Secrets of the Heart

4

Bel rang on the Monday after the funeral. ‘Are you all right? I’m sorry I wasn’t there but I thought of you.’

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘Sticks and stones,’ said Bel, ‘will hurt me far more than your witticisms. You know me, death, babies, I’m hopeless at the messy things.’

Quite right, Agnes thought. It was as well to know one’s limitations but, all the same, she could have done with the comforting sight of Bel’s blue-streaked hair and matching fingernails.

She and Bel had agreed to found Five Star five years ago. Because they were both good, and lucky, the company had flourished. The previous year, they had won two prizes for their documentaries on micro-credit in the Third World, and the controversial look at whaling communities in Newfoundland. Five Star was run from Bel’s Notting Hill Gate flat, where Agnes, who preferred to be based at Flagge House, stayed on her trips up to London and for which she paid Bel a healthy rent.

Bel was four years older, and the administrative genius behind the company. She was also hugely talented and experienced, but a snag in the psyche prevented her from achieving quite what she wanted. Reaching for the stars, Bel shied away when they sailed into view – a binge or an illness – leaving Agnes to cope. Veering between brilliance and burnout, that was Bel, and Agnes would have walked on water for her.

Bel’s papers were being rustled meaningfully at the other end of the line. ‘What’s up?’

Bel sounded dubious, which was uncharacteristic for she was not a creature that entertained doubt. It either was or it wasn’t. A farmer called up from your neck of the woods,’ she pronounced the words as if she was discussing a disease, ‘and he thinks you would interested in a stash of letters he’s discovered in his attic from the Second World War. They were written by a farmer to his girlfriend. They’re all about his farm and their love affair. He says they’re immensely passionate and compelling. There’s about forty of them. He’s sent in two.’

‘Not our sort of thing,’ said Agnes.

‘He disagrees. Apparently he runs an organic farm, or something, and he’s being evicted by the landlord who wants to sell to a property developer and he thinks the letters might help get some publicity.’

Agnes stroked her plait. ‘Why doesn’t he go to the BBC?’

‘Apparently he read the article about your uncle’s death in the local newspaper. He was especially taken with the idea that you had inherited the house and you ran Five Star. He thought you would understand.’

Jack Dun, farmer, to his lover, Mary, who had gone away in December 1942:

After we said goodbye I walked on the moor. Everything, trees, grasses, even the stones, were white and brittle with cold. I followed the old drovers’ path past the oak copse, and I heard the branches on the trees groaning and snapping with ice. Further up, at Tolly’s Spring, I stood and surveyed my land. In winter, it is possible to piece together the clues of an ancient system. That strip there belonged to William, that one to Robin, and that one to the master. You can read the land, Mary, if you care to.

I was looking at the old laws of possession, a kind of love dug into the earth which made it bring forth. The land trusting the men who worked on it.

Yes, thought Agnes. I understand.

At dawn, Andrew Kelsey was up checking on his cattle in the pens, a twice-daily ritual in winter. He was a lean, weathered man, with a thatch of thick dark hair just beginning to go grey, dressed in a clean check shirt and corduroys. He moved slowly and methodically, running a hand over an animal here, casting a professional eye there. ‘Quiet, my beauties, quiet.’

He talked to them in this hushed moment before the day took over. To the uninitiated, each one was very like the next. To the informed eye, each was different. Andrew knew each one as an individual, as instinctively as a parent identifies his child. Always, at his approach, they stirred in their pens, and he fancied that they pressed up against him with something more than indifference. Why not? He treated them with respect and affection, and he ensured they were bedded on straw in good-sized pens.

It was so cold that the manure and straw smells were cancelled out in favour of sharp frost. Andrew fastened the final pen, stacked a couple of sacks of feed ready for the afternoon and backed up the van in the yard because he was expecting Agnes Campion.

He could feel, but not see, the lowering presence of the moor to the north of the farm. So old, so indifferent. But he liked the idea of its antiquity, older than it was possible to tally, older by far than the man-made landscape.

His fingers were aching, as they always did. Two of them on the right hand had been broken, nothing unusual in his work, but the blood no longer ran freely over the knotty calciferous joints until he flexed them. He walked towards the farmhouse. The blood flowed through his fingers, and the words in his head clustered like his cherished birds in the north field.

Soon there would be no bees left to forage in the grass, and no meadows. That was the way things were going. No tiny friction of crickets in the crops. No insects. No fungi running spores through the earth. No sighting of hares perched on chalky outcrops. No skylarks to loose their black arrows into the sky. No cowslip, burnet, toadflax and green-winged orchid.

‘Breakfast.’ Penny, his wife, had opened the kitchen window a crack, shouted through and closed it quickly against the dollop of cold air that slapped her round, unmade-up face. She sounded… not cross exactly but unsettled, a tone that was becoming habitual.

The words slithered away.

Andrew let himself in by the back door, shucked off his boots, washed his hands and padded across the kitchen in his socks. Penny was frying at the stove. As usual, her kitchen was immaculate, dishes stacked, pans shining, noticeboards displaying the weekly schedule, addresses, the bill rota and social engagements. Over by the window that looked out on to the yard and to the clump of ancient oaks beyond, which marked the boundary of the farm, was the latest pile of the women’s magazines that were Penny’s reading matter. Each month, Penny bought her favoured ones – every year more numerous – and read them, word for word, digging up from their pages the explanation to everything. And if one contained information on infertility, it was always left open for Andrew’s attention. Then his mind snapped shut and, invariably, he ignored it. Penny and Andrew were childless, and the empty space had burned into their marriage. At first they had talked about it and visited the doctors but, as their hopes dwindled, so did the occasions when he turned to her in the double bed, or she to him.

He had grown to hate the magazines, and their disinformation, especially as, in the early years when he teased Penny about them – but never too hard for he was a gentle man – she sulked.

Penny placed a fried breakfast in front of Andrew and they ate listening to the radio. Eventually, she fixed her eyes on him and asked, ‘When’s this woman coming?’

In the early days, Andrew had loved Penny’s habit of gazing at him. Loving and trusting, her eyes had seemed larger then. Nowadays, her scrutiny made him uncomfortable, as if she saw into his secrets, his conviction that the world was a greedy, unjust place.

‘She asked if she could come as early as possible because she wants to do some research in Exbury. Ten? Ten thirty? Depends on the roads.’

Penny washed up with a lot of swilling of suds. ‘I suppose this means you’ll go all arty on me.’ The implication was: and leave me out.

Andrew suppressed a sigh. Just because once he had confessed that, if he had not been a farmer, he would have liked to be some sort of writer, a poet maybe, Penny had held it against him. ‘For someone who’s so bad with words,’ she said. ‘Someone who can hardly string a sentence together. Who never talks to anyone.’ She meant that she and Andrew did not hold the long marital conversations to which she had looked forward and which she seemed to think were open and healthy. From that moment, she had chosen to interpret Andrew’s desires, as different as they could be from hers, as a criticism of her, his silences as a deep alienation from their marriage.

Lately, Andrew had begun to wonder if Penny was involved with someone else, specifically with Bob Howell, who ran a dairy farm the other side of the moor. He had no proof, only a gut feeling – a reference in a conversation, a phone call terminated when he entered the kitchen unexpectedly, Bob’s refusal to meet his eye in the pub. Strangely enough, part of him did not care if she was. Or he thought it didn’t but maybe that was something to do with the changes that threatened his life. And his marriage? If he was honest, Penny and he no longer functioned as a proper couple.

He searched in his pockets for a piece of paper on which he had jotted some notes, hauled them out and studied them.

‘What are you up to?’ asked Penny. ‘What’s going on with these letters?’ She was breathing hard.

He raised his head. ‘What are you up to?’

Her gaze dropped and she placed a saucepan on the stove with extra emphasis. ‘That’s not answering the question.’

‘Isn’t it?’ he said, his secret settling like a dog in a basket.

‘Just don’t lose sight of the fact,’ Penny was saying, ‘that we’ve got to save this farm. You’ve got to fight, Andrew, so you can’t get all distracted.’

Andrew heard the car drive into the yard, and went to greet Agnes at the back door. As she scrambled out of the car, his eyes widened in appreciation. ‘The photo in the paper didn’t do you justice,’ he said awkwardly, and led her into the kitchen to introduce her to Penny.

The kitchen was basic, but blissfully warm and clean, with immaculate touches. A dresser with blue china, a pair of old carver chairs, and a huge, burnished mirror on one wall that did not belong in a kitchen but actually suited it. In contrast to her rangy husband, Penny was small and plump, with badly permed hair and sharp-looking eyes, which were fretworked with fine lines a lighter colour than the rest of her complexion. While Penny was making coffee, Agnes inquired as to the date of the house, which she had expected to be much older.

‘This house? It was built in the sixties.’ Obviously Penny took the speaking role in this marriage. She heaved the tray of coffee over to the table. ‘The old house collapsed so Charlie Stone, our landlord’s father, built this one and leased it to Andrew’s father. When he died, Andrew took over. Now Jonas, his son, is trying to chuck us out.’

‘So Andrew has lived here all his life?’

‘Yes.’ Penny seemed tired and unfriendly. Agnes gained the impression of a woman who, over the years, had been disappointed, not drastically, but cumulatively.

‘And you say you’re being chucked out?’

Husband and wife exchanged a look, and Andrew shrugged. ‘As I told your colleague, the landlord has got into debt and wants to sell the land to a developer for a housing estate.’

‘Aren’t you protected by the law?’

‘That’s the problem,’ said Andrew. ‘The lease was reissued in the sixties and the landlord wrote in a water-tight clause that says he can chuck us out precisely when he wants to.’ White-knuckled, he rubbed at his broken fingers. ‘The solicitor has gone over it with a fine-tooth comb.’

She heard the underlying note of tension.

Andrew continued, ‘We farm organic beef here. No pesticides, hormones or stress. The cattle graze on untreated grass and live in family groups. We sell the meat all over the south. There’s a growing market out there.’

This fidelity to the old ways and old knowledge fascinated Agnes and she was warming to this slow-speaking farmer, who had taken to heart the responsibility for his land.

‘You say you’ve lent the letters to the local librarian,’ she said. ‘Is it possible I could look at them? If I felt there was something to work with, there is a television series which runs in the autumn called Hidden Lives. Do you know it? It occupies ten-minute slots and its brief is to explore the lives of ordinary people. As it happens, they’re looking for a couple of historical ones. But I’ll need your help on the research.’

‘Oh,’ said Penny, and stiffened. ‘What sort of research?’

Agnes noticed the body language. ‘Authentication. It’s usually done with wills, electoral rolls, constituency maps, that sort of thing. Don’t worry. Bel, my co-director, specializes in it. Usually it’s not a problem.’

Andrew produced an unremarkable grey file with a clip to keep the papers in place. Written on the spine in faded ink were the words: ‘Cattle Feed’.

‘The letters were mixed up with old bills for cattle-cake and that sort of thing.’ He slid the empty file across the table. ‘They were all jumbled up date-wise,’ he said. He reached for a leather tobacco pouch on the table, and his unfastened shirt cuffs fell back over wrists as warm and brown as walnut wood.

He made Agnes think of summer and the outdoors, of fields and sun, of blackberries and hips and autumn mist burned away by the sun. Her eyes slid past him to the mirror on the wall in which was reflected the trio at the kitchen table. Penny, cross and hostile; Andrew, intent, absorbed in the drama of the letters. Herself? Listening hard with the calm, professional expression she had perfected. The winter sun had shifted and light bounced off the mirror, directing a dazzling, exuberant beam at her.

‘Are you sure the writer, this Jack, lived here at Tithings?’

Andrew tamped a bootlace of tobacco into a Rizla paper, working the calloused fingers around the shape. A match flared, and tobacco smoke drifted up to the ceiling. ‘I’d recognize the landmarks he talks about in my sleep.’

‘And you’ve nothing else on Jack?’

‘No.’

Agnes made more notes. ‘Sometimes memory is the only source. We’ll have to ask around. I suppose he might have moved on after the war. Perhaps Mary didn’t come back and he no longer wanted to be here -’

Andrew cut in. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, tapping the table to underscore the point. ‘He would have stayed here. He wouldn’t have abandoned the farm. Never.’

The chair screeched along the floor and Penny got to her feet. With a gesture that Agnes was not sure how to interpret, she dumped her coffee mug in the sink. An awkward silence followed, which Agnes endeavoured to fill. ‘Could I see round the farm, if you’re not too busy?’

She felt the other woman’s eyes fixed on her back as Andrew led her across the yard to the cattle-pens. Penny had lent her a pair of boots, which were too small, and she couldn’t help thinking that Penny would be taking pleasure in the thought of her cramped feet.

To ease the pressure on her toes, she leaned on the railing of the first pen and savoured a pleasing pungency of cattle and warm straw, pulsing hide, muddy hoof and a base note of disinfectant.

Andrew pushed open the gate. ‘They’re raised on strictly traditional methods. That means they can grow at their own pace and without stress. I try to be totally organic. Sometimes I’m forced to use antibiotics when they’re ill, but absolutely no growth hormones.’

Agnes told the animals how lucky they were. Andrew tapped a warm flank. ‘You are, aren’t you, my beauties? I keep ‘em in family groups. Aunts and cousins…’

‘Have you always farmed?’

‘Always. Originally my father had a big place up in Yorkshire, then we came here.’ He caressed the ear of the beast nearest to him. Little feathery strokes. ‘It’s in the blood.’ The phrase was heavy with private meaning. A little puzzled, Agnes nodded. ‘Along with other things,’ he added hastily, and changed the subject. ‘Let me show you the rest of the farm. The weather’s clearing and you have to seize the moment with the moor. I should explain that I never use chemicals. You know that on some of the bigger farms the soil is technically dead? Eco-death. It doesn’t happen here.’

‘I did a piece on it once.’

He sent her a shy half-smile of approbation.

Together, they walked up to the north field and Andrew pointed out a cluster of granite buildings on the moor. ‘That’s one of the oldest farms in the area. Much older than here. Bits of it date back to the thirteenth century.’

Good camera shot. Agnes peered at the solid grey shapes, and the green and duns of the moor into which they were set. A silent, ancient setting.

One eyebrow arched quizzically, he turned to her. ‘I’d recognize it in my sleep.’ He pushed aside a petrified waterfall of brambles to let Agnes pass. ‘Over there…’ Andrew pointed to the road snaking as perimeter around the farm, and Agnes knew that the whole point of the tour had been to lead her to this spot.

He was saying, ‘There’s where Arcadian Villages propose to build stage one of the estate. Stage two is planned for later and will reach up to the garden of the farmhouse. In all, a hundred and fifty houses.’

She felt his bitterness and anger, as sharp as the wind that was blowing away the rain. ‘I know a little of how you feel. I had someone trying to buy up my house. I can’t tell you how angry I felt.’ She remembered the hot rush of words as she had told Julian Knox that her house was not on offer. ‘So what is happening here exactly?’

He shrugged. ‘The council has turned down the initial planning application but we had a letter yesterday to say that it’s gone to a planning appeal, which will be heard in June. If we win, it will then go before the Environment Secretary and we can spin it out.

They were clever, these planners. They had a nose for the right setting. Agnes could see that. Situated where it was, close to the road, Andrew’s farmland was the obvious place to site Exbury’s overspill. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, with real distress.

‘They think I’m a pushover,’ Andrew said, more to himself than Agnes. ‘The capitalist pushing aside the small man. They can think again.’

The shyness and taciturnity were deceptive, for this was a man who was preparing to fight. And why not? She sneaked a look at his profile. Under the wind-scoured complexion, a fire obviously burned and people with a mission were, sometimes, magnetic: they had a way of drawing you in. Anyway, why should his carefully built-up farm be under threat? Agnes wanted to shout, ‘I’m with you.’ Then she felt rather stupid.

The wind had swung round and she buttoned up her jacket. The collar scratched damply at her neck. He let the bramble fall back into place, brushed against her and again she caught the faint scent of the farm.

‘What are those?’ she asked, indicating a series of white stands under the hedge.

He barely glanced at them. ‘My bees.’

As she drove past the oaks on her way home, Agnes glanced in the driving mirror. Hands stuffed into his pockets and shirt cuffs flapping, Andrew Kelsey was rooted to the ground in the yard, gazing up to the north field, which rolled out under the moor. Tense and intent, his pose had a monolithic quality.

It was late afternoon when Andrew returned home for tea. Penny did not look up from her magazine, but said, ‘She’s pretty and all that, but I don’t think she could cook for a moment.’

‘Probably not,’ said Andrew.

‘She’d be no good as a farmer’s wife.’

‘That’s lucky, then, as I don’t think there’s any question of it.’ He drank the tea. ‘Pen, if I nip down to the pub could you look in on the calves?’

‘Sure,’ she said.

It was not until he was ordering the beer in the company of his mate, Jim, that it struck Andrew that Penny had been quick to say yes. Usually, requests for pub slots required plea bargaining on a grand scale.

The weather had finally cleared, and the moon dominated the sky when Andrew drove back to Tithings, up the potholed road which, in turn, climbed past the oak clumps towards the moor. The axe he kept in the back of the van rattled against the tool box and he thought, Blast. There was always something that needed doing that he had not got round to, something he had not checked up on or put away.

It was old, old land, and demons raged over it. A fertile crucible, with blood-red soil, bisected by hidden lanes and drenched hedgerows. The wind that had blown all afternoon and evening stirred the oak branches as he passed. Hearts of oak. Andrew saluted them, symbols of liberty, stoutness, mercantile imperialism. Under their canopies had been consummated a marriage between the elements and all the best myths. The Green Knight, Robin Hood, the Forest of Arden…

Upstairs in the stuffy main bedroom of the farmhouse, the alarm clock ticked away in the dark. Andrew pulled back the bedcovers and encountered the patchwork quilt, made by Penny’s mother. This was strange. Always, without fail, Penny removed it from the bed and folded it carefully. He put out a hand, felt across the quilt for the warm hump of Penny and found nothing.

He snapped on the light. The bed was empty and so was the room. There was a note on the pillow, which he snatched up. ‘I’ve left you,’ Penny had written, ‘for Bob, who wants me. You don’t and you never have. I’ll fetch my things another time. Good luck with the fight.’

Andrew lurched into the bathroom and was violently sick.

When he finally managed to drop into a twitchy sleep, Andrew dreamed of Jack. He pictured him, tall and short-sighted, ranging the moor and thinking of Mary. He was a man who would have known how to calculate time and distance from the sun and moon, a man whose power and presence were growing as Andrew wrote him into the letters and prepared to deceive as many people as possible to save his farm.

Who sows a field or trains a flower

Or plants a tree, is more than all.