The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (44 page)

‘Is —
is Harry at home?’ I asked falteringly.

Aunt
Clare’s face softened and I am certain her eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh! You
poor child!’ she said, pulling out her handkerchief. ‘You poor child!’

‘Has
something happened to him?’ I demanded, suddenly frightened.

‘Who
knows?’ Charlotte shrugged. ‘He and Marina have vanished without trace.’

‘Oh,’ I
said. ‘Well, as long as he’s alive and well—”

‘Hear
how brave the dear girl is!’ said Aunt Clare. She pulled out her handkerchief. ‘I
could
murder
him for what he’s done to you, truly I could, Penelope.’
She stretched out her hand to me. I felt uncomfortable.

‘I
suppose he’s always loved Marina,’ I mumbled. ‘I was never going to be more
than a friend to him—”

‘Nonsense!’
snapped Aunt Clare, suddenly animated. ‘I never knew Harry as happy as he was
with you, never knew him to be
himself the
way he was with you. I knew
from the moment you first walked into this room, I said to myself — there she
is! The girl I never thought would appear has — has—”

‘Appeared?’
suggested Charlotte, stuffing a crumpet into her mouth.

‘You
agree with me, don’t you, Charlotte?’ demanded Aunt Clare.

‘Oh
yes, Aunt. Of course. But you know, the only thing that really matters now is
that Penelope realises that she mustn’t lose him.’

I gave
Charlotte a kick under the table, but she didn’t respond. ‘I have lost him,’ I
said, hoping I sounded woebegone enough for Aunt Clare and practical enough for
Charlotte.

‘You
haven’t,’ said Charlotte. ‘But there’s no point in running after him unless you
know that he’s the one.’

‘The
one?’ I asked stupidly.

‘Yes.
The one.’

‘The
one what?’

‘The
one you’ll love for ever. The one you can’t imagine ever being without,’ said
Aunt Clare. She stood up. I noticed that her neat suit, usually such a snug
fit, was almost hanging off her that afternoon. She had lost a great deal of
weight recently, I noticed with surprise.

‘Oh,
Charlotte, cut me another slice of Battenburg, won’t you?’ she sighed.

‘Goodness,
Aunt Clare. you do look slim,’ I said.

She
looked down at her hands. ‘Do I? You see what this book is doing to me?’

‘They
should- suggest writing one’s autobiography as a solution for the overweight,’
said Charlotte. ‘And as for Harry —he’s vanished with Miss Hamilton. She rolled
up here on Sunday morning—”

‘High
as a kite, I might add,’ interjected Aunt Clare through a mouthful of cake.

‘High
as a kite,’ echoed Charlotte. ‘And Harry packed a small case and disappeared
with her. He said he thought they might go to the coast for a few days,
somewhere away from London where Marina won’t be recognised. Brighton,
probably.’

‘Anyone
would think she was Marilyn Monroe!’ I couldn’t resist saying.

‘Well
she’s not. The Monroe woman always looks rather vulnerable to me,’ said Aunt
Clare. ‘Nothing vulnerable about Marina. You know what she did, Penelope? She
and Harry raided the wine cellar before they left. A whole case of
Liebfraumilch they took with them. Liebfraumilch! I ask you!’

I
wanted to giggle.

‘How
vulgar can one be?’ went on Aunt Clare. ‘I suppose they did me a favour; I’d
been trying to get rid of the stuff ever since I was given it last summer. I
would have thought Marina might know a little better. Still, one man’s poison
et cetera, et cetera. She coughed.

‘Do you
think Marina’s drunk it all by now?’ asked Charlotte. I pictured her and Harry
on the sea front in Brighton, which was hard as I had never been to the place,
but I had always imagined it as being rather romantic in the windswept,
pebbles-in-your-shoes way that English beaches can be. Something in me felt
irritated that Harry had taken Marina there — he could at least have driven me
to the sea on one of our planning meetings …

‘Harry’s
always thought of Brighton as a rather romantic place,’ said Charlotte. ‘He
likes pebble beaches and hot drinks and watching the seagulls steal people’s
ice-cream cones.

‘What
do you think they’ll do next?’ I asked. ‘When they tire of Brighton?’

‘When
he tires of Marina,’ corrected Aunt Clare darkly. ‘which he will, he will come
home, tail between his legs, begging you to take him back, Penelope.’

‘I’ve
never seen Harry with his tail between his legs,’ observed Charlotte.

So we
talked on, as we always talked at tea, yet there was something new with us in
Aunt Clare’s study that afternoon. Something I couldn’t define, but something
odd that I sensed in the ticking of the clock and the rays of dappled sunlight
that crept into the room and shot bright into Aunt Clare’s eyes.

‘Do
pull the curtains, Charlotte,’ she ordered. ‘It’s too bright.’ I never imagined
that the sun could be too bright for Aunt Clare. At times, she had seemed too
bright for the sun.

Twenty minutes later, I
excused myself and left Kensington Court for Paddington. ‘I hope Harry’s all
right,’ I said to Charlotte as we stood on the doorstep.

‘Do
you?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Do you
really hope he’s all right?’

‘Well,
yes,’ I admitted. ‘I mean, I know that the whole idea was to get Marina back,
but now that’s happened I find it difficult to imagine what’s going to happen
next.’

‘It’s
just as I thought, then,’ said Charlotte with a huge grin. She no longer looked
tired.

‘What
is? Why are you being so odd, Charlotte?’

‘You
love him, of course.’

‘What?’
I breathed. For a split second, everything seemed to fit into place and the
uncomfortable sensation that I had felt for as long as I could remember, of
everything’s moving too fast, of not being able to hold on to myself at all,
vanished. Then, just as suddenly, it was back again.

‘You’re
wrong,’ I said crossly. ‘I don’t understand you, Charlotte.’

‘Nothing
to understand. It couldn’t be simpler.’ .

‘But it’s
not
true!
I wish you’d stop coming out with big statements that bear
absolutely no relation to the truth. I think you do it for fun.’

I
sounded angry. I
was
angry. Charlotte just laughed. ‘Methinks the lady—”
she began.

‘Yes.
The lady
is
bloody well protesting,’ I snapped. ‘You think you know me
so well, don’t you? Well you don’t. This just proves it.

I turned and walked down
the steps of Kensington Court, round the corner and onto Kensington High
Street, then all the way up to Notting Hill, Queens Road and Paddington without
looking back.

Chapter
19

SUCH A
NIGHT

I
n
the five months that I had known her, I had never fallen out with Charlotte and
the prospect of not being her friend appalled me. Equally. her suggestion that
I was secretly in love with Harry filled me with a fury so violent that I
refused to telephone her for four days. With every new morning, I felt
convinced that
she
was going to call
me,
but the telephone
remained horribly, wilfully mute, and I began to wonder if she had simply
decided that she had had enough of me. It was not a good time. I sat at the
dining-room table, and ploughed through yet another essay, this time on
the
perceived notion of the Lady of Shalott as a coquettish, shallow temptress
—
adjectives that only served to remind me of Marina — and I wondered for the
fortieth time where she and Harry were.

I think
everything would have been bearable if Rocky had called, or written, or even
whizzed up the drive in his lovely car for tea. I don’t know what it was in me
that assumed I would see him again — dumb optimism probably — but I found it
impossible to imagine that he might have vanished back to America without
saying goodbye. I had begged Mary not to tell Mama about Rocky and Marina’s
visit, and although she had pursed her lips up very tight, she had agreed that
it would be beneficial for everyone if not a word was spoken. I expect she
thought that Mama would blame her for allowing strangers into the house.
Personally. I felt certain that the only person likely to get into any trouble
would be me. Mary, who had always pretended to disapprove of Americans to
appease Mama, was finding it hard to forget Rocky.

‘Such a
presence!’ she said to me, wiping away a tear as she chopped an onion. ‘And
such smart shoes!’

Mama had been spending
every waking hour in the garden, doing very little of any worth. Her financial
concerns filled me with frustration. She was prepared to acknowledge that we
couldn’t go on as we were, and yet that was exactly what we
were
doing.
Yet her fear of money was everywhere. Sometimes, when she opened her purse her
hands would tremble as though what was inside was contaminated. On another
occasion, when I asked her for two shillings to buy stamps from the post
office, her eyes shone with defiance and she gave me a ten shilling note and
told me to treat myself and Inigo to an ice and a magazine.

‘But—’
I began.

‘Penelope,
you take what you’re given,’ she said ominously. I didn’t enjoy my ice cream
that day. Inigo did. He was quite capable of divorcing extravagance from guilt
— a quality that I envied in him.

‘You seem irritated,
darling. Is anything wrong?’ Mama asked me on day four of my Not Speaking to
Charlotte campaign.

‘No,’ I
said quickly. ‘I’ve got rather a lot of work to get through.’

‘Isn’t
Charlotte helping you?’ asked Mama slyly.

‘We’ve
had a slight row,’ I found myself admitting.

‘Oh?’

‘I
think she thinks she knows me better than I know myself,’ I said, anger at
Charlotte making me say more than I wanted to. Mama laughed.

‘Oh,
she probably does, darling,’ she said lightly. ‘Girls like Charlotte always do.’

I was
fairly speechless. Part of me was maddened by Mama, but another part of me was
itching to pick up the telephone, so I waited until Mama had drifted off before
stealing out of the dining room and into the hall. (I expect you are thinking
that I spent most of my life making telephone calls — Mama certainly thought
this — but before I met Charlotte I don’t think that I had ever made more than
a handful of calls to friends. She was the first person I had ever met who I
can safely say was addicted to the telephone, and the addiction was catching.
It made her lack of communication over the last few days even more irksome.)

Charlotte
answered straight away. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s
me. Penelope.’

‘Goodness,
you sound serious, Penelope. Are you all right?’

‘I’m
not in love with Harry!’ I blurted. ‘I think you were jolly unfair to hurl that
at me. I’ve never been in love with him. Surely you can see that, Charlotte?’

There
was a silence while both of us digested what I had just said.

‘Hmmm,’
said Charlotte. ‘I think we’ll have to agree to disagree.’ She often came up
with these little phrases, and she put on an irritatingly good American accent
when she used them.

‘It’s
not a case of agreeing or disagreeing!’ I hissed. ‘It’s the truth and I’m sorry
if that disappoints you in any way.’

‘The
only thing that’s disappointing is that you can’t see it yet. Still, there’s
time.’

I felt
myself flushing with annoyance. ‘Why is it that you think you can dictate who I
can and can’t fall in love with?’

‘Oh, I
can’t,’ said Charlotte quickly.

‘What
about Rocky?’ I asked. ‘Do I love him too?’

‘Of
course not.’

‘What
do you mean, of course not?’

‘I
mean, of course not. Oh, there’s no doubt you’ve got a thumping great crush on
him, but then so have I. So would the whole country if they could only see the
way he pours champagne, or the way he looks at you when he’s talking, as if he
doesn’t care about anything else in the world. He’s absolutely unavoidably
delicious. It doesn’t mean were in love with him. We just like being with him
and we like the idea of him paying us attention. That’s quite different.’