‘What’s happening next?’
‘Aunt Clare’s going to read an extract from the great book,’ said Charlotte, ‘a passage that I’ve selected about a chance encounter between her and a tiger cub in India. Once that’s over I suggest we scout around the room for any remaining drink and get happily sloshed.’
‘I should go home tonight,’ I said. I didn’t like to think of Mama at Magna on her own at the moment. Charlotte ignored this.
‘Come upstairs and let me show you some of my new designs,’ she said.
On the way to the stairs, we bumped into Christopher.
‘I heard you were going to be here,’ I said delightedly. ‘I like your jacket.’
‘Rather beautiful, isn’t it?’ agreed Christopher. ‘But then it should be. She charged me enough for it.’
‘Who?’ I looked at Charlotte who had the grace to have gone slightly pink.
‘I think it turned out rather well,’ she said.
Christopher looked at her with genuine affection. ‘She’s a talented girl, loath as I am to admit it. I’ve had nine compliments on the jacket already this afternoon, and eight of them were from Patrick Reece. You know he tried to push some cocaine on me when I arrived? I thought those days were behind him.’
We stayed in Charlotte’s room for longer than was strictly polite, but eventually Charlotte decided that the breath and Aunt Clare’s reading could be put off no longer. Re-entering the study was like walking into a furnace. The voices had grown louder with drink and the windows were foggy.
‘Open the window, Phoebe,’ ordered Charlotte, ‘and get me another drink.’ Once Charlotte had her glass in hand, she tapped on the side with a teaspoon, but it didn’t begin to cut through the wall of gossip.
‘Excuse me!’ said Charlotte, and again, louder, ‘EXCUSE ME!’
Everyone fell silent and looked at Charlotte in amazement, as if she had just taken off all her clothes.
‘I’d like to introduce the reason why we’re all here this afternoon,’ said Charlotte in her clear voice. ‘She’s an angel and a slave-driver to boot. The one and only. once met and never forgotten — Her Serene Highness — Clare Delancy!’
There was a great whoop of applause and Aunt Clare moved over to the fireplace where Charlotte was standing.
‘I’ve been with this remarkable book from the start,’ Charlotte went on, ‘and I thought it would be rather nice for everyone if tonight Aunt Clare read an extract from her memoirs.
A few people murmured in agreement.
‘If you would all take a seat or remain standing quietly just for a few minutes,’ said Charlotte, ‘Aunt Clare will begin.’
Aunt Clare picked up the manuscript, looked at the passage Charlotte had selected for her to read and placed it back down
on the table. Charlotte frowned. Aunt Clare sighed and smiled. ‘I would like to read you an extract that my darling niece hasn’t even heard,’ she said, pulling two pieces of paper out of her bag. They were covered in smudgy blue ink. ‘I had to wait until I’d finished the rest of the book until I wrote this bit,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Charlotte.’
Charlotte looked bemused. By this stage the room was simply humming with people — some were standing in the corridor peering in as far as they could. I had been squashed rather further into the room than I would have liked and felt a sudden wave of claustrophobia. I felt awkwardly giant, for next to me stood a woman half my height and five times my age with the most enormous head of white hair and long fingernails, while on my other side was an eccentrically dressed man of sixty-five-ish who can’t have been far off dwarf status; and as the exception that proved Charlotte’s bad breath rule, he smelled overwhelmingly of peppermints and snuff. I tried to move my feet a little and nearly toppled over. I caught Charlotte’s eye and saw her trying not to giggle.
‘I’d like to read you the prologue to my story, because it is, in many ways, the most important passage in the whole book,’ began Aunt Clare, headmistress to pupils, and the force of her presence and the richness of her voice was such that the whole room fell silent at once. ‘It is simple truth and it happened in 1936. What more could anyone want from a prologue?’ She glanced down at the typed page and began to read.
‘I always felt there was a resonance in the fact that my years exactly matched those of the war and of the century and as a result, I measured the world in the same way as I did my own existence. When I was ten, the world around me was ten and growing fast. Equally the century and I began the Great War as children of fourteen. We ended it women of eighteen.’ Aunt Clare paused here and for a second I thought I saw a flash of uncertainty in her expression. She’s nervous, I thought, and thank goodness for that. She cleared her throat and went on, a little too fast at first, then slowing down as she progressed so that every sentence could be captured in the imagination of her audience. I don’t think that there was one person left in the room by the time she finished. Of course, we were all physically there, but everyone’s minds had run away with Aunt Clare. Everyone was with her in 1936.
‘At thirty I met the only man I have ever truly loved outside the opera house at Covent Garden. I was pleased to be on my own; freedom was a rare and delicious treat for me at that time. A man who looked barely old enough to be out of school, carrying an empty birdcage, asked me if he could be so rude as to steal a cigarette. Certainly I said, and he ended up repaying me by taking me out to dinner. We talked of everything but opera, laughed a great deal and drank endless glasses of Chablis and he grew up in front of my eyes. He was just nineteen and so alive with that elusive, inquisitive lust for existence that I felt myself transforming in front of his eyes. I talked in a way I had never talked to anyone, I laid my soul down on the table between us and let him hold it up to the light and ask what it meant: I want to see the world, I said. Go, he said I’m married to a man who detests travel, I told him. Leave him behind, he said. I have a seven-year-old son, I retorted Better and better, he claimed A boy of seven is the perfect companion on any journey I imagined for a blissful few hours that I would be with him for ever, but when midnight came he said he had to drive home, to his parents’ house in the country and could he stop a taxi for me?’ Of course, I said, and I sat in the back of the cab on the way home, imagining that any moment it was to turn back into a pumpkin. I never forgot that evening. Not only because I met him, but because I realised that it was possible for the world to spin just for you, even if only for the length of time that it took to have dinner. For those few hours, I experienced a happiness so acute it felt half holy; a happiness made all the more intense because I knew it was a limited joy just passing through. I did what I had suggested to him that I might do, I did what I never imagined I would ever have the courage to do. Harry and I left Samuel for an entire year and opened our eyes to the rest of the world. What follows is an account of that year, and none of it would have happened were it not for that evening with a stranger in Covent Garden.’
Aunt Clare stopped for a moment and you could have heard a pin drop.
‘I never saw him again, though I heard his name occasionally and it was in India the following year that I read of his engagement in the papers. He married an astonishingly beautiful girl of seventeen.’
I bit my lip and choked back the tidal wave of saltwater that threatened to spill from my eyes. As if feeling it too, Aunt Clare’s eyes hit mine for a moment and hers smiled, infinitely kind.
‘He was killed, of course. The war saw to that. Yet my memory of him is as clear today as it was the morning after our meeting. I think of him still, and in writing this book, the boy with the birdcage has never been far from my thoughts.’
She stopped there and placed the manuscript down on the table in front of her. Her hand was shaking a little. And I knew in the way that you realise you have known something all along. Aunt Clare’s birdcage boy was Papa.
The guests showed no signs of leaving when Aunt Clare had finished reading. If anything, they grew louder s
till, clattering their teeth on champagne glasses, ordering Phoebe to find more cakes and scones. Charlotte and I moved, without speaking, away from the noise and into the morning room.
‘Goodness,’ said Charlotte, who was looking rather white. ‘I don’t suppose you saw that one coming. I certainly didn’t.’ She stood by the window looking down onto the street. ‘Aunt Clare certainly hasn’t lost the ability to hold an audience,’ she added.
‘It’s quite all right,’ I said, and my voice sounded high and unnatural. ‘I think I knew all along that there was something unspoken between Aunt Clare and me. I suppose you did too.’
‘She didn’t dictate that passage to me, Penelope,’ said Charlotte in sudden panic. ‘You have to believe her on that count. She would have known that I would have told you.’
She was right, and I did believe her. It all made sense, of course. Mama’s diary entry the night that I had first mentioned Aunt Clare’s name. Her remark the other night: ‘Maybe he would have been better off with someone older, someone with more confidence.’ She must have known about their evening outside the opera house. Papa must have told her about the one woman who had stirred him before he met her, and being Mama she had never forgotten it.
‘You know nothing ever happened between them? What she read there was the absolute truth,’ said Charlotte, watching me carefully. ‘Oh, darling Penelope, don’t cry!’
Of course, tears take their cue from lines like this, and I found that once I had started weeping, it was impossible to stop. I cried for Papa, and for what we lost when he was killed. I cried for Mama and for Magna and for Inigo. But most of all, I cried for myself, for realising too late that it had been Harry all along, and for pushing him away from me every time he nearly got close. Then, to my horror, the door creaked open, and Aunt Clare’s white-blond head peered round it at us.
‘Penelope!’ she cried, and it was the first time I had seen her truly shocked.
‘Why did you have to read that bit?’ demanded Charlotte, and it was the first time I had seen her truly angry. ‘How could you do that to her? In front of a room full of people?’
Aunt Clare just sighed and placed her hand on my shoulder. ‘I could never tell you,’ she said. ‘And the oddest thing about it was that to anyone else, it would appear that there was nothing to tell. There was nothing to tell, just that I once spent an evening dining with a terribly nice man who happened to be your father. Yet of course, to me, it was everything,’ she said simply. ‘Oh, Charlotte, do open the window. It feels as if the house is on fire.’
‘It’s quite all right,’ I said truthfully. ‘I suppose it’s just so jolly — oh, I don’t know, maddening that Papa had to be killed.’ I blew my nose. ‘Sometimes I feel so cross with him for not staying alive.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Charlotte, get the child some brandy.’
Charlotte poured me a double and I took a great gulp.
‘I seem to have drunk rather a lot this year,’ I said with a half-laugh.
‘Comfort yourself with the knowledge that however much you’ve drunk, Marina Hamilton will have drunk more,’ said Charlotte.
‘I won’t have that girl’s name mentioned in this house,’ said Aunt Clare ominously.
‘Was — was Papa very like me? To look at, I mean?’ I asked Aunt Clare. I knew the answer, of course I did, but I needed, very much, to hear it from someone other than Mama.
‘Oh, you’re very like him,’ said Aunt Clare. ‘That wonderful long nose and those exquisite freckles! I knew right away. as soon as I first set eyes on you, do you remember?’
‘Did you think him very handsome?’ Charlotte asked her. Aunt Clare paused before answering. ‘I wouldn’t say that he was handsome in the usual way.’ she admitted. ‘He was too rare for that, too unusual-looking with that strange colouring and those long eyelashes. Goodness me, Charlotte,’ she went on, much her old self again, ‘who on earth ever fell in love with anyone who looked handsome? What a ghastly bore handsome is.
I remembered Charlotte and me in the back of the cab, a few moments after we had first met at the bus stop.
Is he the most handsome boy in London?’ I had asked her of Harry.
Of course not! she had responded But he’s by far the most interesting.
‘Do you mean he was funny? Mama says that she never had a straight face for longer than five minutes when Papa was alive. She says he made her laugh more than anyone else in the world.’
‘He liked words — liked the way he could twist their meaning to make me laugh.’
‘Ooh! You do that, Penelope!’ cried Charlotte.’
‘Do I?’ I was absurdly pleased.
‘There was a lightness about him,’ said Aunt Clare. ‘That’s the only word I can think of to describe it. You have it too.’
‘What do you mean?’
Aunt Clare stretched her hand out towards my brandy. ‘He struck me as being terribly good at living, which is the greatest gift anyone can ever have. A talent for life.’
‘You mean he seemed very happy?’
‘Not just happy.’ said Aunt Clare. ‘Nothing as straightforward as that.’
‘What do you mean, then?’
‘He was at ease with himself, he was at home in his own skin. I remember seeing the waitress light up when he asked her where she got her pretty shoes.’
‘He was charming, then?’
‘More than that, too. It wasn’t because he was handsome, but because he made people feel as though they were in the right place at the right time when they were with him. I don’t think for a moment that he was aware of this. It was instinctive, his talent for living brilliantly.’
‘Brilliantly?’ It seemed an odd choice of word. No one had ever called Papa brilliant before.
‘For living brightly.’
‘So why did he have to die, then?’ I asked. I didn’t mean to say it out loud. It sounded so stupid. But Aunt Clare looked at me and smiled.
‘One thing I’ve realised,’ she said slowly. ‘The people who are good at living are very good at dying too. I don’t think he was afraid of death.’
‘You — you don’t?’
For a moment it was as if someone had lifted a great weight from my shoulders and I felt almost dizzy with the relief of it, my head light with what Aunt Clare had said. Yet what was I doing, filling myself up with romantic notions about my father from a woman who had only ever spent a few hours with him? What could she know about the man’s soul? However much I loved Aunt Clare, I couldn’t allow myself to be drawn into thinking that she understood Papa better than anyone else. It wasn’t possible.
‘How can you say that? You hardly knew him,’ I said sadly.
But she took my hand in hers. ‘He wasn’t afraid,’ she said quietly. ‘I just know. He wasn’t afraid.’
And I believed her. Not because I wanted to, but because I knew it was true.
Charlotte came with me in the cab to Paddington. We didn’t speak much. My mind swam with images of Papa and Aunt Clare, Papa and Talitha on their wedding day. Papa fighting, Papa dying.
‘I wish Harry was here,’ Charlotte said suddenly. And just the mention of his name sent the adrenalin pumping into my fingertips.
‘I miss him too,’ I said, unable not to say it. Charlotte looked at me with a sideways grin.
‘Oh, I never said I missed him,’ she said, ‘I just wish he could have been here this afternoon. Gosh, Penelope, you’re coming closer and closer to confessing it to me, aren’t you?’
I didn’t smile. I didn’t say anything. Missing Harry was the least amusing experience that I had ever had. Especially when- he was aching as much as I was, but not over me at all. The cab rattled up Kensington Church Street.
‘He’ll come back, you know,’ said Charlotte. ‘They always do.’
There’s never any warning that something extraordinary is about to happen, is there? I got the 6.15 train home, as usual, and collected Golden Arrow from his usual spot. I quickened my pace as I rode
past the deserted village green and threaded up Lime Hill towards the drive. It was dark so I kept the estate wall close to my left as I pedalled along the road, and I hummed Johnnie Ray songs and tried to push away the strange but powerful sense of dreadful urgency that was swamping me as I made my way home. I don’t know which of my senses picked up the changes first — was it my eyes, seeing the sky redder than it should have been, or my ears hearing the unmistakable sound of distant voices shouting? Was it the taste of something different but indefinable in the night air, or the prickle of fear that touched my skin? I reached the bottom of the drive and found a policeman coming towards me, shining a powerful torch into my eyes. I shielded my face and applied the brakes to Golden Arrow.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked him. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Stay away. miss,’ he said firmly. ‘This is no evening for a young girl like you to be snooping around this place.’
‘I live here!’ I cried, trying to squash the rising panic in my voice. ‘What on earth is happening?’
‘You live here, miss?’ repeated the policeman, suddenly concerned.
‘Yes! I live here!’ I repeated, slightly hysterical.
‘I should come down to the station with me if I were you, miss,’ he said, but I remounted the bike and pushed off towards the house before he could say any more. I think he shouted something after me, but I couldn’t hear — the only thing that mattered was getting home, home, home. My legs pushed round and round, faster and faster, my heart crashed against my ribs and I clenched my fingers over the handlebars and rode on. I came to the turn in the drive, and remembered bringing Charlotte here the first weekend she had stayed at Magna.
‘It’s like nowhere else,’ she had breathed.
My first thought that night was how spectacular it looked; the front lawn and the lime avenue lit up under an orange sky that hurt the eyes with its thunderous, glorious brightness, the house itself more alive, more powerful than I had ever known it. Magna was on fire. There was a triumph in the red glow that swept methodically along the roof, there was beauty in the theatrical leaping of the flames that had taken hold of the house and danced with the falling timber and the crackling walls; and Magna was a willing partner in that dance: there felt to me to be no shout of fear from the burning hose, only a laughter, a joy in its destruction, an exultation in the majesty of the display. Mama! I thought with that cold, sick feeling of dread, and I cycled on, closer and closer to Magna, until the heat from the house was so great, and the smoke in the air so thick, that I had to stop again and gasp for air. In front of me stood a familiarly stout figure.