The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (32 page)

‘It
hasn’t a very happy ending,’ I said. ‘Her art mistress went off to India to
study out there and married some important ambassador or other. Poor Aunt Sarah
never quite recovered from the shock of her departure. She married a man called
Sir John Holland who knew all about her past and refused to let her paint. She
was broken after that, having lost her only joy in life. In the end, her bad
leg grew worse and worse. She had terrible arthritis and died rather young.

‘Tragic,’
said Harry with feeling. ‘You must hang on to her painting and never mock her
interpretation of the lake again.’

‘I
always thought she sounded rather nice,” I said, ‘although I never knew her.
She was too tall, like me, and freckled and blonde.’

‘And
not very good at painting,’ said Harry lightly. ‘and funny? And oddly
beautiful?’

I said
nothing but listened to us both breathing. Outside, the hail rained against the
window and the clouds had turned black again and I shivered — half with cold,
half with something else. Then that precious, unnamed thing that had grown
heavier and heavier around us was broken when one of the birds landed on my
chest and I shrieked with shock. Harry sat up and laughed.

‘I
think she wants the last of the bread,’ he said.

The
mood changed after that and oddly enough,’ so did the weather. The storm
passed,’ the rain stopped and a blast of late afternoon sunlight caught us by
surprise. Johnnie sang on, and Harry drank a glass of brandy and imitated
Johnnie singing, which was really very funny. and we argued a bit about jazz.
Then he showed me three or four new tricks and tried to teach me a simple
sleight-of-hand thingy with the ace of hearts that I couldn’t quite pull off We
didn’t venture back downstairs until it was nearly dark and the doves were
starting to look as though a night up in the eaves of the Long Gallery would be
rather nice. Fido started to pace a bit and I realised he should have been fed
an hour ago.

‘I
should really be going,’ said Harry.

‘Of
course,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you won’t stay for supper?’

‘Oh,
no. I told Loopy I’d be with him by seven.

‘It won’t
take you long to get to Ashton St Giles,’ I said, ‘as long as there aren’t too
many branches across the roads.’

‘Should
I mention you to Isobel?’ asked Harry. I had to drag my mind into gear to think
who he was talking about.

‘Oh no,’
I said in horror. ‘She didn’t like me one bit. We had to be partners in dance
class and I was always the man and used to stand on her pretty little toes.

‘I wish
I’d gone to Sherborne Girls,’ said Harry wistfully. ‘Come on,’ let’s get the
birds settled before you go,’ I said. Half an hour and several white feathers
later, we said goodbye and Harry climbed into his car. He wound down the
window.

‘I loved
this afternoon,’ he said suddenly. ‘and are you in any way over your hatred of
the Long Gallery?’

I
grinned. ‘Oh, I think so.’ I paused. ‘Thanks to you and your ridiculous magic.’

‘See
you at the Ritz then.’

‘Oh
help, yes. At the Ritz.’

It wasn’t until after Mama
had returned from Bath, soaked through but delighted because she had found a
beautiful set of (overpriced) candlesticks for the dining-room table, that I
realised Harry and I had not discussed Marina once.

Chapter
14

SOMEBODY
STOLE HIS GAL

The first week in March
began with a fit of squally showers and sudden bursts of blinding sunshine, as
the last dregs of the cold winter drifted away for another year. I left the
window in my bedroom open during the day. and found the first disorientated
honey bee of 1955 lurching around my bedside table like a drunk. I lay about
the house in my denims, pretending to write essays while flicking through the
new magazines and longing for money to spend on clothes. I listened to Johnnie
and thought about Harry more than I ever imagined I would, and it disturbed me.
Sometimes he was impossible to picture in my mind; other times his face would
come- to me clearly and I would think, with great relief, oh, it’s all right! I
don’t find him attractive after all! He wasn’t good looking like Rocky, yet I
couldn’t push aside our night on deck in the Long Gallery. I found myself
wondering whether he had thought about it since, or whether Marina had occupied
his every waking consideration. I spent hours in front of the mirror trying on
outfits for the dinner at the Ritz, with disastrous results. I had neither
Charlotte’s creative flair nor Mama’s penchant for immaculate tailoring, and
whatever I wore looked dull rather than demure. For all that I didn’t want to
attend the dinner, there was no way that I wanted to look half-baked, though I
wasn’t sure exactly who I was trying to impress. I telephoned Charlotte several
times, but always seemed to catch her when she had just finished a particularly
gruelling session with Aunt Clare, and as a member of that elite proportion of
the population who never needed to question whether they looked right as long
as they looked arresting, Charlotte had little time for my dilemmas.

‘Just
go with what you feel comfortable in, darling,’ she kept saying.

‘That’s
just the problem. I don’t feel comfortable in anything.’

‘Don’t
wear anything then. Must dash, ginger scones.

Still, there was no place
more enchanting than Magna in the spring, and Mama and I were the best of
friends on the mornings that we awoke early. linked arms and walked from the
kitchen garden to the pond and back, our lungs full of the whispered sweetness
of viburnum flowers, hearts brightened by the huge swaths of crocuses bobbing
regally beside the overgrown paths that threaded round the outskirts of the
back lawn. We felt the delicate warmth of the sun on our faces and realised how
much we had missed it, and I breathed in the scent of the box hedge that marked
our route round the fruit cages during the war and reminded me of our days in
the Dower House when, in the height of summer, we helped the ladies of the WI
pick raspberries and blackcurrants. I thought about New Year’s Eve and it
seemed an age ago to me already.

‘The
garden looks wonderful, Mama,” I would always say when we arrived back at the
house.

‘It’s
chaos, darling.’

‘I like
chaos.’

On the night before the
Ritz dinner, one more remarkable thing happened to me. In fact, it was
something so remarkable, it was all I could do to contain my astonishment and
delight, and not go shouting with glee all over the house. I plodded upstairs
to my bedroom a little after eleven, closed my curtains and flopped down on my
bed, worrying, as ever, about what to wear the next day. Now that the hour was
drawing near,’ I was considering pulling out of the whole thing, even if it
meant sacrificing Johnnie. And anyway. I thought, surely Harry would be kind
enough to give me the tickets even if I ducked out of my role? I dismissed this
thought almost as soon as it entered my head. Harry was not the sort of man who
would take kindly to being messed about. There was time for one last,’
sorrowful glance at my drear clothes before the dawn broke. I stood up, then
stopped dead as something caught my eye through a crack in the wardrobe door. I
don’t want to sound too C. S. Lewis about what happened next, but suffice to
say that I padded across the room and pulled open the wardrobe door and stuck
my hand in. What I encountered was not Narnia, but something even more
enchanted. It was a pink box, ribboned in black and labelled ‘Penelope’, which
eliminated my two seconds of concern that this was simply Mama racked with
guilt and stuffing the packaging from her latest purchases out of her own line
of vision. I dragged it out with a small cry of delight, my heart thumping in
my chest, and pulled off the ribbon and lifted the lid. Inside was a lot of
expensive-smelling pink and white tissue, and wrapped up within the tissue was
something with a label that sent my heart racing. Selfridges. Like a child
taking a much longed for turn at the lucky dip, I stuck my hand in and pulled
out a handful of soft black material with the most glorious sheen of glitter.
It was a dress, a perfect, adorable, dream dress, the like of which I could
never have imagined yet now that I was holding it, could not imagine living
without. I scrambled to my feet again and flung off my nightie.

‘Oh!’ I
whimpered, for I couldn’t help it, and if anything like this has ever happened
to you, then you will know exactly how I felt. The dress might have been made
to measure; it was demure all right, but it was the first time that I had ever
worn anything that made me feel so much like a woman. The first thing I thought
when I looked at myself in the mirror was that I looked capable of extremely
sophisticated conversation, and it shocked me, but above all else, it excited
me. I found another box, smaller this time but equally delicious, containing a
glorious pair of Dior heels, the sort that Mama would die for and I would
surely never be able to walk in. In with the heels was a packet of
super-elegant stockings, and almost hidden away under the last bit of tissue
paper was a little evening bag containing a stick of Yardley lipstick in an
elegant red colour called Rose-bud. Who had done this? Mama? It simply wasn’t
her style, and she would never have encouraged a dress like this anyway. Harry?
It had to be, yet how had he got into my room? How had
anyone
got into
my room? I remembered, with a shiver, that I had kept my door locked all day for
fear that Mama would send Fido up to root out Marina the rodent. I had kept the
key in the pocket of my trousers. I rummaged frantically for some sign — some
indication of how he had performed this most sensational of tricks. Of course,
what I found told me nothing, except that as a magician Harry was getting
better and better. A card was attached to the underside of the box, and inside
the card was a simple note written in turquoise ink.

From
your Fairy Godmother.

Whoever
on earth she was, I thought, she had terrific taste. I packed the clothes,
shoes, stockings and lipstick carefully into my wardrobe again, and shoved the
boxes under my bed, vowing to dispose of them before Mama,’ Mary or anyone else
found them. The next morning, after a surprisingly sound night’s sleep, I
peered under the bed, wondering if it had all been a dream. Instead, I found
Marina the rodent asleep in the shoe box, like an ornament amongst the pink
tissue paper. Like her namesake, she knew which side her bread was buttered, I
thought.

If
Harry didn’t win his great love back, at least the guinea pig appreciated the
way he did things.

I had awoken praying for
good weather because although my fairy godmother had been considerate enough to
provide me with a dress to die for and sensational heels, she had not
considered what I should cover myself with should the conditions from cab to
Ritz prove inclement. Mama was fond of telling me that it was unladylike to
arrive anywhere without a coat, whatever the time of year, but nothing I owned
looked right over my new outfit. In the end, I settled for a thick coat in
Black Watch tartan that Mama had borrowed off Loretta one Christmas and never
returned. It looked terrifyingly wintery and austere but at least it had a
Harrods label and a bit of oomph. I left Magna with a do-or-die feeling in the
pit of my stomach and spent the train journey nearly jumping out of my skin in
case Rocky happened to be on board again, which of course he wasn’t. Once in
London, I jumped into a taxi and fairly flew along the Bayswater Road and down
Kensington Church Street and found myself outside Aunt Clare’s front door well
before six o’clock. Charlotte answered the door. Her hair was still in rollers,
but she could have turned up at the Ritz without taking them out and still
looked like the most stylish girl in the room. She wore a red dress with silver
shoes that made her even taller than me. Charlotte had no problem with heels
and towering over boys. In fact, I think she rather enjoyed it.

‘Thank
heavens you’re here. Harry’s been going spare all afternoon, convinced you were
going to get cold feet,’ she said,’ bundling me into the house.

‘I have
got cold feet,’ I said. ‘The train was freezing.’