‘What is happening, Kitty?’ he asked quietly. ‘I thought we two had to make a go of it. That was why we had that ridiculous scene with Agnes.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘As with a lot of things, you were right. If that is the case, it is important that we keep on trying.’
She knew that expression. It was Julian being kind, which he was being a lot these days. ‘It’s not just Agnes,’ she said. ‘She was the symptom.’
‘Perhaps we should leave her out of this.’
But she had seen the sudden quickening in his expression, which he strove to hide, and the worst of Kitty erupted. ‘It may suit you to do so, Julian, but I don’t think we should exclude the famous Agnes from this conversation. The minute you saw her, she took up residence in our lives. Agnes made you realize that you did not feel enough for me and our companionship was not…’ she struggled to continue ‘… was not strong enough to build it up again. But, don’t worry, I’m over that now. I tried. You know I tried hard, but even I can tell when I’m beaten.’
She waited for anything he might have to say, and when he remained silent, she extracted an envelope from the dressing-table drawer. ‘This is a statement of our financial arrangements, up to date. As from today, please will you stop anything else coming in from you. Everything is in order.’ She held it out. ‘Take it.’
He ignored it and said haltingly, as he digested the implications, ‘I wish you hadn’t done that. It wasn’t necessary.’
‘Why not? It was part and parcel of our relationship.’
She dropped the envelope on to the bed and sat down at a distance from him. ‘I was educated wrongly, Julian. Women aren’t like me any more. They’ve changed, and they do things differently. I’ve been left behind.’ She swallowed. ‘But I suppose, in the end, they will face what I’m facing.’ And in the act of liberating the words into the ether, Kitty’s heart grew lighter.
See? The prison bars are dissolving.
There was enough truth in what Kitty said to make Julian wince. ‘I’m sorry, Kitty.’ He felt he ought to say more: she was owed explanations but he did not seem capable of making them. ‘Shall I leave now?’
Sudden panic and the terror of what lay ahead almost choked Kitty. She remembered how well they had dealt with each other – in the early days – and what passion and love he had drawn from her. Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps half a loaf was better than no loaf.
‘It’s so hard growing old,’ she burst out.
On that first meeting, ten years ago, she had been so aware of her looks. She posed no complications, was realistic yet properly appreciative of the erotic – and judged shrewdly that Julian was used to helping himself to the good things. She had seen to it that it had all been made to seem so natural.
Julian looked at the beer can. ‘Kitty, I should never have got you into this.’
She reared up from the bed. ‘Oh, no,’ she wept. ‘I don’t want you to say that or to suggest that it’s all been for nothing. But look!’ She tore at the belt of her dressing-gown, and wrenched off her nightdress. ‘Look at me. Look at me properly.’ White, curved and shadowed, she squared up to him like a fighter. ‘Now do you understand? Age. And it is time the prince rode off to find a younger trophy.’
Suppressing a shudder, he picked up the discarded dressing-gown and draped it around the small, delicate body. ‘You exaggerate. There’s nothing wrong with you.’
‘At least let’s be honest.’
But she knew that he knew better than to be honest. That much he could do for her. He moved over to the window and pulled back the curtain. It was impossible to see the sea from Kitty’s cottage and it was one of the reasons he had never liked it.
‘You love Agnes,’ she accused him from the bed, dressing-gown trailing awkwardly from her shoulders. ‘You can be truthful.’
There was no point in subterfuge any longer. Kitty had received, deciphered and read the message. ‘It is nothing to do with you, or how old you are, Kitty. It just is. That’s all.’
Kitty gave a gasp. ‘You never once told me that you loved me.’
‘No, but I should have done.’
While rehearsing this scene, Kitty anticipated the quality of the pain she might experience. She had considered its thrust and sharpness, and trusted she would come through on the other side. But she had misjudged. The pain was, literally, making her breathless.
‘Will you let me explain, Kitty?’
She could see that he wanted her to allow him to justify himself but her curiosity had died. Or, rather, her curiosity had shifted away from Julian and was directed at herself. A different Kitty was pushing her way through an unlit, constricted passage towards the circle of uncertain light at the other end, and she was consumed by impatience to get there.
As a birth, it was quite different from anything she had ever imagined.
Julian finished the beer. ‘You’ve got foam on your lip,’ she informed him, and he wiped it away. Kitty continued, ‘I think it’s time to stop talking. Some things can’t be explained. I will never, never understand why you couldn’t have married me but I have to accept it.’ The old Kitty drove her to add, ‘Once I worshipped you, body and soul, and a punishing God you proved, Julian.’ The new one added, ‘But it was not your fault.’
Julian abandoned the window and picked up his keys. ‘What can I say?’
Kitty sat down at the dressing-table. ‘Theo and I agree that most of the time we travel on the main road but, occasionally, you stop and take breath in a lay-by. Maybe that’s what you need to do.’ For all her determination, she was terrified that she was going to cry but fell back on habit. She picked up her brush and swept the hair from her forehead. Obediently her reflection followed suit – not bad, not so very bad. ‘ Please go now.’
He slid his arms down her shoulders, tracing the old pathways of desire with his fingertips.
She permitted him this last latitude. The bad Kitty rose, fought and conquered her better intentions. ‘You may love Agnes,’ she said, ‘but you might not get her.’ In reply, Julian bent and kissed her neck – in the way that she had loved. Under his touch, her flesh stirred and her pulse quickened. He looked up and caught Kitty’s gaze in the mirror.
She let herself say, ‘I wish I had not been so stupid, and we had had a child. A child would have made a difference.’
‘Perhaps.’ He looked over to the bed they had shared. ‘Who knows?’
‘One more thing.’ She did not turn to face him. ‘I know you are in trouble, and I thought it would be nice to help, so I’ve put in to buy one of the houses on the Tennyson estate. I thought every penny would come in useful.’
Saturday.
The fen was as flat as her waking memory of it, and the earth was dark, sodden and tinged with a green varnish of permanent damp. Only a few houses were visible, huddled inside their palisades of Leylandii cypresses. Otherwise, there were crops as far as Kitty could see, mile on mile of unlovely potatoes and cabbages, threaded through by drainage ditches. They have to grow somewhere, she thought.
Note… Kitty copied into her notebook from the gazetteer before she went to sleep. ‘It was against this backdrop of fen towns and their surprisingly rich and sumptuous churches that the King Edward potato had been developed.’
It was cold and raw in her dream, and Kitty woke up shivering. After a while, she got up and dressed, slipping her feet into her elegant shoes, and went downstairs to eat breakfast. Theo had already arrived and was at work in the downstairs cloakroom.
‘Don’t come in, dark.’
Kitty knew better than to try. She knew exactly where and how to step in between the war zones drawn up by Theo and his cleaning panzer division. ‘Kaboom,’ said Theo. ‘Every mad stinking bacteria of you.’
She poked her head around the door. ‘Tea?’ The Marigolded hands halted – Monday was yellow, Wednesday pink, Friday blue (after each session Theo dried them and dusted them with talcum powder).
‘Yup.’ He stripped off the
gloves and placed them carefully on a clean cloth spread out for that purpose.
Over tea – drunk out of good bone china with a strawberry pattern – Kitty asked, ‘Would you consider moving, Theo? I mean to live somewhere else.’
He whistled, out of tune and discordant. ‘That’s a bit of a whammy.’
Kitty took a deep breath. ‘I wondered, if I moved…’ she looked round at the small, fashionable kitchen ‘… if you came with me, I would look after you. See that you were all right. Care for you as well as I could.’
‘What is this, Kits?’
‘Me. Thinking again. Taking a grip of my life.’
Theo’s brow puckered in an effort to make sense of her question. ‘I’ve travelled far enough, Kits.’ He meant not so much the passage from the red dust of his birthplace to this neat English seaside town, but more the journey in his mind.
‘I understand.’ Kitty got up, balancing neatly on her spindly heels, and tucked her chair under the table. ‘It was just a thought. You can always change your mind.’
The tea-cups were empty. Theo gave them to Kitty, who took them over to the sink and washed them up. After a few seconds, she was aware from the faint chlorine bleach smell that Theo was standing silently behind her. She swivelled to face him and wrinkled her nose affectionately at him, a gesture she would never have dared make to Julian. Theo edged closer, a habit that in the early days had frightened her but now she knew to hold her ground. He circled her neck with his big hands and squeezed very gently.
‘Spit it out, Kits.’
His hands were like a big, warm, reassuring collar and she nudged her cheek in a gesture of affection against one of them. ‘I have to move, Theo, before I go under. For a long time, I imagined I was not capable of doing anything, but I am, Theo, I am. Aren’t I?’
He nodded. If Kitty required reassurance he was going to supply it.
‘So, I’ve decided on a new start, and the strange thing is, I…’ I want to discard, peel away, empty myself ‘… have this urge to be somewhere harsher and colder. I’m not sure why’ She paused. ‘I know it’s unfair to ask you to come with me but I thought I would anyway.’ She paused again. ‘If it’s money, Theo…’
The collar around her neck loosened and fell away. ‘I don’t think I could cope with a move, Kits.’
She was disappointed but not surprised. ‘As I said, you can change your mind.’ She arranged the cups on the rack to dry. A trickle of water escaped towards the sink and she dammed it with her finger, but it oozed its way round it.
‘You know that the drugs make me impotent?’ Theo dried up a strawberry cup.
‘Yes, I do. I guessed that a long time ago.’ Kitty drained the washing-up bowl and wiped it out.
‘I like it. It’s easier. I don’t want to see women in that way.’
‘It was you I invited, Theo, to look after you. I would miss you. Nothing else.’ Kitty bent down to shut the door to the cupboard under the sink.
Theo gave a little chuckle. ‘That’s a girl.’
‘Girl?’ said Kitty, straightening up with the rudiments of a smile. ‘I wish.’
Theo returned to his duties in the cloakroom. ‘Where do you think you’ll go?’ he called.
Kitty’s mind was filled with pictures and one was of the raven hanging in the wind above a wild, grey sea in which seals traced foamy detours around the rocks. Behind unfolded the flat, featureless land across which she was going to walk. ‘Lincolnshire, I think. I don’t quite know why. Except… except I have a feeling I should divest myself.’
‘Masochist?’ Holding his gloves out and playing surgeon in the theatre, Theo returned to the kitchen.
Kitty’s mouth tightened in anguish. ‘I shall grow old, Theo, and I will no longer be desirable.’ She paused and then whispered, ‘I shall have to face it. I must face it.’
Sunday.
But when she woke on Sunday morning, a dull rainy day from which summer had fled, it was to peace.
26
‘I shall have my revenge.’ Maud opened her knitting-bag. ‘Je reviens.’
Agnes looked up. ‘But you are here, Maud.’
It had been three weeks, three difficult weeks, since Bea’s exit – and a lifetime since she had last seen Julian. Maud’s behaviour had disintegrated. Grim-faced, she refused food, veered between tears and rage and drank industrial quantities of bad sherry. This catalogue of misery had culminated in a binge the previous night. Drunk and despairing, she flung at Agnes, ‘What is my life? Nothing. Except debt and decay.’
The words, so it seemed to the listening, mopping-up Agnes, had been wrung from Maud’s failure to connect on a deep and real level with her husband, her house and her sister. An important component had not clicked. A warning sounded in Agnes. It was so easy for it to happen.
Today the removal van came to take away Bea’s furniture. The two women watched in silence the departure of the dressing-table, the glass-fronted Georgian bookshelf and some handsome chairs. Only Bea’s clothes remained, and these were packed into suitcases and stacked in her room, to be picked up later by Freddie.
Bea had gone. Debt and decay. Tentatively, Agnes slipped her hand through Maud’s elbow and held on to her as Bea was erased from the house.
They retired to the drawing room and Agnes lit a fire. High summer had gone and autumn had arrived. ‘There,’ she said, the Scout leader banking on bossiness. ‘That’s brighter.’ For once, the fire took and burned cheerfully, and Agnes and Maud huddled close to the warmth. Outside, wet leaves lay like mislaid gloves over the water-meadow and the rain fell.
Maud was crying again, and Agnes wondered if she should call in professional help. ‘Maud,’ she said gently, ‘I think you should see someone.’
The mere suggestion was enough to provoke a hostile reaction. Maud was arrested mid-sob, hauled out her handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Sorry,’ said Agnes.
Maud’s bony fingers paddled inside the knitting-bag. ‘I shall knit Bea one of my jerseys. Black angora, très chic, and I shall knit a curse into it.’ She extracted a pair of needles and cast on the preliminary stitches.
‘Maud…’
Clack. The needles emitted hidden sparks. Clack.
‘Only joking,’ said Maud, her large, swimming eyes shuttered by her eyelids. ‘Bea deceived us. There she was, all mealy-mouthed and full of good deeds, and all the time she was laughing at us.’ Maud raised her head, and Agnes was treated to the full blaze of despair and jealousy.
‘I don’t believe that of Bea.’ But Agnes suspected that Maud might be correct, for Bea had surprised them all.
‘If I was a young woman, I’d be interviewed in The Times on the pain of being deceived. But that’s about as likely as coming back from the dead. Don’t look so pained. I know that the old should be quiet and housetrained.’ Maud tapped a foot on the parquet floor.
Agnes gave a snort of laughter. ‘Oh, Maud.’ But at least she had stopped crying, even if the grieving, weeping version was easier to handle than the runaway train. ‘Of course, you must say what you feel to me, Maud. But…’
As therapy, the idea of revenge worked beneficially and Maud was looking marginally better. Agnes trod carefully. ‘Did Freddie ever say anything to make you think… that you were special?’ Silence. The rain sent a drum-beat down the long window. ‘Did he?’
Maud shrugged. ‘It was an understanding.’ She sent Agnes one of her looks, picked up the knitting and embarked on a third row.
Agnes levered herself upright, prised the knitting from Maud, unravelled the stitches and rewound the wool on to the ball. ‘I know enough to know that what you’re doing is wrong. I’ve seen revenge, Maud, and the results, and for what it’s worth, once it’s done it never seems to come to an end.’
The older woman stared up her, and Agnes felt rather sick for she had hit the soft, exposed part of her aunt. ‘I wanted to escape too,’ Maud whispered.
Agnes tucked the wool and the needles back
into the bag and placed it gently on Maud’s knee. ‘I’m so sorry.’
The defiance was replaced by a soggier variant. ‘You’re so busy, Agnes. Always travelling. I never know how to take you. Never did. I was supposed to have enjoyed being busy with the house and the village. It never occurred to John that it bored me. And you did, too, Agnes. You were a very boring, ugly little girl.’ Maud looked longingly at the knitting-bag. ‘But… oh well.’ She buried it behind a cushion. ‘I have always wanted to know why I was supposed to fall in with everyone’s wishes. Nobody consulted me. Merely because I wore a skirt.’
‘Did you never love the house?’ Agnes did not inquire about her uncle, for she knew the answer.
‘How can you love a millstone?’ Maud fingered her ring. ‘There were no excitements for John and me. Only Charlborough, drains and rats in the roof.’ She added crossly, ‘I had no option but to live here.’
She was beginning to sound exhausted and, recollecting that Maud was still convalescent, Agnes took action. ‘Bed. Now.’ She helped Maud upstairs, undressed her and settled her down.
‘Thank you, Agnes.’ Maud leaned back into the pillows. In this setting, she grew smaller, beaten, her difficult qualities smoothed away. On an impulse, Agnes bent and kissed the cheek that smelt of cheap face powder. Sighing, Maud touched with her forefinger the place where Agnes’s lips had rested. ‘I’d forgotten what it’s like to be kissed.’
She closed her eyes and appeared to be drifting into sleep. ‘I imagine I’ll get a letter from Maria tomorrow, don’t you?’ she murmured.
Agnes woke up. It was dark and she was drowsy. These days, she slept, dreamed, shuttled between her own and Maud’s bedroom. A swelling, sleepy receptacle. Pregnancy was nausea and a craving for sleep, thick, lengthy dollops, and the drifting in and out of dreamscapes.
She closed her eyes and thought of the house. The irises were dying in the water-meadow. They could not speak out against time and change, or defend the stoicism of the many women who had lived at Flagge House.
Secrets of the Heart Page 23