The Right Thing

Kitty had been back from London ten days and Ben had phoned six times to talk about Rose. He was driving Kitty crazy and she’d taken to shouting ‘I’m not in!’ at the first ring. Of course no-one in the house took any notice. Petroc just looked depressed and growled, ‘It won’t be for me,’ which she took to mean it wouldn’t be Amanda and if it was anyone else he didn’t care anyway. Lily and Glyn always seemed to be on their way out of a room, not so much as turning back with curiosity, when the phone rang.

‘When I think, all those years ago he simply disappeared to do his VSO and never even sent me a postcard,’ she complained to Glyn after the first four calls. ‘He must have been looking through Rose’s address book. I can’t imagine him coming straight out with it and saying, “Hey Rose, what’s Kitty’s number these days, I think I’ll call her a hundred times and talk about the affair I think you’re having.”’

‘It’s for you. Your admirer again,’ Glyn smirked, handing the phone over to Kitty soon after breakfast. Tee-heeing at her and making mocking kissy noises, he drew a fat heart on the Post-it pad on the dresser, scrawled Ben’s name on it and added an arrow through the middle, then stuck it on the cupboard door. He went out to the car to go off to do a stint filling in for a depressed colleague at the college, whistling cheerily, and Kitty could hear him shouting hello across the yard to George.

‘Well, you know what Rose is like . . .’ Ben was sounding defeated as usual. Rose was away working, back in Cornwall filming something about mulch and manure at the Lost Gardens of Heligan and far too near to Tom for Ben’s peace of mind. Kitty assumed she was getting lumbered with his confidence purely on the grounds that she was at the moment geographically closer to his wife than he was. There must have been other, closer friends of hers he could be sounding out, because really she didn’t actually know what Rose was like, not these days. She only knew what she thought Rose might be like. For Ben, apparently, that was good enough.

‘Perhaps I should have gone with her, but pressure of work, you know. And someone’s got to keep the dog company at night.’ Ben laughed weakly, as if even he knew how pathetic he sounded. She imagined him with a lonely takeaway, at one end of a long kitchen table, feeding chicken tikka scraps to an equally miserable-looking basset hound. Then she pictured the two of them curled up together on a sofa from which Rose had long ago banned the dog, watching a video about wronged husbands and revenge, stuffing themselves with sour-cream flavour Pringles.

Kitty shoved a cushion onto one of the kitchen chairs and settled herself into it, resigned to a long session of counselling. Ben was one of those people who liked to get well stuck in for a phone chat, going in for moaning in one long uninterruptible stream. He’d probably got himself all ready to call her with a mug of coffee and a scheduled space in his office diary. In her experience, men weren’t usually keen on telephones. If Petroc and Glyn were typical, they simply made whatever arrangements the call demanded, or in Petroc’s case grunted unintelligibly for fifteen seconds, then hung up. Rita had once said that a low phone bill was the best thing about having sons and not daughters.

Kitty wished she was up in the studio, where at least she could be adding a few seagulls to the Coverack painting while Ben talked. Just within reach on the window-ledge behind the sink was a bottle of Lily’s nail varnish, so she entertained herself painting her left toenails purple. When Ben eventually took a breath she cut in quickly. ‘Well Rose is working too, isn’t she? It’s not as if she’s swanned off for no reason. Suppose it was the other way round and she had suspicions about you; how would you feel if she tagged along to all the wine auctions just to keep an eye on you? It would be like having your mum along at a scout camp.’ She tried to keep it light, though there was only an outside chance she’d achieve a quick cheer-up breakthrough with him and be able to get back to work.

Not much painting had been done in the couple of weeks since she’d got back from London, having decided it might be a good idea to spend a bit of time with Glyn and convince him she wasn’t about to run off back to the city and move into a flat with Julia and Rose in an effort to recapture some sort of lost school-buddy idyll. Nor, she made it clear, was she going to brood about Madeleine and race up the lane every morning to meet the postman’s van in case all the form-filling and list-registering had worked and the girl decided to write a letter. What would it say if she did, she wondered as Ben prattled and she mopped purple globs of varnish off the table, ‘Hello Mum’? ‘I’m now on the Adoption Contact Register,’ she’d told Glyn and the children. ‘If anything comes of it, well fine. If not, well fine as well.’ Glyn seemed convinced, though she wasn’t quite so sure she was.

‘And you’d think after so many years,’ Ben was droning on. ‘Perhaps if we’d had children. Perhaps if it had worked out with you and me . . .’ Kitty started sketching Lily on the back of a bank statement. She could see her through the open doorway, sitting outside on the wall wearing her wetsuit and looking out at the sea, her fine pale hair drifting this way and that in the breeze. In a moment she would slide silently into the water and paddle out into the waves on her board, using reserves of strength that hardly seemed credible in someone who looked so fragile.

‘And she’s taken all her make-up: the going-out sort, not just the stuff she puts on quickly for work.’ Kitty sighed impatiently and prodded at her big toe. The purple stuff was nearly dry but had turned a nasty insipid bluey-mauve, as if she’d been stepped on hard by a big pony. Ben was whining now, there was no other word for it. If it was Petroc she’d tell him to get over it, find someone else.

Lily didn’t care that it wasn’t safe to be surfing alone. It was her beach, nothing the sea did here could surprise her. If someone was with her she’d only have to feel responsible for them, especially close to mid-tide when there was a vicious undertow over by the rocks on the west side. There was a medium offshore wind and the waves were coming in clean and just big enough, early-morning perfection. The sounds of the sea were muffled through her winter helmet and her webbed gloves helped her paddle through the water, out beyond the rock-line, with the grace and speed of a cormorant. Petroc had told her that in her full cold-weather kit she looked like a seal, all cased in neoprene like this. But seals were fat and they lumbered and wobbled on land. Lily felt she was more of an eel, slinky and slim. She got that from her mother who was just starting to admit to being middle-aged now but hadn’t got the spread. Somewhere out there, she thought as she paddled along, she’d got a sister and she didn’t even know what she looked like. She hoped she looked like her, so if they met they could see each other reflected, know how each felt in their own skin. Also she could see what she might look like in a few more years – decide if she liked what the future held and make arrangements, eating-wise and hair colour and such, if she didn’t.

Pulling her concentration back and forgetting about this mystical Madeleine, she kept her head down on the board, feet together, streamlined and low, feeling no aches or strain as if only this one thing was what her body was built for. Knowing without looking that she had reached the right place, she turned the board sideways and lay on the waves. On its way from beyond the horizon, she could see, was the perfect set as if it had just been waiting for her. She smiled, steadied the board and braced as the first wave came, let that one go and then took off on the second. It was better than flying. Someone at school had said it was better than sex, though this particular someone was one who might not be relied on to know. It was like running across the surface of the sea, the ultimate walk on water. ‘Eeeeagh!’ she shrieked as she made a perfect cut-back before planing right up onto the sand. She picked up the board and shook her hair out of the helmet. That was enough for now. It couldn’t be beaten, not on that day.

‘Do you think that’s what Jesus was doing?’ George was on his rock in a patch of thin sun again, bravely barefoot this time. She was sure he must be pretty freezing – he looked all stiff as if he’d been there the whole night. He reminded her of the summer holiday-makers who even in the dankest sea mist still came to the beach, because that was what you did every day for a fortnight.

‘Then he wasn’t a much of a surfer, was he?’ Lily stood in front of George, looking down at him and dripping cold sea water on his pale feet. City feet, she thought, guessing how much it must have hurt him to step across the gravelly yard and the layer of crushed shells, pebbles and weed at the top of the high-tide line. Serve him right, she thought, for not having the soul for poetry. She reached for the cord behind her back, pulled down the zip of her wetsuit and wriggled her shoulders and arms free from the neoprene. Her soaking rash-vest clung to her thin body and she shivered. George grinned up. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about the poetry, about not being keen. If you want to show me some of your writing I promise to ignore my prejudices.’ Lily could feel herself blushing scarlet. She hated him instantly. He was patronizing and he’d wrecked her mood.

‘No fucking way,’ she spat at him and stormed back to the house. Where the skin on her shoulders and back had been cold it now felt as if it was burning, as if she could feel George watching her walk. She felt aware of how she moved, seeing in her mind her skinny legs in their tight black casing. She wished the sand would part and she could walk down into a pit and cover herself. There was nothing worse, nothing at all worse than feeling like a total fool.

‘Rita’s here! Be quick Lily, you’ll make her late,’ Kitty was calling up the stairs. Rita was in the kitchen by the window, watching the blue tits squabbling over the nut feeder hanging from the cherry tree. ‘It’s coming up to blossom time. All swollen buds and sexual readiness,’ Rita murmured. She was sitting inelegantly slumped with her legs apart and her purple crushed-velvet skirt draped across her thighs. Kitty thought the big expanse of fabric looked as if something was missing from her lap, a baby perhaps, or a basket of fruit, whatever they used to hold in those dark old paintings of unsmiling, put-upon women. Rita was wearing flat, round-toed sandals, half blue, half red, like children’s holiday shoes, with enough room inside for her toes to splay comfortably. The shoes were scuffed and shabby, the stitching along the thick crêpe soles was coming undone, and her navy wool tights drooped over the straps. Sad shoes, Kitty thought, shoes for feet that no longer had the heart to dance. How different they were from Rose’s frivolous Manolo Blahniks that she’d worn at Julia’s. Those had been shoes to seduce by, shoes for tautening the leg muscles and making you think of sex. If she’d packed those for Cornwall, she was definitely up to no good. She wouldn’t trouble Ben with that particular question.

‘He’s just like the cats,’ Rita said, watching Lily’s ginger cat pacing stealthily along the beach wall, slinking low to creep up to where the blue tits were feeding. ‘They only want to be in snuggling up to you when it’s cold, making you feel loved and special. Come the summer he’ll be off hunting just like they do and I’ll be all on my own again.’ She stood up and stretched, stiff. ‘Where’s Lily? She does want a lift to school doesn’t she?’ She sounded unusually impatient as if she wished she hadn’t said anything.

‘Doesn’t make it not happen either, does it?’ Rita sighed. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have had the children so young, then these middle years would still have some purpose. But everyone I knew was hauling a baby around with them when I had the boys. Toddlers were an essential part of the scene at all those summer festivals. All their little plump bodies running around naked. Mine had daisies in their hair. You never thought about them growing up and turning into accountants and teachers and stuff.’ Her twisted grin lit up her face again. ‘Malory, the eldest, he rang the other night and told me he’s taking a party of year nines on a geography field trip to Swanage. And he’s worried they’ll misbehave. He’s turned out so straight I can’t believe he’s mine sometimes.’

Amanda was being as friendly and normal as if nothing had happened and Petroc found it very hard to deal with. All the times he’d seen her since what he called in his head the Night of George, she’d just been casual, saying hello and then walking on by with Hayley or someone like she always did, and he’d had to be as if none of it mattered or had even happened. He had a feeling that if he said anything, reminded her how close they’d got to some serious sex, she’d go blank and look at him as if he was loopy. Perhaps it had all been some wanker’s fantasy he’d had. A big sticky horny dream. He wanted to get her alone somewhere and do some talking about what, if anything, their relationship actually was, or could be, but she was like something slippery and couldn’t be cornered. He’d think she was being evasive if she was anyone else, because anyone else would do silly-girl drama things like suddenly turn and stride off the other way if he met them in a corridor. He could deal with that all right, because he’d be the one in control of it all. But Amanda just chatted on, or not, as she always had, borrowing 20p for the phone if he was the nearest, or offering her own notes on Wordsworth’s Prelude to anyone who wanted them, including him. He was simply not special.

Now though, during the morning break she brought an extra cup of coffee to the table where he was reading the Daily Mirror sports pages and asked if he minded her sitting with him. He grunted a casual’s OK’ at her but could feel himself getting as warm as if he was sitting on a radiator that had just been switched on. She was being sisterly, that seemed to be the only word for it, as if absolutely no-one in the whole building meant more to her than anyone else did. It blocked off all possibility of getting back to anything more intimate. Inside his head a voice of the Petroc who secretly absorbed every blokey word of Loaded in Smiths was doing some up-front laddish reasoning with her, saying, ‘So. Shall we go on from where we left off, with my hands up your shirt groping for your tits?’ But back in the college canteen the real-life pink-faced Petroc sat and pretended he couldn’t give a flying fuck about anything but this all-absorbing report about British hopefuls for that summer’s Wimbledon. What he should do, it suddenly occurred to him, was ask her about the adopted thing, about whether she’d ever wanted to go and find her first mother, just to see what she was like. He could tell her about his mother’s given-away baby, who now might possibly turn up. He didn’t think Kitty would mind – at home, since she’d got back from London, it seemed like something that was a now-topic, one with a bit of hope and expectation in it, not a rather sad past one like it had before. It would be something important he and Amanda could share, something special to link them. He took a breath but he’d spent too long thinking and she got in first.

‘Right.’ Petroc sipped his coffee and racked his brains for a clever angle on novel-writing. It might be that he was the first, the only one she’d confided this to, so his interest had better be deep. It might be as good a piece of confiding as the adoption stuff. Nothing original came to mind. ‘What’s it about?’ was all he could come up with.

‘What have I done?’ Petroc mopped at the mess with his sleeve. He would reek of stale coffee for the rest of the day and be reminded of this hopelessly failed encounter. Jamie was approaching with a leer and the kind of lolloping swagger he liked to amble up to girls with. Amanda pushed past him and he made a sympathetic face at Petroc. ‘Upset the queen bee, have you? Let me guess, I bet you said something like, “Let me put my tongue in your ear.” Subtle. Or perhaps it wasn’t ear . . .’

Glyn had a long lunch break, for which he’d phoned Kitty and suggested she meet him at the Tate in St Ives. There was enough time; the classes he’d taken over from Maurice had now been cut to the minimum, doubling up the numbers where feasible and simply cancelling the ones with habitual low attendance, all to save money. Poor Maurice was out of action with serious depression brought on, Glyn soon realized, by the deathly futility of trying to drag the most unwilling and barely literate students through the final stages of GCSE English Language. The oral exams were coming up soon and each pupil made so much effort to avoid preparing for a practice run, choosing a subject for discussion and giving a four-minute talk on it, that during the first period he’d made six of them present an ad lib speech on avoidance of work. Now he was looking forward to lunch.

He drove his scruffy mud-encrusted old Volvo carefully through the narrow streets across the back of the town and down the steep lane towards Porthmeor beach. There were several spaces in the car park, tourists hadn’t yet arrived in numbers large enough to make a difference, but Kitty’s Fiesta wasn’t anywhere in sight and Glyn felt mildly annoyed: he was the one with a class to get back to. George’s bizarre turquoise Bentley, though, was parked up on the road above the beach. ‘On the lookout for inspiration, I suppose,’ Glyn muttered as he locked his car door and gazed, as he always did, across this strip of the finest pale sand and out to the sea that was the most perfect, most unEnglish shade of turquoise. If this beach was a fabric, he’d always thought, it would be up there with the best cashmere, whereas the scrubby strip of foreshore, loved though it was, in front of Treneath would probably rank with, say, denim or calico.

‘I thought you hadn’t got here yet,’ he said, climbing the steps towards her. He hadn’t expected to see Kitty just then, and managed to catch sight of her for a second or two as if she was a stranger. The wind was blowing her thick fair hair wildly across her face. He liked her like that, unkempt and cosmetically careless. She had large, expressive brown eyes that looked all wrong framed and tamed with make-up. As her hair blew around he could make out her joyous smile and the glint of delight in those eyes as if she was more pleased to see him than she had ever been about anyone else. He’d wondered such a lot lately what exactly, maybe something more than the funeral of Antonia, had prompted the decision to make it possible, after so many years, for her lost child to find her. It had crossed his mind that if she thought there was something lacking in her life, it might be to do with him. ‘A retired man is a diminished one,’ his own father had warned him when close to death from the cancer that had hurried so quickly to fill the awful gap of bored inactivity left after the giving up of his all-absorbing work in the Home Office.

Glyn gazed out to where she was staring. George was sprawled on the sand, at last managing to look as if it was something he did every day rather than perching gingerly as if there was a cunning freak wave out in the ocean, destined to swirl up the beach and wash him away to the next life. Beside him, clutching a folder, sat Amanda Goodbody, her arms wrapped round her knees.

The gallery was full of schoolchildren, swarming and circling and chatting as they filled in activity sheets. Their bits of paper fluttered and waved and were dropped on the floor. A furtive collection of small boys sniggered slyly in a corner in front of a painting of a fat pink naked woman, lying on a beach. Kitty thought she looked as if she’d been tragically drowned and washed up on the sand, but the children giggled and grimaced at and pointed at her breasts and the blue and purple seaweed that trailed through her pubic hair like party ribbons. It reminded her sharply, and with deep retrospective shame, of an appalling incident in the school gym changing-room, with a miserably naked Antonia (who’d foolishly braved the showers) held captive and spread-eagled on the cold tiled floor, while an attempt was made to race a pair of snails along her thighs. ‘First one to her fanny’s the winner,’ stipulated Rosemary-Jane. Kitty, watching the small boys, shivered guiltily, remembering her cruel self remarking that the snails would never make it, there were too many dents and dimples. She turned away and made for the café entrance. Glyn, who had never known her as anything but grown-up, kind and reasonable, grinned sympathetically at the children’s teachers who glared back at him with protective hostility.

‘It’s more likely they were expecting us to make some complaint about the noise level,’ Glyn said, picking up the menu and wondering if he fancied vegetable lasagne or a smoked-salmon bagel. ‘There’s a common look of defensiveness that all staff on a school trip have. It comes from being thought to be forever in the wrong.’

A woman with frizzled greying curls was at the next table reading Northanger Abbey, the book propped open with a salt pot. She was taking large bites out of a big untidy sandwich, scattering shards of tomato and shreds of lettuce all over her plate along with messy drips of mayonnaise. Kitty sensed she wasn’t really reading: she was peering just too intently at her book and had pushed her hair behind the ear that was closest to her and Glyn. She reminded her of Julia in the bar, forever vicariously alert to the goings-on of others. She wondered if Julia had any idea that Ben was phoning her almost daily. She was almost tempted to ring and tell her, ask her to give him a call and take over as chief sympathizer and counsellor. Glyn hadn’t noticed the woman listening. She prodded his arm and tipped her head just a tiny bit in the direction of the scattered sandwich.

‘Is it because of the baby?’ Kitty said loudly. The woman looked up and met her gaze, an incredulous expression firing from her wide blue eyes. Glyn glanced sideways and grinned wickedly. ‘Yeah, well there’s the baby, and that old lover of yours being back in your life.’ He leaned towards Kitty and murmured, ‘Do you think she’s just nosy or researching for a novel?’ Kitty giggled then said loudly, ‘It’s not my old lovers that’s the problem, more their wives.’

‘Or their children.’ Glyn suddenly sounded more sombre. Kitty waited, a forkful of lasagne suspended between the plate and her mouth. Far more quietly he said, ‘Years ago, way way back you told me who that baby’s father was, which was all right then because I don’t suppose it crossed your mind you’d ever see him again. I’m quite good at maths, especially the two plus two variety. I do have a memory you know, I do know that the fool who married your friend Rose and who keeps phoning is Madeleine’s father. If she does turn up, are we going to get him as well?’

Glyn looked angry. ‘What do you mean “of course”? Just how elective are you women about who you tell what to? When Julia rings she always sounds as if whatever she’s about to say comes with a “Don’t Tell Glyn” sticker all over it. But you didn’t mind popping up the lane and discussing this Madeleine with Rita.’ His hands were stretched flat on the table, white with tension. The woman at the next table quickly gathered up her book and her bag and swished past to the door. As it opened the sound of laughing children with no complicated histories drifted in.