The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mama. I have often wondered how Lady Lucy could have been so
unbelievably dim to take her with her — did she honestly believe that anyone
would look at her when a girl like Talitha Orr was in the room? My
mother never tired of telling Inigo and me what she wore to Magna that night —
a thin, pale pink satin and silk dress from Barkers of Kensington — and years
later I would sneak up to the cupboard where she kept it, take it carefully out
of its layers of tissue and try it on myself. Standing in front of my mother’s
long looking-glass in her pink dress sent shivers of excitement and sorrow up
my spine. When the soldiers left Magna after the war, the looking-glass had
been broken, but the dress was still neat in the bottom drawer. Some things are
made to survive. I don’t think that a thousand wars could destroy that dress.
     
     
    Mama’s father was a
doctor, and her mother an Irish beauty who doted on her two daughters, Talitha
and Loretta. I don’t suppose that either of my mother’s parents imagined in
their wildest dreams that one of their daughters would end up living in
America, the other in a house like Magna, but it just goes to show where beauty
can land you in life. By any standards, Mama is staggeringly good-looking. When
she turned up at the party at Magna, she had barely spent any time outside
London. At just eighteen, Archie was not especially tall and not conventionally
good-looking but he had acres of land and, more important, acres of style. His
hair was thick and blond and his snub nose peppered with freckles. He was
always laughing. Oh, I know people often say that of people they love, but in
his case it was absolutely the truth. Mama once claimed that she had no
straight-faced memories of my father. She said it in a voice of despair, which
I found confusing at the time, but now I think I understand. When Archie saw
her floating across the lawn, he reputedly fainted. When he came to, a minute
later, Mama was holding his hand. Hello, she said. How lovely to meet you. I
thought I was the one supposed to be falling over.
     
    They were married five
months after their first meeting, in the chapel at Magna. Archie’s parents
tried hard to dissuade him from marrying Mama, whom they considered worryingly
pretty and far too young and inexperienced to cope with such a big house, but
their protests fell on deaf ears. His bride virtually ran down the aisle and
into his arms, a green-eyed, inky-haired fairy in pink lace, already three
months pregnant with me. It was 1937. Mama gleefully moved her few possessions
from London to Wiltshire and awaited the birth of her first child. She had
convinced herself that she was expecting a boy so I came as something of a
shock. I looked then, as I have done ever since, very like my father, which in
turn seemed to please and irritate my mother who was happy that I was never
going to rival her beauty but a little jealous of the instant connection
between infant and father. All this makes her sound self-obsessed, difficult,
capricious — and yes, she certainly was — but she was only seventeen. I have to
remind myself of this sometime.
     
    For years after my father
left us to fight, my mother would mark the date that they had first met by
sitting on the steps leading down to the walled kitchen garden and drinking a
glass of elderflower cordial. One year — I must have been about thirteen — I
joined her and suggested that we toast their first meeting with champagne. She
looked appalled.
    ‘But I
was drinking elderflower the night that we met!’
    ‘But we
could have a proper toast; we could celebrate your meeting,’ I
persisted. I don’t know why I did; I could see that it was upsetting her to
have her ritual shaken like this.
    ‘Penelope,
you’re so horribly modern sometimes.’
    ‘It was
only a suggestion, Mama.’
    ‘Sir
down next to me,’ she pleaded, and I did, feeling the stone step warm on my
thighs in the late afternoon sun. I rubbed my fingers over