The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (54 page)

‘It’s
not true. It can’t be!’ I crashed down onto my chair again and in that instant
I knew that it was true because I found that I had started to cry.

‘Oh,
dear girl,’ said Aunt Clare. ‘Please don’t cry. Really, you mustn’t. I’ve had a
wonderful life. No one could ask for more. Don’t cry.’ She was beside me, her
hand over mine.

‘Does
Charlotte know?’ I sniffed.

‘No.
She knows nothing except that I am thinking of moving to Paris for a few
months. I didn’t want her to be thinking about it when we were working together.
I needed her to be fresh and alive and aggravated with me when I asked too much
of her. I didn’t want her to think she was working with a dying woman. My book
is all life, all new limbs and adventure. Oh no. It wouldn’t have suited to
have told Charlotte.’

‘But
surely she should be told — she’d want to say goodbye—’

‘She
wouldn’t. Not Charlotte.’’

I knew
she was right.

‘She
hated me at times, for pushing her so hard to finish the book. But I had to
push her — you can see that now, can’t you? We had to finish what we’d started
before it was too — well, too late, I suppose.’

‘And
you did,’ I said. ‘You finished it.’

Aunt
Clare nodded. ‘It never mattered to me if it was going to sell five copies or
five thousand,’ she said. ‘I wrote the book for me, and for the people I love —
after all, a little self-indulgence never did anyone any harm. As it happens, I
think it’s done my Charlotte a great deal of good. She was a stranger to
discipline before I got my hands on her.’

‘I had
never heard Aunt Clare refer to Charlotte as hers. I swallowed. ‘And Harry?’ I
asked.

‘Harry’s
known from the start.’

I was
so surprised I stopped crying. ‘What?’ I blinked.

‘I told
Harry because I couldn’t not. He knows me too well. I wouldn’t be able to hide
it from him as I could from Charlotte. And I knew it wouldn’t change us, and
that’s what made it all right. We still argued. I continued to despair over
Marina. He still refused to get a proper job. But he spent great chunks of his
earnings as a magician on me. On doctors, specialists. Nothing that’s come to
any good, but he’s
tried.
That’s the only thing that matters. He tried.’

‘Where
is he now?’

‘He’ll
join me in Paris,’ said Aunt Clare evenly. ‘If I ask him to.

‘You
will, won’t you?’ I begged. ‘Say you will!’

‘I
will, I promise you that much.’

‘He’ll
be lost without you,’ I whispered. ‘He needs you. To —to tell him he’s being
silly. to keep his feet on the ground—’

‘I
think I’ve trained Charlotte rather well in that department, ‘said Aunt Clare.

‘If
only he weren’t still so in love with Marina.’

‘Oh, he’s
not.’ Aunt Clare’s reaction was instant. ‘Not at all. He never has been in love
with her. He just thought he was.’

‘But
what’s the difference?’ I felt angry all of a sudden. Why did Aunt Clare always
talk in riddles like this? Why did she have to be dying? And why did she have
to go to Paris to do it?

‘He’s
only just working that out for himself,’ she said quietly. ‘I regret that your
mother and I will never be friends.’ There was real sadness in her voice now. ‘But
it all worked out as it should, of course. I got to live, and now she wilt too.’

I
reached out for Aunt Clare’s drink. ‘Don’t you think it was a terrible thing?
To destroy a house like Magna?’

‘Far
more terrible to go on living there. Debt is the terrible thing, Penelope. It
swallows you whole. But …’ She turned to me, her eyes wicked, full of fun. ‘Harry
will have a nice surprise when I’m gone.’

‘How’s
that?’

‘Oh, I
sold a piece of china I never believed was worth anything for the most
extraordinary amount the other day. Well — enough to keep Harry in smokes for a
while, as he likes to put it. Christopher Jones spotted it when he was here for
my reading. He nearly burst’ with the excitement. Said he’d never seen a piece
its equal in such wonderful condition.’

‘What?
And in the meantime, let him think he’s poor as a church mouse?’

‘Of
course!’ exclaimed Aunt Clare, ‘I can’t have him thinking he’s got money to
spend. He might lose his mind and start thinking he can afford Marina Hamilton
again.’

‘And
what was the piece?’ I asked her.

‘Oh,
you won’t remember it. It was an ugly thing, really. The little milkmaid that
used to sit right here—’

I
laughed, in spite of everything. I laughed.

I only stayed another ten
minutes. I imagine Aunt Clare didn’t want me to have to sit around and make
conversation with her now that I knew it would be the last time. I didn’t want
to either. She saw me to the door.

‘Aunt
Clare, does Phoebe know? Your — your secret?’ I asked, hating myself for
sounding trite.

‘Oh
yes, she’s known all along.’

‘I see,
That would explain her misery.’

‘Oh no,’
said Aunt Clare. ‘She’s naturally like that. Always has been. And worse than
ever now that Harry’s left.’

Harry.
I couldn’t believe he wasn’t about to saunter
through the door clutching his magic bag, humming a jazz tune and making snide
comments about Johnnie Ray. I wanted to see him so much, I almost felt capable
of conjuring him up, as a traveller in the desert sees water.

‘Just
one thing,’ said Aunt Clare.

‘Anything,’
I said, meaning it.

‘Look
after Charlotte for me. I know she’s still infatuated with that Andrew boy. He’s
not right for her but she’ll take her time realising it. There will always be
part of her that loathes me for keeping her away from him. But you see,
Penelope, sometimes experience knows best.’ She looked thoughtful for a moment.
‘She’s mentioned Christopher rather a lot since you introduced them. You know,
he hasn’t changed a bit since the day I met him. Still such a pretty man, and
still quite unaware of it.’

‘Charlotte
claims he irritates her.’

‘Well!
Need we say more?’

I took
a taxi to the Ritz and sat at the bar to read the letter Aunt Clare had given
me. It felt like the right place to read it and just being there made me feel
that Harry was with me too She had asked me not to read it till she had gone.
But that was impossible. And Aunt Clare knew that as well as I did.

Milton Magna,
Westbury

2 March 1955

Dear Clare

I hope you don’t think it queer that I am writing to you.

What am I saying, of course you do.
(Typical
Mama, I thought. Her letters always read like this — a stream of consciousness,
utterly unplanned.)

My daughter Penelope has become friends with your son and niece, and
apparently you spoke of knowing of Archie and me, and of Milton Magna. Oh, I
can’t think what I’m doing, sending this to you
—
perhaps
I read too much into the coincidence of their meeting, perhaps I am seeing it
as a sign. At any rate, I am here, with the draught whittling through the
window, writing to you.

You were the one woman Archie spoke of with any affection, the only
person to have moved him before he met me. How I hated you for it! Just after
we first met I asked him if he had ever considered marriage before, and being
Archie, he just couldn’t resist being honest. He told me about the evening of your
strange encounter— how you had met outside the Opera House and had talked for
hours. Just talked. He said you were older than him, and married with a son,
and yes, rather beautiful. He said that if you hadn’t been married, perhaps he
would have seen you again. How wretched I felt hearing those words! How
sophisticated and worldly and intimidating you seemed, how untouchable. You
became my one demon, my own private Rebecca. I feared Archie bumping into you
more than anything else in the world.

Oh, he loved me. He loved me more than he loved you, of that I have
no doubt
—
I had his
children, we were as inseparable as twins. And yet nothing could erase the fact
that he had felt something before, something that didn’t come to anything, but
oh
—
something!
(She had underlined this
word several times, and as I read it, I could hear her saying it.)

Anyway, after Archie was killed, I couldn’t bear to look at his
clothes, hanging, no weeping, at me from inside his dressing room. At the back
of the wardrobe, I found a suit I had never seen him wear. I felt faint, I tell
you, because something in me just knew. I pulled it down, and emptied the
pockets. Nothing, except for a ticket to the opera. It hadn’t been torn.
Unused, because something even better than
La
Bohème
happened that night. He met you, Clare.

None of this matters. None of this means anything. You didn’t steal
my husband. I hadn’t even met him. Perhaps that’s what’s made it harder to
bear. You were then, as you are-now, blameless.

I am thirty-five years old, but I feel a hundred and thirty-five. I
live in a house I don’t like, but I’m too frightened to say I don’t like. I don’t
understand my children because I don’t understand myself And why I’m telling
you all this, I can’t think! I can’t think why I didn’t tear up the ticket and
put you out of my mind. Penelope told me that you had described me as a ‘sensational
beauty’. It suddenly struck me that you might have loved him too. I’d never
thought of that before.

So here is the ticket for you. Perhaps you will throw it away,
thinking me very odd indeed Perhaps you will weep over it for days. I suppose I
will never know. Penelope is so fond of Charlotte, and Harry

Yours, freezing cold as usual,

Talitha Wallace

Funny,
I thought, putting the letter- away and pulling out my handkerchief, how the
best months of my life had also been the saddest. As I left the bar, I could
see Kate and Helena Wentworth arriving for a late lunch with a large party of
equally beautiful girls. As usual, Helena’s voice rang out above everyone else.

‘I don’t
think I’m asking for much,’ she was saying, ‘just a good-looking man with
excellent taste, his own aeroplane, a private income and an obsession with
Italy and me.’

The
girls around her exploded in hysterics. The funny thing was that knowing
Helena, she wasn’t joking at all.

I heard
Aunt Clare’s voice in my ear. ‘Hear, hear!’

I was up in London again
the following day to see Charlotte. We met in a café in Knightsbridge, and I
was struck for the first time by her resemblance to Harry. It was there, all
right; I had just never seen it before. It was in the sparkle of her eyes, the
tilt of her head, the way she talked, and I realised with a stab of pain that
the longing for him was worse than ever. Would it ever,
ever
leave me? I
had become used to the ache now; it was with me all the time, and never seemed
to lessen. Time was no healer, I decided, but it was a great accommodator.

‘I
think Mama will marry Rocky before the end of the summer,’ I said, biting into
my hamburger.

‘Shall
you be pleased?’ asked Charlotte.

‘I
think so.’

Charlotte
paused. ‘How is it?’ she asked me slowly. ‘Not having Magna?’

It was
the first time anyone had asked me the question, although I had tried to figure
it out for myself a million times.

‘It’s
partly terrible, like someone dying,’ I said. ‘But there’s another side to it
all, a part of it that feels like being set free,’ I confessed, and hearing the
words spoken, I bit my lip for it felt like a betrayal. ‘Whoever set fire to
the place knew exactly how we all felt,’ I added.

‘What
on earth do you mean — whoever set fire to the place?’ asked Charlotte, leaning
forward and stealing a chip from my plate. ‘Do you think someone — someone
started the fire
on purpose?’

‘Oh
yes,’ I said. ‘I knew that right from the start.’

‘Who,
for goodness’ sake?’

I
laughed. ‘Inigo’s entire record collection was saved, and Marina the guinea pig
and all my notebooks with my stories.

And my
beautiful fairy godmother outfit that I wore to the Ritz.

Oh, and
Mama’s wedding dress,’ I added.

‘Ah,’
said Charlotte.

‘You do
see, don’t you?’ I asked her.

Charlotte
bit her lip.

‘He
heard her say that she hated living there and he saw a way out for her. For all
of us. He took it,’ I said.

‘Very
American of him,’ said Charlotte.

‘Of
course, I don’t really have any proof,’ I said. ‘I could be utterly wrong. But
it was all too perfect to be true. Mama being out of the way. all the animals
taken care of—’