The Right Thing

by Judy Astley

  Kitty groaned and laughed and sank back under the duvet. She didn’t care about socks. No-one could. Glyn shouldn’t – he wasn’t much over fifty but with no school to run, like a prime minister suddenly deposed, hadn’t enough to think about. She dreaded to think with how many trivial obsessions he might start filling those intellectual gaps. ‘The sky wouldn’t fall in if you wore odd ones. Or none,’ she told him. She’d just remembered Rosemary-Jane Pigott – Ruthermere – air-kissing goodbye and saying, ‘Now we’ve all met up again, we must keep in touch. Ben adores Cornwall . . .’

  So Ben Ruthermere adored Cornwall. Since when? she wondered now. And would she have recognized him if he’d been nearby, this summer, say, crewing in the Falmouth Classics or browsing among the artistry at the Penwith Gallery? She tried to picture him: portly, perhaps by now balding, scrabbling at his inside pocket for his reading glasses. He’d been what her mother had disparagingly called Remarkably Average: medium build, neutral colouring and average height. ‘They don’t age well,’ her mother had forewarned as if, for one moment, there’d been any likelihood that Ben Ruthermere, if told of the results of his sexual carelessness, would be prepared to do the decent thing by her pregnant daughter and submit to a hasty wedding. It was such an unlikely and unwished-for outcome that Kitty hadn’t thought there was any point telling him. Besides, he’d gone off to do VSO in Ethiopia before Cambridge and had parents so burstingly proud of him that even the conscience of Kitty’s fire-and-brimstone father quailed at the thought of destroying their delight. ‘What is the point in putting two sets of parents through all this?’ he’d said with a profound sigh of Christian resignation. Madeleine had Ben’s brown-haired, hazel-eyed genes mingled with Kitty’s own slim, blond and brown-eyed ones – she could look like absolutely anybody.

  ‘So how did it go yesterday? You didn’t say much last night.’ Now that Glyn had clothes on he was ready to be conversational.

  Kitty hauled herself out of bed and went to the window to look at the sea. It had a bright and menacing cold sparkle. ‘No, well, I was just so tired. That last bit from Truro, it’s so familiar I got scared I really was driving with my eyes shut.’

  ‘Dangerous. People die driving too tired.’

  Kitty shivered and reached for her velvet dressing-gown over the back of the small shabby sofa that they’d had too long to be able to throw out.

  ‘Poor old Antonia was killed driving her car up a tree. On their own land too, which makes it worse somehow.’

  Glyn looked puzzled. ‘How could it be worse? Dead’s dead. An absolute, the absolute.’

  ‘Yes I know, but don’t you think, and I know it’s not logical, that you should somehow feel safe on home ground? You should be able to trust it, feel secure, the same way you should be able to trust the people you live with.’ Struck by sudden childish irreverence she went on, ‘When we were young and horrible but should have known better, Julia and the rest of us would have laughed and said that in any contest between Antonia and a two-hundred-year-old oak, the tree would be the one to cop it. There wasn’t much to laugh at yesterday though.’

  ‘No. Well, there wouldn’t be.’ Glyn looked solemn but at a loss, Kitty thought. She could see his face searching for something encouraging to say, just as he would have done to a downhearted pupil. Eventually he came up with, ‘Nice to see old school pals again though.’ He waited for her to look cheered.

  ‘Well, strange anyway. Nice doesn’t describe it. Nice couldn’t describe Rosemary-Jane Pigott actually, you should meet her.’

  Glyn considered this more seriously than she had meant him to.

  ‘Well perhaps we could . . .’

  ‘No! Please, I didn’t mean it. Don’t even think of it!’ Kitty laughed. ‘If we’d wanted to keep in touch properly, I’m sure we’d have done it before now. It’s been over twenty years.’ Glyn looked doubtful. He still had a cohort of old school chums, people who’d bonded at fourteen in the post-rugby bath and still met up for drinks, weddings (quieter, second or third ones these days of course), blokeish support and Test Match outings. They swopped snippets of legal and educational advice or edged round medical matters, carefully editing out fallen income or flagging sexual potency.

  ‘Besides,’ she said, drifting through to the bathroom, ‘you’ll only look at her and me and decide I maybe haven’t worn as well as I might. I’m not giving you the chance to do that.’

  From the bathroom window Kitty could see Lily already down on the beach with Russell the cat. Lily kicked moodily at the sand and slung pebbles into the water. No surf, no fun, no excuse to dump the coursework. The orange and white striped cat picked its way along the sand and shingle behind Lily at a safe distance, stopping every now and then to investigate bits of seaweed and washed-up coloured twine. It would have followed Lily on to the school bus if she’d let it but instead it waited around at the end of the lane every afternoon, nonchalantly washing its feet on top of a gatepost as if it just happened to be there at home-coming time. Kitty, testing the bath water with her toe, wondered suddenly if Madeleine was a dog person or a cat one. If she was alive that is, if she was allowed pets at all. She thought of a mean strict family, an aging mother over-keen on hygiene who thought furry four-footed creatures harboured germs and fleas and things that threatened the perfection of a scoured kitchen floor. ‘Poor kid,’ Kitty said to herself as if she’d conjured up a real-life picture.

  Petroc Harding, who worried that he might still be growing, ate four slices of toast and honey and wished he had the kind of mother who fussed in the mornings and concocted huge, grease-strewn, man-building breakfasts. Mornings had never felt right, not since he’d realized at the age of about six that unfairness was possible and that grown-ups got away with it. It was to do with being the son of a head teacher. He felt that as a pupil, right from being very small, teachers had always looked at him in an odd way as if they expected him of all people to sympathize with what they were trying to achieve for their charges, and not give them any disruption and trouble while they did it.

  ‘I didn’t expect that from you,’ Ms Warren had said when at the age of seven he’d thrown Sam Tremayne’s wellington boot into the stream where they were pond-dipping. Sam had yelled a bit but hadn’t really minded much – his boots had already been filled with water and emptied out a couple of times simply because they were better for catching tadpoles than a torn net on a stick. Sam had looked from Ms Warren to Petroc and back again as if there was something weird that he wasn’t being told. Petroc had known immediately what it was about and had stared sullenly at the ground, pretending to refuse to acknowledge his position of being half on the inside when it came to teachers.

  There weren’t that many schools in the area. Parental choice with regard to secondary schools, his mother had complained, was an item for dinner-party discussion only where there was choice. Places like Surrey or Greater Manchester perhaps. Here, you got the school bus on the far side of the main road for one town or the near side for the other, or you fell off the edge of the world to boarding-school and never quite joined in again. At the age of ten it had slowly dawned on him that his next headmaster, the one his swanky know-it-all classmates with older siblings already referred to as Old Hard-on, was going to be the man he called Dad.

  He blamed his father one hundred per cent for the five years of being called Rock-Hard when he’d been planning to be known as Pete, and found it difficult to forgive him for waiting till the very year Petroc himself was to leave the school for the sixth-form college to take up an offer of early retirement, due to the money-saving merger of his school with another. Now, more mature and uneasily pretending he didn’t feel he was being shadowed, he affected a casual tolerance of his father’s presence two days a week at this same college, banging the essentials of the English language into the slow heads of reluctant GCSE retakers.

  ‘Are you going to college?’ Lily brought in the fishy scent of the beach with her and a blast of cold damp air.

  Pet
roc scowled. ‘You want a lift to the bus stop? ’Cos if you do you’ve got less than ten minutes.’

  Lily shrugged. Petroc worried about how pathetically thin her shoulders were. The shrug looked like a wire coat-hanger twitching beneath her school sweatshirt. Even her long fair hair looked underfed and lank. It was as if, aspiring to be a poet, she was keen to take a good old-fashioned share of Keatsian consumption and demise as well.

  ‘Have you had any breakfast?’ he asked her. keeping his voice casual and barely interested so she wouldn’t think he was having a go. It was hard to get it right with Lily, one wrong word and she flounced off, furious. She could flounce for Britain, but then his mum said any girl of fifteen could: it was what they did. He pushed his plate across the table towards her. She gave it a look, turned her nose up and he grinned. ‘Yeah I know. Not much of an offer, cold toast.’

  ‘Cold toast with a bite out of it.’ She pointed a pale skinny finger at it, not quite touching as if it was something nasty the cat had found on the sand. Her nails were almost blue, as if they’d taken on the cold of the outside air and kept it stored.

  ‘So did you have any breakfast?’ he persisted. Lily sighed and started twiddling a strand of hair.

  ‘Cereal. Bran flakes. Six fluid ounces of milk, one cup of lukewarm coffee – two sugars – oh and half a soggy custard-cream biscuit – last one in the packet.’ She smiled. ‘Is that enough?’

  ‘Not in this weather. This is fry-up weather,’ he grumbled, getting up and shoving his plate into the dishwasher.

  ‘You can get me a Bounty bar at the Spar then,’ she countered, picking up her school bag. ‘Where’s the parents?’

  ‘Abluting. Dressing. Planning a red-carpet welcome for the Great Author arriving today.’ Lily smiled, her eyes brightening at the thought of at last having on home ground a fellow writer who wasn’t just one of the usual holiday-break amateurs. To him she would confide her poems, let him read her soul. Better still, he’d know a publisher or two.

  Petroc’s Mini had a rimy coating of cold drops, each one a perfect, separate, shimmering blob. It would rot, he was told by friends, being kept so close to the sea. The salt would eat under its sky-blue paintwork. The tyres would perish and the chrome on the bumpers would soon rust and flake. Envious people liked to say that sort of thing, liked to pile on the bad-luck curses. He patted its back corner, feeling as ever that it was like the rump of a dumpy young girl left looking lost at a party when her tall, gorgeous friends have been claimed for the night.

  ‘Why do you bother to lock it? Who’d want it?’ Lily demanded crossly, pulling at the door-handle. She blew on her hands, emphasizing how cold she was.

  ‘Have you said goodbye to the old folk?’ Petroc asked, climbing into the driving seat. It wasn’t easy – his long legs had to fit each side of the steering-wheel. He was nearly eighteen and prayed he wouldn’t get any taller. The seat was already pushed back so far no-one could sit behind him.

  Lily climbed in beside him, ‘No-one about. They don’t care whether we get educated or not.’

  Petroc grinned at her as he started the eager engine. ‘You aren’t getting educated. I know you spend half your time up the lane in Josh and Rita’s kitchen when you should be at school.’

  ‘You can learn a lot in Rita’s kitchen.’

  ‘Not stuff you pass exams in.’

  ‘You sound like Dad, you know that? She tells me real-life things.’

  ‘Like how to roll a joint and grow your own? Sex a newborn goat and cook mung beans?’

  Lily groaned. ‘God you’re boring. How did our parents manage to produce two people who were so different?’

  Petroc laughed. ‘It’s a mystery. Ask Rita, she’s bound to have a witchy theory.’ Petroc slowed down as they passed Rita’s farmhouse in case of straying livestock. Its roof had a shiny new patch of corrugated iron. He imagined Rita up a ladder with her hand-woven wicker basket full of nails and a mallet that was too heavy for her. All that wild black hair would blow across her face and her boots would slip on the dangerous tiles and she wouldn’t care at all or even notice that she was teasing death. Rita’s last year’s daffodil-season find, Josh, a free and pretty spirit who dabbled lazily in restoring antiques and shivered miserably in inclement weather, wouldn’t know where to begin with roofing pegs and a ladder. Rita wouldn’t ask him anyway, in case he took fright at being asked to be useful. Lily was peering out of the window, eyes bright, hoping to catch sight of her mentor.

  ‘School,’ Petroc reminded her. ‘Just do the exams and then you’ve got choices. You can go anywhere.’

  ‘Yeah I know. It’s just . . . I don’t want to go anywhere, you know? Everyone expects you to want to run away from here, fast as you can to the nearest city. I don’t.’

  Petroc slowed the car round the last mud-caked bend. ‘Here you are. One bus stop, complete with your doting admirer Fergus.’

  ‘Oh thanks. Make my day. There’s also one Spar shop, so money for Bounty bar?’ She turned and smiled at him, her thin little face lit up as she extended her hand for cash.

  He handed her fifty pee. ‘That’s part of my lunch money. Don’t waste it.’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing the Queen was supposed to have said to Princess Diana about food. I’m neither anorexic nor bulimic Petroc, will you just get that?’ The door of the car slammed and Lily’s skinny legs stalked to the bus stop. Her clumpy shoes looked huge, as if she’d borrowed them from Olive Oyl. Fergus, a boy waiting ever more hopelessly for a growth spurt to kick in, grinned up at her. ‘Poor sod,’ Petroc said to himself, switching the radio to Pirate FM.

  Kitty had allocated the best of the guest-rooms to George Moorfield simply because this early in the year he would be the only person occupying the converted barn. Refusing to be impressed by his fame, she’d told Glyn that he was to expect no special favours, especially after his fax had arrived. This notorious gentleman of literature had simply commanded ‘I require en-suite facilities,’ as if deep in Cornwall such a request might be a problem and that the words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ might be unheard-of on the far side of the Tamar. ‘He probably imagines a midden next to a pig pen and one cold tap behind a silage clamp,’ Kitty had said.

  The Barn had rooms for ten guests attracted by adverts in The Author and Writers’ News magazines. A large communal cooking-and-living area gave them a chance to get together and share work problems and ideas. They were usually struggling would-be authors in search of inspiring solitude, either escaping the demands of family life or making the most of holiday time from something in an office and dreaming that this book would be the one that brought them fame, fortune, prizes and film rights.

  Being a painter herself, Kitty had at first thought they might accommodate artists, but decided ruthlessly that they were intrinsically messy and would spend too much time wandering the premises looking for the ever-better view. Writers, Kitty had pointed out to Glyn, had no choice but to be conveniently self-contained, though the previous scorching summer she had noticed several lying on the beach, closed notepads ready for inspiration by their side as they dozed in the sun. George Moorfield was by far the most famous client who’d ever booked in, and Glyn was keen that he should form a happy first impression and tell all his friends who he imagined would be equally celebrated.

  ‘Play our cards right and this place could be right up there on the literary map. A sort of Cornish Bloomsbury,’ he’d enthused to Kitty as they put final touches to the room. Kitty had doubts. One renowned author didn’t make a salon. ‘Do you think he’ll be warm enough?’ Glyn was fiddling with the radiator thermostat. ‘I wonder if it needs bleeding . . .’ he murmured.

  ‘He’ll be fine. It’s like an oven. And he can always set up his computer or whatever he works on down in the kitchen by the Rayburn if he’s in need of being cosier. There’s only him so he won’t be in anyone’s way.’ Kitty smoothed the heavy cream crocheted spread over the bed. The duvet beneath it was goose down, no-one could complai
n of being cold under that. The walls of the room were painted a warm butter yellow and the blue carpet, which was new and shedding the odd tuft, still smelled faintly of Homeworld’s flooring showroom. The building was fearfully quiet and Kitty made a mental note to bring over a radio from the house. George Moorfield might have a fondness for listening to the Archers while he prepared his solitary supper down in the big snug kitchen, or even enjoy an unlikely background of faintly twittering Radio One while he worked.

  ‘I wonder what Madeleine’s bedroom is like,’ she said as she took towels through to the small blue bathroom.

  ‘What?’ Glyn appeared at the doorway looking puzzled.

  ‘Madeleine. That baby I had.’ She didn’t look at him. Her fingers fumbled with the loo-roll holder and she dropped the roll of paper on the floor. Glyn picked it up and handed it back. ‘You haven’t mentioned her for ages.’

  Kitty sat on the edge of the bath. ‘No. Well. It was just that Antonia’s funeral got me thinking about her again. I think I’ve always assumed I could just check up on her for real, if I truly wanted to, any old time, though I know it’s more complicated than that. But who knows how much time any of us have got?’

  ‘Well they do that to you, funerals. They’re a bit fundamental, all that here one minute, gone the next. And where? Gone where?’ He was scratching the back of his neck, Kitty noticed. He always did that when he was nervous about difficult things being said. It wasn’t that he liked emotions tidied away out of sight, as her parents had done, it was more that since he’d retired from dealing with school problems, he seemed to expect there to be nothing tricky to deal with for the rest of his life at home either. Kitty persisted, determined to make him listen because, suddenly, it mattered.

  ‘I don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. All those years ago all you were told was that it was the right thing to do, completely the best thing for the baby, giving it a proper family life. No-one said anything about all the wondering you do for the rest of your own life. Everyone made you feel that to do anything else would have been selfish.’