The Right Thing (31 page)

Ben was out on the sea wall, trying to get his mobile phone to work and not having any luck. Kitty watched him from the doorway, jabbing his fingers crossly at the instrument. If she was interpreting body language, she'd say this was now a call he was making out of resigned duty rather than real inclination.

‘Why don't you use the phone in the house?' she asked.

‘Because I'm not so sure any more that I really want to get through,' he replied. ‘What's up there, beyond the end of your garden?' He pointed to the cliffs rising beyond the curve of the bay.

‘It's the coast path, then round to an old ruined chapel where walkers always stop to have a pee and a look at the view. Do you want to see?'

He slid off the wall and smiled at her. ‘If you promise the wind won't blow us off the clifftop and into the ocean.'

‘Hey, I thought you were a sailor. You should know this is an onshore wind.'

Together they walked past Glyn's vegetable garden and through the matted bramble bushes on the far side of the gate. The wind was dying down now but still crept up in sharp surprise blasts. Kitty pushed her hands into the sleeves of her fleece to keep them warm as she walked. Ben's hands were crammed into his pockets, and it occurred to Kitty, still thinking of body language, that an observer might say the two of them were pretty determinedly avoiding contact on the narrow path.

‘Great smell.' Ben stopped and sniffed at the air.

‘The gorse is just coming into flower. And even the thrift flowers early up here. Soon it'll be all pink and yellow.' The flowering had crept up on her this year. She hadn't been out as much as usual, not roaming across the cliffs and the rocky heathland up there like she usually did. Away in the far bay, St Michael's Mount was bright and stark against the pale spring sky, looking close enough to touch, like an old-fashioned toy fort. She should get a dog, she thought, like absolutely every other person who lived in the country. She could roam for miles along out-of-season empty beaches with maybe one of those giant poodles like Ben's, or a mad spaniel.

‘It's breeding weather,' Ben said. ‘Glyn must have a constant battle with rabbits.'

‘He does. But he won't shoot them, he just can't bring himself to. Locals think he's a soft townie, even though we've been here for nearly twenty years.'

Ben stopped abruptly on the path in front of her, too quickly so that her body stopped only an inch away from his. She could smell the wind-damped wool of his jumper. ‘Tell me about Madeleine,' he demanded. ‘Who is her father? I know she's your daughter but I also know she isn't Glyn's.'

She could just tell him it was nothing to do with him, to go away and sort out things with Rose, who was, in turn, nothing to do with her. ‘Come up the path a bit further. Let's get as far as the chapel and we can sit down out of the wind,' she said, playing for time.

The chapel smelled of urine and dogs and the floor was littered with cigarette packets, crushed drinks cans and a couple of condoms. ‘Amazing you can buy them in any old petrol station now,' Ben commented as they looked inside and then retreated to sit outside against the back wall, sheltered from the wind but facing the searing sun.

‘Yes. Pity you couldn't back in the old days,' she said.

‘Back in our days you mean, when everything like that was whispered and under the counter. Tell me about Madeleine.'

‘OK.' Kitty took a deep breath, for a run at it all at once, ‘I had her when I was eighteen. She was adopted, babies still sometimes were then.' She went on quickly, feeling that she'd choke if she didn't, ‘You know what my family was like. If you're going to ask why I didn't just have an abortion, well it wasn't so easy, especially when you've got a dinosaur for a GP who also happens to be your father's church-warden. Everyone seemed to agree that adoption was the best thing all round. For everyone.'

Ben was silent for a moment and then said, ‘And was it?'

‘How can I know?' Kitty was angry. ‘How can anyone know the might-have-beens? They don't exist, so there's no best or worst. All I know is that whatever they said at the time, you don't give a baby away like it's a kitten or a toy. You don't forget about it, you don't have others as replacements. I love Petroc and Lily enormously, but they weren't some form of compensation.'

‘Then why didn't you keep her?'

‘Because I had neither the nerve, the practicality or the support. When you're a single parent now there's a vast amount of information about benefits and housing possibilities. They could have told us quite a bit then but no-one wanted you to know about it – they made sure you didn't. There's a huge difference between the Single Parents of now and the Unmarried Mothers of then.'

A group of overdressed hikers, cagouled, booted, hatted and with maps dangling in waterproof folders round their necks, panted round the edge of the cliff and passed them on the path. Each of them nodded with curt politeness, not breaking their determined stride. Ben stood up and started pacing restlessly up and down in the patch of sun in front of the chapel. Kitty felt vaguely faint, realizing she hadn't had lunch.

‘You still haven't told me. I'll put it this way,' Ben sounded like a lawyer. ‘Have I got any right to ask who her father is?'

‘Yes. Yes, Ben you absolutely have. But I can tell you don't really need to.'

The rise-and-fall whine of Mick's chain-saw keened like a pained gull way above the deep pounding of the waves below the cliffs. The huge piece of tree would soon be reduced to a meticulous log pile stacked against Rita's barn wall. During the summer, parties of passing walkers would look at it and note its elegant symmetry with approval, reassured that they could just about trust those who inhabited the depths of the country to carry on doing things the way they liked to see them done.

Kitty leaned back against the sun-warmed chapel wall, pulled ragged golden stalks of grass from the earth beside her and plaited them round her fingers, waiting for Ben to ask the inevitable next question. He was still pacing, scowling and angry. Then he turned abruptly and came and slumped down next to her, too close so their legs touched.

‘Why did you never tell me?' he asked at last.

‘Because there wasn't any point in you knowing. At least, that's what I thought at the time. After all, there wasn't anything you could do about it.'

‘Well there might have been, we could have . . .'

‘What? Got married? Ben, we were just kids and anyway, we'd already decided to split. We were a summer thing. It was great and then it was over.'

‘Not necessarily married, but something, maybe something useful. At least I'd have been there for you. A baby would have changed things.'

Kitty felt weary. She wished suddenly that she'd simply invented a fling with someone else, not even thought of letting Ben in on the truth. But there was Madeleine with her own questions, and if she was owed the answers there was no avoiding Ben knowing too. She plucked some more grass to play with and tried to be patient and calm.

‘It did change things. But only for me, and even then it was supposed to be just a simple thing. I couldn't know then that for ever after I'd think about her, wonder what had happened, if she was all right. Everyone said it would be OK, that you just put it behind you and get on with your life and I believed them because it didn't occur to me that they didn't really know. So for a while you do just what they say and you try to look forward, not back.' Kitty could feel her voice getting faster and less controlled, ‘But then her first birthday comes, and then her second and you can't even give her a present. You think about her learning to walk and talk but you don't know what her voice is like, or even if English is her first language, and later you start thinking, surely she must be starting school now, and much further on things like GCSE results come out and you wonder how she's done. And then every time there's a plane crash and you don't even know what name to look for, and when you read about child abuse in children's homes and you think, suppose it didn't work out and she went into care . . . ?' Kitty was crying now, her words too fast and close to incoherent.

‘I'm sorry.' Ben's arms were round her and she was pressed tight against him. His face was blotting away her tears and she could smell the soft homey scent of fabric conditioner on his sweater.

‘So that's what you missed, Ben. It's all negative isn't it? There's none of that you'd have chosen to share.'

She felt him sighing into her neck.

‘I can't tell. I suppose if Rose and I had had children I'd have said no, I wouldn't have wanted to know. It's just that we didn't. And now I know that all the time there was Madeleine.'

Kitty pulled back and looked at him. He still didn't get it. ‘But that's the point,' she said. ‘There
wasn't
Madeleine. Don't you see? For you there wasn't Madeleine. Or for me. She came to find me out of curiosity, to fit together the complete version of her history for herself and her own baby, not to find a “real” mother. She's already got one of those – that was who she asked for the moment she went into labour. I think that's when I realized that I can't ever expect to have any real part in her life, even though I feel I've been existing alongside her, like being just the other side of a wall, ever since I handed her over. I'll only ever know what she lets me know and we start from the day she turned up – those twenty-four-years will stay lost.'

‘But it was you she had her baby with.'

Kitty sighed. ‘Nice thought, and I hope that'll be some kind of bond for later, but I can't kid myself that was her choice. You should have seen her face when she asked me to phone her mother. There was fear and need. She thought she'd got longer to go before it was born – plenty of time to get home. It's where she should have been.'

Later Kitty decided that Ben only kissed her because he couldn't think what to do next. Everything had been said. There they were, curled together on the hard dry earth, squashed against the chapel wall out of the wind. The last time Ben had kissed her, so very many years before, his Mark Bolan curls had flopped against her face. He'd smelled of patchouli and tasted of the joint they'd just shared, sensations entirely of their time, and, Kitty realized, there was no lingering back-burner passion between them just waiting to be fired up. Crushed between his body and the grit-sharp chapel wall, Kitty wondered if he was wishing she was Rose as much as she would have preferred him to be Glyn. ‘Sorry,' he said eventually. ‘It just seemed . . .'

‘Appropriate?' she smiled. She disentangled herself in a tactfully leisurely way and stood up. There wasn't anything else to be said and it was time he went off to find Rose. Far below in the vegetable garden she could see Glyn earthing up the earliest of the potatoes, and she very much wanted to be down there with him.

Glyn's back hurt again. As he straightened and stretched his spine he looked up towards the cliff path and saw Ben and Kitty coming down to the house. From that distance they looked lithe and very young. Kitty still had a coltish long-legged stride, sure-footed on the familiar steep rutted path, and Ben was moving fast to keep up with her, fuelled, Glyn assumed, by a dollop of male ego.

‘Is he staying long, that bloke?' Petroc shambled up the path looking perplexed. ‘I mean, who is he?'

‘Good question. There's more than one answer, but the one we'll settle for is that he's that Rosemary-Jane woman's husband.' Petroc shrugged, his attention already diverted. Along the newly cleared road, rattling and revving, came a battered old Land Rover. Glyn looked at his son's face, recognizing the dopy doggy grin of infatuation.

‘And who is
that?
' he asked, watching the car zooming in too fast through the yard gates and narrowly missing the wall. But Petroc, rushed on by the thrill of new lust, was already on the far side of the garden gate, opening the Land Rover's rusty door and scooping out a large but lively chestnut-haired girl. Turning away just in time to avoid having to watch a fervent teenage clinch, Glyn looked over the wall and up towards Rita's house. The chain-saw had stopped some time before but Mick's van was still parked in the lane. He flexed his back again and wondered if Mick was even now getting
his
massaged. Tricky work, cutting up a tree, you could do a lot of damage. Next time he was in Truro he would buy a book on aromatherapy. He had a feeling Kitty would like it.

‘You will tell me if I'm in the way.' Lily must have said it at least three times. She felt welded to her chair watching Oliver sleeping. There was a yeasty waft of the pizza George had got warming in the Rayburn oven and the sharp tang of onion that he had cut up to put in a salad. She wondered if baby Oliver could smell them and if he instinctively associated the scents with food or hunger. She didn't know anything about babies, hadn't a clue (did anyone?) what knowledge he was born with, or if every sense was a kind of blank until one by one experiences got thrown to him to do his learning from. She thought of parents at Guy Fawkes night parties, taking hold of toddlers' hands, leading them safely away from bonfires and saying ‘No,
hot'.
She would have thought that if the Great Designer had got it right, a child ought to be programmed with at least enough information to keep it safe and fed.

Madeleine was lying on the barn kitchen sofa, her bare sandy feet comfortably up on a cushion and her baby snuffling softly against her body. ‘Stay here if you want, it's fine,' she told Lily. She didn't look up though, but kept her eyes on the tiny head, stroking his little pink ear and feeling his small firm body moving beneath her hand as he breathed.