Secrets of the Heart

Early in February Agnes received a packet from Andrew Kelsey containing seventeen letters from Jack to Mary and dropped everything to read them.

She held them gingerly. These were fragile artefacts from which secrets must be coaxed. Written on various kinds of papers, they were mottled and foxed with age and, in places, worn almost into transparency. Some were in thick lead pencil, some in watery navy blue ink. The handwriting varied in its legibility, and showed signs of stress and cramped conditions. The sifting and making sense occupied Agnes for a whole afternoon.

Afterwards, shaken and moved, she sorted them into date order. It appeared that Mary had left the farm without an explanation and, vague as to where she was going, abandoned the lover who was too old? medically unfit? to fight. To reassure her, remind her, perhaps, Jack wrote in minute detail of life on the farm and, always, of his love for Mary. The list of her beauties was tenderly couched – the shape and colour of her eyes, her slender back and arched feet. A man of deep emotions and some poetry, he described over and over how he had fallen in love with her at first sight. ‘I had no idea,’ he wrote, ‘how completely and utterly you know within the instant. How mind, body and spirit fuse as the spear strikes into the soul.’

After she had finished, Agnes paced up and down her uncle’s study, which was large enough to allow her to do so. Her study now. The letters had convinced her that this was a subject which would work. But how? She picked up the phone and put a call through to Dickie, a commissioning editor at the BBC with whom she had collaborated on several projects.

An hour later she was checking over her diary when Maud appeared in the study doorway. ‘There’s someone on the phone who wants to speak to you,’ she said, in the ultra-polite manner that always gave Agnes pause.

‘What are you up to, Maud?’

‘Rien,’ said Maud, and disappeared.

Agnes picked up the phone. ‘Will you come out for a drink with me?’ said Julian Knox. ‘Please.’

‘Why should I?’

‘Why shouldn’t you?’ he replied. ‘Six thirty at Buzacki’s on Tuesday next week?’

Agnes sighed. ‘I suppose you’ve been talking to Maud.’

‘As a matter of fact, I have.’

‘Then I must come and put the record straight.’

‘Exactly,’ he said.

At Buzacki’s there was a discreet clink of glasses, the glitter of mirror and chrome, and bowls on tables heaped with expensive nuts and handmade crisps.

After a moment or two’s study, she modified her first impressions. This was a different man from the successful opportunist prowling around the walled garden. He was still as sleek and groomed, but more fatigued, troubled, and she wanted very much to know why.

‘Within the instant,’ it had said in Jack’s letter. Agnes helped herself to the nuts. ‘I gather you laid siege to my aunt again. It wasn’t very honest.’ She gave him a direct look. ‘Was it?’

‘Honest? Yes and no. Your aunt was very keen that I had a go at changing your mind. I was interested in seeing you again. Ergo. Is that dishonest?’

She leaned forward. ‘Preying on an old lady?’

‘Is that what you call it?’ He ran his fingers through his red-gold hair, which destroyed the sleek look and replaced it with a boyish one. ‘I was practically kidnapped over the phone by your vigorous aunt and I had to swear on the blood of Julie Andrews that I would try to talk you round.’

Agnes almost felt sorry for him. ‘So she mentioned The Sound of Music?’

He opened his hands in a gesture that said, I quite understand, enjoy even, the absurdities of human nature but this was a tough one. ‘Put it this way, I hadn’t appreciated its merits before. But by the time she had finished I did.’

Kindness to elderly ladies what not what she had expected, or the humour. Perhaps he was a Jekyll and Hyde character, a fiend in the boardroom, wise and tolerant at home. They did exist. Whatever, he was a little mysterious and that always appealed to her. Agnes rolled the wine-glass idly between her fingers. It never did to make assumptions and she should know that by now.

‘Decent homes mean decent lives,’ he said, laying out his case like gems in a jeweller’s window. ‘We need profit. Why not combine the two?’

‘Flagge House is not a proposition.’

‘Of course.’ He poured out more wine. ‘I quite understand. But situations have a way of changing, believe me. And you will be saddled with its upkeep.’ He paused. ‘Not to mention fending off everyone who wishes to give you advice.’

‘Tell me, who should I trust?’

Again the quick, ironic smile. ‘Obviously not me. But now that that’s been said, and I have done what I promised your aunt, shall we change the subject?’

His capitulation was too easy and Agnes was immediately suspicious. She put down her glass and leaned on her elbows. ‘Shouldn’t you come clean?’ she asked. ‘About what you want from me?’

‘Not a bad idea.’ He captured the last nut from the bowl. ‘You look like a schoolteacher,’ he said. ‘A divine one.’

She had forgotten the feint and counter-feint of pursuit, and lust, and the exhilaration of both. The tiny little pricks of anticipation, and the responses resurrected from their semi-death. Only a few weeks ago she would not have thought it possible but perhaps, perhaps, the spectre of an old and done-with love was, finally, banished.

‘Will you come sailing with me some time?’

‘Yes. If you don’t mind a novice.’

He must have been watching her very carefully for he reached out with his hand and covered hers. Thin fingers that she liked. A texture of skin that she liked. ‘I wanted to know if you’re getting over your uncle,’ he said. ‘Does it hurt less?’

She looked down at their hands. ‘I will be fine.’

‘Good.’ He removed his hand and desire washed through Agnes so powerfully that she was literally breathless.

After a moment, he asked if she was working on a project, and she told him about the letters and Andrew Kelsey. She also admitted that they had a problem in verifying who Jack and his lover Mary actually were. It was particularly difficult as there were no letters from Mary. ‘She seems to have disappeared completely, leaving Jack in the dark. But it is odd because Jack is so besotted and what he writes suggests that she is too.’

‘There could be hundreds of reasons,’ said Julian. ‘War was like that.’

‘But to be so secretive.’

‘Secret work, perhaps.’ He refilled their glasses. ‘For instance, the SOE made a point of using women during the war for undercover work. Jack sounds as though he was educated, and perhaps Mary spoke a language and was used in intelligence. I’ve been reading about it. If you make the assumption that Mary was sent into the field – for instance, France – she could not possibly have written any letters home.’

Not bad, thought Agnes, fascinated by the way he held the wine-glass.

‘Can you imagine how lonely and isolated it must have been, knowing that you were living in a different box from everyone else? Being apart.’ He spoke matter-of-factly but his body language suggested to Agnes that he had experienced this.

Within the instant.

Being apart and lonely was Agnes’s main memory, right from the beginning. In fact, she had made a speciality of being miserable. ‘Yes, I can,’ she said. ‘Very well.’

‘It’s only a supposition but I’ll send you a book I’m reading on the subject, if you like.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll get my colleague, Bel, on to it.’

He did not seem to hear her. ‘Think,’ he said. ‘On the run, pushing your response to the limit. Diving into yourself. Digging into yourself.’

Not bad, not bad at all.

The air between them seemed charged, and the chemistry fizzed in the pit of her stomach. Agnes struggled to be sensible.

‘I’m going away for a week or so,’ he said eventually, ‘but can we meet again?’