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.’

‘Champagne…’ She felt the tipsy waves wash through her. ‘It’s very lovely’

‘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.

She lay in the bath, head aching, face smarting, a small, voluptuous bruise blooming on her right thigh. In the corners of the bathroom were damp spots, orchidaceous green and brown, and the cheap straw matting that had been laid by Maud in the economy phase was torn in places.

She was wrestling with the gas stove when Julian wandered into the kitchen, stubbled and sleepy. ‘There seems to be no hot water,’ he said mildly, but it infuriated Agnes.

‘I know, I’ve taken it,’ she snapped. ‘You’ll have to wait. This is not Cliff House.’

‘Did I say it was?’ He sat down at the kitchen table and put his chin in his hands. ‘Do you get cross often?’

‘No. I rarely lose my temper,’ she said, even more crossly. Then she checked herself. ‘Actually, I’m known for my calm. Ask the team.’

He tapped a knife on the table, and she coloured at the memories of the night. ‘I just want to know for future reference.’

Cheeks still flaming, she made the coffee. Its smell revived her. She pushed a cup across the table towards him. ‘Julian…’

He held up a hand. ‘No recriminations at breakfast. That’s the rule. What’s done is done.’

Did one ever learn? Could one manage to put someone else, a person one did not know, in front of one’s own wishes? It was so little and, yet, such a tall order.

They ate breakfast largely in silence. At one point, he put down his cup and said, Agnes…’

She turned abruptly towards him. ‘Yes. What?’

He looked at her face. ‘Nothing.’

‘I’ve decided you must go.’ Agnes eventually addressed Julian across the remnants. ‘I only know a little about you and Kitty but enough to know that I can’t…’ She filled the basin and plunged the china into the suds. ‘I can’t… I won’t do it again. I can’t make Kitty suffer.’

He studied the worn grain of the table. ‘Isn’t that having your cake and eating it?’ He sounded weary and disappointed.

She sat down at the table and rested her aching head on her hands. ‘Yes,’ she admitted miserably. ‘It is. Not very admirable, but it happens.’ She looked up through her interlaced fingers. ‘Julian, you never told me how long you have been with Kitty’

His voice flattened. ‘Ten years. And we’ve worked fine together. We have been a team.’

Ten years of a shared bed and intimacies of which Agnes could have no notion and to which she had no right. Of flesh touching flesh companionably, of shared cries, pleasures, irritation and silence. Of plans and expectations of each other. This was Kitty’s territory, not hers. Kitty had yielded part of herself up to it. Kitty had staked it out, cultivated it and built her house on it.

‘Do you often put it at risk?’

‘Kitty has been faithful and true.’

‘But not you?’

‘No.’

Agnes fought to give the other woman her due. She knew why Kitty loved this man: for his energy, his gleaming house, his kindness, his knack of making money, his humour. His seriousness. For the lonely child in grubby shorts chipping away at the rock face. She understood precisely because she loved him for these things too.

Julian pressed on, ‘Kitty and I agreed the rules between us.’

‘But is she happy?’

‘On and off.’

‘Are you happy?’

Julian considered. ‘I’ve been too busy to ask.’ He stared at the face opposite him. ‘Don’t be angry.’

‘I’m angry with myself.’ The kitchen in Flagge House was a rotten, dingy place to end anything, let alone this. ‘You must go back to Kitty. You’ve got ten years’ worth of reward points… Anyway, I don’t want to be part of a sort of harem, which is what, I gather, I would be. It isn’t what I want. I feel more strongly about my love affairs than that.’ She looked straight into the face that she had kissed many times only a few short hours previously. ‘I’m sorry.’

He shrugged in a way that told her he was hurt but not showing it. ‘Don’t worry. This is not everything, Agnes. In the end, the flesh and the devil is only a little bit of life.’ She flinched, and he pushed the pieces of paper with Virginia Marie’s training reports over the table towards her. ‘At least take these.’

She picked them up. ‘Thank you.’

The chair scraped on the tiled floor. He stood behind her and she tensed. He lifted the heavy hair from the nape of her neck, pressed his lips to the tendon skimming under the skin and walked out of the room.

Agnes spent the morning searching the house for her uncle’s set of Jane Austens. They had disappeared on the day of his death and she had never managed to locate them. She wanted them back. She checked the books in the document room and searched the drawing room, bedrooms and the boxes in the attic, then returned to the document room for a second look. But they were not there.

Eventually, unsuccessful, Agnes returned upstairs to the bedroom where she picked up her discarded clothes from the floor, stripped the bed, smoothed the bedspread over it and opened the window.

She thought of Julian’s determined, experienced lust, and of her own response, of the drained, vulnerable, sleeping face on the pillow, the soft sigh of his unconscious breath, the tussle between them, and sat down abruptly on the edge of bed.

Some things you can have, some things you never, ever have. That was one of the laws that must be obeyed. Otherwise it was anarchy.

14

A week later, Agnes scooped up the aunts at the airport, plus a collection of plastic bags and suitcases, and drove them home.

As ever, Maud was on the case. ‘Bea had to stay behind on some of the trips. Anyone with medical problems was not allowed up the mountains.’

‘I didn’t mind. I was quite happy resting in the hotel.’ Bea gave an impression of being more than usually placid. ‘The sun was out most of the time and you would have loved the colours, dear.’

‘But the meat at dinner always had hairs on it.’ Maud swivelled round to face Bea in the back of the car. ‘You ate yours.’

Agnes concentrated on turning off the motorway and, this culinary solecism out in the open, Maud returned to the subject of the coach trips. ‘I’m afraid Bea missed a remarkable one,’ she said, with satisfaction, and went on to describe how strong the sun had been, everyone commented on it, it had been almost too bright. Slowly, slowly, the coach had risen above the world up into the mountain, a place of solitude and green, cleansing light. ‘And here,’ the disembodied voice of the guide had declared reverently, ‘is where the opening scenes of The Sound of Music were shot.’

Agnes could not resist it. ‘Actually, Maud, Julie Andrews spent most of the time in a fur coat while they were filming because it was so cold.’