The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (21 page)

‘How
wonderful!’ Mama cried. ‘You are clever. Oh, Penelope! Do save the ribbon on
that ham — it’s too wonderful to throw away.

Dear
Mama. She was wearing a new pair of cream trousers with a high-necked black
sweater. With her black hair swept into a perfect chignon, she looked the
epitome of style, yet the room she sat in shamed us all. The curtains hung
sorry as teardrops, ripped and faded beyond any kind of chic; the mauve
wallpaper — unchanged since my great-grandmother’s era —peeled miserably around
the once beautiful Inigo Jones cornices. The ceiling was stained yellow with
age and dry rot, and Mary had not removed a bucket that had caught water from a
serious leak on the floor above a week ago. Sensitive as a heat rash to my
friends’ reactions to my mother, I noticed Charlotte’s jaw drop and Harry’s
face become strangely watchful. I knew precisely what they were thinking: we
knew she was young but we didn’t expect her to be
this
staggering. Why
on earth doesn’t she do something about the house?

‘Penelope,
show Charlotte and Harry to their rooms,’ said Mama with a soft smile. ‘How
delightful
to have the house full of beautiful youth. It’s how it should be, you know.’

I
wanted to gnash my teeth, but I wasn’t sure how, so I let her go on.

‘Dinner
will be at eight o’clock,’ she said. She looked suddenly tired. ‘I’m not sure I
have the energy to stay awake until midnight, but you young ones can celebrate.
My sister Loretta and her husband Luke are here from
America.’
She
paused to allow the force of her disdain to sink in. ‘They’re recovering before
dinner.’ Her eyes shifted to Mary’s bucket on the floor.

‘Oh
Lord,’ she said quietly. ‘I meant to get rid of that.’

I
stepped forward and picked it up. ‘Charlotte and I will be down at the stables
this afternoon,’ I said. Mama took a cigarette from the silver case that Papa
gave her for her eighteenth birthday.

‘And
what about you, Harry?’ she asked. ‘Do you ride?’ She asked the question
perfectly innocently. but it hung in the air so evocatively that he actually
blushed.

‘I don’t,’
he admitted finally.

‘Ah
well. I hear you’re a magician?’

‘I hope
to be one day.’

There
was a short silence, then a strange and spooky thing happened. Harry glanced up
at the ceiling and the lights in the morning room flickered and went out, and
we would have been plunged into blackness were it not for the amber glow from
the dying embers in the fireplace. Mama gasped and pressed her hand to her
chest and Charlotte and I cried out at the same time and grabbed each other in
that instinctive yet altogether undignified way that girls do when this sort of
thing happens. Power cuts were par for the course in a house like Magna, but
the timing of this one seemed a little too appropriate to be true.

‘Harry!
Stop it!’ hissed Charlotte, her face livid with dancing shadows, and
miraculously the lights came back on again, and the fire looked cold and small
once more.

‘It
wasn’t me, for goodness’ sake,’ said Harry innocently. ‘though I’m very happy
for you to believe that I can pull off stunts like that. It can only be a good
thing for my reputation.’

‘Well!’
said Mama slowly. ‘That was
quite
something. Whatever can we expect
next? Books flying off the shelves? Wardrobes spontaneously combusting?’

‘Oh,
please, no,’ I whimpered in alarm.

‘I don’t
go in for anything like that,’ said Harry. ‘I’m rather a traditional sort of
magician, in fact.’

‘Sounds
like a contradiction in terms,’ said Mama. She didn’t look tired any longer.
She liked this sort of thing.

‘Would
you like me to take a look at your fuse box, Lady Wallace?’ asked Harry.

‘Oh,
would you? And please, you must call me Talitha.’

The
next minute, Inigo exploded into the room brandishing the dust pan and brush. ‘The
lights went out and I knocked this off the halt table and the frame’s smashed.’
In his hand was the photograph of Papa in his uniform. I braced myself for
tears from Mama who usually considered this sort of thing a Bad Omen. Instead,
she smiled at Inigo.

‘Well,
it can’t be helped. Leave the photograph for Johns; he can take it into town
and have it reframed.’

‘That’s
it?’ asked Inigo suspiciously.

‘Whatever
do you mean, darling? Accidents happen. ‘Not round here they don’t, I thought.

My mother was dynamite by
candlelight; she used it like an actress to enhance her mystique, her
gypsy-green eyes and her film-star vulnerability; against the backdrop of the
dining room in all its medieval glory, she looked even more bewitching. She
placed herself between Harry and Uncle Luke. Mary, set-faced with the effort of
catering for more than the usual total of three, whisked us through our prawn
cocktails and I fancied I could read Harry thinking well why on earth not serve
something comforting like soup on such a cold night?

‘So you’re
a magician?’ Loretta asked Harry. Here we go again, I thought.

‘I’m
training,’ explained Harry. ‘It’s a long process. It’s not the sort of thing
that there’s any point in being just halfway good at.’

‘I can
imagine,’ said Mama. ‘No good making someone disappear, then not knowing how
to get them back again!’

‘I don’t
know,’ I muttered to myself.

‘And
how about you, Charlotte? And you, darling Penelope? What do girls like you do
with yourselves nowadays?’ asked Loretta, turning her kind eyes towards me.

‘Now
that’s a question.’ I sighed.

Charlotte
paused and glanced around the table to assess whose attention she had. This
sort of behaviour from her made me slightly nervous. Charlotte was still an
unknown quantity to me, someone capable of saying almost anything. I chewed
hard on a rubbery prawn and hoped that she wouldn’t be too outrageous.

‘Girls
like me,’ she said slowly. ‘Well, most of us spend a few months in Europe
learning to speak beautiful French or Italian. Then when we arrive back in
England, we go to plenty of smart parties where we hope and pray that some
nice, rich young man will see us standing on the edge of the dance floor. Then
I suppose we marry him and have children.’ She gave me a glittery little grin. ‘Well,
that’s what I’ve heard, anyway. It’s all the rage among the girls I went to
school with. Personally. it leaves me a little bit cold. I want to earn my own
money. I’m intent on making a great deal of it. Then perhaps marrying Johnnie
Ray. if Penelope hasn’t got there first.’

Uncle
Luke gave a shout of laughter.

‘Penelope’s
off to Rome in September,’ said Mama quickly. I think she felt slightly
surprised that someone other than herself was capable of being the centre of
attention. ‘She’s been desperate to see the Sistine chapel in the flesh for as
long as I can remember.’

‘Yes,’
I said automatically. but found myself thinking,
have I?
It was hard to
cast my mind back to a time when I felt desperate over anything but Johnnie and
music and waltzing off to parties and eating chips. Yet Mama was right: a few
years ago and after reading a dire romantic novel set in seventeenth-century
Rome, I had longed to go to Italy.

‘I
adore the thought of Italy,’ said Charlotte dreamily. ‘My aunt refuses to let
me go. She thinks I’ll fall in love with a foreigner and never return.

‘She’s
absolutely right,’ said Harry.

‘And
what may I ask is wrong with falling in love with a foreigner?’ asked Loretta,
pretending to be shocked. ‘Good gracious, I married one!’

‘Uncle
Luke’s not foreign, he’s American!’ said Inigo indignantly. Luke threw back his
head and roared at this; a great rumble of rich noise with the odd high squawk
thrown in for good measure, and it set us all off, though I couldn’t really see
what was so amusing.

‘I can’t
see Penelope marrying an Italian. She’s far too in love with England,’ said
Harry idly.

‘More’s
the pity,’ said Mama.

‘What
do you mean by that?’ I asked Harry, but my heart was beating faster because it
wasn’t often that people said things about me that I had not even realised
myself until that moment.

‘I’ve
never known anyone as English as you,’ agreed Charlotte. ‘The way you look, for
a start, like something out of an Enid Blyton story. Gosh, your freckles are so
perfectly placed that after our first tea I had a bet with Harry that you drew
them on with a pencil.’

‘So
that’s why you told me—’

‘Exactly.’

‘I
still don’t see why that makes me terribly English. Just having freckles—’

‘Oh,
but it’s not just that, is it?’ said Charlotte. ‘It’s the way you talk, the
things you say. the sort of stuff that shocks you, like some of the things
Marina was saying the other day. the stuff that doesn’t shock you, like getting
into a cab and having tea with me at Aunt Clare’s when you’d never met me
before—’

‘Ahem!’
I coughed loudly. Mama was still unaware of how I had met Charlotte.

‘Don’t
sound ashamed of it,’ said Harry, ‘I think it’s a very very good thing. I wish
I was like you.’

‘You’re
the
worst,’
said Charlotte. ‘You’re an English eccentric. Nothing could
be more tiresome.’

‘December the thirty-first 1954,’
announced Inigo, who was hot on proclaiming times and dates.

‘Just
two minutes of 1954 left. Farewell, sweet rationing,’ he added with glee.

‘Can
you believe it?’ said Harry.

‘It’s
odd,’ said Mama, ‘but when I heard that meat was coming off rationing, I felt
sort of empty. Frightened that we might start to forget, I suppose. Oh, I’m
being silly. I’m sorry.’ She picked up her glass and her hand was shaking and I
knew that she hadn’t really meant to say what she had just said. Papa was the
one being that she never used for effect. Luke reached out and touched her arm.

‘Nothin’
silly ‘bout that,’ he said softly. ‘Ah know just how you feel.’ He smiled at
Charlotte and me. ‘You young ones have honey days ahead. And thank the Lord for
that.’

‘Amen!’
I cried.

‘May
the new year bring us all the honey we can eat!’ added Charlotte.

‘All
the honey!’ we repeated and raised our glasses and Inigo ran to the gramophone
and put Frankie Laine on. When the grandfather clock in the hall struck bleakly
at midnight I sensed its surprise and resentment at being drowned out by the
American pop music that blasted from the hall. Inigo grabbed me and Charlotte
by the hand and we danced out of the dining room, kicking off our shoes and
spilling champagne down our fingers.

Chapter
9

MODERN
BOYS AND GUINEA PIGS

1 January 1955 was the
first time that I can remember feeling hot in the hall. Hot from dancing and
laughing, hot from the quivery, odd anticipation for the new year. Inigo ran
upstairs and came down with his guitar and played along with every single
record that we put on. Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, Johnnie of course — he knew
all of them, and though Charlotte and I sang along with everything (like the
fans we were), it was Inigo who had every groove of the vinyl ingrained in his
being. He approached pop music like a scholar, cursing himself on the rare
occasions when Luke asked him a question he could not answer. The mathematics
of the records enthralled him as much as the music — what colour was the label?
How many minutes and seconds, precisely. did each song last? Then, at half-past
one in the morning, Luke slipped upstairs and came down carrying two records on
a label that none of us had ever seen before.