Chapter Thirteen
They were really too big for Ben’s car. As he lowered himself carefully into the leather seat and sought space to arrange his legs, Glyn wondered what kind of man would buy himself a Porsche when he’d got to the age and size where getting in and fitting behind the wheel could only be an effort and an undignified squeeze. Ben Ruthermere wasn’t overweight and neither was Glyn, but with the extra substance that accumulates with age they both bulged beyond the edges of the snappy little sports seats till their shoulders almost touched and the silly stubby gear stick was uncomfortably close to their knees. To choose to drive like this, to fold himself up and puff himself into place, a man had to be feeling pretty unsettled about something. Glyn presumed it was the classic cliché sexual thing, along with an attack of the middle-age insecurity terrors. He could only sympathize, when he thought about it, but was glad that his own confidence-boosting indulgence in decent designer clothes (long-run bargains, as women usually argued) didn’t involve four-figure insurance.
‘It’s up here on the left, watch the bend though, the wall sticks out,’ Glyn said. They were roaring past Rita’s. There were no lights on now and he hoped she wasn’t lying awake and weeping. Perhaps he should drop Ben off there, then the two deserted ones could snuggle up together and soothe away their various miseries. Ben wasn’t at all bad-looking, Glyn thought, trying not to chuckle at his idea, Rita would think it was all her birthdays at once. Ben, though, might not.
‘Are you sure this is going to be OK?’ Ben asked for the third time.
‘Absolutely. Kit will be delighted to see you, I’m sure.’ Glyn wasn’t at all sure but the poor man had driven an awfully long way, straight from a city office by the look of his smart but crumpled suit, and could hardly start searching for a hotel room in Penzance this late in the evening. And besides . . . a terrible demon in him could hardly wait to see Kitty’s face. Madeleine would be there. There would be Kitty, Madeleine and Ben – with luck they’d all sit in a row on the bigger of the blue sofas, two of the three not knowing that together they made up a family. A family of sorts anyway.
‘I should have phoned,’ Ben was saying as they pulled into the yard. Yes you should, Glyn agreed silently, just as Kitty had thought about Rose when she’d turned up weeks ago. ‘But the mobile doesn’t seem to work here,’ Ben continued as they freed themselves rather stiffly from the baby car.
‘No, well, this is a primitive outpost of the empire. We tend to rely on carrier pigeons and semaphore.’ Ben squinted through the dark, trying to make out what Glyn was talking about.
‘For communication?’ Glyn said. ‘It’s OK, it’s a joke . . . well nearly.’ He headed for the door, realizing Ben was more tired than he’d thought. ‘This way, come on in.’
Kitty’s face was exactly the gratifying picture of gob-smacked astonishment that Glyn had anticipated, but disappointingly Madeleine wasn’t in sight. He assumed she’d gone up to bed. Even for someone as young as her, being that pregnant must take its toll.
‘Ben! How lovely to see you!’ Kitty’s social graces took over quickly from her surprise. She and Ben kissed politely, like a dinner-party pair. ‘Is Rose with you?’ she looked behind him as if expecting her to be hovering behind the door. As if, Glyn thought. She was hardly the sort for shy hanging-back.
‘I found him in the pub, looking lost,’ Glyn said.
Ben laughed. ‘Well, you might as well be lost in a pub as anywhere else.’
‘Er . . . where’s Madeleine? Gone to bed?’ Glyn tried to sound casual.
‘Actually, she’s moved across to the barn. I went across and helped her make up the bed in room six. She and Lily both need the space, Madeleine needs more than a single bed, and George needs a helper, so it seemed a good idea.’
‘True. We all need space.’ Kitty gave Glyn a hard look. He was looking too pleased with himself, too pent-up with suppressed glee. ‘Drink, Ben? There’s a bottle of white open in the fridge. I think, well I hope, it’s just about good enough to serve to a wine merchant. I’ll fetch it.’ Glyn left the room, whistling cheerily. Kitty and Ben sat on sofas opposite each other, each waiting for the other to say something. Kitty tried a sort of welcoming how-lovely smile and felt her face collapsing into what must have looked like a uselessly empty grin. What was she supposed to do with him? Ben was leaning forward, his tired hands drooping like big empty gloves in front of him. Any moment, she felt, he might drop to his knees at her feet and plead to be told where his wife was.
‘Rose isn’t here you know, Ben. Hasn’t even called in, or phoned,’ she said eventually.
‘No. Well I gather that. But you do know where she is and what she’s up to.’
‘I know she’s making her programme near St Austell, that’s the last thing I heard. I can’t tell you where she’s staying because I haven’t a clue.’ And I don’t give a flying fuck, she added in her head.
‘She’s with Tom Goodrich. They’ve been at it for years.’ He sounded weary. ‘I’ll go over there tomorrow and see what it is she wants to do about us. About her and me. As if I didn’t know.’ Kitty didn’t know what to say. Ben looked, just now, more angry than defeated.
‘Well if it’s a divorce, why not just go for it?’ she suggested gently. ‘I mean, it’s not as if there are children involved.’ Put like that it sounded horribly insensitive.
‘No. No it isn’t,’ Ben said, with a wry grin. ‘That’s some of the problem. She wanted some and couldn’t have any. So she started wanting someone else’s. Antonia’s would do as well as anyone else’s, especially when they came with such a plum of a father and a gem of a house.’
‘She got used to taking stuff from Antonia round about the age of eleven,’ Kitty said. ‘Her Conway Stewart pen, her Latin homework. Rose even stole a pair of grotty unwashed gym socks when she’d forgotten her own. It was easy, just a nasty habit.’
‘OK, drinks all round,’ Glyn interrupted. He looked strangely jolly. He was enjoying himself. Kitty glared at him and stood up, deciding she wasn’t up to playing social piggy in the middle for this pair. ‘You two finish the bottle. I’ll make up the studio sofa bed for you, Ben, and Glyn will show you where everything is, but for now I’m afraid I just have to go and sleep. See you in the morning, we can talk then.’
Petroc had thought there were only a certain number of times you could see reruns of movies you’ve enjoyed with someone else. The first time he’d seen Blue Juice had been about four years before with twelve others skiving a Wednesday-afternoon games session. There were far too many of them, more than a football team’s-worth, for their absence to pass without comment and his stomach had been cramped with nerves anticipating his father’s wrath. He wouldn’t be picked out or made any kind of embarrassing example at school, that hadn’t bothered him, but at home there’d be that disappointment thing that parents went in for. Parents like his who went in for Personal Trust specialized in hurt silence and the tight-lipped ‘We didn’t expect this,’ as if that could be even halfway true – if you’ve got a teenager you get trouble, it’s the way life’s arranged. What had made that particular afternoon blissfully worthwhile had been that, in the scramble for seats, Amanda Goodbody had somehow ended up sitting next to him. Her thigh was squeezed against his in the dark, only an accidental brush of the hand away from being flesh against flesh that back then had only recently started doing serious lusting. He hadn’t, now he came to think of it, really entertained the thought of anyone else as a serious object of adoration since then.
This time though, for the rerun of Blue Juice, he was in Hayley Mason’s bedroom. Propped up on a heap of pillows in Hayley Mason’s single bed, watching her video and sharing Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice-cream straight from the tub. He was contentedly sated from sex with the never-before-considered, all-enveloping Hayley, a girl with warm welcoming flesh that had moved about softly beneath him like feathers in a plump new duvet. If Amanda Goodbody walked in now, all long, hard-muscled thighs and a waist as bony and thin as a violin body, declaring undying love and lust for him, he could honestly say she’d be told to go away and forget it. Hayley had no complications, no complexes, no self-doubts. She was friendly and direct. She had a taste for beach life, detective novels, football, sex and some, but not all, of the bands that he liked. She planned a year off after A levels (no angst about failing: you worked, you passed) with a six-month job in London and four months visiting relations in Australia, followed by teacher training. She did not yearn for fame, a life more thrilling, men not attainable, hair that was blonder or a size ten body. Petroc, licking the spoon and passing it over to her, thought that this time it just might be love. Restful, peaceful, blissful love.
‘Y’all right?’ she asked, plunging the spoon deep into the melting ice-cream. It wasn’t a request for reassurance. She just wanted to know. Petroc looked down at her large blue eyes and tangled mass of dark brown hair. Her smile was broad and generous, her teeth even and pretty. There was a tiny smear of pink ice-cream at the edge of her top lip. Petroc leaned across and kissed it away, gently.
“M’all right,’ he told her.
Kitty had been waiting over an hour for Glyn to come up the stairs. She didn’t want to go to bed, though earlier she’d felt so tired she could have happily curled up on the sofa and spent the night there. Glyn was still downstairs with Ben. She’d heard as she waited the rumble of male voices and every now and then one of them would laugh. There had been the sound of Glyn returning to the kitchen, bottle-opening noises, the clinking sounds of ice and glass, heavy male footsteps, the flush of the downstairs loo, more laughter and more talking. She’d tried to read, lying on the sofa with her feet kept warm under a cushion, staring at the same words on the same page over and over. She’d looked out of the window, stared across at the barn wondering what Madeleine was dreaming about. Girls of twenty-four don’t come running up in the morning and say ‘Mummy, I had this dream . . . !’ She’d missed all that. They didn’t share their secrets and hopes either, or tell you what they worried about in the seconds before sleep got them. They didn’t tell you if they woke up in the night with a pounding headache. Even Lily didn’t do all that any more, and she was only fifteen. Kitty would never know if Madeleine preferred to sleep on her left or right side, or if she flung her arms up above her head like a baby and slept on her back, one leg out to get cool. There was no sign of life in the barn. For all she knew, George and Madeleine and the bulk that was the baby could be awkwardly but contentedly tucked up in bed together. She couldn’t know. Nobody needed her to know. All this, and all of Madeleine’s life, was none of her business and never had been.
‘Oh. You’re still up. I thought you’d be asleep ages ago.’ Glyn was suddenly in the room, hauling off his sweater, straight from the back the way men always did. For a second, Kitty, who had actually started dozing, had a picture of Ben pulling off a purple ribbed top in exactly the same way in his teenage bedroom, so very long ago. It had lain crumpled on the floor, trodden over and mashed in with the rest of their scattered clothes in their haste to fall into his bed. He’d had an eight-track stereo in his room, one of those technological non-starters that had rushed into oblivion like Betamax video and the Sinclair C5. They’d played David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album, she remembered, and burned jasmine-scented joss-sticks. On the wardrobe door had been a poster of Bryan Ferry, strutting in silver, snake-hipped and slick-haired.
‘Ben’s gone up to the studio. I showed him where everything was. He’s knackered, I bet we don’t see him before ten tomorrow.’ Glyn was taking his time, wandering round the room less aimlessly than it appeared. He always took his watch off as he passed the chest of drawers on the way to their bathroom, always left his shoes just outside his wardrobe and then had to shift them out of the way with his foot in the morning when he needed to open the door and choose clothes.
‘What did you two find to talk about till . . . what is it, heavens, nearly one thirty,’ Kitty said. She stood up and stretched, wondering what had happened to all those way-back days of clothes-casting and bed-leaping, all too fast and frantic to care about the consequences. The consequence was sleeping just across the yard.
‘We didn’t talk about you, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Glyn emerged from the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. ‘There’s more to life – there’s cricket and wine and the falling pound and slug control . . .’
‘Glyn, what are you playing at?’
‘Playing?’ He went back into the bathroom and she followed him. He slooshed mouthwash and looked in the mirror, tweaking at his hair as he did every night to see if it was more inclined to fall out than it had been the day before.
‘Yes, playing. You’ve got this smug “I know a secret” look. I bet you’ve had it all evening, chitchatting away with Ben. He probably thinks you’re demented.’
He switched off the bathroom light, pushed past her and got into bed. ‘Well I do know a secret don’t I?’ he said. ‘The question is, is Ben going to be told it too? After all, you could argue that he’s entitled. In fact you could hardly argue that he’s not.’
‘I wish I’d never told you.’ Kitty was angry. ‘It isn’t a game and it’s nothing to do with you. What Ben didn’t know all those years ago he really doesn’t need to know now. It wouldn’t change anything – well, not for the better anyway – what difference can it make after all this time?’
‘Well I don’t agree.’ Glyn climbed out of bed again and put his bath robe on. It was white waffle cotton, which Kitty always thought looked like judo kit, just now seeming perfectly suited to his combative mood. He strode to the window and stood looking out towards the sea. The wind was getting up. The softly damp new leaves on the old beech tree near Rita’s house were rustling urgently, and when Kitty joined Glyn to stare out into the dark she could just make out the awkward jerky twitchings of the great limbs, like a very old man who is determined to have one last go at disco dancing. ‘I think you should tell both of them – Madeleine and Ben,’ Glyn went on. ‘Then everything’s out in the open and they can make of the situation whatever they will. They are grown-ups, Kitty.’
‘No. I can’t do that. Well at least, not without thinking and . . .’
‘Thinking?’ Glyn was shouting now. ‘It’s a bit late for thinking. If you and Ben had done some thinking all those years ago, we wouldn’t be having this ridiculous conversation.’
‘Ssh! You’ll wake Lily! And Ben will hear too. He’ll think we’re arguing about him. He’s feeling bad enough about Rose without imagining we’re rowing about him being here.’
Glyn sighed. ‘Always other people’s feelings. You’re so sodding saintly, Kitty. Or are you a control-freak? Just tell Madeleine she’s got a father. Tell Ben he’s got a daughter – that’ll give them both something new to think about. You can’t keep pulling all their strings for ever. Just let go.’ He got back into bed, turned his back on her and switched his lamp off. She felt dismissed, no longer worth listening to or talking to. It was probably something he’d perfected in his teaching days.
Kitty went into the bathroom, shut the door and turned on the shower taps, running the water as hard as it would go. She took all her clothes off, hurled them into the laundry basket and sat on the floor, leaning her back against the ice-cold tiles on the side of the bath. ‘Just let go.’ The words seethed and spat in her head. How were you supposed to let go of what you’d never had? ‘Just let go’ was a lot like ‘Put it all behind you’ and ‘Now you can get on with your life’ – the cosy phrases that were trotted out when the mistake-babies had been safely signed over to their new parents. The neat clichés were so glib and slick and easy to say – and they took so little thought. Even from Glyn, Kitty thought now as she stepped wearily into the shower, even Glyn.
Lily hated waking in the night. The sleep afterwards was always too light and fidgety. She’d gone to bed early, before ten, as soon as she’d helped Madeleine move her stuff across the yard to the barn. There was nothing to stay up for. Madeleine and George didn’t make it obvious that they wanted to be on their own; they included her in what they said, but she kept feeling as if they were waiting for her to leave. She felt she was handing Madeleine over to George and she felt desolate, as if she’d lost her somewhere in the yard between the house and barn. Lily had become Madeleine’s special person in the house, and now in the barn it was going to be George. They kept making stupid jokes, finishing each other’s sentences and talking in Fawlty Towers voices (George being Basil and Polly and Madeleine going between Manuel and Sybil). They didn’t do it very well, but they laughed at each other as if they were just the best comedy thing ever.
But worse than feeling that she was only on the edge with them, not right there in the middle, was being sure that after she’d gone they’d stop being TV characters and start taking the piss out of her mum and dad. She wasn’t sure why, she was only aware of the sense that that was why they were waiting for her to go. She could just imagine it, too horribly clearly, even if she lay in bed with her hands over her ears; Madeleine acting all crawly and caring like her mum was, copying the way she was with her: ‘Madeleine, are you sure you’re comfortable? Another cushion?’ and ‘Yoghourt – what flavours do you really like?’ which she said every time she made a shopping list, as if not having a clue about Madeleine’s dairy preferences was the one thing she’d really minded missing out on for all those years.
Kitty and Glyn were talking loudly enough for her to hear across the corridor and through two closed doors. Lily had often wondered what it would be like to live in a household of high dramatic tension; to have parents who didn’t go in for give and take and careful reasoning but thrashed out the tiniest disagreements at the highest volume, and with door-slamming and plate-smashing and stuff said that should be unforgivable. It was hard work to nurture the soul of a tortured poet in a household of casual consideration and good manners and a sort of easy-going general happiness.
They were close to shouting now, in that way, she could tell, that meant they were only keeping the volume down because they didn’t want someone else to hear. She could sense teeth that were gritted and control that was only just there. In the interests of research, Lily slipped out of bed and out of the room and close enough to their door to hear details, but far enough away so that she could bolt back to bed if there was something she needed to pretend she hadn’t heard.
Lily hadn’t thought about Madeleine having a father – a birth father in the same way that Kitty was her birth mother. She felt, as she shivered outside the room, that she’d had a terrible failure of imagination about that. There were photos that Kitty had kept from when she was young, about Petroc’s age, wearing hideous tight skimpy tops with long swirly skirts. She’d had too much long thick hair, a fringe that covered half her nose and was half grown out at the sides, curling round on her cheeks. Lily had looked at those photos and seen someone who was still her mother, but wearing a disguise as someone young, like fancy dress. She’d not been her mother then, she’d been just a young girl like Amanda, or Charlotte or herself, with boyfriends and problems and then a baby and then not a baby. She’d never kept Madeleine a secret, but she hadn’t said anything at all about who the father had been. None of them had thought to ask – a name wouldn’t have meant anything and besides, Madeleine had always been something, an event, that had happened to Kitty all by herself. Lily, listening so hard she was hardly breathing, now knew Madeleine’s father was someone called Ben. Someone with, according to her father, rights.
Lily then heard her father yelling ‘Just let go!’ He was angry. She heard a light click off and their bathroom door slam and didn’t want to leave things there.
‘Mum?’ She opened the door a few inches. It was dark, silent, as if she’d been dreaming it all.
‘Lily? What are you doing up?’ Her father’s voice was soft, like it used to be when she was little and he was worried that she might be ill or sleep walking.
‘I heard you. You were arguing. What’s wrong?’ He wasn’t going to tell her. He’d gone into caring-night-time-parent voice.
‘Nothing, Lily. It’s OK. Just stuff that will sort itself out in time. Go back to sleep now, it’s late and you’ve got school.’
‘No I haven’t, it’s Saturday tomorrow. Who’s Ben?’
‘Ben?’ Glyn switched on the light and sat up. ‘What about Ben?’
‘Who is he?’ she persisted, leaning against the door-frame.
‘He’s . . .’ Glyn considered for a moment, ‘he’s the husband of that old friend of your mother’s. You know, that Rose who came for a night. He’s here, up in the studio, arrived after you’d gone to sleep.’ He grinned at her. ‘So if you walk into the kitchen tomorrow morning and he’s munching toast, you’ll know, won’t you?’
Lily scowled and chewed her nail. She recognized, just as Kitty had, a schoolmasterly dismissal – a dismissal with only half the truth at that. ‘Yeah I’ll know,’ she snarled, ‘sure I’ll know.’
She went back to bed. The patch where she’d been sleeping was still warm and Russell had taken the opportunity of sliding under her duvet and curling up by the pillow. She curled her body round him and pulled him close to her. He purred and twitched his whiskers in his sleep. ‘Animals don’t go through life wondering where their children have got to, do they? Or who their mums and dads are,’ she whispered to him. She hoped they didn’t. Imagine, she thought, cows pining for every calf. Cats sorrowing after kittens, wondering about the ‘Free to a good home’ offer and whether it had been checked and certified. All that paw-kneading that cats did when they sat on your lap, she imagined them picturing a big, soft, long-ago mother cat and the remembered taste of her milk.
She snuggled deep down in the bed with the cat, who miaowed and struggled and then leapt to the floor, protesting at being cuddled so hard. He went to the closed door and started scratching at it, clawing at the paintwork and at the carpet. ‘Ssh Russell, come back and let’s get to sleep,’ Lily called to him but the scrabbling got more frantic. She sighed and swore and climbed out of bed again, opened the door and followed him down the stairs, hungry now from being awake so long that her stomach had started thinking it was time for breakfast. As Russell hurtled out through the cat flap, she padded around the kitchen in the dark, assembling a crust from the end of a big wholemeal loaf, butter and some dense and over-sugared marmalade that Polly at the Spar had made the year before and sold at the playgroup fête.
Lily sat on the worktop with her arms huddled round her knees, munching hard and staring out across the wall at the moonlight on the sea. The wind was fiercer now, moaning through the trees. Silver-edged clouds scudded in the sky, hurtling across the moon. In the morning the sea would be high and the surf would be gnarly and difficult. Madeleine had promised to come out and watch her. She wanted to be impressive, it was important. She slid down off the worktop and went back to the bread bin, cutting another fat slice of bread. Madeleine hadn’t liked her picking at food and saying she wasn’t hungry all the time. She’d said it was important to keep your body warm inside. You could only do that with food. She’d said you shouldn’t let the body starve and fret and crave and then pretend you were doing it to be in control of it. You didn’t have the right, she’d said. Your body was there to look after your happiness so you shouldn’t be ungrateful to it and refuse to give it what it asked for.
Madeleine wasn’t chatty for the sake of it, not like most people which must be why Petroc had given up trying to get her to talk to him and Dad just thought she was moody. It meant though that if she was telling you something, it was because she really believed it needed saying and that made Lily feel special. Lily finished the bread and opened the fridge. She took out a carton of milk and drank about half of it, straight from the pack, the fridge door still open. Then she broke off a piece of Cheddar from the big slab on the top shelf. ‘You’ll have bad dreams,’ she could hear her mother warning.
When the kitchen light snapped on, Lily’s mouth was bulging with chocolate biscuit.
‘Lily! Jeez, what the fuck are you doing?’ Petroc stood blinking in the doorway, eyeing the devastation. On the table was the bread, crumbs scattered, the marmalade jar empty and lying on its side. There was a big twiggy skeleton that had once been a bunch of grapes, the chewed bones of a couple of cold chicken legs and a line-up of six cereal packets. Lily was leaning against the sink, her skinny wrist shoved down to the bottom of a tube of Pringles, sour cream and chives flavour.
‘I didn’t eat the cereal. I just got the packets out.’ Lily was defensive and wide-eyed. She slid her arm out of the Pringles tube and pushed it behind her onto the draining-board.
‘What for, to read the nutritional values while you scoffed your way through everything else?’ Petroc picked up the chicken bones and flung them into the bin. ‘What’s wrong with you, Lily? You’re being scary.’
‘Nothing’s wrong. Madeleine said I didn’t eat enough. No-one else has dared say it, like they didn’t care. She does.’
‘Oh. Madeleine said. Well there you go.’ He wiped the crumbs from the top of the table.
‘Don’t you like her?’ Lily looked scared.
‘I like her, a bit. I don’t know her. She doesn’t say anything, not about herself. Surely you’ve noticed?’
‘She says stuff to me. She did when she was in my room anyway. Now she’s not. She’s gone over to stay in the barn.’
‘What, with George?’ Petroc grinned.
‘Not with George. Just with more space, she said.’
Petroc reached into the fridge for a Coke and sat down at the table, tracing his finger through the damp patches the wet cloth had left. ‘She might be with George, you know. She comes all alive when he’s around.’
‘She can’t be, he’s old. Anyway she came here to be with us, with her real mum, not pick up a bloke.’ Lily stamped across the kitchen and looked into the fridge again.
‘Hey, don’t eat any more, please. You’ll explode – even precious Madeleine wouldn’t expect you to go that far. And sure, he’s old, but he’s old and rich, old and famous. Perhaps that’s what she’s into. We don’t know. We don’t know anything.’
Lily huddled her arms round her body. She was feeling quite sick now, and starting to tremble with cold. There was a gale blowing outside and the wind was whistling under the kitchen door, chilling her feet. ‘I know we don’t know. But we’re getting to know, at least I was. I don’t want her to leave before I can be sure she won’t go away for ever. And imagine Mum if Madeleine just went off and left now . . .’
‘She’ll go some time, Lily. You can’t just keep her in a box like some stray cat that’s turned up, hoping it won’t remember its way home. Madeleine’s got a family somewhere else. Her real family.’
‘I know, I know. I’m freezing. I must go to bed. Petroc, why are you so late home? Were you with Amanda?’
‘Amanda? Who’s Amanda?’ he grinned at her.