The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets Read Online Free PDF

Johnnie Ray? Yet how could I not tell
her?
    ‘Oh,
this and that,’ I replied uneasily.
    ‘Like
what?’ she persisted.
    ‘Oh,
the usual stuff, a bit of jazz, a bit of—’
    ‘Oh, jazz!’ cried Charlotte, her voice heavy with disappointment. ‘How terminally dull.
Funny, I didn’t have you marked as one of those. Harry’s addicted to the
stuff, can’t get enough. Personally, it leaves me utterly cold.’
    There
was a pause.
    ‘I
think jazz is rather important,’ I said pompously, but Charlotte said nothing. I
can tell her. I thought. She’ll understand. I took a deep breath. ‘But
I — I rather prefer, well, actually, I am utterly and completely dedicated to —
to — Johnnie Ray,’ I admitted.
    There.
I had said it. Charlotte pretended to swoon. ‘Thank goodness!’ she said.
‘I think he’s the dreamiest man alive.’
    ‘You
do?’
    ‘Of
course. How could anybody not?’
    ‘Do you
think he might come to London and marry us?’
    ‘He’d
be mad not to,’ said Charlotte, without any irony at all.
     
    I hummed ‘If You Believe’
all the way to the station. It was as if I had been watching a play and hadn’t
realised how good it was until the last scene. On the way down to Magna that
night, I missed, yes, really missed, Charlotte, Aunt Clare and Harry. It
had taken them just a couple of hours to alter my life, yet I didn’t quite know
how yet.
    It wasn’t
until I boarded the train that I felt something strange in the pocket of my
coat that had not been there when I handed it to Charlotte in the cab. It was a
small green velvet box. I opened it up and found a piece of paper inside,
folded up. I opened the paper. On it were written two words, in peacock blue
ink. Thank you!
    I liked
the exclamation mark. Charlotte, I thought, seemed like one herself.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter
3
     
    THE
DUCK SUPPER
     

     
    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