The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (25 page)

‘Until
she opens that letterbox of a mouth.’

‘Did
you make enough money to justify the whole grisly experience?’ asked Charlotte.

‘Just
about. I was booked for another two lunch parties this week so it’s not all
bad.’ He looked tired suddenly.

‘So you’re
in it for something other than the thrill?’ I asked, rather surprised. ‘I
always imagined that the money was a secondary consideration.’

‘Money
is never a secondary consideration, Penelope,’ said Harry irritatedly. ‘Do you
really think I’d hang around girls like Sophia and Kate for my own amusement?
They’re enough to send anyone running for the hills.’

‘Why do
you do it then?’ I said.

‘Because
I love magic, I’m good at it and I can put up with all of it when I’m paid as
much as I was paid tonight.’ He pulled out a stack of crumpled pound notes from
the inside pocket of his jacket and tossed them onto the table. Charlotte gave
a low whistle.

‘Nice
work,’ she said. ‘I expect it’ll all be gone by tomorrow evening.’

‘It won’t,’
said Harry sharply. I had never seen him so agitated.

He
looked at me and sighed. ‘How’s the founder of the Johnnie Ray Fan Club
tonight?’ he asked.

‘Very
well thank you,’ I said firmly. ‘And if only I
were
the founder! We’ve
missed out on tickets to his Palladium shows. Mama threw my fan club letter
away before I read it,’ I went on, aware of the sourness in my voice. ‘We could
have had discount tickets. As it happens, we’re left with none at all.’

‘Shame.’
Harry yawned, picking up last week’s
Country Life.
I wanted to scream at
him.

‘I don’t
suppose we can expect you to understand a tragedy of this proportion,’ said
Charlotte irritatedly.

‘You’re
right, I don’t. If you’d missed out on tickets to see George Melly. or Humphrey
Lyttelton, yes, I could muster up something that resembled sympathy. But not
getting to see Johnnie Ray? I should consider it a narrow escape.

Charlotte
threw a cushion at him, which missed and knocked a little ornament of a rather
ugly milkmaid off Aunt Clare’s table and onto the floor where it broke. For
some reason, this seemed to annoy Harry very much.

‘For
God’s sake!’ he snapped, picking up the pieces. ‘You’re not thirteen any more,
Charlotte.’ He stared at the bits, trying to work out how it had smashed. ‘I
suppose I could try to fix this—’

‘Oh,
just wave your wand over it,’ suggested Charlotte airily.

Harry
glared at her. ‘When are you going to stop being so bloody thoughtless? It’s so
typical of you not to give a damn about anyone else’s things.’

Even I
was amazed at the vehemence of his tone. Charlotte recovered fast. ‘Well! Since
when have you cared about Aunt Clare’s china collection! I’ve heard you say
yourself that that milkmaid was a hideous piece of tat she should never have
bought. And as for thoughtless! Talk about the pot calling the kettle—’

‘Oh,
shut up. Just
shut up!’

Harry
put the broken milkmaid into his top hat and for a moment I thought he really
was going to magic it back together. Instead, he looked straight at me with
those ever-changing magic eyes.

‘You
look good in black,’ he said softly.

‘Goes
with the mood,’ I said, rattled.

He sauntered
off to bed, taking his top hat and wand with him. The next morning the milkmaid
was back on the table, smiling blithely. as good as new. Charlotte and I
examined her under the light and couldn’t see a single crack. You had to hand
it to Harry. He had style.

Chapter
11

MY
BEAUTIFUL YOUTH

When I was eighteen, I
spent a great deal of time absorbed in magazines. My favourites were
Vanity
Fair
(which Mama ordered and I read feverishly as soon as she put it down),
and
Woman and Beauty,
which was aimed exclusively at young housewives.
Even though housewives represented a section of society as alien to me as the
creatures in the outer-space comics that Inigo devoured, I was quite addicted
to reading about them. I kept a stack of magazines in my bedroom, and another
downstairs in the morning room for flicking through while waiting for Mama or
Inigo to appear, and their pages worked their magic on me more effectively than
even I was aware. By the time I had whizzed through ‘The ABC of Unusual
Holidays’ I felt desperate for a hill climbing trip to Austria. ‘Tartan,
Tartan, Everywhere!’ found me rummaging through the mothy depths of my
great-grandmother’s old trunk in search of a kilt I could fashion into ‘this
season’s look’. I was quite overcome (and more than a little bit ashamed) of my
need to spend money. When, oh when would I be ‘Free as Air in my Loveliest
Clothes’?

In between the boredom of
my studies, I did everything I could to make money. and tried to keep a strict
policy of giving fifty per cent of all that I earned to Mama, and therefore to
Magna. Once the excitement of Christmas and New Year was over, I went back to
working for Christopher once a week in his shop in Bath. The shop was placed
between New Sounds, the best record shop in Bath, and Coffee On The Hill, the
best café, which meant that I frequently ended up out of pocket before I had
even left the town centre, and very little found its way back to Magna. Inigo,
who was away at school much of the time, was even worse than me. He sold comics,
chocolates and even cigarettes to his fellow pupils on the black market. I
confronted him about it one weekend.

‘Don’t
you think you should stop spending so much money on yourself and give something
to Mama?’ I asked, drowning in guilt myself as I had just spent five shillings
on a slap-up tea with a school friend in the café after my Tuesday shift.

‘I don’t
want to give Mama my dirty cash,’ said Inigo gravely. ‘It’s black money.
Penelope; everything I do at school is illegal. It wouldn’t be right to pour it
into Magna. It would be like cursing the place.’

‘Whereas
spending it on yourself is quite acceptable.’

‘I’ve
already sold my soul to the devil for the sake of rock ‘n’ roll.’

‘Oh,
you’ve got an answer for everything,’ I said crossly.

One
thing that I did start to do at this time was writing stories and sending them
off to the magazines I so adored. It was the one thing in my life that I did
without considering payment; all I wanted was the thrill of seeing my name in
print. I ransacked my imagination for romantic tales of good-looking heroes and
beautiful women and frequently stayed up late writing into the night, eating
Cadbury’s Chocolate Sandwich biscuits (which like all biscuits tasted
especially good after midnight), with Marina the guinea pig snuggled into the
crook of my arm. I had some letters back from friendly enough editors, all
saying that they liked my style, but that I was not quite right for their
magazine, and perhaps I could send them something when my writing had matured?
At the time, I felt rather stung by this but a few months later when I wrote a
story that came right from my heart onto the page, I realised how right they
had been. But I am going too far ahead.

I told myself that I was
making a difference to Magna — perhaps the money I earned would go towards Mary’s
salary, or a new spade for Johns, or new candles for the dining room? It was a
gesture that made me feel better, but it scarcely touched the surface of the
problems we faced. I was horribly aware of the yawning chasm of debt that we
were sinking into, and I felt helpless. Since the night of our Duck Supper
before Christmas, Mama had not mentioned money. The odd thing about Mama was
that she liked to think of herself as a doomy sort of person, but there was a
natural optimism in her that refused to be defeated, however hard she squashed
it down, and I know that she never lost faith completely. She scoured the
cellars for buried treasure and had the Watteau outside my bedroom and the few
remaining paintings in the library valued by a dealer in London; perhaps Aunt
Sarah’s pesky oil of the lake was worth millions after all? No, said the
dealer, no more than a couple of hundred pounds, and he winced when he heard
that Mama had let a Stubbs go for a fifth of its value three years after the
end of the war. In the back of her mind, Mama clung fast to the hope that Inigo
would find a rich girl to marry. She had more or less given up on me. The fate
of other big houses did not augur well. My childhood rang out with the names of
great, lost houses. Broxmore, Draycott, Erlestoke and Roundway — Wiltshire
houses all — each reduced to rubble through tax or fire or death. Houses like
ours were a rare breed, but not quite rare enough. Each loss struck Magna like
a blow upon a bruise.

When I thought of it I
felt dizzy with worry, and the fastest way to forget was to go shopping. I
craved new shampoos and lipstick (Gala of London did the most delicious
make-up), cigarettes (I didn’t really like smoking but as
things
in
their bright, squashy packets, cigarettes were the last word in essential
style), coffee and the cinema. After rationing, this new life was intoxicating,
and there to be revelled in before it was taken away again.

Of course, all this time I
was thinking about Johnnie and the fact that he was going to be coming to
England in April, and how on earth Charlotte and I were going to get tickets to
his sold-out shows. Every time I thought about the mere fact of his being in
England, my knees felt weak; once, when I imagined being in the same
room
as
him, I actually had to sit down and have a glass of water. I played his records
as often as I dared at home — it was not Mama who objected so much as Inigo,
who had moved on to Elvis Presley and saw little point in listening to Johnnie
Ray any more. Despite the fact that I was still living at home (and of course
we had no money to make living at home any easier than it had been in the
previous years), there was a sense of something uprising, a feeling gathering
momentum that had started in America and was making its way to our shores. I
was a teenager, and even if this was nothing more than a label for a section of
the population that had always been there, it somehow felt as if it meant more
now than it had done the year before.

Before I met Charlotte, I
had done nothing but stare out of windows. She was unafraid of most things and
most people; she thought nothing of bunking a train fare, but she would make
sure that she did so with a ham sandwich and chocolate éclair from Fortnum’s
about her person. If ever she was caught, she would turn out her pockets to
reveal the most extravagant packed lunch imaginable in the smartest of bags and
the ticket collector always let her off I recognised pieces of myself in her
and she encouraged the ‘rebel in me to emerge. Certainly. I would be happy to
sneak into the cinema after the film had started. But in those shoes? Never!

London intoxicated us
both, and in the first weeks of 1955, whenever we could, Charlotte and I would
take a trip into the West End where we would stare at beautiful hats in Swan
and Edgar and talk about what we would sell if we had our own shop. Charlotte
was drawn like a magpie to bright colours and sparkly window displays, and her
eye was second to none.

‘I
wouldn’t have dressed that mannequin in that drear trench coat.

‘Oh, I
rather like it.’

‘Typical
you. Penelope, you must try to develop better taste.’

‘My
taste is impeccable, thank you very much!’

‘You’re
too trad by far.’

‘Just
because I like to look vaguely respectable—’

‘Don’t
use that word in my presence.

I put
on my worshipping voice. ‘Oh, Charlotte, you’re so
weird,
you’re so
different…
wish I was like you!’

In
response to this, she pulled the ribbon out of my hair and ran off down Oxford
Street. She was good at being teased, and the better we knew each other, the
more we played up to our differences. My conscientious following of all the
latest trends complemented her refusal to conform, and we battered the
seriousness out of each other. She also had a habit of nudging me violently
when nice-looking boys walked past us. They were confused by Charlotte, with
her eccentric clothes and her height and her confidence. She did not radiate
the faint-worthy. womanly atmosphere of Mama, rather she threw something
completely different at them — sex, I suppose — and they weren’t used to
getting that from someone with such class.