Secrets of the Heart

2

Maud had acquired the habit of inserting French words into her conversation on the annual holidays to Deauville with John. She did so whenever the mood took her, chiefly to indulge her desire to be noticed, but she maintained that it was to do with her inner ear, which was particularly sensitive to languages.

It was mid-morning, the day after the funeral. A post-mortem of the ceremony had been held and the conversation had turned to the next move. Not surprisingly, Maud was prickly.

‘Comment?’ she challenged Bea, her widowed sister, who had lived at Flagge House since the death of her husband seven years previously.

‘I don’t think you should have said what you did.’ A pale, shrunken-looking Bea poured out cups of tea and handed them round.

Maud was sufficiently surprised by her sister’s attack to snap back, in English, ‘What did you say?’ It was rare for Bea to criticize Maud: when she did, it was usually in the presence of a witness.

‘I didn’t like what you said to him that morning… just before… you know…’

Maud’s still large, lustrous eyes – she had been an exceptionally pretty woman – were sullen. ‘I thought you were supposed to be comforting me.’

Maud was wearing one of her home-knitted jumpers, a professional-looking creation in mourning-black angora with a turtle neck, but she looked frozen. The diamond-paste ring that she habitually wore with her wedding band gave off a blackish sparkle that never fooled anyone who knew about diamonds. ‘Aren’t you?’ she reiterated.

Agnes and her aunts were huddled at the kitchen table below a ceiling across which yellow stains sailed in cloud formations, surrounded by a litter of saucepans and the unopened cans of soup on which the aunts appeared to survive. The cold crept round their feet and an acrid underlying whiff of mould emanating from the leaking window seemed more than usually noticeable.

Agnes drank her tea out of the thick white cup that had once been of use in a station canteen before fetching up in a jumble sale. It tasted dead, if such a thing were possible, and her stomach protested. Grief was a funny thing, circling round like a tiger and pouncing just at the moment you thought you had it under control. Guilt, as she knew from experience, did not bother with the circling.

At any minute now, she must spring into action. With some amusement, she had read about how families assign roles to the separate members – the moneymaker, the fool, the dreamer – and now Agnes had been assigned hers. That was fine. That was what was expected of her, and what Agnes expected of herself. She knew, and they knew, that despite their sparring the sisters were united in their expectation that Agnes would take charge of both the argument and of the future. Agnes will know what to do.

‘I had to tell John the truth. I was taught to tell the truth.’ Maud raised her eyes to the ceiling and dropped them again when she encountered the colony of spiders in the cornice. She faced Agnes. ‘You weren’t the only one in his life,’ she said, dripping bitterness. ‘I was the one who was married to him, you know.’

Bea was apparently fixated by the dingy laurel tree that guarded the entrance to the kitchen yard. ‘It wasn’t kind, Maud.’ She did not look at her sister. ‘You must have peace when you’re dying.’

Agnes braced herself. ‘What did you say, Maud, that was so terrible?’

Maud’s bulldog expression said: You can’t shame me. ‘That I was sick and tired of words like “heritage”, and how ridiculous it had been that because he was the owner of a house like this we had been martyred all our lives to it. What’s more, I told him I wanted to move out and live in a bungalow. A nice warm modern one. There, that’s what I said.’

Agnes stared at Maud. In a normal marriage one hoped for a little peace in which to shelter. Pierre had agreed, adding that his marriage to Madeleine did not stop him worshipping Agnes’s size seven English feet and long ash-blonde hair. As a result, a besotted Agnes in all innocence, no, foolishness, had spent four years imagining that Pierre would leave his wife in the flat on the rue Jacob in Paris with the three elfin daughters.

She knew those daughters as well as she might have known her own, for everywhere she went, in everything she did, they were there, like the tender, infant putti in the paintings: Katrine, the clever one, Claudine, the pretty one, and Mazarine, the plump little angel of the family. She had been jealous of them, the only considerations that gave Pierre pause. Their innocence, their physicality, their needs were balanced in the palms of Pierre’s hands, and Agnes hated it, and hated herself for that.

That was before Madeleine had arrived at Agnes’s hotel one evening and pointed out how terribly the family was suffering, and if Pierre said otherwise he was lying. After that, everything changed, and because Pierre was forbidden, Agnes wanted him even more. Yet the more she wanted him, the more she thought of Madeleine until, in some tortured fashion, Madeleine became more important, the one who occupied Agnes’s thoughts.

After she had told Pierre it was over and that she was not coming back to Paris, Agnes had finally tumbled to the conclusion that the good and bad areas of a marriage were irrelevant. You grew round the other person, like fat and muscles over organs, and that was that.

Maud shrugged. ‘You needn’t look so disapproving, Agnes. I have a point, and John knew it. Anyway, he probably didn’t hear what I said.’

‘But he did.’ Bea was as fierce as it was possible to be.

No fool, Maud realized that her trespass was too far and she adjusted her tone to a more reasonable one. ‘You ought to sell this millstone, Agnes. It’s done nothing but bring trouble and misery on all of us. Think. We could all have some money to buy somewhere sensible.’

Agnes’s fingers folded across the cup and tightened but she said nothing. An empty bag is impossible to burst and it was best with Maud in this mood to be as empty as possible.

‘For a start, there’s a leak in the blue bedroom ceiling,’ said Maud, ‘and the roof is getting worse.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Agnes. Maud had a nose for the details. ‘It’s on the list.’

‘Long ago,’ Maud had once, in a rare soft moment, told the frightened little cuckoo who had dropped into her nest, ‘John and I had to mend the roof. Nail fatigue, I think. The men found a plate in the rafters, one of the Delfts. A maid must have broken it and been too frightened to own up. She would have lost her place.’

That a plate could so alter a life had shocked Agnes. She had asked to see the pieces, and Maud obliged. Agnes cradled them in her hands: indigo blue and greyish white shapes, which had ridden over a dark sea from Holland to the sun-flecked drawing room in England. If she thought hard enough, she could still feel the sharp, gritty edges that had grazed her skin.

‘But why ever not sell?’ Maud saw the nice, clean, warm bungalow slipping away.

Agnes finished her tea. As clearly as if he was in the room, she heard her uncle’s voice. ‘Family, tradition, history, not letting go…’ Those were the charges laid on her by him. To be fair to Maud, they probably did not make sense. But they made absolute sense to Agnes. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘the Jane Austens are missing from his bedroom. Someone has moved them. Do you know where they are?’

‘You were wrong,’ said Bea, for a second time. She whirled round, fierce and trembling.

Maud poured herself another cup of tea. ‘Thank God I’m not a proper Campion,’ she said. ‘It’s perfectly ridiculous.’

Both Agnes and Bea knew exactly what this outburst betokened. Maud had always felt excluded, an interloper of forty-five years who could never quite see her way into the charmed circle. The pretty bride who had married John had never truly found her niche.

‘Actually, can we not argue?’ Bea looked ill with distress.

Agnes reached for her bag and extracted her notebook. ‘Let’s sort a few things out, then we can have lunch.’

‘I’ll lay up.’ Bea struggled to her feet.

Maud watched her sister bustling around with china and silver. ‘Not those spoons for soup, Bea,’ she said, after a moment or two. ‘Will you never learn?’

A couple of hours later, Agnes tucked Bea into bed for a nap and ordered her to stay put for at least an hour. Maud retired to the small sitting room, formerly the butler’s pantry, in which the television and video-recorder were installed. Within minutes, music drifted through the house.

Tackling a pile of paperwork in her uncle’s study, Agnes heard the familiar notes and knew exactly what Maud was watching. First, the unsoiled grey-green vista of an Alpine mountainside on which a dot appeared to fling wide its arm and loose a string of high notes. Then, in a director’s sleight of hand, the camera panned down to transform the dot into Julie Andrews. Once again, Maud was worshipping at the shrine of The Sound of Music.

Agnes gritted her teeth and telephoned Bel, her co-director at Five Star, the production company they ran together. Bel operated from the London end and they kept in constant touch. Half-way through their discussion on the schedule for their project, The Death of the English Apple, she heard Maud cry out. Agnes shot down the passage to find her transfixed in front of the screen, which was now a mass of moving colour and song.

‘It’s so sad. I can’t bear it.’ Maud pressed a hand to her mouth.

Agnes sat down beside her. ‘Maud, John was eighty. I know he didn’t want to die but perhaps…’ She could not bring herself to continue.

Maud stiffened. ‘Oh, that,’ she said. ‘I meant,’ she pointed to the screen, ‘she looks so young and beautiful, so pure, and I can’t bear it.’

Agnes looked. Julie Andrews was progressing up the aisle in her wedding dress, and the choir were singing like angels. She counted to five and leaned over to tuck the tartan rug around Maud’s angular form. ‘You know this is your home, don’t you? Always. You mustn’t worry.’

Maud dropped her hand and turned a countenance on Agnes on which incomprehension and anger were etched. (Agnes could almost predict the number of seconds required for Maud to slot into dramatic gear.) But Maud surprised her. She stretched out an arm to Agnes, the paste ring quivering on her finger like a roosting insect, and the aggression was replaced by a weary regret. She pulled at a fold of papery skin at her wrist. ‘Look at me. Old. Drained. Fatiguée. If you take on this house, you will end up the same.’

‘Hush, Maud.’ Agnes tried to soothe her, but Maud grabbed her.

‘Believe me.’

1939-45 was the era of yet another war, and of Morse code.

Before sending a message from the field to Home Station, an agent was required to key a message into a numbered phase. From there, he or she would hook it up to a second transposition, at which point the original message had been thoroughly scrambled.

The concept of double transposition appealed to Julian Knox, who, being fascinated by codes, had picked up a history of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War in a bookshop and bought it. He had reached the section on coding. The mathematical constructions were fascinating. So was the neatness of a code and, in contrast, its risky fireworks and the dig-deep analysis to which he responded. He liked, too, the exhilaration of stalking an objective enfolded in cryptographic darkness and of dragging it into the light. He liked the puzzle and, when the key was exposed, its absolute rationality.

He was thinking about safety and danger, the closed message and the clear, as he drove down the motorway from London to Lymouth, where he lived and where Kitty, his mistress, was waiting. On the way, he planned to detour to Charlborough, which was only eight or so miles to the west of Lymouth, Mrs Campion had invited him to drop in at any time, and Friday afternoon seemed as good as any and fitted in with the weekend schedule.

In the period since Maud Campion had called, faithful Angela had been busy. She had extracted relevant material from the County Masterfile, which, because they did so much work in the area, was kept permanently up-to-date. It included a report on the river systems, its farming (the ratio of arable to dairy), its parishes, topography, recorded footpaths and hedgerows. She had also produced a large-scale map of Charlborough on which she had highlighted with coloured marker pens the railway lines, churches, glebelands, school playing-fields and conservation areas. Julian insisted that the team was meticulously briefed and, because he played fair, that included him.

Still reflecting on the subversions, the almost erotic moment of discovery posed by the code, he drove through the moorland that separated the snug, thriving coastal town of Lymouth from Charlborough, which was struggling to preserve its shop and bus route.

In the drive at Flagge House, it took only a few seconds to see that, if it was not quite in rigor mortis, it was certainly in extremis. The older, main section of the house was lovely but the Victorian addition was graceless, and the repairs that had been undertaken to shore up portions of walls and roof were inadequate.

Never trust an old house. It was a greedy thing, honeycombed as often as not with rotting roofs, collapsed windows and hidden problems which, naturally, were always the worst. Why did one old house fare better rather than another? The answers were various. Owners defaulted, families decayed, energy dwindled. As a loose Darwinist, Julian accepted the injustice of chance and survival, and built it into the underlying philosophy of his business.

He slowed the car to a crawl and assessed the terrain. The team could work their miracles here with a couple of well-designed but low-cost houses. Behind them, in the water-meadow, was easily space enough to build two expensive, sensitively sited houses, whose sale would subsidize the former and bulk up the margins. As a division of self-interest into altruism, the equation was sound and good.

He parked the car by what was obviously the old kitchen garden. It was raining and he pulled his jacket out of the back before he stepped through the gate set into the brick and found himself in a walled garden.

His expert eye registered the subsidence in the bricks, and the shards of glass littering fractious unwilling soil. It was a place that no longer held energy and had given up the struggle. He bent down to pick up one of the pieces of the glass. It was thick and old-fashioned, tinged with green and lead deposit, smeared with snail slime. Probably from one of the wrecked Victorian cloches abandoned by the cold frames.

‘Excuse me,’ said a voice. ‘What do you think you are doing?’

A girl with loosely plaited thick fair hair walked through the opposite entrance to the garden towards him, her hands dug into the pockets of her navy blue pea-jacket. Her skin glowed but there was a brushstroke of weariness under the eyes and anger expressed in the set of a large mouth. The effect was of long-limbed beauty, but beauty that was worn carelessly, disregarded even. The shock of discovery, which he knew of old, went through Julian.

Not now, he thought.

‘You’re trespassing,’ she informed him.

Abandoning Maud to Julie Andrews, Agnes had seized her jacket and fled outside. The rain brushed her cheeks, light whispery drizzle that soaked everything it touched, and she made for the shelter of the kitchen garden.

A stranger was walking around it, a tall, confidently dressed man with reddish-blond hair. He was examining a shard of glass, in a manner suggesting energy and attack, and she observed that, under a battered jacket, he was city-suited, a type she tended to avoid.

She challenged him, and the stranger dropped the glass and turned round. Agnes looked into a face that was knowledgeable, sophisticated, clever and a little bit sad. It was a face that reminded her of the Greek masks, one laughing, the other tragic. The last always got to her. Her fingers closed around the fluff in her pocket. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

He straightened up. ‘A Mrs Maud Campion phoned me and asked me over. Apparently the house is for sale.’ He peered at Agnes’s flushed, set face. Rain had plastered tendrils on to her forehead. ‘You don’t look as old as your voice.’

‘Possibly because it was not me. Maud Campion is my aunt. But you’ve been misinformed. Or perhaps,’ she said coolly, ‘you did not hear properly.’

The stranger’s eyebrows twitched together, but he did not budge. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied.

The reporter and observer in Agnes took mental notes. Does not like to be doubted.

He shrugged, and the superbly cut suit obediently followed the movement. ‘It’s a wonderful place,’ he said politely. ‘It must have been beautiful once.’

True. On the wall behind him in the old days would have grown an espaliered peach: the nails were still in situ and traced their pattern over the pink brick. In the shade of its ripe, moist fruits would have flourished chard, spinach and sweet young peas. But, whoever he was, this man did not fit into the picture.

‘It would be an ideal project,’ he said, quick and calculating.

Agnes was on a short fuse. ‘Were you hoping to find somewhere to buy in the village? There is a house by the church. It’s in hideous brick, its architectural references are to suburbia and it’s been built on part of the cricket pitch that had been left in perpetuity to the village but, no matter, the developer and the local planning officer did a deal and hey presto.’ She looked again at the suit. ‘But the price is good.’

‘Sounds dreadful,’ he said sympathetically, ‘but perfect for me. Vulgar, intrusive and, no doubt, very expensive.’ He brushed a runnel of rainwater from his cheek and added, ‘I see you have me summed up.’

Despite herself, Agnes grinned. ‘That settles that, and you need not stay any longer.’

He appeared to consider. ‘Not quite. There is Mrs Campion to explain things to.’

Agnes did not respond and he continued, ‘My firm develops sites. During my conversation with your aunt, she suggested strongly that this might be one of them.’

‘Ah,’ she said, after a moment or two. ‘One of those.’

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘Do you?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Someone has to build houses. It can be done with taste and subtlety.’

This was an old chestnut and she had imagined that he would be cleverer than to produce it. ‘Subtlety,’ she exclaimed passionately. ‘Not always. Take at look at the houses on the edge of village when you leave. That was once a wood with medieval coppices and wild anemones. Now there are plastic swimming-pools and plate-glass windows.’

‘I’ve upset you,’ he said.

‘My uncle loved those anemones. He died last week.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Startled, she looked up at him and read his wish to convey a similar acquaintance with grief.

He said, ‘I don’t possess a handkerchief but I’m sure you’re the sort of person who has one.’

‘I don’t.’ She thought of the anemones lying under the bricks and mortar.

‘How lucky then,’ he said, ‘that you are not wearing mascara.’

There was a moment or two of silence.

His feet crunched on glass as he moved away. The rain began to fall in earnest. ‘There is a good case for pulling down a house in bad shape.’ He turned to address her. ‘A house like this can bleed you dry and there is always a need for new housing.’

Agnes pulled herself together. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘of course, but not here.’

‘So be it.’ He tipped a sliver of glass with the toe of his shoe. He seemed to be considering the next move. ‘In my experience, defenders of the heritage are never prepared to enter the debate and there are arguments on both sides.’ Again he smiled, ironic and, this time, a little defensive. ‘I don’t blame them. It’s easy to forget that if we want to develop our new industries we have to house people and give them the services they want. But I am holding you up.’ He turned to go. ‘Will you apologize to your aunt for me?’ His gaze roved pointedly over the wounded glasshouses, the shattered cold frame in the corner, the barren soil. ‘I should stick to sailing,’ he remarked. ‘It’s less controversial and there are not so many people out for your blood.’ He turned to Agnes. ‘Do you sail?’

‘No, I don’t.’

She led the way out of the walled garden to his car. He opened the door and extracted his wallet. ‘Here’s my card.’

She looked down at the white rectangle. ‘That’s very kind, but I don’t see the point.’ It was balanced between his finger and thumb. There was no point either in being any more rude than she had been. Agnes stretched out her hand, took it and read the name printed on it. Comprehension dawned. ‘I know who you are. You do a lot of work in this area. That’s why Maud got in touch.’

Pepped up no end by this confrontation, she watched the car disappear down the drive.