Secrets of the Heart

8

In late spring, the South Devons were due to be driven to their summer pasture – his dumb blondes, his gentle beauties, who required such pampering during the winter otherwise they drooped. Unlike the tough and hardy Welsh Blacks. Now they were cattle with an attitude.

Andrew checked with the calendar pinned up above his desk – 15 March – for in matters of the farm he was meticulous and knew exactly to the hour when any event was planned. For instance, the date of the planning inquiry, 10 June, was fixed in large letters above the calving rota on the calendar, and two weeks previous to that had been pencilled in for ‘Agnes Campion and film crew’.

Time was flying on. It eluded his grasp, and the days dropped into the slot quicker than any coin.

The computer booted up and Andrew began the daily update of the records. Betsey, Bill, Caro, Carlo… Tammy, Violet…

In the past, Penny had helped. ‘I do half of everything in this marriage,’ she had declared at the beginning, and had kept her word for twenty years, she seated at the kitchen table, he in the study, where they shouted to each other through the open door while they attacked the wall of paper.

Looking back with his newly charged feelings, Andrew was prepared to give those peaceful, productive years more credit than he had done.

Granted, spring and calving had always been bad times for Penny. ‘Everywhere is… ripe,’ she had sobbed once. A mocking conspiracy of plant and animal to show up the Penny who was unable to conceive. ‘It’s the pesticides,’ she accused, ‘used on the other farms. They’ve killed my ovaries.’

A shape at the open window made Andrew look up and, to his amazement, Penny was leaning on the sill wearing one of her more battered anoraks. ‘Hallo, Andrew.’ She had a scarf crammed down over her head and was wearing unfamiliar pink lipstick. She was obviously nervous and triggered a bristling defensiveness in Andrew. He did not bother to get up. ‘What are you doing here? Been let out of the love-nest?’

Penny’s roughened cheeks turned white. ‘I needed some things. Clothes. But don’t let’s discuss that now. I think Caro’s in trouble and you’d better get the vet.’

Within seconds Andrew was in the pen and running a hand over the sweating heifer, trying to locate the position of the calf. She was in pain, and her hard, lumpy flanks heaved in and out with each breath. He almost groaned. It was almost certainly breech and vets cost money. The Devons were usually reliable breeders but you always got one in the bunch.

‘How’s the disaster fund?’ Penny extracted a rope from the bin and tossed it in Andrew’s direction. She was referring to the money they set aside each year under the heading ‘Trouble’.

‘Low. Very low.’ The farm’s finances were never good and each year there was a struggle to meet the contingencies. Andrew swore and caught the eye of the labouring cow. ‘All right, girlie,’ he said. ‘Easy. It was nothing. Easy now.’

He knew what Penny would be thinking. You treat the cow better than you treated me. You are gentle with her, but never with me.

‘You don’t have to stay,’ he said abruptly, because she was right and he didn’t want to think about it. ‘I’ll manage until Peterson comes.’

Penny’s features snapped into a familiar set. ‘Don’t get on your high horse. You need help. She’s a valuable beast.’

‘Fine.’

Together they arranged the pen, working as a team who knew exactly what to do, until a van drew up in the yard. The vet did not waste words.

‘Breech,’ he said. ‘A Caesar, I’m afraid.’

Andrew did some mental arithmetic which, since there was no option, was a waste of time. Penny merely tied up Caro. Peterson administered a local anaesthetic and made the first sweeping cut with the scalpel. The flesh peeled away with a tearing sound and exposed the bulging uterus. Caro remained quite quiet and, seemingly, now not in pain. Gently, Peterson manipulated the calf, all legs and eyes, into the world and settled him beside his mother.

‘I’ll say goodbye, then.’ Penny stuffed her hands into her anorak.

Busy with Caro, neither man responded. The smell of the birth blood was fresh and repellent, primitive, even. Before Peterson had finished sewing Caro up, she was nuzzling and petting her calf. The mother spoke to the calf, the calf spoke to its mother – and the alchemy between mother and offspring was safely conjured. As they watched, the calf looked at its mother and, with a cry, butted his head into her savaged flank.

Peterson gathered up his tools and Andrew hosed the floor. ‘It’s nice,’ said the former. ‘These days, it’s like visiting factories on many farms. Still, you can’t be sentimental.’

Andrew regarded the concrete floor, the corrugated iron, the empty feed bags, the bloodstrewn straw and the quiet nativity, and, with an uplift of spirits, thought, Yes.

To his surprise, when he returned inside Penny was still in the kitchen, sitting quietly at the table. She had taken off the headscarf and her dry, bleached hair sprang round her face. ‘I thought you didn’t live here any more.’ Then, still buoyed by his flash of optimism, Andrew added more gently: ‘I’m getting confused.’

She placed her hands on the table and levered herself to her feet. ‘I had a quick cup of tea. The place is a mess. I knew it would be. I wanted to ask you something.’

He stepped out of his bloodied overalls and dropped them on the floor. Penny pointed at them. Andrew shrugged and picked them up. ‘What do you want to ask me?’

She thrummed her fingers on the edge of the table, a curiously uncertain sound. ‘These letters…’ She seemed reluctant to frame her question. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about them when you first found them? Why did you leave it so long before you said anything? You told that girl before you bothered with me.’

Again he shrugged. ‘It wasn’t deliberate. I found them. You were staying with your mother. I sent them off and forgot all about them. Before I knew it the researcher was on the phone.’

The drumming increased. Then ceased. ‘You didn’t want me to share in them,’ she stated flatly.

‘Then why ask?’

She fumbled with the zip of the anorak. ‘I suppose it confirmed that I, your wife, was the last person in the world in whom you would confide. That’s all.’ She placed the chair neatly under the table and stepped back from the piece of furniture at which she had spent so much of her married life. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

He knew from her clenched hands that she was willing him to contradict her and to apologize. In fact, Andrew knew exactly what Penny wanted, but he could not summon the charity to give it. He looked away, down at the table, which still wore a veneer of the polish Penny had applied with such energy when she ran the house, and felt his lack of charity more bitterly than he could describe.

‘That’s why I left.’ Her voice was brittle with tension. ‘I couldn’t bear it any more.’

Her sadness encompassed the non-children, the silent husband, the threat to her home, the lack of a future and the battle they should be fighting together. As did his.

Cross, tired and a fish out of water, Bel came shakily down off the train on to the platform at Charlborough where Agnes was waiting, bearing schedules, budgets and the post. Her crossness intensified at the sight of Agnes in old trousers and hastily plaited hair. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘When will you learn?’

Bel had brought her own coffee from London and hunched over a full mug, which Agnes kindly made. ‘This kitchen, Agnes, is a disgrace. Even you can see that.’

Agnes glanced up at the mesh freeways that belonged to the spiders. ‘So it’s no good me asking if you would like to run Five Star from here, then?’

‘You are joking?’

‘I am.’

The postbag was large and it was half an hour or so before Agnes slit open a packet from Julian Knox containing a photocopied chapter from Undercover During the Second World War, and an invitation to a reception for the coming Friday, plus a brief note asking if she would have dinner with him afterwards.

‘Ah,’ said Agnes, who had tried a couple of times to contact him at Portcullis but had been told by Angela that he was away.

‘Intelligence-gathering as a metaphor, do you suppose?’ Bel’s shrewdness had returned with the intake of caffeine.

‘For what?’

Bel was expert at interpreting Agnes’s expressions. ‘You’ve got this one bad,’ she said wearily. ‘It’s the crusade.’

Agnes did not contradict her.

The idea had been for Bel to look over the house. But even with the coffee boost, Bel did not seem good material. Agnes toned down the planned tour of the house, omitting the attics and, having assessed Bel’s fake snakeskin half-boots, the walk by the river. Yet if the shivers were a little overdone, Bel was reasonably complimentary about the rooms and the hall.

Agnes pointed out the depressions in the flagstones made by countless feet, the mark on the newel post where generations had put a hand to steady themselves, the burn in the wood on the bottom tread, made – family history had it – by the heated shoe of a horse fleeing with the news of defeat from a Civil War battle. She bent over and punched the tapestried seat of a stool by the hall window, and eddies of dust rose into the still, cold air. How do I keep this particular story intact? she asked herself, and thought of the dust-shrouded attics where once a maid had wept and hidden a plate.

Bel paused by the portrait of the other Agnes. ‘She looks tough. Who was she?’

Agnes explained that she had died in childbirth at the age of thirty-one, leaving a husband, nine children and a household.

Bel’s crossness returned. ‘She wasn’t a woman, she was an organ. No wonder she looks like death in life.’

Tenderly, Agnes touched the painted face. The other Agnes’s lips were firm, composed. The silk dress was trimmed with lace and the mirror, held in a white, ringed hand, reflected the furniture and paintings in the room. ‘She accepted it, or at least didn’t question it. Those were the terms of her time and she exchanged them for status.’

‘Gave her a prolapse more like.’

‘Probably.’ Agnes sank down on the bottom stair. ‘I try to imagine what she felt, especially during that last pregnancy. Frightened, perhaps, knowing the luck had probably run out.’

Bel shrugged. ‘I should think she was furious. Wouldn’t you have been? He did not love her enough to stop giving her children.’ She kicked one snakeskin boot against the other. ‘Excuse me, kind husband, you have failed to impregnate me for the nth time. To your work, sir. I am ready to receive the death thrust.’

‘But she had a family,’ Agnes pointed out, ‘which meant something. “Ladye. I shall no more delighte in any creature, but the Lord.” Her husband wrote that on the cover of her housekeeping book after she died, and he had carved on her tomb, “From one who loved her”.’

‘Thank the Lord,’ said Bel, reaching for her cigarettes, ‘that childbirth is now an option.’ She lit one and blew out a lazy, contemptuous curl of smoke.

‘Yes,’ said Agnes, after a moment. ‘Thank goodness.’