‘Kitty…’ Julian took a step towards her.

Kitty squared up to him. ‘I don’t think there’s any point in beating around the bush. Tell Agnes to go,’ she demanded. ‘Now. At once.’ She tugged at Julian’s arm.

‘Kitty…’ Julian removed her hand from his arm. Agnes is here at my invitation. This is not your business.’

Kitty rounded on him. ‘On the contrary, it is my business. We may not have a piece of paper, Julian,’ she was trembling, ‘but we have everything else. We have a marriage.’ She snatched her hands behind her back to hide them. ‘I know it started out as something else, but that’s what it’s ended up as. I must defend it.’

Oh, God, thought Agnes, noting julian’s at-bay expression, I should not be here, and she looked round blindly for her bag. The baby deserves better than this mess. ‘I’ll go-.’

She allowed Julian to see her into the car, placed the key in the ignition and said, ‘I shouldn’t have come. I should have stuck to what I said.’

He looked so miserable and defensive that she almost laughed, the kind of laugh that is the only response to profound misery.

‘Agnes, what did you want to talk to me about?’

‘It was nothing. Go back to Kitty.’

‘Listen,’ he said urgently, ‘you’re right. This can’t go on. Once I’ve sorted out Portcullis, I will sort this out. I promise.’

‘When will Portcullis be sorted out?’

‘I don’t know.’ He placed a hand on the car door.

She avoided looking at him but gazed down at the hand with brown fingers, brushed with fine gold hairs. At least she knew now where she stood.

On the drive back to Flagge House, Agnes’s face and arms glowed with sunburn, and black depression gathered in her heart.

Fact. She had desired and taken, and got herself pregnant. The so very clever, practical Agnes.

Fact. She had an unborn child to consider – and other considerations clustered as thickly. House. Aunts. Herself.

Each time, with both men, she had left a little bit of herself behind. And who could say that if she had told Julian about the baby that, in the end, they would have tired of each other too?

The situation she was in was not new, and there was nothing startling to be deduced from it. She gripped the wheel and drove on far too fast. The struggle between will, inclination and stricture was as old as time.

After the sound of Agnes’s car had died away, Julian said, ‘I want to talk to you, Kitty.’

‘No.’ Kitty had collected herself. She smiled her society smile but avoided looking at him and proceeded to lay out her agenda. ‘There’s no point in raking it over. We shall have to forget this incident. I shall. Let’s be normal. Let’s just be very, very normal.’

Kitty, the skilled, emotional debt collector. In little ‘normal’ ways, Julian would be asked to pay – as he had in the past. He considered producing the old arguments about their arrangement and their separate freedoms, but they no longer applied. ‘I’m sorry we’ve reached this point.’

‘What did you expect?’ she flashed.

‘But you agreed.’

‘Sometimes, Julian, you have the emotional age of an newborn.’

‘OK. OK.’ He paced up and down. She was right to question him. ‘Kitty, if my behaviour is making you so unhappy that you feel forced to go off to clinics, then we must do something. Make a decision.’

The look she gave him made him flush. It was of pity and superior understanding. ‘Nonsense, darling. We’re fine. It will all settle down.’

Kitty fetched her luggage from the drive, dumped it in the hall and followed him into the kitchen. ‘Shall I make some coffee?’

Let’s be normal, please, let us be normal

Julian was searching in the cupboard for the mineral water. ‘No, thanks.’

Kitty surveyed the washing-up and ran water into the bowl. She spoke with the same light, relentless note. ‘Having visitors has obviously turned you into a pig. How long has this lot been here? By the way, did I tell you that Vita Huntingdon’s daughter is already pregnant?’

‘Kitty, I know this is difficult, but please concentrate.’

Kitty scraped the plates clean and tipped them into the hot water. ‘Julian, over the years I have learned many things from you. One of them is, don’t give up easily. You have given me excellent tuition.’

‘Clearly.’

His sarcasm lashed Kitty into retaliation. She dug her hands into the water and said furiously, ‘Don’t talk to me as if I was some business rival, or someone to play boardroom games with. I’m not one of your projects and I’m not a profit margin. I am the woman you live with. Or, rather, your version of it… Like it or not, you’re committed to me.’ She seized the dishcloth. ‘How often have I been in this kitchen, organizing operations to keep your life running smoothly? Countless times. How many times have I sorted the house out, rearranging cushions, hanging clothes, putting everything back into the order that you like? You demand, Julian. How many times have I bitten back requests to accompany you to London and stayed here as you wished? I have been here, in your life as well as your bed, and I will make you acknowledge that, if it kills me.’

It was enough. Without another word, he walked out of the kitchen and the study door banged shut.

He emerged just as Kitty’s hand was creeping towards the half-empty wine bottle on the kitchen table. ‘Fatal on an empty stomach,’ she murmured, with an irritating laugh. Julian refilled his glass with water.

Kitty gave in. ‘I’ll have some wine.’ She drank, her lipsticked mouth sipping fast and neatly. ‘I needed that.’ She put the glass down and fiddled with a charm on her bracelet. ‘Julian, I’m sorry for my outburst.’

The depths of his indifference to her apology terrified her. ‘I understand.’

‘I was defending my territory,’ she added hastily. ‘It was a hitch, nothing to worry about. All marriages have hitches. People survive. It’s a matter of will, an act of will. Anyway, I came to tell you that the clinic was very positive and – ‘

‘Kitty, we are not married. The contract was different.’

She gave an impatient tsk. ‘Words, Julian. You may be good on numbers but you need a few lessons in what matters.’

He stared at her. Kitty was correct. What expertise he possessed lay not in emotions but in theory and, at this precise moment, he was too embattled to change anything.

Kitty straightened in her chair and ran her hand over her hair to check that it was in place. She spoke with the fluency of someone well rehearsed in their lines. ‘We are married. You may think that this performance of weekends only and separate houses keeps you nicely insulated. But it doesn’t.’

‘You accepted it.’

‘Well, now I don’t. I’ve changed.’ She leaned over the table towards him, her face so soft with love that he could not bear it. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Julian. You’re feeling sad and trapped and besotted with someone else. But you know it will fade. If love isn’t fed, it dies of starvation…’ Kitty faltered, for the irony was cruel. ‘The other night you were honest and said that ten years is about the limit for any one relationship. Maybe that’s true. But it seems stupid to be condemned to repeating it with different people. Why don’t we just accept that we’re at a different stage?’

He looked down into his glass. ‘Why do you put up with all this, Kitty?’

‘You know those letters you were reading?’ asked the desperate Kitty.

‘Those damn letters,’ he muttered.

‘Well, the farmer wrote something along the lines that his life was empty without Mary, for she was the other half of his soul and without her he possessed only half a soul.’ Kitty reached up and took off her large, gold clip earrings and laid one down on the table. ‘That is me, Julian…’ she placed the second beside it ‘… and how I feel about you.’

‘Kitty. I can’t say the same. I’m sorry’

She sprang to her feet and her chair went winging back along the floor. ‘I beg you, Julian. Don’t leave me.’ She flung herself at Julian’s feet and slid her arm around his knees.

Guilty, despairing, repelled, Julian looked down at Kitty, a woman he had partly made who was wholly his responsibility. Sick with love that was not for Kitty, he put out a hand and stroked the highlighted head bent in front of him.

That night in the bedroom, they undressed. Kitty opened drawers, creamed her face, blew a drift of powder off the surface of the dressing-table and brushed her hair. Julian soaked in a bath, listened to the radio, ran more hot water, dropped a large towel on the floor and left it where it fell.

They lay in bed, exchanged a few words about the alarm clock, the whereabouts of the water glass, what time they would get up. The light snapped off and, with profound thankfulness, they waited for the dark to hide them from each other.

Eyes burning and chest occasionally shuddering from the aftermath of her crying, Kitty lay awake for a long time. Then, very daring, she put out a hand, touched the form beside her and… Julian flinched.

At that, Kitty walked to the edge of the precipice and was forced to look down.

On Monday morning, Angela greeted Julian in his office in a tight Lurex dress with a fake peony in her hair, which did nothing to hide her intelligence. On the desk were a list of calls, his appointment book, a tray of coffee and biscuits and his correspondence.

Before the afternoon was out, Julian together called his young, trendy, socially aware team and gave them a rundown on the situation. Then he dispatched some of them by helicopter to reconnoitre twenty acres of farmland near Bath being sold by its broke owner – land so expensive that the margins might prove impossible. He also called in Harold, who was wearing yet another variant of the crumpled linen suit but whose trendiness was cancelled out by his ashen face. Again they went over the figures.