‘No trouble.’ Kitty spread out a hand in front of her and inspected those nails. It was a rude, off-hand gesture and she hoped Agnes took it as such. It was the action of an older woman who, conscious of the younger woman’s power and beauty, was fighting back. Then she felt shame seeping through her. How trivial, how pointless. Kitty summoned her training. ‘You’ve probably got a lot on your plate. Julian tells me you travel a lot.’
‘Yes, I do.’ Agnes pushed back her hair with a weary gesture, but she gave a polite smile. ‘It was good of you to have me to stay… considering.’
‘Considering… everything,’ said Kitty. ‘It was.’
‘But I shouldn’t have stayed.’
Kitty sensed that Agnes was curious about her. How did she live? she was wondering, with that knowing, professional attitude of hers. What did Kitty do? Surely, she would be thinking, this woman did not spend her days waiting for Julian? Agnes was not to know that Kitty also pondered these questions and concluded that the condition of waiting could be expressed as an art form, or a psychological state. Some people did things, others waited. Passivity. What was it exactly? Was it in fact, asked the articles, a form of aggression?
And this girl, Kitty crossed over to the window and looped back the curtain proprietorily, she is the kind who uses the freedoms I never could have imagined, which I was never permitted, with which to bully others into letting her have her own way. By being here, she is saying, I don’t owe anybody any fealty. I demand personal space. Sexual autonomy. I don’t care about anyone else. Otherwise she would not allow herself to be interested in Julian.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have anything for lunch, so we’ll put you on an early train.’
There. The message had been conveyed. Go away.
‘Yes, of course. I need to get back. If you can give me a lift. Or perhaps I could order a taxi.’ Kitty crossed the room and placed a small, determined hand on the door-knob. ‘Kitty,’ Agnes added, ‘I know that you and Julian have been together for a long time. I understand the need to preserve.’
In the moment between the first sentence of the exchange and the next, an old battle was fought. For possession, for supremacy. ‘The reigning queen in the hive fights off the young nubile pretenders,’ Jack had written, in one of the letters Kitty had read. ‘She will kill, if necessary’
How nice of Agnes to yield so publicly. Kitty smiled in triumph. ‘I’ll make the tea. Why don’t you come into the kitchen? Julian doesn’t like anyone in his study.’
In the kitchen, Kitty busied herself with pulling up the blinds and setting out the tea things. These are mine by right, she thought, carefully placing teaspoons in the saucers and filling the milk jug. I should be mistress of this house.
She looked up and out of the window, exhaustion registering in every muscle. Sometimes the effort of existence was almost too great.
There had been an accident further down the line and Sunday morning trains were not running. Julian rang Kitty and told her that he was driving Agnes home and he would not be late for lunch.
He had set out to make Cliff House a house of the elements: light, sun and water. Pockets of darkness and awkwardness had been eradicated by his ruthless hand, and with applications of white paint. He had decreed that decoration be kept to a minimum. He had wished to harness space and natural colours so that, weightless and airy, the house appeared to float above the sea.
Flagge House was different.
‘What do you think of my home?’ In giving him the tour, Agnes was demonstrating to him where her heart lay. Intent and preoccupied, she dragged back the curtains and shutters of the big window in the drawing room to reveal the interior. Julian absorbed the exquisite proportions of the room and pale honey parquet floor and conceded that it was beautiful.
‘Sometimes,’ said Agnes, ‘if I am quiet, I can hear the house sigh and breathe. It’s living, you know.’ She held up a finger and her eyes narrowed in concentration. ‘Listen.’
She was trying to convince him of her crusade and because he was more – much more – than half in love with her, he listened. Agnes struggled with the shutters. One by one, oblongs of light tumbled into the room like dominoes to reveal the raddled face of age. Water had stained the parquet and pushed its blocks above the surface. Above the central window, the lintel sagged.
‘It’s perfect,’ she said, ‘isn’t it?’ Love was so blind, he thought, touched in a raw, unexpected way.
Agnes conducted him through the house, luxuriating in each room – the document room, which she explained had been her uncle’s study and was now hers, the chilly arsenic-green dining room, the kitchen. She showed him the carved staircase, the window of thick lead-hazed glass through which the Campion women had watched their men ride off to battle, to Court or to discover more bits of the globe.
Almost, she succeeded in making him forget other contexts and other considerations. That was her witchery. Following in her wake, Julian was drawn deeper into the blindness.
She made him stand on the top step of the terrace and look over the meadow to the river. ‘We don’t have the right to destroy that.’
He pulled himself together sufficiently to say, ‘We have to survive. And survive with others with competing claims.’
‘Of course.’
They went back to his car, which was parked by the walled garden. ‘This was the scene of your trespass.’
‘Have you forgiven me?’
She touched her plait. ‘No.’
‘Quite right.’ He dug his hands into his pockets. ‘Agnes… I want to…’ But he could sense her retreat.
‘Did you know that walls can be read like documents?’ she said, in a conversational manner. ‘I’m planning a programme on it’
Julian cut her off and grasped her by the shoulders. Puzzled and lusting, he searched her face for a clue as to why he was baffled by his responses to Agnes. His was normally such a clear-cut world. In his ears rang Kitty’s cry of sexual possession and pleasure of the previous night.
‘We are not talking about the one thing we should be,’ he said angrily. ‘Look at me, Agnes.’
Her eyes were clouded with distress. ‘There is nothing to discuss, Julian. I’ve seen the situation. I know the situation. I’ve been involved with a married man.’
He felt her sadness. He felt Kitty’s sadness. He felt his own confusion, and a sense of impending disaster.
‘What you have with Kitty should not be broken,’ she was saying. ‘Some things have to go on. There is too much destruction everywhere.’
‘So, no more meetings?’
She searched his face. ‘No,’ she said, desperately. ‘Go away. Please go away and leave me in peace.’
He pulled her to him. She smelt as he remembered. Soft, clean, flowery, but this time with a just a hint of salt. As he pulled her closer, Julian felt that he was taking possession of centuries: of brick aged into rose, of wood fretted by time, of stone wearing a mantel of lichen.
Agnes pulled herself free as Maud rounded the corner in the drive, dressed in her church hat and full regalia of paste ring and a huge brooch brooding on her chest. She was on top form. ‘Has Agnes offered you any coffee before you go? No biscuits, I’m afraid, but that’s how we are. Frugality is very democratic, don’t you think? Here we all are in this historic house practising self-denial as merrily as Mrs Cadogan in her council flat.’
13
Agnes drove the aunts to Heathrow airport, kissed them, and handed them over to the tour operator, who was dressed in a flowered dirndl and holding a placard with ‘16 May, Captains and Marias Assembly Point’ written on it.
Bea’s cheek smelt of fabric-conditioner. Maud’s exuded a soft, powdery decadence and she jabbed a finger into the soft part of Agnes’s arm. ‘Good riddance. That’s what you’re thinking, aren’t you? Tell the truth.’
Agnes tucked a magazine into their hand luggage. ‘Don’t forget to send me a postcard.’
‘Do talk to that nice man about the house
,’ said Maud.
Agnes arrived back at Flagge House in the late evening. It seemed too much effort to cook supper so she opted instead for a glass of wine and settled down on Maud’s sofa in the butler’s pantry with a copy of the Jack and Mary letters.
She read till quite late. A harvest sun warmed her neck, the taste of cold, sweet cider was on her tongue, and the weight of a lover’s arm was around her body. Jack to Mary. Wartime lovers, and a man and a woman who had chosen to pursue a life together.
At the end, she let the file slide on to the cushion beside her. Nothing really had happened between her and Julian, only a bat-squeak of promise. No hearts had been broken, not like last time.
What was an affair? A grand roar of passion and tempest, followed either by regret and sadness or by the clutter of saucepans, laundry and the peculiar smell of a fridge that was never cleaned by either party.
Anorexics argued that power came from starvation and that it was possible to thrive on an emotional monasticism. Certainly, it was safer and left her free to work. A man or a woman was mentally leaner, fitter and more active without with the fat of emotion.
Sometimes Agnes pictured herself as others might see her. There goes Agnes. Successful. Ambitious. Her arena, the world; her subjects ranging loftily through politics, social problems, ecology and the vastness of war, the lost spirituality of the century and the cry of the endangered dormouse. No ropes, thank goodness, bind her to a stove, a cradle, an occupied double bed. There was no need for her to be unselfish or to pull in the focus of her vision. Work ensured that you were whole: a thinking, acting, creative person.
‘Agnes,’ those observers would say, ‘a modern woman.’
She closed the letters file and the phone rang.
‘It’s me,’ said Julian. ‘I need to see you.’
‘But I don’t wish to see you.’
There was a pause. ‘I’m ringing from the pub in the village.’
Julian must have heard the hammer of her racing heart down the phone.
He arrived within five minutes with a carrier-bag full of champagne, smoked salmon and home-made brown bread. He was tanned from sailing but pale and exhausted-looking under it. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ He watched her unpack the picnic and set it out on the kitchen table. ‘I’ve tried very hard to stay away, but I’ve had a hell of week at work.’
‘Does Kitty know?’ she asked quietly, fetching a couple of glasses and cutting the bread into slices.
‘No.’
‘Will you tell her?’
‘Probably’
How clever he was. Sneaking past her defences, telling her she was needed. Agnes arranged the smoked salmon on the plate and said desperately, ‘It won’t do.’
‘No, it won’t, but I’m here. Look at me, Agnes.’
Eventually she raised her eyes and looked at him.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he said.
She accepted the glass of champagne, drank and looked up at the ceiling. The spiders were in residence and, in the dim light, the walls were deeply shadowed. She drank another mouthful. Fatal on an empty stomach. After a minute or so it did not seem such a terrible thing that Julian Knox was there in her kitchen. In fact, it felt right. ‘What is happening at Portcullis?’ she asked recklessly, feeling the champagne work its way up to the outer reaches of her brain synapses. ‘Laying waste the fields of England?’
He frowned, and offered her a sandwich. ‘Perhaps you should eat this,’ he said. ‘You looked starved. Since you ask so nicely, things are not brilliant. The share price is going down and I have probably over-extended the two northern projects. There is no lack of demand in the south for houses, but the north is lagging behind and what profits there are from the north are not sufficient to fund the extra-expensive south. But let’s not talk about it. I’ve got something for you.’ Julian picked up his jacket, extracted an envelope and held it out. ‘Don’t look so suspicious. Take it.’
She obeyed. Inside were a couple of closely hand-written photocopied pages.
‘Go on, read it,’ he urged.
‘Number 20. Virginia Marie Lacey. Code name: Claude. Subject responding well. Physically slight, but very fit. Reflects hard on the tasks allotted her and succeeds in maintaining objectivity. N. B. Not good with drink. She must be cautioned to avoid it. She is very young and we question her maturity.’ The report was initialled and dated 21 May 1942.
The second page was written in a different hand. ‘Number 20. Code name: Claude. French excellent. Any slight irregularities in accent put down to childhood in Canada. Exceptional grasp of Morse code. Sometimes obstinate and does not get on with her immediate superior. Disobeyed orders on night operation. Not happy with explosives…’
‘I thought it would interest you.’
Mary? A slight, too-young, determined figure launching herself into moonlit operations without the comfort of a whisky. Agnes stroked the pages and felt a glow of affection for these daring women. ‘How did you get hold of these?’
‘Imperial War Museum. They’re very helpful. According to my source, most of the SOE records were destroyed after the war but a few remained. They didn’t get much down on paper anyway, but these training reports are in the library.’
She drank yet more champagne. ‘You mean, you spent an afternoon doing this for me?’
He took the glass from her hands and set it down on the table. ‘It was a happy couple of hours as it turned out, researching. It took my mind off my problems, which I needed, and I’d rather think about you than Portcullis. Does it make a difference that it was me?’
Ashamed, Agnes looked down at her feet, which seemed bigger than she remembered. Julian had moved close to her and Agnes discovered she was breathless with the effects of champagne. She struggled to order her thoughts. ‘Yes, it does make a difference.’ She folded her arms to make a barrier between them.
He had decided she was drunk, and the idea made her hot with indignation, although she knew it was perfectly true. He put a hand under her chin and raised her face. ‘I’m afraid I’m after both your body and your house.’
‘You mean the land, don’t you?’ she countered. ‘You want to plunder my land like William the Conqueror, or whoever it was.’
‘Not entirely true. Oh, I admit that I’m happy to swing a hammer against centuries of reverence for the English house, not because I don’t rate beauty, because I do.’ He smiled and said gently to soften the impact, ‘It is my opinion that Flagge House is at the end of its natural span.’ He moved even closer and closed his fingers over a handful of plaited hair. ‘How do you woo a woman? Like this?’
She nodded.
‘And like this?’
She was helpless.
‘And what do you wish?’ His breath travelled in a pathway up along her shoulder towards her mouth.
‘There is no point…’
‘In what?’
But the champagne had stolen her subtleties of speech. Agnes found herself slipping down into the chair, where she laid her head on her hands. A longing for nurture, for assuagement of her hunger, for the safety-belt of some kind of certainty, pierced her.
She felt his hands moving over her shoulders and neck. ‘What are you doing?’ she murmured.
‘Unplaiting your hair.’ He sounded surprised that she should ask. ‘I’ve wanted to do it for some time.’
She took his hand, and the tanned fingers clenched within her own. ‘Don’t you see? There’s Kitty’ She clutched the fingers harder.
He had the grace to look away. ‘The honest answer is that I can’t think about Kitty at this moment.’ His fingers played music on her skin. ‘But we do have an arrangement and always have. You can give yourself permission to do something, if you wish to do it. It is simple. You don’t have to hedge it round with guilt and foreboding.’
True. Vexed by the seesaw of drunken emotion, she spread his fingers and slipped her own between them. ‘Darling Agnes,’ said Julian, ‘don’t look like that. I can’t bear it.’
‘Enough.’ He pulled her into the hall and up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs, he hesitated then pushed open her bedroom door, picked her up and laid her on the bed. Agnes gazed up at the spinning room, sighed and gave in.
Half-way through, Agnes thought, I’ve forgotten what it is like. Then she corrected herself, No, for it has never been like this before.
This incident was very physical. Hammering hearts, raised pulses, stomachs shifting. The world was on the move and she was racing to catch up with it.
The light from the corridor caught his face: absorbed, almost feral. Like the fox. No, that was wrong too. The fox sneaks across the water-meadow in search of a drink, his coat brushed with burrs and dulled from weather. I hear him bark, sometimes, at night.
Shaken, she turned to Julian and kissed him. He ran his fingers down the slope of her shoulder. ‘You’re lovely, Agnes, did you know?’
Her spirit lifted, and she caught her breath with the sweetness of the moment. Then she shifted her body towards him and twined her arms around his neck. He fitted his cheek to the curve of her shoulder – and fell asleep with a rapidity that startled her.
The noise of the river woke Agnes at first light. She turned her head on the pillow. Julian was still deeply asleep, a hand flung out, the fingers curled towards the ceiling. He looked exhausted and vulnerable, all assurance gone.
She had been here before. For a long while, she looked at him, the sweetness and elation replaced by a more familiar, dreaded emotion that she had got herself into another muddle.
Agnes slid out of bed, shivering as the air hit her nakedness, grabbed her dressing-gown, crept down the corridor to the bathroom and locked the door. It was important that she and Julian did not share any more intimacies.
While she ran the bath, the huge, stained, claw-footed Edwardian one that took ages to fill, she scrubbed her face with lotion. Then she faced herself squarely in the mirror and made some calculations. Since Pierre, she had not needed any form of birth-control and last night had been a risk. The calculations seemed to pan out in her favour, and Agnes’s slight eruption of panic diminished.
Secrets of the Heart Page 11