anguish and revulsion overrode her natural distrust of Agnes.
Penny had not known her husband’s secret landscape.
‘I had no idea that Andrew was capable of that sort of thing,’ she said, more than once, her boots leaving imprints on the green linoleum floor. ‘He went mad. He attacked them with an axe, sort of goading them to sting him. He wanted it.’ Eventually, Penny ran out of steam. ‘Oh, well,’ she said miserably, ‘that’s life. I’ll have to do my best with him. Although I will never understand…’ She looked straight at Agnes and sent a silent message: I am his wife and you are not.
Agnes thought of her plans and the solution Andrew had offered. She thought, too, of his hidden passions and despair, which she had imagined would become a second nature to her.
But Penny’s anxious, worn face was implacable.
Agnes raised her hands to push back her hair and her changing shape was revealed. Penny’s hands flew to her mouth and she emitted a little sound, such as a beaten animal might.
‘No,’ Agnes cried at once. ‘It’s not what you think. It’s not Andrew’s.’
‘My God,’ whispered Penny. ‘Oh, my God.’
Agnes had no griefs to bear against Andrew, no years of whittling down, no bleaching out of optimism. Nothing to forgive. But Penny had, and he of her.
‘Can I see him?’
Penny collected herself and led Agnes down the ward to Andrew, who was propped up on pillows, with a drip in his arm.
‘Andrew…’ Agnes had been anticipating a horrible sight, but even so she flinched at the violence that had been done to him. Andrew’s skin was blistered and weeping. His face and limbs looked swollen and pulpy, like rotten fruit. Even the blue eyes had vanished, reduced to watchful slits.
Penny announced that she would leave them to talk and would be in the canteen. Agnes promised not to tire the patient. Penny flicked a look that said, ‘Don’t try me too far.’
She watched Penny retreat down the ward. ‘Penny tells me that she’s moved back into Tithings.’
The split, swollen lips worked with difficulty. ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’ He spread his hands out on the sheet – a bag of sausages with nails attached.
‘That must change things between us.’
‘I want to talk to you.’
He turned his head awkwardly on the pillow and the strain of the movement registered in the flare of mottled skin on his puffy neck. She stifled her regret and the questions, for he looked too ill. Very, very gently she covered one of the swollen hands with her own. ‘The farm?’
‘I have until December to slaughter my cattle, dismantle my fences, pack my bags… scatter my hay to the winds.’ He struggled hard with his speech.
‘And to fight?’
‘I fought it. I fought as hard as I could.’ He winced. ‘In all ways.’
She cradled his hand as gently as she could, and it seemed to comfort him.
‘Agnes. I have something to tell you.’
‘Do you?’
Sometimes the truth is buried. You can ignore it, walk round it, refuse to look at it. But it is there all the same. Buried. The fossil in the cliff. She heard a faint, echoing tap through the salt water and the million million shifting grains of sand.
The confession was halting, guilty and agony – for both of them.
She recoiled. He lay quiet, gazing at her, waiting for her anger to be unleashed.
Andrew had been driven to the brink by the threat of being evicted from Tithings. ‘I thought and thought about what I could do. Then I saw the write-up about you in the paper and the solution arrived in a flash. I wrote them at night when Penny was asleep. I read up about old paper, went to see some period letters in a museum. Knew there was a bundle of my father’s pencils in a drawer and an old pot of ink. Then I began. It was as easy as breathing. Jack was in me. Mary was in there. I knew them as well as I knew myself.’ Again, Andrew shifted his poisoned body and winced. ‘It was strange. Everyone wished to construct a story around them. All I had to do was sit it out and hope the timing fell into place before the balloon went up. But I miscalculated. I had hoped the programme would go out before the verdict from the inquiry.’
He gazed out of the insulated hospital window, as if he hoped to see reflected in it his land rolling out its soft, brilliant colours, hazy in sunlight, washed by rain, diamond bright in frost.
‘What I loved about you, Agnes, was your belief in the letters. And from there it was easy for me to persuade myself that you believed in me.’
Agnes struggled to make sense of what he was saying and to reconcile it with her goal of the rich, full life. She sought the truth and it hit her cruelly in the face. What did it tell her? It was this, bald and unedited: in wanting to believe in the letters, in allowing them to supply some of her own needs, she had ignored warnings and made a fiction of her judgement and experience. It was impossible to be much more stupid.
He flinched at her expression. ‘That was deception on a grand order,’ she said, ‘and I was taken in.’
He shrugged painfully. ‘Sometimes the end justifies the means.’
Agnes smoothed a lock of hair back from his forehead, her fingers brushing the skin as lightly as foam. Under her touch, he lay quiet. All her tidy structures and plans lay in an untidy heap. ‘When were you going to confess this?’
‘I would have told you eventually. Some time in the future.’ He turned his face to hers. Swollen, desecrated flesh. ‘I calculated we were even. You are carrying another man’s baby and I was going to act as its father. You would have had to forgive me.’
‘Yes, I suppose I would have done. But at a price. It was a risk, Andrew.’
‘Possibly.’
She looked at the floor and he edged his hand over the sheet towards her. ‘I hoped I would get away with it and keep Tithings.’
A long, long pause.
‘Say something, Agnes. Please.’
She shuddered with anger and humiliation, then pulled herself together. How could she judge? Every day human beings used each other, not always carefully or wisely or kindly, and it would be a good thing to find words that would give him comfort. ‘You are an artist, Andrew. The letters and the farm are part of that. The letters are very fine.’
That was all she could manage.
Moisture oozed between the puffy flesh around his eyes. ‘They
The activity in the ward continued. Trolleys. Tea-cups. The muffled sound of a radio. Voices.
Agnes bent down to pick up her bag and her plait fell over her shoulder. He watched her through watering eyes.
‘You were Mary,’ he insisted. ‘You stepped into her place. I could not believe my luck.’
She shrugged.
‘I liked you in the honeysuckle crown,’ Andrew was saying.
Agnes looked away.
A nurse appeared, swished at the curtains around the bed and the side-show of the ward was blotted out. He seemed to be in increasing discomfort. The nurse flicked an eye over him and fed him some water through a beaker with a spout. Then she was summoned elsewhere and Agnes took over.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, between painful swallows.
Her sigh was dredged from the depths. ‘Maybe, maybe, I can present your story as the hidden life. We can get at it that way’ She shrugged and her flicker of enthusiasm was doused. ‘But I don’t really know, Andrew. I’ll have to think about it.’
Slowly and painfully, he circled his fingers around her wrist. ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered.
She disengaged her wrist and went to look out of the window. In the car park below, traffic was edging in and
