Secrets of the Heart

for, in a curious way, Agnes felt her experience of them made her truly alive.

The cold knifed into her flesh and hurt her bare feet, and she tucked her arms across her chest, a defensive posture that she noticed she had adopted lately. Correction: that she had taken to since Pierre.

Happiness and unhappiness were so close that they were joined at the hip, except that unhappiness was longer lasting. But she had no intention of letting it become a life habit. Occasionally, Agnes dreamed of warm kitchens where she did feel happy – which surprised her as her interest in cooking was minimal – but put it down to some residual message to do with contentment lurking deep in her psyche. Perhaps there was a programme to be made that investigated the meaning of the kitchen?

Above all, Agnes wanted to live as completely as she could manage, for the ambitions that drove her were deep-seated. She had been battered and hurt, and now she was grieving bitterly for the end of a loving era and worried by the prospect of the new, but she wanted to understand what she was and how best to be that person.

Outside, the waxing light threw a transparent wash over the meadow. My land. With a tremor of delight and dread she said it aloud: ‘My land.’

With a grand sweep that made the rings rattle, she pulled the curtain fully back and stared at the shapes massing across her vision: the land, the trees, the perimeter wall snaking its way towards the village.

Silence. Except for the sound of the river running over those stones as it had since human memory began.

Agnes shivered and hugged herself for warmth. Her land and house. Flagge House had acquired its name because of the river and wild irises for which the area was famous. No longer did they grow in their masses but, if the year was propitious, the irises ran up a display of colour that aped the white and smoky- yellow carpet of previous glories.

It was good soil, whose mixture of clay and chalk produced a mix of vegetation, and where the river had thrown an ox-bow and slowed its pace, it was carpeted with moss and lush grass.

In the past, figures had moved over this landscape, purposeful, occupied figures, who understood and lived by the land. Her Agnes, the dead Agnes of the portrait, would have been among them. Silk skirts swishing, lace pouting at her breast, earrings jangling.

Sleepless and wrung out, Agnes felt the weight of those past lives. Something had ended. Something was beginning.

2

Maud had acquired the habit of inserting French words into her conversation on the annual holidays to Deauville with John. She did so whenever the mood took her, chiefly to indulge her desire to be noticed, but she maintained that it was to do with her inner ear, which was particularly sensitive to languages.

It was mid-morning, the day after the funeral. A post-mortem of the ceremony had been held and the conversation had turned to the next move. Not surprisingly, Maud was prickly.

‘Comment?’ she challenged Bea, her widowed sister, who had lived at Flagge House since the death of her husband seven years previously.

‘I don’t think you should have said what you did.’ A pale, shrunken-looking Bea poured out cups of tea and handed them round.

Maud was sufficiently surprised by her sister’s attack to snap back, in English, ‘What did you say?’ It was rare for Bea to criticize Maud: when she did, it was usually in the presence of a witness.

‘I didn’t like what you said to him that morning… just before… you know…’

Maud’s still large, lustrous eyes – she had been an exceptionally pretty woman – were sullen. ‘I thought you were supposed to be comforting me.’

Maud was wearing one of her home-knitted jumpers, a professional-looking creation in mourning-black angora with a turtle neck, but she looked frozen. The diamond-paste ring that she habitually wore with her wedding band gave off a blackish sparkle that never fooled anyone who knew about diamonds. ‘Aren’t you?’ she reiterated.

Agnes and her aunts were huddled at the kitchen table below a ceiling across which yellow stains sailed in cloud formations, surrounded by a litter of saucepans and the unopened cans of soup on which the aunts appeared to survive. The cold crept round their feet and an acrid underlying whiff of mould emanating from the leaking window seemed more than usually noticeable.

Agnes drank her tea out of the thick white cup that had once been of use in a station canteen before fetching up in a jumble sale. It tasted dead, if such a thing were possible, and her stomach protested. Grief was a funny thing, circling round like a tiger and pouncing just at the moment you thought you had it under control. Guilt, as she knew from experience, did not bother with the circling.

At any minute now, she must spring into action. With some amusement, she had read about how families assign roles to the separate members – the moneymaker, the fool, the dreamer – and now Agnes had been assigned hers. That was fine. That was what was expected of her, and what Agnes expected of herself. She knew, and they knew, that despite their sparring the sisters were united in their expectation that Agnes would take charge of both the argument and of the future. Agnes will know what to do.

‘I had to tell John the truth. I was taught to tell the truth.’ Maud raised her eyes to the ceiling and dropped them again when she encountered the colony of spiders in the cornice. She faced Agnes. ‘You weren’t the only one in his life,’ she said, dripping bitterness. ‘I was the one who was married to him, you know.’

Bea was apparently fixated by the dingy laurel tree that guarded the entrance to the kitchen yard. ‘It wasn’t kind, Maud.’ She did not look at her sister. ‘You must have peace when you’re dying.’

Agnes braced herself. ‘What did you say, Maud, that was so terrible?’

Maud’s bulldog expression said: You can’t shame me. ‘That I was sick and tired of words like “heritage”, and how ridiculous it had been that because he was the owner of a house like this we had been martyred all our lives to it. What’s more, I told him I wanted to move out and live in a bungalow. A nice warm modern one. There, that’s what I said.’

Agnes stared at Maud. In a normal marriage one hoped for a little peace in which to shelter. Pierre had agreed, adding that his marriage to Madeleine did not stop him worshipping Agnes’s size seven English feet and long ash- blonde hair. As a result, a besotted Agnes in all innocence, no, foolishness, had spent four years imagining that Pierre would leave his wife in the flat on the rue Jacob in Paris with the three elfin daughters.

She knew those daughters as well as she might have known her own, for everywhere she went, in everything she did, they were there, like the tender, infant putti in the paintings: Katrine, the clever one, Claudine, the pretty one, and Mazarine, the plump little angel of the family. She had been jealous of them, the only considerations that gave Pierre pause. Their innocence, their physicality, their needs were balanced in the palms of Pierre’s hands, and Agnes hated it, and hated herself for that.

That was before Madeleine had arrived at Agnes’s hotel one evening and pointed out how terribly the family was suffering, and if Pierre said otherwise he was lying. After that, everything changed, and because Pierre was forbidden, Agnes wanted him even more. Yet the more she wanted him, the more she thought of Madeleine until, in some tortured fashion, Madeleine became more important, the one who occupied Agnes’s thoughts.

After she had told Pierre it was over and that she was not coming back to Paris, Agnes had finally tumbled to the conclusion that the good and bad areas of a marriage were irrelevant. You grew round the other person, like fat and muscles over organs, and that was that.

Maud shrugged. ‘You needn’t look so disapproving, Agnes. I have a point, and John knew it. Anyway, he probably didn’t hear what I said.’

‘But he did.’ Bea was as fierce as it was possible to be.

No fool, Maud realized that her trespass was too far and she adjusted her tone to a more reasonable one. ‘You ought to sell this millstone, Agnes. It’s done nothing but bring trouble and misery on all of us. Think. We could all have some money to buy somewhere sensible.’

Agnes’s fingers folded across the cup and tightened but she said nothing. An empty bag is impossible to burst and it was best with Maud in this mood to be as empty as possible.

‘For a start, there’s a leak in the blue bedroom ceiling,’ said Maud, ‘and the roof is getting worse.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Agnes. Maud had a nose for the details. ‘It’s on the list.’