Kitty struggled for control. After a few seconds, she asked in a normal voice, ‘Do you mind if I do my hair?’ She sat down at Agnes’s dressing table and pulled off her earrings. ‘These ones always hurt. I don’t know why I wear them. Well, I do, actually. Julian gave them to me.’ She picked up Agnes’s hairbrush. Agnes flinched. How dare Kitty touch her things? Kitty examined it thoughtfully, opened her handbag and extracted her own.
The mirror was old and spotted with age and the reflection in it was unclear. Deft and skilled, Kitty worked away at her hair and traced the line of her lips with a lip pencil, remaking the pretty object. She assessed her handiwork. ‘Julian is difficult.’ She trailed the sentence, releasing her insider knowledge in a tantalizing fashion. ‘Pernickety. Demanding. He has his moods… and his tastes. I always make an effort.’
Agnes pictured Julian sitting on the sofa in Bel’s flat, balancing a glass on the arm. He was talking about the Lincolnshire project, pulsing with attack and energy, one leg crossed over the other. She closed her eyes. It had been then that she had noticed he was wearing socks whose wool had worn thin with age under the impeccable suit.
‘No, Julian is not easy. He works to his own timetable.’ Kitty closed her handbag with a snap. ‘Thank you so much for letting me freshen up. I’ll find my own way out’
What did Kitty think she was doing with her poisoned drip, drip of intimacies? Perhaps, she imagined that she had wrestled Agnes into a boneless heap on the floor where she could administer a kick with her crocodile shoes. Agnes’s emotions did an abrupt change-about. There was a rush of waves in her head, the screech of a million small stones pulled into the riptide and she felt the cold, salt shock of her anger. ‘There is one thing…’ Ever after, she was never to be quite sure of anything, least of all herself. ‘One thing…’ Clearly expecting to hear Agnes’s final capitulation, Kitty was arrested with her hand on the door handle.
‘I think I’m pregnant!’ Agnes cried out, in protest and despair.
Kitty fled down the stairs and into the still summer afternoon.
‘Why did she tell me?’ she sobbed in the safety of her car. ‘Why did she tell me?’
Above her, the wood pigeons cooed and fluttered in the trees.
22
The following morning Agnes made her way down Charlborough’s main street to the surgery, a modern building perched on the outskirts of the Bee Orchid housing estate.
Duggie Sutherland had been taking care of Agnes since she was twelve and knew her every nook and cranny well enough to ask any question he pleased. Duggie hated the new surgery and longed to be back in the cramped, damp rooms he had once occupied before they metamorphosed into a Group Practice. ‘How’s the air-conditioning?’ she teased, knowing that it sent him into a frenzy.
‘Do not ask.’ He did a quick test and it did not take him long to confirm what Agnes suspected. About seven weeks.’
In the clinical surgery, the confirmation seemed so matter-of-fact with none of the panic and disbelief of the past few weeks. Agnes slid back into her T-shirt. ‘Sod’s law of averages,’ she remarked. ‘It happened only once after months of abstinence.’
‘Hold out your arm.’ He attached the blood-pressure equipment. ‘This is not a scientific answer, Agnes, but it could be because you were ready.’
‘Why didn’t you come to see me at once? Or anyone?’
She looked down at her lap. ‘You know what they say about people in burning houses hiding under beds and in cupboards?’
‘No. Tell me about it. You might like to know that your blood pressure is down in your boots, which will be making you feel a bit odd. It will readjust in a couple of weeks.’ He chucked her under the chin. ‘Optimism, my girl. New life.’
She sat down on the chair by his desk while he wrote up the notes. ‘Duggie, I find the prospect of having a baby terrifying. I wasn’t planning it. I’m not ready…’ She pulled desperately on a strand of hair. ‘I wasn’t envisaging this bit of biology being thrust on me quite yet.’
He put his head to one side.
She knew what he was going to say. ‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘Don’t even think it, Duggie. I can’t have an abortion or send it away. I couldn’t. I haven’t managed much in the way of coherent thought but I just know I couldn’t do it.’ She shrugged. ‘More fool me.’ She tugged at her hair and winced. ‘How typical of Nature to make a muddle.’
‘Or you,’ suggested Duggie.
She pushed her plait back over her shoulder, dug her hands into her linen skirt pockets and sent him a tiny, tremulous smile. ‘Point taken.’
She pictured herself bowed down with a buggy, nappies in a bag, a baby on a hip, encumbered and struggling with the tired, I-can’t-take-much-more expression she had so often seen on mothers. They looked so battered, so shell-shocked and resentful. ‘I don’t want this baby, Duggie. I don’t know how I’m going to manage and I can’t feel anything for it except terminal crossness with myself.’
He tucked her notes into the folder. ‘Is the father involved?’
‘No, he isn’t.’
Later, Agnes knelt by her bed – a old, childish pose, long discarded. She rested her head on its hard edge and the position soothed the nausea that tormented her.
The clear motives and clear vision had vanished. So had the Agnes who knew what was what, who believed in the rules. In their place was confusion. How could she have done what she had done?
On Thursday, Kitty left a message for Julian at the office with Angela to say that she would be coming up to London for the evening and that he was not to worry about supper. He returned to the flat in the Barbican to find the table laid with candles and flowers and Kitty busy in the kitchen.
It had been an awful day and he craved peace and quiet, but he forced himself to look pleased. ‘Have I missed a birthday or something?’
She put a couple of steaks under the grill. ‘Hallo, darling. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll be gone in the morning and I won’t see you at the weekend.’
Kitty never went away without elaborate checking and cross-checking. Presumably he was being sent a signal about which he had no inkling and, at this precise moment, no curiosity either. Kitty fiddled with the cutlery. Expectant.
‘Where are you going?’
Kitty’s expression was the one she assumed when she was giving him a present. ‘I’m going to be checked out at a clinic.’ She bent down to look at the meat. ‘To see if everything is working.’
‘Oh, Kitty.’
She turned away to attend to the salad in the sink. ‘I just want to be sure, Julian. Before it’s too late.’
All he could see was her averted back. ‘Kitty, please stop doing that and look at me.’ Obediently, she turned round. ‘Now, listen. You don’t really want children, do you?’
She fiddled with the gold chain at her throat. ‘But I think you do, Julian. You admitted it that time when we talked before.’
‘That was just an aside. I didn’t expect you to take me so literally.’
‘Asides are often very telling.’
Kitty was on form.
‘Don’t be pompous, Julian.’
‘Am I? Sorry.’
Kitty picked up the salad dressing. ‘Think about the theory of evolution you’re so interested in. I’ve thought about it, Julian, carefully. It must have occurred to you – and you were sweet to understand my wishes in the past
