The Right Thing

by Judy Astley

  ‘Anyone got a match?’ Ben was still playing with the bass, pushing it here and there with a spatula the way Glyn always did with anything on a barbecue.

  ‘Here.’ Rose handed him her gold lighter, not looking at him, but smirking and biting her lip, just the way Kitty remembered her when she’d offered the rum-laced drink to poor Antonia. The flame that leapt out was spectacular, shooting way up to the ceiling and licking all round Ben’s hand, which he pulled away too fast, spilling the bottle of Pernod all over the fish and into the flames.

  ‘Shit!’ he roared, backing towards the sink and turning on the cold tap.

  ‘My curtains!’ Julia shrieked, flapping at the burning cloth with a tea towel.

  ‘A bit clumsy, Ben.’ Rose commented.

  Kitty grabbed the small fire extinguisher that Julia had hanging on the wall by the door and aimed it at the cooker. It fizzed for a few seconds, produced a pathetic stream of foam and gave out. Rose flung the contents of the kettle at the curtains and Julia squealed again.

  ‘Fire brigade?’ Rose’s voice was excited.

  ‘No, I’ll deal with this. You three out. Now.’ Ben was moving fast, scooping the three women out through the front door.

  ‘It’s freezing and people opposite are staring.’ Rose stood on the pavement, hugging her body and stamping her feet. ‘Let’s go to next-door’s party and keep warm.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Kitty agreed. She followed the sounds of music and a good time up the path next to Julia’s and rang the bell.

  ‘Mick’s here!’ someone on the other side yelled, opening the door wide and standing back.

  ‘Ah. Not Mick,’ said the voice, shutting the door quickly.

  ‘That was Martin!’ Julia shouted. ‘And did you see . . . ?’

  ‘All those studs,’ Kitty marvelled.

  ‘And the leather mask!’

  ‘I saw a naked bottom and some boots,’ Rose said solemnly.

  ‘No wonder I wasn’t invited.’ Julia sounded quite regretful. Kitty took hold of her arm. There was a chic and inviting café bar just across the road. Ben would find them in there if he escaped alive from the kitchen inferno. There’d be food and she was starving. ‘Suppose they had asked you,’ she comforted, ‘you wouldn’t have had a thing to wear.’

  Rosemary-Jane smirked. ‘I would,’ she said. Kitty grinned at her. She didn’t doubt it.

  ‘Drinks,’ Julia said the moment the café door was open.

  ‘You’d better have a Coke,’ Rose told her, ‘unless you want to get pissed enough to do an Antonia.’

  Kitty bought spritzers for her and Rose and a diet Coke for Julia. The menu looked reasonably promising with mussels and lasagne and a selection of chicken dishes and salads. There were quite a lot of customers but Julia bustled her way through to a free table and sat down heavily.

  ‘Shall we wait for Ben?’ Kitty said, studying the menu.

  ‘Heavens no. If I spent my life waiting for Ben I’d never get anything done. I love him dearly but he’s one of life’s plodders, everything at his own stolid pace.’

  Her mother had been on the right lines then, Kitty thought. Staring at the menu she thought about all the sticky summer days they’d spent together, curled up in his single bed while his mother was out at work, typing for the local education authority. The sun had blazed away outside and they had lain there, sweaty and pale, touching and kissing and experimenting and being pleased to have each other like this at just the right time for learning the sexual ropes. They’d known it was to be temporary, which made it more exciting somehow (nothing of the ‘stolid pace’ about him then, she recalled). Ben had had his flight to Africa booked since well before he’d met her and neither of them was going to claim it was the kind of love that could shatter long-laid plans.

  Just as they were about to order Ben arrived. He brought with him the scent of fire and cold night air.

  ‘All done. Though the kitchen’s a bit messy,’ he told Julia, putting her house keys into a puddle of spilt wine on the table. Rose tutted loudly, picked them up and wiped them down Ben’s thigh. Presumably used to this sort of thing, he ignored her, ‘I smothered the fire with towels but the smoke’s made the whole house smell a bit. I left the windows open.’

  ‘Burglars,’ Julia grumbled. ‘I’ll be robbed.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ Rose reassured her. ‘Say thank you nicely, Julia.’

  ‘Thank you Ben,’ Julia smiled.

  ‘So,’ Ben said as Rose went to the bar to order. ‘I suppose living in Cornwall you saw quite a lot of that poor Antonia woman you were all taking the piss out of?’ he said to Kitty.

  Kitty thought about Rose at the funeral, angling her long body towards Antonia’s widower. The words ‘indecent haste’ came to mind. ‘Actually, I hadn’t seen her, haven’t seen her since we left school. Julia only dragged me along because she was curious. As ever.’ She looked hard at Julia but Julia’s attention was elsewhere, her head turned so that the salient details of the row the couple behind her were having were going directly into her left ear.

  Ben’s eyebrows had shot up in surprise. ‘Really? But Rose said you were practically neighbours. She’s been working down there you know, a garden programme.’

  ‘Everyone thinks you’re only ten minutes from everyone else if you live in the same county. I did know about the programme.’ Ben was asking for different information, she could see it in his anxious eyes. She didn’t have it to give, only an awful sense of power that if she voiced her suspicions she could make this man very unhappy.

  ‘Antonia had three children, Rose told me,’ he said. ‘Poor things. Imagine losing your mother like that.’ She felt touched, recognizing real sympathy for these children he’d never met.

  ‘We haven’t got children.’ He was watching Rose exchanging easy chat at the bar with a blonde Australian barman. She was pulling at strands of her highlighted hair and then pointing at his, apparently deeply involved in discussing tints. ‘I didn’t used to think she minded that much though,’ Ben added.

  But what about you? Kitty thought. Really, she no longer knew him well enough to ask. She never had.

  Chapter Eight

  Kitty had been back from London ten days and Ben had phoned six times to talk about Rose. He was driving Kitty crazy and she’d taken to shouting ‘I’m not in!’ at the first ring. Of course no-one in the house took any notice. Petroc just looked depressed and growled, ‘It won’t be for me,’ which she took to mean it wouldn’t be Amanda and if it was anyone else he didn’t care anyway. Lily and Glyn always seemed to be on their way out of a room, not so much as turning back with curiosity, when the phone rang.

  ‘When I think, all those years ago he simply disappeared to do his VSO and never even sent me a postcard,’ she complained to Glyn after the first four calls. ‘He must have been looking through Rose’s address book. I can’t imagine him coming straight out with it and saying, “Hey Rose, what’s Kitty’s number these days, I think I’ll call her a hundred times and talk about the affair I think you’re having.”’

  ‘It’s for you. Your admirer again,’ Glyn smirked, handing the phone over to Kitty soon after breakfast. Tee-heeing at her and making mocking kissy noises, he drew a fat heart on the Post-it pad on the dresser, scrawled Ben’s name on it and added an arrow through the middle, then stuck it on the cupboard door. He went out to the car to go off to do a stint filling in for a depressed colleague at the college, whistling cheerily, and Kitty could hear him shouting hello across the yard to George.

  ‘Well, you know what Rose is like . . .’ Ben was sounding defeated as usual. Rose was away working, back in Cornwall filming something about mulch and manure at the Lost Gardens of Heligan and far too near to Tom for Ben’s peace of mind. Kitty assumed she was getting lumbered with his confidence purely on the grounds that she was at the moment geographically closer to his wife than he was. There must have been other, closer friends of hers he could be sounding out, because really she didn’t actually kno
w what Rose was like, not these days. She only knew what she thought Rose might be like. For Ben, apparently, that was good enough.

  ‘Perhaps I should have gone with her, but pressure of work, you know. And someone’s got to keep the dog company at night.’ Ben laughed weakly, as if even he knew how pathetic he sounded. She imagined him with a lonely takeaway, at one end of a long kitchen table, feeding chicken tikka scraps to an equally miserable-looking basset hound. Then she pictured the two of them curled up together on a sofa from which Rose had long ago banned the dog, watching a video about wronged husbands and revenge, stuffing themselves with sour-cream flavour Pringles.

  Kitty shoved a cushion onto one of the kitchen chairs and settled herself into it, resigned to a long session of counselling. Ben was one of those people who liked to get well stuck in for a phone chat, going in for moaning in one long uninterruptible stream. He’d probably got himself all ready to call her with a mug of coffee and a scheduled space in his office diary. In her experience, men weren’t usually keen on telephones. If Petroc and Glyn were typical, they simply made whatever arrangements the call demanded, or in Petroc’s case grunted unintelligibly for fifteen seconds, then hung up. Rita had once said that a low phone bill was the best thing about having sons and not daughters.

  Kitty wished she was up in the studio, where at least she could be adding a few seagulls to the Coverack painting while Ben talked. Just within reach on the window-ledge behind the sink was a bottle of Lily’s nail varnish, so she entertained herself painting her left toenails purple. When Ben eventually took a breath she cut in quickly. ‘Well Rose is working too, isn’t she? It’s not as if she’s swanned off for no reason. Suppose it was the other way round and she had suspicions about you; how would you feel if she tagged along to all the wine auctions just to keep an eye on you? It would be like having your mum along at a scout camp.’ She tried to keep it light, though there was only an outside chance she’d achieve a quick cheer-up breakthrough with him and be able to get back to work.

  Not much painting had been done in the couple of weeks since she’d got back from London, having decided it might be a good idea to spend a bit of time with Glyn and convince him she wasn’t about to run off back to the city and move into a flat with Julia and Rose in an effort to recapture some sort of lost school-buddy idyll. Nor, she made it clear, was she going to brood about Madeleine and race up the lane every morning to meet the postman’s van in case all the form-filling and list-registering had worked and the girl decided to write a letter. What would it say if she did, she wondered as Ben prattled and she mopped purple globs of varnish off the table, ‘Hello Mum’? ‘I’m now on the Adoption Contact Register,’ she’d told Glyn and the children. ‘If anything comes of it, well fine. If not, well fine as well.’ Glyn seemed convinced, though she wasn’t quite so sure she was.

  ‘And you’d think after so many years,’ Ben was droning on. ‘Perhaps if we’d had children. Perhaps if it had worked out with you and me . . .’ Kitty started sketching Lily on the back of a bank statement. She could see her through the open doorway, sitting outside on the wall wearing her wetsuit and looking out at the sea, her fine pale hair drifting this way and that in the breeze. In a moment she would slide silently into the water and paddle out into the waves on her board, using reserves of strength that hardly seemed credible in someone who looked so fragile.

  ‘And she’s taken all her make-up: the going-out sort, not just the stuff she puts on quickly for work.’ Kitty sighed impatiently and prodded at her big toe. The purple stuff was nearly dry but had turned a nasty insipid bluey-mauve, as if she’d been stepped on hard by a big pony. Ben was whining now, there was no other word for it. If it was Petroc she’d tell him to get over it, find someone else.

  ‘You know, maybe you should just give up on her,’ Kitty said callously, her mind on Petroc and his gloom over Amanda. ‘Maybe all the worst possibilities you can think of are absolutely right and your marriage has simply run its course.’

  ‘Oh. You don’t really think so? Not deep down?’ Ben prodded for signs of hope. Kitty felt as if she’d smacked a puppy.

  ‘Look Ben, why don’t you just ask her? It can’t really be worse than just imagining, surely.’ It could though, she knew that. No-one wants to be told that the worst they think is true. It was so much more comfortable to keep pretending that the best might be true instead.

  Lily didn’t care that it wasn’t safe to be surfing alone. It was her beach, nothing the sea did here could surprise her. If someone was with her she’d only have to feel responsible for them, especially close to mid-tide when there was a vicious undertow over by the rocks on the west side. There was a medium offshore wind and the waves were coming in clean and just big enough, early-morning perfection. The sounds of the sea were muffled through her winter helmet and her webbed gloves helped her paddle through the water, out beyond the rock-line, with the grace and speed of a cormorant. Petroc had told her that in her full cold-weather kit she looked like a seal, all cased in neoprene like this. But seals were fat and they lumbered and wobbled on land. Lily felt she was more of an eel, slinky and slim. She got that from her mother who was just starting to admit to being middle-aged now but hadn’t got the spread. Somewhere out there, she thought as she paddled along, she’d got a sister and she didn’t even know what she looked like. She hoped she looked like her, so if they met they could see each other reflected, know how each felt in their own skin. Also she could see what she might look like in a few more years – decide if she liked what the future held and make arrangements, eating-wise and hair colour and such, if she didn’t.

  Pulling her concentration back and forgetting about this mystical Madeleine, she kept her head down on the board, feet together, streamlined and low, feeling no aches or strain as if only this one thing was what her body was built for. Knowing without looking that she had reached the right place, she turned the board sideways and lay on the waves. On its way from beyond the horizon, she could see, was the perfect set as if it had just been waiting for her. She smiled, steadied the board and braced as the first wave came, let that one go and then took off on the second. It was better than flying. Someone at school had said it was better than sex, though this particular someone was one who might not be relied on to know. It was like running across the surface of the sea, the ultimate walk on water. ‘Eeeeagh!’ she shrieked as she made a perfect cut-back before planing right up onto the sand. She picked up the board and shook her hair out of the helmet. That was enough for now. It couldn’t be beaten, not on that day.

  ‘Do you think that’s what Jesus was doing?’ George was on his rock in a patch of thin sun again, bravely barefoot this time. She was sure he must be pretty freezing – he looked all stiff as if he’d been there the whole night. He reminded her of the summer holiday-makers who even in the dankest sea mist still came to the beach, because that was what you did every day for a fortnight.

  ‘Was what what Jesus was doing?’ she called as she walked up the sand.

  ‘Was Jesus the first surfer? You know, walking on the water?’

  ‘Did he have a board?’

  ‘Don’t think the Bible mentions one.’

  ‘Then he wasn’t a much of a surfer, was he?’ Lily stood in front of George, looking down at him and dripping cold sea water on his pale feet. City feet, she thought, guessing how much it must have hurt him to step across the gravelly yard and the layer of crushed shells, pebbles and weed at the top of the high-tide line. Serve him right, she thought, for not having the soul for poetry. She reached for the cord behind her back, pulled down the zip of her wetsuit and wriggled her shoulders and arms free from the neoprene. Her soaking rash-vest clung to her thin body and she shivered. George grinned up. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about the poetry, about not being keen. If you want to show me some of your writing I promise to ignore my prejudices.’ Lily could feel herself blushing scarlet. She hated him instantly. He was patronizing and he’d wrecked her mood.

  ‘No fucking
way,’ she spat at him and stormed back to the house. Where the skin on her shoulders and back had been cold it now felt as if it was burning, as if she could feel George watching her walk. She felt aware of how she moved, seeing in her mind her skinny legs in their tight black casing. She wished the sand would part and she could walk down into a pit and cover herself. There was nothing worse, nothing at all worse than feeling like a total fool.

  ‘Rita’s here! Be quick Lily, you’ll make her late,’ Kitty was calling up the stairs. Rita was in the kitchen by the window, watching the blue tits squabbling over the nut feeder hanging from the cherry tree. ‘It’s coming up to blossom time. All swollen buds and sexual readiness,’ Rita murmured. She was sitting inelegantly slumped with her legs apart and her purple crushed-velvet skirt draped across her thighs. Kitty thought the big expanse of fabric looked as if something was missing from her lap, a baby perhaps, or a basket of fruit, whatever they used to hold in those dark old paintings of unsmiling, put-upon women. Rita was wearing flat, round-toed sandals, half blue, half red, like children’s holiday shoes, with enough room inside for her toes to splay comfortably. The shoes were scuffed and shabby, the stitching along the thick crêpe soles was coming undone, and her navy wool tights drooped over the straps. Sad shoes, Kitty thought, shoes for feet that no longer had the heart to dance. How different they were from Rose’s frivolous Manolo Blahniks that she’d worn at Julia’s. Those had been shoes to seduce by, shoes for tautening the leg muscles and making you think of sex. If she’d packed those for Cornwall, she was definitely up to no good. She wouldn’t trouble Ben with that particular question.

  ‘What’s wrong Rita, you’ve lost some of your sparkle?’

  Rita managed a half-hearted smile. ‘Not much. Just that it’ll soon be summer and Josh will be off.’