Secrets of the Heart

13

Agnes drove the aunts to Heathrow airport, kissed them, and handed them over to the tour operator, who was dressed in a flowered dirndl and holding a placard with ‘16 May, Captains and Marias Assembly Point’ written on it.

Bea’s cheek smelt of fabric-conditioner. Maud’s exuded a soft, powdery decadence and she jabbed a finger into the soft part of Agnes’s arm. ‘Good riddance. That’s what you’re thinking, aren’t you? Tell the truth.’

Agnes tucked a magazine into their hand luggage. ‘Don’t forget to send me a postcard.’

‘Do talk to that nice man about the house,’ said Maud.

Agnes arrived back at Flagge House in the late evening. It seemed too much effort to cook supper so she opted instead for a glass of wine and settled down on Maud’s sofa in the butler’s pantry with a copy of the Jack and Mary letters.

She read till quite late. A harvest sun warmed her neck, the taste of cold, sweet cider was on her tongue, and the weight of a lover’s arm was around her body. Jack to Mary. Wartime lovers, and a man and a woman who had chosen to pursue a life together.

At the end, she let the file slide on to the cushion beside her. Nothing really had happened between her and Julian, only a bat-squeak of promise. No hearts had been broken, not like last time.

What was an affair? A grand roar of passion and tempest, followed either by regret and sadness or by the clutter of saucepans, laundry and the peculiar smell of a fridge that was never cleaned by either party.

Anorexics argued that power came from starvation and that it was possible to thrive on an emotional monasticism. Certainly, it was safer and left her free to work. A man or a woman was mentally leaner, fitter and more active without with the fat of emotion.

Sometimes Agnes pictured herself as others might see her. There goes Agnes. Successful. Ambitious. Her arena, the world; her subjects ranging loftily through politics, social problems, ecology and the vastness of war, the lost spirituality of the century and the cry of the endangered dormouse. No ropes, thank goodness, bind her to a stove, a cradle, an occupied double bed. There was no need for her to be unselfish or to pull in the focus of her vision. Work ensured that you were whole: a thinking, acting, creative person.

‘Agnes,’ those observers would say, ‘a modern woman.’

She closed the letters file and the phone rang.

‘It’s me,’ said Julian. ‘I need to see you.’

‘But I don’t wish to see you.’

There was a pause. ‘I’m ringing from the pub in the village.’

Julian must have heard the hammer of her racing heart down the phone.

He arrived within five minutes with a carrier-bag full of champagne, smoked salmon and home-made brown bread. He was tanned from sailing but pale and exhausted-looking under it. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ He watched her unpack the picnic and set it out on the kitchen table. ‘I’ve tried very hard to stay away, but I’ve had a hell of week at work.’

‘Does Kitty know?’ she asked quietly, fetching a couple of glasses and cutting the bread into slices.

‘No.’

‘Will you tell her?’

‘Probably’

How clever he was. Sneaking past her defences, telling her she was needed. Agnes arranged the smoked salmon on the plate and said desperately, ‘It won’t do.’

‘No, it won’t, but I’m here. Look at me, Agnes.’

Eventually she raised her eyes and looked at him.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he said.

She accepted the glass of champagne, drank and looked up at the ceiling. The spiders were in residence and, in the dim light, the walls were deeply shadowed. She drank another mouthful. Fatal on an empty stomach. After a minute or so it did not seem such a terrible thing that Julian Knox was there in her kitchen. In fact, it felt right. ‘What is happening at Portcullis?’ she asked recklessly, feeling the champagne work its way up to the outer reaches of her brain synapses. ‘Laying waste the fields of England?’

He frowned, and offered her a sandwich. ‘Perhaps you should eat this,’ he said. ‘You looked starved. Since you ask so nicely, things are not brilliant. The share price is going down and I have probably over-extended the two northern projects. There is no lack of demand in the south for houses, but the north is lagging behind and what profits there are from the north are not sufficient to fund the extra-expensive south. But let’s not talk about it. I’ve got something for you.’ Julian picked up his jacket, extracted an envelope and held it out. ‘Don’t look so suspicious. Take it.’

She obeyed. Inside were a couple of closely hand-written photocopied pages.

‘Go on, read it,’ he urged.

‘Number 20. Virginia Marie Lacey. Code name: Claude. Subject responding well. Physically slight, but very fit. Reflects hard on the tasks allotted her and succeeds in maintaining objectivity. N. B. Not good with drink. She must be cautioned to avoid it. She is very young and we question her maturity.’ The report was initialled and dated 21 May 1942.

The second page was written in a different hand. ‘Number 20. Code name: Claude. French excellent. Any slight irregularities in accent put down to childhood in Canada. Exceptional grasp of Morse code. Sometimes obstinate and does not get on with her immediate superior. Disobeyed orders on night operation. Not happy with explosives…’

‘I thought it would interest you.’

Mary? A slight, too-young, determined figure launching herself into moonlit operations without the comfort of a whisky. Agnes stroked the pages and felt a glow of affection for these daring women. ‘How did you get hold of these?’

‘Imperial War Museum. They’re very helpful. According to my source, most of the SOE records were destroyed after the war but a few remained. They didn’t get much down on paper anyway, but these training reports are in the library.’

She drank yet more champagne. ‘You mean, you spent an afternoon doing this for me?’

He took the glass from her hands and set it down on the table. ‘It was a happy couple of hours as it turned out, researching. It took my mind off my problems, which I needed, and I’d rather think about you than Portcullis. Does it make a difference that it was me?’

Ashamed, Agnes looked down at her feet, which seemed bigger than she remembered. Julian had moved close to her and Agnes discovered she was breathless with the effects of champagne. She struggled to order her thoughts. ‘Yes, it does make a difference.’ She folded her arms to make a barrier between them.

He had decided she was drunk, and the idea made her hot with indignation, although she knew it was perfectly true. He put a hand under her chin and raised her face. ‘I’m afraid I’m after both your body and your house.’

‘You mean the land, don’t you?’ she countered. ‘You want to plunder my land like William the Conqueror, or whoever it was.’

‘Not entirely true. Oh, I admit that I’m happy to swing a hammer against centuries of reverence for the English house, not because I don’t rate beauty, because I do.’ He smiled and said gently to soften the impact, ‘It is my opinion that Flagge House is at the end of its natural span.’ He moved even closer and closed his fingers over a handful of plaited hair. ‘How do you woo a woman? Like this?’

She nodded.

‘And like this?’

She was helpless.

‘And what do you wish?’ His breath travelled in a pathway up along her shoulder towards her mouth.

‘There is no point…’

‘In what?’

But the champagne had stolen her subtleties of speech. Agnes found herself slipping down into the chair, where she laid her head on her hands. A longing for nurture, for assuagement of her hunger, for the safety-belt of some kind of certainty, pierced her.

She felt his hands moving over her shoulders and neck. ‘What are you doing?’ she murmured.

‘Unplaiting your hair.’ He sounded surprised that she should ask. ‘I’ve wanted to do it for some time.’

She took his hand, and the tanned fingers clenched within her own. ‘Don’t you see? There’s Kitty’ She clutched the fingers harder.

He had the grace to look away. ‘The honest answer is that I can’t think about Kitty at this moment.’ His fingers played music on her skin. ‘But we do have an arrangement and always have. You can give yourself permission to do something, if you wish to do it. It is simple. You don’t have to hedge it round with guilt and foreboding.’

True. Vexed by the seesaw of drunken emotion, she spread his fingers and slipped her own between them. ‘Darling Agnes,’ said Julian, ‘don’t look like that. I can’t bear it.’

‘Champagne…’ She felt the tipsy waves wash through her. ‘It’s very lovely’

‘Enough.’ He pulled her into the hall and up the stairs.

At the top of the stairs, he hesitated then pushed open her bedroom door, picked her up and laid her on the bed. Agnes gazed up at the spinning room, sighed and gave in.

Half-way through, Agnes thought, I’ve forgotten what it is like. Then she corrected herself, No, for it has never been like this before.

This incident was very physical. Hammering hearts, raised pulses, stomachs shifting. The world was on the move and she was racing to catch up with it.

The light from the corridor caught his face: absorbed, almost feral. Like the fox. No, that was wrong too. The fox sneaks across the water-meadow in search of a drink, his coat brushed with burrs and dulled from weather. I hear him bark, sometimes, at night.

Shaken, she turned to Julian and kissed him. He ran his fingers down the slope of her shoulder. ‘You’re lovely, Agnes, did you know?’

Her spirit lifted, and she caught her breath with the sweetness of the moment. Then she shifted her body towards him and twined her arms around his neck. He fitted his cheek to the curve of her shoulder – and fell asleep with a rapidity that startled her.

The noise of the river woke Agnes at first light. She turned her head on the pillow. Julian was still deeply asleep, a hand flung out, the fingers curled towards the ceiling. He looked exhausted and vulnerable, all assurance gone.

She had been here before. For a long while, she looked at him, the sweetness and elation replaced by a more familiar, dreaded emotion that she had got herself into another muddle.

Agnes slid out of bed, shivering as the air hit her nakedness, grabbed her dressing-gown, crept down the corridor to the bathroom and locked the door. It was important that she and Julian did not share any more intimacies.

While she ran the bath, the huge, stained, claw-footed Edwardian one that took ages to fill, she scrubbed her face with lotion. Then she faced herself squarely in the mirror and made some calculations. Since Pierre, she had not needed any form of birth-control and last night had been a risk. The calculations seemed to pan out in her favour, and Agnes’s slight eruption of panic diminished.

She lay in the bath, head aching, face smarting, a small, voluptuous bruise blooming on her right thigh. In the corners of the bathroom were damp spots, orchidaceous green and brown, and the cheap straw matting that had been laid by Maud in the economy phase was torn in places.

She was wrestling with the gas stove when Julian wandered into the kitchen, stubbled and sleepy. ‘There seems to be no hot water,’ he said mildly, but it infuriated Agnes.

‘I know, I’ve taken it,’ she snapped. ‘You’ll have to wait. This is not Cliff House.’

‘Did I say it was?’ He sat down at the kitchen table and put his chin in his hands. ‘Do you get cross often?’

‘No. I rarely lose my temper,’ she said, even more crossly. Then she checked herself. ‘Actually, I’m known for my calm. Ask the team.’

He tapped a knife on the table, and she coloured at the memories of the night. ‘I just want to know for future reference.’

Cheeks still flaming, she made the coffee. Its smell revived her. She pushed a cup across the table towards him. ‘Julian…’

He held up a hand. ‘No recriminations at breakfast. That’s the rule. What’s done is done.’

Did one ever learn? Could one manage to put someone else, a person one did not know, in front of one’s own wishes? It was so little and, yet, such a tall order.

They ate breakfast largely in silence. At one point, he put down his cup and said, Agnes…’

She turned abruptly towards him. ‘Yes. What?’

He looked at her face. ‘Nothing.’

‘I’ve decided you must go.’ Agnes eventually addressed Julian across the remnants. ‘I only know a little about you and Kitty but enough to know that I can’t…’ She filled the basin and plunged the china into the suds. ‘I can’t… I won’t do it again. I can’t make Kitty suffer.’

He studied the worn grain of the table. ‘Isn’t that having your cake and eating it?’ He sounded weary and disappointed.

She sat down at the table and rested her aching head on her hands. ‘Yes,’ she admitted miserably. ‘It is. Not very admirable, but it happens.’ She looked up through her interlaced fingers. ‘Julian, you never told me how long you have been with Kitty’

His voice flattened. ‘Ten years. And we’ve worked fine together. We have been a team.’

Ten years of a shared bed and intimacies of which Agnes could have no notion and to which she had no right. Of flesh touching flesh companionably, of shared cries, pleasures, irritation and silence. Of plans and expectations of each other. This was Kitty’s territory, not hers. Kitty had yielded part of herself up to it. Kitty had staked it out, cultivated it and built her house on it.

‘Do you often put it at risk?’

‘Kitty has been faithful and true.’

‘But not you?’

‘No.’

Agnes fought to give the other woman her due. She knew why Kitty loved this man: for his energy, his gleaming house, his kindness, his knack of making money, his humour. His seriousness. For the lonely child in grubby shorts chipping away at the rock face. She understood precisely because she loved him for these things too.

Julian pressed on, ‘Kitty and I agreed the rules between us.’

‘But is she happy?’

‘On and off.’

‘Are you happy?’

Julian considered. ‘I’ve been too busy to ask.’ He stared at the face opposite him. ‘Don’t be angry.’

‘I’m angry with myself.’ The kitchen in Flagge House was a rotten, dingy place to end anything, let alone this. ‘You must go back to Kitty. You’ve got ten years’ worth of reward points… Anyway, I don’t want to be part of a sort of harem, which is what, I gather, I would be. It isn’t what I want. I feel more strongly about my love affairs than that.’ She looked straight into the face that she had kissed many times only a few short hours previously. ‘I’m sorry.’

He shrugged in a way that told her he was hurt but not showing it. ‘Don’t worry. This is not everything, Agnes. In the end, the flesh and the devil is only a little bit of life.’ She flinched, and he pushed the pieces of paper with Virginia Marie’s training reports over the table towards her. ‘At least take these.’

She picked them up. ‘Thank you.’

The chair scraped on the tiled floor. He stood behind her and she tensed. He lifted the heavy hair from the nape of her neck, pressed his lips to the tendon skimming under the skin and walked out of the room.

Agnes spent the morning searching the house for her uncle’s set of Jane Austens. They had disappeared on the day of his death and she had never managed to locate them. She wanted them back. She checked the books in the document room and searched the drawing room, bedrooms and the boxes in the attic, then returned to the document room for a second look. But they were not there.

Eventually, unsuccessful, Agnes returned upstairs to the bedroom where she picked up her discarded clothes from the floor, stripped the bed, smoothed the bedspread over it and opened the window.

She thought of Julian’s determined, experienced lust, and of her own response, of the drained, vulnerable, sleeping face on the pillow, the soft sigh of his unconscious breath, the tussle between them, and sat down abruptly on the edge of bed.

Some things you can have, some things you never, ever have. That was one of the laws that must be obeyed. Otherwise it was anarchy.