Despite what was widely reported only days later, Agatha never contemplated suicide. This was not in her nature. In fact, the idea affronted her. When hearing of someone else’s suicide, she always felt enraged. Wasteful and cowardly. As long as there was life there was hope.
Hope. She could crank up her beloved Morris Cowley and follow Archie to London. She could march into his office and grab him by the lapel and insist he see the necessity of working things out. She could shake his love for her back into him. He would remember she was flesh of his flesh. He would not go away for the weekend with his mistress but end things with her, and return home where he belonged.
All of that would involve a scene. Agatha had not been raised to cause scenes, or to display emotions in public. She was raised to keep busy, so she bundled up in her fur coat and accompanied Honoria and Teddy on their walk to school. ‘Here,’ she said to Teddy, handing the little girl her hoop and stick. ‘You can spin this along the way.’
Teddy obliged till the end of the drive, then tossed the hoop on the grass to skip ahead. Peter followed her. He was a wonderfully companionable dog; there was never any question of a leash. Agatha reclaimed the hoop and rolled it herself as they walked along the dirt road.
‘My mother didn’t believe in schooling for a girl,’ Agatha said to Honoria. ‘She thought it was best to let my mind develop naturally.’
Honoria knew this perfectly well but listened attentively as if hearing it for the first time. A person in despair likes to visit the past. Agatha’s past had included her beloved Nursie, and a governess here and there. She’d spent occasional months in proper schools in Torquay, and overseas when she was older. And she’d gone to finishing school; one couldn’t do without that. Honoria nodded, as if finishing school would have been an option for her.
‘But mostly I ran wild in Torquay, all over the grounds at Ashfield.’ She stared after Teddy, a pretty child whose brown hair seemed to grow richer and darker by the day. Agatha’s eyes glazed over with the past, as she remembered how she used to roll her hoop in the gardens at home, through the dark ilex, past the elms, around the big beech tree, making up imaginary friends to keep her company. Did Teddy have the same goings-on in her private thoughts? Did she entertain herself with endless stories and invented companions? Or was she only concerned with the tangible world, the real friends that would preclude a need for pretending?
‘Oh, Honoria,’ Agatha said. The hoop calmed her but slowed them down. It was child-size and she had to stoop to make it work. Teddy ran ahead down the road, in sight but out of earshot. Agatha gave up, tossing it to the side to collect on their way home.
‘You’ll have to face it, Agatha.’ Honoria was weary of the way Agatha believed the game was still on, when so clearly it had already been won by someone else. ‘I know it’s hard but face it you must. He’s gone for good.’
‘I simply can’t believe that.’ Agatha would never speak of intimate things between herself and her husband so she didn’t tell Honoria about the night before. Instead she rattled off a list of examples, friends she knew whose husbands had had a lark with some other woman but then got over it and returned home. She thought again of waiting out her contract with Bodley Head so that she could settle handsomely at William Collins. The strategy had worked with her career and now it would work with her marriage. All one needed to get through these things was patience and a plan.
Honoria listened but it sounded to her like desperation. She could tell by the way Agatha wrung her hands, she knew it was desperation too. Sometimes hard truths needed to be stated plainly.
‘Colonel Christie won’t get over it,’ Honoria insisted. ‘I’m sorry to say so, but it’s no use painting the lily. I see it in his face. And why would you want to stay married to a man who prefers that little tart? Better to face facts. He’s gone from you.’
‘Gone from me,’ Agatha echoed. Her cheeks stung from the chilly air.
Her mother had warned her only last summer – the summer that turned out to be her last – not to spend too much time in Torquay, away from her husband. ‘If a woman spends too much time away from her husband, she loses him,’ her mother had said. ‘Especially a husband like Archie.’