Secrets of the Heart

He knew it was impossible for her to settle until she knew he was safe. ‘It’s never too late,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I keep telling you that.’ Friday was their night, the culmination of a day of preparation and of mounting vigil. This Friday, she had kept that vigil at the window until it was very late and the food laid out in the kitchen had long congealed. Then, she had sat on the sofa with a glass of whisky and pictured Julian asleep at Cliff House, breathing lightly and softly. Remote and only half hers.

I will not let it hurt me, she told herself, the old hot, sick feeling threatening.

I will not.

Julian had made up for it, of course, by sneaking into the house in the early light, having been out for his morning walk. He smelt of sea and cold, and when he bent over to kiss her, her lips had fastened on his cheek with relief.

She laid her head on his chest, searching for the heartbeat she liked to hear. ‘Give me five minutes and I’ll make you your breakfast.’

He plonked himself full length on the bed and closed his eyes. It was then that she asked him for a second time why he had not come as he had promised. He murmured, ‘I wanted to get the research sorted. Think numbers. Work out logistics. All that sort of thing.’

Without me.

Kitty was brushing her hair, always an interesting exercise. If she brushed it back, then she was one sort of person, if she brushed it forward, or to the side, she was another. Transformations of this sort were her business, for she was a woman who made herself in the image of what others wanted. Well, what men wanted. The ones who kept Kitty in her so far successful career of being kept. She did not mind. Furthermore, it was easy: if Kitty did not possess conventional brains she understood more than most the value of metamorphosis.

Julian’s prone figure on the bed was reflected behind her own image in the generous mirror. I adore him. Kitty transferred her attention to herself. Yes. That was her as he wished and, therefore, as she wished: a small, delicate, creamy-highlighted blonde with lovely bone structure.

Julian eased himself into a sitting position, picked up the phone and punched in numbers. He mouthed, ‘Patrick Leache,’ at Kitty.

‘Oh.’

It was no use protesting. Julian relied on Leache, who was the area’s district planning officer, for his information, which was often imparted in private conversations at weekends. Not, said Leache’s enemies, that planning came into it but his friends in the building business were warm in their support of his work. I hate the Leaches of this world, thought Kitty, fiercely and illogically. Julian was explaining his possible interest in a house and could Patrick have a look at some point. He added the name ‘Campion’. Like most people in the area, Kitty knew the name if not the house itself. ‘Would there be a problem?’ Julian was asking.

He put down the phone and lay back with an expression that Kitty knew of old. It meant that he was contemplating a challenge, one that pleased and stimulated him. It meant that he would often be too busy for her.

One step forward, two back. The anger never seen by others stirred in Kitty’s soul. She fought it for she knew, from experience, that anger tightened the ligaments in her neck and hardened her features. Oh, Kitty, Kitty, what a sham you are.

If she was truthful, and Kitty tried hard to be so, her anger was really a form of grief and impotence, not the strong, cleansing emotion that psychotherapists advised it should be.

Come, tell the truth. She loved a man with a desperate passion that she knew was not returned, and would never be returned.

These days, being a mistress was a minority occupation. Rather old-fashioned, really. ‘I am clever enough,’ Kitty had once confided to her friend Amy, ‘to know that I am a dinosaur, but not clever enough to do anything about it.’ Amy rather disagreed. Over twenty years or so, she had witnessed Kitty moving with tact and grace from one lover to another (but not too many), providing, of course, they had sufficient funds. Kitty had done rather well out of it, she suggested, very much better than a nurse or a secretary. ‘I mean,’ added Amy, ‘your career is being a Kept Woman and you’ve proved to be a high flyer. It takes guts and nerve, Kitty, make no mistake.’

Beautiful, discreet, charming and childless by choice – Kitty needed all her energy to concentrate on herself – it was too precarious a life to be otherwise.

True, she had worked at it.

She had not intended to be a professional mistress, but Kitty had made the mistake of becoming entangled with one married man after another, a practice that had become, she now realized, a kind of addiction but had not appeared like that to begin with. Stopping was impossible. In those early days, Kitty had believed that the Robins and Harrys and Charleses would leave their wives. Later on, she had grown to see the advantages of being single yet bound with delicate chains. In the style to which she had grown accustomed, Kitty had learned the secret. There were always men who wanted a mistress.

But things were changing.

‘I’m longing for an orange juice, darling,’ she pleaded. ‘Then I’ll do breakfast.’ She had battered him into being good and contrite and, reluctantly, Julian pulled himself upright and went to do her bidding. Using a tissue, Kitty patted her face dry and applied expensive cream. Its glutinous, silken touch on her fingertips reassured her: her armoury and investment against… well, what? Against the vanishing beauty that had once been set and immutable and, at forty-eight, was now slipping.

Kitty got up and sat down at the foot of the bed, spreading out her manicured fingers on the counterpane, and was reminded of the things that went on in it, accomplished with shared greed and skill. Last night was not by any means the first Friday on which Julian had failed to turn up, but the shortfall mattered when you sensed that the slope was becoming steeper, or the precipice closer.

Was it significant? Freedom and space, and all the other abstracts Julian talked about with regard to their relationship, seemed at times to Kitty to come very expensive. In fact, because she loved Julian as she had not loved the others, she had grown to hate and distrust such terms. Anyway, most people didn’t want freedom. It was, well, too free.

Theo, darling, mad, Australian Theo, who cleaned the cottage three days a week as part of his therapy, would understand. ‘OK, darl,’ he would say, bringing out all the cliches. ‘He’s a flaming bastard. A stupid, blind bastard.’ And Kitty would bathe in the white heat of Theo’s gratitude and affection, which was Kitty’s repayment for having rescued him from the institution into which he had been binned. It would have the effect of thawing the ice-chip in her heart. Just a little.

Loving was so exhausting, so dependent-making, so hurtful. I have tried, I have tried, to conduct my career on the basis of good manners, affection and financial expediency, she thought, and I have succeeded. Yet I am continually surprised by how savagely love undercuts all of those things.

Before he left Lymouth on Sunday evening, Julian said goodbye to Kitty and returned briefly to Cliff House. London was the place where he worked and laid his head. Kitty’s cottage was the place where he conducted yet another part of his life, but this generous, light-filled Victorian house was home. Poised on the cliff above its own tiny beach a little way out of the town, it was where the parts of him had been shaped – difficult, hard, puzzling, as the process had been. Here, where the smell of salt and spiky marsh plant intensified in the spring, the birds surfboarded the waves and, when the sea grew rough and tides pounded, he could hear the grinding of stones, slate and granite, one upon the other. When the water retreated, leaving rank memorabilia of weed and detritus dotted like a pox on the smooth sand, and the sticky bottom slice of the cliff crept into view, the old passion for the fossil chase flared. On quiet summer days, the sand shimmered, the stone grew hot and the sea turned transparent. Then it was possible to hear the shift of sand underfoot, the eddy of a current on the turn, the splash of a seabird, and he discovered, yet again, the power of insignificant objects – a shell, a stone, a piece of wood – to satisfy.

Sometimes on the beach a memory shifted, unfolded. Then he remembered how he had longed to grow up, not only because he imagined he would be given the answer to the questions that puzzled him but because he had imagined that being grown-up meant that you were never lonely.

Cliff House had belonged to his parents, who had astonished themselves, and their friends, by producing Julian when they were well into their forties. ‘Never mind,’ said the wives of Lymouth, agog at this evidence of geriatric