Secrets of the Heart

‘For what?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Well, yes,’ she said, and felt the pulses beat in her wrist and at her throat.

The following week, she and Bel waited in the reception of Television House. ‘Tell you what,’ said Bel, ‘if this goes through and the figures are right, we’ll go shopping.’

Bel was always trying to smarten up Agnes and it was true that she had not bothered much lately.

‘I’m sick to death of you in those trousers and refusing to take an interest in what you look like. Pierre was a pig and you’re over him, and it’s time you got your hair cut.’

‘You sound like him,’ she murmured.

Pierre had berated Agnes for her lack of chic and her English indulgence in imperfection, and she had argued that what lay underneath was what mattered. He had said, ‘You are so young, Agnes, so innocent. Do you want to succeed?’ She had been so angry and so sure she was right… Agnes was brought up short. For the first time she was thinking about Pierre without the accompanying hobgoblins of pain and humiliation. Good.

‘OK,’ she said, taking Bel by surprise. ‘Let’s go shopping.’

‘Right,’ said Dickie, opening the meeting. ‘What have you beauties got for me today?’

They were in one of the conference rooms with huge plate-glass windows, no air – or, rather, only the conditioned kind swarming with menacing bacteria – and rows of bottled mineral water. Providing you nailed him in the mornings, Dickie’s nose for a popular programme was infallible and Agnes trusted him. She outlined a couple of ideas: the Jack and Mary letters, a forty-minute expose of the DDT breastmilk scandal in India.

‘Breastmilk, great,’ said Dickie. ‘Just what we should be doing. Nice and PC. That will jack up the Brownie points. The other one…’ He shook his head. ‘I know we said we wanted history, but I’m not quite sure. Not sexy enough.’

Agnes said, ‘Actually, there is a handle on this one. The farmer is about to be evicted by a landlord who wants the land back for development. There’s a row brewing in the local community. The farm’s been there since the sixteenth century.’

Dickie brightened. Bel, like lightning on the uptake, shoved the list of figures over the table. He glanced at them. ‘Don’t try and pull any wool over my eyes.’

‘Why should I?’ asked Agnes, softly.

‘Because you’re unscrupulous, sweetie, that’s why. As I well know.’ Dickie read on. ‘Who’s Mary?’ he asked.

‘His lover. We think she went off to fight somewhere. One theory is that she was an agent.’

‘Oh, well, then,’ Dickie said, ‘that’s great. I like it. Battlefronts, women in the front line, Mata Hari, injustice, war. Great.’

Despite working late into the night on budgets, Agnes woke fresh and clear-eyed at Flagge House. Today she had three meetings in London, a catch-up with Bel and a drink with Jed, her favourite cameraman. She stretched and her head fell back. It was too soon to jump to conclusions, and one crackling strike of attraction over a glass of wine did not a new life make.

She padded into the bathroom and endeavoured to concentrate on the meetings. The breastmilk project required more money. How could she arrange it by the autumn? More worrying, Jed had been booked for another project. But instead of solutions presenting themselves, the image of a blue, sunlit sea danced across her vision in an enchanted wash of colour and light. A wine-dark sea, over which she would speed with the freedom of the released.

Downstairs, she located a spare copy of the letters, which had been typed up and bound into a file, and packed them carefully into a padded envelope with her business card. On it, she wrote, ‘I thought you might like a copy.’

This she sent to Julian Knox.

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.