Secrets of the Heart

18

Julian watched Andrew’s van lumber down the drive until it was out of sight. ‘Agnes, it wasn’t your fault. Your aunt lashed out because she was in pain.’

She shook her head. ‘I should have done something about that wretched floorboard.’

‘One always should have done something,’ he said lightly. ‘King Alfred should have checked the oven and Bluebeard should have gone into therapy’ He made it sound so easy, so forgivable and explicable. ‘I’ll lock up while you pack,’ he finished. ‘Tell me what to do.’

She looked at him in a way that his mother had sometimes, with tolerance and a slight suggestion of impatience, and he wanted to shake her and tell her not to underestimate him. Then he took in the pallor, and an uncontrollable tenderness washed through him. ‘Get moving,’ he said.

Fifteen minutes later, the house was closed and shuttered, and they were back in the drive. Softly, evening was stealing in. Cloaking reason and principle and substituting yearning, the dying light tracing a different horizon to the day. The swifts were calling and the wood pigeons’ fractiousness had stilled. A ring of darkness gathered and waited.

‘Will you be all right?’ He was now concerned by how pale she was and searched his memory for how to treat shock. ‘Maud is in the best hands. It could have happened at any time.’

‘Yes, of course.’ She picked up her rucksack and Bea’s bag. ‘Thank you.’

He fingered his car keys. ‘Agnes, I’m driving you to the hospital.’

‘What about – wherever you were going?’

‘I’ll get up early.’

‘I’m fine. I can cope. I can cope absolutely. I’ve coped with far worse.’

‘Of course.’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I have an awful feeling I’m always lecturing you, but self-0001reliance becomes ridiculous if it means you can’t accept the offer of a lift when you need one. Furthermore, it doesn’t mean you’re making a claim on me. Or ruining Kitty’s life.’

‘No,’ she said stubbornly. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Agnes,’ he said, and startled by the pressure on her shoulders, she looked up at him. He said quietly, ‘Just get in the car.’

At the hospital the wait was long. Casualty smelt of blood and alcohol; it was noisy with cries of distress and impatience; it was overheated, airless, and overflowing. The doctors were weary. Maud’s fracture turned out to be more serious than had been suspected, the consultant was unavailable and operating theatres were full. To complicate matters, it was decided that Bea should stay in overnight for observation.

It was after nine o’clock before a heavily sedated Maud was wheeled away and Bea finally settled in the twenty-four-hour ward. Agnes reeled out into the car park, fatigued to the bone.

Julian was waiting. He had made phone calls, dispensed cups of coffee, waylaid one set of nurses while Agnes dealt with the other, and even managed to procure toothbrush and toothpaste from the hospital shop. She got into the car and slumped into the seat.

‘Don’t talk.’ He started up the engine.

‘You’re good at hospitals,’ she said, and shut up.

Ten minutes later, they drew up outside the Hanbury Hotel, whose topiary and Georgian façade were lit by discreet, white lights. It looked expensive. Before Agnes could protest, Julian assumed command. ‘You’re staying here tonight and so am I. I’ve arranged it. I couldn’t bear to think of you grappling with that bathroom by yourself. The hospital has the number so you are contactable.’

Speechless, she nodded. He reached over and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Poor tired Agnes.’

A bottle of wine and a plate of sandwiches were waiting in the lounge, which overlooked a floodlit garden that had been laid out by a genius. The bread was homemade and the ham had been cooked by the chef. After Agnes had finished eating, Julian refilled her glass and talked to her of other things – painting, sailing, his fascination with codes, living in the East.

The wine bottle was empty. Agnes crumbled the remains of the bread on her plate. A progression of things flashed through her mind in a crazy, speeding way, while her body behaved like lead.

‘Tell me about the codes. In the war, I mean.’

‘I don’t know much. There is someone at the museum who could help, if you’d like to talk to them.’ Julian shrugged. ‘There are the obvious things. The shorthand, for example. A Morse phrase like QTC meant: “We have a message for you.” Or QRU: “No traffic for London.”’ He stood up and pulled her to her feet. ‘If the enemy did net in a couple of similarly configured messages, same length, same repetition of words, it was known in the trade as “a depth of two”. Cryptographers loved that. It was their meat and drink. From a depth of two all sorts of things could be worked out and all sorts of things depended on it, including, possibly, your life or death.’ He paused. ‘Bed.’

At the door of her room, he slotted in the plastic security card, unlocked it and stood aside. ‘I’m down the passage. I won’t see you in the morning as I’ll have to get up at dawn, but I’ve arranged for a taxi to pick you up at ten o’clock.’

She leaned on the doorpost. ‘Aristotle said you can only be happy when you are virtuous. On your showing tonight, you must be a happy man.’

‘Agnes…’

‘No,’ she forestalled him. ‘It’s all been said before. Except one thing. I forbid you to be rude about my bathroom.’

He fingered the plastic card. ‘Goodnight, Agnes.’

Agnes sat on the bed. Exhausted as she was, she was reluctant to undress. The moments before the sleep she craved were so black that she was afraid. What else was it that Aristotle had said? That there was no short-cut to happiness.

It was true. Wherever she turned, she had run up against obstacles. Was that so surprising? But she had been naive in thinking that, after the squeeze and confinement of childhood, a little air would be let in. That she would spring out of her cage, a strong, capable human being who would deal with what life flung at her strongly and capably. Perhaps it was because she felt so low and dispirited. Perhaps it was true that broken childhoods resulted in broken adults who could never quite see straight, who never got to know themselves. Some people just drove through life, from A to Z, with no problems, and were able to accommodate the demands made on them and the demands of their own hearts. They did the right things, married, had children, gathered grandchildren around them and performed beautifully.

But, so far, whatever Agnes had set her heart on proved to have a canker at the centre. Pierre. The house. Julian.

She reached for the bottle of water on the table and drank a glass. She had never managed quite to eradicate her tendency to misery. As an adolescent anything could set it off. The feeling was so heavy and so particular that it ached physically. It took only the slightest thing: ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ sung to Brother James’s Air, a flash of tawny African landscape on television and, especially, the conjured image of the other Agnes dying in childbirth – with the white faces of those bereaved children gazing at their dead mother. Those children were looking at a bleaker place where they would stumble, time and time again, against reminders of their abandonment. An empty chair. The scared feeling that there was no anchor. No one to take care of, or to mind about, the small intimate details that could not be shared. When she confessed how she felt to her uncle, he explained that it was a way of mourning her own parents, which was perfectly logical.

That was part of Julian’s attraction. Agnes drank a second glass of water. She understood so well a small, lonely boy in grubby shorts, digging away at a fossil cliff. She imagined the rip of the wind, the smell of salt, the little clunking noises of the chisel on the rock, the slither and patter of falling scree. The fierce, intent, determined look.

As she had grown older, Agnes had learned to manage her misery and to keep it in check. In fact, she had been quite proud of herself. That was why documentaries appealed to her. Any misery, loneliness and injustice had to be dealt with in a disciplined, factual manner. Then it had been contained. Packaged. Made to be useful and creative. Until now.

As Pierre once said, You are not smart.

During the night she woke, nauseous and uncomfortable. She had been dreaming of the river and, in her dream, trying to puzzle out the paradox. Water ran through time and place and never changed, yet never ceased to do so.

When she returned the following morning, Flagge House was shrouded in a dead quiet, not the drowsy content of the living. But as Agnes stepped into the hall an orchestra struck up. Creaks, a scutter of mice in the roof, the movement of brick on stone, wood on stone.

She bent down to pick up the post on the mat and inhaled a sharp, musty damp. ‘Drains and plumbing,’ Maud had said bitterly. In the end that was what life amounted to.

No wonder Maud had fallen in love with a musical.

Agnes rang the hospital and was informed that Maud was post-operative and as comfortable as could be expected. Bea, having been examined by the doctors, would be coming home after lunch. Mrs Innes, added the staff nurse, had arranged her own lift home and had left instructions that Miss Campion was not to be bothered.

Agnes went into the kitchen. She washed up yesterday’s tea things, swept the floor, cleaned out the fridge and wiped down the oven – work that women had done for centuries, to which she turned precisely because she did not want to think about being a woman and of the sweet, peculiar double helix of emotion, calculation and anxieties of being female.

She was in the study talking to Bel on the phone when Bea arrived.

Wearing Maud’s paste brooch prominently on her lapel and the ring on her finger, Bea looked cheerful and rested. ‘Hallo, dear, I’m sorry to have given you so much trouble but I’m better. Those nice nurses sorted me out. I had been taking my pills in the wrong order.’

Agnes felt the tug of familial ficelles settling around her. She led Bea into the kitchen and sat her down. ‘Would it be a good idea if you gave me the pills? Then you wouldn’t have to worry’

‘How very sweet you are.’

‘Bea, who brought you home?’

The stay in hospital had done wonders for Bea – she looked as happy and excited as a child. ‘Freddie,’ she said. ‘Who else?’