by Rachel Hore
‘Good to see you, Harry! You’ve met Agnes, I see. Your pictures are going well – I saw a lady just now brandishing her chequebook. Gone for one of the saucy ones, I expect. Look, I’ve just been talking to Tom. Freda Brett-Jardine’s having a party later. Why don’t we go to Previtali’s and mosey on there afterwards.’
‘Well, why not? Agnes, are you game for it?’ Harry asked her, an expression of lazy amusement in his eyes.
She had felt her heart flutter in fear at the thought that this might be the end of their time together, but now all was arranged, she believed she would burst with happiness. Dinner, with this wonderful, fascinating man, and then a party. She nodded, her eyes bright as they locked on his.
‘Let’s get our hats and coats,’ said Raven, not seeming to notice his sister’s unusual behaviour. ‘We’ll find a cab with Tom and meet the others there.’ And he grabbed Agnes’s hand. On impulse, she offered her other hand to Harry and he gripped it. The warm pressure of his touch was the only thing she was aware of as they made their way towards the door.
‘It is the most extraordinary night of my whole life so far,’ Agnes sighed. Later, much later, she lay awake on cool sheets, giddy with the effects of drink and dancing, her ears buzzing from loud music and voices, remembering Harry’s body brushing against hers as they danced, his breath warm in her ear. She knew without doubt that she was in love. When she finally left him, standing on the stairs outside the party, she had felt bereft, hardly noticing the ride home with Raven through the quiet streets.
The dinner at Previtali’s had passed in a kind of dream. Raven and Harry had ordered for her and dishes had come and gone with her hardly having tasted them, though she sipped at her wine. Their party was a noisy one. Tom was a lively fellow, a bluff, red-faced man who regaled the table with his journalist’s stories. They were joined by Raoul Green, a lithe Jewish-looking man, and he brought another half a dozen people with him from the viewing, including a Mr Beales who seemed to own a publishing company, and two glamorous-looking women who took little notice of Agnes but giggled a lot and had to take frequent trips to the powder room, knocking into other diners’ chairs on the way and apologizing too loudly to their annoyed occupants.
Agnes didn’t mind their rudeness. She was just content to sit between Raven and Harry, listening to Raven describe to Sam Beales some stories he was writing and answering Harry’s questions about what she had been doing in London. She gauged that he lived alone, using a bedroom with a north light as his studio.
‘Where do you come from, Harry?’ she asked.
‘Cambridgeshire,’ he replied. ‘Though I don’t go back there much now.’ He toyed with the grilled fish on his plate. ‘My father didn’t like my becoming an artist. No money in it. Certainly not respectable. Fortunately, my older brother was happy to take over the business when he retired, so they’ve tried to forget about me.’
‘That sounds very hard. Aren’t they pleased to hear how well you’re doing?’
‘Maybe if I chose religious subjects or painted pretty landscapes. But my mother is very pious – we’re Catholics, you see – and the priest has told her I paint pornography, though I don’t think he’s ever seen one of my pictures, just read a review somewhere, I expect. I . . . anyway, I’ve disgraced myself in a whole variety of ways, so it seems better to keep away.’
‘But aren’t you very lonely without your family?’
‘Lonely?’ Harry gave her a curious look as the dishes were taken away and ices placed in front of them. ‘When you are a stranger amongst your own family then you can feel the loneliest person in the world.’
Agnes leaned towards him and whispered, ‘I sometimes wonder whether Raven feels like that. Father is going to be furious when he hears he has thrown over his job.’
‘Have you, Raven?’ Harry raised his voice to break into the noisy conversation on Agnes’s other side. ‘Have you really left the City?’
‘The City has left me! Thrown me out, rather. An occasion to celebrate, don’t you think?’
While the others all laughed and drank, unthinking, to Raven’s newfound freedom, Agnes sat quietly. She was imagining the reception they were going to get on their return.
The rain had stopped now. The air was muggy and it was getting dark. As they drifted out of the restaurant, the girls squabbling about what to do next, she pulled Raven aside. ‘Don’t you think we ought to go home and face the music? Father and Vanessa won’t even know where I am.’
‘Jeanette will have told them you’re out with me. Come on, I promised Freda I would show up. Let’s go.’
And when Agnes found herself sitting close to Harry in the cab, she forgot everything but the exhilaration of the present moment.
Freda Brett-Jardine lived in a top-floor flat in one of the white terraced streets off Kensington High Street. It was utterly unlike any of the opulent venues frequented by Agnes in the past few weeks. For a start, there was a winding staircase covered in elderly carpeting, up which they had to climb three floors, Harry pulling Agnes by the hand, Raoul’s girls complaining all the way. They could hear the unmistakable sound of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet growing louder as they went and at the top was waiting the most extraordinary-looking woman Agnes had ever seen.
Freda Brett-Jardine was as dark as an Egyptian, her exotic beauty highlighted by kohled eyes and a gorgeous floaty dark gold dress and jacket, both embroidered with black swirls, like an Indian sari Agnes had seen in a book. She could have been any age between twenty-five and forty-five. Her expression was one of boredom. Even when she smiled, it did not touch her eyes.
‘Darlings, you came! Raven, Harry, Raoul, it’s wonderful to see you. I was just giving up on you all. No Vanessa? Well at least I’ll have you for myself tonight.’
Agnes’s eyes widened at her brazenness, but Raven ignored the comment. He introduced everybody else, but Freda’s eyes passed vaguely over the rest of the party and returned to Raven. She hung onto his arm as she led them into the flat and straight through to the drawing room where two or three young men in white ties loitered stiffly, clearly waiting for everything to start.
‘Freda’s husband was an antiquarist,’ whispered Harry in Agnes’s ear, as she stopped to look round in delighted amazement. ‘Travelled all over the East.’ The walls were covered with hangings, the floors festooned with Turkish rugs and great cushions, the ceiling was oxblood red, as were what she could glimpse of the walls. Bright-coloured throws disguised sofas and archairs. Huge chests, cupboards and carved decorative pieces in dark Indian wood completed the transformation of a shabby Kensington apartment into a boudoir of a maharajah. Agnes breathed in the heady scent of incense and some mysterious sweeter smell wafting through it.
More people arrived – an elderly man in an ancient black suit, several informally dressed young men, a plain and very talkative young woman in a shapeless cover-all garment with them. Agnes asked for a lemonade when someone offered her a drink, but when it came, it had a strange taste and she sipped at it with caution.
‘Where is he now?’ she shouted in Harry’s ear over the wail of the gramophone, careful not to trip over the snarling head of a tiger rug by the fireplace. ‘Mr Brett-Jardine, I mean.’
‘Nobody knows. Maybe he was eaten by this fellow,’ Harry shouted back, nodding at the tiger. ‘Or, more likely, Freda traded him for a native. Exotic tastes, our Freda.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, puzzled. Then ‘Oh,’ as the penny dropped and she blushed.
Harry laughed. Agnes laughed too. She was beginning to feel dizzy. From the drink – which certainly wasn’t just lemonade. From the seductive roll of the music, the heat, which was oppressive despite the open windows, the smoky spice in the air. And from happiness. Around them, as the room filled up with laughing, chattering strangers, she could hear snatches of fascinating conversation.
‘And she’s thrown him out again . . . this time she won’t have him back, I’m sure.’
‘Elegaic yet contempo
rary, a tour de force . . .’
‘Bankrupt, my dear, and since the police raid . . .’
Someone changed the music. Ambrose’s orchestra. A few couples were beginning to dance, dreamily, forcing the talkers to move back to make room.
‘Shall we?’ Harry whispered, relieving Agnes of her drink and taking her into his arms. She clung to him in the small space as they jostled with the other dancers.
There followed more drink, loud conversation, more dancing. Gradually Agnes was no longer aware of what she was saying, or to whom. She laughed and flirted and danced until the room started to spin.
‘I’ve got to get some air,’ she said to Harry. He drew her out of the flat onto the landing. It was cooler there, and she began to feel better. She leaned against the wall and, after a while, looked up at Harry, smiling.
‘Phew. I must look a sight,’ she said. ‘My hair everywhere.’
‘No, you don’t,’ he said, reaching out and touching her face. ‘I must paint you. You look . . . so lovely. Like Tennyson’s lily maid in your gold and white and green.’
‘Lancelot and Elaine,’ she breathed through soft parted lips. ‘You know Tennyson.’ The air between them altered, became thin, charged with possibility. An eternal moment eventually passed and the spell broke. He bent and kissed her. She kissed him back, and at her response he kissed her again, then he pulled her towards him and pressed his mouth hard against her open lips.
‘Agnes!’ Raven’s voice was harsh. They broke apart. Raven glanced briefly at Harry as if he were no one. ‘I think we should go. I’ll say our goodbyes and get the coats.’ He turned and went back inside.
‘I’m sorry,’ Harry said. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Yes, you should. Yes, you should, Harry,’ Agnes said fiercely. ‘Don’t mind him.’ Suddenly she felt miserable. She would lose him. ‘You . . . m-may paint me,’ she stuttered.
Harry studied her, then kissed her again. Then he reached into his pocket and brought out a wallet, from which he extracted a card. ‘It’s the middle bell but it doesn’t always work, you have to knock. Come when you can,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a telephone, I’m afraid, but I’m usually in late afternoon. Or send me a note.’ Then he waited, wordlessly, as Raven re-emerged, helped Agnes on with her coat and swept her downstairs. As they reached the first landing, she looked up and her eyes met Harry’s where he was leaning over the banister. At his smile, a rush of desire coursed through her. She gazed at him, her heart plain on her face, until Raven pulled her away.
They hardly spoke a word in the taxi. Raven smoked and stared out of the window into the night. Agnes’s eyes fluttered closed, then she opened them again as the world raced round and nausea threatened. It was after 2 a.m. when they reached home. A flustered Jeanette, great circles of tiredness round her eyes, opened the door to the flat, showed them straight into the drawing room and pulled the doors shut on them. Vanessa was huddled up in an armchair, smoking furiously. She had clearly been crying. Gerald was leaning, one arm on the mantelpiece, his face like stone. He ignored Agnes. All his rage was directed at Raven.
‘So you’re home. Where in God’s name have you been with her? We’ve been frantic with worry. And what’s all this I hear from Armstrong? You’ve got some explaining to do, my boy.’
‘Gerald, you must listen to me,’ wailed Vanessa. ‘He’s not a child. He’s got to find his own way. Make his own mistakes.’
‘Let me deal with my son as I see fit!’ shouted Gerald. Then his voice softened. ‘I’m sorry, my dear. Why don’t you see to Agnes?’
‘We’ll get you something comforting to drink, darling,’ Vanessa whispered, ushering Agnes out of the room. ‘No, va te coucher, Jeanette,’ she told the maid, who put down the tea-cloth she was clutching and staggered gratefully to her room.
Vanessa made her stepdaughter a tisane and helped her to bed. There Agnes lay for a long while, drifting in and out of sleep, thinking about Harry and Raven and Vanessa. Something was worrying her there. Mrs Brett-Jardine’s voice echoed in her head: ‘No Vanessa? No Vanessa?’ Why should Vanessa have been there? Eventually, there came the sounds of doors opening and closing and the flat fell into darkness and silence. In the morning, she was briefly roused from sleep by the front door slamming. When she finally awoke, it was mid-morning and Raven had gone.
The closing of the front door and Bobby’s yapping woke Kate and she sat up, stiff and cold, and looked at the clock. Eleven fifteen. She grabbed at the exercise book that was slipping from her lap.
‘Hello, dear, you still up?’ Joyce put her head round the door.
‘Just about,’ yawned Kate. ‘Did you have a good time?’
‘Ooh yes. And I met a friend of Lillian’s who knows you. Marion someone. Says she’s a cousin.’
‘Marion? Of course, her family had a house in Woodbridge. I didn’t realize she still lived round there. She came to our wedding, Mum says, though I don’t really remember her.’
‘Well, I’ve got her phone number, dear, in case you wanted to give her a call sometime. Very keen to hear how your mother is, though I didn’t like to—’
‘Thank you. I will ring her. She might want to know about Agnes.’
‘Now I’m off to bed, dear. Anything you want?’
‘No, I’ll go up myself in a little while, thanks.’
When Joyce had gone upstairs Kate looked at the open book. She had read most of the entries before dozing off into a dream in which she could vividly recall the strange sculptures in Green’s, the exotic smells of Mrs Brett-Jardine’s drawing room, the touch of Harry’s lips . . .
She picked up all the books and arranged them in date order. There was only one more after this. She opened the final book to check. It was the journal that began in 1943 with the words Father still very ill. Either Agnes hadn’t written a diary for fifteen years, since 1928, or there was a volume missing. As she gathered up all the books to take them upstairs, Kate wondered what those fifteen missing years had brought to Agnes Melton.
Chapter 23
July 2004
‘There’s the sign – Chapelfield Hall.’ Simon turned the car right off the main road, through a pair of stone gate-posts and down a gravel drive with coniferous parkland on either side.
‘It looks like something from the set of The Addams Family,’ breathed Kate, as they rounded a bend and a dark Gothic edifice rose into view. ‘Ravens and all.’
‘Well, common or garden crows. And the odd pigeon. But it is imposing, isn’t it? Looks good, Kate!’ And they grinned at one another in childlike excitement. Simon freewheeled the car gently into the large car park to one side of the hotel and they sat for a moment listening to the clicks and whirrs of the cooling engine as if, suddenly, neither had the reserves of energy for the task before them.
It was early Saturday afternoon. They had had a quick salad lunch with Joyce and the children before setting out for this hotel ten miles outside Norwich.
‘It’s just north of the city,’ she had told Simon that morning. ‘Right in the country. And it’s got a pool and a gym.’
And a golf course. But she didn’t mention that in case he thought he’d drag her round for a game. She loathed golf.
In fact, though, Simon had been most attentive since his unusually prompt return on Friday by the five o’clock train. The children had been all over him, proudly showing their Sport’s Day stickers, Daisy for being first in the egg and spoon race, Sam for being third in the obstacle race. Joyce and Kate had finally managed to get them off to sleep at nine, then Joyce had deliberately disappeared into the kitchen to tidy up by herself, leaving Simon and Kate contemplating one another in the sitting room. Simon wouldn’t sit down. He paced about sighing, rattling the coins in his jeans pocket, rearranging the ornaments on the mantelpiece, or going to one of the windows to peer out as if he were suddenly intensely interested in the garden. Finally, Kate suggested they go for a walk, and they let themselves out into the twilight leaving a resentful B
obby behind.
In the event, it wasn’t much of a walk. They just followed the road down towards the village and stopped in the deserted adventure playground. Sitting side by side on the swings, rocking gently to and fro, Simon shuffling the bark chippings with his brogued feet, they finally began to talk.
Kate told him briefly about her week, the news of the school, about Agnes, whom she had not had time to see since reading her journals, and what Max had said about the old lady going into a home. Simon was quiet, though he seemed very concerned about the school closure and questioned her about what exactly Mrs Smithson was recommending. When Kate trailed to a halt, he stood up and went and put a hand against the metal swing-frame, shoving it hard, as though testing it for its strength. Then he said, ‘I saw Meredith last night.’
‘Simon, you said . . .’ breathed in Kate.
He turned round sharply, and she could see the emotion working in his face.
‘I told her it was over. I wouldn’t be seeing her any more.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and stood up abruptly, then didn’t seem to know what to do with herself.
‘C’mon.’ Taking her arm in a clumsy movement, Simon guided her over to sit on a wooden bench at the edge of the playing area. He squeezed her to him, dropping kisses on her hair, her forehead. She raised her face and he kissed her mouth, hard and hungrily. It was then she realized he was crying.
‘Don’t,’ she said, and started to cry, too.
He pushed back the strands of her hair that had tumbled over her face and whispered, ‘Sorry, I’m so sorry, darling,’ over and over again, and she kissed him quickly then buried her face in the warm living comfort of his chest.
They sat there for a few moments until she said, ‘I’ve got to move. I’ve got a crick in my neck.’ She found a more comfortable position, with his arm round her shoulders and, after a moment, said quietly, ‘What did Meredith say when you told her?’