Secrets of the Heart

The rest of his clothes followed. Cold air ran up his body: the hair on his chest and groin responded, genitals tightened. He made his way down to the water’s edge. There, the sea swirled over his feet, pummelling his toes, and receded, weaving its improvised, spumy lacework. Julian had swum here countless times. He knew the precise slope of the shore into the water, the formation of the rocks at its edge, and had explored their private rooms, daydreaming, inserting fingers into the anemones in the rockpools, and preying on transparent filigree shrimps. He knew where the rocks poked up out of the sea and where the tide exposed their hidden places.

It was here that he had gone over and over the puzzle of childhood. ‘Of course we love you very, very much,’ said his repressed mother when he asked her. He could not remember her kissing him.

Feet edging gingerly over the stones, he waded into the water until it reached his waist. The dense, cold mass sucked at him, willing him to strike out for the new continent. Gasping at the shock, Julian launched himself into the water.

Hair sleeked into a black cap, he swam for a long way. The sand in the water flayed at his skin, rubbing away the layers of habit. It flayed the image of Kitty, leaving a memory, as sticky but abrasive as the salt that licked over his body.

Agnes began to bleed.

At first reluctant, for he was of the opinion that nature should take its course, Duggie Sutherland finally arranged for Agnes to be admitted to hospital where she lay, pale and sweating, and gazed in panic at the ceiling.

They told her it sometimes happens at sixteen weeks, fitted a drip, rebandaged her burnt fingers, took endless notes and left her alone. Terrified that she might lose the baby, she struggled to find the rational, calm Agnes on whom she relied.

But that Agnes had fled, over the dew-wet meadow, leaving only her footprints – for she had never really existed.

Now she imagined herself on the operating table, knees raised while her baby slid away.

Desperately she focused on the small shape that was trying to leave its shelter. The curve of thin eggshell skull, the webbed feet, the tiny articulated shoulder. No, she cried out to it, you must not. You must hang on. You are not ready.

Forgive me for my doubt and for my busy, unattached life.

Perhaps you thought it was best to get out while the going was good. Perhaps you chose death in preference to what is on offer.

I promise to take care of you. I will wrap you in the softest of coverings, and lull you carefully and tenderly into being.

It was time to put down the anchor. When she got out of hospital, she would ring Andrew and tell him that she would marry him. Then she would settle to tidying and shaping the ends of her life in order to be ready for her baby. That was the least she could do. It was what she should do.

Agnes’s head hurt, and she moved restlessly in the white hospital bed. Somewhere, in the distance, she heard a woman screaming. Was it the other Agnes, struggling to give birth, held down on her bed by other women’s hands? Above her in the attic, mice scrabbling from beam to beam and the spiders spinning their webs?

For the tenth time in two days, Andrew picked up the phone and dialled Flagge House. For the tenth time, there was no answer.

In the end, he rang Bel. As he waited in his study at Tithings for her to answer, the sun came out behind the oaks. They seemed bigger, sturdier, more intrusive than he remembered from the morning. Stag-headed in shape. Oak was the hardest and stoutest of woods. It had built a navy and carried a nation. It resisted. It repelled fungal dry rot and teredines, boring molluscs-the invaders. The oak would face the bulldozer – and repel it.

When she eventually answered, Bel was crisp, never having troubled to conceal that she could not take Andrew seriously. Andrew didn’t care. Early on he had dismissed Bel as a woman of no substance and a sharp tongue. The theatre of her cropped, moussed hair and rainbow fingernails had never entertained him.

He asked Bel if she knew where Agnes was, and Bel replied that she was taking a few days off but was not sure where.

Andrew suspected she was lying.

‘Oh, by the way,’ said Bel, ‘did Agnes tell you? The Hidden Lives programme has slipped in the schedule. It looks like late October.’ She was maddeningly smug. She added, ‘Agnes is doing her best to get it out earlier, but she has other things to do, you know.’

‘I hope she is,’ he said. ‘The results of the planning inquiry have been delayed. I’m not sure quite when they’re due, but possibly early October and the timing could be critical.’

‘Goodness, the tension must be unbearable for all you farming folk.’

‘No need to be like that.’

‘Who do you think Mary was?’ Bel flashed the question, which, as it was meant to do, took Andrew by surprise.

‘Mary? Oh… Mary. To be honest, I can’t make up my mind about Mary.’

‘Mary,’ said Bel flatly, ‘is a probability, not a definite, wouldn’t you say? You can chase her down the byways of parish registers, electoral rolls, through the dusty corridors of Somerset House, but she eludes us, doesn’t she? And, believe me, I have chased her. Mary, the eternal woman who inspires such passion, the epitome of courage, suffering and mystery. How do we decode Mary? I’ve tried and failed, and I have to tell you that I’m pretty sharp at spotting weak links. She almost seduced me too.’

‘Ah,’ said Andrew. ‘You, too.’

‘Come on, Andrew.’

For a moment, he was tempted to lay down the burden of his secret. Only the notion that it would be Bel’s multi-studded ear receiving the confession prevented him. He did not want to waste his passion and effort on a woman like her. ‘Will you tell me where Agnes is?’

‘No, I won’t. She needs absolute peace and quiet. OK?’

28

The waiting was terrible. Having put back the date twice already, for no good reason as far as Penny could see, the worse-than-useless inspector was taking delight in spinning out the torture. Stuff about further evidence and extra figures. Gossip in the pub had it that Stone, the caring landlord, was hopping mad at the delay because he needed the money, pronto.

At night sometimes, lying beside Bob, Penny prayed that Stone would go bankrupt, and when he did she planned to send him a postal order for five pounds with orders to buy himself a good meal.

Wouldn’t they laugh, if people knew her terrors? The brisk, unflappable Penny reduced to a sleepless bag of nerves. Bob hated her tossing and turning but she didn’t care, one way or the other, what Bob thought.

If Andrew lost the farm, it would kill him.

Some things you know, and you have no idea why you know, but if you feel something so strongly, it is unwise not to pay it attention. Penny knew she must keep an eye on her husband.

Unable to bear it any longer, Penny drove over to the farm at the next opportunity. It was lunch-time, Wednesday, the slot between checking the meat orders and the journey to the abattoir.

‘As I thought.’ Penny edged into the kitchen to find Andrew eating a crispbread and cheese. The sight that greeted her was expected: unwashed dishes, a tangle of clothes in the corner and a muddle of cups and tins on the table. She directed her gaze to her husband. ‘When did you last wash those jeans? Get ‘em off, they’re filthy. And everything else.’

Habits were strong. Andrew stepped out of the offending clothes, revealing his lean, worked body. A little softer, perhaps, around the contours, but the same man Penny had married twenty years earlier. She flashed a glance past the flat naked stomach and legs to the countenance above, which seemed so frighteningly indifferent as to whether she was there or not, and knelt down to retrieve the clothes, sick with longing to turn the clock back nine months.

He watched her sort out the clothes into their respective colours and stuff the first load into the machine.