Secrets of the Heart

by Elizabeth Buchan

  ‘I will never understand what you see in it,’ said Agnes, driven to protest.

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand.’ Maud threw down her knitting, consulted her watch and reached for her lipstick. ‘Freddie will be here any minute.’

  Bea pleated the material of her skirt, and the dust motes danced in the sun.

  The doorbell rang. ‘I’ll go,’ said Bea, and fled from the room.

  A moment later Agnes, who was stacking the Sunday papers, looked up to see a poised, groomed Kitty in a pink linen suit preceding Freddie. To be with Kitty, even without Julian, in the same room did extraordinary things to her stomach and, for a moment, she thought she might faint. Fortunately, the cotton wool in her knees turned into proper muscle and she got to her feet.

  ‘Hello, Agnes,’ said Kitty, and flushed a violent red. ‘I am sorry to drop in on you without warning. I would very much appreciate a few words.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Agnes.

  ‘Is a chap going to be offered a drink?’ asked Freddie.

  Bea waylaid Kitty. ‘Sherry? This is some from my special bottle. I have a kind man who sells it to me in the wine shop. Where have you come from?’

  ‘I’ve intruded on a lunch party?’ Kitty’s poise appeared to desert her and she had gone from very red to very pale.

  ‘The more the merrier.’ Freddie presumed on his intimacy to good effect. ‘Now, how are my ladies?’

  Maud raised her head – the gesture of a younger woman which, in a younger woman, would have accentuated a swan neck. Her huge eyes were hungry and watchful. She tapped her watch. ‘Hallo, Freddie. We’ve been waiting all morning for you.’

  Agnes gathered her wits. ‘Could you stay for lunch, Kitty?’

  Kitty had already downed the sherry and Bea was refilling her glass. Actually, I only wanted a few words.’

  ‘Lymouth,’ Bea was saying. ‘I had a friend there once. A champion jam-maker.’ In Bea’s book there was no greater compliment, a reminder that the world functioned on casseroles, jams and knitted rugs, a sub-stratum of thrift and skills that still held their own.

  Jam-making was not a feature of Kitty’s world or Agnes’s. Their eyes met in mutual ratification of this fact. Antagonists but, briefly, allies.

  ‘Could I use your bathroom?’ asked Kitty.

  Agnes led the other woman past the burnt-in hoofprint and the empty niche at the turn of the stairs, past the exquisite oriel window. Kitty put out a hand to the newel post. ‘Someone loved this wood.’ She ran her fingers over its curves. ‘Very much.’ She paused under the window.

  There was silence.

  Kitty continued, ‘We only borrow houses for a while and then we hand them on.’ Her high heels clattered on the stairs. ‘You didn’t see my cottage when you came down. It’s tiny. Julian doesn’t like it very much. He prefers Cliff House. If I’m truthful, so do I.’

  Agnes showed Kitty the bathroom and suggested that they talk in her bedroom. When Kitty knocked and slipped into the room, Agnes was waiting by the window. She addressed Kitty calmly: ‘The best view of the river is from my aunt’s room, but this one is pretty good. On still nights I can hear the running water and, sometimes, foxes.’

  ‘Really?’ Kitty straightened her shoulders.

  Agnes continued, ‘This is the bedroom in which the maiden aunts always slept. One of them, Great-great-aunt Lucy, slept here for the whole of her life. I found her riding boots at the back of the wardrobe. So slim, they were like pencils.’ Reluctantly, Agnes faced Kitty. ‘I think they were happy in here, the maiden aunts. I feel they were.’

  Kitty now patted her hair, her wrist weighed down with a gold charm bracelet. Oval-nailed and fine-skinned, they were the kind of hands the Victorians would have delighted in casting in plaster and displaying in glass cabinets. Then she fussed with her bracelets. ‘It’s obvious why I’m here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So.’ Now Kitty smoothed the strap of her handbag. ‘Let’s get on with it. I want – I want you to leave Julian alone. I thought I had made that clear at our previous meeting, but not clear enough. Anyway, it’s worse than I thought, for I can see… I know that he is very taken with you. It doesn’t often happen, although there have been… others. He’s quite – quite reserved.’ She paused, and said simply, ‘But he’s mine. We’ve been together for a long time and that counts for something, don’t you think? You’ve seen enough in your work to know what goes wrong when people take things that don’t belong to them.’

  Agnes swallowed.

  ‘You are there in my home all the time,’ cried Kitty. ‘All the time. I know you are. He’s obsessed with you.’ She brought herself up short. ‘But other things matter too…’

  Yes, yes, I am wrong. Without meaning to be so. Truly, truly, without intent, I have blundered into being put in the wrong and heaven knows where that leaves Julian. Didn’t he think that ten years of reward points earns a tranquil old age? Kitty does. That is why she is here. And me? Never mind that the blossom on the tree is so scented, so beautiful, so tempting.

  ‘… All I need,’ the soft, inexorable voice of Kitty drove on, ‘is a little peace. Then I can manage. Then I can pull it together.’

  Agnes was shaking. Not even when faced with Madeleine had her reaction been so marked. Of course Kitty was in the right and the complications stretched out in great web of misunderstanding and crossed connections. Yet… there was nothing in this world that belonged exclusively to someone else and she was tempted, almost, to conclude that it was a question of who was the stronger. She heard herself saying, ‘Isn’t that up to Julian?’

  Kitty shook her head. ‘It’s taken me a long time to discover this. Ten years, in fact, but no. I have a say in it too.’

  ‘I understand.’ This was the real battle, the big one. Compared to this, the others had been skirmishes, and she felt quite breathless with pain.

  She turned to face Kitty, the pink and fragile Kitty, who had chosen to confront Agnes at Flagge House because… of the shared bed, because the moments of despair were shared equally with moments of pleasure and content. Because what Kitty had built she was not going to allow Agnes to knock down. Because Kitty had made an act of will to fight and now chose to exercise it.

  ‘You might not believe this, Kitty, but I did consider you,’ she said at last. ‘Ask Julian.’

  Kitty’s handbag was a crocodile one with gold fastenings. It slipped with a clunk to the floor. ‘I don’t want your name mentioned by him ever again.’ She bent over to pick it up. ‘Ever.’

  ‘Will you go now?’

  Kitty joined Agnes at the window. ‘How I dislike your type. Nothing personal, of course.’

  ‘My type?’

  ‘Women who have no investment in anything. You younger women imagine you have it sewn up. You have recast your role and have made it your business to pity women like me. Oh, I don’t mind the careers and the money-making. I had my chance, I suppose. But I do mind your greed and the way you trespass on us because your bodies are younger and firmer and you have no rules.’

  Agnes made to turn away but the other woman grabbed her. ‘You will listen to me. You are younger but you have no idea. Yet.’ She released Agnes, and fiddled with the ring on her right hand. ‘I even thought about killing myself because I find the situation so exhausting and unfair, and it would pay you back.’ The confidence was dropped clumsily. ‘But I won’t. I won’t.’

  Appalled, Agnes placed her hand on Kitty’s shoulder and pressed it. Thin and sharp and brittle beneath her younger - and therefore, more powerful – fingers. Those fingers now bore down into Kitty. ‘Just go, Kitty. Now. Before anything else is said or done.’

  Kitty struggled for control. After a few seconds, she asked in a normal voice, ‘Do you mind if I do my hair?’ She sat down at Agnes’s dressing table and pulled off her earrings. ‘These ones always hurt. I don’t know why I wear them. Well, I do, actually. Julian gave them to me.’ She picked up Agnes’s hairbrush. Agnes flinche
d. How dare Kitty touch her things? Kitty examined it thoughtfully, opened her handbag and extracted her own.

  The mirror was old and spotted with age and the reflection in it was unclear. Deft and skilled, Kitty worked away at her hair and traced the line of her lips with a lip pencil, remaking the pretty object. She assessed her handiwork. ‘Julian is difficult.’ She trailed the sentence, releasing her insider knowledge in a tantalizing fashion. ‘Pernickety. Demanding. He has his moods… and his tastes. I always make an effort.’

  Agnes pictured Julian sitting on the sofa in Bel’s flat, balancing a glass on the arm. He was talking about the Lincolnshire project, pulsing with attack and energy, one leg crossed over the other. She closed her eyes. It had been then that she had noticed he was wearing socks whose wool had worn thin with age under the impeccable suit.

  ‘No, Julian is not easy. He works to his own timetable.’ Kitty closed her handbag with a snap. ‘Thank you so much for letting me freshen up. I’ll find my own way out’

  What did Kitty think she was doing with her poisoned drip, drip of intimacies? Perhaps, she imagined that she had wrestled Agnes into a boneless heap on the floor where she could administer a kick with her crocodile shoes. Agnes’s emotions did an abrupt change-about. There was a rush of waves in her head, the screech of a million small stones pulled into the riptide and she felt the cold, salt shock of her anger. ‘There is one thing…’ Ever after, she was never to be quite sure of anything, least of all herself. ‘One thing…’ Clearly expecting to hear Agnes’s final capitulation, Kitty was arrested with her hand on the door handle.

  ‘I think I’m pregnant!’ Agnes cried out, in protest and despair.

  Kitty fled down the stairs and into the still summer afternoon.

  ‘Why did she tell me?’ she sobbed in the safety of her car. ‘Why did she tell me?’

  Above her, the wood pigeons cooed and fluttered in the trees.

  22

  The following morning Agnes made her way down Charlborough’s main street to the surgery, a modern building perched on the outskirts of the Bee Orchid housing estate.

  Duggie Sutherland had been taking care of Agnes since she was twelve and knew her every nook and cranny well enough to ask any question he pleased. Duggie hated the new surgery and longed to be back in the cramped, damp rooms he had once occupied before they metamorphosed into a Group Practice. ‘How’s the air-conditioning?’ she teased, knowing that it sent him into a frenzy.

  ‘Do not ask.’ He did a quick test and it did not take him long to confirm what Agnes suspected. About seven weeks.’

  In the clinical surgery, the confirmation seemed so matter-of-fact with none of the panic and disbelief of the past few weeks. Agnes slid back into her T-shirt. ‘Sod’s law of averages,’ she remarked. ‘It happened only once after months of abstinence.’

  ‘Hold out your arm.’ He attached the blood-pressure equipment. ‘This is not a scientific answer, Agnes, but it could be because you were ready.’

  ‘That’s pop psychology, Duggie.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come to see me at once? Or anyone?’

  She looked down at her lap. ‘You know what they say about people in burning houses hiding under beds and in cupboards?’

  ‘No. Tell me about it. You might like to know that your blood pressure is down in your boots, which will be making you feel a bit odd. It will readjust in a couple of weeks.’ He chucked her under the chin. ‘Optimism, my girl. New life.’

  She sat down on the chair by his desk while he wrote up the notes. ‘Duggie, I find the prospect of having a baby terrifying. I wasn’t planning it. I’m not ready…’ She pulled desperately on a strand of hair. ‘I wasn’t envisaging this bit of biology being thrust on me quite yet.’

  He put his head to one side.

  She knew what he was going to say. ‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘Don’t even think it, Duggie. I can’t have an abortion or send it away. I couldn’t. I haven’t managed much in the way of coherent thought but I just know I couldn’t do it.’ She shrugged. ‘More fool me.’ She tugged at her hair and winced. ‘How typical of Nature to make a muddle.’

  ‘Or you,’ suggested Duggie.

  She pushed her plait back over her shoulder, dug her hands into her linen skirt pockets and sent him a tiny, tremulous smile. ‘Point taken.’

  She pictured herself bowed down with a buggy, nappies in a bag, a baby on a hip, encumbered and struggling with the tired, I-can’t-take-much-more expression she had so often seen on mothers. They looked so battered, so shell-shocked and resentful. ‘I don’t want this baby, Duggie. I don’t know how I’m going to manage and I can’t feel anything for it except terminal crossness with myself.’

  He tucked her notes into the folder. ‘Is the father involved?’

  ‘No, he isn’t.’

  Later, Agnes knelt by her bed – a old, childish pose, long discarded. She rested her head on its hard edge and the position soothed the nausea that tormented her.

  Why did I tell Kitty?

  The clear motives and clear vision had vanished. So had the Agnes who knew what was what, who believed in the rules. In their place was confusion. How could she have done what she had done?

  On Thursday, Kitty left a message for Julian at the office with Angela to say that she would be coming up to London for the evening and that he was not to worry about supper. He returned to the flat in the Barbican to find the table laid with candles and flowers and Kitty busy in the kitchen.

  It had been an awful day and he craved peace and quiet, but he forced himself to look pleased. ‘Have I missed a birthday or something?’

  She put a couple of steaks under the grill. ‘Hallo, darling. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll be gone in the morning and I won’t see you at the weekend.’

  Kitty never went away without elaborate checking and cross-checking. Presumably he was being sent a signal about which he had no inkling and, at this precise moment, no curiosity either. Kitty fiddled with the cutlery. Expectant.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Kitty’s expression was the one she assumed when she was giving him a present. ‘I’m going to be checked out at a clinic.’ She bent down to look at the meat. ‘To see if everything is working.’

  ‘Oh, Kitty.’

  She turned away to attend to the salad in the sink. ‘I just want to be sure, Julian. Before it’s too late.’

  All he could see was her averted back. ‘Kitty, please stop doing that and look at me.’ Obediently, she turned round. ‘Now, listen. You don’t really want children, do you?’

  She fiddled with the gold chain at her throat. ‘But I think you do, Julian. You admitted it that time when we talked before.’

  ‘That was just an aside. I didn’t expect you to take me so literally.’

  ‘Asides are often very telling.’

  Kitty was on form. Full marks, Kitty. He studied the expression on the flawless features and saw a new stubbornness. ‘But you can’t construct an entire case around a remark.’

  ‘Don’t be pompous, Julian.’

  ‘Am I? Sorry.’

  Kitty picked up the salad dressing. ‘Think about the theory of evolution you’re so interested in. I’ve thought about it, Julian, carefully. It must have occurred to you – and you were sweet to understand my wishes in the past – to understand what sort of woman I am, but one of the fundamentals must be to reproduce. It’s taken me a bit of time to work it out. But that makes it sound so clinical. It isn’t meant to be like that.’ Under the grill the meat was spitting and she dived towards it. ‘I would like to give you what you want.’

  ‘Kitty, this is madness.’

  She straightened up, flushed and, clearly, already pregnant with this new development in their strange life together. ‘No, it isn’t. It’s just another stage.’

  In the office the next morning, Angela appeared in skintight shiny trousers and a little jacket and informed Julian that Harold wished to see him urgently.

  Harold approached h
is boss with the wariness of the messenger who understands there is a more than even chance he will have turned into the kill by the end of the interview. If he had not known what was coming, Julian might have been amused.

  ‘Julian, I can’t make those figures work as you asked. In particular, the Lincolnshire figures. They don’t look good.’

  He slid papers on to the desk and Julian gave them a quick once-over. ‘You’re wrong, Harold. It’s not a question of them not looking good. They’re disastrous.’

  ‘I think I meant that.’

  ‘Well? Can I have a breakdown?’

  Harold looked even worse. ‘For example, the Lincolnshire project. The take-up on the houses is less than a third. That means…’ He cleared his throat. ‘It means only thirty houses have been sold, and none of the ones in the higher bracket price range. We needed to sell sixty-five to achieve the margin. I’ve run a check on the local employment figures. Not good. The young are moving south to look for jobs and agricultural wages have hit rock bottom. The upturn we calculated on has not happened.’

  Julian informed Harold that he could add to the list of woes. A letter had come in from Bristling’s factory, who had decided to pull the plug on the Lincolnshire project for precisely the same reasons.

  Harold was trying hard to keep some sort of control. ‘Protest is also building over the Sussex site. The antis have discovered that the houses would be built on part of an old smugglers’ route. The heritage people are jumping up and down.’ Harold dug his hands into the pockets of his fashionable linen suit.

  ‘I believe it,’ said Julian.

  The two men were silent.

  ‘Maybe,’ offered Harold, ‘we could palm off the Lincolnshire project on the council.’

  ‘I think not.’

  Julian took another look at the figures. If a profit warning on the next quarter’s results was going to be necessary, then the share price would be affected. He ordered Harold to arrange a couple of emergency meetings and to get himself a cup of coffee. Harold disappeared.