by Judy Astley
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.
‘Hi. George Moorfield. You were expecting me?’ Kitty adjusted a woolly sock and stood up properly to look at this house guest who’d arrived so unforgivably early.
‘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.
She pulled a vase from the dresser shelf and quickly shoved the daffodils in, arranging them rather uselessly.
‘These are for your room which is ready if you want to come and see it,’ Kitty told him. He stood up and gave Glyn a glance of amused conspiracy. ‘Should they have water, do you think?’ he suggested kindly.
‘God I feel so twittish,’ Kitty told Glyn the moment she got back from the barn. ‘He must think I’m a complete lunatic – covered in mud, flapping about with waterless daffs and dropping boots everywhere.’
‘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.’
‘Actually he told me he didn’t want to see so much as an empty wine bottle while he’s here, in case he’s tempted to take a sniff at it. He’s come here to be very seriously off the booze.’
‘Telling you his troubles, was he?’
‘While we sat cosily on the bed, you mean?’ Kitty grinned at him. ‘No, just warning me not to invite him in for a g. and t. at sixish.’
‘In his dreams. But there’s the pub in the village, he must have passed it. If he’s tempted, it isn’t far. And the Spar has a decent chardonnay, not to mention six brands of vodka.’
‘We could let his tyres down.’
‘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.
‘He said there was a phone call and he’d taken a message?’ Kitty searched among the junk mail and lists and loose bits of paper by the phone on the dresser.
‘Oh, sorry, forgot – it’s on the shelf, next to the blue mug.’ Glyn pointed from the doorway, ‘I’m going back to the shallots. Decisions must be made. See you later.’
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.
‘I did 1471,’ Julia announced without saying hello. ‘I am glad you rang back. You’ll never guess what.’
Kitty laughed. Julia still sounded so like the eager schoolgirl she’d been when she’d discovered a secret romance between the gorgeous young Latin mistress and the visiting violin teacher.
‘OK, what won’t I guess?’ she indulged her.
‘Rosemary-Jane hasn’t come back from the funeral yet. I’ve had her husband, Ben-that-you-used-to-know, on the phone wondering if she’d stayed with me.’ Julia paused for breath then asked, more subdued, ‘Is she with you?’
‘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.’
‘Worse than I thought then.’ Julia’s drama hysteria was rising. ‘She surely couldn’t have stayed with him. Not even Rose would be so callous.’
‘With Antonia’s husband, do you mean?’ Kitty wondered, not for the first time, if Julia, divorced and with her solitary son away at Edinburgh, now had too little of substance to think about.
‘Widower. And she’s not the type to hang about waiting for the decent interval. He’s a lone man; she’d be sure to pounce before someone else does.’
‘Look Julia, I really wouldn’t know.’
‘Yes you would. You remember what she was like.’
‘Julia, it was more than twenty years ago. We were into David Bowie and dyeing our hair purple!’ What would Ben look like these days, Kitty wondered again.
‘She married your bloke. Kitty, he surely wasn’t the one who . . .’ Julia suddenly said. She sounded as if this was the first time it had crossed her mind. Kitty could feel her pulse getting up speed.
‘Oh, he and I had a brief thing, that was all, just a teenage number before he went off to do VSO.’ With forced breeziness she headed off Julia’s train of thought.
There was a pause, in which Kitty could have sworn she could hear the mechanics of Julia’s brain ticking over.
‘But wasn’t that about when you, you know that bit of trouble . . .’
‘That baby, do you mean?’
‘Yes, that baby.’
‘Oh I had the baby loads later. You know I only told you, or rather my mother told yours, Rose never knew and I hope she won’t, even now.’
‘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.’
‘Ooh what? Tell me now.’ Luckily Julia was as easy to lead as a child’s pony.
‘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?’
‘I’ll ask her. I’ll let you know.’
‘Thanks Julia. And Julia?’
‘Hmm?’ Julia sounded eager to go now, on to the next thing, a nice bit of sleuthing.
‘I’m sure Rosemary-Jane will turn up soon. She always did.’
‘Yes I remember. Like an alleycat slinking home. With her knickers in her handbag and her tights on back to front . . .’
Chapter Four
Petroc had always understood that having a car was a great and essential woman-puller. It was something he couldn’t remember not knowing, same as the way he knew stinging-nettles hurt and that Coke tasted nicer than milk. He’d seen the power that local boys on the summer beaches had when they’d got their own wheels. Holidaying girls from distant dusty towns, flicking their Sun-In hair and tweaking the ridden-up bottoms of their bikinis into place, didn’t want some bozo with a bicycle to take them clubbing. They didn’t want to be walked back to their B and B where their giggly mates peeping from behind net curtains could see they’d only pulled a sad under-age yokel with legs for transport, however muscly and gorgeous those legs might have looked down on the daytime sand. Sunshine kit required a wetsuit that was truly sleek in all the right places, a Kamikaze board that was for serious creaming on the waves, not just for posing, and, top of the range, a Cal-look rainbow-paint-job Beetle horsed up with some ludicrous 1800cc fuck-off engine and wheels the size of the ones on Rita’s tractor. He’d seen girls roll over and pant for the guy last year who’d turned up on Fistral beach with exactly that. Not much was special about the bloke himself, but, starting up, that car had sounded like big cats mating and its exhaust had smelled of rude hormones.
Petroc was the first in his year to pass his test and he was daily grateful that his grandmother was given to indulging him with generous presents. As he sat in the college library reading up on the importance of the Industrial Revolution in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, he could see his adored Mini down below in the car park waiting, like Lily’s cat on the gatepost, for their end of the day reunion. There might be many places in the nation where this car wouldn’t rate high on desirability, but in a county where most villages were lucky to see two buses a day and none at all after dark, the Mini was a true prize.
‘Not going into Penzance are you?’ Jamie Kent’s perpetually beery breath wafted in front of Petroc and he recoiled, waving the air.
‘Jesus, Jamie, are you using pints of Tinners for mouthwash?’
Jamie grinned, his big over-pink face like an eager Labrador’s. Glyn had once said that Jamie already looked prime for his first heart attack. ‘No-one in their right mind will ever sell him life insurance,’ he’d added, as if Jamie, at seventeen, was likely to care.
‘Got to have lunch somewhere haven’t I?’ he said to Petroc. ‘I leave the non-drinking to you drivers. Anyway, are you going to Penzance? Caniver lift?’
‘Well I wasn’t, but I suppose I need a couple of things. OK.’
‘Good – and Hayley and Amanda too?’
‘Amanda Goodbody?’ Petroc’s hands grew hot and he prayed not to be blushing. Never was a girl so perfectly named.
‘By name and by nature.’ Jamie smacked his chubby lips. Petroc knew it was beyond hope that Jamie would organize himself to crush into the back with big, bouncy Hayley when he could haul Amanda in to squash up next to him and jiggle his great rugby-player thigh against the most delectable girl in the college. Petroc sighed, feeling used, being Jamie’s transport by proxy for the purpose of his trying to pull Amanda. There wasn’t much hope that Jamie would succeed, of course, which had to pass for compensation, but then from what he’d heard, there wasn’t much chance of anyone short of a Rock God pulling her. She had a waist-long flag of soft pale hair, the bleached-out white-gold of a sand dune, and one of those pearly mouths that looked as if it had just said the poutiest bit of ‘oh’. Even girls looked at her. He wondered where she and Hayley were going in the town. He couldn’t imagine them wanting Jamie to give them a yes/no opinion on some dress they’d found in Beauty and the Beast. Still, a quiet word offering a return trip just to Amanda might secure him the possibility of hanging around the town till she took a whim to go home, then at least her spectacular legs would be alongside his as he drove, and with his being so long, their limbs might just crash into each other a bit.
‘Do you think George is OK over there in the barn all by himself? Not lonely or anything?’ Kitty put down the Times crossword and looked across the room at Glyn. ‘I know what he said about drink but I wonder if we should invite him up, just for some coffee or something.’
‘Hmm, maybe, whatever.’ Glyn was noncommittal and clearly not listening. Kitty grinned. She should know better, she realized, than to try to talk to Glyn when Manchester United were one nil down to Southampton on TV.
‘Though this might be the time of night he does most work. Unless he’s a morning sort. It’s only that we never seem to have just one all by themselves. He must be rattling around.’ No reaction from Glyn. ‘Or he might have hung himself from that rafter in front of the Rayburn.’
‘I’ll go over and see him, shall I? See if he wants anything?’ Lily asked, wandering into the room carrying an apple from which Kitty could see only a tiny bite had been taken. For supper Lily had eaten just one small lamb chop but a reasonable quantity of broccoli, no potatoes. Kitty realized she was now noting all that she ate. In the pools of lamplight in the sitting-room Lily’s face looked all hollows and shadows, like a bruised skull. She’d always been thin, it was hard to work out if she was imagining that the girl looked somehow less of herself than she used to. She wondered if she should have tried to get her to eat more, or would that be putting pressure on and make her fight against it even more? At this stage it might be better to ignore what she ate, just carry on as usual, expecting her to turn up for meals and at least eat something, like normal people did. There’d been no rush to the loo to do any secret throwing-up, anyway. The thought almost made Kitty smile. Lily had always so hated being sick that she would, if she felt it was even remotely likely, wander the beach groaning loudly and breathing so deeply she almost passed out, just to try to get rid of the awful nausea. It was impossible to imagine her being able to do it on purpose. What was possible, though, was to imagine Lily starving herself to a state of near-hallucination in an attempt to stimulate her brain to celestial heights of poetry.
‘He won’t want a serious type of drink, obviously,’ Kitty carried on musing to whoever might be half-listening. ‘But he might like to feel it’s OK to mingle a bit if he wants to.’ The first half of the match had finished and a heavy-metal ad for a Real Man’s car came on. Glyn pressed the remote and turned the sound down.
‘T
he writers don’t usually come in here and mingle with us,’ Glyn reminded her, looking faintly hostile. He made a bit of a ritual of getting through several cans of Budweiser when he watched football, and resorting to coffee or fizzy water just to keep an alcoholically challenged guest feeling comfortable would render the match unwatchable. ‘They usually make their own entertainment. Once you start letting them in . . .’ He sounded as if he was talking about stray cats.
‘Well, making your own entertainment’s fine when there’s more than one of them. We’ve never had a lone author out there before.’
‘If he’d wanted to be with people, he could have gone to a hotel. Or just stayed home and let the pursuing wives catch up with him.’
Kitty sighed and gave up, returning to a tricky anagram.
‘So shall I go?’ Lily persisted. ‘Is no-one going to answer me?’
Kitty put the paper down again and looked at her. ‘No don’t go, Lily; it’s OK. I expect Glyn’s right. We should leave the man in peace.’ Lily went to the window and peered out, bored, into the darkness. There was more than enough peace out there for anyone if you imagined nothing but trees and grass and the sea, frozen for the night like a dismal painting. But you only had to do a bit of listening to work out that there wasn’t anything that was really peaceful at all: there were owls and foxes and mice, and sea birds roosting on sea that wouldn’t rest, and the waves that always had something to say and small, pinching winds that wouldn’t let the trees sleep. It was only ordinary people who thought that darkness meant everything stopped; creatures, plants, poets, they knew better. She crunched her apple extra loudly so her parents knew she was still breathing.
Kitty recalled what she’d read about about George Moorfield’s most recent novel. She hadn’t actually read the book yet, but it would have been hard to miss the enormous number of reviews and interviews it had generated. Something about the kind of extended family, she recalled reading, where not to have sex with every single member would have been, as the Sunday Times had put it, ‘significant as a sin of omission’. Lily would want to show him her writings. It was easy to catch herself speculating what he might want to show her.
