The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (43 page)

‘Who?’
demanded Harry.

‘Oh,
just Rocky Dakota,’ I said breezily. I could hear Harry’s sharp intake of
breath.

‘What?’

‘Rocky
came down here to get Marina so you don’t need to bother. She’s back in London
so I expect she’ll come knocking on your door any moment now.

‘Why
the hell does he need to go sticking his nose into other people’s business,’
snarled Harry. ‘Why didn’t you tell him that I would be down to get Marina?’

‘Because
I didn’t know that for certain!’ I snapped back. ‘You told me to let her sweat
for a while. When were you planning on coming to get her, anyway? Next week?
Next month?’

‘I was
going to take the train to Westbury this afternoon.’

‘Well,
as I say. no need. Rocky swept her off in his Chevrolet.’ I hoped Harry couldn’t
hear my jealousy.

‘No
doubt you wished it was
you
in the bloody car with him.’

‘That’s
neither here nor there,’ I said, unable to issue a denial. ‘Marina was drunk
and mad, and she hates me.

‘She
doesn’t hate you,’ said Harry. ‘She only
thinks
she does.’

‘What’s
that supposed to mean?’ I demanded, but I thought about Rocky and how he had
said exactly the same thing about Marina’s love for Harry. How I hated talking
to Harry on the. telephone! I don’t think we had ever managed a civilised
conversation in all the time we had known one another.

‘Do you
still want her to hurt a bit?’ I asked him.

He
sighed. ‘Of course not. I’m not
that
much of a bastard, Penelope. It’s
been pretty hellish trying to pretend that I don’t want her, I can tell you. I’ve
been terrified she’ll move on again. Perhaps she already has,’ he added
ominously.

There
was a short silence, then, on cue, I heard a distant, persistent ringing noise.
‘The doorbell,’ said Harry needlessly.

‘Off
you go then. That’ll be her, won’t it?’

‘I
should think so. Nobody else would be crazy enough to leave their bed in this
weather.’

‘Goodbye,
then,’ I said stiffly.

‘Goodbye.’

There
was a pause while both of us waited for the other to put the receiver down.

‘Before
you go,’ said Harry quickly. ‘I just wanted to say thank you. You know, for
everything really. I can’t deny that this whole thing has rattled rather out of
control. You’ve been pretty marvellous, Penelope Wallace, actress
extraordinaire.’

‘I’ve
got my Johnnie Ray tickets,’ I said, embarrassed. Praise from Harry was not
something I was very used to.

‘Front
row,’ he said.

‘Front
row,’ I echoed.

‘Not
long to go, now,’ said Harry.

His
words stuck in my mind long after I had replaced the telephone. It was how I
had always felt but had never really believed until then.
Not long to go.
Until
something, anything,.
everything
happened to me.

Later that night, Mama
arrived home and Inigo was driven back to school.

‘Please,
darling, make it through to the end of term, at least,’ said Mama, kissing him
goodbye. ‘No more Radio Luxembourg,’ she added sternly. There was not much
grumbling from Inigo. In fact, he even managed a cheerful wave from the car
window as Johns lurched off down the drive and I realised that meeting Rocky
had made him impervious to the outside world. The short time he had spent
talking to him had replaced his restlessness with a steely calm and a wilful
determination. Mama seemed unsettled by his lack of resistance.

‘Do you
think he’s feeling quite normal?’ she asked me.

‘I
shouldn’t think so, Mama. When is Inigo ever normal?’

‘I
trust he’s getting over this silly pop music bug.’

She
didn’t need me to respond to this. She knew there wasn’t a hope.

I spent the rest of the
afternoon weeding the fruit cage. Mama stood about watching me. (She did a
great deal of watching in the garden.) I didn’t mention Rocky and Marina’s
visit to Mama because I knew she would have been horrified by the idea of not
one but
two
Americans in the house. There was a part of me that hated
keeping anything from Mama — I would nearly always prefer her to know
everything rather than rattle on in ignorance — but my feelings for Rocky
outweighed my honesty. I didn’t want her to poison my mind with her prejudice,
and I use that word in the truest sense. She was afraid of America and Americans.
They represented change, and the modern world, and Inigo leaving us. If that
wasn’t a good enough reason to hate the place and the people, then what was? As
I weeded I kept half an eye on Mama, trying to guess what was going through her
mind. I wondered if she trusted me. I wondered sometimes how much she actually
liked
me at all. In the past few months, I had felt more and more distant from
her, less and less able to understand her. There were only seventeen years
between us. When I was growing up, it had felt like only seven. It felt like
seventy now. I reached for a trowel and began digging away at the border round
the kitchen garden.

‘Careful!’
ordered Mama. ‘There’s no need to hack away, Penelope. The garden is a living
thing, you know.’

She
liked saying this. When she stood up to straighten her back a few minutes
later, some of her gypsy-black hair had broken free from the headscarf she
always wore when she stepped into the- garden. Her cheeks were flushed pink
from the energetic March breeze and there was a smudge of earth on the end of
her nose. She could have been photographed right there and then for the front
cover of
Country Life
and she would have had every bachelor in England
swooning at the newspaper stands.

‘You’re
so lucky, Mama,’ I said suddenly. ‘You never get watery eyes and a red nose in
the cold.’

She
laughed.

‘It’s
true,’ I protested. ‘You suit the cold.’

‘Oh,
Penelope,’ she said, shaking her head.

We
stood together not saying anything for a short while and all the time the wind
roared around us and the daffodils blew and skidded about like drunk dancers at
a Dorset House party.

‘I’ve
been thinking …’ began Mama.

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, I
don’t know,’ Mama said restlessly. She pulled off her gloves and knotted her
fingers together, looking worried. Framed against racing grey clouds with the
dizzying swoop of the back lawn and the pond behind her, Mama looked like a
beautiful Agatha Christie heroine about to break down and confess that yes, she
did it, she killed the vicar.

‘What
is it, Mama?’

‘Sometimes
I feel so small, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Especially at Magna. As if the house is
too big for us, as if it’s swamping us. I have these odd nightmares, you know.
I dream that the walls of the house just get wider and wider, until all of us
are quite lost. I look for the front door, but it’s grown so tall, I can’t
reach to let myself out.’ She had to talk quite loudly as the wind was so
strong, which seemed fitting with what she was saying. She closed her eyes.

‘Funny,’
I said. ‘With me, it’s quite the opposite. I dream that Magna closes in on us,
lower and lower. Inigo and I have to run and hide under our beds because the
ceilings are falling down on our heads.’

‘Where
am I when this is going on?’ demanded Mama.

‘Oh,
you’re with us, too,’ I said, but I lied, because oddly, Mama was never in my
dreams about Magna.

Mama
took out her powder compact and cried out in horror. ‘What a sight!’ she
exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me I had a great splodge on my nose, Penelope?’

‘I
rather liked it,’ I admitted.

Mama
dug around for her handkerchief to wipe the splodge off her face, but a sudden
gust of wind took it out of her hands and off across the lawn. I lumbered after
it, hearing the thud, thud, squelch of my wellingtons on the grass. On and on
went the hanky, cheerful and light as a child’s balloon. Every time I nearly
had it, it took off again. It was heading towards the pond.

‘Hurry!’
yelled Mama, mildly hysterical. ‘That was one of the embroidered set of five
Archie gave to me on my wedding day!’

But I
was too late. A strong surge of wind sent the small square of lace straight
into the pond. I waded in after it but it floated off, out of reach. I looked
around for a large stick but by the time I had found one it was too late and
the hanky was irretrievably floating towards the centre of the lake.

Mama
looked distressed. ‘Can’t we do something?’

‘With
any luck it will float into the reeds and get stuck somewhere we can reach it.’

‘Oh,
what does it matter?’ asked Mama bleakly, and on cue, the heavens opened.

The
sudden burst of energy had inspired me. ‘Race you back to the house, Mama.’

‘Oh,
don’t be silly. Penelope.’

But
once I started to run, she couldn’t resist the challenge — it was the
competitive child in her that she had tried her hardest to squash but never
quite succeeded in destroying entirely. We ran from the pond to the back door —
which was quite a distance, I might add — drenched within seconds as the rain
fell harder and harder. Mama won because I slipped over at the last moment.

‘And I’ve
got shorter legs than you!’ she cried triumphantly. whipping off her sodden
headscarf She was quite cheerful for the rest of the day after that. At tea
time, she brought up the subject of Marina the guinea pig.

‘I
thought we could ask Johns to build some sort of outdoor hutch for your rodent,’
she said. ‘It really isn’t on keeping her upstairs. Not in a house like Magna,
darling. Queen Victoria herself slept a night in your room, you know. December
1878, I think.’
The roof is falling off and you’re worried about the guinea
pig in my bedroom?’
I wanted to scream.

‘I bet
she froze to death,’ I said sulkily.

‘I
shouldn’t think so. She was a plain woman. Plain women don’t tend to feel the
cold.’

‘Plain
but powerful,’ I said, buttering a stale crust of bread.

Four days later, I went
for tea with Charlotte and Aunt Clare. I had not heard from Harry since our
last phone call, which had left me puzzled rather than relieved. After all that
conspiring and discussion, the lack of communication felt odd, although there
had been times over the months that had passed when I would have given my eye
teeth
not
to talk to him. I half expected him to answer the door to Aunt
Clare’s flat and bundle me into the kitchen to talk about our next move. But
there was no need for that any more. He had got her back. He had won.
We
had
won.

As it happened, Charlotte
answered the door.

‘We’re
mid-paragraph,’ she said wearily. ‘Come in.’

Until
that afternoon, I don’t think that I had ever seen Charlotte look tired. Her
long hair fell lank and greasy over her hunched shoulders and one could have
packed enough kit for a two-week holiday in the bags under her eyes. I realised
then how much of her appeal was in the glow of her skin and the brightness of
her gaze. Without this, she almost looked ordinary. I don’t think I completely
understood how hard she had been working until I saw her then and I felt suddenly
ashamed. Charlotte was doing something substantial, something important. She
was recording her aunt’s stories for her, keeping them perfect, intact, for
ever. Whether or not the book went on sale for the rest of us seemed somehow
irrelevant.

‘We’ve
been up since six,’ she explained, thudding back onto her seat and staring at
the paper she had just fed into the mouth of the typewriter. ‘Aunt Clare wants
to finish by tomorrow night.’

I sat
down quietly. Aunt Clare was lying on the day bed, her eyes tight shut, her
arms stretched up into the air. Despite the fact that she had the gramophone
playing softly in the corner, the room seemed quieter than usual.

‘He
was to become the only man I was ever to love with all my heart,’
said Aunt Clare. ‘No. Scrub that.
He was the only man I ever
loved.
That’s enough, isn’t it? I mean, one can’t state it more clearly
than that.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Half an hour, Charlotte, ‘she said. ‘Then we’ll
carry on. Oh, good afternoon, Penelope, ‘she said, giving a start. ‘I didn’t
hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.’ She sat
up. ‘What a
strain
this book is becoming,’ she sighed. ‘I can’t think
how anyone writes more than one of the damn things in a lifetime.’ She gave me
a small smile. ‘I suppose it’s rather like childbirth — the mind chooses to
forget the pain the body has gone through,’ she added.

‘One
would never write a single word if one knew the horrors that lay ahead,’ agreed
Charlotte.

‘But if
you sell copies by the sackload, you may well forget the horrors,’ I said
quickly.

Aunt
Clare smiled. ‘You
are
encouraging!’ she said. ‘Let’s have tea, shall
we?’