The Right Thing (26 page)

‘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.