Secrets of the Heart

27

When Julian let himself out of Kitty’s house, he savoured the curious, unfamiliar taste of being truly at liberty. The night air was cool as it would be for early October. A touch of salt, the thick, felty chill of the turn of the season.

In the end, it had been Kitty who had sent him packing and destroyed the pact. Yet her action appealed to Julian’s sense of justice – the symmetry of justice in the rough. In doing what she had, and throwing down the gauntlet of the purchased house, Kitty had gained control and that was only right. The balance had evened, easing his conscience, and it struck him that Kitty had been more generous than she had meant to be.

Always he welcomed the moment of change: the point when the needle quivered on the marker before falling into a different quadrant. But it was usually concerned with his business life. Then the search was on for the undiscovered continent somewhere out there, unknown and challenging. But this was different.

He looked up to the illuminated bedroom in the cottage and the contrary impulses that accompanied a big transition made him pause and cast his mind over what might have been, feel the pang of regret. He would miss Kitty or, rather, the glimpse of the Kitty she had manifested tonight. With that flash of spirit, that cleverly judged segue of patronage and revenge, she had blotted out the irritations and trapped feelings of the past few years.

How would she manage in the harshness of marshland and wold, his soft Kitty? For a second or two, he was tempted to return to the house to instruct her to wrap up warmly, to buy stout boots and to make sure that her car was serviced. Always, she had required warmth, cherishing, protection against her fragility, a gentle easing in to new surroundings.

The light in the window went off.

Julian got into his car and drove home.

Cliff House was quiet and, of course, empty. Its rooms smelt of air from which the oxygen had been sucked. Cold as it was, Julian flung open the window in his study and sea sounds flowed into the room. Shivering a little, he sat down to work.

At three thirty, he finished for the night and, stiff and chilled, got up to close the window.

The figures on which he had been working closed a story whose finale was not good – no happy ending for him – and in which his role was not illustrious. At least he had known in advance and had had the grace of a couple of days, which was time enough to practise being the figurehead of a firm that had been taken over.

Looking back, his successes had been spectacularly easy. Cushioned by thriving markets and solid finance, he had made choices and they had worked. But perhaps luck had played more of a part in his success than he had calculated. Perhaps the successful genes – for which he could claim no credit – of strength, intelligence and ruthlessness on which he depended had, this time, failed to outmanoeuvre luck’s skittishness

The precise ingredients of the situation would be difficult to analyse – or perhaps they wouldn’t, but of one factor he was sure: he was tired of thinking, arguing, bolstering, and of the depression that had weighed him down for the last frantic weeks through which he had struggled. Dying by degrees, he almost begged for the coup de grâce.

He ticked off the pointers: the proposed deals and alliances that melted on examination; the unreturned telephone calls; the meetings that were changed; the not-quite-engaged gaze of the financiers; the wooing of shareholders by others.

‘What am I going to do with my hats?’ a Conservative MP’s wife once asked Julian at one of the dos where he had automatically worked the floor. The question, and her aggrieved manner, had stopped him in his tracks. ‘I am redundant and elderly,’ she continued. He had smiled politely, but without comprehension. ‘A hat-wearing wife is no longer required,’ the redundant political wife explained. ‘What is required is a younger, efficient, hatless wife.’ Now he was more open to that type of remark. Julian pictured a stack of silk and felt circles arranged one over the other, dust-powdered coffins of unrealized ambitions.

Now he understood.

Consider. If it was not rectified, the implications of a wrong turning multiplied and grew into a mass. Ask any mathematician. That was precisely what had happened at Portcullis. He had made an error in investing in projects that could not produce the profit margin, and a prime misjudgement had been to invest in a farmer’s field in Lincolnshire.

How astute Kitty had been to buy one of the houses. In doing so she had weighed perfectly her judgement on the lover who had failed her.

He picked up the fossil anchoring his papers. The inefficient were eaten, or taken over, by the more efficient, and he hated the idea that his trendy, clever, visionary team would suffer as a result of him.

He thought of Agnes. He was sure that she had sussed his bad and weak sides, the bits of him that hated to face up to feelings and scenes. Did she think of him as emotionally retarded? Could she pull those bits into shape? Did he wish her to?

Last time he had seen her, sitting at the wheel of the car with a spitting Kitty lurking in the doorway, she had looked so young and tragic that he had almost swept her off there and then. But he hadn’t because of Kitty.

It was growing lighter.

Julian picked his way in the semi-darkness down the cliff path to the beach below. With each step, the susurration of the water murmured louder against his eardrums. Over to the east, where the sun was rising, water and sand were tipped with a cold brilliance.

Long ago, the centre of the earth had growled and shaken, shifting and folding a mix of shale and limestone, and this coast had been made. Layer had been thrown down on layer, trapping animals and micro-organisms, flattening and crushing, until all that was left was the scratch of rock on rock, the hiss of decomposing bodies as they were turned to stone, and the echoes of sand falling into the water.

Imprinted on the beach was a record of the past and of what had taken place there, events indifferent to anything but the energy of themselves.

Julian was humiliated by the idea that his time was over and that layers of new rock would close over him. Once his role at Portcullis was finished, as it would be, he would have no more relevance than the fossil on his desk. Nothing more, nothing less than an interesting example of a wrong turning taken by the evolutionary river.

He kicked off his espadrilles. Sand oozed between his toes and the pebbles pressed uncomfortably into his feet. The rest of his clothes followed. Cold air ran up his body: the hair on his chest and groin responded, genitals tightened. He made his way down to the water’s edge. There, the sea swirled over his feet, pummelling his toes, and receded, weaving its improvised, spumy lacework. Julian had swum here countless times. He knew the precise slope of the shore into the water, the formation of the rocks at its edge, and had explored their private rooms, daydreaming, inserting fingers into the anemones in the rockpools, and preying on transparent filigree shrimps. He knew where the rocks poked up out of the sea and where the tide exposed their hidden places.

It was here that he had gone over and over the puzzle of childhood. ‘Of course we love you very, very much,’ said his repressed mother when he asked her. He could not remember her kissing him.

Feet edging gingerly over the stones, he waded into the water until it reached his waist. The dense, cold mass sucked at him, willing him to strike out for the new continent. Gasping at the shock, Julian launched himself into the water.

Hair sleeked into a black cap, he swam for a long way. The sand in the water flayed at his skin, rubbing away the layers of habit. It flayed the image of Kitty, leaving a memory, as sticky but abrasive as the salt that licked over his body.

Agnes began to bleed.

At first reluctant, for he was of the opinion that nature should take its course, Duggie Sutherland finally arranged for Agnes to be admitted to hospital where she lay, pale and sweating, and gazed in panic at the ceiling.

They told her it sometimes happens at sixteen weeks, fitted a drip, rebandaged her burnt fingers, took endless notes and left her alone. Terrified that she might lose the baby, she struggled to find the rational, calm Agnes on whom she relied.

But that Agnes had fled, over the dew-wet meadow, leaving only her footprints – for she had never really existed.

Now she imagined herself on the operating table, knees raised while her baby slid away.

Desperately she focused on the small shape that was trying to leave its shelter. The curve of thin eggshell skull, the webbed feet, the tiny articulated shoulder. No, she cried out to it, you must not. You must hang on. You are not ready.

Forgive me for my doubt and for my busy, unattached life.

Perhaps you thought it was best to get out while the going was good. Perhaps you chose death in preference to what is on offer.

I promise to take care of you. I will wrap you in the softest of coverings, and lull you carefully and tenderly into being.

It was time to put down the anchor. When she got out of hospital, she would ring Andrew and tell him that she would marry him. Then she would settle to tidying and shaping the ends of her life in order to be ready for her baby. That was the least she could do. It was what she should do.

Agnes’s head hurt, and she moved restlessly in the white hospital bed. Somewhere, in the distance, she heard a woman screaming. Was it the other Agnes, struggling to give birth, held down on her bed by other women’s hands? Above her in the attic, mice scrabbling from beam to beam and the spiders spinning their webs?

For the tenth time in two days, Andrew picked up the phone and dialled Flagge House. For the tenth time, there was no answer.

In the end, he rang Bel. As he waited in his study at Tithings for her to answer, the sun came out behind the oaks. They seemed bigger, sturdier, more intrusive than he remembered from the morning. Stag-headed in shape. Oak was the hardest and stoutest of woods. It had built a navy and carried a nation. It resisted. It repelled fungal dry rot and teredines, boring molluscs-the invaders. The oak would face the bulldozer – and repel it.

When she eventually answered, Bel was crisp, never having troubled to conceal that she could not take Andrew seriously. Andrew didn’t care. Early on he had dismissed Bel as a woman of no substance and a sharp tongue. The theatre of her cropped, moussed hair and rainbow fingernails had never entertained him.

He asked Bel if she knew where Agnes was, and Bel replied that she was taking a few days off but was not sure where.

Andrew suspected she was lying.

‘Oh, by the way,’ said Bel, ‘did Agnes tell you? The Hidden Lives programme has slipped in the schedule. It looks like late October.’ She was maddeningly smug. She added, ‘Agnes is doing her best to get it out earlier, but she has other things to do, you know.’

‘I hope she is,’ he said. ‘The results of the planning inquiry have been delayed. I’m not sure quite when they’re due, but possibly early October and the timing could be critical.’

‘Goodness, the tension must be unbearable for all you farming folk.’

‘No need to be like that.’

‘Who do you think Mary was?’ Bel flashed the question, which, as it was meant to do, took Andrew by surprise.

‘Mary? Oh… Mary. To be honest, I can’t make up my mind about Mary.’

‘Mary,’ said Bel flatly, ‘is a probability, not a definite, wouldn’t you say? You can chase her down the byways of parish registers, electoral rolls, through the dusty corridors of Somerset House, but she eludes us, doesn’t she? And, believe me, I have chased her. Mary, the eternal woman who inspires such passion, the epitome of courage, suffering and mystery. How do we decode Mary? I’ve tried and failed, and I have to tell you that I’m pretty sharp at spotting weak links. She almost seduced me too.’

‘Ah,’ said Andrew. ‘You, too.’

‘Come on, Andrew.’

For a moment, he was tempted to lay down the burden of his secret. Only the notion that it would be Bel’s multi-studded ear receiving the confession prevented him. He did not want to waste his passion and effort on a woman like her. ‘Will you tell me where Agnes is?’

‘No, I won’t. She needs absolute peace and quiet. OK?’