‘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.
3
Saturday.
‘Why didn’t you come last night?’ Kitty Richardson asked Julian Knox as she slid out of bed and ran over to greet him. ‘I was expecting you as usual. I waited.’
Yes, she had. She had stood by the window of her small, exquisitely arranged cottage for a long time that Friday evening, anticipating the crunch of his car turning into the drive, in much the same pose (had she but known it) that Agnes had assumed at the window of Flagge House. However, in Kitty’s cottage, which she had bought outright herself, the curtains were lovely, expensive, clean, and if they bore a resemblance to those hung at the windows of Julian’s house, which could be seen from Kitty’s windows across the bay, that was because Julian had paid for the same interior designer to furnish both houses as a job lot.
‘Sorry, Kitty,’ said Julian, and Kitty tensed, for Julian did not sound that sorry. ‘I had some business in the morning, then I went to view a possible project on the way down. By the time I reached Lymouth it was late and I wanted to go over the figures, so I went to Cliff House for the night. Forgive?’
Liar, liar, she thought, for Julian knew perfectly well that, whatever the hour, Kitty always waited up. He had needed to go home to the house poised on the sea cliff, just to breathe, and she bitterly resented it. He knew Kitty could see the house from her cottage and would have been watching, would have seen the lights go on. He knew what Kitty would have felt, and her disappointment.
‘Why didn’t you ring?’
‘It was late. I told you.’ He paused. ‘You would have seen the lights, Kitty, and known I was safe.’
He knew it was impossible for her to settle until she knew he was safe. ‘It’s never too late,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I keep telling you that.’ Friday was their night, the culmination of a day of preparation and of mounting vigil. This Friday, she had kept that vigil at the window until it was very late and the food laid out in the kitchen had long congealed. Then, she had sat on the sofa with a glass of whisky and pictured Julian asleep at Cliff House, breathing lightly and softly. Remote and only half hers.
I will not let it hurt me, she told herself, the old hot, sick feeling threatening.
I will not.
Julian had made up for it, of course, by sneaking into the house in the early light, having been out for his morning walk. He smelt of sea and cold, and when he bent over to kiss her, her lips had fastened on his cheek with relief.
She laid her head on his chest, searching for the heartbeat she liked to hear. ‘Give me five minutes and I’ll make you your breakfast.’
He plonked himself full length on the bed and closed his eyes. It was then that she asked him for a second time why he had not come as he had promised. He murmured, ‘I wanted to get the research sorted. Think numbers. Work out logistics. All that sort of thing.’
Without me.
Kitty was brushing her hair, always an interesting exercise. If she brushed it back, then she was one sort of person, if she brushed it forward, or to the side, she was another. Transformations of this sort were her business, for she was a woman who made herself in the image of what others wanted. Well, what men wanted. The ones who kept Kitty in her so far successful career of being kept. She did not mind. Furthermore, it was easy: if Kitty did not possess conventional brains she understood more than most the value of metamorphosis.
Julian’s prone figure on the bed was reflected behind her own image in the generous mirror. I adore him. Kitty transferred her attention to herself. Yes. That was her as he wished and, therefore, as she wished: a small, delicate, creamy-highlighted blonde with lovely bone structure.
Julian eased himself into a sitting position, picked up the phone and punched in numbers. He mouthed, ‘Patrick Leache,’ at Kitty.
‘Oh.’
It was no use protesting. Julian relied on Leache, who was the area’s district planning officer, for his information, which was often imparted in private conversations at weekends. Not, said Leache’s enemies, that planning came into it but his friends in the building business were warm in their support of his work. I hate the Leaches of this world, thought Kitty, fiercely and illogically. Julian was explaining his possible interest in a house and could Patrick have a look at some point. He added the name ‘Campion’. Like most people in the area, Kitty knew the name if not the house itself. ‘Would there be a problem?’ Julian was asking.
He put down the phone and lay back with an expression that Kitty knew of old. It meant that he was contemplating a challenge, one that pleased and stimulated him. It meant that he would often be too busy for her.
One step forward, two back. The anger never seen by others stirred in Kitty’s soul. She fought it for she knew, from experience, that anger tightened the ligaments in her neck and hardened her features. Oh, Kitty, Kitty, what a sham you are.
If she was truthful, and Kitty tried hard to be so, her anger was really a form of grief and impotence, not the strong, cleansing emotion that psychotherapists advised it should be.
Come, tell the truth. She loved a man with a desperate passion that she knew was not returned, and would never be returned.
These days, being a mistress was a minority occupation. Rather old-fashioned, really. ‘I am clever enough,’ Kit
ty had once confided to her friend Amy, ‘to know that I am a dinosaur, but not clever enough to do anything about it.’ Amy rather disagreed. Over twenty years or so, she had witnessed Kitty moving with tact and grace from one lover to another (but not too many), providing, of course, they had sufficient funds. Kitty had done rather well out of it, she suggested, very much better than a nurse or a secretary. ‘I mean,’ added Amy, ‘your career is being a Kept Woman and you’ve proved to be a high flyer. It takes guts and nerve, Kitty, make no mistake.’
Beautiful, discreet, charming and childless by choice – Kitty needed all her energy to concentrate on herself – it was too precarious a life to be otherwise.
True, she had worked at it.
She had not intended to be a professional mistress, but Kitty had made the mistake of becoming entangled with one married man after another, a practice that had become, she now realized, a kind of addiction but had not appeared like that to begin with. Stopping was impossible. In those early days, Kitty had believed that the Robins and Harrys and Charleses would leave their wives. Later on, she had grown to see the advantages of being single yet bound with delicate chains. In the style to which she had grown accustomed, Kitty had learned the secret. There were always men who wanted a mistress.
But things were changing.
‘I’m longing for an orange juice, darling,’ she pleaded. ‘Then I’ll do breakfast.’ She had battered him into being good and contrite and, reluctantly, Julian pulled himself upright and went to do her bidding. Using a tissue, Kitty patted her face dry and applied expensive cream. Its glutinous, silken touch on her fingertips reassured her: her armoury and investment against… well, what? Against the vanishing beauty that had once been set and immutable and, at forty-eight, was now slipping.
Kitty got up and sat down at the foot of the bed, spreading out her manicured fingers on the counterpane, and was reminded of the things that went on in it, accomplished with shared greed and skill. Last night was not by any means the first Friday on which Julian had failed to turn up, but the shortfall mattered when you sensed that the slope was becoming steeper, or the precipice closer.
Was it significant? Freedom and space, and all the other abstracts Julian talked about with regard to their relationship, seemed at times to Kitty to come very expensive. In fact, because she loved Julian as she had not loved the others, she had grown to hate and distrust such terms. Anyway, most people didn’t want freedom. It was, well, too free.
Theo, darling, mad, Australian Theo, who cleaned the cottage three days a week as part of his therapy, would understand. ‘OK, darl,’ he would say, bringing out all the clichés. ‘He’s a flaming bastard. A stupid, blind bastard.’ And Kitty would bathe in the white heat of Theo’s gratitude and affection, which was Kitty’s repayment for having rescued him from the institution into which he had been binned. It would have the effect of thawing the ice-chip in her heart. Just a little.
Loving was so exhausting, so dependent-making, so hurtful. I have tried, I have tried, to conduct my career on the basis of good manners, affection and financial expediency, she thought, and I have succeeded. Yet I am continually surprised by how savagely love undercuts all of those things.
Before he left Lymouth on Sunday evening, Julian said goodbye to Kitty and returned briefly to Cliff House. London was the place where he worked and laid his head. Kitty’s cottage was the place where he conducted yet another part of his life, but this generous, light-filled Victorian house was home. Poised on the cliff above its own tiny beach a little way out of the town, it was where the parts of him had been shaped – difficult, hard, puzzling, as the process had been. Here, where the smell of salt and spiky marsh plant intensified in the spring, the birds surfboarded the waves and, when the sea grew rough and tides pounded, he could hear the grinding of stones, slate and granite, one upon the other. When the water retreated, leaving rank memorabilia of weed and detritus dotted like a pox on the smooth sand, and the sticky bottom slice of the cliff crept into view, the old passion for the fossil chase flared. On quiet summer days, the sand shimmered, the stone grew hot and the sea turned transparent. Then it was possible to hear the shift of sand underfoot, the eddy of a current on the turn, the splash of a seabird, and he discovered, yet again, the power of insignificant objects – a shell, a stone, a piece of wood – to satisfy.
Sometimes on the beach a memory shifted, unfolded. Then he remembered how he had longed to grow up, not only because he imagined he would be given the answer to the questions that puzzled him but because he had imagined that being grown-up meant that you were never lonely.
Cliff House had belonged to his parents, who had astonished themselves, and their friends, by producing Julian when they were well into their forties. ‘Never mind,’ said the wives of Lymouth, agog at this evidence of geriatric sex, ‘older people produce more intelligent children.’
Since the intelligence quotient mattered to his scholar father and quiet mother, they set about parenthood with the best of intentions which, unfortunately, were impossible to realize. They were too old and Julian too young.
‘It is one thing to enjoy the idea of a clever child, quite another to experience it,’ Julian’s father was heard to say more than once.
Perplexed by it all, they had left their son quite alone.
His growing-up had been quick and solitary and, as quickly, he had gone away to seek his fortune in the heaving, seething money markets of the East, only returning on their deaths. Then, Julian had set about banishing the past and all its clutter.
Cliff House was ripped open. Bathrooms were installed, ancient radiators replaced, the bay window rearticulated. Wrapped in Cellophane, upholstered furniture arrived from London, and interlined curtains were hung at the windows. On the plain, empty walls, Julian hung paintings, landscapes and seascapes, shot through with the sun and isolation that he craved in his home.
By then, he and Kitty had met and agreed on their partnership and she had helped him with the transformation. But not too much. Cliff House was Julian’s reclaimed domain. Kitty had hers, and the freedom and separate spaces provided the key to their ten years together. Separate territories gave space, light, flexibility: the elements he most admired.
It was very cold that Sunday evening in January but, after packing up his papers and books, including Undercover During the Second World War, Julian abandoned the house, walked down the garden to the path running along the edge of the cliff and slithered down to the beach.
The cold wrapped him with the curious sensation of being both icy dry and wet. The sea roared and the wind whipped any traces of warmth from his body and flayed the skin of his lips.
It was just as Julian liked it.
Nature was not often overly generous, but she had been to the girl in the walled garden. Whose genes had those been? The father’s, the mother’s? A plundering Scandinavian way back in the centuries? She had been tall, ash-blonde, her hair shading to white by the hairline, with a lustrous complexion and grey eyes. This was a beautiful, spirited creature, he thought, with the flight of fancy he always indulged at the beginning of a chase. Not yet tested, still stretching her muscles, pregnant with secrets and visions.
Not now?
She was not in the least like Kitty. The disloyalty made him pause, and it was entirely the wrong moment to become sidetracked. He knew the risks of taking his eye off the ball when the figures were on the slide.
A flash of light above made Julian look up. There, poised on the cliff path that ran between the cottage and Cliff House was Kitty, in her blue cashmere jacket, waving to him with a torch. Every line of her body and movement of her arm proclaimed her love. Waving goodbye. After a second or two, he raised his arm and waved back.
On the way back to London in the car, Julian worked out a campaign by which to get a better look at Flagge House and its owner.
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.’
Secrets of the Heart Page 3
