The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (5 page)

The train sped out of
London and I found myself a seat by the window and ordered a milky tea and
thought about what Aunt Clare had said about my parents and Magna. She was
right, my parents
were
married before they were whelped. Of course, it
never dawned on me that my mother was so very young until I got to the age of
about eight, and started to pay attention to what other girls’ mothers looked
like. I remember having lunch at Magna one rainy August afternoon and telling
her that it was my best friend Janet’s mother’s birthday.

‘And
she’s going to be
thirty!’
I squeaked. It seemed terribly old. ‘How old
are you, Mama?’ I asked her.

‘Twenty-five,
darling. Twenty-five and glad to be alive — oh, Penelope, please don’t get jam
on your dress — no, too late…’

Now I must say something
of Magna, or rather of Milton Magna Hall, the house that Aunt Clare so admired.
To speak of its beauty would be missing the point of its power. To speak of its
power would be missing the point of its chaos. Really I shouldn’t be referring
to the house as Magna at all — it’s rather like shortening Windsor Castle to ‘Castle’
— but when Inigo and I were little, the word Magna came easily to us, probably
because it sounded so like the word ‘Mama’ and Mama was, after all, the centre
of our world. When I started working for Christopher he pointed out our error.
I chose to ignore him.

My
parents met for the first time at Magna, at a cocktail party in June. It goes
without saying that my mother’s version of events is always up for debate, but
apparently she met my father and knew ‘within five minutes’ that he was the man
she was destined to marry. My mother, then sixteen and about to begin three
years of studying opera at the Royal College of Music, was not officially
invited that night, but found herself accompanying a nervous friend who had
asked her along to the party. This nervous friend, the legendary Lady Lucy
Sinclair, was supposed to be utterly in love with my father, and hoping to
snare him that night. Of course you can imagine what happened when she turned
up with Mama. I have often wondered how Lady Lucy could have been so
unbelievably dim to take her with her — did she honestly believe that anyone
would
look
at her when a girl like Talitha Orr was in the room? My
mother never tired of telling Inigo and me what she wore to Magna that night —
a thin, pale pink satin and silk dress from Barkers of Kensington — and years
later I would sneak up to the cupboard where she kept it, take it carefully out
of its layers of tissue and try it on myself. Standing in front of my mother’s
long looking-glass in her pink dress sent shivers of excitement and sorrow up
my spine. When the soldiers left Magna after the war, the looking-glass had
been broken, but the dress was still neat in the bottom drawer. Some things are
made to survive. I don’t think that a thousand wars could destroy that dress.

Mama’s father was a
doctor, and her mother an Irish beauty who doted on her two daughters, Talitha
and Loretta. I don’t suppose that either of my mother’s parents imagined in
their wildest dreams that one of their daughters would end up living in
America, the other in a house like Magna, but it just goes to show where beauty
can land you in life. By any standards, Mama is staggeringly good-looking. When
she turned up at the party at Magna, she had barely spent any time outside
London. At just eighteen, Archie was not especially tall and not conventionally
good-looking but he had acres of land and, more important, acres of
style.
His
hair was thick and blond and his snub nose peppered with freckles. He was
always laughing. Oh, I know people often say that of people they love, but in
his case it was absolutely the truth. Mama once claimed that she had no
straight-faced memories of my father. She said it in a voice of despair, which
I found confusing at the time, but now I think I understand. When Archie saw
her floating across the lawn, he reputedly fainted. When he came to, a minute
later, Mama was holding his hand. Hello, she said. How lovely to meet you. I
thought
I
was the one supposed to be falling over.

They were married five
months after their first meeting, in the chapel at Magna. Archie’s parents
tried hard to dissuade him from marrying Mama, whom they considered worryingly
pretty and far too young and inexperienced to cope with such a big house, but
their protests fell on deaf ears. His bride virtually ran down the aisle and
into his arms, a green-eyed, inky-haired fairy in pink lace, already three
months pregnant with me. It was 1937. Mama gleefully moved her few possessions
from London to Wiltshire and awaited the birth of her first child. She had
convinced herself that she was expecting a boy so I came as something of a
shock. I looked then, as I have done ever since, very like my father, which in
turn seemed to please and irritate my mother who was happy that I was never
going to rival her beauty but a little jealous of the instant connection
between infant and father. All this makes her sound self-obsessed, difficult,
capricious — and yes, she certainly was — but she was only seventeen. I have to
remind myself of this sometime.

For years after my father
left us to fight, my mother would mark the date that they had first met by
sitting on the steps leading down to the walled kitchen garden and drinking a
glass of elderflower cordial. One year — I must have been about thirteen — I
joined her and suggested that we toast their first meeting with champagne. She
looked appalled.

‘But I
was drinking
elderflower
the night that we met!’

‘But we
could have a proper toast; we could
celebrate
your meeting,’ I
persisted. I don’t know why I did; I could see that it was upsetting her to
have her ritual shaken like this.

‘Penelope,
you’re so horribly modern sometimes.’

‘It was
only a suggestion, Mama.’

‘Sir
down next to me,’ she pleaded, and I did, feeling the stone step warm on my
thighs in the late afternoon sun. I rubbed my fingers over a stalk of rosemary
and lay back listening to the hypnotic buzzing of the wasps in their nest in
the old pear tree. The garden was the centre of the universe, and within its
walls lay the whole world, Edenesque. What else counted outside the dry stone
walls of Magna?

I stared
at my fellow passengers and wondered if any of them had had as extraordinary an
afternoon as I had. I felt so restless, I had to sir on my hands for fear I
might burst with wanting to talk about everything. Aunt Clare, more than anyone
else I had met, seemed instinctively to understand how living in a house like
Magna was a double-edged sword. When you are just eighteen and desperate for
something to happen to you (and anything
at all
will do as long as it
involve a boy and some nice clothes) a house like Magna tends to give you a
reputation before you have even opened your mouth. But it isn’t just the age of
the place (most of the house was built by a faithful member of the royal
household called Sir John Wittersnake in 1462) but its
size
that gets
people’s eyes lit up. Glimpsed from the road, through a gap in the estate walls
or a break in the avenue of whispering lime, Magna sits like a sapphire among
the trees — part birthday cake, part ocean liner, part sculpture, part
skeleton: a magnificent, ostentatious chunk of history, immediately defining
those who have lived within its walls with the same adjectives.

Even at a school like
mine, it was hard to make anyone believe that we were not rich. Alas, by the
time I was eight, anything of any value had gone the way of all things — to
Christies. People who came to stay could not believe that in the 1950s anyone
could live somewhere so giggle-makingly medieval. If you wanted grandeur, there
was the Great Hall, if you wanted ruins, there was the West Wing, if you wanted
ghosts… well, you just needed to live there. The largest room in the entire
house was boarded up, destitute, unused and full of spiders. Before the war,
there was a household of forty. Now there were two — a housekeeper and a
gardener. Yet nothing could dim the extravagance of the
idea
of Milton
Magna Hall. It was most frustrating.

At Westbury, I jumped off
the train and looked out for Johns who was usually sent to meet me in the
beaten-up Ford, but much to my relief I found Inigo there instead, lounging
against the bonnet of the car smoking a cigarette and looking fed up. Inigo,
being just sixteen, dressed like a Teddy boy whenever he could, which was not
as often as he’d like as Mama had twenty fits when he combed his hair into the
notorious Duck’s Arse (DA we called it). Having just escaped from school for
the weekend, he was still sporting his school uniform, which would have
rendered any other boy desperately square. Not Inigo. Several girls on the
platform saw him and giggled and nudged each other, which he pretended not to
notice, but I knew that he had. He shouldn’t really have been at the wheel as
he hasn’t passed his test, but he’s actually the best driver I know.

‘Hurry
up!’ he muttered, leaping back into the car.
‘Grove Family.’

Inigo
is addicted to the
Grove Family,
but we don’t have a television so he has
to go and watch it at Mrs Daunton’s house in the village. She talks through the
show and Inigo ignores her. It’s an arrangement that seems to suit both parties
rather well.

We sped
off home, arriving back in the village in no more than seven minutes. My mind
drifted to Christopher and Aunt Clare’s perfectly accurate comment on his
ability to gossip. What on earth had happened between him and Aunt Clare in
Rome? I would be far too shy to ask him straight out. And wasn’t Aunt Clare
still
married
until last year? I was so deep in thought that I didn’t
even notice that Inigo had stopped the car at the bottom of the drive.

‘If you
whizz out here, I can still make the start of the programme,’ said Inigo. I
opened the passenger door.

‘How
kind. It’s such a mild evening,’ I yelled, as the wind whipped the words out of
my mouth.

‘Isn’t
it?’

I
glared at my brother, but he just grinned at me so I walked away before he
could see me smiling too. Inigo is impossible to stay angry with for long. In
fact, I felt like a walk. The drive is almost my favourite part of the whole
estate, though walking up to the house on a stormy night can be a little bit
scary. That evening I rounded the corner that gives the first proper view of
the house and imagined what Charlotte would think of Magna. It is a house with
a dual personality. Once you have taken in the thrill of the medieval building,
there’s the extra bit that was added to the equation in 1625 — a vast wing
stuck onto the side of the house where Renaissance panelling replaced bare
stone and marble replaced oak. My Great-Aunt Sarah recorded in her diary that
the East Wing looked as though someone’s starry-eyed friend had arrived at
Magna with a new quill and a fresh sheet of paper and instructions to ‘lighten
the place up a bit’. I think she thought she was being funny — after all, she
was referring to Inigo Jones, my brother’s namesake. It wasn’t until I was
about fourteen that I realised how famous he had been, how important his work
was. Until then, aunts, uncles, historians, servants, tenants and trippers all
had opinions on Magna that ensured we knew the house was more important than its
inhabitants.

That’s
one of the oddest things about living in a house of Magna’s size and reputation
— everyone feels entitled to air their views about the place. Indeed it
inspires the most awkward questions from people who should know better than to
ask. I will never forget my first-year art mistress quizzing me over the
remarkable Stubbs in the study and did I know precisely which year it had been
painted?
Oh, the rearing pony with the funny fetlocks?
I said brightly.
That
was sold last year to pay for the roof
Miss Davidson’s thin face paled and
I realised that perhaps this was the sort of information I should be keeping to
myself.

Eight years later, there
was little of any worth left at Magna. The only way to pay for the damage done
by the army, who had requisitioned the house during the war for four long
years, was to sell what was left
inside
to pay for the
outside.
When
Papa died it set the clocks ticking throughout the house with an added chill —
death duties came even to the families of those who died heroes. I did not
understand this at the time, only that it seemed odd to have to give away money
just when we had lost Papa. And Mama was hopeless with money — she never
stopped finding ways to lose it.

I flung open the hall door
and shivered. The Great Hall at Magna is the first thing that anyone sees when
they arrive at the house, and it takes some getting used to. I have to remember
every time someone new arrives that they are likely to take a few minutes to
get accustomed to it. Steadfastly medieval, and weighty with dark, panelled
wood and low windows, it is dominated by ten life-size wooden figures, arms
stretched up to support the ceiling. Apparently, they were carved to represent
the master masons who built Magna, a motley crew indeed. Inigo always says that
the hall is the sort of place that any self-respecting ghost would avoid like
the plague. Suits of armour stand to attention in every corner, and where there
is no room for another family portrait a set of antlers hangs proud. A huge
bearskin rug covers the floor in front of the fireplace, teeth bared, eyes wide
open and staring. The bear was a present from my great-great-grandfather to his
future wife (‘No wonder she died young,’ said Mama) and its long claws used to
scare me so much that I could never be in the room on my own for fear that it
would come back to life, just to get me. As a result of my fear, Mama made
sure that when we had a telephone
installed in the hall, it was placed right next to the bear skin, so convinced
was she that he would encourage me to finish my calls quickly. She wasn’t
wrong. There were other stuffed animals scattered about the room — a polar bear
by the staircase, a zebra skin by the front door — all of which served to make
the hall not exactly welcoming, but also not the sort of place that anyone
forgets. The whole effect is pulled together by a vast fireplace — five
children could stand upright inside it during the summer, yet during the
winter, despite being constantly on the burn, it seemed incapable of throwing
out much heat.