Secrets of the Heart

had taken time to explain the market. It was a curve, he said, that went either up or down. But you had to be careful. If you magnified any portion of that curve, even smaller variations would be revealed. ‘By all means take advantage of them,’ he had said, ‘but don’t try to explain the whole picture from them.’ Kitty always smiled at the recollection. It was so characteristic of her lover, interfering, cajoling, anxious to explain how to see things. Oh, he had been at his best when expounding his theory: impassioned, alive, powerful.

But she had seen the point at once. One way or another, she had been operating on the same principle all her adult life.

‘Of course,’ whispered a cocktail-party acquaintance into Kitty’s ear back in those early days, ‘Julian’s name is mud among certain elements in the City. They don’t go much on his philosophy. Julian is thought to be someone who preaches the good of his operations and, at the same time, is completely ruthless. I mean,’ murmured the putative friend, ‘One does not like to be spitted and, at the same time, to be told it’s good for you, does one?’

At the time, this view of Julian had disturbed Kitty, for it was not always possible to know what you were letting yourself in for when you made a sexual arrangement. That was before she fell in love with him. Now, Kitty felt her knowledge of Julian to be far superior. She knew, she knew – because she loved him – that his cool, detached manner hid a sadness that she could not quite understand and never would.

Kitty had taken her finances into her own hands, and Julian thoroughly approved. Now, she had such a sweet man to advise her, and they enjoyed very nice conversations on a weekly basis.

Kitty breakfasted on grapefruit and black coffee. Then she swallowed several vitamin pills, checked the fridge and put on her pale blue jacket. For years now, she had held a block booking at the beautician’s for Friday mornings. Nine thirty sharp to eleven thirty. Today that resulted in the smoothest of legs and underarms, and in scented, massaged flesh. Now it was time to do the weekend shopping.

Lymouth was crowded. In the last two years, a couple of supermarkets had appeared in the high street and brought in extra custom. Kitty emerged from the second, more expensive one, and encountered Vita Huntingdon, who was bearing several monogrammed bags.

Kitty smiled. ‘Special occasion?’

‘Daisy Wright’s fiftieth.’ Vita’s large, big-boned face was flushed. ‘They’re making quite a thing of it.’ Having imparted this information so carelessly, Vita obviously immediately regretted it. Kitty knew why: she herself had not been invited.

Kitty felt the bars around her status in Lymouth lock into position. ‘How lovely,’ she said, in her lightest voice. ‘Is it a big do?’

Vita attempted to steer into less choppy waters. ‘It’s on Wednesday,’ she said, as if that explained the lack of an invitation on Kitty’s mantelpiece. ‘So, you see, Kitty dear, Julian wouldn’t be around, would he? It’s in the evening, with a marquee. I shall be wearing my thermal undies.’ As she got deeper into it, Vita’s jaw made a sawing motion. She swallowed. ‘Must dash.’

Kitty stood aside. ‘Lovely day.’

‘Isn’t it.’

It’s not so much that I’m a kept woman, Kitty transferred the shopping from one hand to the other, but the precariousness of my position. They think that, at any minute, I might make a play for one of their husbands. They think I know the ropes of ‘all that’, the irony being that they have probably given up ‘all that’ some time ago. They don’t like being reminded so blatantly of ‘all that’.

Then she smiled to herself. It was perfectly true. She did know the ropes of ‘all that’. Very well indeed.

Kitty put her shopping into the car and drove back along a sun-drenched sea-front. Today, as it was so often on this strip of the coast, the water was the light, joyous blue of spring, clear and controlled-looking.

How stupid of her to be affected by Vita.

On impulse, she parked the car and got out. The sun was almost blinding. She fumbled for her dark glasses and toyed briefly with the idea of a walk, but in her expensive high heels she would only sink into the sand and stumble over the stones.

If you were a married woman, you were invited to fiftieth-birthday parties, but if single or divorced you made do with flower rotas and coffee mornings.

So be it.

The gulls screamed and coasted on the updraughts above her head. Kitty felt disturbed suddenly by the sea’s wideness, its infinite capacity, and turned away. A tiny cascade of sand slipped down a large black rock in front of the car, grain by grain, slipping down, like the days of her own life.

Tell the truth, Kitty. Do you care that much? The truth? These days, you are not so anxious for company, but much more for companionship and intimacy. It no longer mattered that Kitty often spent days alone – except for Theo, of course. Sometimes, after one of these periods of solitude, she became jumpy and remembered that she ought to do something. Attend a lecture? Hold a lunch party? Take painting lessons? Yet none of these appealed very much, and an insistent voice continued to whisper, ‘Look again, think again.’

She started up the car. The water was so blue today, reminding her of the blissful times with Julian when she had surrendered to passionate love in a way that had never been true of her time with Charles, Harry or Robin.

A salt smell, the slap of water running up the sand, the sudden eddies of a chill wind through the car window: it was time to go.

Back at the cottage, Kitty hung up her blue jacket on a padded coat hanger. It exuded a faint scent of wet wool and salt and, for a second or two, her mind went inexplicably, frighteningly blank, as it did sometimes. With a little cry, she buried her face in Julian’s spare jacket, which hung on the next peg.

The phone rang in her small but fashionable kitchen, with its distressed paintwork and double cooker, while she was unpacking the shopping.

‘Kitty,’ said Julian, ‘I won’t make this evening. OK? But come over to me in the morning. Sorry.’

‘What are you doing?’ Kitty’s body felt heavy with disappointment.

There was a slight pause. ‘I’m taking Agnes Campion out to dinner after the Portcullis do.’

‘Ah, the girl on the card.’

‘Yes.’

No more needed to be said. From time to time Julian, well… did this. Nothing serious and, to be fair, Kitty was free to do the same. But she did not want her freedom. That they gave each other a little leeway was part of the bargain and Julian always insisted that Kitty trust him. She strove to do so, but each time it happened she felt she was hovering on the edge of an abyss which, as she forced herself to look into it, seemed ever darker and deeper.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask why she had not been invited to the Portcullis reception – surely, it was her place to be at his side? – when he said, ‘Listen, Kitty, I’ll see you on Saturday’

She put down the phone.

‘Gidday, darl.’

Theo breezed his way into the kitchen carrying the bag with the Equipment. Dusters, bleached and ironed. Cloths for wet work. Cloths for dry work. A stiff nailbrush for obdurate corners. Dettol – the dead giveaway to fellow obsessives. Polish. Lavatory-cleaner. Sink-cleaner. Cream-cleaner. Drawer-cleaner. Bacteria-destroying-cleaner. Window-cleaner.

Sharp but a little madder-looking than of late, Theo grinned at the frozen Kitty. ‘How’s my beaut? Orright?’

She lifted her hand off the phone and her spirits lifted, just a little. Tine. And you?’

For a moment, Theo’s face was a mask of terror and pain, a reflection of the anarchy occupying his head. Then because it was Kitty, whom he loved, asking the question, he pulled himself together. ‘It’s ruddy bad at the mo, if you must know, but a person has to trudge on.’

‘Have they adjusted your medication, Theo?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t ask.’

‘Tea, then.’ Kitty swung into action. In the grip of his bad times, Theo would launch himself at the house, bearing his industrial-size bottle of Dettol, and scrub until the house smelt like a field hospital and Kitty was forced to throw open every window.

They were both outsiders, and the echoes of destruction emanating from the battlefield of Theo’s mind were a