Secrets of the Heart

29

As it turned out, Maud and Agnes were both in hospital for a week and sent messages to each other, via one of the support staff in a pretty pink apron, who reported back to Agnes that Mrs Campion was surrounded by flowers and eating well.

The doctors ran numerous tests on Agnes, including a scan. The technician had been kind and pointed out where the obscure grey shadows made sense. Agnes had puzzled and frowned but, under the technician’s tuition, pieced together a fluttering, pulsing shape.

‘Look,’ invited the technician. Agnes obeyed, and peered through a gateway presented by science into a mystery enacted and re-enacted since the first cell assembled itself in the primordial fluid. The observer could watch through the camera lens. ‘Ah,’ she breathed, and her own heart leaped in greeting. What she was seeing flowed in from the river of time. The indistinct beating shape strung on to a necklace of bones was being built out of genetic information passed on hundreds and thousands of years ago.

She gave a little cry.

‘Please keep still,’ admonished the technician. ‘Look.’

And Agnes finally stepped out from behind the lens and looked deep into another human being. Into its heart, and through its heart to beyond. Beyond the image, beyond the genetic assembly, into another dimension for which she had no explanation.

‘We can see the foetal heart,’ said the technician. ‘And everything looks fine. Do you want to know the sex?’

‘No. No, thank you.’

The experience left Agnes weak and shaky, but with a burning determination that this baby would be born.

During her week’s stay in hospital, she swam back up to the surface. The sickness lessened and she grew stronger and felt better. Of course she would manage the clutter and muddle that had been thrown into her path. A full, rich life absorbed the unpredictable, and did not throw it away. The house, baby, unsuccessful love affairs must not be wasted on mean, niggardly regret. Now that she had struggled to this point, her power would grow. She would cope, drawing on strengths lying dormant.

She pictured growing fonder and fonder of Andrew, with the real, solid affection she had witnessed between couples who relied on the steady beat of trust and liking, not the great, gusting emotions of passionate love. Between them they would work out a division of labour and locations. They had many things in common, a shared purpose. She felt Andrew to be a man she could trust with the baby and with herself.

For long hours, she lay and looked at the ceiling. What a challenge and labour it was to be the woman that she wished, requiring an interweaving of maternity, creativity, practicality, which were all constantly altering and progressing. And she wanted, she very much wanted, to achieve this state of mind and hold it with grace. No anger. No looking back.

Yes. With the sickness gone, her body more biddable, it was time to plan and schedule commitments. Agnes’s certainties had returned.

As she lay quiet and dreaming, her thoughts returned to the other Agnes. Petticoats wadded around her feet against the draughts – often complained about in contemporary letters – the other Agnes had sewn samplers, one for each of her children with their names and birthdates. Rupert, Charles after the King, Henrietta, Margaret, Henry… But not the one who killed its mother. That child had remained nameless. In hushed moments, she must have told her children stories. Of battles and kings, of witches and demons. And, leaning over and speaking directly to little Henry, of younger sons winning fortune.

In a few months’ time, Agnes would assume her place in the circle of story-tellers. She, too, would be easing a child into its context, settling it into it with tenderness, and with colours and banners of imagination and history.

She rang up Bel and discussed fixing up a couple of schedules, to book in Jed, and to set up a meeting with Dickie.

First she needed to talk over things with Andrew. It was at this point that Penny phoned.

When Andrew finally opened his eyes after the sedation had worn off, his body was on fire with pain and hot, swollen tissue. Anxious and rumpled, Penny was sitting by the bed, a handkerchief between her fingers, her eyes trained on him.

‘Am I dead?’ he muttered.

‘No, but you had a bad reaction.’

He digested this information. ‘I was stung once too often.’ He managed the half-joke, and watched her expression clear miraculously. If it was possible to feel pleasure at such a moment, it gave him pleasure.

Poor Penny.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why hurt the bees? They did no harm.’ She moistened his lips with a sponge and he sucked at it gratefully.

‘Penny. Could you do one thing?’

In the act of dipping the sponge into the water for a second time, she paused. ‘If I can.’

‘I know this is a difficult. But could you get hold of Agnes for me?’

The sponge dropped on to the floor with a dull sound.

Penny’s phone call to Agnes left the latter in no doubt how much effort it had cost the other woman to make. ‘The reason I’m ringing is because Andrew’s had this accident,’ Penny explained, in a voice wrung out with tension and nerves.

Agnes had only that morning arrived back from hospital. She sat down on the tenants’ chair in the hall. ‘Is he hurt? Badly?’

‘A little.’ Penny doled out the information with reluctance. ‘But he’s asking for you. The doctor thinks it might help if you came. After we got the news about the farm, he had a bit of a breakdown.’

‘You’ve lost the farm?’

‘Yes, we have.’ Agnes noted the ‘we’. There was a hint of triumphalism that the worst had come to the worst, a brand of I knew it, as Penny outlined a version of the events that had taken place at Tithings. ‘He wants to talk to you about something. He won’t say what. Actually, he can’t talk much just at the moment. We’re in the cottage hospital.’

Agnes agreed she would come.

Penny continued, ‘There’s one thing you should know. I moved back into Tithings yesterday, for the time being. Andrew will be staying in hospital.’ She added, ‘I wanted the situation to be quite clear.’

‘Oh,’ said Agnes, the careful future that she had plotted and planned dimming dramatically in her mind’s eye. ‘Perhaps we can talk about that.’

She drove sedately past a misty moor, whose uplands had once been home to the Bronze and Iron Age settlers. In the watery sun, the stones appeared less monolithic and important. The wildness of the plain had been tamed by the road, and the mysterious connection between land and human, earth and sun was obscured by the mist, as the Iron Age settlements had been subsumed under a shroud of chalky soil.

Agnes gripped the wheel and drove on.

At the sight of Agnes hovering at the entrance to the ward, Penny’s mouth tightened, but she got up at once to greet her.

Agnes said warily, ‘It was very nice of you to contact me, Penny. Under the circumstances… which I am not quite clear about.’

‘Who is?’ said Penny, brusque to the point of rudeness. ‘But that’s Andrew. I never know with him.’ She folded her arms. ‘At least, he’s stable.’

‘Good.’

‘I can’t believe – I mean. His bees…’

Greatly daring, Agnes touched Penny’s arm. A gesture intended to be reassuring, friendly. Unthreatening.

‘It was… so odd… mad,’ continued Penny, and described haltingly, but intelligibly, the dark, unpredictable force that had been unleashed in Andrew, which had rocked Penny to her foundations. ‘Lighting bonfires I can understand – to make a gesture – but…’ The revelation of this side of her husband had been a terrible shock for Penny, and her anguish and revulsion overrode her natural distrust of Agnes.

Penny had not known her husband’s secret landscape.

‘I had no idea that Andrew was capable of that sort of thing,’ she said, more than once, her boots leaving imprints on the green linoleum floor. ‘He went mad. He attacked them with an axe, sort of goading them to sting him. He wanted it.’ Eventually, Penny ran out of steam. ‘Oh, well,’ she said miserably, ‘that’s life. I’ll have to do my best with him. Although I will never understand…’ She looked straight at Agnes and sent a silent message: I am his wife and you are not.

Agnes thought of her plans and the solution Andrew had offered. She thought, too, of his hidden passions and despair, which she had imagined would become a second nature to her.

But Penny’s anxious, worn face was implacable. Leave us in peace,

Agnes raised her hands to push back her hair and her changing shape was revealed. Penny’s hands flew to her mouth and she emitted a little sound, such as a beaten animal might.

‘No,’ Agnes cried at once. ‘It’s not what you think. It’s not Andrew’s.’

‘My God,’ whispered Penny. ‘Oh, my God.’

Agnes had no griefs to bear against Andrew, no years of whittling down, no bleaching out of optimism. Nothing to forgive. But Penny had, and he of her.

‘Can I see him?’

Penny collected herself and led Agnes down the ward to Andrew, who was propped up on pillows, with a drip in his arm.

‘Andrew…’ Agnes had been anticipating a horrible sight, but even so she flinched at the violence that had been done to him. Andrew’s skin was blistered and weeping. His face and limbs looked swollen and pulpy, like rotten fruit. Even the blue eyes had vanished, reduced to watchful slits.

Penny announced that she would leave them to talk and would be in the canteen. Agnes promised not to tire the patient. Penny flicked a look that said, ‘Don’t try me too far.’

She watched Penny retreat down the ward. ‘Penny tells me that she’s moved back into Tithings.’

The split, swollen lips worked with difficulty. ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’ He spread his hands out on the sheet – a bag of sausages with nails attached.

‘That must change things between us.’

‘I want to talk to you.’

He turned his head awkwardly on the pillow and the strain of the movement registered in the flare of mottled skin on his puffy neck. She stifled her regret and the questions, for he looked too ill. Very, very gently she covered one of the swollen hands with her own. ‘The farm?’

‘I have until December to slaughter my cattle, dismantle my fences, pack my bags… scatter my hay to the winds.’ He struggled hard with his speech.

‘And to fight?’

‘I fought it. I fought as hard as I could.’ He winced. ‘In all ways.’

She cradled his hand as gently as she could, and it seemed to comfort him.

‘Agnes. I have something to tell you.’

‘Do you?’

Sometimes the truth is buried. You can ignore it, walk round it, refuse to look at it. But it is there all the same. Buried. The fossil in the cliff. She heard a faint, echoing tap through the salt water and the million million shifting grains of sand.

The confession was halting, guilty and agony – for both of them.

She recoiled. He lay quiet, gazing at her, waiting for her anger to be unleashed.

You wrote Jack’s letters. ‘ Why? But, of course, I know why you did it.’ Agnes sat stony-faced, her hands folded in her lap.

Andrew had been driven to the brink by the threat of being evicted from Tithings. ‘I thought and thought about what I could do. Then I saw the write-up about you in the paper and the solution arrived in a flash. I wrote them at night when Penny was asleep. I read up about old paper, went to see some period letters in a museum. Knew there was a bundle of my father’s pencils in a drawer and an old pot of ink. Then I began. It was as easy as breathing. Jack was in me. Mary was in there. I knew them as well as I knew myself.’ Again, Andrew shifted his poisoned body and winced. ‘It was strange. Everyone wished to construct a story around them. All I had to do was sit it out and hope the timing fell into place before the balloon went up. But I miscalculated. I had hoped the programme would go out before the verdict from the inquiry.’

He gazed out of the insulated hospital window, as if he hoped to see reflected in it his land rolling out its soft, brilliant colours, hazy in sunlight, washed by rain, diamond bright in frost.

‘What I loved about you, Agnes, was your belief in the letters. And from there it was easy for me to persuade myself that you believed in me.’

Agnes struggled to make sense of what he was saying and to reconcile it with her goal of the rich, full life. She sought the truth and it hit her cruelly in the face. What did it tell her? It was this, bald and unedited: in wanting to believe in the letters, in allowing them to supply some of her own needs, she had ignored warnings and made a fiction of her judgement and experience. It was impossible to be much more stupid.

He flinched at her expression. ‘That was deception on a grand order,’ she said, ‘and I was taken in.’

He shrugged painfully. ‘Sometimes the end justifies the means.’

Agnes smoothed a lock of hair back from his forehead, her fingers brushing the skin as lightly as foam. Under her touch, he lay quiet. All her tidy structures and plans lay in an untidy heap. ‘When were you going to confess this?’

‘I would have told you eventually. Some time in the future.’ He turned his face to hers. Swollen, desecrated flesh. ‘I calculated we were even. You are carrying another man’s baby and I was going to act as its father. You would have had to forgive me.’

‘Yes, I suppose I would have done. But at a price. It was a risk, Andrew.’

‘Possibly.’

She looked at the floor and he edged his hand over the sheet towards her. ‘I hoped I would get away with it and keep Tithings.’

A long, long pause.

‘Say something, Agnes. Please.’

She shuddered with anger and humiliation, then pulled herself together. How could she judge? Every day human beings used each other, not always carefully or wisely or kindly, and it would be a good thing to find words that would give him comfort. ‘You are an artist, Andrew. The letters and the farm are part of that. The letters are very fine.’

That was all she could manage.

Moisture oozed between the puffy flesh around his eyes. ‘They are true,’ he got out with difficulty. ‘I have lived every sentence.’

The activity in the ward continued. Trolleys. Tea-cups. The muffled sound of a radio. Voices.

Agnes bent down to pick up her bag and her plait fell over her shoulder. He watched her through watering eyes.

‘You were Mary,’ he insisted. ‘You stepped into her place. I could not believe my luck.’

She shrugged.

‘I liked you in the honeysuckle crown,’ Andrew was saying.

Agnes looked away.

A nurse appeared, swished at the curtains around the bed and the side-show of the ward was blotted out. He seemed to be in increasing discomfort. The nurse flicked an eye over him and fed him some water through a beaker with a spout. Then she was summoned elsewhere and Agnes took over.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, between painful swallows.

Her sigh was dredged from the depths. ‘Maybe, maybe, I can present your story as the hidden life. We can get at it that way’ She shrugged and her flicker of enthusiasm was doused. ‘But I don’t really know, Andrew. I’ll have to think about it.’

Slowly and painfully, he circled his fingers around her wrist. ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered.

She disengaged her wrist and went to look out of the window. In the car park below, traffic was edging in and out of the exit and entrance. A couple of dead flies lay between the vases of flowers on the window-sill. The recycled air felt hot and heavy.

Her throat ached in a familiar way. Had it all been a waste, that fumbling towards a different understanding?

The ache spread to her back and, as she moved, there was a sharp twinge of stretched tendon down her side. She brushed her hand across her waist, which was no longer a curve but something lumpier and more mysterious. A nurse called out sharply. There was the clatter of a trolley moving down the ward. Agnes pressed the ache in her back and shifted her stance. Her body had been invaded and, at thirty – nearly thirty-one – it was time.

There was no point in not forgiving. Life flowed in one direction and it was impossible to go back.

She turned and leaned over the bed to kiss the hot, swollen forehead, forcing her lips to touch the flesh in farewell and regret. ‘Of course.’

When Penny poked her head around the curtain, she was bearing a tray loaded with polystyrene cups and a plate. ‘I don’t know if you’ve managed to eat, but just in case you haven’t I’ve got a sandwich. Egg without mayonnaise.’ She balanced the tray on the locker. ‘I wasn’t going to spend good money on beef.’

How very like Penny. Flowers in a spare bedroom. Sandwiches on the tray. Her courage could not be questioned.

Agnes accepted the tea and the sandwich. ‘You are kind,’ she said, and meant it. ‘How much do I owe you?’

Penny looked from Agnes to Andrew and drew her conclusions. ‘Nothing,’ she said.