by Judy Astley
George laughed. ‘No, it’s OK, I like it. I suppose gossip is a sort of rustic hobby.’
Glyn felt uncomfortably as if he, a former habitué of Dulwich, was being called on quite unsuitably to defend rural habits. He wasn’t really in the right mood: it was only mildly irritating, certainly not worth the effort of arguing about, that George assumed any old odd-bod from east of Plymouth must be just the most fascinatingly exotic creature to the culturally deprived peasants. He shrugged. ‘Not really. Scratch the surface round here and you’ll find most of the inhabitants are refugees from towns upcountry. Rita in the farmhouse up the lane lived in Chiswick till ten years ago. That Josh she’s got living there apparently has an old mum in Macclesfield.’
‘Yeah, well we’re all refugees. Everyone’s got something to get away from, and I’m not just talking places.’ George stared out over the sea and Glyn recognized a cue for him to ask a suitable question inviting confidences. He kept quiet. He didn’t want to know about the carping ex-wives or writer’s block or the difficulties of avoiding vodka. Whatever or whoever it was George was on the run from, he wasn’t remotely interested, not right now. It was just the wrong moment. What he wanted to do was sit and think about Kitty and this long-lost baby that was nothing to do with him. He wanted to work out how he was supposed to feel about the possibility of being confronted by Petroc and Lily’s half-sister.
It was all right for Kitty, whizzing off to meet the Post-Adoption people for counselling, to be dosed up with information and advice – at least she got to put her fears and ideas to someone. If he had turbulent feelings of his own about all this, no-one was going to help him calm them down. ‘It’s only just in case there’s any chance of taking it further. I might not,’ she’d said breezily as she left, as if there really still could be a moment where she’d decide to call it a day and give tracing the girl no more thought. It was about as likely as the FA saying they weren’t that bothered about the next World Cup.
Over the weekend there’d been one of those momentous family suppers that he’d always associated with heavy television dramas. Whoever thought it a good idea to combine the consumption of food with the discussion of the most serious, life-changing events? That was something that, when he was safely in an armchair doing the viewing, he’d always wondered about. He’d scorned it as a dramatist’s lazy device for gathering half a dozen diverse characters together. Now he knew he’d always associate the taste and texture of monkfish and coriander with the feeling of being absolutely excluded, completely left out from right inside his own family. It was like a grown-up version of being last to be picked for the rounders team, with the same heartburning anxiety, the same stubborn waiting to be asked rather than making what he wanted known.
When Kitty had said ‘What do you think?’ she’d been addressing Petroc and Lily but not him. He’d kept his eyes on her, waiting for her to turn his way. Instead she handed him the dish of spiced rice (what for? consolation?) and waited for the children’s responses. Petroc had been wary, fidgety, reminding Glyn of pupils who’d been put on the spot with a test they’d forgotten they should revise for. It might have been because he was the elder one thinking he was about to concede his leader’s place. He’d gone on eating, clearly thinking hard and barely tasting what he ate. Bits dropped off his fork and he picked at them idly as if he’d already had a meal and was being too polite to say so and offend the cook.
‘Yeah, go for it. I’d like to meet her. We should,’ Petroc had eventually decreed and had then put down his fork and left the rest of his food untouched, all effort exhausted. In the gap where no-one spoke, Cilia Black and Blind Date could be heard being raucous and risqué from the TV in the sitting-room. Lily had been straightforwardly thrilled and eager to try to find this sister, childishly heedless of any possible problems. She wanted to see her now, she wanted time off to go with Kitty to London as if this ‘Madeleine’ might be brought home in a giant carry-cot in a sort of reverse of her original adoption. She was just too naïve to think there might be any dreadful consequences of all this. He, Glyn, with his appetite deadened, had sat and waited for his opinion to be sought and it wasn’t. He was the one whose misgivings didn’t count, the only one in the family who wasn’t related to this child, or this young woman as she’d now be. If she was alive. If she wanted to meet her birth mother. If, for heaven’s sake, she’d had such a miserable life she decided she wanted to move in with them and have another go at Happy Families. There were so many ifs to consider that no-one seemed to feel the need to discuss with him. He wasn’t relevant.
One of the biggest ifs now scurrying backwards and forwards across his mind was the one that went: what if nothing comes of all this? It was too late for there to be nothing at all. Dire disappointment and a sense of abject failure might be the least of what was waiting for Kitty.
George Moorfield didn’t even look at her. Lily sat like the Little Mermaid on her rock and fluffed her hair out the way Amanda Goodbody used to when she was at the school. Whenever you went near her, there’d been this waft of fresh shampoo in the air like some smelly spell she kept hanging about her to get all the boys to lust. Lily was willing to bet Amanda was still doing the same trick at the college, conquering a whole new set of besotted males. You shouldn’t be that clever and that beautiful, that was like going back for second helpings of a delicious pudding while there was still a great long queue of people waiting for their first lot. God should have been more careful, kept things more even. Madeleine might be beautiful and clever like Amanda. Lily wondered if she would be able to bring herself to like her if she was. She’d try. Madeleine might have a beautiful, faultless nature too. That might be harder to like.
Lily wrote down a few unrelated words in a circle on her notepad. She wrote yellow, sentient, sap, coruscate, fleeting and triumph, at random, without stopping to think. She tried to detach her thoughts from the inside of her head so it was like automatic writing, coming from somewhere celestial, material from which somehow a poem would evolve. When it worked it was like being halfway into a trance. It wasn’t working now. It didn’t seem to be the right kind of day and it was too early in the year to feel properly warm outside, even in the sun. Probably, she admitted, it was something to do with the fact that she was simply sitting there on the rock posing as a poet but not, at that moment, feeling remotely like one. There was a stack of homework she’d been putting off till this day and she had difficulties with maths on her mind.
The maths made her think about Josh. It was all very well not minding ending up a drifter like him if there was some kind of choice about it, but suppose there wasn’t, suppose she was just too dense ever to pass her exams and then hadn’t got any choices at all? Decisions would have to be made right now, whether to get down to some serious schoolwork and spend less time on the sea or to go with her soul and aim to get the British women’s surf championship out of the hands of Robyn Davies as soon as she possibly could. Right now the sea wasn’t on her side. It sat out there on the turn of the tide, barely moving, lazy and flat. Today it would have to be the schoolwork, which was a pain because she’d have to eat a reasonable amount if she didn’t want to be distracted all day by hunger pangs.
Glancing sideways to where her father was heading back towards the garden, she watched from behind her mirrored Oakley sunglasses as George Moorfield hauled himself awkwardly to his feet and staggered slightly on the rocks that jutted through the beach’s sandy surface. He still looked all wrong on the sand, in spite of the soft new boots and the bulky sweater that made him resemble a Tellytubby. Lily approved of him looking out of place. He was Town Man, an urban author who knew about agents and smart lunches and parties where everyone discussed their reviews and their agents and their spot on The South Bank Show. His flat had been in the Telegraph magazine one Saturday, all bookish chaos and erotic art. It was right that he should look bizarre out of his proper environment. When her first poetry collection was published, (before, during or after surfing stardom) L
ily intended to be equally peculiar and be feted around London in a pair of tatty Reef beach shoes, a Headworkx top and the floppy cream and black check drawstring baggies she’d seen through the windows of Big Wednesdays in Falmouth. She’d smell just slightly of the ocean (but definitely not of fish or bladderwrack) and be photographed for the cover of the Sunday Times magazine lying on the wet sand with the turquoise waves of Porthmeor beach lapping over her.
‘Are you doing homework?’ Now he was there, blocking out her sun. Lily had been dreaming away and was caught out yet again with no smart answers.
‘Er, no, actually I’m waiting for inspiration. I write poetry,’ she confessed, knowing instantly that she sounded silly and babyish. Amanda Goodbody would have simply smiled and said nothing and been thought enticingly mysterious. If she, Lily, had smiled goofily and said nothing he’d probably have repeated the question, louder, the way people do with small children who aren’t concentrating. She waited, watching his face and daring him to laugh at her. George Moorfield nodded his head solemnly. ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ he said and then grinned, looking like Petroc used to when he’d broken something and couldn’t help laughing. ‘I’m not much of a one for poetry, myself. Frankly, I can’t stand the stuff. Sorry.’
On the train Kitty tried not to think ahead to how she expected this meeting to go. She told herself, as she flicked unseeingly through her newspaper, that it could only go well. Only positive things could come out of it. It would be reassuring, like going to see a doctor when both of you know there isn’t anything really wrong. She would be asked polite pertinent questions about her motives and why she thought finding Madeleine (or at least making it possible for Madeleine to find her) was a good idea. She had answers ready for all that, well thought-out answers that could only bring approving nods and satisfactory little ticks in relevant boxes on forms. There would be gentle comfort and warnings about not expecting too much, even to expect only disappointment. She was ready for that.
Changing trains at Waterloo for the Northern line, she made for a block of seats that were vacant apart from one slumped and dozing passenger where none of the silent standing passengers seemed to want to sit. Wary that there might be something disgusting waiting to be sat on, Kitty hesitated and met the eye of an old lady, straphanging and clutching the hand of a small big-eyed girl. ‘I wouldn’t,’ the woman muttered to Kitty. Kitty glanced at the man. He was curled forward, awkward and twisted, his head hanging down. A thin stream of saliva was dribbling over the knee of his threadbare cord trousers and there was a more sinister patch of wetness collected around his shoes. He’s only asleep, asleep and drunk, she thought. No-one spoke. No-one looked at him or each other. Kitty looked again. His back was bent over across his knees and if he was breathing it should have been easy enough to tell. A stench of neglect wafted from him across the carriage as the doors opened and closed. Once again a passenger went to sit down and quickly, more practised than Kitty was perhaps, thought better of it and swerved away to the other end of the carriage. Kitty thought of London’s young lost people sleeping and sometimes dying in doorways. Maybe one of them was Madeleine. Of all the guises she pictured her in, this one had never crossed her mind. The next stop was hers. Only at the top of the escalator did she find a station official.
‘There was a man on that train, I have an awful feeling he might be dead,’ she told him. ‘Is there someone you can tell?’
The man shrugged. ‘We get them now and then. Not as bad as the Circle line. They can go round and round all day till someone complains about the whiff. I’ll mention it, they might get him off by Finchley Central.’
‘Thanks.’ Kitty walked away, feeling she’d failed at something, though she wasn’t sure what. A poor dirty man that nobody wanted to touch, alive or dead. He must have had some sort of family once, and then somehow perhaps lost them.
The little office was trying hard to be homey and relaxing, with its jolly pink tulips, comfortable, slightly shabby armchairs and a coffee-table on which Kitty noticed a newly opened box of paper tissues.
‘Coffee? Or would you prefer tea?’ The counsellor, Helen, was smiling, plump and mumsy in a gathered floral skirt and maroon chenille jumper. She bustled between the room and an annex where Kitty could hear the sounds of water and a kettle. Double glazing muffled the sound of traffic from the main road and she felt quite safely enclosed in the warm room with this woman who had immediately told her that she too had once given away her baby.
‘So. Tell me about your baby’s birth.’ Helen settled herself in the chair opposite and sipped her tea. ‘Oh, biscuit?’ She jumped up again and ran back through the doorway.
‘No thanks,’ Kitty called after her. ‘It was very quick and hurt like hell,’ she added.
‘Stiches?’ Helen sat down again and bit into a chocolate digestive.
‘No, actually.’ Kitty grinned. ‘My mother didn’t approve of that; she thought I was “getting away with it” as she put it. I suppose it confirmed her opinion that I really was a loose woman, quite literally!’
Helen laughed. ‘You weren’t though, were you. You were just unlucky, like me, like so very many others. Tell me what she weighed and was she bald like mine? He looked just like an egg.’
‘Well she was seven pounds exactly, quite thin and long, and she had sort of pale gingery hair. I remember thinking that it might have some curl to it later.’ As she said it, Kitty could almost smell the creamy hot scent of baby scalp. She wondered about the curls – had they happened or had Madeleine’s hair turned dark and straight and flat?
‘I’ve never talked about this,’ Kitty realized, feeling slightly light-headed. ‘I did after the other two were born. Everyone does, don’t they? It’s usual, it’s what you do with your friends, I hadn’t thought about it before. We weren’t supposed to talk about it after because we weren’t supposed to dwell on it. No-one back home knew, and your parents, well . . .’
‘Adoptive births tended to be somewhat furtive and were supposed to be wiped from the memory,’ Helen agreed. ‘You missed out on all the natural celebration you got with the later, “legitimate” births, all that essential new-mother bonding too. We women give each other that listening time to rant on about the uselessness of gas and air, or the wait for epidural top-ups. I always think it’s as much part of the birthing event as the grannies knitting all those bootees.’
‘There wasn’t any of that either. I was in that ward, ten beds, for three days and my mother’s face never betrayed anything more than hostile duty when she came to see me.’
‘She did come, though. She must have felt something.’
‘She wouldn’t look at Madeleine.’ Kitty’s eyes were filling and she reached forward to the tissue box. Madeleine had spent most of her time in the nursery. ‘In case you get too attached’ had been the reason given by a shifty-eyed nurse who hadn’t really known how Kitty should be treated. ‘Too attached’ might have meant letting down the childless couple who were counting on being able to give this baby a home. They’d been promised, so they were owed. There were single rooms for those thankfully rare mothers who’d lost their babies, but girls like Kitty were harder to categorize.
‘Everyone else passed their babies around their visitors like gorgeous new dollies.’ Kitty sniffed. ‘Sometimes I just hated them all and I pulled the curtains around the bed, but I couldn’t shut out the sound of all that gift-wrap. So much oohing and aahing over the teddy bears and Babygros. And everyone kept saying I was doing the right thing. For the baby.’
‘Yes. For the baby.’ Helen smiled. Kitty felt again the desolation of those days. The married mothers, triumphantly bloated with breast milk, had lain like vast queen insects on their beds, surrounded by cards and flowers and a steady stream of joyful noisy visitors. Kitty had sat alone on her bed pretending not to watch, carefully embroidering the last silver stars onto the dress she’d made for this baby that she wasn’t allowed to cuddle, missing the gossipy companionship of the girls from th
e home. As she thought about that time, she recalled the man she’d seen on the train that morning, the ultimate, desolate, result of having neither love nor care. If what she had done hadn’t been the right thing for the baby, however was she to live with that?
Chapter Seven
Glyn stood back on the path to check that he’d put the bean poles in straight. The designer-crafted gardens he’d seen in smart magazines were currently favouring decorative wigwam-style arrangements, usually placed in symmetrically balanced corners of the garden or arranged centrally on beds as a focal point (‘edging, filling and height’ were the potager buzz-words). Stubbornly he preferred to stick with the traditional approach: a long structure like a denuded scout tent, using plain, fuss-tree bamboo cane held together with plain green string. ‘The beans don’t give a toss about fancy scaffolding,’ he murmured to himself as he tied the last pole firmly into place. With luck, and with a good pitched battle against slugs and snails, it wouldn’t be long before the whole thing disappeared from view beneath a mat of glossy bean leaves anyway.
The fresh air and the effort had given Glyn an aching back but new energy. When he’d finished in the garden, instead of going into the house to clean off the mud, he took a wander down the lane towards the field where Rita’s goats were bleating softly just the other side of the wall. As he approached their noise grew louder and he heard the little ones scampering eagerly towards the gate, excited by the sound of his footsteps and the anticipation of attention and food. ‘Hello babies,’ he murmured to them, crouching down to stroke the pair of black and white heads that nuzzled eagerly into his hand. Behind them, their mother watched him warily, her eyes mistrusting.
