‘Not necessarily. It’s possible that she wanted to leave Jack and used the war to escape.’
Julian and Agnes looked at each other across the table. Why not consider Julian’s theory? thought Agnes. It was safe and containable. ‘But even in war don’t you have to trust?’
‘It depends. I can think of lots of cases where you love someone very much but don’t tell them everything for good reasons.’
She refilled the glasses, watching the red swirl of liquid until it settled. ‘Are you being nice to me for me or my house?’
‘Guess.’ Julian cut into an apple from the fruit bowl. ‘Why are you being nice to me when, clearly, somebody has told you something at the party?’
‘Guess.’
They stared at each other. Then he leaned over and kissed her.
‘Who is Kitty?’ she murmured, through a welter of sensation, which ceased abruptly as he stopped kissing her, sat back, ran his fingers through his hair. I know that gesture already, she thought.
She pressed the point. ‘I think I should know, don’t you?’
All the ease and humour had fled from his expression. In their place was a frozen, at-bay look. Oh, God, she thought, not again. Not again.
‘Would you mind if I told you about Kitty another time?’
A familiar angry, hopeless feeling took possession of Agnes. ‘Yes, I do mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but if you have something to tell me about Kitty, then you must do so now’
There was a swish and hum of traffic on the wet streets outside, and the murmur of conversation, the click of car doors and clattering feet.
‘Julian, who is Kitty?’ He frowned but she persisted. ‘Why can’t you say who she is?’
He looked straight into Agnes’s eyes and replied, ‘Kitty and I have had an arrangement for a long time. We meet mostly at weekends.’
She was conscious of relief, as sharp and unmistakable as a mouthful of lemon juice. He was not married.
Saturday.
Very early in the morning, Kitty had slipped through the white mist shrouding the path to Cliff House. Now and again, her feet fought for anchorage on the drenched grass, and she blundered in the obscuring mist. The sea murmured quietly and the shrieks of the gulls tore out of the shrouded sky. As she slipped and slid along the narrow, stony path, she told herself that everything was quite normal. Absolutely normal.
Kitty let herself into Cliff House, via the conservatory, stopping to plump up the Wedgwood blue cushions on the white wicker chairs. She tiptoed silently into the house and halted by the open door of Julian’s study. He kept his fossils in here – extinct sea animals with obscure names. Dull, implacable things.
She glided into the room to check them and stopped by the desk where a file lay open. On top of it was a list in Julian’s handwriting. ‘Virginia Marie, Claude, Katrine.’ Kitty stared and a hand gripped her heart coldly. Virginia? Katrine?
She pushed aside Julian’s list and bent over to read what was in the file. ‘The enemy is now me…’
Oh, yes, it is, she thought. The enemy is me: my rotten, ageing body. She leafed further through the pages. ‘5 June 1942. My Darling. I am worried. I can’t help feeling that you are exposed to danger, your white, slender body hungry or damaged… Remember you promised to return.’
Kitty sat down heavily in the desk chair. Tears began to flow down her cheeks and she let them drip down to her chin.
A hand descended on to her shoulder, causing her to rear up in fright. ‘And what the hell do you think you are doing?’ asked Julian.
She looked up at him, wet eyes meeting antagonistic ones, and faltered, ‘Reading these letters. What does it look like?’
He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘You’re snooping, Kitty.’
She sobbed. ‘I know, I know.’
Julian had woken suddenly, choked by a dream. He had been walking along the beach. His feet dug into sand so hot that it burnt his soles. Arms wide, he swung round to savour the heat and then, suddenly, he was in deep water, fighting for breath. Below his blurring vision lay rocks and sands and a world of undulating seaweed.
He lay and reflected on his dream. Its imagery and significance were embarrassingly obvious. He was in deep water.
Not now.
He turned and punched the pillow. On that Friday morning a journalist from the Guardian had rung to check whether the rumours that Portcullis’s disappointing margin of return on the Hastings and Bournemouth project had been correct. Julian had been able to put him right – after a fashion. But it was a straw in the wind.
It was no good becoming involved with Agnes Campion at this precise moment. Why, therefore, had he asked before he left Agnes’s flat that night if he might see her again? That she had refused meant nothing. He had asked a second time and she repeated that she could not see him again until they had sorted out the subject of Kitty. It had not occurred to Julian that Agnes might be a woman of scruple.
Kitty? Kitty was the thorn buried in Julian’s flesh that, every so often, drove itself in deeper. It was a reminder, a penance… an anchor. How could he explain the position to a pair of puzzled grey eyes?
He said goodnight and left the flat.
The sound of feet padding softly in the kitchen broke his reverie. Kitty.
He heard the sound of stifled sobbing.
Agnes knew perfectly well that she had been obsessed by Madeleine. Madeleine the virtuous mother, Agnes the outcast sinner. Madeleine was dazzlingly soft and seductive, full-bodied, fragrant and powerful. Agnes placed her in a frame and arranged the objects of married life around the figure of the suffering wife.
The three elfin-faced daughters in smocked floral frocks and white socks. The appartement in the rue Jacob, painted a fashionable grey-white. The china, the glassware, the books.
But even all these considerations, and the domestic details, begged from the reluctant Pierre, had not stopped Agnes continuing the affair, and she had learned the lesson of the selfish power and persuasion of passion.
Yet Madeleine had triumphed. In their bed, she lay beside Pierre, and it was Agnes who grew bitterly jealous of the rightful wife. Equally, Agnes understood the other woman’s grief and her desire to make Agnes pay for her trespass. In that Madeleine had succeeded superbly, for Agnes suffered as she had never before, her guilt ensuring that it was sharper, more intense and more damaging than perhaps was necessary.
Perhaps Madeleine had banked on that too.
The pattern must not be repeated; nor should she get back on the treadmill of hope and self-disgust. Yet the terrible thing was that the moment Julian had confessed about Kitty, Agnes’s emotions slipped into a higher gear. She had fallen in love.
11
Everyone sat it out through March, which turned to April, a grudging, unspring-like April with squalls of rain and blustery winds, and into May, holding the equilibrium. At least, that was how Agnes saw it. She pictured Kitty – well, a notional picture of Kitty – willing the centre to hold and Julian, hair ruffled, eyes hollow with strain, dodging the issue. And herself?
She did her best to forget Julian. Heroically so. She and Bel had mapped the next six months’ work, found the money, set the schedules. This left her free to concentrate on the house.
My house, she thought, so wounded by all that warm, careless flesh that has lived under its roof, by numberless feet treading through the centuries, by weather and by the slippage of energy and money.
First, a survey. (‘If you want instant depression,’ Julian Knox had told Agnes over that meal of scrambled eggs, ‘talk to a surveyor.’ He added, ‘They are careful people.’)
No doubt about it, Mr Harvey was indeed a careful man. He took one look at Flagge House and got down to work with his electronic tape-measure, which emitted a bee-like hum.
‘Regular maintenance,’ he informed Agnes, with the satisfaction of a missionary faced with the most pagan of territories, ‘can pre-empt all sorts of horrors, an
d I’m afraid the late Mr Campion did not invest in it, if you take my meaning.’ Enraptured by the flight of his electronic bees, he adjusted the dial. ‘An historic house can’t look after itself.’ His tone was one of reproof.
They made for the drawing room and Mr Harvey measured and paced with his tape-measure and dictated notes. Occasionally he became transfixed by a crack or a fissure, by the tilt of the stone fireplace and, in particular, the long windows overlooking the terrace.
Eventually he pronounced, ‘Proper restoration is always expensive, but it depends what you want. A total overhaul or just bits and pieces.’
‘Can you pick and choose what to preserve?’ Agnes fingered a curtain, which had been bleached by the light. ‘I would have thought not.’
Mr Harvey’s machine hummed in agreement. ‘I’d like to view the cellars and storage areas.’
The cellars ran the length of the house and were dark, cold, and bled damp. Agnes led the way. ‘This one was known as the women’s cellar,’ she explained, embarrassed that anyone should have had to work in such conditions, ‘where they did the pickling, spicing and meat curing. The men’s cellar, where the wine and beer was kept, is through that door.’
The measuring and humming and dictating began all over again. If Mr Harvey was of a careful disposition, he was also a showman. He paused, milking his moment, and ran his hand over the brick on which a blotched mural had been painted in mould. ‘It’s a big story of rising damp, Miss Campion.’ To emphasize the tragedy, he stamped his feet on the flint cobbles and showed her where the ooze created a lustrous setting around the cobbles.
Agnes went quiet. She knew death had been here, an uneasy death, or so it had been reported in the records. A-swagger with riches racked up from exploiting trade in cardamom, muslin and jute in the East India Company, Archibald Campion had been hot to build a grandiose Victorian wing. Driving their spades into the earth to set the foundations for the wing, the estate workers had hit a pile of human bones. ‘There was no question that they were human,’ noted Camilla Campion, Archibald’s wife, ‘and some were horribly charred. We were afraid that we would catch a putrid contagion.’ The conclusion was, she reported, shocked, that these bones were the relicts of plague victims, denied proper burial in the graveyard.
Unquiet their death and, thus, unquiet their souls: they beat their anguish and disturbance against the brick and silence.
Mr Harvey was upset by what his inspection revealed. His machine snapped to a halt. ‘I’m afraid that, over the years, the external soil level has risen. It requires to be stripped back and a damp course inserted.’
‘I’d better get you some coffee, Mr Harvey, and we can discuss the options.’
While they sat and drank it in the kitchen, Mr Harvey reeled off a verbatim report in which the word ‘defective’ featured heavily. The roof timbers were defective. The brickwork was defective and had the additional problem of soot disease – ‘Sulphuric acid, Miss Campion, caused by a mingling of fumes and damp air, which penetrates the brickwork.’ Further defects included damp in the roof and an almost certain infestation of lyctus and death-watch beetle, and the ivy growth on the Victorian wing.
‘I know that,’ said Agnes. She looked down at her untouched coffee. ‘What are we talking?’
Mr Harvey shifted into a comfortable position on the chair and totted up sums under his breath. ‘Thousands.’ He peered at her face. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Campion. Once you’ve reached fifty or so anything else on top seems immaterial.’
At last Mr Harvey announced that he had done. With doom in her heart, Agnes accompanied him to his van, parked by the kitchen garden. He tapped the wall. ‘These I like. Put me in front of a wall,’ he said, ‘and I can tell you such things about it. Like this one.’ He pointed. ‘English bond. Not to be mixed up with Flemish bond.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Agnes, with gallows humour.
‘I noticed when I drove up that your boundary wall over by the river is knapped flint and brick. Used in Hampshire and here since Roman times. Needs repairing.’ He took a final squint up at the house. ‘Bucket repointing on the brickwork,’ he said, ‘and you’ll probably have to stipple it for the weathered effect. Otherwise, you’ll have the heritage people down on you.’ He inserted himself into his van. ‘Guttering? Well, needs completely replacing. Cast iron, I’m afraid, but we might get away with fibreglass for the hopper heads.’
Then, mercifully, Mr Harvey drove carefully away.
The house was bleeding to death and, for the moment, she was powerless to provide a transfusion.
Within an hour, Peter Bingham was on the phone to report that he had had a telephone call from a London estate agent, who wished to know if Flagge House was for sale. A housing association and a developer, who specialized in converting older properties into multiple-occupancy, had both expressed interest.
‘Stop there,’ said Agnes. ‘Have you been speaking to Mr Harvey? Whether you have or you haven’t, the answer is the same.’
While Agnes dealt with Mr Harvey, the sisters were upstairs practising packing for the Sound of Music holiday. Or, at least, Maud was. The bedroom was chilly, and when a depressed Agnes joined them, she scolded them for not turning on the electric radiator that she had bought in an effort to head off Maud’s fires. Shoes clacking on the wooden floor, she crossed the room and turned it on.
Outside, the river ran strong and fierce, still swollen with spring rain.
‘We wanted to save you money,’ said Bea, edging closer to the heat.
Maud sailed about the bedroom, dropping pieces of clothing here and there and shuffling, to no point, through a discarded pile of blouses and stockings. Patient Bea waited on the sidelines and, every so often, stepped in to restore order.
‘Only one suitcase, dear, don’t you think?’ Bea sorted the stockings into colour-coded heaps.
‘You were always so bossy,’ said her elder sister. ‘Always.’
Bea’s busy hands did not stop. ‘Was I? Dick didn’t think so. He liked the way I kept house.’
Maud’s large eyes were veiled. ‘Dick,’ she said spitefully, ‘was a saint.’
Bea dropped the stockings and plumped down on the edge of the bed. ‘Yes, he was, wasn’t he?’ The characteristic serenity had cracked, and she showed her distress. And I miss him so.’
Agnes sat down beside Bea and slid her arm around her shoulders. ‘What do you miss most?’
Bea picked at the folds in her skirt. ‘I miss… I miss the journey. We moved forward… I can’t explain quite what I mean. But, whatever it was, it ended when he died.’ The concertina of material twitched between her fingers.
Not to be outdone, Maud was still rattling through her clothes. She held up a blouse against her chest, threw it down, picked up an alternative. ‘The buttons are off this one.’ She swung round and accosted the pair on the bed. ‘Where did this… journey with Dick begin? Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought you lived all your married life in Shaftesbury. Or are you speaking in some kind of code?’ Her voice crescendoed with echoes of a child’s rage.
Agnes squeezed Bea tight. ‘Darling Bea.’
Bea held out her hand for Maud’s blouse. ‘Give it to me. I’ll mend it.’
Maud clutched it hard to her chest. ‘Will it make you feel better?’
‘Maud!’ Agnes summoned her patience.
‘Give me the blouse, dear.’ Bea turned so pale that Agnes was alarmed.
‘Have you taken your pills, Bea?’ she asked.
Maud gave the blouse a final inspection and tossed it over to her sister. ‘There.’
Agnes retrieved it from Bea’s lap, folded it and laid it to one side. ‘You can sort it out later. You are all right, aren’t you, Bea?’
‘Oh, yes, dear. Of course.’ Bea was looking more her normal self. She seemed embarrassed by her revelations and twisted her wedding ring up to her knuckle. ‘Don’t mind what I say. I was confused. But the habit…’ she considered ‘… of being with someone has t
o be unlearned.’
‘Alors.’ Maud hovered in front of her sister. ‘Marriage is there to be endured, like bank managers and politicians, because there is nothing else.’
‘Maud, that’s foolish,’ murmured Bea.
‘I may be many things, but not a fool.’ In a rare gesture, Maud placed a hand on Bea’s shoulder. ‘I wish,’ she said, ‘that I missed John.’
There was a lull in the jealousies and hostilities.
Julian rang the day after. ‘Agnes? I’ve been thinking. Would you like to come sailing at the weekend? I’ll tell you about Kitty as I promised.’
Maybe the Kitty problem had been dealt with. Agnes anticipated being gracious and understanding, and prepared to dissipate any awkwardness, but was not offered the chance to do either. Julian greeted her at the station – Agnes’s car was being serviced – and drove straight to the beach. There he busied himself with the boat, a J24, issued requests and Agnes’s high spirits did an about-face. The wind blew in smartly from a choppy sea and, despite the oilskins, her extremities were a mass of gooseflesh. Ignorance made her clumsy and Julian’s commands became sharper. ‘I said I was a novice,’ she protested, when he ordered her to wind a sheet round the cleat.
He seemed amazed. ‘What difference does that make?’
Eventually, sail flapping and sheets clacking, they nosed their way out of the protection of the point and headed for open sea.
Once beyond the spit, the wind screamed and the land bucketed across her vision. Out here, the sun was brighter, tougher, refracting off an expanse of white, wind-tossed water, and Agnes was the dazzled traveller gliding over its waves.
‘I don’t like to mention this,’ Julian hailed Agnes from the tiller, ‘but could you pay attention? The wind’s backing up and it’s going to get rough.’
Agnes hung on grimly to the side of the boat.
‘We’re going about,’ shouted Julian, the wind whipping his hair into a frenzy. Agnes lost her balance and went sprawling against the railing.
‘Novice’s luck,’ said Julian unfeelingly.
Secrets of the Heart Page 9
