The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (48 page)

‘Oh, I
couldn’t promise that,’ said Deborah.

The
village green was eerily still. An owl hooted from the depths of the cherry
tree and the shadow of a fox crossed the road in front of us. Now that we were
out of London, the night was alive with stars and the moon looked as if it had
been through one of Mary’s vigorous washes; it glowed as white as Marina
Hamilton’s teeth. Charlotte climbed into the back seat of the car for the last
part of our long journey. Rocky and I said nothing for the five minutes that it
took to drive back to Magna. Why is he doing this, I thought. He doesn’t have
to be here with us.

‘You
should stay the night,’ I said.

‘First
sensible thing you’ve said tonight, kid.’

Rocky
bundled us out of the car and we crept into the hall —Mama never locked any
doors, which Rocky found horrifying.

‘I’ll
show you to the Wellington room,’ I said, stumbling over a cricket bat. ‘Charlotte,
you know where you’re sleeping.’

‘Sure
do.’

I was
achingly conscious of Rocky following me upstairs and I wished with all my
heart that I had not drunk quite so much gin. I felt terribly weary and
unaccountably sad all of a sudden, as if I had been smacked in the head. Rocky,
sharp as a razor, sensed the horror of my hangover.

‘Gin
will make you feel more disgusting than any other spirit,’ he said, sitting
down on the bed. ‘I suggest you get some sleep and drink a stack of black
coffee tomorrow morning.’ He looked exhausted all of a sudden, his kind brown
eyes small with tiredness. He gave a great yawn, like a lion. I wanted to collapse
into his arms and say how sorry I was for putting him so far out of his way
with such a long drive, but instead I hovered at the door like a child looking
for approval.

‘I
expect Mama will jump out of her skin when she sees you tomorrow,’ I said in a
high voice. ‘Don’t worry, I shall explain everything to her. Once she realises
that you were our knight in shining armour, she’ll forgive you everything.’

‘As far
as I’m aware, I don’t have reason to beg her forgiveness,’ said Rocky evenly.

‘You’re
American,’ I explained.

‘Ah,’
said Rocky. ‘So the fact that I rescued her daughter from the streets of Soho
won’t come into it at all.’

I
grinned. ‘Not at all.’

There
was a pause, and I supposed I should leave and make my way back to my room, but
something in me went on to ask:

‘How’s
Marina?’

Rocky
looked surprised. ‘Marina? You didn’t know?’

‘Know
what?’

‘Well,
she’s back with George, of course. Just like I said. Decided that she couldn’t
live without him. They’ve already taken off to the States. So your magician
might come back to you after all. I’d give him another chance if I were you.
Marina’s a powerful drug but I don’t believe he ever stopped loving you. How
could he?’

‘Oh,’ I
whispered, too dumbstruck to say anything else.

When I
awoke the next morning, I convinced myself that I had dreamed that last part of
our conversation. After all, if Marina was with George, where was Harry? Rocky
must have it wrong, I thought. But somehow, I couldn’t imagine Rocky ever
having anything wrong. He was simply the most right person I had ever
encountered.

Although I set my alarm
clock for eight, which was only three hours after I had gone to bed, I must
have slept right through, for when I awoke the sun was streaming through the
window in a triumphant caught-you-out-there way. Horrors, I thought, fixing
together the events of the night before. It was eleven o’clock. I dressed
quickly and padded across the landing to Charlotte’s room. There was no
response when I knocked, and when I pushed open the door she was still curled
up in bed.

‘Leave
me alone. I’m dying,’ she croaked.

‘You’d
better hurry up about it. It’s gone eleven and Mama must have met Rocky by now.’
I crossed the room and pulled open the curtains. ‘It’s raining!’ I cried in
surprise for the sunlight had been infused by a heavy downpour, the sort that
you get in April, falling at a slant and lightning bright in the sunlight.

I raced
downstairs and into the dining room. For a moment or two, I stood at the door,
looking in at the scene before me. I knew instantly. Rocky had been lost to
Mama. I supposed it had to happen, but that didn’t stop it from hurting, and it
started to hurt straight away, because I knew that there was no questioning it.
She was laughing at something he had said, her whole body rocked forward
towards him instead of recoiling back, away from everything, which was the
stance in which I had known Mama for as long as I could remember. They were
sitting together on the window seats, framed by the newly rich green of the
lawn, while unbelievably, behind them, in the brilliant morning sky, shone the
faint curve of a rainbow.

‘Look!’
I heard myself exclaiming, and I rushed over to join them, pointing at the sky.

‘How
glorious!’ said Mama. She turned back to Rocky. ‘Do you get wonderful rainbows
in America?’

He
laughed at her, which was something that ordinarily she couldn’t handle at all.
‘We sure do,’ he said.

‘Penelope,
darling, Rocky’s been telling me all about last night,’ said Mama, smiling at
me and taking my hand. ‘How lucky that he happened to drive past the theatre
when he did! He says the place was awash with drunks.’

I
blushed. ‘Sort of. We were fine. We just wanted to meet Johnnie.’

‘Won’t
you stay for lunch?’ Mama asked Rocky. ‘We’re not having much, just a chicken
pie, but we’d love to have you.

Rocky
looked at me and I knew that he was asking for my approval. There was a light
but friendly challenge in his eyes, as if to say go on! You said she hated
Americans but I’m doing pretty well so far!

‘Of
course you should stay. Rocky,’ I said.

Knowing that I couldn’t
have Rocky for myself was one thing, but knowing that the reason for this was
because he was falling in love with my mother was quite another. He took
Charlotte to the station in time to catch the
12.45
to Paddington, but
he returned for lunch and I tried not to stare as he held Mama’s eyes in his
for longer than he had ever held mine, and she actually blushed for the first
time in living memory. There was something fascinating about Mama that day. She
was like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, fluttering towards Rocky’s light
with hesitant new wings. Shattered by Johnnie and gin, I excused myself after
lunch, saying that I was going to have a lie-down. Upstairs, Marina the guinea
pig rushed out to greet me and I fed her one of Mary’s carrots and stared out
of my window until the light faded from the sky and the sunset spilled an inky
pink and red over the horizon. At four o’clock, I turned on my bedside lamp,
opened my notepad and began to write. I didn’t stop until eight, when I was
called for supper. I called the story ‘Cry’ after Johnnie’s song, and I felt,
somewhere deep inside me, that it was the best thing I had ever written. It was
certainly the most true. I folded it into an envelope and walked down to the
post box in the village straight away. The day that I always knew would arrive
was here, but it didn’t hurt the way I thought it would. Certainly, it ached,
but it was a peculiarly sweet ache, like giving away your last pear drop to
someone you know will appreciate it more than you. Not that I’m comparing Rocky
to a pear drop, really, but — oh, I think you understand what I mean. That
evening, Charlotte telephoned me.

‘You’ll
never guess what’s happened,’ she said.

‘What
is it this time?’

‘Marina’s
vamoosed back to America with George.’

Although
I had already heard this from Rocky, it still shocked me. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘I
do. Harry hasn’t reappeared. I suppose he can’t face us all after
this. I feel rather sorry for him, which is saying something. I don’t think I’ve
ever felt sorry for Harry before in my whole life.’

He and
I both with broken hearts, I thought. It was never supposed to be like this.

The following week was a
revelation for me, for Mama and for Magna. Rocky, who had been booked to fly
back to America the day after he dropped me home, postponed his flight and said
that he would be in England until the end of the month. He telephoned us every
other day, and he came down to see us for dinner on Saturday night. Not once
did Mama and I talk about him when he was not with us. It felt forbidden, as if
talking about it was recognising the one fact that Mama was too frightened to
admit to. He was replacing Papa. He was making her happy. What did I do? I
wrote a great deal in my diary. and walked through the bluebell woods thinking
hard about it all, and found that I could see the picture far more clearly now
than I had done that day on the train when I first encountered Rocky, or that
evening at the Ritz or even the night that he had driven us all home only a
week ago. I could see, for the first time, that there had never been any
serious possibility of Rocky’s falling for me. I was too young (though when one
is eighteen and delirious about a man of forty-five one feels terribly.
terribly grown up, and not the guileless ingénue that he sees one as at all) — but
more than that, Rocky understood very little about what was important to me,
and I to him. The twenty-seven years between us had included a war that I could
barely remember and he would never forget. But Mama … she instinctively
understood things that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. And I suppose, above
almost everything was the fact that had always been there, staring me in the
face. She was just too beautiful for him
not
to fall in love with. I
felt, for all this, oddly proud of Mama. It amazed me, how little it actually
hurt. Then I started to realise that the reason it hurt so little was because
it wasn’t actually Rocky that I was missing. It was somebody else. Only once I
realised who it was, it started to hurt more than ever.

I invited Charlotte to
Magna on Saturday night when I knew Rocky was coming for dinner again. I wanted
her to see for herself what I had told her about on the phone. Of course. I was
also hoping for news of Harry and I hated myself for hoping. Inigo was also
home, and full of excitement at Rocky’s presence. Rocky had barely taken off
his coat before- Inigo ushered him into the ballroom.

‘I’ve
been playing the guitar,’ he announced, pushing back his black hair. He seemed
to have grown up a great deal since the beginning of the year, or perhaps since
he had last seen Rocky. He looked taller, more like a man and less like the
little boy I had always known.

‘Let’s
hear you,’ said Rocky.

Inigo
looked hesitant and I knew he was worrying about Mama.

‘She
won’t be down for twenty minutes,’ I reassured him, knowing that Mama was
currently soaking in the bath, waiting for the moment to make her entrance.

‘You
don’t want your mother to hear you play?’ Rocky asked Inigo.

Inigo
looked uncomfortable. ‘She doesn’t like me playing the guitar. She thinks it’s
never going to get me anywhere.’

Rocky
shook his head.

‘I’ve
chosen the ballroom,’ went on Inigo, ‘because the echo sounds nice in here.
Kind of like a record.’

‘Ah,
no,’ said Rocky seriously. ‘If you’re any good, you’ll sound good anywhere. Why
not play to us in the library?’

Inigo
looked a bit taken aback, but agreed straight away, so we all trooped into the
library and took our places. Charlotte and I sat on the day bed, she in her
painted shoes. Inigo pulled his guitar out of its case.

‘I
thought I’d play you an Elvis Presley song to start with, just to get you
feeling good,’ he said, as if we were an audience of five hundred rather than
three. Rocky laughed.

‘Go
ahead.’

Inigo
cleared his throat and looked down at his feet and I sensed him charging
himself full of confidence and I felt terrified for him, yet absolutely
convinced that if anyone could pull off the feat of playing to a man like Rocky
in a room like the library at Magna, then he could. His fingers struck hard at
the guitar and he started to sing,
really
sing, and his voice was like a
record, perfect and dangerous and shot through with conviction. He chose a song
that Luke had sent to him only a couple of weeks before, called ‘Heartbreak Hotel’,
and it had an incredible range — one minute high and raw, the next low and
tender. When he sang, Inigo’s eyes never left our faces. He was unafraid of
challenging us to look away, which of course none of us did. He was better than
I had ever heard him, spine-tinglingly magical, and I felt a flutter of sorrow
as I realised that this was the start of the end — that Inigo’s life ‘was going
to change for ever if he carried on performing like this. As he came to the end
of the song, I couldn’t resist looking at Rocky for his reaction. His face
looked unchanged, unmoved, and for a second I felt alarmed. Surely he couldn’t
expect anything more than that?

‘You
got another one, kid?’ Rocky asked him simply.