a wreath on the front
door. She even fashioned a pained-looking fairy for the top of the tree using
pipe cleaners and some silver foil. On Christmas Eve, I spotted her grey-stockinged
legs carefully ascending the stepladder in the morning-room doorway.

‘What
on
earth
are you doing, Mary?’ I demanded, curiosity forcing me to
abandon my copy of
Housewife
in the middle of an article called ‘Is
Mother Ever Wrong?’ (Yes, frequently. in my view.)

‘Yer
mother wants this up here,’ Mary announced, brandishing an armful of mistletoe
at me. ‘Johns brought a whole load back with ‘im from Hereford last week, the
socking great Romeo. ‘Old the ladder for me, won’t ye?’ she huffed.

‘Who
would you like to kiss you under the mistletoe, Mary?’ I teased.

‘Marlon
Brando,’ she answered promptly. her face reddening as she struggled with the
branches.

‘Mary!’
I was genuinely astonished.

‘Good
arms,’ she said. ‘Nice to see a man with good arms.’

There
was a pause as she concentrated on knotting the mistletoe to the moth-eaten
antlers of the stag above the door.

‘Well
hung,’ I observed, and I think I saw a twitch of a smile on Mary’s thin lips.

On Christmas Day. Inigo
and I linked arms with Mama and walked through the garden to church. It was one
of those rare December mornings of cloudless blue sky and bright white sunlight,
when the grass scrunched frostily underfoot and the church bells really did
seem to peal with tidings of great joy for all the world, but especially for
us, in our corner of the world, our piece of little England. Being of a
romantic disposition, I had always liked attending church, but since the war
the family pew (as uncomfortable now as it must have been when it was first
carved in 1654) had felt too big for just the three of us. I had a sudden wave
of longing for Papa, for the presence of a man to protect us.

‘A very
Happy Christmas to you,’ came a low voice from the pew behind and I turned
round to see Mrs Daunton, rosy with the cold morning, smiling at Inigo and me.
Next to her sat the vicar’s beautiful daughter, who seemed to me to be wearing
an awful lot of pancake and pink lipstick for a Christmas service. She gave me
a small smile that seemed to unite us in something I couldn’t quite explain but
probably had something to do with being younger than everyone else. Her father
spoke about John the Baptist and how he prepared the people for the coming of
Christ and I tried hard not to think about clothes and music, and all the other
things that just seemed to pop into my head at the wrong time. We sang ‘0 Come
All Ye Faithful’ and Inigo and I nudged each other during the ‘now in flesh
appearing’ line because the way that it was phased made it sound as if Jesus
was starring in a film. Mama looked down at her hands during the service, and I
thought about her thinking about Papa and wondered if Aunt Clare was thinking
of him too. When we filed out into the churchyard an hour later, Mama stood and
talked to people about the village, and the gymkhana and the proposed expansion
of the village stores. There was no denying it, Mama’s star quality was her
great gift. She had fame in the village, and there was great public sympathy
for her in the big house, ‘rattling around like a pin in a trunk’ as I once
heard her situation described.’

‘Penelope
thinks another gymkhana is a wonderful idea, don’t you?’ said Mama, cueing me
up for a long conversation with Mary’s sister, Lucy, who was fifteen years
younger than Mary and lacked her sister’s woeful outlook on the world.

‘Weren’t
we lucky with the weather last year?’ she began. ‘I can’t think what we would
have done had it rained…’

I
nodded and smiled and tried not to tune in to Inigo’s conversation with Helen ‘Williams
that included words like cinema and ‘Marlon Brando’ and finally ‘Palladium’ and
‘Johnnie Ray’. By the time we waved goodbye and set off for Magna half an hour
later, I was fairly bursting at the seams with wanting to know what Helen
Williams knew, and I didn’t.

‘She
says Johnnie’s coming to London again next year,’ said Inigo casually.

‘I don’t
think you should have been discussing John Ray in church,’ Mama reproved him.

‘Johnnie,
Mama,
Johnnie!’
I snapped in exasperation.

‘And we
weren’t in church, we were standing outside,’ said Inigo, maddening as ever.

Throughout
all of that Christmas, the Duck Supper of the previous month hung over the
three of us, and with it the incomprehensible, unthinkable notion that we
couldn’t afford to be where we were any longer. That we had nothing left to
offer Magna except for ourselves — and what use were we? In the back of my mind
I felt we were being cruel to the house — it was suffering because of our lack
of money and our romantic convictions that something would come right in the
end. One evening, I caught Mama rummaging through a crate of old junk from the
cupboard in the blue room. For a wild moment, I wondered if she was looking for
something of Charlotte’s, for she was the last person to have slept there.

‘What
are you doing, Mama?’ I asked her.

‘Searching
for hidden treasure,’ she said without the slightest trace of irony.

I
wanted to tell her not to be so stupid, and what on earth was she expecting to
find, but I hadn’t the heart. And of course, there was always the hope inside
me that perhaps the answer to our prayers would reveal itself amongst a box of
moth-eaten blankets, crumpled newspapers and broken toys. Could it also contain
a teddy bear worth thousands of pounds? Or the discarded necklace of a
long-forgotten ancestor? We dreamed on, but I was horribly aware that dreaming
was getting us nowhere.

A week later, after lunch,
Luke and Loretta arrived. They had set sail from America on Boxing Day and,
after five days at sea, stood in the hall and marvelled at us. Inigo and I
couldn’t have been more excited had they sailed in from Mars.

‘My
word!’ exclaimed Luke in his delicious Southern drawl. ‘Who on earth are these
two, Lolly?’ (Mama despised Luke’s calling her sister ‘Lolly’; nicknames were
to be avoided at all costs, which makes one wonder why she named me Penelope.) ‘You
two are grown so tall!’

Inigo
and I both adored Uncle Luke who was six foot five with a wide, smiling face
and huge yellow-green eyes; the sort of man who looked as though he was
perpetually making hay while the sun shone. It would be disloyal to my mother
and my aunt to say that Loretta was a much easier, sweeter, less beautiful
version of Mama, but I thought it just the same.

‘The
image
of Archie, isn’t she, Luke?’ she whispered; shaking her head in wonder.

‘The
very image!’ agreed Luke, enveloping me in a bear hug. ‘Your daddy was the very
best man I ever met,’ he went on. ‘An’ I only met him the three times, didn’t
I, Lolly? Funniest man I ever did meet. Biggest feet an’ all.’ Papa was never
more real than he was through Luke’s memories of him.

‘An’
you, young man,’ he went on, addressing Inigo and his duck-arse hair this time.
‘Well bless my soul. You look like a young Elvis Presley to me.

‘Who?’
I giggled.

Charlotte and Harry
arrived two hours later. Mama received them in the morning room and Charlotte
plied her with presents — a huge ham, a box of violet creams from Harrods, a
bottle of lavender bath oil from Swan and Edgar that I intended to swipe as soon
as possible, and a fruit cake that weighed almost as much as Mary.