by Judy Astley
‘Fucking cat!’ the girl shrieked, gathering up the fat hanks of hair and pushing them roughly behind her ears. The cat stalked off with its tail high, leapt gracefully up onto the beach wall and sat with its back to the house and the girl, starting a dignified wash to its paw.
‘Hey, you bloody bastard animal!’ Before Kitty could rush out and stop her, the girl had picked up a pebble and hurled it after Russell. It missed, but only just and the cat slid down the wall and out of sight onto the beach, probably under the impression that the girl had thrown something for him to chase, the way Lily did.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ Kitty flew out of the back door, the warm spoon still in her hand. The girl turned round and looked at her, but stayed just where she was. Kitty stopped a few safe yards from her. This was a big-built young woman she was confronting, one not in the best of moods and who slung stones at small cats.
‘Well? Why did you throw that at the cat?’
‘It scratched me.’ The voice was now hardly more than a whisper, but there was no mistaking a well-practised tone of aggrieved justification. ‘It’s its own stupid fault. Stupid cat, I wish I’d hit it.’ Her mouth was turned down at the corners into a sulky pout that looked as if it was habitual. She was older than Kitty had first thought, certainly beyond her teens and well old enough to have grown out of this kind of childish whine. ‘I hate cats,’ she added, in case there should be any remaining doubts. Her eyes were surprisingly sparkly, Kitty was alarmed to see, as if she really was hurt but was doing her best to seem hard to cover up. Kitty went closer, half-expecting the girl to turn and flee.
‘It was only doing what cats do. It didn’t mean any harm to you on a personal level, I’m sure.’
The girl gave a loud sniff and looked down at her feet. One of her toes had come through the fabric of the shabby black espadrille, showing badly chipped silver nail polish. The shoes were tied on with long black ribbons that wound too tightly round her ankles, cutting into chubby flesh that was mottled bright pink and white with the wind. It wasn’t warm enough yet for bare legs and Kitty ridiculously imagined the girl falling asleep, like something in a fairy tale, or a hibernating hedgehog, on the last warm day of the previous summer and waking up months later in the same clothes.
‘Were you looking for someone?’ she asked her eventually; this might, it occurred to her, be one of George’s cast-off women, very much down on her luck and hell-bent on revenge. There was another loud sniff and the glittery eyes stared hard at her. They were very blue, very piercing and the angry challenge in them reminded her of Lily when she was lying about having finished all her homework.
‘Yeah I am, actually. I’m looking for my mother.’ It was boldly said, no trace of a whine this time.
‘Oh, well I haven’t seen anyone. What does she . . . where might she . . .’ Kitty’s mouth went dry and her heart thudded. ‘You can’t be, surely . . .’ she muttered, wondering if she’d ever make sense again. She stood very very still, waiting either for the sky to fall in or for the girl to laugh and ask what the hell she was gabbling about. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. There should have been phone calls, letters, distant, polite, reasonable stuff, with everyone having time to consider, and the right things to say and a mutually agreed time and place. There should be a feeling of nervous excitement, a bit of dread and a lot of worried anticipation, all stirred up together before a meeting, pre-planned and properly organized. When she’d asked if this, this type of turning up out of nowhere and pouncing might happen, she’d been told it was extremely unlikely. She’d sensed a weary but kind smile in the voice of the man on the Adoption Register phone who had said it, as if he wanted to add, ‘Oh, all the mothers ask that and I know I shouldn’t say it, but really people just read too many of the wrong sort of books . . .’
‘Can’t be what?’ the girl demanded. ‘I can. I can be whatever I want. Or whoever.’ She shoved her hands back into her pockets and pulled the coat round her bulky body for comfort. She was staring hard, and waiting; silent and antagonistic.
‘You’d better come in.’ Kitty turned abruptly, stiffly, and led the way into the kitchen. She pointed at a chair at the end of the table. ‘You sit there and I’ll make you some tea.’ She knew she sounded brusque and hated herself for it. And tea, how clichéd and detached and English to come up with nothing better to offer than that after twenty-four years. There was probably a tone somewhere between tenderness, regret and jubilation that would be appropriate. Something that could express quite simply all the years of imagining just this one person turning up and claiming her. Right now though, she was only aware of underlying panic, a terror of doing things all wrong. All the might-happens, all those first-meeting scenes that had been going through her head in the past few weeks had been no real preparation. She’d had things all ready to say that she now couldn’t even begin to recall, things to persuade a given-away child that she wasn’t the most evil and selfish mother in the world.
‘I hate tea. I want Coke.’ The childish sullenness was back now, as if the earlier aggression had exhausted her. ‘And I know who you are. I can tell by your hands shaking. You’re Katherine Cochrane. You’re my mother.’ She didn’t look up as she said it, but pulled Kitty’s Times towards her and gazed down at the sequined swimsuit as if she was very seriously considering buying it.
Kitty reached into the freezer for ice. Her arms felt like metal bars, her hands were still shaking and her fingers stuck to the ice tray. She wrenched them free, needing the sensation of quick pain to make her feel this was real.
‘Yes I am, or at least I was . . . then. It’s Katherine Harding now. Kitty.’ Bizarre, she thought, to be introducing herself to her own daughter. ‘Are you . . . what are you called?’
‘Huh?’ the girl looked up at her as if she was crazy, her mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘What the fuck d’you think I’m called? Sodding Nigel or something? I’m Madeleine, aren’t I. Like you called me. Christ, I only got two things from you in my whole bloody life, my name and this.’ She reached deep into one of the coat pockets and pulled out some crumpled fabric, then shoved it across to Kitty. Kitty took hold of it carefully and smoothed out the material. It was the tiny dress, the silver embroidered stars looking to her now as if a child from another century had sewn them under the guidance of an exacting governess. Kitty put her hands over her face and big hot tears soaked their way through her fingers.
‘Don’t drip on it,’ Madeleine grumbled, pulling the baby dress out of Kitty’s reach. ‘I thought you might not believe it was me if I didn’t bring something. Lucky there was something. I’ve got my birth certificate as well, in case you’re still wondering, not that you’re probably interested, not that much. I’ve had the certificate for years but you weren’t exactly making it easy to find you.’
Kitty reached for the box of tissues on the dresser and blew her nose. Madeleine was staring at her quite coldly, sitting perfectly still with her hands wrapped round the glass of Coke, dragging all the icy coolness into her palms.
‘So why didn’t you look for me before? Soon as I was eighteen? You could’ve. I’ve been waiting for you to, checking in every single week with E-Mail from wherever I was. Didn’t you want to? Didn’t you wonder what had happened to me?’
Kitty felt the words ‘Didn’t you care?’ elbowing their way through the questions. She sat down opposite Madeleine, poured herself more tea, bracing her unsteady wrist against the table edge.
‘I don’t think there’s been a day since I gave you up that I haven’t thought about you,’ she replied honestly.
‘Then why did you do it? I couldn’t do it.’ Madeleine frowned. ‘No real mother could. Not one who was any good.’
It was all going too fast, Kitty thought. There were things she wanted to know too, like had Madeleine been happy. What were her parents like, where did she live. One word wrong and this girl, so volatile and brittle, might stalk right out of her life again and never come back, never tell her anything
at all.
‘You don’t know what it was like back then,’ she told her. ‘From my background, how things still were. We were still “unmarried mothers”. “Single parents” was a term that came along just that little bit later. Too late. I never got the chance to feel like I was a real mother.’ She thought for a moment while Madeleine waited. During the pause Kitty half expected her to cut in with all the easy accusations about feebleness, lack of feeling. She went on, ‘All the girls in this home we’d been sent to, we were treated like something damaged, no good for anything. You can’t believe how much a bunch of eager Christians can lay on the notion of “unfitness”. You had to try to put things right by doing the best you could for the baby. Believe it or not, the message was that only the worst kind of selfish mother would want to keep her baby and bring it up all by herself. You had to give up the baby to someone who could give it a better life, that was being a good mother. I think that’s a classic example of Catch-22.’
‘Yeah but, shit, it wasn’t that long ago. I thought all that flower power and stuff made it all right to have kids on your own.’
‘Not in my dad’s parish, it wasn’t,’ Kitty almost laughed. ‘All that hippy stuff was just about past by the time I got pregnant and it had terrified them. My father, your grandfather, he used to say, “Peace and love are all very well in theory.” And this from a vicar.’ Kitty recalled the day he’d said this, barking at her over the Sunday roast lamb. She’d sniped back that she thought the whole point of Christianity was peace-and-love in practice, at which her mother had cut in with her usual ‘Stop trying to be clever’ and the argument had spiralled into something about if they’d given up wanting her to be clever, then why wouldn’t they let her go to art school, to what they thought of as a den of drop-outs?
Madeleine was trying not to laugh. ‘Sorry,’ she spluttered as the giggles welled up. ‘A vicar! Shit, my grandad was a vicar! I wonder what he’d think of me. I’m not exactly godly. Mum wasn’t either.’ The giggles stopped abruptly and she said, ‘Did she get me from one of those church adoption things? I mean don’t you have to. promise to bring up the child to be churchgoing and good? We sometimes went to weddings but . . .’
Kitty wondered whose weddings they’d been, family ones, aunts, cousins or just her mother’s down-the-pub friends. Had Madeleine been a bridesmaid? It was easy to imagine her sulking in satin and roses. These were more things she couldn’t know about. She wished she could have written down the things to ask, the silly, superficially irrelevant things like had her mother brushed her hair with a special top-of-the-range bristle brush, the type that cost a fortune, or had she just had a series of plastic spiky ones that got lost down the backs of chairs. Kitty studied her face, trying to capture and savour each feature. She looked quite a lot like Petroc – her top front teeth crossed slightly like his and her chin had the same tiny cleft but she was on a bigger scale. Not taller, but broad and big-boned. Her cheeks were plump and over-pink and there seemed to be a lot of body packed under the bulky coat. My first baby Kitty thought, wondering what to say next that wouldn’t drive the girl away again, make her disappear back to wherever she’d come from, satisfied to have been disappointed, relieved to return to the woman she called Mum.
‘You were adopted through a Christian charity. I hadn’t a clue what they expected from parents in terms of religious commitment. All they went on about was “a good home”.’
‘Like a stray cat. You’ve got other children. My brothers and sisters.’ Madeleine’s tone was accusing. Her eyes had gone hard when she’d looked at the wall calendar hanging on the end of the dresser. Kitty glanced at it, following her gaze. ‘Petroc dentist’ was down for next Friday, and ‘Lily – overnight at Charlotte’s’ had been written the week before.
‘So you managed to keep them,’ Madeleine stated, staring at Kitty. Her eyes had gone glassy again, the way they’d been out in the yard.
‘They came much later. Petroc’s only seventeen. Lily’s fifteen. Things were different.’
‘You mean you were married. And not that much later. I’m only twenty-four.’ Madeleine gave a sudden snorting laugh. ‘What sort of a name is Petroc? I bet he hates it. I bet he gets the piss taken.’
‘Petroc was a Cornish saint. There’s quite a few with that name round here.’
‘I still bet he hates it though.’
‘Well, he did go through a phase of calling himself Pete,’ Kitty admitted.
‘Troc would’ve had more style. And Lily,’ Madeleine sneered. ‘Sounds like one of those old women drinking Guinness in the corner of some old brown pub. Lil. An old bag in a knitted hat.’
Kitty laughed, picturing again the rows of crocheted hats in her father’s congregation. Several of them might well have been called Lil, Lilian. Their first names had never been mentioned. Her father had cooed in his oily fashion over each and every one of them, lingering too long on the after-service handshakes with ‘Dear Mrs Ellis, tea urn on the boil?’ or ‘Oh Miss Pemberton, such flowers’. Thus he perfected the art of making seduction out of the impersonal and ensuring the small essential comforts of church life were taken good care of.
‘They’ll be home soon,’ Kitty said suddenly, ‘Petroc and Lily. He’ll be picking her up from school about now. No it’s Friday though isn’t it? She’ll be here later, on the bus.’ She was rambling, almost incoherent in her effort to explain a family life Madeleine hadn’t been part of. Madeleine probably wouldn’t want to know. Kitty seemed to have forgotten how to be sensitive.
‘Oh he’s got a car then. More than I had at seventeen.’ Madeleine tore a narrow strip off the edge of the newspaper and rolled it up between her chubby fingers. She had beautiful fingernails, perfect clean ovals. Kitty had a sharp clear vision of a little girl standing on tiptoe to reach a tap, carefully washing her hands, patting them dry on a towel and making an experimental mess with too much hand cream.
‘I suppose you want me to disappear before they turn up?’ Madeleine made a move to get up, but Kitty quickly reached out and grabbed her wrist. Surprisingly, given the girl’s bulky size, her fingers met round the slender bones. ‘No! Please, don’t leave. There’s so much to say, to find out about . . .’
‘About each other?’ Madeleine snarled, finishing her sentence. ‘I know what I need to know. You’re alive and well and you’ve been perfectly happy without me.’ She grinned suddenly. ‘Though maybe I’ll hang on for a bit, have a look at my brother and sister and watch them getting the shock of their lives.’
‘Yes, please stay.’ Only reluctantly did Kitty let go of the wrist. It was skin that had been close-knit and new the last time she’d touched it. ‘Actually, they not only know you exist, have known since they were little, but I also told them there was a chance you’d find us. They know I’ve been doing the research it takes for you to find me.’
‘Oh.’ Madeleine slumped back in her chair, disappointed.
‘And where will you go to anyway?’ Kitty asked. ‘How did you get here? Did you drive or get a taxi from Redruth?’ Even as she said it the words seemed ridiculous. The girl looked as if she could have barely afforded the bus fare from Penzance, let alone a cab.
‘Train, bus, then I hitched a lift from the main road, with some old hippy woman who said she knew you. She said mad things, like she knew who I was and good luck, though I didn’t tell her anything. She had one of those fake-mystery smiles, like I’m supposed to think she’s telepathic or a witch.’ Madeleine laughed, ‘Actually when I got out of her car I got out really quick, ’cos I really thought she was going to kiss me or put a spell on something. She was well weird.’
Rita, Kitty deduced. Rita who was right now probably fidgeting and pacing with curiosity and asking Josh how long she should give it before she popped in to borrow a spanner and find out what was going on.
‘Anyone in?’ Kitty jumped. George’s big shaggy head appeared round the kitchen door. Absurdly Kitty thought how much he resembled an Irish wolfhound. ‘Sorry, didn’t
mean to interrupt.’ He hovered in the doorway, staring at Madeleine and waiting to be introduced. He must be bored, Kitty realized, in need of even the smallest diversion. ‘Hello George. This is . . . this is my daughter, Madeleine,’ she said as clearly and steadily as she could manage. Madeleine was already out of her chair and giving George the smile she might have been keeping in reserve for a better mother than Kitty. ‘You’re George Moorfield! Amazing. I’ve read all your books!’ She stood in front of him, looking like a starstruck admirer and George beamed at her, shrugging slightly and trying unsuccessfully to look faintly modest.
‘And I think you’re a horrible, pathetic, overrated pornographer,’ she went on, keeping the smile going in a strange contrary way. George’s expression whizzed from startled to amused, bordering on delighted. Kitty felt like warning him that to laugh might be a mistake. ‘I suppose a shag’s out of the question then?’ he muttered, not quite far enough under his breath.
‘No,’ Madeleine said.
‘No?’ said George, puzzled.
‘No, it’s not out of the question. You’re not unfanciable,’ she continued bluntly. George scratched his head and grinned stupidly, stumped for a reply. Kitty’s sense of unreality was getting worse. In need of something to do to remind her where and who she was, she picked up the half empty can of tuna from the worktop and went to put it away in the fridge. It didn’t say it was dolphin friendly, she noticed, pathetically trying to make some sense of what was going on and failing. She didn’t particularly like dolphins; they all had the same false and indiscriminating smile which was a simple genetic accident of the jawline that made fools feel loved. Madeleine was grinning at George as if she’d never met anyone she loved more in her life, and at the same time slating his life-work.
‘Er, I just wondered if there’d been any post?’ he eventually asked Kitty, keeping a wary eye on Madeleine.
