Secrets of the Heart

11

Everyone sat it out through March, which turned to April, a grudging, unspring-like April with squalls of rain and blustery winds, and into May, holding the equilibrium. At least, that was how Agnes saw it. She pictured Kitty – well, a notional picture of Kitty – willing the centre to hold and Julian, hair ruffled, eyes hollow with strain, dodging the issue. And herself?

She did her best to forget Julian. Heroically so. She and Bel had mapped the next six months’ work, found the money, set the schedules. This left her free to concentrate on the house.

My house, she thought, so wounded by all that warm, careless flesh that has lived under its roof, by numberless feet treading through the centuries, by weather and by the slippage of energy and money.

First, a survey. (‘If you want instant depression,’ Julian Knox had told Agnes over that meal of scrambled eggs, ‘talk to a surveyor.’ He added, ‘They are careful people.’)

No doubt about it, Mr Harvey was indeed a careful man. He took one look at Flagge House and got down to work with his electronic tape-measure, which emitted a bee-like hum.

‘Regular maintenance,’ he informed Agnes, with the satisfaction of a missionary faced with the most pagan of territories, ‘can pre-empt all sorts of horrors, and I’m afraid the late Mr Campion did not invest in it, if you take my meaning.’ Enraptured by the flight of his electronic bees, he adjusted the dial. ‘An historic house can’t look after itself.’ His tone was one of reproof.

They made for the drawing room and Mr Harvey measured and paced with his tape-measure and dictated notes. Occasionally he became transfixed by a crack or a fissure, by the tilt of the stone fireplace and, in particular, the long windows overlooking the terrace.

Eventually he pronounced, ‘Proper restoration is always expensive, but it depends what you want. A total overhaul or just bits and pieces.’

‘Can you pick and choose what to preserve?’ Agnes fingered a curtain, which had been bleached by the light. ‘I would have thought not.’

Mr Harvey’s machine hummed in agreement. ‘I’d like to view the cellars and storage areas.’

The cellars ran the length of the house and were dark, cold, and bled damp. Agnes led the way. ‘This one was known as the women’s cellar,’ she explained, embarrassed that anyone should have had to work in such conditions, ‘where they did the pickling, spicing and meat curing. The men’s cellar, where the wine and beer was kept, is through that door.’

The measuring and humming and dictating began all over again. If Mr Harvey was of a careful disposition, he was also a showman. He paused, milking his moment, and ran his hand over the brick on which a blotched mural had been painted in mould. ‘It’s a big story of rising damp, Miss Campion.’ To emphasize the tragedy, he stamped his feet on the flint cobbles and showed her where the ooze created a lustrous setting around the cobbles.

Agnes went quiet. She knew death had been here, an uneasy death, or so it had been reported in the records. A-swagger with riches racked up from exploiting trade in cardamom, muslin and jute in the East India Company, Archibald Campion had been hot to build a grandiose Victorian wing. Driving their spades into the earth to set the foundations for the wing, the estate workers had hit a pile of human bones. ‘There was no question that they were human,’ noted Camilla Campion, Archibald’s wife, ‘and some were horribly charred. We were afraid that we would catch a putrid contagion.’ The conclusion was, she reported, shocked, that these bones were the relicts of plague victims, denied proper burial in the graveyard.

Unquiet their death and, thus, unquiet their souls: they beat their anguish and disturbance against the brick and silence.

Mr Harvey was upset by what his inspection revealed. His machine snapped to a halt. ‘I’m afraid that, over the years, the external soil level has risen. It requires to be stripped back and a damp course inserted.’

‘I’d better get you some coffee, Mr Harvey, and we can discuss the options.’

While they sat and drank it in the kitchen, Mr Harvey reeled off a verbatim report in which the word ‘defective’ featured heavily. The roof timbers were defective. The brickwork was defective and had the additional problem of soot disease – ‘Sulphuric acid, Miss Campion, caused by a mingling of fumes and damp air, which penetrates the brickwork.’ Further defects included damp in the roof and an almost certain infestation of lyctus and death-watch beetle, and the ivy growth on the Victorian wing.

‘I know that,’ said Agnes. She looked down at her untouched coffee. ‘What are we talking?’

Mr Harvey shifted into a comfortable position on the chair and totted up sums under his breath. ‘Thousands.’ He peered at her face. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Campion. Once you’ve reached fifty or so anything else on top seems immaterial.’

At last Mr Harvey announced that he had done. With doom in her heart, Agnes accompanied him to his van, parked by the kitchen garden. He tapped the wall. ‘These I like. Put me in front of a wall,’ he said, ‘and I can tell you such things about it. Like this one.’ He pointed. ‘English bond. Not to be mixed up with Flemish bond.’

‘Certainly not,’ said Agnes, with gallows humour.

‘I noticed when I drove up that your boundary wall over by the river is knapped flint and brick. Used in Hampshire and here since Roman times. Needs repairing.’ He took a final squint up at the house. ‘Bucket repointing on the brickwork,’ he said, ‘and you’ll probably have to stipple it for the weathered effect. Otherwise, you’ll have the heritage people down on you.’ He inserted himself into his van. ‘Guttering? Well, needs completely replacing. Cast iron, I’m afraid, but we might get away with fibreglass for the hopper heads.’

Then, mercifully, Mr Harvey drove carefully away.

The house was bleeding to death and, for the moment, she was powerless to provide a transfusion.

Within an hour, Peter Bingham was on the phone to report that he had had a telephone call from a London estate agent, who wished to know if Flagge House was for sale. A housing association and a developer, who specialized in converting older properties into multiple-occupancy, had both expressed interest.

‘Stop there,’ said Agnes. ‘Have you been speaking to Mr Harvey? Whether you have or you haven’t, the answer is the same.’

While Agnes dealt with Mr Harvey, the sisters were upstairs practising packing for the Sound of Music holiday. Or, at least, Maud was. The bedroom was chilly, and when a depressed Agnes joined them, she scolded them for not turning on the electric radiator that she had bought in an effort to head off Maud’s fires. Shoes clacking on the wooden floor, she crossed the room and turned it on.

Outside, the river ran strong and fierce, still swollen with spring rain.

‘We wanted to save you money,’ said Bea, edging closer to the heat.

Maud sailed about the bedroom, dropping pieces of clothing here and there and shuffling, to no point, through a discarded pile of blouses and stockings. Patient Bea waited on the sidelines and, every so often, stepped in to restore order.

‘Only one suitcase, dear, don’t you think?’ Bea sorted the stockings into colour-coded heaps.

‘You were always so bossy,’ said her elder sister. ‘Always.’

Bea’s busy hands did not stop. ‘Was I? Dick didn’t think so. He liked the way I kept house.’

Maud’s large eyes were veiled. ‘Dick,’ she said spitefully, ‘was a saint.’

Bea dropped the stockings and plumped down on the edge of the bed. ‘Yes, he was, wasn’t he?’ The characteristic serenity had cracked, and she showed her distress. And I miss him so.’

Agnes sat down beside Bea and slid her arm around her shoulders. ‘What do you miss most?’

Bea picked at the folds in her skirt. ‘I miss… I miss the journey. We moved forward… I can’t explain quite what I mean. But, whatever it was, it ended when he died.’ The concertina of material twitched between her fingers.

Not to be outdone, Maud was still rattling through her clothes. She held up a blouse against her chest, threw it down, picked up an alternative. ‘The buttons are off this one.’ She swung round and accosted the pair on the bed. ‘Where did this… journey with Dick begin? Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought you lived all your married life in Shaftesbury. Or are you speaking in some kind of code?’ Her voice crescendoed with echoes of a child’s rage.

Agnes squeezed Bea tight. ‘Darling Bea.’

Bea held out her hand for Maud’s blouse. ‘Give it to me. I’ll mend it.’

Maud clutched it hard to her chest. ‘Will it make you feel better?’

‘Maud!’ Agnes summoned her patience.

‘Give me the blouse, dear.’ Bea turned so pale that Agnes was alarmed.

‘Have you taken your pills, Bea?’ she asked.

Maud gave the blouse a final inspection and tossed it over to her sister. ‘There.’

Agnes retrieved it from Bea’s lap, folded it and laid it to one side. ‘You can sort it out later. You are all right, aren’t you, Bea?’

‘Oh, yes, dear. Of course.’ Bea was looking more her normal self. She seemed embarrassed by her revelations and twisted her wedding ring up to her knuckle. ‘Don’t mind what I say. I was confused. But the habit…’ she considered ‘… of being with someone has to be unlearned.’

‘Alors.’ Maud hovered in front of her sister. ‘Marriage is there to be endured, like bank managers and politicians, because there is nothing else.’

‘Maud, that’s foolish,’ murmured Bea.

‘I may be many things, but not a fool.’ In a rare gesture, Maud placed a hand on Bea’s shoulder. ‘I wish,’ she said, ‘that I missed John.’

There was a lull in the jealousies and hostilities.

Julian rang the day after. ‘Agnes? I’ve been thinking. Would you like to come sailing at the weekend? I’ll tell you about Kitty as I promised.’

Maybe the Kitty problem had been dealt with. Agnes anticipated being gracious and understanding, and prepared to dissipate any awkwardness, but was not offered the chance to do either. Julian greeted her at the station – Agnes’s car was being serviced – and drove straight to the beach. There he busied himself with the boat, a J24, issued requests and Agnes’s high spirits did an about-face. The wind blew in smartly from a choppy sea and, despite the oilskins, her extremities were a mass of gooseflesh. Ignorance made her clumsy and Julian’s commands became sharper. ‘I said I was a novice,’ she protested, when he ordered her to wind a sheet round the cleat.

He seemed amazed. ‘What difference does that make?’

Eventually, sail flapping and sheets clacking, they nosed their way out of the protection of the point and headed for open sea.

Once beyond the spit, the wind screamed and the land bucketed across her vision. Out here, the sun was brighter, tougher, refracting off an expanse of white, wind-tossed water, and Agnes was the dazzled traveller gliding over its waves.

‘I don’t like to mention this,’ Julian hailed Agnes from the tiller, ‘but could you pay attention? The wind’s backing up and it’s going to get rough.’

Agnes hung on grimly to the side of the boat.

‘We’re going about,’ shouted Julian, the wind whipping his hair into a frenzy. Agnes lost her balance and went sprawling against the railing.

‘Novice’s luck,’ said Julian unfeelingly.

How she loathed being useless. She scrambled into a sitting position and rubbed potential bruises. ‘Everyone loves a sailor,’ she said bitterly.

An uncomfortable half-hour later, they beat shore-wards. Agnes shivered with anticipation of dry land, for any pleasure in the sailing had long vanished. She crouched lower on the bench and tried to cover her hands, now enticingly mottled, with the sleeves of her oilskins. In contrast Julian looked on top of the world and glowing.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked, and when he shook his head, said with some feeling, ‘I hate you.’

Back on shore, they queued for fish and chips at the van parked at the harbour entrance then wandered to the nearest bench to eat them. Shuddering cold fits attacked Agnes, and she hiccuped and shivered.

Julian draped his oilskin over her shoulders. ‘You didn’t like that much, did you?’

She shook her head.

He prised the empty chip paper from her stiff hands. ‘It’s a bit early in your sailing career to be subjected to the rigours. I should have made sure that you went out on a sunny pancake.’

‘I have a sailing career?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since meeting me.’

‘I see. Forgive me asking. I just wanted to know, that’s all.’

‘A reasonable question.’ He squinted, balled up the chip papers and launched them at the rubbish bin.

The chips and the strong tea were excellent restoratives. Agnes buried her bare feet in the sand, a thousand tiny abrasions pricking the skin, and slid her hands up inside the sleeves of her waterproof jacket, which almost persuaded her she was warm.

Julian leaned over and wiped a fleck of salt water from her nose. ‘A walk, I think.’

He led her east along the beach in the direction of Cliff House. The tide was way out and they scrabbled for footholds among the stones and layers of beached seaweed. Agnes stopped to pick up a shell with a razor-sharp edge. ‘How long have you lived here?’

She had the impression it was not something he talked about much, but he did now. Chilly parents, a small boy left to his own devices, silent meals, anniversaries unacknowledged. She watched a small figure in grubby shorts haring down the road on a bicycle, bird-watching on the dunes, solitary picnics accompanied by the music of sea birds on the cliff, the tired, cold return to a house where electricity was rationed by cost-conscious parents. Her imagination painted him as very small against the grandeur and sweep of sea and land, and she heard in the screaming wind the sobs of the boy whose tenth birthday had been forgotten.

We have no right to hurt the tender, curled child. Ever.

‘Childhood is a lottery, I suppose,’ she said. ‘You can be born to the wrong parents, in the wrong skin, or the wrong place.’ She let the shell drop to the sand.

They exchanged a look that surprised them both with its impact.

‘The best thing about childhood is that it comes to an end,’ said Julian eventually.

At twelve years old, she had scuttled and lolloped around the walled garden with no purpose, her companion the terror of being abandoned for a second time. ‘That’s why we go back. To make sure we are adults.’

‘Nothing so complicated. In my case, Cliff House was available. I wanted a base.’

The wind slammed a handful of hair into her mouth and she grabbed it. ‘Have it your own way.’

‘I will.’ He grinned and tucked her hand into his elbow.

They wandered on, their feet flicking up seaweed and pebbles, the wind attacking hair and clothes. In the spring light, stone, wood and sand appeared white and insubstantial. The gulls dived. Her hand was warm and safe in his pocket. Surely, once you had been through a love affair and were hovering on the brink of another the feelings and emotions would be the same. But, no, they weren’t. Not at all.

Julian slowed down and pointed. ‘Cliff House is over there. And over there…’ he paused ‘… where the cliff path runs alongside, is where Kitty lives.’

‘Kitty lives here? She lives separately?’ She stopped in her tracks.

‘I promised I would tell you about her.’

‘I’m listening.’

She thought she heard his sigh above the wind. ‘As I told you, I spend most weekends with Kitty’

‘Ah, I see.’ Actually, she did not quite see. ‘Not during the week?’

‘Not usually. Sometimes she comes up to London.’

Agnes asked, ‘Why have you invited me down here? To Kitty’s territory.’

Julian did not answer directly. Instead he pointed to the smooth overhang of rock where compressed clay and shale formed a perfect fossil bed. As a boy, I spent hours hunting for fossils and I found my best ones there. Often in the least likely places. I learned never to give up the chase which, in the end, was a pity because word got around and the fossil hunters descended in droves.’ There was a pause, and he added quietly, ‘Kitty and I allow ourselves a degree of freedom. That was the arrangement. It’s worked for a long time.’

A seagull screamed past and splashed heavily into the sea.

She stopped and pushed the obstinate strands of hair out of her mouth. ‘Does it work for Kitty too?’

‘I don’t know any more,’ he said.

‘And you?’

He hesitated. ‘Our agreement was that if we wished to go our separate ways for a little while then we were free to do so.’

‘Was?’ she reiterated.

He looked down at her. ‘Things change.’

In the kitchen of Cliff House, Julian produced cakes and tea. ‘I have a housekeeper who comes in when Kitty isn’t here and organizes things.’ He lifted the laden tray and conducted Agnes into the conservatory, which had an uninterrupted view over the garden to the sea. Through the glass, the sea appeared tamed and silent. Julian was still in his ragged, salty jeans, but he had combed his hair, and the wildness had been replaced by something smoother, less direct. The small, lonely boy had been put back in the cupboard.

Agnes drank her tea. ‘Who does the gardening?’ she asked, but she was thinking frantically about the business of Kitty. How did this woman, this weekend woman, fit in? Did he wish to get rid of one weekend woman only to substitute another? ‘Things change,’ he had said, and she flinched at the problems the two words encompassed. How could she have imagined that Julian would arrive unencumbered in her life?

‘Theo. He’s an outpatient at the local psychiatric hospital. He works for Kitty too. In fact, he adores her. Gardening and cleaning are part of his therapy.’

‘I need a Theo. Can every home have one?’

‘Agnes, can I say something? Don’t let your house drag you under for the sake of it. Preserving a house at all costs is… not clever. If you are going to do it, think hard.’

He looked so anxious and genuine, so upset for her, that she wanted to kiss him into tranquillity. Instead, she smiled sweetly at him. And you told me not to trust anyone.’

The phone rang and he got up to answer it. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

A minute stretched into two, then five and she could hear him talking fast in the next room. The daylight was fading and the sun was poised above the sea like a scarlet bauble, so bright that Agnes wanted to touch it. She let herself out of the conservatory and walked down to the gate that led on to the cliff path.

It was narrow and the cliff was steep, dangerous, no doubt, in the dark. Here and there it divided and forked down to the tiny beach, which was flanked by black rocks and pools, one leading into the other like a necklace of sparkling stones. The dying sun threw a red wash across the rocks and pools where the mermaid would – surely – rise to the surface to meet her calvary of human love, and Neptune ride in on the spume to impose his law.

Out to sea, a tanker steamed from east to west. The incoming tide rushed in and flung a lacework, woven with orange peel, tin cans and plastic bottles, further up the sand.

‘Things change,’ she reiterated, feeling the first rays of real happiness steal through her. The prodigal returns.

‘Hallo,’ said a voice from below. ‘Who are you?’

Agnes swivelled round. Ultra-slender, ultra-groomed, honey blonde, defensive… This must be Kitty.