Secrets of the Heart

Honesty was only a fig-leaf.

‘Come here.’ Julian mastered his irritation. He put his arm around her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry about this.’

All traces of her mini-rebellion seeped away, leaving her drained. With an effort, Kitty pulled herself together. ‘You’re right. Let’s forget it. There are other things to worry about.’

‘Good girl.’ He slid his hands around her waist, reacquainting himself with her fragile frame. ‘Dinner?’

She turned and ran her hand up the features she loved so well and which she was never quite clever or astute enough to read. ‘Sure.’

Over the spaghetti they discussed the Hidden Lives programme, a safe enough subject, and speculated as to Mary’s identity. Kitty suspected that she might have been a domestic or a Jewish refugee, someone at any rate who was undervalued in the social scale of the time, and when Agnes reported that Bel was working on several ideas, including the SOE theory, Kitty asked abruptly, ‘Why does the explanation have to be so dramatic? What about real life? Plenty of ordinary people in the war fell in love with the wrong people and had to say goodbye because they had to go and pick cabbages or look after their parents.’

How on earth had Agnes got herself into this situation? Kitty’s ambush had been masterly. Agnes was aware that Julian had been watching her, quietly, covertly, while she was being forced to watch Kitty smile, offer food, pat her hair. Kitty sat on her seat with possession, wielded her knife and fork as the owner. She turned to her lover with a smile that said, ‘I know your secrets.’ It was all designed for Agnes’s benefit and Agnes understood.

With an effort, she refocused on what Kitty was saying.

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you,’ continued Kitty, ‘that she might – she might have been pregnant?’

Later, Kitty showed Agnes upstairs and stood pointedly in front of Julian’s bedroom. ‘Goodnight, Agnes.’

In the double bed, she drew Julian close and, despite her exhaustion, coaxed him into responding to her yielding, pampered body. Then as she straddled him, she gave a great cry of possession and pleasure and Agnes heard it, as was intended.

Early the next morning, Kitty awoke with a start beside the sleeping Julian. Someone was moving around the house. Agnes, of course. Kitty manoeuvred out of bed and glided downstairs.

She discovered Agnes in Julian’s study where she had pulled back the curtains and was watching the sea. In the half-light, she seemed awkward, rumpled. Ill at ease. At Kitty’s entrance, she swung round and her hair – so shiny, so touchable, so youthful – swung with the movement of her body. ‘I’ve woken you, I’m sorry’

How dare she be in here? thought Kitty. Julian hated people invading his study. She closed the door and advanced into the room. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’ True, there were smudges of fatigue under Agnes’s eyes. ‘I was going to make myself a cup of tea, I hope that was all right.’

Kitty knotted the dressing-gown around her tiny waist (achieved with such effort), her pearly pink nails catching the light. ‘I’ll make a pot.’

‘Please don’t. I’m sure you want to go back to bed.’

‘No trouble.’ Kitty spread out a hand in front of her and inspected those nails. It was a rude, off-hand gesture and she hoped Agnes took it as such. It was the action of an older woman who, conscious of the younger woman’s power and beauty, was fighting back. Then she felt shame seeping through her. How trivial, how pointless. Kitty summoned her training. ‘You’ve probably got a lot on your plate. Julian tells me you travel a lot.’

‘Yes, I do.’ Agnes pushed back her hair with a weary gesture, but she gave a polite smile. ‘It was good of you to have me to stay… considering.’

‘Considering… everything,’ said Kitty. ‘It was.’

‘But I shouldn’t have stayed.’

Kitty sensed that Agnes was curious about her. How did she live? she was wondering, with that knowing, professional attitude of hers. What did Kitty do? Surely, she would be thinking, this woman did not spend her days waiting for Julian? Agnes was not to know that Kitty also pondered these questions and concluded that the condition of waiting could be expressed as an art form, or a psychological state. Some people did things, others waited. Passivity. What was it exactly? Was it in fact, asked the articles, a form of aggression?

And this girl, Kitty crossed over to the window and looped back the curtain proprietorily, she is the kind who uses the freedoms I never could have imagined, which I was never permitted, with which to bully others into letting her have her own way. By being here, she is saying, I don’t owe anybody any fealty. I demand personal space. Sexual autonomy. I don’t care about anyone else. Otherwise she would not allow herself to be interested in Julian.

‘I’m afraid I don’t have anything for lunch, so we’ll put you on an early train.’

There. The message had been conveyed. Go away.

‘Yes, of course. I need to get back. If you can give me a lift. Or perhaps I could order a taxi.’ Kitty crossed the room and placed a small, determined hand on the door-knob. ‘Kitty,’ Agnes added, ‘I know that you and Julian have been together for a long time. I understand the need to preserve.’

In the moment between the first sentence of the exchange and the next, an old battle was fought. For possession, for supremacy. ‘The reigning queen in the hive fights off the young nubile pretenders,’ Jack had written, in one of the letters Kitty had read. ‘She will kill, if necessary’

How nice of Agnes to yield so publicly. Kitty smiled in triumph. ‘I’ll make the tea. Why don’t you come into the kitchen? Julian doesn’t like anyone in his study.’

In the kitchen, Kitty busied herself with pulling up the blinds and setting out the tea things. These are mine by right, she thought, carefully placing teaspoons in the saucers and filling the milk jug. I should be mistress of this house.

She looked up and out of the window, exhaustion registering in every muscle. Sometimes the effort of existence was almost too great.

There had been an accident further down the line and Sunday morning trains were not running. Julian rang Kitty and told her that he was driving Agnes home and he would not be late for lunch.

He had set out to make Cliff House a house of the elements: light, sun and water. Pockets of darkness and awkwardness had been eradicated by his ruthless hand, and with applications of white paint. He had decreed that decoration be kept to a minimum. He had wished to harness space and natural colours so that, weightless and airy, the house appeared to float above the sea.

Flagge House was different.

‘What do you think of my home?’ In giving him the tour, Agnes was demonstrating to him where her heart lay. Intent and preoccupied, she dragged back the curtains and shutters of the big window in the drawing room to reveal the interior. Julian absorbed the exquisite proportions of the room and pale honey parquet floor and conceded that it was beautiful.

‘Sometimes,’ said Agnes, ‘if I am quiet, I can hear the house sigh and breathe. It’s living, you know.’ She held up a finger and her eyes narrowed in concentration. ‘Listen.’

She was trying to convince him of her crusade and because he was more – much more – than half in love with her, he listened. Agnes struggled with the shutters. One by one, oblongs of light tumbled into the room like dominoes to reveal the raddled face of age. Water had stained the parquet and pushed its blocks above the surface. Above the central window, the lintel sagged.

‘It’s perfect,’ she said, ‘isn’t it?’ Love was so blind, he thought, touched in a raw, unexpected way.

Agnes conducted him through the house, luxuriating in each room – the document room, which she explained had been her uncle’s study and was now hers, the chilly arsenic-green dining room, the kitchen. She showed him the carved staircase, the window of thick lead-hazed glass through which the Campion women had watched their men ride off to battle, to Court or to discover more bits of the globe.

Almost, she succeeded in making him forget other contexts and other considerations. That was her witchery. Following in her wake, Julian was drawn deeper into the blindness.

She made him stand on the top step of the terrace and look over the meadow to the river. ‘We don’t have the right to destroy that.’

He pulled himself together sufficiently to say, ‘We have to survive. And survive with others with competing claims.’

‘Of course.’