The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (23 page)

‘He’s
just so
nice,’
she admitted.

I
laughed. I couldn’t help it. ‘Of all the things you could have said about him!’
I said. ‘I never would have expected you to say he was
nice.

‘It’s
hard to find nice boys,’ said Charlotte sadly. ‘I miss him so much sometimes.
It hits me completely out of the blue. Pathetic, really. I feel myself
desperate for a dose of him.’ She frowned. ‘Now, where did I put my glass of
wine?’ she added quickly. And that was it. And as it happened, she had kicked
her wine over on to the rug at her feet, but as it was impossible to tell what
colour the rug was supposed to be in the first place, I didn’t suppose it
mattered much. We lounged around talking until five in the morning. I had never
spent so long in that room in the entire eighteen years that I had lived at
Magna. By the time we crawled up the stairs to bed, I felt quite different
about the library. Charlotte pulled books off the shelves and read me chunks
from her favourite authors. Not only was it the first night I heard Elvis, but
it was the first night I heard Coleridge. In turn, Charlotte asked me to tell
her the stories behind the watchful faces of my ancestors. When all the faces
seemed to jumble into one and I could not remember who they were or what had
made them great or terrible, I made it up. I had the feeling that Charlotte
didn’t really care what was true and what wasn’t. What mattered to her was a
good story.

The next morning, an hour
before Charlotte and Harry were due to take the train back to London, I knocked
on the door of the Wellington room and creaked open the door, and found Harry
muttering to himself with an outsized, upturned top hat in his hands. He looked
up when he saw me.

‘Quick!’
he whispered. ‘Stick your hand in!’ ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Into
the hat!’ he hissed impatiently. ‘Close your eyes!’

Obediently,
I closed my eyes, stuck my hand quickly into the hat and felt something soft. I
gave a bit of a scream, which I think Harry must have expected, because when I
opened my eyes, he was grinning and looking smug.

‘Take a
look,’ he said. I peered cautiously into the hat and gasped when I saw the
tiniest of rodents no longer than my hand. It was entirely white, except for a
dusting of charcoal over the nose.

‘Oh,
Harry!’ I gasped. ‘It’s
precious!
It’s a hamster!’

‘It’s a
guinea pig,’ he corrected me. ‘But how did you get— ‘Don’t ask silly questions
that you know I will never answer, he said quickly. ‘I thought I’d give her to
you.’ He blew a lock of hair out of his brown eye. ‘To say thank you for having
me,’ he added a little heavily.

‘But—’

‘Rabbits
are somewhat passé,’ said Harry quickly. ‘but guinea pigs strike me as rather
amiable creatures. You can keep this one inside if you want. It seems a bit
cruel to shove it into a cage outdoors when it’s used to the interior of a
luxurious hat like this.’

‘But
Harry, this is a living animal, not a loaf of bread,’ I said, casting my mind
back to the legend of Julian. ‘What shall I do with her?’

‘You’re
not supposed to do anything with her,’ said Harry.

‘Just
make sure she has water and carrots and a bit of attention. ‘He lifted the
creature out of the hat. ‘She has a look of Marina about her. In fact, I think
she should be called Marina, don’t you?’

I
laughed. ‘Well, I suppose I should thank you,’ I said. ‘No one’s ever given me
a guinea pig before.’

‘I
should hope not,’ said Harry.

Luke and Loretta left half
an hour after Charlotte and Harry. As usual, saying goodbye to guests at Magna
made me feel more sad than saying goodbye to people anywhere else in the world.
It was a grey. wet afternoon with the sort of efficient, blustery wind that
encouraged the jackdaws to clack and shriek around the chapel like fighter
pilots — even Banjo had stirred himself for a determined, hightailed gallop
around the field. I hovered in the shelter of the front door with no shoes on,
watching Luke load suitcases into the car. Mama fussed behind him,’ not really
helping but wanting to leave him with the best impression she could. In the
back of my mind, I knew that it had always irked her that Luke had only ever
had eyes for her older sister, though it would have horrified her if it had
been any other way.

‘Look
after your mother,’ whispered Loretta, scrunching over the gravel and kissing
me on the cheek. ‘Don’t fall in love and leave this place without making sure
she’s a little happier.’

‘I have
no intention of doing either of those two things,’ I said indignantly. Loretta
laughed.

‘Harry
was right,’ she said, ‘you are so utterly English sometimes. Don’t change,
will you?’

The car rounded out of the
drive, and we waved until they were out of sight, laughing when Luke honked the
horn and scattered the rabbits into the hedge. The sight of them reminded me of
Marina the guinea pig, and I shot upstairs to my room where Harry had installed
her in a cardboard box lined with last week’s
Telegraph.
(Ironically.
the gossip pages featured a big piece about the Hamilton party, and I had to
lift Marina the rodent off a photograph of Marina the human being to read it.
There was a good deal of guff about the daughter of an MP I’d never heard of
vanishing with the piano player in the jazz band, which foxed me as I
remembered the aforesaid musician being about ninety and toothless, but what
did I know?) When I finally finished reading, I had a stiff neck and Marina the
rodent had scuttled under my dressing table. It took me twenty minutes to get
her out again. Perhaps when the weather improved I could set her free in the
garden, I thought hopefully. Where on earth had she come from? Surely she hadn’t
just appeared out of Harry’s hat? After he and Charlotte left, the house seemed
deathly quiet. Even the hiss and crackle of Radio Luxembourg fading in and out
on Inigo’s wireless could not dent the void of silence left by their departure.
That night, I shoved a carrot into Marina’s box, pulled on a pair of thick
socks and climbed into bed. Through the grey and pink curtains in my bedroom (I
don’t think they had been washed since before the war and they would probably
disintegrate on contact with soapy water anyway), I sensed a bright moon. I
thought about Harry and Johnnie, about the flickering lights and the guinea
pig, and about Luke and Loretta and Magna. I thought about 1955 and how I would
be feeling at the end of the year. I thought about Mama and tried to imagine
how it would have been had Papa not been killed.

Chapter
10

FIVE O’CLOCK
AND LATER

A week later, Charlotte
and I were sitting on a bench in Hyde Park finishing cheese rolls. My lectures
had finished early. and the afternoon stretched out before us, cold and blue in
the winter sunlight. I had all but abandoned the friends I had made on my course,
and I was starting to realise why Charlotte preferred loafing around with me to
the girls that she had grown up with. We bumped into them very regularly —
beautiful, perfumed girls with white smiles flashing — and afterwards Charlotte
would always say how depressed they made her, how their engagement rings had
made them shadows of what they were in the sixth form common room. Only last
week she had pointed out the girl who had been head of the school in the year
above her.

‘There
goes Delilah Goring,’ she said sadly. as a girl in a fox fur stole and a cream
hat crossed the road on the arm of a tall, red-headed man. ‘Or rather, what was
Delilah Goring.’

That afternoon in the
park, Charlotte was quieter than usual, and I knew her well enough by now to
understand the difference between Charlotte Dreaming and Charlotte Speculative.

‘Anything
wrong?’ I asked. Charlotte threw her crust to a passing pigeon.

‘Why
should there be?’ she demanded.

I said
no more. I knew that the best way to get Charlotte to talk was to feign lack of
interest. Sure enough, she pulled something out of her pocket and handed it to
me.

‘Read
it,’ she instructed. ‘It arrived this morning.’

The
handwriting was terrible, the spelling atrocious, but the turn of phrase
Byronic.
I have to see you,
it ended (and
have
was underlined).
If
we met one more time then I think I could get over you and lern to forget you
and whot hapened betwene us. I will wait for you outside the caff on T. Court
Road on Friday at 5p.m. Yours for allways faithfuly, Andy.

‘Funny
thing is,’ said Charlotte, ‘I don’t want him to learn to forget me.’

‘Gosh,
he’ll be there in an hour,’ I said, checking my watch.

‘I
know.’ Charlotte bit her lip. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘Will you come too?’

‘Oh,
Charlotte, I don’t think I’m invited.’

‘I’m
inviting you. You can make sure that I leave after half an hour. If I go alone…’
She trailed off.

‘Of
course I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I’m
longing
to meet A the T.’

So we tripped along
Tottenham Court Road until we got to the caff. Mania would have
died.
I
was nervous, because it was getting dark, we were somewhere way off my usual
track and Charlotte’s demeanour had changed completely.

‘We’ll
just wait here,’ she said. ‘He’s always a few minutes late. It preserves his
dignity.’ It wasn’t especially cold, but her teeth were chattering. ‘Here he
is,’ she muttered. ‘Oh help.’

Andrew
appeared very suddenly. a cigarette between his teeth, his hands in the pockets
of his jacket. He had beautiful hair —black, thick and shiny and quiffed in a
perfect DA, its glossy perfection emphasising the chiselled frailty of his
face. He wasn’t especially good-looking, but he was fearfully attractive and,
much to my satisfaction, he disproved Mama’s theories about all Teds having bad
skin: his face was as white as porcelain and utterly blemish free. He flicked
wary, grey-green eyes at Charlotte. She was taller than him, but so intense
were her nerves that she looked small and uncharacteristically shy.

‘You
all right?’ he said.

‘Fine.
This is my friend Penelope.’

Andrew
nodded at me.

‘Hello,’
I said.

‘Tea?’
said Andrew lightly.

Charlotte
shook her head briefly. ‘I’d like a cigarette and something stronger than tea,’
she said. Andrew grinned.

‘I hear
Babycham’s all the rage with the ladies these days.’ He pushed open the door of
the caff.

A
number of Teds were sitting inside, smoking and laughing. One of them nodded at
Andrew when we walked in; a couple of them stared at Charlotte and me.

‘Ignore
‘em,’ advised Andrew.

The air
was heavy with smoke, and the tables were greasy. Someone put a record on — it
was a dance hall song that I hadn’t heard before.

‘H-how
have you been, Andrew?’ asked Charlotte, her legs jittering under the table. ‘Everything
all right at home?’

Andrew
lit a cigarette and passed it to her. ‘What do you think?’

‘Your
father?’

‘Still
drinking. Still shouting. He stamped on two of my new records last week for no
reason at all. Broke my arm last month when I tried to stop him hitting Sam.’

I
gasped in horror. Andrew gave me a mocking smile. ‘Bastard. It was the new Bill
Haley and his Comets disc. Just got hold of it, too,’ he added resentfully. His
eyes lit up for a moment. ‘You should hear it, Charlie.’

Charlotte
kicked me under the table, which I presumed meant I was to ignore the nickname.
She started to shred her napkin. ‘And work?’ she asked him. ‘Still working
hard?’

‘Sacked
last week. Got into a fight.’

‘Oh,
Andrew,’ wailed Charlotte.

‘Wasn’t
my fault,’ he said moodily. ‘Bloody nothin’s ever my fault. I’m just good at
takin’ the blame.’

‘Yes,’
agreed Charlotte. ‘You’re right there.’

Andrew
leaned forward and took her hand in his. At first Charlotte looked as though
she might pull away. but she couldn’t.