The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

by Eva Rice

  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—’

  ‘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

  Harry 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

  When 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.