Secrets of the Heart

6

The card lay on top of Julian’s papers in the kitchen of Cliff House. Kitty noticed it at once. She picked it up. ‘Who’s Agnes Campion?’

Julian was stowing a bottle of wine in the picnic cooler. ‘Possible business.’

‘Oh.’

Kitty scrutinized the card for further clues. Was his answer the usual ducking away from confrontation? She knew him so well, from back to front, from side to side, and she knew that he would work all night rather than face her questioning. And, oh, how he hated confrontation, particularly where feelings were concerned. But wasn’t that like all men?

Julian fastened the cooler and placed it on the floor. Then he reached over and prised the card out of Kitty’s hand. ‘Business, Kitty. That’s all.’

He was lying, she knew he was, but she had to carry on as if it did not matter a jot. Kitty put her head on one side in a manner that always made Julian uneasy. He had told her it made her seem arch, but she couldn’t help it. ‘Don’t be a bully.’

‘Then don’t pry.’

‘Of course not.’ Kitty picked up her expensive pale blue jacket and shrugged it on. ‘Why do you insist on picnicking in mid-winter? Why do I let you bully me?’ They were en route for Lincolnshire, where Julian was going to make one of his weekend site visits which, as chief executive of the company, was not strictly necessary but, as he explained to Kitty, only unwise emperors never visited the empire.

‘It’s nearly spring. It’s good for you. For me.’ Julian grinned and kissed her cheek lightly. ‘Let’s go.’

Everything was all right, really.

Nevertheless, the card cast a darkening shadow over Kitty as they drove north to Lincolnshire. It was always the way, she had discovered. Small things possessed a power to disturb out of proportion to their size.

Agnes Campion.

They drove across fenland, so flat that Kitty felt giddy, through which were threaded drainage ditches as straight as tram-lines. A ferocious wind buffeted the car and whipped over fields so large that Kitty wondered if she had strayed into the Russian steppes.

Mile after mile, the countryside was quite different from the pink-bricked, graceful landscape she was used to, but she had had the forethought to read up on it a little. Here had been traditional farming communities, governed by rote and season, by husbandry and tilth – she liked that word – but they had been invaded by new techniques. She peered out of the car window. If you looked carefully at the rich-soiled fields, said the guide, it was possible to see traces of the old ways.

Suddenly, miraculously, the fens folded up into the wolds and the road was tugged upwards by the swell of the land. Kitty was entranced and she reached for the guidebook. ‘“Once the wool market for England,”’ she read out, ‘“the county is dotted with substantial grey stone churches and large houses built in a more prosperous age. The poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, lived and wrote in the area and called it the ‘Haunt of Ancient Peace’.”’

At Horncastle, Julian turned right towards Skegness and drove several miles. On the outskirts of Loutham, where the sea was just discernible in the distance, he stopped the car beside a field in which the skeletons of new houses were already in place. ‘Welcome to the Tennyson housing estate.’

They got out of the car, Kitty already shivering inside her pale blue jacket. ‘Why here? It’s so windblown and… ugly.’

‘Well, for one, Bristling’s have built a large factory this side of Boston and it’s a perfect dormitory site for its executives.’

‘And where,’ asked Kitty, surprising herself, ‘will the badgers and foxes sleep?’

Julian hunted for his jacket on the back seat. ‘I didn’t know you were a naturalist, Kitty darling.’

‘I’m not,’ Kitty fought to tie a headscarf over her hair, ‘but I could be.’ She looked over to the sea. Dotted with only a few trees, the outlook was bleak, desolate, and she turned back thankfully to the car.

While Julian had his meetings with the group who had been assembled already by the Portakabin, Kitty drove herself to the nearest village and amused herself in a couple of junk shops. She bought a blue and white plate for her collection, a mirror for the staircase in the cottage, and a wooden coal scuttle banded in brass as a present for her mother. Signing a cheque always brought a satisfactory rush of blood to her head.

Eventually, she drove back to retrieve Julian, who was still occupied with the architect. Feeling more acclimatized, Kitty hauled on a pair of Wellingtons and wandered around the estate, which was well over a mile in circumference. On the sea side, the foundations for a perimeter wall had already been dug, but Kitty felt instinctively that it would be no defence against the winds roaring in from polar regions, or rain lashing in from the sea.

She walked along the rudimentary roads and closes to the furthest end. It was part of her self-imposed mission to be curious for, lately, she had been feeling the lack of it in herself and had wondered fearfully if it was a sign of ageing.

At the end of the final close, one of the houses, much smaller than the others, was set at an angle to the rest. It faced in the direction of the coast, and the pale winter light illuminated its carapace of scaffolding and empty window arches.

Picking through the piles of bricks and mud, Kitty walked up to it and peered into the interior. Someone would settle here, put up pictures, agonize over the arrangement of the furniture, open the french windows into the tiny back garden, fry bacon in the kitchen, draw the curtains against the winter. As she gazed into it, she heard a soft voice in her head say, ‘You must start somewhere.’

Kitty lingered so long that she began to shiver in earnest.

That night, in the hotel bedroom where they were staying, she asked Julian why that particular house was so much smaller. He looked up from a bound manuscript he was reading and told her that it was part of the thinking. ‘Zeitgeist housing, Kitty.’ These days, marriages did not last, mothers were single and grandmothers did not live with their families. There was a demand for small accommodation for all those who did not live in large family units. ‘The shape has changed,’ he added, and Kitty saw the point, only too well.

‘Why don’t marriages last, do you think?’

But Julian cradled the pages of the manuscript. ‘It’s too much to ask,’ he replied. ‘I suppose we get sick of each other. That is our nature, and it can’t be helped.’

Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid. Keep off these topics.

Julian returned to his reading and Kitty examined the wallpaper. She slid down on to the pillows. Reading was not one of her habits; she preferred the radio. Eventually, she tried again. ‘What are you reading?’

Julian looked down at the face on the pillow. Then he leaned over and stroked it. ‘A rather remarkable collection of love letters.’

Kitty’s interest sharpened. ‘Whose?’

‘A farmer’s. He was writing during the Second World War to his lover who had gone off to fight.’

‘Male or female?’

‘Female.’ He seemed alight with an emotion she could not catalogue. ‘Listen to this, Kitty. He writes that he feeds on her absence like the vampire. “I suck greedily on my unassuaged desire until my throat is blistered and burning…”’ He put the manuscript on the bedside table, lay down with one of his quick, decisive movements and turned off the light.

The writer knows, thought Kitty. He knows how I feel. She wanted to reach out and to feast as greedily on the flesh that she loved so well but Julian was too silent, too still for her to dare.

I must start somewhere.

They were back in Lymouth early on Sunday evening. Julian drove Kitty to the cottage, unloaded her suitcase and announced that he would spend Sunday night at Cliff House because he had work to do. To her astonishment, Kitty heard herself saying, ‘Julian, I’ve been thinking. Thinking that… it’s time for a change.’ She knew what he was likely to say, that there wasn’t time, that he was busy and couldn’t it wait, so she held out her hand, pulled him into the hall, shut the front door and leaned against it. ‘No, you can’t go yet. I won’t let you until we’ve talked.’

‘Kitty…’

Her courage was fragile so she got the words out in a rush. ‘I would like us to get married. We suit each other and it would be so much more practical.’

Fists clenched, she waited for his reply. She longed, how she longed, to live in Cliff House, so big and generous, sited so perfectly by the sea. How she would grace it, the trophy that, surely after ten years, she had earned. How well they would fit together, she and it. The serene, bay-windowed room framing the seascapes, the sunlight that poured through it, the garden she would make it her business to study. ‘Say something,’ she begged.

He did not look at her – a bad sign. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Kitty.’

She felt his trappedness, or was it indifference?, like a thousand slashes, but pressed on. ‘Why not, Julian?’ He shoved his hands into his pockets, and she remembered the faint disturbance given off by Agnes Campion’s card. ‘Is there someone else?’

Now he did look at her, with a kind, too kind, expression, and for a few terrible seconds she thought she had hit on the truth.

‘I’m not sure.’ She winced and damned their agreement for absolute honesty. Julian continued, ‘But I don’t think we should make any changes. I don’t know why exactly, Kitty, and I know I should explain it better. Except I’ve been happy with what we’ve got.’

‘You must know why.’

He shook his head. ‘Kitty, if…’

Ominous ‘if.

A picture of one future took shape in her head with appalling clarity. No Julian sitting in the chair by the window, an echoing space in the bed, which she took care to make up each Friday with Italian cotton sheets and which bore the impress of his body when he left.

‘Stop,’ she said, her courage and resolution vanished. ‘It’s all right. I didn’t mean it.’

He moved towards her, took her in his arms and dropped a kiss on her blonde, highlighted hair. She shuddered with the humiliation of that light kiss. ‘Is this making you unhappy, Kitty? I couldn’t bear that. You must be honest.’

‘No,’ she lied. ‘No. Not at all.’

Julian took her hand and pulled the fingers gently, one by one. ‘I would prefer to stay as we are. I hope I look after you well enough, and you like it here in Lymouth.’

‘Do I?’ Kitty felt too weary to dissemble. ‘What do you know about the weekdays?’

Now he traced the shape of Kitty’s fingernails. ‘Nothing at all, thank goodness.’ His finger slid up her arm. ‘So lovely to touch, Kitty,’ he murmured, and she had an awful, awful feeling that the words were not really for her. ‘That’s what I’ve always loved about you. You’re so well… tended.’

Coward, she wanted to fling at him. Coward.

‘Soft, lovely Kitty.’

She hated his patronage, but also knew that he did not intend it in that way. He thought he was paying her a compliment, and it amused her that even the accomplished Julian stumbled. She also knew that she was not going to receive an answer to her question. She raised her beautifully made-up eyes to his.

‘Don’t rock the boat, Kitty.’

In his way, Julian was being loyal, for she knew now there was someone else. His warning was a kind of fidelity – the one they had agreed on.

There was silence, except the dim, muffled sound of a rough sea.

Oh, God, thought Kitty. Help me.

Patience. Instinct. Sexual perfection and expertise, a willingness to abandon. These were the elements that Kitty summoned to her aid. She reached up and kissed Julian on the corner of the mouth where she knew it roused him. ‘Once upon a time,’ she said, brushing the line of his jaw with her tongue, ‘there was a fair princess…’ Julian laughed and moved closer. Ah, thought Kitty. She could feel his response and stirred it further by nipping his lower lip gently between her teeth. ‘Who lived in a tower. Untouched.’

Julian’s arm circled Kitty. ‘And she waited for a prince to come along. One day he did. Better still, he was tall, fair and rich.’

Safely encircled, Kitty sighed. ‘But he had one fault.’

‘Oh?’

‘He was too bossy. And she wasn’t quite sure that his lovemaking was up to it.’

‘You devil,’ said Julian, and pulled her even closer, ‘for that.’

Kitty’s spirits rose. She understood this particular exchange very well. In one way or another, she had played it with all her men. ‘And what are you going to do about it?’

‘I could take myself off. Or…’

‘Or?’

‘I could decide the last accusation was rubbish and deal with the situation in the way I think fit.’

Kitty backed towards the staircase. She raised a school-mistressy finger. ‘Stay where you are, Julian. Right there.’

She turned and fled up the stairs to the bedroom.

In the middle of the night, Kitty woke. Julian’s head rested against her shoulder and she smiled to herself. He had stayed, and such moments of sweetness made up for the doubt and confusion, and for her fear for the future.

It was only as she was drifting back to sleep that she realized that Julian was still awake.