The Right Thing

by Judy Astley

  ‘Sorry George, if there had been I’d have brought it over.’ Please go away, she willed him, closing the fridge door loudly in the hope that it would sound like a hint. She heard something fall over inside it, something messy from the top shelf splashing and clattering to the bottom. An egg, probably, demanding maximum effort for clearing up which she felt was well-deserved, seeing as she didn’t seem to be handling anything too well just now.

  ‘Right. Just that I’m expecting the beginnings of a divorce. Er . . .’ George continued staring at Madeleine for a moment or two, then backed out of the door. ‘See you . . . around? Are you staying?’ he said to her, looking worried in case she said yes.

  ‘Yes. Well probably,’ she told him. As the door closed Madeleine’s smile vanished and she turned on Kitty. ‘The man you married, the father of these two kids you’ve got, is he my father too?’

  ‘No he’s not.’ Kitty felt exhausted. She wished she could put Madeleine in a cupboard for a few hours while she collected her thoughts.

  ‘I shall want to know about him. And about why you’ve got George Moorfield’s mail being delivered here,’ Madeleine said. ‘You can tell me later though, maybe tomorrow.’ She leaned back against the dresser, hugging herself into the coat again. ‘Can I stay?’

  Petroc’s car swished across the gravel into the yard, skidding slightly as he braked and turned at the same time. Glyn did that sometimes, showing off like a schoolboy when he was particularly happy about things. He hadn’t done it lately. Kitty felt sick.

  ‘Of course you can stay, we can all . . .’

  ‘Yeah I know, get to know each other.’ The sneer was back, but with less venom. The door opened and Petroc hauled his college bag through it, hurling it hard onto the table.

  ‘Oh. Hi,’ he said, looking at Madeleine with no particular interest. There were often strangers in the kitchen: writers, stray walkers, people off the beach who were desperate enough to ask to use the loo.

  ‘Hello little brother,’ Madeleine said.

  On the bus Fergus had told Lily she was a scraggy cow which was particularly uncalled-for when she’d just given him the best part of a Crunchie bar. Lily stamped angrily up the lane from the bus stop, ignoring Russell who miaowed eagerly and trotted along fast beside her, desperate to be stroked.

  ‘You should eat more,’ Fergus had said as he gobbled it quickly, shedding flecks of gold honeycomb down the front of his Quiksilver fleece. Then he’d come out with the classic. Lily strode faster, more furiously, thinking about it. ‘You’ll never get a bloke to fancy you till you grow some tits.’ As if, she thought, turning off into Rita’s gateway, as if she cared, as if it was completely compulsory for every girl to provide a pair of globular toys for some fumbling adolescent jerk.

  ‘Hi! You’re in a hurry, you OK?’ Rita was out by her front door, tidying up the dried-out leftovers of last summer’s plants. Where she’d cleared out old leaves, new soft green growth was coming through the earth. It had made her envious, that nature could let plants renew themselves annually like that, but not people.

  ‘I’m OK.’ Lily turned off the road onto Rita’s path and flopped down on her doorstep, looking at her splendidly skinny legs arranged in front of her. ‘I’m thinking about men and balls.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Footballs, cricket balls, their balls, big round bouncy breasts – all the things they like to play with. Don’t they ever want more grown-up toys?’

  Rita sat back on her heels and laughed. Lily could see her fillings glinting bright gold, like the inside of Fergus’s Crunchie. ‘Well of course they do. Sometimes they like long sleek cars, it’s hard to part them from the TV remote control and I’m told that up-country, where these things actually work, they can’t go out without clutching a titchy dick-sized mobile phone. Why, what’s brought this on?’

  ‘Someone, someone stupid and pathetic, said I was too thin for boys to like. As if I care.’ Lily folded her legs under her and wrapped her arms around her knees.

  Rita stopped grinning. ‘To be honest you are getting a bit Bambi-like,’ she ventured warily. ‘But I expect you’re in a growing phase, stretching a bit.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Lily told her, concentrating on twisting her shoelace round and round. ‘I just don’t want . . .’

  ‘Don’t want what?’ Rita prompted gently.

  ‘Anything much.’ Lily looked up and shrugged, grinning at her. ‘Can I stay for supper? Then you can see that sometimes I do actually eat. I’ll do the dishes.’

  Rita stood up and arched her back, stretching her body with her hands on her hips. The gesture reminded Lily of joky versions of pregnant women. The thought of pregnancy almost made her shudder, the ultimate in loss-of-control – a runaway body, two, your own on the outside and the wild greedy one inside, sapping all your nutrients and leaving you feeling sick and wasted and huge and dead.

  ‘Actually, I think you ought to go home,’ Rita said eventually, ‘I gave a lift to someone who was going to your place. If she’s still there you might want to see her.’

  ‘Mysterious. Who is she?’

  ‘Go and have a look. She might have gone by now, but you should still go, just in case.’ Rita reached out a hand and hauled Lily up from the step. She gave her a quick hug and stroked her hair. ‘Go on,’ she urged, giving Lily a small push. ‘Look, your cat’s still waiting by the gate. And take care of yourself.’

  Chapter Ten

  Glyn stared at the display of spades and tried to feel like a wise old gardener with years of hard-acquired knowledge (perhaps even several weathered generations’-worth) behind him. The only immediate differences he could see between the various implements were the prices, and the fact that some of them were in appropriate shades of cabbage green while others were in shiny stainless steel or toy-like primary colours as if they were for hugely oversized children to build sandcastles on the beach. Around him, people mooched about pushing their equally toy-like green plastic trolleys containing a couple of strips of too-early bedding plants, packets of seed, cartons of lawn food or some bright new thornproof gloves. Amateurs, he sniffed to himself, then felt remorseful. Maybe not one of them would have to dither over the selection of a simple spade, more than possibly any of them might be able to look at him scornfully and say, ‘That’s the one you want, mate,’ no hesitation.

  He picked out one with a pale, shiny wooden shaft and a blade in a tint that brought to mind the British racing-green Austin he’d once owned, felt its weight and wondered what, exactly, he was supposed to be feeling for. Which was better, a lightweight tool that would probably bend to uselessness after a few hours but make the effort of lifting the earth easier, or a vast heavy one that would still be going strong when Lily’s grandchildren were digging their own allotments, but would give him a spine like a figure seven in minutes? Green would disappear into the foliage the moment he leaned it against the hedge, but scarlet looked frivolous, a plaything for the weekend fun-gardener who’d probably think bastard trenching was a Mafioso way of getting rid of troublesome enemies.

  ‘Tricky, isn’t it?’ Glyn was startled out of his reverie by a woman’s voice extremely close to his ear.

  ‘Decisions, I mean. Goodness, you are Glyn Harding aren’t you? I mean when you’ve only met someone once . . . though I’m pretty good at faces. Please don’t think I accost strangers generally.’

  The owner of this face was smiling confidently at him. She wasn’t really going to allow him not to be Glyn Harding. She looked familiar. Predatory teeth and eyes that gave the impression of seeking out trouble. He remembered.

  ‘Sorry. I was miles away. Rosemary-Jane, isn’t it?’

  ‘Rose,’ she corrected briskly. ‘Names like Rosemary-Jane are only OK for the under-nines; so very Milly-Molly-Mandy, I always think, don’t you?’

  ‘Er, I hadn’t considered really.’ Actually he had, many times, during the months when Petroc, at about twelve, had failed to persuade any of his school-friends to start ca
lling him Pete. He’d been quite alarmingly troubled at the time, so much so that Glyn and Kitty had tried to please him by going along with the new name. But it had sounded false and self-conscious, calling ‘Er, Pete, supper’s ready!’ up the stairs. Now, though, Petroc seemed to be quite proud of his name. Perhaps he’d grown into it, or found that girls liked it, or had simply met several people with worse ones and was relieved not to be called Horatio or Marmaduke.

  ‘Nice jacket,’ Rose murmured, a speculative finger reaching out for a second and giving the light wool fabric a brief stroke. ‘Armani?’

  ‘Kenzo, in a sale a couple of years back.’ Glyn felt childishly pleased at having his taste in clothes approved by a woman so obviously urbane and knowing. Rose was wearing a sleek charcoal grey trouser suit that would have looked more at home behind an executive desk than it did in a mid-Cornwall garden centre. Beneath the jacket was a simple scoop-necked top. She wore no jewellery except for silver stud earrings, no fussy scarf, just a frosting of streaky gold hair hanging on her shoulders. Glyn wondered what on earth she was doing there and the ridiculous thought shot into his mind that she’d perhaps been tailing him. She might want to stroke more than his sleeve. The thought was troubling, just like the ones he now and then had about Rita, but not unexciting, though on balance he’d still prefer her to be several hundred miles away, sorting out things with her husband so Kitty could be let off counselling duty.

  ‘So which of these pretty spades are you going to buy? Or are you just window-shopping?’

  ‘I’m going to buy the middle weight at the middle price.’ Suddenly decisive, he hauled out a blue one out from the rack. He presumed that would also count as a middle colour too. He wasn’t really sure if it was exactly what he wanted, but what he did want was not to be quite so close to this woman’s overpowering perfume. It was unmistakably mistress-scent. Her poor forever-phoning husband was probably right to have suspicions.

  ‘I’m out here researching. Officially anyway,’ she said, walking with him towards the checkout. ‘Actually I just felt the need to get out and about by myself for a few hours. Not long enough to venture as far down the county as your place, sadly, but I might drive to Fowey on the way back and take a look at that place where Daphne du Maurier lived.’ She giggled, her hand to her mouth like a caught-out schoolgirl, ‘I’m supposed to be checking out the price of compost bins for the programme and a location where we can film a short piece on them. Thrilling huh?’ She giggled again and then went on, ‘I could have just phoned around, or got my PA to do it, seeing as that’s what she’s paid for.’ Glyn had his mind on the items he wouldn’t be checking out if she hung about much longer. You didn’t drive this far just for a spade. He’d got a long list of things like rabbit-proof netting, heavyweight secateurs, a selection of piping and comfrey liquid fertilizer that required solitary concentration and he wasn’t going to get through it without getting rid of Rose.

  ‘Programme?’ he murmured vaguely, sorting through his wallet for the right credit card.

  ‘It’s called Where There’s Muck. Garden secrets of the rich and/or famous?’ She smacked his arm lightly. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it. That would be just too disloyal.’ Rose was pouting. She was wearing very shiny lipstick, with a careful pencil outline that was just a bit too contrasting. Probably something she’d picked up from a makeup artist on a programme, he assumed, though he knew she produced rather than presented this show that he now felt guilty for not having seen.

  ‘Sorry, I have to confess I haven’t actually watched it. My TV tastes are simple, they run to football, cricket and University Challenge.’

  ‘I bet you can answer all the questions.’ She smiled at him, those big teeth making him nervous.

  ‘I bet you can too,’ he countered. ‘Though don’t you find . . .’

  She interrupted quickly, laughing. ‘I know what you’re going to say: you can answer absolutely everything but only when there’s no-one in the room to be impressed!’

  ‘Exactly.’ Glyn paid for his spade and they walked out together into the car park. He recognized Rose’s silver BMW parked opposite his scruffy Volvo and wondered again if this was such a coincidence.

  ‘Your husband phones sometimes,’ Glyn ventured.

  ‘Oh, Ben’s a great one for offloading his worries.’

  Glyn hadn’t mentioned worries, and immediately wished he hadn’t mentioned Ben, either. He hoped she wasn’t going to do confiding, not of marital problems anyway. He’d had all that back in his headteacher days, when depressed, defeated women would come in to explain that little Toby’s or Tanya’s sudden lack of progress might just be something to do with Daddy taking off with the skinny waitress from the Jolly Mariners. ‘Trouble at home’ was all he needed, by way of coded information, but was never handed so precise a statement. Once an abandoned wife, or occasionally a husband, got as far as the chair beside his desk, they somehow couldn’t resist the urge to use him as something between a counsellor and a confessor. His secretary had kept supplies of tissues in the stationery cupboard, specially for the purpose.

  Glyn reached his car and stood by the door, Rose still beside him, wondering how impolite he could bring himself to be, if he could just get in and wave and smile and drive away. Instead he waited, jangling his keys, but not very loudly. Rose had taken up a strangely angular position, her elbow leaning on his car roof as if she was pinning it down, stopping it moving. ‘The trouble with Ben is he has a romantic view of the past. He thinks everything is running downhill too fast for him these days. He’s one of those men who still has his degree certificate hanging on his study wall and a collection of rugby-team photos from the days when he was young and fit. I don’t think he’d be able to lay his hands on our wedding photos though.’ She had a look of sorrow, just for a few seconds, but it was enough. She’d got him.

  ‘Have you got an extra hour or so?’ Glyn heard himself asking. ‘You could leave your car here and I’ll drive us down to the pub at Mylor harbour for a swift half or even some perfectly respectable tea. It’s not really grockle season yet, so it should be pretty quiet.’ Kitty wouldn’t mind how late back he was, she’d be pleased he was making an effort with one of her friends and after he’d dropped Rose back to her car again he could get on with his garden-shopping with a clear conscience. Rose was climbing into the Volvo before she’d finished saying yes, though she might well have instantly regretted it as she noticed its filthy state and was discreetly wiping the dust from her jacket that had attached itself to her when she’d carelessly leaned on the roof.

  ‘Sorry about the mud. We don’t much go in for car-washing round here.’ Glyn started up the elderly but dependable engine and headed towards the main road.

  She grinned, ‘Sorry for being so crassly city-ish. By the way, did Kitty tell you, if Ben didn’t, I’ve been seeing a bit of Tom Goodrich, Antonia’s widower while I’m down here? It’s the least I can do, poor man.’

  Glyn gave an encouraging ‘Mmm’.

  ‘We weren’t terribly nice to Antonia when we were at school, to be honest. I expect Kitty told you that anyway.’

  ‘I think she did mention it, no details though.’ Glyn had forgotten how far it actually was from the garden centre to Mylor. What on earth were they going to find to talk about after the next few minutes?

  ‘Bit late to do anything about it now though, isn’t it?’ he said, negotiating a double roundabout.

  ‘What, about Antonia? Yes of course, but one can hope to make up a bit, you know, somehow . . .’

  ‘To soothe your conscience?’ With the woman’s husband?

  ‘Whatever helps.’ Glyn wondered, if she thought there was something to be made up, how she intended making up the spiritual deficit to Ben when the time came, or would she keep postponing the moment of pay-off indefinitely till the grim reaper came to collect his back rent? He could just see her, arguing the toss with St Peter at his gate, saying ‘I was just trying to be nice’ as if that made it all all rig
ht. Not for the first time he wondered about heaven’s door policy – were the amoral allowed more leeway than the immoral?

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ Rose admitted as Glyn brought drinks out to their table beside the river. ‘Ben and I took a boat a couple of years ago, sailed from Falmouth to the Scilly Isles . . .’

  ‘Isles of Scilly,’ Glyn corrected automatically.

  ‘What? Oh, right, and then back up here, up the river. This place was swarming with families, masses of children. They all seemed to be called Jasper and Sebastian and from places like Putney and they all had absolutely thousands of pounds’ worth of exactly the right sailing clothes, you know all state-of-the-art life-jackets and those dinky red jackets and Docksiders and stuff. Sweet.’

  Rose, catching sight of a young couple entwined on a bench near the pub door, continued abruptly, ‘You knew, of course, that my husband and your wife had a teeny walk-out together way back at the end of our schooldays?’

  ‘I did know,’ he said, smiling. ‘But I didn’t know if you knew, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Oh yes, well I expect everyone did. I wasn’t actually around then. Went straight from school to work for Camp America, taking care of little brats with tooth-braces and spoilt New Jersey whines, and when I came back it was time for Oxford. Julia’s the one who kept up with everyone. Ben spent a summer with your Kitty then went off to do good works in foreign parts, and apparently Kitty went off somewhere too. She might not even remember where she went, but I bet Julia Taggart does.’ Her face, then, lost its smile but she said brightly enough, ‘Ben and I don’t have children. We have a poodle. The big sort, standard. I don’t think of him as “my baby” though, like some women might. I mean he’s our third and you don’t replace your kids when they snuff it. They’re dogs, pets, simple as that.’

  Glyn studied her face as she sipped her spritzer. She wasn’t looking particularly pensive, just casually interested in her surroundings, as if she was used to having this conversation early in new relationships, it was just a couple of sentences to be got through. It seemed quite awful, he thought suddenly, that he knew about a baby her husband had fathered, and yet neither Ben nor Rose had any idea. I hope this girl never turns up, he caught himself thinking.