after the war but a few remained. They didn’t get much down on paper anyway, but these training reports are in the library.’
She drank yet more champagne. ‘You mean, you spent an afternoon doing this for me?’
He took the glass from her hands and set it down on the table. ‘It was a happy couple of hours as it turned out, researching. It took my mind off my problems, which I needed, and I’d rather think about you than Portcullis. Does it make a difference that it was me?’
Ashamed, Agnes looked down at her feet, which seemed bigger than she remembered. Julian had moved close to her and Agnes discovered she was breathless with the effects of champagne. She struggled to order her thoughts. ‘Yes, it does make a difference.’ She folded her arms to make a barrier between them.
He had decided she was drunk, and the idea made her hot with indignation, although she knew it was perfectly true. He put a hand under her chin and raised her face. ‘I’m afraid I’m after both your body and your house.’
‘You mean the land, don’t you?’ she countered. ‘You want to plunder my land like William the Conqueror, or whoever it was.’
‘Not entirely true. Oh, I admit that I’m happy to swing a hammer against centuries of reverence for the English house, not because I don’t rate beauty, because I do.’ He smiled and said gently to soften the impact, ‘It is my opinion that Flagge House is at the end of its natural span.’ He moved even closer and closed his fingers over a handful of plaited hair. ‘How do you woo a woman? Like this?’
She nodded.
‘And like this?’
She was helpless.
‘And what do you wish?’ His breath travelled in a pathway up along her shoulder towards her mouth.
‘There is no point…’
‘In what?’
But the champagne had stolen her subtleties of speech. Agnes found herself slipping down into the chair, where she laid her head on her hands. A longing for nurture, for assuagement of her hunger, for the safety-belt of some kind of certainty, pierced her.
She felt his hands moving over her shoulders and neck. ‘What are you doing?’ she murmured.
‘Unplaiting your hair.’ He sounded surprised that she should ask. ‘I’ve wanted to do it for some time.’
She took his hand, and the tanned fingers clenched within her own. ‘Don’t you see? There’s Kitty’ She clutched the fingers harder.
He had the grace to look away. ‘The honest answer is that I can’t think about Kitty at this moment.’ His fingers played music on her skin. ‘But we do have an arrangement and always have. You can give yourself permission to do something, if you wish to do it. It
True. Vexed by the seesaw of drunken emotion, she spread his fingers and slipped her own between them. ‘Darling Agnes,’ said Julian, ‘don’t look like that. I can’t bear it.’
‘Champagne…’ She felt the tipsy waves wash through her. ‘It’s very lovely’
‘Enough.’ He pulled her into the hall and up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs, he hesitated then pushed open her bedroom door, picked her up and laid her on the bed. Agnes gazed up at the spinning room, sighed and gave in.
Half-way through, Agnes thought, I’ve forgotten what it is like. Then she corrected herself, No, for it has never been like this before.
This incident was very
The light from the corridor caught his face: absorbed, almost feral. Like the fox. No, that was wrong too. The fox sneaks across the water-meadow in search of a drink, his coat brushed with burrs and dulled from weather. I hear him bark, sometimes, at night.
Shaken, she turned to Julian and kissed him. He ran his fingers down the slope of her shoulder. ‘You’re lovely, Agnes, did you know?’
Her spirit lifted, and she caught her breath with the sweetness of the moment. Then she shifted her body towards him and twined her arms around his neck. He fitted his cheek to the curve of her shoulder – and fell asleep with a rapidity that startled her.
The noise of the river woke Agnes at first light. She turned her head on the pillow. Julian was still deeply asleep, a hand flung out, the fingers curled towards the ceiling. He looked exhausted and vulnerable, all assurance gone.
She had been here before. For a long while, she looked at him, the sweetness and elation replaced by a more familiar, dreaded emotion that she had got herself into another muddle.
Agnes slid out of bed, shivering as the air hit her nakedness, grabbed her dressing-gown, crept down the corridor to the bathroom and locked the door. It was important that she and Julian did not share any more intimacies.
While she ran the bath, the huge, stained, claw-footed Edwardian one that took ages to fill, she scrubbed her face with lotion. Then she faced herself squarely in the mirror and made some calculations. Since Pierre, she had not needed any form of birth-control and last night had been a risk. The calculations seemed to pan out in her favour, and Agnes’s slight eruption of panic diminished.
She lay in the bath, head aching, face smarting, a small, voluptuous bruise blooming on her right thigh. In the corners of the bathroom were damp spots, orchidaceous green and brown, and the cheap straw matting that had been laid by Maud in the economy phase was torn in places.
She was wrestling with the gas stove when Julian wandered into the kitchen, stubbled and sleepy. ‘There seems to be no hot water,’ he said mildly, but it infuriated Agnes.
‘I know, I’ve taken it,’ she snapped. ‘You’ll have to wait. This is not Cliff House.’
‘Did I say it was?’ He sat down at the kitchen table and put his chin in his hands. ‘Do you get cross often?’
‘No. I rarely lose my temper,’ she said, even more crossly. Then she checked herself. ‘Actually, I’m known for my calm. Ask the team.’
He tapped a knife on the table, and she coloured at the memories of the night. ‘I just want to know for future reference.’
Cheeks still flaming, she made the coffee. Its smell revived her. She pushed a cup across the table towards him. ‘Julian…’
He held up a hand. ‘No recriminations at breakfast. That’s the rule. What’s done is done.’
Did one ever learn? Could one manage to put someone else, a person one did not know, in front of one’s own wishes? It was so little and, yet, such a tall order.
They ate breakfast largely in silence. At one point, he put down his cup and said, Agnes…’
She turned abruptly towards him. ‘Yes. What?’
He looked at her face. ‘Nothing.’
‘I’ve decided you must go.’ Agnes eventually addressed Julian across the remnants. ‘I only know a little about you and Kitty but enough to know that I can’t…’ She filled the basin and plunged the china into the suds. ‘I can’t… I won’t do it again. I can’t make Kitty suffer.’
He studied the worn grain of the table. ‘Isn’t that having your cake and eating it?’ He sounded weary and disappointed.
She sat down at the table and rested her aching head on her hands. ‘Yes,’ she admitted miserably. ‘It is. Not very admirable, but it happens.’ She looked up through her interlaced fingers. ‘Julian, you never told me how long you have been with Kitty’
His voice flattened. ‘Ten years. And we’ve worked fine together. We have been a team.’
Ten years of a shared bed and intimacies of which Agnes could have no notion and to which she had no right. Of flesh touching flesh companionably, of shared cries, pleasures, irritation and silence. Of plans and expectations of each other. This was Kitty’s territory, not hers. Kitty had yielded part of herself up to it. Kitty had staked it out, cultivated it and built her house on it.
‘Do you often put it at risk?’
‘Kitty has been faithful and true.’
‘But not you?’
