The Right Thing (3 page)

‘I forgot you're a
landlady
.' Julia's small mouth pursed up as much as it was able, reminding Kitty of a cat's bottom.

‘Usually only in the summer. In the winter I'm still a painter. When you specialize in local scenic views it's a lot easier when the tourists aren't cluttering up the horizon.'

‘Oh yes, I remember you were arty at school. I called you a creep for volunteering to paint the scenery for the play. A landlady though . . .' Julia mused. Kitty could see exactly the picture Julia was conjuring up.

‘Hey, I don't wear fluffy high-heeled mules and charge for use of cruet you know, and they're all writers, there for either their own projects or a workshop session so they're pretty much self-contained,' Kitty reminded her patiently. ‘So are you coming, or shall I make my goodbyes and disappear?'

Julia peered past Kitty and gazed around the room. ‘Oh look, there's Rose, still here, must just say bye-bye to her. She's got a lot of nerve, I'll say that for her,' Julia murmured, gazing at her oldest friend with admiration. Kitty waited, holding her breath. Rose was standing by a small and delicate walnut desk, her hand resting carelessly among silver-framed photos. Kitty guessed they must be more family shots. She looked like a cat toying idly with treasures in a room from which it was normally banned. As if she was listening to her thoughts, Rose shifted slightly and smiled across at Kitty over the shoulder of the man she was talking to, Tom.

‘She's got a perfectly good husband of her own at home. Her second one of course, but then women like Rose rarely stop at one,' Julia confided through discreetly gritted teeth. ‘But of course you knew that, didn't you?' This was the second time that afternoon that this assumption had been made. Kitty felt even more in the dark than before. ‘Old boyfriend of yours from the sixth form,
you
know the one, just before your little bit of trouble.' Kitty felt a horrible urge to put her hands over her ears to make it not true but it was too late. ‘Ben Ruthermere.' Julia's wide eyes were slightly bloodshot. ‘Don't tell me you don't remember. She ran into him in Paris, oh, five years back. Coincidence or what?'

Kitty couldn't tell her she didn't remember Ben so she didn't reply. Julia was looking mildly triumphant. ‘You should have read all those HOGS newsletters, you see, instead of shredding them up for your organic compost heap or whatever.'

Kitty looked across at Rosemary-Jane who was still eye to eye with Large Antonia's husband. Ben Ruthermere, fresh out of the sixth form, sexual novice and all-round ordinary boy, had never known he was Madeleine's father. So he'd married Rosemary-Jane Pigott who could hardly be better cast as a wicked stepmother. Or just simply as wicked.

Kitty fought her way up from a dream in which her father, towering huge through candlelight, was thumping the edge of the pulpit and denting the wood like dough, leaving a caving imprint of his pudgy hand. His bulk loomed bigger than a Disney monster's shadow and he leaned hard with the palms of his hands so the wood bulged forward, out like a ship's prow. Beneath it in the congregation were hundreds of identical grey crocheted hats on heads that cowered and keened and wailed into white twitching hankies with hand-embroidered corner initials in pink. Kitty's eyes flickered open with relief that this wasn't how she would ever again have to spend a Sunday morning. Her father had been a vicar with a keen eye for promotion and a congregation of adoring old ladies squabbling over the church-hall tea urn and flower rota, just like characters in a Barbara Pym novel. Humble, penitent and pious during his fiery services, the faithful would emerge from his church shaking off their sins in the sunlight like dogs fresh out of a river. Thus purged, they'd go straight back to claim-staking over the post-service biscuit provision and whose turn it was to tidy away the vestments. ‘Worth your weight,' he used to smarm and charm at them, though weight in what he never specified. In manky old tea-leaves, Kitty used to think whenever she found furtive pairs of these women hunkered down on the vicarage sitting-room floor, picking through bags of jumble like rooks on a run-over squirrel.

Kitty's waking mind found its way back to the present and she thought about Julia, the day before, referring to her ‘little bit of trouble'. It was just the sort of dust-under-the-carpet euphemism her parents had favoured. Julia enjoyed the phrase because it hinted at the privilege of knowing a secret; her mother liked it because it avoided uncomfortable truth. ‘Trouble' was what Kitty had ‘got herself into', as if no-one else could possibly be involved and she'd done it out of spite. With a father who feared his bishop far more than he feared God, this Trouble had to be got out of the house and away from sight as fast as possible. The right thing had to be done.

The trouble hadn't felt so little at the time, either.
She
hadn't felt so little. Her grossly pregnant eighteen-year-old body, skin distended to near-translucency by a baby that must have been meant for a much bigger and more grown-up mother, had felt like a dragged sack of swedes. She'd felt as if between her legs some precarious collapsing bulge was threatening to thrust its way to her knees. Each day for the last four pregnant months, banished to one of the nation's last mother-and-baby homes, she'd spent eight hours perched in cramped agony on a hard chair, sure that only the seat's unyielding wood was forcing this parasitic growth to stay inside her as she sat with the other inmates addressing envelopes and stuffing them with flyers for cut-price garden equipment. ‘Anyone who wants a cheap tool can have my ex,' one of the girls had giggled.

Kitty remembered they'd all sworn to keep in touch, friends for life linked by their months of exile, but no-one really did. One by one, they peeled off to the hospital to give birth and were sent back to the home to be safely segregated in the baby-care wing, where they couldn't contaminate those who still had the births to get through with any tricky and emotional changing of mind over adoptions. Arrangements had been made – any girl who made a fuss and insisted on leaving with instead of without her child was deemed thoroughly selfish, having no concern for the dashed hopes of the deserving childless. Leaving that place must have been like coming out of prison, she'd thought at the time, you didn't want to be reminded, you just rushed to get on to the next thing and of course no-one outside wanted to talk about it in case you got embarrassingly upset or told them difficult truths.

Baby Madeleine had been handed over to the social worker in a tiny night-blue dress, embroidered with silver stars and with the name that was unlikely to stay hers in gold thread at the hem. Kitty's mother had watched her carefully handstitching it, her eyes full of fear that she might yet change her mind and bring home the child inside the dress. ‘It's what comes of being artistic,' had been said more than once in the house before Kitty was sent away, though whether her parents meant the pregnancy or the starry little outfit, Kitty was beyond calculating.

Madeleine's adoptive parents had probably binned it the moment they got her home, Kitty assumed, eagerly wrapping their own identities round their chosen child with maybe a lovingly crocheted pink shawl, traditional Viyella nighties and a different name they'd had waiting, perhaps something from the Bible or fiction. She imagined, trusted for her baby's sake, that they, childless and longing, might well have had a long-treasured store of locked-away baby clothes, hoarded against the hope that one day there'd be some reason to get them out of the case on top of the wardrobe.

She closed her eyes again and sniffed gently, inhaling the remembered smell of a newborn's downy scalp. Madeleine, heading for twenty-five, could well be a mother herself by now, incredulous from those first seconds after birth that anyone could ever, ever consider giving away their child.

‘You awake?' Glyn rolled heavily out of bed and twitched a curtain aside to look at the day and decide what to wear. Kitty didn't need to look out at the weather, she could hear from the sea what the day would be like. The tide was high and close but the water was calm and whispering, promising a much-needed spell of gentleness at this end of a long bleak winter. There was no surf, so Lily would at least go to school instead of pleading a headache which would clear up magically when she slipped out of the kitchen door and down into the sea with her surfboard. When she opened her eyes again Glyn was moving around the room, large and loud and shadowy like a hopeless burglar. She could smell his showered cleanness, sense the traces of dampness on his body and realized she must have dozed into an extra ten minutes of sleep. There would be droplets of water between his shoulder-blades and a dewy sparkle left in the fold of his arm.

‘Bloody socks,' he said, staring down into an opened drawer. ‘Does everyone else's dryer eat them or what?'

‘Everyone's does. Didn't you know it's one of life's great mysteries? You should just buy dozens of identical ones then you wouldn't notice if the odd one went missing,' she suggested from the depths of the duvet. She glanced at the clock on the blue wicker table beside her, pulled herself up in the bed and looked at him properly in the half-light. He cared about clothes, pointlessly for an early-retired ex-head teacher who lived in such country depths and spent so much time digging vegetables. He made sure that trips to London coincided with the smartest sales, scorning clothes shops outside the capital as fit only for those whose spiritual home was a golf-club bar. Calvin Klein was etched in the elastic round Glyn's middle, reminding her of an over-large schoolboy whose mummy still went in for name-tapes.

‘You can't just have all the same socks.' Glyn looked almost shocked at the idea, pulling back the curtain and using what early light there was to check his colour-matching skills. He held the socks at arm's length by the window, the way he did when trying to do the crossword without his reading glasses. ‘What about ones for tennis and for skiing and winter walks and gardening? And silk ones for formal stuff and weddings and proper cotton in case of athlete's foot?'

Kitty groaned and laughed and sank back under the duvet. She didn't care about socks. No-one could. Glyn shouldn't – he wasn't much over fifty but with no school to run, like a prime minister suddenly deposed, hadn't enough to think about. She dreaded to think with how many trivial obsessions he might start filling those intellectual gaps. ‘The sky wouldn't fall in if you wore odd ones. Or none,' she told him. She'd just remembered Rosemary-Jane Pigott –
Ruthermere
– air-kissing goodbye and saying, ‘Now we've all met up again, we must keep in touch. Ben
adores
Cornwall . . .'

So Ben Ruthermere adored Cornwall. Since when? she wondered now. And would she have recognized him if he'd been nearby, this summer, say, crewing in the Falmouth Classics or browsing among the artistry at the Penwith Gallery? She tried to picture him: portly, perhaps by now balding, scrabbling at his inside pocket for
his
reading glasses. He'd been what her mother had disparagingly called Remarkably Average: medium build, neutral colouring and average height. ‘They don't age well,' her mother had forewarned as if, for one moment, there'd been any likelihood that Ben Ruthermere, if told of the results of his sexual carelessness, would be prepared to do the decent thing by her pregnant daughter and submit to a hasty wedding. It was such an unlikely and unwished-for outcome that Kitty hadn't thought there was any point telling him. Besides, he'd gone off to do VSO in Ethiopia before Cambridge and had parents so burstingly proud of him that even the conscience of Kitty's fire-and-brimstone father quailed at the thought of destroying their delight. ‘What is the point in putting
two
sets of parents through all this?' he'd said with a profound sigh of Christian resignation. Madeleine had Ben's brown-haired, hazel-eyed genes mingled with Kitty's own slim, blond and brown-eyed ones – she could look like absolutely anybody.

‘So how did it go yesterday? You didn't say much last night.' Now that Glyn had clothes on he was ready to be conversational.

Kitty hauled herself out of bed and went to the window to look at the sea. It had a bright and menacing cold sparkle. ‘No, well, I was just so tired. That last bit from Truro, it's so familiar I got scared I really was driving with my eyes shut.'

‘Dangerous. People die driving too tired.'

Kitty shivered and reached for her velvet dressing-gown over the back of the small shabby sofa that they'd had too long to be able to throw out.

‘Poor old Antonia was killed driving her car up a tree. On their own land too, which makes it worse somehow.'

Glyn looked puzzled. ‘How could it be worse? Dead's dead. An absolute,
the
absolute.'

‘Yes I know, but don't you think, and I know it's not logical, that you should somehow feel safe on home ground? You should be able to trust it, feel secure, the same way you should be able to trust the people you live with.' Struck by sudden childish irreverence she went on, ‘When we were young and horrible but should have known better, Julia and the rest of us would have laughed and said that in any contest between Antonia and a two-hundred-year-old oak, the tree would be the one to cop it. There wasn't much to laugh at yesterday though.'

‘No. Well, there wouldn't be.' Glyn looked solemn but at a loss, Kitty thought. She could see his face searching for something encouraging to say, just as he would have done to a downhearted pupil. Eventually he came up with, ‘Nice to see old school pals again though.' He waited for her to look cheered.

‘Well, strange anyway. Nice doesn't describe it. Nice
couldn't
describe Rosemary-Jane Pigott actually, you should meet her.'