Maud cried and cried. She cried at the doctor’s, in the accident ward of the hospital, and she cried in her hospital bed when it was arranged that she should be admitted for a little while.
It took most of the day to grapple with the insurance company and electricians, and to clear up the worst of the mess. The smell made Agnes gag as, alternately wincing and cursing her painful fingers, she extracted tins from cupboards and tried to wash the worst of the mess from the walls. Then she tackled the china on the open shelves and bore it away to the laundry room.
Various experts arrived to assess the damage. The window needed replacing and the kitchen was unusable and out of bounds. Agnes abandoned it to the spiders, miraculously still occupying the cornice, and the sickening ash.
That evening, Bea rang. Agnes was wrestling to cook pasta on a portable Calor gas stove that she had bought in the village. She felt sick, barely able to lift another finger and at the end of her tether. For once, she had little time for the gentle voice. ‘Was it necessary to be quite so secretive?’ she demanded.
Bea tackled the
‘If Freddie was spared, I wasn’t.’ Agnes described the events of the morning, and had the Pyrrhic satisfaction of hearing Bea’s shocked response. ‘I’m so sorry. I never imagined… Most of my clothes, did you say, dear?’
After a few minutes’ more conversation, Agnes was aware that Bea, kind but secret Bea, no longer cared, although she was making a valiant effort to hide it. She had travelled far away into the shiny, insulating bell jar of a new life.
‘It’s only a kitchen, dear,’ she said, as her parting comment. ‘It can be repaired.’
‘Your aunt has done me a favour,’ said Andrew, when Agnes told him about the fire. ‘If you don’t have a kitchen, you must come here. I’ll fetch you. Please send the respects of one arsonist to another.’
27
When Julian let himself out of Kitty’s house, he savoured the curious, unfamiliar taste of being truly at liberty. The night air was cool as it would be for early October. A touch of salt, the thick, felty chill of the turn of the season.
In the end, it had been Kitty who had sent him packing and destroyed the pact. Yet her action appealed to Julian’s sense of justice – the symmetry of justice in the rough. In doing what she had, and throwing down the gauntlet of the purchased house, Kitty had gained control and that was only right. The balance had evened, easing his conscience, and it struck him that Kitty had been more generous than she had meant to be.
Always he welcomed the moment of change: the point when the needle quivered on the marker before falling into a different quadrant. But it was usually concerned with his business life. Then the search was on for the undiscovered continent somewhere out there, unknown and challenging. But this was different.
He looked up to the illuminated bedroom in the cottage and the contrary impulses that accompanied a big transition made him pause and cast his mind over what might have been, feel the pang of regret. He would miss Kitty or, rather, the glimpse of the Kitty she had manifested tonight. With that flash of spirit, that cleverly judged segue of patronage and revenge, she had blotted out the irritations and trapped feelings of the past few years.
How would she manage in the harshness of marshland and wold, his soft Kitty? For a second or two, he was tempted to return to the house to instruct her to wrap up warmly, to buy stout boots and to make sure that her car was serviced. Always, she had required warmth, cherishing, protection against her fragility, a gentle easing in to new surroundings.
The light in the window went off.
Julian got into his car and drove home.
Cliff House was quiet and, of course, empty. Its rooms smelt of air from which the oxygen had been sucked. Cold as it was, Julian flung open the window in his study and sea sounds flowed into the room. Shivering a little, he sat down to work.
At three thirty, he finished for the night and, stiff and chilled, got up to close the window.
The figures on which he had been working closed a story whose finale was not good – no happy ending for him – and in which his role was not illustrious. At least he had known in advance and had had the grace of a couple of days, which was time enough to practise being the figurehead of a firm that had been taken over.
Looking back, his successes had been spectacularly easy. Cushioned by thriving markets and solid finance, he had made choices and they had worked. But perhaps luck had played more of a part in his success than he had calculated. Perhaps the successful genes – for which he could claim no credit – of strength, intelligence and ruthlessness on which he depended had, this time, failed to outmanoeuvre luck’s skittishness
The precise ingredients of the situation would be difficult to analyse – or perhaps they wouldn’t, but of one factor he was sure: he was tired of thinking, arguing, bolstering, and of the depression that had weighed him down for the last frantic weeks through which he had struggled. Dying by degrees, he almost begged for the
He ticked off the pointers: the proposed deals and alliances that melted on examination; the unreturned telephone calls; the meetings that were changed; the not-quite-engaged gaze of the financiers; the wooing of shareholders by others.
‘What am I going to do with my hats?’ a Conservative MP’s wife once asked Julian at one of the dos where he had automatically worked the floor. The question, and her aggrieved manner, had stopped him in his tracks. ‘I am redundant and elderly,’ she continued. He had smiled politely, but without comprehension. ‘A hat-wearing wife is no longer required,’ the redundant political wife explained. ‘What
Now he understood.
Consider. If it was not rectified, the implications of a wrong turning multiplied and grew into a mass. Ask any mathematician. That was precisely what had happened at Portcullis. He had made an error in investing in projects that could not produce the profit margin, and a prime misjudgement had been to invest in a farmer’s field in Lincolnshire.
How astute Kitty had been to buy one of the houses. In doing so she had weighed perfectly her judgement on the lover who had failed her.
He picked up the fossil anchoring his papers. The inefficient were eaten, or taken over, by the more efficient, and he hated the idea that his trendy, clever, visionary team would suffer as a result of him.
He thought of Agnes. He was sure that she had sussed his bad and weak sides, the bits of him that hated to face up to feelings and scenes. Did she think of him as emotionally retarded? Could she pull those bits into shape? Did he wish her to?
Last time he had seen her, sitting at the wheel of the car with a spitting Kitty lurking in the doorway, she had looked so young and tragic that he had almost swept her off there and then. But he hadn’t because of Kitty.
It was growing lighter.
Julian picked his way in the semi-darkness down the cliff path to the beach below. With each step, the susurration of the water murmured louder against his eardrums. Over to the east, where the sun was rising, water and sand were tipped with a cold brilliance.
Long ago, the centre of the earth had growled and shaken, shifting and folding a mix of shale and limestone, and this coast had been made. Layer had been thrown down on layer, trapping animals and micro-organisms, flattening and crushing, until all that was left was the scratch of rock on rock, the hiss of decomposing bodies as they were turned to stone, and the echoes of sand falling into the water.
Imprinted on the beach was a record of the past and of what had taken place there, events indifferent to anything but the energy of themselves.
Julian was humiliated by the idea that his time was over and that layers of new rock would close over him. Once his role at Portcullis was finished, as it would be, he would have no more relevance than the fossil on his desk. Nothing more, nothing less than an interesting example of a wrong turning taken by the evolutionary river.
He kicked off his espadrilles. Sand oozed between his toes and the pebbles pressed uncomfortably into his feet.
