by Judy Astley
Right now, though, there wasn’t much point starting anything that would take more than ten minutes. Petroc’s car, stranded with him at the college, was in dire need of a new battery. ‘It’s not just that it won’t start, Mum,’ he’d moaned down the phone, ‘It’s totally flat and even with push-starting it’s going to keep on doing it.’ Kitty, fearing for Glyn’s back and blood pressure if he had to help get the car going every morning, agreed to pick up a new battery, drive over to the college and help Petroc install it.
Even after nearly seventeen years, since she and Glyn had left their small house in Dulwich and taken over his family’s collapsing homestead after the death of his father, Kitty still found the distances that had to be covered for the simplest country errand daunting. Visiting the Truro Sainsbury’s seemed to take more than half a day. You didn’t just pop down to the Spar for an extra pint of milk without checking the fridge and the bread bin in case you later found you had to make another trek out. Her three-year-old Fiesta had covered nearly sixty thousand miles, and at every garage economy-minded local drivers queued patiently in line at the single diesel pump. Right now, having driven five miles to collect Petroc’s new battery and making her way another ten miles in the opposite direction, Kitty found herself wondering what it would be like to live again in a place where all one needed for life’s efficiency and comfort was to be found in a five-mile radius. Urban politicians who whinged about housewives cluttering up the streets with the school run and gadabout weekend families polluting popular beauty spots clearly had no idea how real people in the country had to function without flag-down public transport.
Kitty drove up the hill towards Redruth station where an Intercity train heading for London was waiting to get going again. It looked far too big for the small station, making impatient revving noises as if it could hardly wait to get out of the county and up to serious speed. Among the schoolchildren who casually used the service just between Penzance and Bodmin every day, there would be many who had never travelled any further, never crossed the Tamar or seen a terminus bigger or busier than the harbourside shed at Penzance. When Kitty had phoned the Post-Adoption Centre she’d been offered counselling, either locally or in London. She didn’t want it to be local; the baby had been something from a distant time and a distant county. She could park right now, if she wanted to, forget about Petroc and his battery and simply get on that train.
A bus loading a rush-hour queue of passengers forced her to wait, and she recognized a tall slender blonde girl sitting on the bench across at the station outside the ticket office. Amanda Goodbody. Petroc had mentioned her name at his final school speech day when Kitty had been tactless enough to wonder aloud how a girl could so completely not resemble her parents. She of all people should have known better and when he’d said, ‘Oh, she’s adopted,’ it had been inevitable. ‘Even her mum calls her a cuckoo,’ he’d laughed. Kitty had felt ashamed of her careless comment. The parents, she recalled as she waited for the slow procession of heavily laden bus passengers to pay their fares to the driver, had been classic Cornish farming people, stocky and with plum-skinned weather-battered complexions whatever the season. Amanda’s hair was baby-fine and light, whereas her family’s earth-brown hair resembled impenetrable nests of sprung wire.
‘Hey! Mrs Harding!’ Just as Kitty was about to move off behind the fully loaded bus, a streak of pale yellow flashed across the front of her car. ‘Are you going anywhere near the college?’ Amanda’s eager blue eyes were peering through the window at her, so close Kitty could have counted her eyelashes. ‘I’ve forgotten Macbeth!’
‘Haven’t we all!’ Kitty laughed, opening the passenger door. A fresh scent of teenage skin and Body Shop soap wafted in with Amanda. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I was hanging round the station desperately hoping to see someone I knew, even if it’s only really slightly. I’ve got an essay. Something about Lady Macbeth and motherhood.’
‘Was she a mother? I haven’t read it since school and I can’t actually remember.’ There was a gap in the traffic and Kitty pulled out and overtook the bus.
‘Oh yes, she was. She says some stuff about breast-feeding anyway, though who knows what happened to the kids. Perhaps the babies died.’ Amanda didn’t seem remotely perturbed by the idea.
‘Perhaps,’ Kitty agreed. ‘That might have made her jealous of that other one who had lots of children, the ones that Macbeth killed. I hated that bit. What was it he said, “All my pretty chicks and their dam . . .” I always thought that was terribly sad. I remember sitting in class feeling quite tearful. It’s about all I remember of the play.’
‘Yeah, that was old Macduff,’ Amanda told her. She fished around in her bag and took out some sticks of chewing-gum, offering one to Kitty who declined. Amanda peeled off the silver paper and folded it into a boat shape. ‘I suppose my mum could have killed me,’ she said suddenly, crumpling up the tiny silver ship between her fingers. Kitty, negotiating a right turn, was startled. They’d looked like a pretty close family when she’d seen them at the speech day, proud and happy parents, a daughter loving enough to allow them to hug her in public when her name came up for the English prize. ‘Why? What have you done?’ Kitty asked.
‘Before she had me. Not this mum, not the one that adopted me, the one I was born with,’ Amanda said. ‘She could have had an abortion but she gave me away instead. I think I’m glad she actually went ahead and had me, but then you never know if you’d have got a chance to be someone else instead if you’d died, do you? I mean if your soul, or inner self or me-ness, whatever you like to call it, was going to exist anyway, you don’t know if you’d have got a better deal if you’d been given another shot at it. Like karma, you might have been awarded a completely wonderful life just because it was owed to you.’
Kitty felt exhausted. The girl’s train of thought was faster than Great Western.
‘Come on, Amanda – look at yourself, beautiful, talented, clever, what more could you ask for?’ They were pulling into the college drive, so Kitty assumed she could count on a short and uncomplicated answer. Amanda sighed. ‘Paris?’ she said after a small pause for thought. ‘I wouldn’t have minded being French. I do so admire Colette.’ She sighed again as they stopped and she stretched her long legs out of the car door. ‘You’re right though, I am lucky. But I do wish I’d done A-level philosophy,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it would have helped.’
‘It might have made things worse,’ Kitty told her. ‘Anyway, good luck with the essay. And with anything else you think you need it for.’
‘Cheers!’ the girl was out of the car and sprinting for the building. ‘Hi Petroc!’ she yelled as she ran.
‘Huh,’ mumbled Kitty’s son, barely looking up. Amanda didn’t even look back.
Chapter Six
The trouble with staying with Julia Taggart was that she liked to know exactly what you were there for. It was the price of the visit and, as Kitty preferred the comforts of staying at Julia’s house to the dodgy anonymity of a cheap hotel, she was going to have to donate some information along with the flowers and contributory bottles of wine.
Julia, so long divorced and with only her own inclinations to indulge, hadn’t yet moved on from the squashy over-stuffed décor of the 1980s and although the surfeit of curtain fabric and the number of cushions to be removed from the bed before it could be got into were slightly oppressive, at least Kitty knew this was one house for which she didn’t need to pack the transparent hot-water bottle with the floating scarlet hearts in it that Glyn had given her last Valentine’s Day. The spare-room walls in Julia’s Victorian house in Richmond were painted the faded terracotta of old flowerpots, and the pile of the pale blue carpet was deep enough to lose even the flashiest earrings in. Kitty sometimes suspected that the rush to streamline her own home with stark beech floor and unlined calico, abandoning the cosy fitted carpet and padded curtains, had been an impulse not properly thought out. She’d been inspired by too many interior-décor features on the Amer
ican seaside look, all clapboard, linen and hot picnic summers. It was a look that required a serious input of sunshine, and sometimes in the mild but dank Cornish winter she felt her sitting-room resembled a skinny girl who’d worn a sleeveless silk frock to a chilly marquee wedding in early May.
‘So, what time’s your appointment?’ Julia demanded over breakfast in her sunny kitchen which was the exact soft blue of love-in-a-mist. Behind the request, Kitty sensed a reminder to Tell All the moment she returned. Julia had never quite understood the word ‘confidential’, but there’d be plenty of time on the tube back from north London to work out suitable edited highlights.
‘I can’t think what you need to see a counsellor for, actually,’ Julia, not waiting for an answer, commented as she poured coffee into artistically uneven rustic mugs. ‘They can’t tell you anything that you can’t tell yourself. If you’ve decided you want to find your daughter what difference does it make what anyone else thinks?’
‘I think the idea is that with this person I work out for myself the things I don’t already know, if you see what I mean,’ Kitty told her. ‘Like why do I want to do this now, what’s different from earlier. Why find her at all and what do I think either she or I could possibly have to gain from it, that sort of thing.’
Julia sniffed. ‘There might not be anything to gain at all, not on your side. She might turn out to be one of those squawking girls who present kids’ telly. Or she might be in prison for murdering her adoptive mother. You should be careful, digging things up. Or wait another ten years till she’s more sort of fully formed. More like us, settled.’
‘Digging things up’ made Kitty think of an old Labrador rooting in the earth for a long-buried bone, scattering earth and trampling peonies. This thought was swiftly followed by the poignant image of a child’s exhumed coffin, a dusty version of what she’d pictured during Antonia’s funeral. Quashing her demons, she grinned at Julia. ‘You sound just like Glyn. I think I’d rather risk it than not and if I want to see “settled” I can look in the mirror at my ever-increasing wrinkles and feel depressed. Don’t forget I can’t actually do any finding myself. I’m just opening the doors for her to do it, if she wants to. Of course she might not.’ Kitty found she always added some kind of rider like that, even when she was only thinking, not speaking. It felt like touching wood or crossing fingers, except this time she hadn’t quite decided which particular outcome she was touching wood for. Julia could easily be right, Madeleine could have turned out to be a complete disaster. Or not. Fingers crossed again.
She reached across the table for more butter. The croissants were fat and flaky and sinfully delicious, enough to make you sure that diets were only for those sad souls who were losing the will to live. Julia had gone out early to collect them from the French patisserie round the corner. In a moment of frank envy for the joys of urban life, Kitty thought of the huge old earthenware bread bin on the pitted wooden worktop at Treneath, which tended to contain nothing more exotic than basic whole meal and Lily’s favourite spongy white sliced. Sometimes she bought croissants in supermarket bags of eight and then put them in the freezer where they languished forgotten until they resembled fossilized pallid Plasticine and were long past any possible eat-by date. She could imagine the various versions of the Madeleine she’d conjured up for herself, peering into that bread bin: one version sneered at the lack of smart ciabatta and olive focaccia; another, less sophisticated Madeleine hauled out a half-defrosted pain au chocolat and scoffed it down cold with cooings of delight.
‘So anyway, what time do you have to be there?’ Julia persisted.
‘Eleven thirty.’ Kitty sensed possible trouble. Julia’s sense of curiosity might make her suggest going along as well. She’d say it was for ‘support’, which was so very much a blackmail word in that the offerer knew exactly how almost impossible it was for the offeree to find a tactful way, any way, of turning it down.
‘Oh good. That fits in.’ Julia looked pleased and started bustling about clearing plates and mugs while Kitty was still finishing her last piece of croissant, licking butter from her fingers. ‘It gives you plenty of time to get back after and get ready.’
Julia was being careful, as she rinsed plates and shoved knives into their dishwasher slots, not to look at her, but Kitty could just see the edges of a little smile.
‘OK, you’ve got that I-know-something look, Julia. What are you planning?’
Julia looked up, wide-eyed. With her bobbed chestnut hair hanging like a spaniel’s ears beside her face and her pink-cheeked suggestion of guilt, she reminded Kitty of the day they’d stashed one of the biology lab’s dissection catfish behind the gym radiator. ‘Nothing!’ she insisted, dragging it out to several syllables. (Shades of ‘It wasn’t me’ from way back then.) ‘Just a little surprise supper. Especially in your honour.’ Kitty recognized another blackmail phrase. ‘I’ve just invited a couple of people, that’s all, so we won’t have just each other to put up with all evening.’ Julia bent back to the dishwasher and swopped a couple of plates round, pointlessly as far as Kitty could make out. ‘Just Rosemary-Jane and Ben. Unless you feel you’ve seen too much of her lately, just that she mentioned they might be out this way today . . . Oh and a chap called Martin from up the road who I wheel out when I need to make up the numbers. No-one special. Or do you think you might be too tired? I just thought you might find it fun to see your old ex again. That’s all.’
Kitty grinned at her, defeated by Julia’s cunning. ‘No, I won’t be too tired. I think I can manage north London and back without needing an early night. Though I don’t for a moment imagine Ben will remember which of his girlfriends I was. It was hardly a great romance. Typical teenage thing.’
It was important to underplay it. Julia had shown staggeringly untypical reticence in not chiselling away to find out who Madeleine’s father was, but it didn’t mean one or two possibles hadn’t crossed her mind. She wouldn’t ask directly, that would be too simple and would involve no satisfying detective work. If Kitty simply said, right now, ‘Julia, I think I ought to tell you, Ben was Madeleine’s father,’ Julia would be as disappointed as a child who demands and actually gets their Christmas presents early. Perhaps she hoped that plenty of tongue-loosening alcohol over dinner would lead to indiscreet reminiscing.
‘Oh, he’ll remember. Men only pretend they don’t in case we’ve got something to hold against them. It’s just like when they get drunk and claim everything’s a blank and they weren’t responsible. I had a husband like that.’ Julia sighed and her face took on a rather remote, distant-memory kind of look. Briskly, she grabbed a J-cloth and wiped Jif round the sink as if scrubbing away the last memories of this substandard man.
‘Now I’ve got today off work,’ Julia said. ‘So I’ll just go down to the market for veg and over to Kingston for fish. Simple. I’ll see you later.’
‘So you’re on your own then. I saw Kitty going off in her car yesterday with a bag and a look of travel.’ George sat next to Glyn on the rock. Glyn shifted along slightly, regretting it instantly as he felt the seeping of a patch of damp through his Levis. It wasn’t worth getting soggy just to make a point, but the beach was plenty big enough. George could have parked his bum anywhere. Why didn’t it occur to him that a man sitting by himself on a rock might be there because he wanted to do some thinking in peace and quiet? Glyn had assumed a writer would be sensitive to moods. Presumably George was only sensitive to his own. That must be the problem with living so much in the inside of your head, you ended up thinking no-one else had anything going on in theirs. Lily, off school for an inset day, was further along the shore, perched in another patch of sunlight on a rock of her own, huddled up with her sweatshirt pulled over her knees and a notebook open. Glyn guessed she was writing something creative, sea-gazing for inspiration. Perhaps if he’d brought his garden journal and a pencil with him George might have kept a respectful distance while he planned his bean bed.
‘She’s left the car at the
station in Redruth and gone to London for a couple of days. To see a friend,’ Glyn told him grudgingly. Now perhaps George would go away and scribble something, which was what he was renting his room for, paying all that money. He was always wandering about, looking as if sitting down and actually writing something was the last thing he was there for. Weren’t writers supposed never to be off duty? Shouldn’t they carry handy notebooks around with them? Glyn was willing to concede that any kind of hand-sized computer might seize up from sand damage out here on the beach, but even Lily wouldn’t be parted from a biro and a notepad in case a perfectly turned phrase struck. George, he could see, had given into the elements and was sporting a new pair of those sheepskin boots that Lily liked in a moss green shade. His chunky cream oiled-wool sweater was one of those sold as ‘Cornish traditional’ in Penzance. It looked so stiffly new it must have felt like wearing a doormat. Glyn would never wear anything like that; he preferred anything wool to be from the softest lamb, and ideally from Paul Smith.
‘One of the most sod-awful things about London,’ George stared out at the stripes of mauvey-grey sky on the horizon, ‘is there’s all those people and no-one to talk to just when you need to pass the time of day and make sure your powers of speech are still intact. You go down to the Kensington 7-Eleven for a Guardian and all they do is grunt and look as if they’re about to call the police if you so much as comment on the weather. Here though, now here whenever I see someone they’re up for a chat. Rarity value I suppose.’
Don’t be too sure, was on the tip of Glyn’s tongue. ‘Curiosity more like,’ he said instead. ‘They just want to know what the hell you’re doing here. Once you’ve been in the Spar a couple of times, everyone knows who you are and what you’re up to. You’ll end up desperate for a bit of Kensington anonymity.’
