The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (22 page)

‘Think
you might like these,’ he said. ‘This boy’s gettin’ kinda big where we come
from. Mah friend Sam’s got him on his record label. We saw him jus’ a couple of
months ago at the Louisiana Hayride — crowd went mad for him, y’know. Sam thinks
he’s the greatest thing he’s ever seen. Ah think you kids’ll love this record.’
(I loved the way Uncle Luke said record. ‘Rec-ud.’)

‘Who is
he?’ asked Charlotte, flopping onto the chair next to me.

‘He’s a
white boy. though you’d never believe it, hearing this. He’s this funny
hillbilly cat — sorta your school weirdo type — but
man
he’s good too.
Loretta says he’s a good-lookin’ kid. I wouldn’t know but I guess she’s right.’
Luke laughed.

He put
the record on. When I heard Uncle Luke’s hillbilly cat singing ‘Blue Moon of
Kentucky’ for the first time, the only thing I remember thinking was that I
didn’t believe for one moment that the singer was a white boy. Certainly, the
voice was something else, and hearing new records from America was always
exciting, but I doubt I would have given any of this much more thought that
night were it not for Inigo.

‘Play
it again! Flip it over. What’s the other side?’ Inigo demanded. ‘Can I keep it?’
His face was white as a sheet, as if he had been given a terrible shock.

‘Y’know,
I should’ve played ya the other side first,’ said Luke, grinning. ‘This is the
real
eye-opener.’

When I
tell people about the first time I heard Elvis singing ‘Mystery Train’, they
don’t believe me. For the rest of the country — unless, I suppose, Sam Phillips
had other friends from Memphis who had travelled to England at the end of
December, armed with records from his tiny label, which I sincerely doubt —
Elvis did not break through until the start of 1956. Yet there we were in the
hall at Magna, in the primitive hours of 1955, listening to the man who would
become known as the King. I wish I could say that I knew, from that moment,
that Elvis was going to change everything. I wish I could say that I had some
extraordinary sense of something new and important happening, but I just can’t.
I liked the songs, and I was intrigued by the sound of the white-boy singer,
but that night my judgement was blurry with champagne, and I felt sick with
violet creams and dancing. It wasn’t until after Luke and Loretta had left a
day later, after Inigo had drummed the songs into my brain with his constant
playing and replaying of the record, that it dawned on me that he was something
a bit different — yet for Charlotte and me, Johnnie was still the brightest
star in the firmament, irreplaceable, untouchable. Inigo was quicker than us,
like that. For him, the Messiah had arrived. It was almost as if he did not
know what to do with himself The revelation of Elvis and the New Sound was so
great to him, he would have happily swum across the Atlantic just to meet him.
From that night on, he became possessed.

Only’ half an hour after
Elvis made his debut in Wiltshire, England, Mama demanded that we take him off
the gramophone and play some jazz.

‘You
can’t dance to this white guy of yours,’ agreed Harry. ‘We want a bit of
something we can really move to.’ He clicked his fingers rapidly. a gesture
that would have made anyone else seem absurd.

‘If you
can’t move to the hillbilly cat, you can’t move to nuthin’,’ observed Luke, and
I thought how nice it would be to have him around all the time, just to be on
hand to make remarks like that in his addictive Southern drawl.

‘What
do you think of our boy Elvis, girls?’ asked Loretta. ‘He’s pretty sweet in the
flesh, I might tell you.

‘He
certainly
sounds
good,’ I said politely.

‘Don’t
ask them, they’re Johnnie Ray obsessed,’ said Inigo dismissively.

‘You
are?’ asked Luke. ‘You girls rather hear Mr Emotion than my man Elvis Presley?’

Charlotte
looked thoughtful. ‘Johnnie moves us,’ she said simply. ‘That’s why we like him
so much.’

‘Love
him,’ I corrected her automatically.

Luke
roared with laughter. ‘The Million Dollar Teardrop?’ he cried, wiping his eyes
with the mirth of it all. ‘Y’know, girls, ah’m not altogether sure that he’s
the kinda guy who’d love you two back, if y’know what I mean. Hee hee haa haa
hee!’

I didn’t
know what he meant,
really
I didn’t, but I smiled and looked as though I
did.

‘Hats
off to y’all,’ said Luke. ‘But I think you’d be on to a surer thing with young
Presley here. He’s got somethin’ the like of which ah’ve never seen before.’

‘It’s
the way he
moves,’
said Loretta.

‘You
wouldn’t expect it from a young guy like him. But when he sings, he moves like
he’s lost control of his whole self. Tell them, Loll.’

Loretta
gave us a wicked look. ‘We watched the girls watching him when he played the
Hayride. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, really something
extraordinary. He just ripped the place up.’

Inigo
hung on to every word.

‘He
sings so raw,’ said Luke. ‘Up-tempo songs, not all slush like your man Johnnie.
For what it’s worth, I’d keep watching.’

I had
my doubts. Can you believe that? I had my doubts.

While this conversation
had been going on, Harry had taken it upon himself to change the record and
suddenly the hall was full of Humphrey Lyttelton and jazz.

‘Feel
this!’ said Harry. He stood in the middle of the hall, arms lanky and loose by
his sides, cigarette hanging delicately between his fingers, smoke swirling up
around him like a genie. Spot-lit by the remaining candles on the chandelier,
easy in his suit and correspondent shoes, he looked very grown up all of a
sudden. I felt a million miles from him.

‘Won’t
you dance with me, Penelope?’ he asked. My eyes flickered towards Mama.

‘Go on,
then,’ she said rather roughly. ‘Surely those dance classes you took last year
taught you something, Penelope.’

‘Oh,
Harry, I’m sorry,’ I said, flushing scarlet. ‘I can’t dance to jazz,’ I added
lamely.

‘How
can you not dance to jazz?’ he asked me, half laughing. ‘You’re ridiculous.
All
girls under twenty are ridiculous.’

‘It’s
probably because Johnnie hates jazz,’ interrupted Inigo. ‘She has no interest
in anything that Mr Ray hasn’t deemed noteworthy.’

‘Come
here.’ Harry pulled me towards him and spun me round.

‘No!’ I
pulled away. horrified in front of Mama.

Harry
laughed. ‘Don’t be so silly.’

‘And a
happy new year to you too,’ I muttered, hating him again.

‘I
think she looks beautiful,’ said Mama tersely. I shot her a grateful smile.
Sometimes, and always at the times I least expected it, Mama really came out on
my side. I think it was because she took criticism of me as a personal insult
to her.

Harry
just laughed.

Charlotte
was talking to Loretta at great speed about American fiction. ‘I’m crazy for
Salinger,’ I heard her say.

I shook
my head, suddenly hot. ‘I think I might take a breath of air.’

‘Have
you read
Catcher in the Rye?’
demanded Charlotte. ‘I thought it was
blissful.’

I slipped out of the hall,
through the dining room, into the kitchen and out of the back door. It was a
chaotic night. Grey, shadowy clouds skidded over the cold, pale moon, and
although I could make out the stubborn form of the Plough, there seemed no
order to the rest of the firmament. The stars looked wild and unscrewed to me,
as if there was nothing there to stop them shooting towards the earth at any moment.

Instinct
and champagne drew me and my beautiful frock out onto the black velvet lawn and
through the door in the wall that led to the kitchen garden. I might add at
this point that I had consumed more champagne than I ever had done before,
which had the useful consequence of washing away fear in a sort of blissful
wave of carelessness. I’m not afraid of the dark! I thought, and shouted it out
loud, just in case there were any badgers or barn owls that might have been
interested.

‘Nineteen
fifty-five!’ I said. Then louder, ‘NINETEEN FIFTY-FIVE!’ I laughed. The year
ahead was a blank page, and surely all anyone could ever want was blank pages?
I turned round, feeling tiny. swaying and sinking my heels in mud, to face
Magna, imagining the centuries slipping back and back until the day the first
stone was laid in its creation. Nothing, not the dedication of Inigo Jones, nor
the years of hard work from those austere, painted faces that lined the walls
in the drawing room and the hall, made me anything other than the most
important person ever to have lived at Magna, the one who understood and loved
the house the most. I could almost see the ‘place breathing from where I stood,
and I closed my eyes and felt myself terribly. terribly modern. As I say. I was
also terribly. terribly drunk. I struck up a conversation with Johnnie.

‘Oh,
Johnnie,’ I sighed. ‘Will I ever see you sing again?’ I closed my eyes for an
answer. I imagined him standing next to me, talking into a microphone, a band
lined up behind him ready to strike up at any moment.

Come to
the Palladium! I heard him say. I’ll sing for you, I’ll cry for you, Penelope.
Can I call you Penny?

‘Oh, I’d
rather you’ didn’t, Johnnie. Nobody does.’

I felt
cross with myself for making him ask a silly question like that. I reached out
my hand. I wanted to touch him, to know that he knew me, that he understood me
the way I thought he would— ‘Penelope! Where on earth are you?’

It was
Mama. Johnnie and his orchestra vanished with a regretful smile and a wave, and
I watched Mama wrapping her coat round her and taking little steps in her
Christian Dior shoes down towards the kitchen garden. Fido followed her,
plunging ahead, his nose to the ground.

‘Where
are you, Penelope? For goodness’ sake, you’ll catch your death of cold.’

‘I’m
here., Mama.’

‘Oh!
Gracious, you frightened me! Who in heaven’s name were you talking to?’ she
demanded, eyes flashing torch-bright into the box hedge.

 ‘I was
talking to Johnnie.’

She
looked irritable, as well she might. Her sacred space for private contemplation
about Papa was not the spot for chatting away to pop stars.

‘Do
come inside. People will think you’re quite mad.’

We
walked back up to the kitchen door, and I found myself holding her hand.

‘Did
you like dancing with Harry?’ she asked me.

‘Not
really. He’s so rude to me, Mama. I’m sure he would much rather have danced
with you.’

Mama
answered me briskly. ‘You’ve had too much to drink, darling. It’s not
attractive. You’ll end up like your grandmother if you’re not careful.’

Oddly
enough, this remark was enough to sober me up completely.

Most people collapsed into
bed soon after that. Inigo wanted to carry on listening to Elvis, but Mama told
him that she would have to remove the gramophone from the house if he did not
give it a rest.

‘Well,
goodnight y’all,’ said Luke, his arm round Loretta. For some reason, the sight
of them both, making their way upstairs together, tired but happy. and ready to
start their return journey the next day. choked me unbearably. Magna needed the
rock-sure stability of people like Luke and Loretta. Without people like them,
the house swayed, unhinged.

Charlotte
led me into the library and shut the door quietly behind her. Kicking off her
red shoes, she flopped into the reading chair and started pulling grips out of
her hair at terrific speed. Rooms came alive when Charlotte was inside them,
and the library was no exception. Her vitality gave a curious glamour to the
rows of dust-covered first editions; her literacy and unquenchable thirst for
reading somehow justified the unashed cigarette swaying dangerously close to
the hopeless oil painting of
The Lake, Milton Magna, on Mid-Summer’s Eve
1890
by good old Great-Aunt Sarah.

‘Harry
seems happy tonight,’ she said, placing heavy emphasis on the word happy. ‘He
seems to have forgotten all about the American girl.’

‘Marina?’

‘Yes of
course Marina — who do you think I was talking about? Ava Gardner?’

I
giggled.

‘It won’t
last,’ sighed Charlotte. ‘He can only ever forget about her for short bursts of
time. Then it comes back again, worse than ever.’

‘How
tiresome it must be,’ I said, ‘being in love. I was always led to believe it
would be the most wonderful thing ever.’

‘Who on
earth told you that?’ said Charlotte in amazement. ‘I’ve never known it to be
anything other than torture.

‘Andrew?’
I asked softly.

She
twisted her hair around a finger, something that I noticed she tended to do
when she felt uncomfortable. Andrew and Charlotte remained something of a
mystery to me. I had tried to talk about him — to find out when Charlotte had
last seen him, how often she thought about him — but it was tricky. She kept
him to herself most of the time; he was a piece of her that I sensed I would
never be able to touch. She guarded her time with Andrew and what she said
about him seemed attentively planned, selected with care so that I knew enough,
but not enough at all. That night, it seemed that she couldn’t quite resist
talking about him.