The Right Thing (21 page)

Showering quickly, Glyn realized he was accumulating quite a list of things to make amends for. Awash with guilt was the apt phrase that came to mind as he squeezed the last of the shower gel from the bottle. The pun failed to please him, a sure sign that his guilt was entirely justified. He was being horrible to Kitty whichever way you looked at it, unfaithful, unsupportive, moody and, with Madeleine, not particularly welcoming. The two of them edged round each other like lions waiting to battle it out over the carcass of a zebra.

‘I'm going to the shop for a paper,' he told Kitty, joining her in the kitchen. ‘Anything else we need?'

‘More bread perhaps?' She peered into the bread bin and hauled out a heel of something wholemeal and solid. ‘Yes, more bread. I think Madeleine likes this sort . . .'

‘Madeleine likes, Madeleine likes . . .' the words marched through Glyn's head in time with his own steps thudding fast along the lane.

Rita's wolfhound was tied to a rail outside the shop. Glyn hesitated, then went in. He didn't want to start avoiding Rita; he could imagine what sort of fool she'd make him feel if she suspected he might be. He could imagine her saying, ‘Such a fuss over a bit of sex!' as if he was a silly adolescent. He skirted round the inside of the shop, picked out what he needed and met her at the door as both of them were leaving.

‘Hello Rita, how's things?' he said, falling into step beside her as she and the dog started to make their way home. She looked preoccupied and vague, mildly unkempt too, he noticed. ‘Fine,' she said brightly.

‘We've got a visitor.' Glyn could hear himself not sounding thrilled. ‘Though I expect you knew all about her coming before I did.'

‘So it was her!' Rita smiled, pleased with herself for getting it right.

‘It was Kitty's adopted baby, if that's what you mean by “her”,' he agreed.

‘Don't you like her then?'

He shrugged. ‘What does it matter what I think? She's here, holed up in Lily's room. They giggle in the night. She and Kitty talk rather carefully in the kitchen – Kitty trying not to be too obviously asking heaps of questions, Madeleine grunting a few grudging yeses and noes. She stops and stares at me like a great moody teenager when I walk in. You wouldn't think she was twenty-four.'

Rita smiled. ‘You're not exactly sounding all that grown-up yourself, Glyn. In fact I'd say I'm hearing a jealous little boy.'

‘Hah!' he barked. ‘Well you would say that wouldn't you? Bloody conspiracy of women. All that “What would
you
know” etcetera as if you've all got the secret of the heavens and we don't deserve to share it.'

‘Oh come on. That's not what I meant at all. Anyway, how's Kitty taking it all? That's the important thing. And what's the girl like?'

Glyn slowed down and looked up at the sky, considering a reply. Rita had simply confirmed his certainty that Madeleine's effect on
him
was just not ‘important'.

‘She's . . . well she's not like the other two. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at that. She's also what she calls “just a little bit pregnant”, just a teeny matter of about seven months. Apparently her mother doesn't know, she's been living in Scotland with a sod, she says, but he's long gone.'

‘But Kitty knows.'

‘Kitty does,' he agreed. ‘And Kitty's delighted.'

‘About the baby?'

‘About knowing about it. She denies it, of course, but she's all gleeful, like it's their secret bond or something. I don't know why I'm telling you this.'

That wasn't true. It was because he just had to tell someone. The uncomfortable feeling that he didn't quite belong in his own home had grown steadily since that very first across-the-kitchen glare from Madeleine. He'd got it all wrong, blurting out the hopeless, unwelcoming thing instead of feigning some kind of second-hand delight on behalf of Kitty. It had only been because dropping the spade had hurt his shin. It had actually drawn blood, but no-one had rushed to mop
that.
Now he and Madeleine existed in the house in an atmosphere of wary truce, sidling round the kitchen giving each other far too much space or making for opposite sofas in the sitting-room and having nothing to say. Clumsily, he'd made one attempt at getting to know her, asking her, as teachers inevitably do, about her schooldays and exams.

‘School was shit,' she'd snarled, barely looking up from the
Sunday Times
magazine, ‘exams were fine. OK?' and that was it; she'd abandoned the magazine on the floor, stalked out to find Lily on the beach, leaving him feeling he was worse than a vicious interrogator with a desk and a harsh light and a wish to send her to her death.

Kitty was so elated she was blithely unaware of anything amiss. ‘I can hardly believe we're all together,' she'd said, snuggling up to him in bed a couple of nights after Madeleine's arrival. Who exactly were ‘we'? he'd wondered, keeping silent so as not to burst her happy-bubble.

‘Kitty's lucky. The only person she's ever lost and she gets her back,' Rita said glumly as she reached her gate.

‘Well she did lose her parents, a few years back.'

‘Yeah but . . . you know what I mean. Josh has gone. I can sense it. He's been looking out over the sea like somebody shipwrecked for the past week. He was up before me this morning, out doing stuff with his car. He won't be there when I get back – he's not the sort to bother with goodbye.'

Rita was staring out across her garden towards the first field and the barn. No sounds of Josh being industrious came from it. Only the goats in the next field were bleating softly to each other. Hesitantly, Glyn put his arm across her sagging shoulders and she leaned her head against him. Her thick dark hair, blown by the wind, was woven through beneath the top layer with many strands of the purest white. It looked pathetically vulnerable, like a black kitten rolling on its back and exposing skinny pinkish-white underparts.

‘He's probably on the beach,' Glyn suggested, ‘or gone to see George.'

‘No,' Rita said, ‘it's a different kind of silence. He's gone.'

Petroc was in the library rethinking his reading of
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Tess's illegitimate baby had died, but suppose it hadn't? Who would have taken care of it? Perhaps it would have grown up in the sprawling muddle of the Durbeyfield family, thinking of Tess as some kind of much older sister and maybe she'd never have told Angel Clare the truth and then maybe they'd have lived on quite happily and of course there'd have been no story. He'd heard of families arranged like that even now. There'd been a boy at infants' school with a mother who'd always seemed more than a bit too old, with tight chipolata curls instead of the long careless hair that the other mothers had. ‘Our little afterthought' he'd once heard her calling him to another school-gate mum. Petroc had been far too young to know what she was talking about and had imagined ‘Afterthought' was just an embarrassing middle name. Years later when they were both at the comprehensive the boy had been having Thursday afternoons off for counselling because he'd just found out that this woman was his grandmother and his wild sister Sally, who'd hung round the Newlyn fish market since she was thirteen larking about with men, was really his mum.

‘Are you working or can I sit here?' Amanda Goodbody had managed to come into the library, cross the room and actually pull up a chair without Petroc noticing. Usually he could sense her presence from out in the corridor long before she entered a room. Lily would say it was her Issey Miyake perfume but Petroc secretly preferred to think it was the targeting of pheromones or even something mystically cosmic.

‘Sorry. You were concentrating and I've spoiled it.' She had already sat down. Her knee brushed against his under the desk before he'd had time to notice whether her legs were bare or if they were encased in denim.

‘I was thinking about Tess.'

‘Tess?' Did she look just a smidgen alarmed, he wondered; did it cross her mind for a second that he'd flipped for someone else? Or was that wide-eyed look just amazement that he was actually working?

‘I was thinking about her baby, the one that died in the book.'

‘Oh, that baby. Yeah I know.' Amanda had lost interest and was delving in her bag for her own work. Books spilled out and mingled with his. Sheets of music cascaded across the desk and he noticed how small her hands were as she collected them together.

‘I had a sister, years ago . . .' he started. Amanda's hands went still and she looked at him, fearfully he thought. ‘No it's OK, she didn't die.'

Amanda sighed and dumped her bag noisily on the seat beside her. ‘Good. That's all right then because I'm late with the Eliot essay and I don't want to be rude but sympathy does take so much time.'

‘She's turned up. She's staying with us,' Petroc babbled while she opened books and propped
The Waste Land
up against her bag. ‘We've never seen her before and she's twenty-four and pregnant.'

‘Oh that's the one! George was rambling on about someone. I can't say I listened properly.' Amanda beamed at him, eyes bright and crinkled. She'd get big crow-foot lines one day, he thought, and her hair would coarsen and go grey and she might run to fat. She wasn't perfect, there was no caring in her. Inside her head was a lot uglier than the outside.

Petroc felt feeble. Adoration for her was dripping away like blood, leaving him weak. He'd enjoyed his long obsession, could hardly recall a time before it. If only it had been more fruitful. ‘I just wondered, seeing as you were adopted too, whether you might like to come and meet her. Perhaps you could talk to her, you know, having all that in common . . .' his voice trailed away.

‘No,' Amanda said. She'd stopped smiling. Her face was set into its Madonna look, all flat and pale and flawless with no expression, no life, no interest.

‘No?' Perhaps she thought, wrongly for once, that his motives were suspect.

‘No. I don't want to meet her. We've got nothing in common. It would be like inviting your mum round to meet mine just on the grounds that they'd got blue eyes. You don't lump all gay people together, do you? Or French ones, or black ones? Her experience will be nothing like mine. We're just a pair of kids brought up in a pair of families. Nothing else. I've never even felt the slightest urge to find my birth mother.' Amanda shrugged and reached into her bag again, pulling out her pencil case. She took out a black fountain-pen and a ruler and wrote her essay title at the top of a blank sheet of file paper. Petroc watched as she underlined it three times. Overemphatic, he judged. Self-important even. Before she'd teamed up with George Moorfield she'd probably only have ruled one line like the rest of them.

‘Of course I might try and find her it I suspected she was someone fantastically famous, because that might be interesting and possibly even useful,' Amanda said, looking up. She'd put on her most stunning smile. Petroc looked at her, testing out his new indifference. It was still there. The smile didn't bewitch him any more. He didn't actually like her very much. He smiled back coolly and then took a quick glance round the library. Several other girls, previously of no more interest than the brown and cream striped window blinds, were dotted about at desks, some working, some chatting, all potentially more than a bit alluring. Just a brief radar sweep took in plump Hayley Mason, broad of thigh and with a blithely fashion-free dress sense but a stunning cloud of nut-brown curls, another girl whose long slim legs coiled with pretty gawkiness round her chair legs. No longer being slavishly besotted by Amanda Goodbody might be wonderfully liberating.

As Kitty drove into the multistorey car park in Truro she tried to detach herself mentally from the sheer ordinariness of what she was doing and capture the essence of the moment. Beside her sat Madeleine, quiet but apparently contented enough. She'd stopped thinking of the girl's frequent long silences as sulking hostility. If she hated the family that much she surely would have left by now, curiosity satisfied.

I'm here to buy baby clothes with my daughter
Kitty thought as she steered the car up the slope to level five. She practised the words in her head as if she might need to say them. Perhaps someone from the village might be out in the town. They might stop to chat and look with curiosity at this big, pretty girl walking along with her. Kitty could introduce her, as she had on that first day to George. This time though, there'd be none of that awkward rush and confusion. Now she could smile and watch faces for reactions, savour this odd extra parenthood. ‘
My daughter, Madeleine
.'

‘I haven't got much money, only about twenty quid,' Madeleine warned as she got out of the car. She moved with difficulty, hauling herself out with both hands like someone who'd never been particularly lithe and was now, with the weight of pregnancy, finding even the smallest exertion tricky.

‘Don't worry about the money. I don't think we'll be breaking the bank with a trip to Mothercare,' Kitty told her, adding, ‘were you any good at games at school?'

Madeleine gave a short laugh, one that Kitty could tell didn't express amusement. ‘Games? Jesus no. You had to be able to run fast for hockey and tennis and I couldn't. I was quite good at netball though, people got out of my way. Strange thing to ask.'

Kitty was thinking about Antonia lumbering around the field during hockey warm-up. ‘Twice round the pitch and then twice back again!' had been the games mistress's way of killing the first fifteen minutes of those dreaded long-ago Wednesday afternoons. Poor slow Antonia had always still been sweating and gasping in one direction long after the others had turned to run the other way. Looking back, Kitty was sure the little warm-up routine had been specially designed with the humiliation of the congenitally slow in mind.