Secrets of the Heart

9

Friday.

For Kitty, a day of preparation, dedicated to the readying of the body, as Catholics once reserved it for fish. It had been her habit since the beginning, since the Harrys, the Robins, the Charleses – and Julian – from when her flesh had still been sweet and pliant, and the preparations had been more of a celebration than a necessity.

Now, change was creeping in, and Kitty was forced to consider new tactics against the rigidity tightening her skeleton, and the slackness sliding into her slender body. This enemy – age – had to be fought, with exercise, unguents and discreet visits to the plastic surgeon. Kitty knew she was inviting mockery, contempt, perhaps, from those who did not need such props (yet) and from those who considered one should take whatever one was given, brittle bones, sagging chins and all, but to take charge of her disintegration helped Kitty a great deal.

I was brought up in a world, she told herself, where we were taught that to make our bodies pleasing to men was our prime function. I have obeyed my lessons. I am not about to change for the sake of new political theories.

Anyway, any fool knows that it works better.

She scrutinized other women for clues. Did that one betray a new wrinkle, the suggestion of fat pooled around the waist? Or did she exhibit a fullness in the upper arm, and the tell-tale collapse of flesh between the nose and chin? If she found the signs, Kitty was secretly, shamefully, pleased that she was not alone. Yet, even then, into that companionable sense of fellow decay crept competition. She would prove better at preserving herself than they. Her arms would be slenderer, her chin less full, her thighs more taut.

Sometimes she imagined climbing inside the mind of the younger woman and tasting her freedom, her shamelessness, her ambition. Then Kitty would be permitted to view the horizon as these clever, earning, self-sufficient younger sisters saw it. Then again, sometimes she imagined it was possible to knock a way out of the pretty shell in which Julian kept her. But not for long: anxiety and fear would reclaim her. It was ridiculous to think she could earn her living in the conventional manner. Anyway, she loved Julian too much.

To get on with Friday.

The morning. Around her breakfast tray lay copies of the day’s newspapers, to be tidied out of sight. From them, Kitty extracted various opinions of the British economy and the latest play to hit London’s West End, which she planned to recycle, with subtle amendments, during dinner with Julian. These days, having an opinion was always useful.

Next, the bath and the process of creaming, patting and disguising. After she had applied her makeup, Kitty shrugged off her dressing-gown and pulled open a drawer in the cupboard. It was stacked with silk shirts, all tenderly folded and stowed. So expensive, so beautiful, so desirable. A second drawer revealed cashmere jumpers: grey, écru and white. Kitty sorted through them, their texture emitting a luxurious message through her skin, and picked the one for the day.

She pushed her feet into a pair of new high-heeled crocodile shoes. Finally, she checked the financial pages of The Times.

Yes. The portfolio was in excellent shape. Each of her lovers had given her something, including the one who had left a large sum in his will. (Of course, the children had screamed blue murder.) To her surprise, Kitty discovered that she had an instinct for the stock market, a feel for the swell of loss and gain. Neither was she too greedy: Kitty knew when to cut her losses.

At the beginning, when Julian had been so besotted (but not, she reminded herself, enough to marry her), he had taken time to explain the market. It was a curve, he said, that went either up or down. But you had to be careful. If you magnified any portion of that curve, even smaller variations would be revealed. ‘By all means take advantage of them,’ he had said, ‘but don’t try to explain the whole picture from them.’ Kitty always smiled at the recollection. It was so characteristic of her lover, interfering, cajoling, anxious to explain how to see things. Oh, he had been at his best when expounding his theory: impassioned, alive, powerful.

But she had seen the point at once. One way or another, she had been operating on the same principle all her adult life.

‘Of course,’ whispered a cocktail-party acquaintance into Kitty’s ear back in those early days, ‘Julian’s name is mud among certain elements in the City. They don’t go much on his philosophy. Julian is thought to be someone who preaches the good of his operations and, at the same time, is completely ruthless. I mean,’ murmured the putative friend, ‘One does not like to be spitted and, at the same time, to be told it’s good for you, does one?’

At the time, this view of Julian had disturbed Kitty, for it was not always possible to know what you were letting yourself in for when you made a sexual arrangement. That was before she fell in love with him. Now, Kitty felt her knowledge of Julian to be far superior. She knew, she knew – because she loved him – that his cool, detached manner hid a sadness that she could not quite understand and never would.

Kitty had taken her finances into her own hands, and Julian thoroughly approved. Now, she had such a sweet man to advise her, and they enjoyed very nice conversations on a weekly basis.

Kitty breakfasted on grapefruit and black coffee. Then she swallowed several vitamin pills, checked the fridge and put on her pale blue jacket. For years now, she had held a block booking at the beautician’s for Friday mornings. Nine thirty sharp to eleven thirty. Today that resulted in the smoothest of legs and underarms, and in scented, massaged flesh. Now it was time to do the weekend shopping.

Lymouth was crowded. In the last two years, a couple of supermarkets had appeared in the high street and brought in extra custom. Kitty emerged from the second, more expensive one, and encountered Vita Huntingdon, who was bearing several monogrammed bags.

Kitty smiled. ‘Special occasion?’

‘Daisy Wright’s fiftieth.’ Vita’s large, big-boned face was flushed. ‘They’re making quite a thing of it.’ Having imparted this information so carelessly, Vita obviously immediately regretted it. Kitty knew why: she herself had not been invited.

Kitty felt the bars around her status in Lymouth lock into position. ‘How lovely,’ she said, in her lightest voice. ‘Is it a big do?’

Vita attempted to steer into less choppy waters. ‘It’s on Wednesday,’ she said, as if that explained the lack of an invitation on Kitty’s mantelpiece. ‘So, you see, Kitty dear, Julian wouldn’t be around, would he? It’s in the evening, with a marquee. I shall be wearing my thermal undies.’ As she got deeper into it, Vita’s jaw made a sawing motion. She swallowed. ‘Must dash.’

Kitty stood aside. ‘Lovely day.’

‘Isn’t it.’

It’s not so much that I’m a kept woman, Kitty transferred the shopping from one hand to the other, but the precariousness of my position. They think that, at any minute, I might make a play for one of their husbands. They think I know the ropes of ‘all that’, the irony being that they have probably given up ‘all that’ some time ago. They don’t like being reminded so blatantly of ‘all that’.

Then she smiled to herself. It was perfectly true. She did know the ropes of ‘all that’. Very well indeed.

Kitty put her shopping into the car and drove back along a sun-drenched sea-front. Today, as it was so often on this strip of the coast, the water was the light, joyous blue of spring, clear and controlled-looking.

How stupid of her to be affected by Vita.

On impulse, she parked the car and got out. The sun was almost blinding. She fumbled for her dark glasses and toyed briefly with the idea of a walk, but in her expensive high heels she would only sink into the sand and stumble over the stones.

If you were a married woman, you were invited to fiftieth-birthday parties, but if single or divorced you made do with flower rotas and coffee mornings.

So be it.

The gulls screamed and coasted on the updraughts above her head. Kitty felt disturbed suddenly by the sea’s wideness, its infinite capacity, and turned away. A tiny cascade of sand slipped down a large black rock in front of the car, grain by grain, slipping down, like the days of her own life.

Tell the truth, Kitty. Do you care that much? The truth? These days, you are not so anxious for company, but much more for companionship and intimacy. It no longer mattered that Kitty often spent days alone – except for Theo, of course. Sometimes, after one of these periods of solitude, she became jumpy and remembered that she ought to do something. Attend a lecture? Hold a lunch party? Take painting lessons? Yet none of these appealed very much, and an insistent voice continued to whisper, ‘Look again, think again.’

She started up the car. The water was so blue today, reminding her of the blissful times with Julian when she had surrendered to passionate love in a way that had never been true of her time with Charles, Harry or Robin.

A salt smell, the slap of water running up the sand, the sudden eddies of a chill wind through the car window: it was time to go.

Back at the cottage, Kitty hung up her blue jacket on a padded coat hanger. It exuded a faint scent of wet wool and salt and, for a second or two, her mind went inexplicably, frighteningly blank, as it did sometimes. With a little cry, she buried her face in Julian’s spare jacket, which hung on the next peg.

The phone rang in her small but fashionable kitchen, with its distressed paintwork and double cooker, while she was unpacking the shopping.

‘Kitty,’ said Julian, ‘I won’t make this evening. OK? But come over to me in the morning. Sorry.’

‘What are you doing?’ Kitty’s body felt heavy with disappointment.

There was a slight pause. ‘I’m taking Agnes Campion out to dinner after the Portcullis do.’

‘Ah, the girl on the card.’

‘Yes.’

No more needed to be said. From time to time Julian, well… did this. Nothing serious and, to be fair, Kitty was free to do the same. But she did not want her freedom. That they gave each other a little leeway was part of the bargain and Julian always insisted that Kitty trust him. She strove to do so, but each time it happened she felt she was hovering on the edge of an abyss which, as she forced herself to look into it, seemed ever darker and deeper.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask why she had not been invited to the Portcullis reception – surely, it was her place to be at his side? – when he said, ‘Listen, Kitty, I’ll see you on Saturday’

She put down the phone.

‘Gidday, darl.’

Theo breezed his way into the kitchen carrying the bag with the Equipment. Dusters, bleached and ironed. Cloths for wet work. Cloths for dry work. A stiff nailbrush for obdurate corners. Dettol – the dead giveaway to fellow obsessives. Polish. Lavatory-cleaner. Sink-cleaner. Cream-cleaner. Drawer-cleaner. Bacteria-destroying-cleaner. Window-cleaner.

Sharp but a little madder-looking than of late, Theo grinned at the frozen Kitty. ‘How’s my beaut? Orright?’

She lifted her hand off the phone and her spirits lifted, just a little. Tine. And you?’

For a moment, Theo’s face was a mask of terror and pain, a reflection of the anarchy occupying his head. Then because it was Kitty, whom he loved, asking the question, he pulled himself together. ‘It’s ruddy bad at the mo, if you must know, but a person has to trudge on.’

‘Have they adjusted your medication, Theo?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t ask.’

‘Tea, then.’ Kitty swung into action. In the grip of his bad times, Theo would launch himself at the house, bearing his industrial-size bottle of Dettol, and scrub until the house smelt like a field hospital and Kitty was forced to throw open every window.

They were both outsiders, and the echoes of destruction emanating from the battlefield of Theo’s mind were a small price to pay for the comfort of having him.

‘For the comfort of having each other, darl,’ Theo would have corrected.

In the London flat on the Friday afternoon, Bel hooked a finger into Agnes’s waistband and pulled. ‘A tight black number, I think.’

Agnes allowed herself to be dragged into Bel’s bedroom. ‘Black’s not my colour.’

‘Believe me, darling,’ Bel’s thin hand lay heavy on Agnes, ‘it’s better to go forth armed. Ask any general.’

She opened the cupboard and peered in. ‘It’s a pity you’re so big.’

In Bel’s world a size eight was big. ‘Sticks and stones,’ murmured Agnes, submitting gracefully and thankfully, and pulled off her sweater.

So Agnes waited in a sleeveless black dress (‘I’ll freeze,’ she protested. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ replied Bel. ‘Anyway lust will warm you’) and glittering earrings for Julian Knox, who had insisted on picking her up.

When he arrived, punctually and decisively, but rather pale and preoccupied, he said immediately, ‘You look stunning.’

‘Thank you.’ The dress rustled against Agnes’s skin. ‘I’m sorry I’ve made you go out of your way.’

‘I wanted to pick you up.’ As Julian helped her into the car, he added, ‘There are no ulterior motives.’

‘I expect that’s rubbish,’ she replied, happy and excited at the vista that was panning out nicely.

He fitted the key into the ignition but his eyes continued to rest on her loosened hair. ‘You’re right,’ he said eventually, and both laughed.

At half past ten, Kitty went upstairs to her pretty bedroom, took off her clothes, folded them away and swallowed a homeopathic sleeping pill (less damaging to the skin). It did not work.