Secrets of the Heart

She let herself say, ‘I wish I had not been so stupid, and we had had a child. A child would have made a difference.’

‘Perhaps.’ He looked over to the bed they had shared. ‘Who knows?’

‘One more thing.’ She did not turn to face him. ‘I know you are in trouble, and I thought it would be nice to help, so I’ve put in to buy one of the houses on the Tennyson estate. I thought every penny would come in useful.’

Saturday.

The fen was as flat as her waking memory of it, and the earth was dark, sodden and tinged with a green varnish of permanent damp. Only a few houses were visible, huddled inside their palisades of Leylandii cypresses. Otherwise, there were crops as far as Kitty could see, mile on mile of unlovely potatoes and cabbages, threaded through by drainage ditches. They have to grow somewhere, she thought.

Note… Kitty copied into her notebook from the gazetteer before she went to sleep. ‘It was against this backdrop of fen towns and their surprisingly rich and sumptuous churches that the King Edward potato had been developed.’

It was cold and raw in her dream, and Kitty woke up shivering. After a while, she got up and dressed, slipping her feet into her elegant shoes, and went downstairs to eat breakfast. Theo had already arrived and was at work in the downstairs cloakroom.

‘Don’t come in, dark.’

Kitty knew better than to try. She knew exactly where and how to step in between the war zones drawn up by Theo and his cleaning panzer division. ‘Kaboom,’ said Theo. ‘Every mad stinking bacteria of you.’

She poked her head around the door. ‘Tea?’ The Marigolded hands halted – Monday was yellow, Wednesday pink, Friday blue (after each session Theo dried them and dusted them with talcum powder).

‘Yup.’ He stripped off the gloves and placed them carefully on a clean cloth spread out for that purpose.

Over tea – drunk out of good bone china with a strawberry pattern – Kitty asked, ‘Would you consider moving, Theo? I mean to live somewhere else.’

He whistled, out of tune and discordant. ‘That’s a bit of a whammy.’

Kitty took a deep breath. ‘I wondered, if I moved…’ she looked round at the small, fashionable kitchen ‘… if you came with me, I would look after you. See that you were all right. Care for you as well as I could.’

‘What is this, Kits?’

‘Me. Thinking again. Taking a grip of my life.’

Theo’s brow puckered in an effort to make sense of her question. ‘I’ve travelled far enough, Kits.’ He meant not so much the passage from the red dust of his birthplace to this neat English seaside town, but more the journey in his mind.

‘I understand.’ Kitty got up, balancing neatly on her spindly heels, and tucked her chair under the table. ‘It was just a thought. You can always change your mind.’

The tea-cups were empty. Theo gave them to Kitty, who took them over to the sink and washed them up. After a few seconds, she was aware from the faint chlorine bleach smell that Theo was standing silently behind her. She swivelled to face him and wrinkled her nose affectionately at him, a gesture she would never have dared make to Julian. Theo edged closer, a habit that in the early days had frightened her but now she knew to hold her ground. He circled her neck with his big hands and squeezed very gently.

‘Spit it out, Kits.’

His hands were like a big, warm, reassuring collar and she nudged her cheek in a gesture of affection against one of them. ‘I have to move, Theo, before I go under. For a long time, I imagined I was not capable of doing anything, but I am, Theo, I am. Aren’t I?’

He nodded. If Kitty required reassurance he was going to supply it.

‘So, I’ve decided on a new start, and the strange thing is, I…’ I want to discard, peel away, empty myself ‘… have this urge to be somewhere harsher and colder. I’m not sure why’ She paused. ‘I know it’s unfair to ask you to come with me but I thought I would anyway.’ She paused again. ‘If it’s money, Theo…’

The collar around her neck loosened and fell away. ‘I don’t think I could cope with a move, Kits.’

She was disappointed but not surprised. ‘As I said, you can change your mind.’ She arranged the cups on the rack to dry. A trickle of water escaped towards the sink and she dammed it with her finger, but it oozed its way round it.

‘You know that the drugs make me impotent?’ Theo dried up a strawberry cup.

‘Yes, I do. I guessed that a long time ago.’ Kitty drained the washing-up bowl and wiped it out.

‘I like it. It’s easier. I don’t want to see women in that way.’

‘It was you I invited, Theo, to look after you. I would miss you. Nothing else.’ Kitty bent down to shut the door to the cupboard under the sink.

Theo gave a little chuckle. ‘That’s a girl.’

‘Girl?’ said Kitty, straightening up with the rudiments of a smile. ‘I wish.’

Theo returned to his duties in the cloakroom. ‘Where do you think you’ll go?’ he called.

Kitty’s mind was filled with pictures and one was of the raven hanging in the wind above a wild, grey sea in which seals traced foamy detours around the rocks. Behind unfolded the flat, featureless land across which she was going to walk. ‘Lincolnshire, I think. I don’t quite know why. Except… except I have a feeling I should divest myself.’

‘Masochist?’ Holding his gloves out and playing surgeon in the theatre, Theo returned to the kitchen.

Kitty’s mouth tightened in anguish. ‘I shall grow old, Theo, and I will no longer be desirable.’ She paused and then whispered, ‘I shall have to face it. I must face it.’

Sunday.

But when she woke on Sunday morning, a dull rainy day from which summer had fled, it was to peace.

26

‘I shall have my revenge.’ Maud opened her knitting-bag. ‘Je reviens.’

Agnes looked up. ‘But you are here, Maud.’

It had been three weeks, three difficult weeks, since Bea’s exit – and a lifetime since she had last seen Julian. Maud’s behaviour had disintegrated. Grim-faced, she refused food, veered between tears and rage and drank industrial quantities of bad sherry. This catalogue of misery had culminated in a binge the previous night. Drunk and despairing, she flung at Agnes, ‘What is my life? Nothing. Except debt and decay.’

The words, so it seemed to the listening, mopping-up Agnes, had been wrung from Maud’s failure to connect on a deep and real level with her husband, her house and her sister. An important component had not clicked. A warning sounded in Agnes. It was so easy for it to happen.

Today the removal van came to take away Bea’s furniture. The two women watched in silence the departure of the dressing-table, the glass-fronted Georgian bookshelf and some handsome chairs. Only Bea’s clothes remained, and these were packed into suitcases and stacked in her room, to be picked up later by Freddie.

Bea had gone. Debt and decay. Tentatively, Agnes slipped her hand through Maud’s elbow and held on to her as Bea was erased from the house.

They retired to the drawing room and Agnes lit a fire. High summer had gone and autumn had arrived. ‘There,’ she said, the Scout leader banking on bossiness. ‘That’s brighter.’ For once, the fire took and burned cheerfully, and Agnes and Maud huddled close to the warmth. Outside, wet leaves lay like mislaid gloves over the water-meadow and the rain fell.

Maud was crying again, and Agnes wondered if she should call in professional help. ‘Maud,’ she said gently, ‘I think you should see someone.’

The mere suggestion was enough to provoke a hostile reaction. Maud was arrested mid-sob, hauled out her handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘Are you mad?’

‘Sorry,’ said Agnes.

Maud’s bony fingers paddled inside the knitting-bag. ‘I shall knit Bea one of my jerseys. Black angora,