The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (55 page)

‘And
how is she?’ asked Charlotte. ‘Your dear mama?’

‘She
knew too. She started it, I think. But she would never have dreamed of doing it
without him.’ And Aunt Clare, I thought to myself.

‘How
could they be certain not to be caught?’ whispered Charlotte.

‘Somehow
I don’t think he left any stone unturned,’ I said…’He’s not the sort of man who
would, is he? He says he can help Inigo with his singing — you know — put him
in touch with the right people to make his own record.’

‘So I
suppose Inigo can forgive him anything?’

‘He
doesn’t think like me — he never questioned what happened,’ I said. ‘Inigo sees
it as a miracle that Mama wasn’t at Magna when it happened. He thinks we were
lucky. He’s so fixated by music that everything else seems secondary to him.’

‘A the
T was arrested last week,’ said Charlotte with a grin. ‘He and Digby were
caught tearing up the seats in the cinema after watching
Blackboard Jungle
.
He wrote me a card telling me all about it. He says he wasn’t to blame.’

I
laughed. ‘Mama says she’ll never talk to Inigo again if he gets into trouble’
for rioting in the aisles.’

‘Rioting
in the aisles,’ said Charlotte thoughtfully. ‘We
must
do some of that
before the week’s over.’ She looked at me carefully. ‘How are you, anyway?’

‘I don’t
know,’ I confessed. ‘It seemed so awful at first, and I’ve always been so much
more sentimental about the house than Mama or Inigo. I kept on thinking about
playing records in the ballroom and the night Marina descended upon the place
and all the duck suppers we’ve had since the war ended and how I would never
again sit on the window seat in my room looking out over the drive and — and — it’s
odd,’ I confessed, ‘but I think I only ever really appreciated Magna since
meeting you and Harry.’

‘Don’t
be silly.’ said Charlotte briskly.

‘Oh,
but it’s
true.
In the short time that we spent there together, I loved
the place much, much more than I ever had in the years before that. I mean,
Inigo and I felt sometimes that it was rather like a prison. Every dark corner
frightened me; it seemed so old and so
dark.
We would much rather have
carried on living in the Dower House after the war.’

‘Hoses
like Magna are much easier to admire when you don’t have to clean your teeth in
them,’ said Charlotte, pushing a slide into her thick hair.

And I
nodded, because she was exactly right.

‘I
thought Magna was a dream house,’ admitted Charlotte, ‘but you know me,
anything elaborate and romantic and ancient sends me into raptures. But I could
never have lived there all the time. It was like a museum, somewhere you
stepped inside and pretended to be someone else for the time you were there. It
wasn’t
real.
That was what I loved about it, I think.’

‘It was
real when
you
were there,’ I confessed. ‘Just as it was real to Mama
when Papa was alive. Those times that you came to stay. the times when we
stayed up late in the library, the times with Harry—’ I felt myself about to
cry as one feels about to sneeze, but I managed to choke back the tears. ‘For
some reason, I said, my voice shaking, ‘for some reason, I keep on thinking
about — about Harry — and the Long Gallery the afternoon of that terrible storm
— I — I don’t know why—’

Charlotte
handed me a handkerchief. ‘He sent his love to you in his last postcard,’ she
said kindly. and I felt her eyes sharp for my reaction. ‘He wrote,
Do send
my love to Penelope, not that she’ll remember who I am after seeing Johnnie Ray
at the Palladium.
It came from Paris. He thinks he’s going to stay there
until the end of the month. Apparently. the magic scene in France is
magnifique.’

‘And
Marina?’ I asked. ‘Did he mention her?’

‘No,’
said Charlotte. ‘I read in the papers that she and George have come back to
Europe and are holding a cocktail party in Nice aboard some boat or other to
celebrate their reengagement.

‘The
party goes on. Somehow, I don’t think we’ll be invited to that one.’

‘Oh, I
imagine we’ll
definitely
be invited,’ said Charlotte breezily. ‘She can’t
afford to keep people like us at too much of a distance, you know. We know too
much, don’t we?’

There
was a pause.

‘What
do you think you’re going to do now?’ Charlotte asked me.

I
closed my eyes for a moment, wondering how to answer. ‘I don’t think I want to
live in the Dower Hose much longer,’ I said.

‘I don’t
blame you.’

‘It’s
not just that,’ I said. ‘I feel restless. I want to move, maybe go with Inigo
to America—’ It was the first time I had thought this, but saying it made me
all the more certain that I had to get away for a while.

‘No!’

‘What
do you mean, no?’

‘You,
Penelope Wallace?’ Charlotte laughed hard. ‘Gosh, wonders will never cease.’

‘I
thought I might go and find Johnnie,’ I said with a grin. ‘Want to come too?’

‘Aunt
Clare’s going to Paris,’ said Charlotte suddenly. ‘I don’t think she’s coming
back.’

‘You
don’t?’

Charlotte
shook her head. ‘Perhaps I’m wrong,’ she ‘said slowly. ‘Perhaps I’m wrong. I
think she’ll stay out there for a while, at least.’

I said
nothing. Aunt Clare had chosen not to tell Charlotte. Far be it from me to
betray her trust.’

‘I
spoke to Christopher yesterday,’ she said, going a little bit red. ‘I’m’ trying
to persuade him to go into business with me. Come and have a look at the spot I’ve
chosen, if you like,’ she added, her eyes lighting up. ‘It’s on the King’s
Road. We could walk there now.’

We paid
our bill and left the café. As we linked arms, I thought of that cold afternoon
in November when Charlotte had first appeared in front of me in her green coat,
asking if I wanted to share a cab with her. It felt like yesterday. and yet
surely a hundred years had passed since that first afternoon in Aunt Clare’s
study.

‘Aunt
Clare always said we should follow our dreams,’ I said idly.

Charlotte
stopped walking and turned to me with a grin.

‘Couldn’t
we follow them in a taxi?’ she said.

EPILOGUE

H
arry
returned to London two months later. He took Charlotte and me to lunch at
Sheekey’s. I wore the dress I had worn that night at the Ritz and prayed he
wouldn’t notice how much I was shaking. It was a balmy evening, which felt odd,
as I had never known Harry in the summer. It suited him. I had expected him to
look older — tired from carrying around Aunt Clare’s secret for so long — but I
should have learned not to try to second-guess anything about Harry. He looked
better than I had ever known him. He walked into the room’ and pushed his hair
out of his eyes, and I saw the waitress double-take as she noticed their
strangeness. He looked over to where we were sitting at the bar, sipping
Coca-Cola through straws, and I felt tears stinging my eyes with the relief of
seeing him. The utter
relief of
seeing him. The strange thing was that
even though we were in the same room, I ached for’ Harry more than ever. I had
never known someone so familiar, yet so utterly foreign to me. I wondered for a
moment whether he was still obsessed with Marina, yet I just knew that he wasn’t.

We sat
down to lunch, and he told us how he was with Aunt Clare at the end, and how
she had talked of us all. He told us how much he missed her. Charlotte cried
and he took her hand and told her that Aunt Clare had said that the most
important thing about writing her book had been the fact that she had done it
with Charlotte’s help. That made her cry even more. I just sat there, aching. I
had never been aware of Harry’s kindness before. To me he had always been
aloof, difficult, brilliant — never kind. But that afternoon, I realised that
he had done everything for someone else. It struck me that the Marina Affair
had kept both him and Aunt Clare beautifully distracted from her illness. While
his mother disapproved and complained and tried to get him a proper job, she
was still fighting. Harry would not have had it any other way.

An hour
later, Charlotte left us to meet Christopher. When she had gone, Harry asked me
about Inigo and I said that he was going to America to play the guitar and
become famous. My brother, the pop singer! Maybe one day he’ll play the
Palladium like Johnnie Ray. Harry said he didn’t doubt it. Then he told me that
he had planned to go to Italy from Paris but something had pulled him back to
London instead. I asked him what that was, but I think I knew. I knew because
when I looked at him, I saw something in his face I had never seen before. I
knew because we were still sitting together three hours later, while the
waiters looked at their watches and started to lay the tables around us for
dinner. I knew because Elvis Presley himself could have walked in and I wouldn’t
have looked up. We smoked cigarettes and drank red wine and talked about music
and magic. And about the Long Gallery and Dorset House. And of Aunt Clare and
my father, and Mama and Milton Magna.

We
talked of what was to come. And of the lost art of keeping secrets.

AFTERWORD

W
hen
Elvis finally made it big in
1956,
Johnnie Ray became something of a
forgotten figure. To me, he will always be the ultimate pop star. I have never
known anything like the crowds outside the Palladium that night that Charlotte
and I went’ to see him sing. He was the forerunner. He died on 24 February 1990.
He was sixty-three years old.