by Judy Astley
‘What did you two find to talk about till . . . what is it, heavens, nearly one thirty,’ Kitty said. She stood up and stretched, wondering what had happened to all those way-back days of clothes-casting and bed-leaping, all too fast and frantic to care about the consequences. The consequence was sleeping just across the yard.
‘We didn’t talk about you, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Glyn emerged from the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. ‘There’s more to life – there’s cricket and wine and the falling pound and slug control . . .’
‘Glyn, what are you playing at?’
‘Playing?’ He went back into the bathroom and she followed him. He slooshed mouthwash and looked in the mirror, tweaking at his hair as he did every night to see if it was more inclined to fall out than it had been the day before.
‘Yes, playing. You’ve got this smug “I know a secret” look. I bet you’ve had it all evening, chitchatting away with Ben. He probably thinks you’re demented.’
He switched off the bathroom light, pushed past her and got into bed. ‘Well I do know a secret don’t I?’ he said. ‘The question is, is Ben going to be told it too? After all, you could argue that he’s entitled. In fact you could hardly argue that he’s not.’
‘I wish I’d never told you.’ Kitty was angry. ‘It isn’t a game and it’s nothing to do with you. What Ben didn’t know all those years ago he really doesn’t need to know now. It wouldn’t change anything – well, not for the better anyway – what difference can it make after all this time?’
‘Well I don’t agree.’ Glyn climbed out of bed again and put his bath robe on. It was white waffle cotton, which Kitty always thought looked like judo kit, just now seeming perfectly suited to his combative mood. He strode to the window and stood looking out towards the sea. The wind was getting up. The softly damp new leaves on the old beech tree near Rita’s house were rustling urgently, and when Kitty joined Glyn to stare out into the dark she could just make out the awkward jerky twitchings of the great limbs, like a very old man who is determined to have one last go at disco dancing. ‘I think you should tell both of them – Madeleine and Ben,’ Glyn went on. ‘Then everything’s out in the open and they can make of the situation whatever they will. They are grown-ups, Kitty.’
‘No. I can’t do that. Well at least, not without thinking and . . .’
‘Thinking?’ Glyn was shouting now. ‘It’s a bit late for thinking. If you and Ben had done some thinking all those years ago, we wouldn’t be having this ridiculous conversation.’
‘Ssh! You’ll wake Lily! And Ben will hear too. He’ll think we’re arguing about him. He’s feeling bad enough about Rose without imagining we’re rowing about him being here.’
Glyn sighed. ‘Always other people’s feelings. You’re so sodding saintly, Kitty. Or are you a control-freak? Just tell Madeleine she’s got a father. Tell Ben he’s got a daughter – that’ll give them both something new to think about. You can’t keep pulling all their strings for ever. Just let go.’ He got back into bed, turned his back on her and switched his lamp off. She felt dismissed, no longer worth listening to or talking to. It was probably something he’d perfected in his teaching days.
Kitty went into the bathroom, shut the door and turned on the shower taps, running the water as hard as it would go. She took all her clothes off, hurled them into the laundry basket and sat on the floor, leaning her back against the ice-cold tiles on the side of the bath. ‘Just let go.’ The words seethed and spat in her head. How were you supposed to let go of what you’d never had? ‘Just let go’ was a lot like ‘Put it all behind you’ and ‘Now you can get on with your life’ – the cosy phrases that were trotted out when the mistake-babies had been safely signed over to their new parents. The neat clichés were so glib and slick and easy to say – and they took so little thought. Even from Glyn, Kitty thought now as she stepped wearily into the shower, even Glyn.
Lily hated waking in the night. The sleep afterwards was always too light and fidgety. She’d gone to bed early, before ten, as soon as she’d helped Madeleine move her stuff across the yard to the barn. There was nothing to stay up for. Madeleine and George didn’t make it obvious that they wanted to be on their own; they included her in what they said, but she kept feeling as if they were waiting for her to leave. She felt she was handing Madeleine over to George and she felt desolate, as if she’d lost her somewhere in the yard between the house and barn. Lily had become Madeleine’s special person in the house, and now in the barn it was going to be George. They kept making stupid jokes, finishing each other’s sentences and talking in Fawlty Towers voices (George being Basil and Polly and Madeleine going between Manuel and Sybil). They didn’t do it very well, but they laughed at each other as if they were just the best comedy thing ever.
But worse than feeling that she was only on the edge with them, not right there in the middle, was being sure that after she’d gone they’d stop being TV characters and start taking the piss out of her mum and dad. She wasn’t sure why, she was only aware of the sense that that was why they were waiting for her to go. She could just imagine it, too horribly clearly, even if she lay in bed with her hands over her ears; Madeleine acting all crawly and caring like her mum was, copying the way she was with her: ‘Madeleine, are you sure you’re comfortable? Another cushion?’ and ‘Yoghourt – what flavours do you really like?’ which she said every time she made a shopping list, as if not having a clue about Madeleine’s dairy preferences was the one thing she’d really minded missing out on for all those years.
Kitty and Glyn were talking loudly enough for her to hear across the corridor and through two closed doors. Lily had often wondered what it would be like to live in a household of high dramatic tension; to have parents who didn’t go in for give and take and careful reasoning but thrashed out the tiniest disagreements at the highest volume, and with door-slamming and plate-smashing and stuff said that should be unforgivable. It was hard work to nurture the soul of a tortured poet in a household of casual consideration and good manners and a sort of easy-going general happiness.
They were close to shouting now, in that way, she could tell, that meant they were only keeping the volume down because they didn’t want someone else to hear. She could sense teeth that were gritted and control that was only just there. In the interests of research, Lily slipped out of bed and out of the room and close enough to their door to hear details, but far enough away so that she could bolt back to bed if there was something she needed to pretend she hadn’t heard.
Lily hadn’t thought about Madeleine having a father – a birth father in the same way that Kitty was her birth mother. She felt, as she shivered outside the room, that she’d had a terrible failure of imagination about that. There were photos that Kitty had kept from when she was young, about Petroc’s age, wearing hideous tight skimpy tops with long swirly skirts. She’d had too much long thick hair, a fringe that covered half her nose and was half grown out at the sides, curling round on her cheeks. Lily had looked at those photos and seen someone who was still her mother, but wearing a disguise as someone young, like fancy dress. She’d not been her mother then, she’d been just a young girl like Amanda, or Charlotte or herself, with boyfriends and problems and then a baby and then not a baby. She’d never kept Madeleine a secret, but she hadn’t said anything at all about who the father had been. None of them had thought to ask – a name wouldn’t have meant anything and besides, Madeleine had always been something, an event, that had happened to Kitty all by herself. Lily, listening so hard she was hardly breathing, now knew Madeleine’s father was someone called Ben. Someone with, according to her father, rights.
Lily then heard her father yelling ‘Just let go!’ He was angry. She heard a light click off and their bathroom door slam and didn’t want to leave things there.
‘Mum?’ She opened the door a few inches. It was dark, silent, as if she’d been dreaming it all.
‘Lily? What are you doing up?’ Her father’s voice was so
ft, like it used to be when she was little and he was worried that she might be ill or sleep walking.
‘I heard you. You were arguing. What’s wrong?’ He wasn’t going to tell her. He’d gone into caring-night-time-parent voice.
‘Nothing, Lily. It’s OK. Just stuff that will sort itself out in time. Go back to sleep now, it’s late and you’ve got school.’
‘No I haven’t, it’s Saturday tomorrow. Who’s Ben?’
‘Ben?’ Glyn switched on the light and sat up. ‘What about Ben?’
‘Who is he?’ she persisted, leaning against the door-frame.
‘He’s . . .’ Glyn considered for a moment, ‘he’s the husband of that old friend of your mother’s. You know, that Rose who came for a night. He’s here, up in the studio, arrived after you’d gone to sleep.’ He grinned at her. ‘So if you walk into the kitchen tomorrow morning and he’s munching toast, you’ll know, won’t you?’
Lily scowled and chewed her nail. She recognized, just as Kitty had, a schoolmasterly dismissal – a dismissal with only half the truth at that. ‘Yeah I’ll know,’ she snarled, ‘sure I’ll know.’
She went back to bed. The patch where she’d been sleeping was still warm and Russell had taken the opportunity of sliding under her duvet and curling up by the pillow. She curled her body round him and pulled him close to her. He purred and twitched his whiskers in his sleep. ‘Animals don’t go through life wondering where their children have got to, do they? Or who their mums and dads are,’ she whispered to him. She hoped they didn’t. Imagine, she thought, cows pining for every calf. Cats sorrowing after kittens, wondering about the ‘Free to a good home’ offer and whether it had been checked and certified. All that paw-kneading that cats did when they sat on your lap, she imagined them picturing a big, soft, long-ago mother cat and the remembered taste of her milk.
She snuggled deep down in the bed with the cat, who miaowed and struggled and then leapt to the floor, protesting at being cuddled so hard. He went to the closed door and started scratching at it, clawing at the paintwork and at the carpet. ‘Ssh Russell, come back and let’s get to sleep,’ Lily called to him but the scrabbling got more frantic. She sighed and swore and climbed out of bed again, opened the door and followed him down the stairs, hungry now from being awake so long that her stomach had started thinking it was time for breakfast. As Russell hurtled out through the cat flap, she padded around the kitchen in the dark, assembling a crust from the end of a big wholemeal loaf, butter and some dense and over-sugared marmalade that Polly at the Spar had made the year before and sold at the playgroup fête.
Lily sat on the worktop with her arms huddled round her knees, munching hard and staring out across the wall at the moonlight on the sea. The wind was fiercer now, moaning through the trees. Silver-edged clouds scudded in the sky, hurtling across the moon. In the morning the sea would be high and the surf would be gnarly and difficult. Madeleine had promised to come out and watch her. She wanted to be impressive, it was important. She slid down off the worktop and went back to the bread bin, cutting another fat slice of bread. Madeleine hadn’t liked her picking at food and saying she wasn’t hungry all the time. She’d said it was important to keep your body warm inside. You could only do that with food. She’d said you shouldn’t let the body starve and fret and crave and then pretend you were doing it to be in control of it. You didn’t have the right, she’d said. Your body was there to look after your happiness so you shouldn’t be ungrateful to it and refuse to give it what it asked for.
Madeleine wasn’t chatty for the sake of it, not like most people which must be why Petroc had given up trying to get her to talk to him and Dad just thought she was moody. It meant though that if she was telling you something, it was because she really believed it needed saying and that made Lily feel special. Lily finished the bread and opened the fridge. She took out a carton of milk and drank about half of it, straight from the pack, the fridge door still open. Then she broke off a piece of Cheddar from the big slab on the top shelf. ‘You’ll have bad dreams,’ she could hear her mother warning.
When the kitchen light snapped on, Lily’s mouth was bulging with chocolate biscuit.
‘Lily! Jeez, what the fuck are you doing?’ Petroc stood blinking in the doorway, eyeing the devastation. On the table was the bread, crumbs scattered, the marmalade jar empty and lying on its side. There was a big twiggy skeleton that had once been a bunch of grapes, the chewed bones of a couple of cold chicken legs and a line-up of six cereal packets. Lily was leaning against the sink, her skinny wrist shoved down to the bottom of a tube of Pringles, sour cream and chives flavour.
‘I didn’t eat the cereal. I just got the packets out.’ Lily was defensive and wide-eyed. She slid her arm out of the Pringles tube and pushed it behind her onto the draining-board.
‘What for, to read the nutritional values while you scoffed your way through everything else?’ Petroc picked up the chicken bones and flung them into the bin. ‘What’s wrong with you, Lily? You’re being scary.’
‘Nothing’s wrong. Madeleine said I didn’t eat enough. No-one else has dared say it, like they didn’t care. She does.’
‘Oh. Madeleine said. Well there you go.’ He wiped the crumbs from the top of the table.
‘Don’t you like her?’ Lily looked scared.
‘I like her, a bit. I don’t know her. She doesn’t say anything, not about herself. Surely you’ve noticed?’
‘She says stuff to me. She did when she was in my room anyway. Now she’s not. She’s gone over to stay in the barn.’
‘What, with George?’ Petroc grinned.
‘Not with George. Just with more space, she said.’
Petroc reached into the fridge for a Coke and sat down at the table, tracing his finger through the damp patches the wet cloth had left. ‘She might be with George, you know. She comes all alive when he’s around.’
‘She can’t be, he’s old. Anyway she came here to be with us, with her real mum, not pick up a bloke.’ Lily stamped across the kitchen and looked into the fridge again.
‘Hey, don’t eat any more, please. You’ll explode – even precious Madeleine wouldn’t expect you to go that far. And sure, he’s old, but he’s old and rich, old and famous. Perhaps that’s what she’s into. We don’t know. We don’t know anything.’
Lily huddled her arms round her body. She was feeling quite sick now, and starting to tremble with cold. There was a gale blowing outside and the wind was whistling under the kitchen door, chilling her feet. ‘I know we don’t know. But we’re getting to know, at least I was. I don’t want her to leave before I can be sure she won’t go away for ever. And imagine Mum if Madeleine just went off and left now . . .’
‘She’ll go some time, Lily. You can’t just keep her in a box like some stray cat that’s turned up, hoping it won’t remember its way home. Madeleine’s got a family somewhere else. Her real family.’
‘I know, I know. I’m freezing. I must go to bed. Petroc, why are you so late home? Were you with Amanda?’
‘Amanda? Who’s Amanda?’ he grinned at her.
Chapter Fourteen
The view from the bedroom window was peculiarly different in the morning. Something had changed in the night that was disorientating, as if the house had secretly shifted angles the tiniest bit. Kitty looked out and tried to work out what had changed. The sky seemed more open, bigger somehow and down the lane Rita’s farmhouse was stark against clouds that were still being hurtled along by the wind. Then she realized she couldn’t normally see that much of Rita’s house.
‘Some of the beech tree’s gone,’ she announced to the dozing heap that was Glyn. ‘A lot of the beech tree’s gone. That whole big branch, the one halfway up on the left.’
The heap heaved itself upwards and joined her to have a look. ‘Oh great. And it’s fallen right across the lane.’
‘So we’re stuck?’
‘We’re stuck.’ He laughed. ‘And not just us. Now no-one can escape. That should be
jolly. We’re all trapped in here together like something out of Agatha Christie. I wonder who the first murder victim will be.’
Kitty laughed. ‘You could always scramble over the top of the branches and make a desperate bid for freedom.’ He might really do that, she thought, anything to get away from conflict.
‘I could take Ben with me.’
‘You could.’ Then she teased, ‘But he might not want to go.’ Kitty could see Madeleine down on the beach, standing still and facing the sea, her arms stretched straight out crucifix-style as if challenging the keening wind to push her over. She was wearing a hippyish long purple dress of the sort that Kitty had sent to the jumble back at the end of the 1970s. The bottom of it ended in fringing that was tangling round her ankles and her feet were bare. Kitty was entranced, taking in the way the girl’s long thick hair rippled backwards, the tension in her spread fingers. She thought she wouldn’t look out of place as a magnificent ship’s figurehead, strong and fearsome and powerfully beautiful.
‘What the hell’s she doing out there? She must be bloody freezing.’ Glyn was frowning now. Kitty knew she couldn’t expect him to look at Madeleine the same way that she did, but she felt mildly disappointed that he couldn’t see her, just for one objective moment, as a sight rather wonderful out there alone communing with the churning waves. ‘She’s supposed to be meeting up with Lily and watch her surf. The sea’s horribly fierce though.’
‘That won’t stop Lily.’ Glyn was bustling about now, looking for clothes, picking out sweatshirts from the drawer, unfolding them, having a look, refolding and putting them back as it there was something just very slightly amiss with the first three he tried. She smiled. She was used to this ritual. Eventually he pulled out a Quiksilver fleece, gave it a brief fond hug and laid it on the bed for after his shower. Kitty wondered if Ben had odd little habits like this, and if that was partly why Rose was looking for something less predictable elsewhere. He might be one of those men who always shoves his fist into clean socks to check for holes or dozing moths or splinters – enough to drive anyone to start calculating alimony.
