Secrets of the Heart

21

Agnes stifled a yawn and glanced up from the Sunday papers at the mantelpiece on which she had arranged family photographs. There weren’t many left in their thinning family. She yawned a second time and frowned. Feeling bushed in the aftermath of a big shoot was normal but this was different. An anchor had attached itself to her body, a great hobbling fatigue. This is what ill people must feel, she thought, with a quiver of unease. Since her return from Devon her body seemed to be changing, urging itself into a different way of behaving. Even her hair felt different.

Andrew had not been too disappointed when she answered, ‘No,’ to his request to stay, but she sensed that he flinched inwardly and was sorry. As best she could, she explained it was impossible to do anything but go slowly. She had learned that a little at a time had a better chance of succeeding. Andrew had been understanding and sensible, but when she got into the car, he grabbed her hand.

‘You won’t let me down over the film. Promise?

The women were sitting in the big drawing room, which Agnes insisted they use. It was too beautiful to leave empty, she had argued. ‘We live in this house. We are not lodgers or squatters.’ Maud and she had quarrelled about it, and Maud had eventually declared that Agnes must do as she liked, as she held all the purse strings, but she would not raise one finger to help. Agnes had had the curtains cleaned, the cornices brushed, and had polished the furniture with a mixture of turpentine and wax.

‘Time for the apéritif?’ Accompanied by the paraphernalia of the invalid, which included a walking-stick – of which she made cunning use – plus an electric alarm, Maud had progressed from the bedroom to the blue brocade sofa. There she sat, enthroned but still bad-tempered and weak, the velocity of her knitting increasing to a ferocious speed.

Agnes cupped her chin in her hand. Maud had been a bad patient and a worse convalescent, and Agnes and Bea had been run ragged by her demands. But Agnes had felt sorry for her aunt. Maud had been terrified by her experience, and the equation had been made that once you were dead you had gone. ‘Before you are cold, you are forgotten,’ she said, ‘the waters close over,’ and she wasn’t ready for that by a long chalk.

Sunday lunch was cooking. The shutters in the drawing room at the big window were folded back and the sun streamed in. Well away from her sister, Bea sat by the window, hands folded in her lap. She seemed peaceful enough, and yet, as she squinted in Bea’s direction, it struck Agnes that she was waiting for something.

On a previous visit, Freddie gently suggested that Maud should try another musical, just for fun. What Freddie said usually resulted in magic and, for a time, the strains of Les Misérables replaced Julie Andrews in Flagge House. But the status quo soon reverted and once again raindrops and kittens filled the drawing room.

‘I will never understand what you see in it,’ said Agnes, driven to protest.

‘I don’t expect you to understand.’ Maud threw down her knitting, consulted her watch and reached for her lipstick. ‘Freddie will be here any minute.’

Bea pleated the material of her skirt, and the dust motes danced in the sun.

The doorbell rang. ‘I’ll go,’ said Bea, and fled from the room.

A moment later Agnes, who was stacking the Sunday papers, looked up to see a poised, groomed Kitty in a pink linen suit preceding Freddie. To be with Kitty, even without Julian, in the same room did extraordinary things to her stomach and, for a moment, she thought she might faint. Fortunately, the cotton wool in her knees turned into proper muscle and she got to her feet.

‘Hello, Agnes,’ said Kitty, and flushed a violent red. ‘I am sorry to drop in on you without warning. I would very much appreciate a few words.’

‘Of course,’ said Agnes.

‘Is a chap going to be offered a drink?’ asked Freddie.

Bea waylaid Kitty. ‘Sherry? This is some from my special bottle. I have a kind man who sells it to me in the wine shop. Where have you come from?’

‘I’ve intruded on a lunch party?’ Kitty’s poise appeared to desert her and she had gone from very red to very pale.

‘The more the merrier.’ Freddie presumed on his intimacy to good effect. ‘Now, how are my ladies?’

Maud raised her head – the gesture of a younger woman which, in a younger woman, would have accentuated a swan neck. Her huge eyes were hungry and watchful. She tapped her watch. ‘Hallo, Freddie. We’ve been waiting all morning for you.’

Agnes gathered her wits. ‘Could you stay for lunch, Kitty?’

Kitty had already downed the sherry and Bea was refilling her glass. Actually, I only wanted a few words.’

‘Lymouth,’ Bea was saying. ‘I had a friend there once. A champion jam-maker.’ In Bea’s book there was no greater compliment, a reminder that the world functioned on casseroles, jams and knitted rugs, a sub-stratum of thrift and skills that still held their own.

Jam-making was not a feature of Kitty’s world or Agnes’s. Their eyes met in mutual ratification of this fact. Antagonists but, briefly, allies.

‘Could I use your bathroom?’ asked Kitty.

Agnes led the other woman past the burnt-in hoofprint and the empty niche at the turn of the stairs, past the exquisite oriel window. Kitty put out a hand to the newel post. ‘Someone loved this wood.’ She ran her fingers over its curves. ‘Very much.’ She paused under the window.

There was silence.

Kitty continued, ‘We only borrow houses for a while and then we hand them on.’ Her high heels clattered on the stairs. ‘You didn’t see my cottage when you came down. It’s tiny. Julian doesn’t like it very much. He prefers Cliff House. If I’m truthful, so do I.’

Agnes showed Kitty the bathroom and suggested that they talk in her bedroom. When Kitty knocked and slipped into the room, Agnes was waiting by the window. She addressed Kitty calmly: ‘The best view of the river is from my aunt’s room, but this one is pretty good. On still nights I can hear the running water and, sometimes, foxes.’

‘Really?’ Kitty straightened her shoulders.

Agnes continued, ‘This is the bedroom in which the maiden aunts always slept. One of them, Great-great-aunt Lucy, slept here for the whole of her life. I found her riding boots at the back of the wardrobe. So slim, they were like pencils.’ Reluctantly, Agnes faced Kitty. ‘I think they were happy in here, the maiden aunts. I feel they were.’

Kitty now patted her hair, her wrist weighed down with a gold charm bracelet. Oval-nailed and fine-skinned, they were the kind of hands the Victorians would have delighted in casting in plaster and displaying in glass cabinets. Then she fussed with her bracelets. ‘It’s obvious why I’m here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So.’ Now Kitty smoothed the strap of her handbag. ‘Let’s get on with it. I want – I want you to leave Julian alone. I thought I had made that clear at our previous meeting, but not clear enough. Anyway, it’s worse than I thought, for I can see… I know that he is very taken with you. It doesn’t often happen, although there have been… others. He’s quite – quite reserved.’ She paused, and said simply, ‘But he’s mine. We’ve been together for a long time and that counts for something, don’t you think? You’ve seen enough in your work to know what goes wrong when people take things that don’t belong to them.’

Agnes swallowed.

‘You are there in my home all the time,’ cried Kitty. ‘All the time. I know you are. He’s obsessed with you.’ She brought herself up short. ‘But other things matter too…’

Yes, yes, I am wrong. Without meaning to be so. Truly, truly, without intent, I have blundered into being put in the wrong and heaven knows where that leaves Julian. Didn’t he think that ten years of reward points earns a tranquil old age? Kitty does. That is why she is here. And me? Never mind that the blossom on the tree is so scented, so beautiful, so tempting.

‘… All I need,’ the soft, inexorable voice of Kitty drove on, ‘is a little peace. Then I can manage. Then I can pull it together.’

Agnes was shaking. Not even when faced with Madeleine had her reaction been so marked. Of course Kitty was in the right and the complications stretched out in great web of misunderstanding and crossed connections. Yet… there was nothing in this world that belonged exclusively to someone else and she was tempted, almost, to conclude that it was a question of who was the stronger. She heard herself saying, ‘Isn’t that up to Julian?’

Kitty shook her head. ‘It’s taken me a long time to discover this. Ten years, in fact, but no. I have a say in it too.’

‘I understand.’ This was the real battle, the big one. Compared to this, the others had been skirmishes, and she felt quite breathless with pain.

She turned to face Kitty, the pink and fragile Kitty, who had chosen to confront Agnes at Flagge House because… of the shared bed, because the moments of despair were shared equally with moments of pleasure and content. Because what Kitty had built she was not going to allow Agnes to knock down. Because Kitty had made an act of will to fight and now chose to exercise it.

‘You might not believe this, Kitty, but I did consider you,’ she said at last. ‘Ask Julian.’

Kitty’s handbag was a crocodile one with gold fastenings. It slipped with a clunk to the floor. ‘I don’t want your name mentioned by him ever again.’ She bent over to pick it up. ‘Ever.’

‘Will you go now?’

Kitty joined Agnes at the window. ‘How I dislike your type. Nothing personal, of course.’

‘My type?’

‘Women who have no investment in anything. You younger women imagine you have it sewn up. You have recast your role and have made it your business to pity women like me. Oh, I don’t mind the careers and the money-making. I had my chance, I suppose. But I do mind your greed and the way you trespass on us because your bodies are younger and firmer and you have no rules.’

Agnes made to turn away but the other woman grabbed her. ‘You will listen to me. You are younger but you have no idea. Yet.’ She released Agnes, and fiddled with the ring on her right hand. ‘I even thought about killing myself because I find the situation so exhausting and unfair, and it would pay you back.’ The confidence was dropped clumsily. ‘But I won’t. I won’t.’

Appalled, Agnes placed her hand on Kitty’s shoulder and pressed it. Thin and sharp and brittle beneath her younger - and therefore, more powerful – fingers. Those fingers now bore down into Kitty. ‘Just go, Kitty. Now. Before anything else is said or done.’

Kitty struggled for control. After a few seconds, she asked in a normal voice, ‘Do you mind if I do my hair?’ She sat down at Agnes’s dressing table and pulled off her earrings. ‘These ones always hurt. I don’t know why I wear them. Well, I do, actually. Julian gave them to me.’ She picked up Agnes’s hairbrush. Agnes flinched. How dare Kitty touch her things? Kitty examined it thoughtfully, opened her handbag and extracted her own.

The mirror was old and spotted with age and the reflection in it was unclear. Deft and skilled, Kitty worked away at her hair and traced the line of her lips with a lip pencil, remaking the pretty object. She assessed her handiwork. ‘Julian is difficult.’ She trailed the sentence, releasing her insider knowledge in a tantalizing fashion. ‘Pernickety. Demanding. He has his moods… and his tastes. I always make an effort.’

Agnes pictured Julian sitting on the sofa in Bel’s flat, balancing a glass on the arm. He was talking about the Lincolnshire project, pulsing with attack and energy, one leg crossed over the other. She closed her eyes. It had been then that she had noticed he was wearing socks whose wool had worn thin with age under the impeccable suit.

‘No, Julian is not easy. He works to his own timetable.’ Kitty closed her handbag with a snap. ‘Thank you so much for letting me freshen up. I’ll find my own way out’

What did Kitty think she was doing with her poisoned drip, drip of intimacies? Perhaps, she imagined that she had wrestled Agnes into a boneless heap on the floor where she could administer a kick with her crocodile shoes. Agnes’s emotions did an abrupt change-about. There was a rush of waves in her head, the screech of a million small stones pulled into the riptide and she felt the cold, salt shock of her anger. ‘There is one thing…’ Ever after, she was never to be quite sure of anything, least of all herself. ‘One thing…’ Clearly expecting to hear Agnes’s final capitulation, Kitty was arrested with her hand on the door handle.

‘I think I’m pregnant!’ Agnes cried out, in protest and despair.

Kitty fled down the stairs and into the still summer afternoon.

‘Why did she tell me?’ she sobbed in the safety of her car. ‘Why did she tell me?’

Above her, the wood pigeons cooed and fluttered in the trees.