Secrets of the Heart

31

‘Maud,’ Agnes trod warily, ‘Bea has sent us a letter.’

The two women were in the drawing room and both were swathed in sweaters. The atmosphere was both stuffy and cold and, in the cornice above them, the spiders moved through the webs with complete freedom.

‘I suppose you had better read it to me.’

‘“Dear Ones,”’ began Agnes experimentally, ‘“Freddie and I are positively frisking around Egypt. The Isabella is very luxurious and the food gorgeous. Dancing most nights. The Nile is warm and mysterious and we surge up it like a great white swan…”’

Sailing across deep, transparent water, lit by the reflection of glowing lamps. New land. Enchantment. Magic. Mystery. Love.

Agnes winced.

‘“… We’ve been to see the tombs with their beautiful wall paintings. Freddie is very dashing in his whites. In fact, I call him my Captain von Trapp…”’

To her surprise, Agnes felt indignant on Maud’s behalf, for that last remark was cruel.

‘I hope she breaks her hip.’ Maud knitted away furiously at a fluffy blue garment, destined for the children’s hospital.

‘She’s enclosed a photo.’ Agnes examined it. It was of the group, assembled by the ship’s rail. They were all in evening dress, and most of them held a glass of champagne.

Maud dropped her knitting and peered at it uncertainly. ‘Where’s Bea? Can’t see her.’

Bea was standing at the back of the group, and it took a moment or two to pick her out. There she was, smiling gently, in a long green dress. In the picture, her waist appeared as slender as a young girl’s.

Agnes got up and propped up the photograph on the mantelpiece. She tapped Bea with her fingertip but of course the figure did not respond. Funny old Bea, she thought. Running off with Freddie, pinching the Jane Austens. Lifelines, perhaps, in a bumpy sea.

After a moment, she slid the photograph behind an invitation.

‘By the way,’ Maud was uncharacteristically subdued, ‘did you send that property developer packing?’

One hand on her aching back, Agnes bent down to throw another log on the fire. Dislodged, yet another spider crept out from the basket and Maud put out her good foot and crushed it.

‘In a manner of speaking. He lives with someone else.’ Agnes hesitated for Kitty was owed her name. ‘She’s called Kitty.’

‘What a useless name.’

Agnes sifted through the rest of the post and listened to Maud, who had launched an offensive against unmarried mothers and the selfishness of Agnes. While she was ranting, the knitting was shaping up into a matinée jacket of the kind that had gone out of fashion. Angrily, Maud delivered her valedictory shot. ‘I’ve held back from asking, but are you ever going to grace us with the name of the father? Or perhaps you don’t know.’

Agnes was taking a long time to read the single sentence on a postcard. In fact, she read it over and over again, just to be sure. She said quietly, ‘I will ignore that remark, Maud.’

‘Maria would never have got herself into such a hole. No husband. No money. No prospects.’

Agnes turned over the card and examined a photograph of Lincoln cathedral. ‘No doubt, but it’s different these days.’ She put the card to one side then picked it up again and held it, as if it was of utmost preciousness. ‘Maud, I’ve arranged a small loan from the bank for the kitchen and I’ve worked out a timetable for the most pressing repairs, which can begin next year in the spring. In the end, the bank was helpful but not generous. If we go carefully they might stump up more.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Maud interjected. ‘Even I know there’s no collateral and we need hundreds of thousands.’

Agnes could not bring herself to reply.

Again Maud opened her mouth, and out issued the jangled, dissatisfied spirit that dwelt in her. ‘How are you going to manage? What are you going to put on the birth certificate?’ The voice cracked. ‘Don’t expect me to help. I don’t know what to do with babies?’

The words flowed on but Agnes was not paying attention. She was thinking of how inadequate some words were. Some like ‘snazzy’ and ‘perfumed’ did a good job. But ‘joy’ and ‘surprise’ and ‘indebtedness’ only performed half their function. In no way could they match the feelings behind them.

‘I never told you he turned up here the other day when you were in Exbury.’

Agnes looked blank. ‘Do you mean Mr Harvey?’

‘Don’t be witless, Agnes. The property developer.’

Agnes dropped the postcard and retrieved it. ‘Julian? Here?’

In the study, which was stacked with videos of her work, including the orphanage programme, and an emergency spare of The Sound of Music, Agnes was going through her papers.

This much she knew. When Thomas Campion had returned from the Armada in 1588 and, with his companions, looked down from the ridge to the water-meadow and made his plans to build his ‘bigge howse’, he had not been thinking of the past, but of a future.

In the records, it was set down that he spent £550 on wood and, since oak was becoming scarce, he had ordered it from the wrecked ships on the shoreline. He had paid £37 12s. for the marble fireplace, £50 for the tapestries, stripped from a Catholic house in the next village. Finally, £100 had been paid over to the sovereign for the rights of ‘assart’, the holding of private property within the boundaries of a royal forest.

The records told the story of Thomas’s fine burial stone, of his son’s extravagances, of his son’s marriage to Agnes and her goodly portion. She knew of Agnes’s great-great-granddaughter’s unwise decision to build a folly on the marshy land by the river, and she knew, too, of Gervase Campion’s passion for flowers and his death in the Himalayas on a bulb-hunting expedition. She could read of the remodelling and adapting of the house to accommodate new ambitions. A second staircase. The Victorian kitchen. How one member of the family had decided on change because the old ways had run out. How they shifted, adapted, expanded… and, finally, the story reached Maud and Agnes.

The past was a rich and fertile place, where Agnes had wandered to make up the shortfalls in her own existence. With her camera, she had projected her portrait of Flagge House on to an inner canvas – its richness of brick and wood, its beauty, its virtuoso stonework and glittering fenestration, its intimacies and poise. It had been a time of enchantment and profound disappointment. Of course it had been, for the past could never be trapped and preserved.

Agnes gathered up the family papers – incomplete, untidy, some indecipherable – and fitted them into the old-fashioned box file that had belonged to her uncle and put them away in the cupboard.

It was finished.

Julian arrived within two hours of her phone call. Agnes was sitting in the drawing room, looking over a sodden, flatly lit water-meadow. When she heard the car she got to her feet and went outside to meet him.

She saw instantly that he looked terrible, pale and bruised around the eyes, and felt the awesome depth of her love and tenderness, which burst to the surface, so intensely that she knew she could never have substituted anything else.

They stared at each other without moving. They needed that moment of harsh, pure feeling before the needle dropped into another quadrant. Then she asked, ‘Bad?’

He thought. Damn the figures and the dig-deep analysis. I can’t begin to explain this. He returned the smile, drinking in the iridescence of her radiantly happy grey eyes. As bad as it could be. Portcullis is finished, and finished with me. Legatt’s have taken over, the shareholders have been offered their pound of flesh, snatched at it, and the new masters want me out fast. It’s just a question of negotiating the pay-off, which they will do because they want my silence.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

She knew the words were inadequate – what would Kitty have said? - but she would practise and become expert.

Julian made a visible effort and came up with, ‘What news of the letters programme?’

‘Dropped from the schedules. But I’ll tell you about that later.’

She seemed reluctant to elaborate and he probed further: ‘Wasn’t the Exbury trip successful?’

‘Andrew lost the farm. He’s in quite a state.’ Agnes was shivering in the chill, and she led Julian into the house.

‘And?’ He waited, breath stilled, for her answer.

‘His wife has gone back to him, if that’s what you are asking.’

‘Ah.’ Julian walked over to the window, a man whose energy had been diminished and drained. ‘I thought I might be too late.’

Agnes picked up the postcard of Lincoln cathedral. ‘I received this from Kitty. She writes, “I’m living here now.”’

He looked down at it. ‘Kitty decided that enough was enough.’ His fingers drummed on the shutter, the tap of impatience that Kitty engendered in him but, following as quickly, was a scorpion’s sting of regret and nostalgia. ‘It was my fault because I met you… Ten years is a long time.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, for a second time.

‘I wonder if ten years is all we can ever ask of each other?’

‘I don’t know, but that’s what I want to talk to you about.’ Agnes sat down on the sofa. ‘I want to tell you something, Julian. I’m pregnant.’

‘A baby?’ It took a couple of pulse beats, then: ‘Whose?’

Agnes smiled and shook her head. ‘Didn’t you notice? I’m huge.’

He ignored her. ‘Whose it is? Please tell me.’

Struggling through the flat tone was fear, wonder, excitement. Agnes took pity. ‘It’s yours, Julian. Of course.’

‘Are you sure?’

She scrutinized the exhausted face. ‘You and Maud have more in common than you realize. You both imagine that I have a particularly lurid love life.’

He smiled bleakly. ‘Then I must help you. You must let me.’

‘Sail away to the land where the bong trees grow?’

‘Nothing wrong with that.’

She reached up and placed a hand on his chest. The new, powerful Agnes. ‘I want to give you something.’

He caught her hand and pressed it on to her stomach. ‘Aren’t you giving me this?’ he demanded. ‘You must say that you are. Otherwise I will imprison you on the island, where you will go mad with boredom.’

The response pleased Agnes more than she could say. ‘Go and sit down and listen to me, because this isn’t easy.’ He hovered. ‘Go on.’ Julian did as he was told.

Agnes looked out over her water-meadow. Its music and the play of light on the water were about to change. ‘Julian, I’m giving you the grounds of the house. I come with them. That is, if you want me… us. I’ve reached the conclusion that things cannot go on as they are. If Flagge House is to survive, then I must contrive. Survivors are survivors, because they are survivors. That’s something you’ve tried to tell me. Survivors are there at the right time. It is a present to Darwin, I suppose.’

‘Remind me sometime to explain the theory to you properly’ Julian was digesting the implications. ‘Agnes, do you mean it?’

Already the energy of the old Julian was flowing back, investing his features, pulling the weary body into shape. He was shaking himself back into a skin that was comfortable and familiar. ‘Let me think. Finance. I’ll be hobbled by investors because of my history, but that’s OK. Once I’ve got a team organized and I’m out of Portcullis, we’ll design you houses that will look as though they belong here.’ He checked the water-meadow from the window. ‘Four.’

‘Two, Julian. No more,’ she cried in panic.

He grabbed her hand. ‘Three.’

‘Two.’

His fingers squeezed hers hard. ‘I promise it will work, Agnes. I will make it work. I’ll leave the river, make it the focus of the planning.’

She was beginning to shiver violently with cold and with the reaction that follows great change. She also felt a little sick.

She looked out through the window. The figures that had moved across the meadow and plundered her imagination had vanished.

He stood beside her, hair ruffled, narrow-eyed and calculating, and she looked at the profile and wondered at the contrariness and yet the vastness of her love for him and for the unknown person she carried. ‘Ten years you said… for a relationship.’

He frowned. ‘Did I?’

‘Ten years is not enough for a child. It must be longer.’

He touched her stomach. ‘Will you come and live with me?’

She thought of the children surrounding the dying other Agnes. ‘Yes. For the time being.’

His grip tightened on her.

‘Maud.’ Agnes led Julian into the kitchen. ‘You wanted to know who the father is so I’m introducing him. Furthermore, we’re going to get married.’

Maud poked at the pork chops that Agnes had put out for lunch. ‘Very nice.’

‘Are you hungry?’ Agnes removed the plate. ‘Listen, Maud, I have agreed with Julian to develop the water-meadow and then Flagge House.’

Maud sat down with a thump. ‘Pull down the house?’

Agnes slid her arm around Maud’s shoulders. ‘No, of course not. But the money made on the field development will be used for renovating Flagge House into a proper home, including a flat for you. A nice, warm, centrally heated one.’

‘But you won’t change the house? Make it different?’

‘Maud!’ cried Agnes in exasperation.

‘You mustn’t do it.’ Maud was shrunken and wildeyed at the prospect of the changes she had begged for all her life. ‘I didn’t mean it, Agnes!’

‘How long have you been bullying me to sell the house?’

Maud assessed her captive audience. ‘You can be so stupid about things.’ She hunched a shoulder. ‘I had to make my stand somehow. Anyway, I feel differently now.’

‘This will be better, you’ll see.’

‘But it won’t be the same. The house won’t be the same.’

Agnes stroked the angora-clad bony outcrop of Maud. ‘No,’ she agreed, filled with a weary, desolate feeling. ‘It won’t.’

But Julian was watching. ‘Agnes,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’

She looked up at him and smiled.

Every line of Bel’s body conveyed messages of outrage and betrayal. ‘You’re going to do what?’

‘I’m going to marry the father of my baby and strive to give it some kind of security, and I’m going to live in Lymouth while everything is sorted out.’ She added, ‘I’m on hold, Bel, for the time being.’

Camaraderie. Exhaustion. The noise and smell of planes, bad food, the murmur of the team at work in the dawns, late at night, the bad habit of one last nightcap in the hotel bar. The absolute desire to get a vision on to film, absolutely as it should be. That would all go.

Bel’s frosted blue nails vanished as she searched in her handbag for a cigarette, which she lit defiantly. ‘What happened to you, Ag? You’ve gone off message. You’ve gone bush, native… whatever.’

‘Sticks and stones, Bel. I’m having a baby. It changes you.’

‘Doesn’t take your wits or your ambition, does it?’

Agnes perched on the edge of the table, a manoeuvre that, these days, required thought. ‘Did you ever believe in the letters?’

Bel’s expression hardened, glazed. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I reckoned you were being led up the garden path.’

Agnes’s eyebrows lifted. ‘You always were sharper. I’m sorry, Bel.’ She picked up her rucksack. ‘Look, I’ve had a word with some of our contacts, and there’s a couple who’d be very interested in you joining the team. Here they are.’

Bel picked up the list, scanned it and her eyes widened. ‘Good grief. Thank you.’

‘Just remember when you’re the big successful shot, and I want to come back, which I will, that you owe me one. OK?’ Agnes made for the door. ‘I’ll see you soon and we’ll wrap up the ends. And, Bel, thank you for everything.’

‘Agnes…’ Bel’s expression had not softened one jot. Nevertheless, she said, ‘I wasn’t being quite truthful. There were moments… Once I even thought I heard her, transmitting her messages from the field.’

Oh, Bel.

Bel hunched over the keyboard. ‘Goodbye.’