The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (8 page)

‘Ah.
That must have been it.’ I tried not to laugh. ‘Er — have you
ever
been
to Rome, Christopher? Perhaps in your giddy youth?’ I blushed at my nerve.

‘Of
course I’ve been to Rome, you silly girl. How on earth could I be doing what I’m
doing if I hadn’t been to Rome?’

‘I’ll
see you in the new year,’ I said hurriedly. Christopher could be quite
intimidating when he wanted to be.

‘Don’t
expect any more money,’ he warned.

I spent long hours in the
library at Magna. I had two exams to take in the summer and scores of essays to
complete in the meantime. Three months ago, Mama and I had agreed that I should
take English Literature, History of Art and Italian for a year before spending six
months with old friends of Papa’s in Italy, where presumably I would finally
learn to speak the language while floating around Rome and Florence (Mama was
unaccountably suspicious of Venice and Milan). There were plenty of girls my
age with the same kinds of plans which made me feel comforted and bored in
equal measures, but since I’d met Charlotte the comfort factor had been
entirely swamped by frustration. I could not imagine a girl like her following
the herd for one moment, and she would think me jolly dull for doing so. I
wouldn’t be able to pretend to her that I was enjoying my studies. I had been
looking forward to the English course, but soon found the endless dissection
and analysis of the books utterly destructive. I wanted to read, but not to write
about what I had read. Shakespeare was the greatest trial. I had adored
watching
The Merchant of Venice
and
The Winter’s Tale,
but had no
interest at all in talking about the minutiae of the text. My History of Art
classes were almost as tricky. Staring at photographs of the duomo in Florence
or the interior of Salisbury Cathedral struck me as quite pointless. I needed
to smell the buildings, to hear the sharp dip of my heels on their floors. My
appreciation of great art was too literal for study. I would even go so far as
to say that I could not understand any art unless I was up close to it, until
it filled all my senses with its presence. I said this to Christoph once. He
called me naive beyond my years, which I said didn’t make sense. He said that proved
his point entirely.

The days before Charlotte
and Harry arrived at Magna for the first time made working even harder than
usual. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something important, something vital,
was hovering just out of my reach, something that would change everything for
ever. Accepting tea with Charlotte had set my life off course, had swung me off
the familiar tracks that I had travelled on all my life so far. I tried to
work, but most of the time ended up drinking cocoa while listening very quietly
to Johnnie Ray, old blankets wrapped round my knees to keep out the cold. By
Wednesday, I quite understood Cleopatra’s demands for mandragora. Time and
again I considered sneaking back into my mother’s room for another look at the
mysterious diary entry, but I stopped myself just short of doing so. I was
afraid of being caught, but more than that, I was afraid of what it might say.
She had not mentioned our visitors since the Duck Supper, but I sensed they
were on her mind. Oddly, I did notice that Debrett had been taken away from her
bedroom window and replaced by a vast dictionary. Whether or not there was any
significance in this, I could not tell, and dared not ask.

Relief came one morning,
when Mama suggested that we travel to London to take a look at the new season’s
dresses.

‘You
must have at
least
two new frocks for Christmas parties,’ she said,
spreading a thin layer of marmalade over her toast. ‘You are my daughter and
you
will
look beautiful.’

She put
down her knife and stretched her hand out to me, her face full of sympathy. She
often looked at me like that, and I never held it against her because her pity
was so genuine. With the party season fast approaching, it distressed her that
I was not a fraction as spectacular as she. I don’t think that it occurred to
her that it was possible to be even passably pretty if one was tall with
freckles and had a friendly smile. For my mother, female beauty was all about
wide eyes and gypsy-dark hair and making grown men faint.

‘I don’t
know that I need any new clothes—’ I began.

She
tutted with frustration. ‘Oh, Penelope, don’t be ridiculous. You must have at
least one new dress, and that is my final word on the matter.

‘But
they’re so — so expensive,’ I stammered. ‘You said yourself that we have no money
to spare. I’m sure we should be mending the piano or fixing the fireplace in
the study—’

‘Johns
will run us to the station. Would you change into a skirt, darling? Hurry up!’

I
scuttled out of the room and bounded upstairs.

I have always found shopping
with anyone a trial, but shopping with my mother was a hazardous experience
that I tried and failed to avoid as much as possible. It was not just that our
tastes differed — like any girl of six foot I liked simple designs and modest
shoes while she favoured the flounce of Parisian couture and five-inch heels —
but more than that, her beauty meant that shop assistants gravitated towards
her, leaving me kicking my (flat) heels in the background. I don’t want to
sound too sorry for myself, but there can be very little more disheartening for
an eighteen-year-old girl than being outshone by her thirty-five-year-old
mother. As I pulled on a pair of stockings and a black skirt, it struck me that
the thrill of meeting Aunt Clare, Charlotte and Harry was probably intensified
by the fact that my mother had played no part in it.

Oh, how I wanted to be too
intellectual for new clothes! Stacked up on the chimneypiece in my bedroom were
five fashionably lettered invitations on thick white cards from girls called
things like Katherine Leigh-Jones and Alicia Davidson-Fornby. I had never met
either of those two, but my mother insisted on my accepting both invitations,
swearing that the Leigh-Joneses kept llamas in Devon and the Davidson-Fornbys
had the best cook in Hampshire. I resisted the temptation to say well, so what,
but then I resisted the temptation to say most things to Mama. I was, in spite
of the fact that she was almost a foot shorter than me, quite afraid of her —
far more so than Inigo who was younger than me but fiercely opinionated. As a
result I was caught between the need to do exactly as my mother wished, and the
desperate urge to break away from her. More than ever, both sides of
thirty-five were acutely aware of the widening gap that the war had placed between
the generations and Mama was more difficult than most. The fact that we seemed
to have so little in common frightened me and my years at boarding school had
only intensified the sneaking suspicion that she was quite unlike everyone else’s
mothers. I vividly recall the gasps of admiration when I arranged my mother’s
photograph on my chest of drawers on my first night away.

‘What a
pretty lady,’ said the girl called Victoria in the next-door bed to mine.

‘Is she
your mother?’ demanded Ruth, a moon-faced child with a loud voice.

‘Yes.’

‘She
looks like a film star. When was that taken?’

‘Just a
few weeks ago,’ I said, startled by all the interest.

By this
time all eleven girls were crowding round my bed.

‘She
doesn’t look like you,’ observed Ruth tactfully.

‘I
think she does,’ said Victoria.

‘No she
doesn’t.
She’s
got black hair.’ Ruth pointed a puddly finger at the
glass of the photograph frame.

‘They
have the same eyes.

We didn’t,
of course, but Victoria could sense my discomfort. I smiled gratefully at her
and asked if she wanted to share some Nestlé’s condensed milk from my tuck box
(rationing was still on, and I craved the stuff). We were best friends from
that night onwards.

‘Penelope!
We don’t want to miss the train!’ shouted Mama. I slipped my Johnnie Ray fan
club magazine inside an old issue of the
Tatler
and bolted downstairs.

On the way to London, I
thought about Harry and his great love for the mysterious Marina Hamilton and
why my mother had not yet told me how she knew Aunt Clare. Sometimes I save all
my thinking for the train — I find the hypnotic rhythm of the carriages
rattling over the tracks make it an excellent location for reflection. Mama
read
The Times
and said things like ‘I don’t know
why
we bother’
every time she turned a page.

At Reading,
a group of Teddy boys made a terrific racket as they boarded the train. There
was something about Teds that rather thrilled me, although I knew they were
always getting into scrapes with the police. None of this lot was very handsome
—thin, angry mouths and none of them a day over seventeen — but I couldn’t tear
my eyes away from the loudest of the group. He took his comb out of his pocket
no less than fifteen —
fifteen!
—times on that journey, and there was
beautiful red velvet on the lapels of his drape jacket. Mama kicked me under
the table when she saw me staring — she lived in abject fear of me running off
with a Ted, though the chance alone would have been a fine thing. Her main
reason for not liking them was that they all had spots, for my mother strongly
believed that clear skin was second only to good hands in the list of the
important physical features for potential husbands. Poor Mama, her beauty was
such that the boys on the train couldn’t resist staring at her and nudging each
other when she stood up at the end of our journey. She wore a grey and white
checked skirt and a slim wool coat and a slash of red lipstick; her tiny ankles
and shapely calves were encased in her best silk stockings. When she dressed up
for a trip to London, she was as glorious as any Hollywood star.

‘Silly,
silly silly,’ she huffed irritatedly as they wolf-whistled at her on the
platform. ‘For goodness’ sake, stop smiling, Penelope, you’re encouraging them.’

‘They’re
not looking at me,’ I said, with perfect truth.

‘Selfridges first, I
think,’ said Mama as the cab rattled off.

‘We
could have taken the bus,’ I pointed out.

‘In
these shoes? Come on, darling.’

‘You
gave the porter an enormous tip, Mama.’

She
ignored me, and I really didn’t blame her. The trees in Hyde Park sparkled
silver in the vague November sunlight and I hated myself for reminding her of
our Duck Supper dilemma. I huddled into my coat and wished I had remembered the
Fair Isle gloves. My mother opened her purse and extracted her lipstick and
powder.

‘I
think Inigo was right about the gymkhana,’ she said, raising her eyebrows at
her reflection. (She had exquisite eyebrows.) ‘It was
such
a boost for
Magna last summer.’

Irrationally,
I felt a surge of annoyance. It had been me, not Inigo, who had mentioned
holding another gymkhana at Magna. There was never any trace of spite in my
mother’s words, but her intrinsic assumption that any sensible suggestions had
to come from Inigo, and not me, drove me to distraction.

‘People
are so very grateful,’ she went on. ‘It gives them something to talk about,
doesn’t it? Mrs Daunton at the shop hasn’t drawn breath about the number of
cakes she sold. “All but three fairy cakes gone, Mrs Wallace,” she kept saying,
“and only one flapperjack left.”’

I
snorted with laughter, in spite of myself. My mother was a superb mimic. She
laughed too. I noticed the cabby glancing in his mirror to grin at us, and the
next moment he rocketed over a bump in the road, unseating Mama and sending my
hat flying off my head. Well, that finished us off completely. When my mother
got the giggles there was no hope for anyone; she was as infectious as measles.

‘One
flapperjack,’ she repeated, taking out her handkerchief and wiping her eyes. ‘Oh
help, we’re nearly there. Pull yourself together. Penelope!’

She
overtipped the driver too.

There was something
gorgeously theatrical about Selfridges, with its intoxicating smells of powder
and perfume and the rows of salesgirls with shapely fingernails and
Thursday-afternoon smiles. It was impossible to imagine anything bad happening
to anyone in such a place, and, as always, I felt my intellectual resolve
weaken. I wanted everything, everything,
everything
— in fact, I felt
myself positively winded by my need to consume.

‘Second
floor,’ said Mama briskly. ‘Up we go.

She
attracted the attention of a dopey-looking blonde creature in Evening Wear and
put her to work straight away.

‘What’s
your name, darling?’ my mother asked.

‘Vivienne,’
announced the creature, firmly.

‘Really?’
asked my mother doubtfully.

Vivienne
widened her eyes.

‘Well,
Vivienne, we’re going to need your help. My daughter here needs new dresses for
the party season, nothing black, you understand. She has wonderful legs and
good cheekbones, you see? We must make the most of them.’