The Right Thing

‘Well of course Glyn’s not going to be interested in some old baby from way back. Why should he be? It wasn’t his.’ Rita bustled about her cluttered kitchen, searching among the jumble of blue and purple glass jars on the shelf behind the sink for the one that contained the plain old ordinary tea bags that Kitty seemed so boringly to prefer. Rita could offer twenty different herbal selections and it irritated that her nearest tea-sharing neighbour was a PG Tips type. The pampered Josh’s current favourite was ginger and ginseng (which he didn’t suspect was to perk up both digestion and libido), with a dash of lemon to ward off his tendency to colds. Rita kept this in his special copper box that he claimed he’d found on a Peruvian mountain. She reached into the fridge and pulled out a jug of milk.

Rita went on, ‘You shouldn’t expect him to be even slightly curious. Men let things go better than we do and then it’s on to what’s next. He probably wouldn’t be that interested even if it was his.’ There was in Rita’s scathing tone more than a hint that she found men, apart from the adored Josh, unreliable, unfeeling and untrustworthy.

‘Well I’d be curious if it was his, wouldn’t you?’ Kitty picked up a pair of small grey sleeping cats from the rocking-chair and sat down on a torn patchwork cushion with them on her lap. Lazily they stretched their baby limbs, extending hair-fine claws, and snuggled back down immediately, purring gently as if she’d never disturbed them.

‘If you like,’ Rita conceded grudgingly. ‘Generalizing horribly, I think some men just shut inconvenient things out rather than poke at them like old scabs till there’s blood and disaster everywhere like we do. And not only that, we then martyr ourselves clearing up the mess and absolutely demanding all the blame.’ She grinned, her mouth slightly twisted as it always was, showing a glimpse of a gold premolar. There was a gypsyish look to Rita, something to do with flamboyance with colour and a Carmen-style swagger when she moved, as if she might, given the right amount of moonlight, moonshine and a camp-fire audience, break into a spontaneous flamenco. When she walked, her hips whistled up the air around her. Glyn had once admitted to Kitty, after a party, that Rita was pretty sexy, but only in a draughty sort of way. ‘She could swish a bloke into bed,’ he’d said, looking nervous.

Kitty frowned. ‘You’re right. And whatever I unearth now, there is no baby any more. Somewhere out there is a grown young woman, all cooked and finished.’ She laughed. ‘Glyn still looks at his own children sometimes as if he can’t quite believe he’s produced them, especially since they’ve been teenagers. Imagine how he’d feel if a fully formed adult turned up at the house looking for a mum who wouldn’t have a chance of recognizing her.’

‘Well of course I imagine it. More now than I used to even. I’m sure everyone who’s ever had a child adopted does the same thing. Over the years I’ve pictured her at different ages arriving on the doorstep: a sad little girl run away from being sent too early to boarding-school, or a stroppy thirteen-year-old having her first flukey go at finding me, easy as something out of Enid Blyton. And then a year or two back I kept expecting a cool nineteen-year-old to turn up, doing a casual detour after the backpack trip to India, checking out her real mother . . .’

‘Yes, I know, I know.’ Kitty gathered up the cats and put them back on the chair again. Her thighs were warm where their little bodies had lain and the outside chill damp air wasn’t tempting. ‘I’d better get going. Don’t want to miss our illustrious guest arriving. Glyn’s so excited you’d think we were getting royalty.’

Rita’s eyes glinted and the twisted grin returned. ‘I’m pretty excited too. I’ve read all his books and they’re so full of complicated sex I’m wondering if he’ll be short of company.’ She put her hands on her hips and thrust her breasts forward in mock provocation. She was wearing an ancient rainbow-knitted sweater but Kitty imagined the fine cleavage beneath, cupped and lifted by the purple satin or lime green bra she’d seen flying brazenly on the orchard washing-line.

‘Are you suggesting I should charge for it?’ Rita giggled, ‘though I suppose a girl has to make a living . . .’ Girl was pushing it; Rita wouldn’t see forty-five again, surely explaining why she so treasured the idle (but young and vigorous) Josh who was probably upstairs now, still sleeping off Rita’s attentions till she brought him tea and tenderness.

‘I’ll invite you over for supper, just as soon as he’s settled in,’ Kitty promised. ‘But who knows, he might prefer Petroc . . .’ She made her escape before Rita could throw a cold tea bag at her and picked her way through the mud in the yard towards the field where the last daffodils waited to be saved from running to seed. Rita’s five small fields with their tumbled-down banks of mixed scrap iron, crumbling wall and bramble-woven hawthorn had a scrappy pre-war appearance, as if they’d been salvaged from a group of ancient cottage gardens. The daffodil picking was finished and these leftover flowers that had bloomed just too late had a desperate look to them, like debs at an old-style coming-out dance where there weren’t quite enough men. Wordsworth’s host they were not, these mud-splashed and pathetic, shivering and rather puny specimens. Lily looked just like that in winter, all pinched and trembling, Kitty thought, as her ancient Timberlands sucked and squelched their way through the puddle of coppery mud that had collected by the gate. Lily had limbs like strings and a new-found appetite for large amounts of fruit that she’d pick up from the dresser halfway through a meal and walk out of the kitchen with, saying she’d eat it in her room, she didn’t feel like a big meal just now.

Kitty’s fingers were sticky with dripping sap after picking an armful of the damp flowers, and she wondered if she’d bother going to all this trouble for some less legendary scribbler taking a fortnight off from the nine-to-five grind to indulge a fantasy. That would be the sort of client who would most appreciate a huge bunch of hand-picked daffodils, she thought. George Moorfield had the comfort of bestseller status and a bank account boosted by prizewinnings. As she stepped carefully through the least of the mud back to the road a large turquoise car, a strange mixture of what looked like a Bentley at the front and a pick-up truck at the back, sped towards her along the lane, heedless of any possible traffic round the bend ahead. Its wheels whooshed up an arc of muddy water which soaked Kitty’s jeans.

‘Shit! Stupid bastard!’ she yelled after the car, setting out speedily along the road in the same direction. It could only be going to Treneath, there was nowhere else after that, unless the driver fancied whizzing on up towards the coast path and then up and over the cliff edge. She marched along fast and furious, keeping to the middle of the road. If the driver realized he’d taken a wrong turning and came back, she’d make bloody sure he had to stop so she could tell him what she thought.

Glyn counted out a hundred shallots and laid them out on the clean, empty staging in the greenhouse. He breathed in the soft damp smell of young lettuces, picked a crisp young leaf from the earthenware pot next to him and chewed it speculatively, trying to feel certain that it tasted so very much better than something imported from Guatemala that he could get in a supermarket. It was costing a lot, on the whole, all this going organic and growing their own. Much more than if they just bought vegetables at Safeway. The fact that Kitty never pointed this out made him wonder, sometimes, if she was just indulging him, letting him play, like a child in mud. He had to make sure he thought of it as something separate from simply replacing shop veg, make it not just functional. There were plenty of restaurants that could be interested – the word ‘organic’ on a menu was a handy price-booster, especially with the sort of holiday visitors who liked to go home able to say, ‘So marvellous, entirely local veg’. That was the sort of comment that went into the restaurant guides.

He loved the process of sowing and raising the little seedlings, the first magic sight of them sprouting, then potting them on at the two-leaf stage, holding them carefully by the leaves so as not to hurt the stems. He’d done a lot of damage that way at first, even though he’d thought he’d done it right and then he’d had to watch so many of them struggle, fall down and shrivel just because he’d been heavy-handed. Ignoring advice from five instruction books, on the grounds that he was an intelligent man and knew many things better than most, he’d also meticulously thinned out his first batch of carrots, thinking they surely needed more room than that, only to leave them as no-mercy prey for carrot fly. The various crops needed more attention than small children, and certainly far more than Lily and Petroc, with their teenage secret lives, were needing these days.

He glanced out of the greenhouse at the nine raised rectangles of earth in the walled vegetable garden. Together they looked like a block of good chocolate. The soil was rich and well-manured and the old stone walls kept the warmth in and the wind out, which prolonged the growing time. He was still picking broccoli from the year before, the garlic was already a foot tall and the cauliflowers had been bigger than the ones in Rita’s medium field that she rented to the farm on the hill. He looked at the shallots waiting on the worktop. ‘All in now, or stagger them?’ he muttered aloud, pondering the problems of storing a harvest of several hundred when they all ripened at once. He should have started some off back in December, getting them in on the shortest day like the garlic.

‘First sign of craziness, if you’ll forgive the cliché.’ The voice (male) was alarmingly close, right beside him, shoulder to shoulder and too chummy. Glyn felt instant fury that anyone should have crept up so close without him noticing, almost into the middle of his reverie. He’d assumed years running a school had given him a sort of second sight where being sneaked up on and surprised was concerned. It was something basic you just didn’t let happen, like turning your back in a physics lab full of frisky fourteen-year-olds.

‘Not these, they’re sets for this year’s crop,’ Glyn told him grudgingly. He’d looked forward to meeting this man, read his books which probed the problems of the Doubt-Racked Male and thought he might, just possibly, be something of a soulmate. Now he just wanted to snatch the baby onion out of George Moorfield’s careless hand and put it back in line. The feeling reminded him uncomfortably of confiscating penknives from first-years. Recalling good manners he forced a smile and offered an earthy hand. ‘I’m Glyn Harding, I suppose you didn’t find anyone up at the house?’

‘Well yes.’ Glyn wiped his hands on a ripped tea towel and led George out of the greenhouse, closing the door behind him firmly and not just to keep the warmth in. People should know that greenhouses, like sheds and attics and little huts down at the ends of paths, were private retreats, never to be invaded. He didn’t mind about the wandering through the house, that was more public space, or the answering the phone – who could ever leave one to ring? It wasn’t even eleven o’clock yet. He was pretty sure tenants weren’t supposed to arrive till after three, though this one might have thought he’d be above mere instructions. Kitty usually dealt with the clients, and this one, well this was one he’d actually read, which made him feel he was talking to someone who wasn’t quite real.

George Moorfield was wearing clothes that looked as if they’d been selected specially to be deliberately contrary to what was appropriate for some of the deepest countryside Britain had to offer. His suede boots were as pale as lion fur and his black leather jacket was so glaringly new it was still as stiff as cardboard. Its front barely met over the substantial portly belly that was squashed into denim shirt and jeans. It must have been a very uncomfortable drive, Glyn concluded, unless the man had worn an old tracksuit for the actual journey, changing into image-wear the moment he crossed the Tamar, like Joan Collins travelling on Concorde. The famous author looked several years older than the photo that appeared in his books, his long grey hair well receded as if it had slipped backwards, exposing vulnerable pink scalp at the front.

‘Kit will be back in a minute,’ Glyn said, now wondering what on earth he should do with him, ‘And she’ll show you to your room and all that. Come into the house and have some coffee.’ The man had an extraordinary car, he noted, passing the strange blue-green Bentley parked just where it most inconveniently blocked the gateway. Glyn didn’t comment, feeling that to mention the thing might seem depressingly parochial. They got their fair share of strange motors in Cornwall too. If you could stick a truck back-end on a Beetle, like the Neanderthal Josh bloke who ‘worked’ on Rita’s land, it was surely no big deal to tag one onto a Bentley.

Lily’s G-Shock watch said 10.30. She was hungry now and her stomach was going to rumble till break, all the way through Maths. She would eat half of the Bounty bar as soon as break started and see if the uncomfortable full feeling lasted all the way to lunch. She didn’t like feeling hungry because it was something she couldn’t decide to feel or not to feel, it was just automatic, so the feeling had to be kept just a little away from her, usually just a dry biscuit’s-worth here and there, with only occasional giving into sweet temptation like today. She wrote her best poems when her head was full of the clanging panic of hunger. ‘Thin as a nun’ had come to her the night before when she’d been looking at her pale narrow body in the bathroom mirror. It made her think of sacrifice and purity and a no-sex state. She hated having periods too, for the same lack of controllability. They just came, all by themselves, bringing cramps and a terror of some disastrous bloody accidental embarrassment every month, whatever she did.

She didn’t want to starve, but she knew from things she’d read and from the girl who’d had to leave school when she got so skeletal she couldn’t stand, that there was a clever balance if you worked at it hard enough and were careful. She wouldn’t end up like that girl, with peach-fur skin and a head like just a skull and tights that hung drooping off her legs, not a chance. But if she got it right and didn’t eat just quite enough, the periods would go away and she’d be all right, not anorexic, definitely not that, but in control. Perhaps she’d have just a little tiny corner of the Bounty bar. Charlotte could have the rest. It would be greedy to eat the whole thing in front of her anyway.

She chewed the ends of her fine fair hair and thought about the summer. She’d be able to surf every day, and always feel exactly the same. She wouldn’t have moods, cramps, blood, pads or any of that hassle. She’d be OK, she always had breakfast and she’d make sure her energy level ticked over. Well she’d have to, or she wouldn’t even be able to lift her board, would she?

Smiling, she raised her hand to reply to a question that had been asked and answered about ten minutes previously, earning a rebuke for lack of concentration and a concerned narrowing of the eyes from the teacher. ‘Sorry.’ Lily smiled more broadly, her expression turning cheeky. The concern vanished, to be replaced with one of relief. Lily noted the alteration and understood it: teachers much preferred their pupils, especially sensitive teenage girls, to be merely naughty rather than suspiciously loopy. Their lives were difficult. enough.

‘Glyn! Glyn, whose is that car in the yard?’ Kitty staggered into the kitchen shedding daffodils, shouting and kicking off her boots at the same time. She’d left muddy prints and sticky trails of sap all over the beechwood floor in her hurry to be cross with the stranger who’d splattered her with mud.

‘Mr Moorfield! Goodness we weren’t expecting you till later.’ She immediately wished she hadn’t said that. It reminded her of her mother who, out of good old Christian charity, had liked to be sure people were aware of their shortcomings. She dropped the boots to shake hands, ‘Excuse the mud – there’s lakes of it out in the lane.’

‘Oh dear, was it you I zoomed past so rudely? I’m so sorry – I was so afraid of getting lost in these teeny roads, the high banks and the narrowness made me feel just a bit trippy.’ He had a rather drawly don’t-care voice, she thought, like someone who is well used to being able to charm his way out of trouble. She recalled tabloid tales of two wives, each of whom in their turn had walked out claiming mental turmoil that they could no longer stand, presumably after that charm wore thin and tattered.

‘Well it was his fault about the mud. He’s got one of those knacks some blokes perfect over the years,’ Glyn told her wearily, handing her a fresh mug of coffee across the table. ‘He makes women go all dippy and then they’re grateful when he’s all understanding and sweetness to them.’ Kitty looked at him, frowning. ‘I hope you don’t really think I’m that susceptible. Anyway, I thought he was someone you admired,’ she said. ‘What happened?’

‘He invaded my greenhouse.’ Glyn laughed. ‘No, I admire his books. No-one else does Thinking Man as Victim these days and gets away with it quite like he does. But it’s a bit like meeting actors, they’re always shorter than you expect. With writers, they’re shorter in the sensitivity department and his hands have got thinker’s twitch.’

‘Only after he moves that monstrous thing away from the gate.’ Glyn hauled himself out of the chair. He was carrying his shoulders very stiffly, Kitty noticed, as if George Moorfield made him feel old and decrepit. There couldn’t really be anything in it, age-wise: Glyn was early fifties, and George was clearly even more than that in spite of the leather and Levis.

Kitty smoothed out the scrap of paper on which George had scrawled Julia Taggart’s number and started dialling. The usual irritating electronic voice told her that the number she was calling knew she was waiting and she hung up. There wasn’t much left for her and Julia to talk about anyway; they’d discussed who’d worn/said what at Antonia’s funeral on the drive to the station, and Kitty could only surmise Julia had some earthy piece of gossip about Rosemary-Jane that she’d forgotten to pass on, something that just couldn’t wait till they next met in London. Minutes later, as Kitty was setting out to ask George to repark his car so she could get out to the supermarket, the phone rang.

‘Me? No of course not. Yesterday was the first time I’d seen her since she went off to shine and sparkle at Oxford. I didn’t even know she’d married Ben-that-I-used-to-know, as you call him. I couldn’t honestly claim to know either of them now, not in the being adults-together sense.’

‘Well I’ve never mentioned it. I promised, didn’t I?’ Julia needed distracting from speculation. Kitty thought quickly and got in before Julia could take things any further, ‘Actually Julia, I was going to call you to do with all that. It was just a thought, really, I don’t know whether you’d have any ideas.’

‘If, just if I wanted to find out where the baby was now, is there some kind of organization where you can let them know you’re willing to be traced? Because I think that it’s the child who has to do the finding, not the mother. I’m not saying I’d want to, I just feel I need to know how to go about making it possible, opening doors. I think it’s to do with feeling mortal after poor Antonia.’

‘Hmm. I know what you mean. You just think people are always there, of your own generation anyway.’ More ticking of Julia’s brain cells was going on. ‘Listen, leave it with me and I’ll find out and ring you back. I’m pretty sure there was a woman up here in Richmond who met a long-lost son. It isn’t necessarily all joy and bananas, you know. You might end up with disappointment.’

‘You sound like Glyn! It’s not as if I haven’t thought it through. Ask anyone in the same boat, if you can find them, and they’ll tell you they’ve gone over it a million times. And I might not do anything about it – it’s a just-in-case sort of thing. So will you ask this woman?’