by Judy Astley
‘It might stop Lily,’ Kitty said, ‘she’s not stupid about the sea.’
‘She’s stupid about Madeleine though, she’s desperate to impress her. We’d better have a word when she gets up. The surfs too . . . what’s the word she uses?’
‘Gnarly; though I guess we old people are still allowed just to call it “rough”. You know what she’s like if we try to use unsuitably hip words.’
Kitty felt edgy. Breakfast with Ben had to be faced. Glyn would probably hover around giving her significant looks and pushing her to blurt out that by the way, perhaps Ben would like to be introduced to his own daughter? She dressed quickly and went downstairs, praying there would be time for a solitary thought-collecting cup of coffee before he emerged from the studio. The gods weren’t listening: there was a rumble of conversation.
‘So you wax the top of the board like this for really good grip. The top’s called the deck . . .’ Kitty heard Lily from outside the kitchen door. Lily was sitting on the table, her surfboard propped against the back of a chair. Ben sat beside her drinking coffee and watching while she rubbed the board with its special wax and a broad loving movement. Her skinny arms emerging from the baggy teeshirt reminded Kitty of the kind of candlestick lamp base that’s been given too big a shade. Closer inspection as she worked showed that the narrow little arms had a surprising amount of muscle tone, strength gathered from paddling so hard on the sea. The air smelled sharply of apples from the wax.
‘Hello Ben, I see you’ve met Lily.’ He looked a lot more relaxed than he had the night before, in comfortably aged jeans and a beaten-up dark blue sweater with plenty of pulled threads. He looked younger somehow too, as if in the night he’d dreamed away some of his worries or even made a couple of positive decisions.
‘I certainly have met Lily. I wandered into the kitchen and the first thing she said to me was “Hi, pass over that block of sex wax.”’
Lily giggled. ‘Mr Zog’s finest sex wax. It’s only what it’s called. It’s just to make you buy it.’
‘Well, for those of us ignorant of the arcane culture of surfers I can tell you it came as a shock before nine in the morning.’
Lily was looking pleased with herself. ‘Ben said he’s one of your old boyfriends,’ she said, interested but slightly disbelieving.
‘I did have one or two you know, romance isn’t something your lot invented,’ Kitty told her.
‘No, exactly,’ Ben agreed, ‘our lot invented it.’
‘Don’t tell me. Gross.’ Lily did an exaggerated shudder.
Kitty made coffee and delved into the freezer, pulling out a bag of the kind of croissants Julia Taggart would certainly scorn to serve to guests. She shoved a trayful of them into the Rayburn and set the timer, knowing she’d completely forget them otherwise and later be faced with a dreadful smell and an oven full of what would then look like a set of earth-brown dog turds.
‘You’re not actually surfing this morning though, are you Lily? I mean have you seen the state of the sea? And the wind’s still howling and gusting.’
Lily looked astounded. ‘Of course I am! It’s pumping out there! There’s an onshore wind on a falling tide, no problem. I promised Madeleine I’d give her a sort of land lesson, show her what I’m doing and explain what it’s all about.’
‘Who is Madeleine?’ Ben asked. Lily looked at Kitty as if asking permission to tell the truth.
Kitty got in first. ‘She’s staying here, over in the barn with George Moorfield.’
‘The writer? Good grief. I thought he’d got a posse of wives already.’
‘She’s not . . .’ Lily cut in. She’d stopped the waxing and was looking at Kitty oddly, wondering, calculating. The oven timer bleeped and Kitty bent to take the croissants out and then assemble butter, knives and all the various jams and marmalades that were in the cupboard. ‘Lily’s right, Madeleine’s definitely not one of George’s famous conquests. She’s helping him out with phone calls and mail, so he can get on with his book. That’s what we’re supposed to be selling to writers who come here, the chance to put a good big space between themselves and the day-to-day hassles.’
‘Then they give a few chosen people the phone number and the world follows them down the satellite rays or whatever they are. Morning Ben, sleep OK?’ Glyn wandered into the kitchen and picked up a croissant on his way to the coffee.
‘Fine thanks. Though I did wake up early and wonder why I couldn’t hear the thrum of traffic.’
Kitty opened the back door and went outside to the sea wall. The wind was strangely warm as if it had ventured too fast across the sea from a much hotter place and hadn’t yet run out of energy. The scudding clouds were parting fast now, showing smeared trails of vibrant blue. Madeleine had gone from the beach, leaving a trail of splayed footprints on the damp sand leading to the water’s edge. Closer to the wall the wind had blurred the tracks she’d made in the soft dry sand up above the high-tide mark. Kitty walked down the steps and across the gritty foreshore, kicked off her shoes and planted her feet squarely in a pair of the wet prints, feeling the shape and size of them compared to her own. Madeleine’s were bigger, squarer and Kitty’s toes fitted so neatly inside the outline that it looked as if someone had drawn a line exactly an inch all round her own feet. She pictured soft plump baby feet with tiny fairy nails, imagined Madeleine’s adoptive mother buying her first baby shoes. She wondered if she’d kept them, as she had kept Lily’s and Petroc’s. The two pairs of blue T-bar Start-Rites, Lily’s a couple of sizes smaller than Petroc’s, languished carelessly at the back of her underwear drawer. Madeleine’s mother might be the type who’d preserved hers in a specially made display case, or, worse, had them cast in bronze, mounted on a plinth and displayed in a glass cabinet. Or she might just have sent them to the Oxfam shop.
‘I’ll be off in about ten minutes.’ Kitty jumped. Ben was suddenly there beside her, the sand having silenced his footsteps. His feet were bare, unexpectedly tough-looking and with a trace of a tan. She’d forgotten that he was a practised sailor and had him firmly categorized as a city-street man, pale-footed and tender-skinned. ‘I suppose I’d better go and find Rose and have it out with her. It’s what I came for.’ He looked terribly young and rather foolish, Kitty thought.
‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic. Where’s all last night’s big rush?’ she asked. He shrugged, his hands stuffed in his pockets like a boy caught with no good reason for a bit of silly vandalism. ‘Evaporated. It’s being here maybe? Seeing what playing happy families should be like? Except Rose and I aren’t a family and we’re not even much of a couple.’
‘You mean you’ve seen the possibility of something else.’
‘Yeah. Who knows.’ He grinned, looking just as brightly careless as he had at eighteen for a second. ‘Maybe I’ll sign up with one of those exclusive dating agencies and pull myself a desperate countess with child-bearing hips.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Gone ten already. I’d better be on my way.’
‘Oh. Er . . . that might not be so easy.’ There was the small matter of the beech tree. ‘A big branch of a tree fell down last night, right across the lane. I could see it from our window this morning.’
Ben looked around quickly as if another route might materialize. He lived in London, too used to alternatives and choices. ‘And that’s the only way out?’
‘The only way out. Sorry.’ He grinned at her. ‘Don’t be. I can use more practice at this winding-down thing.’ He touched her shoulder lightly. ‘And I’m enjoying seeing you again.’
Lily had pulled her wetsuit on and was ready. From her bedroom window she looked down at the heaving sea and wondered if it was really such a great idea. Petroc was still asleep. If he’d been up and said to her, ‘Not today Lily, don’t even think about it,’ she might have listened. Or she might not. Madeleine wasn’t even there. She’d been out there earlier, wandering about and watching the water. Lily had seen her pick up a pebble and fling it at the waves. Perhaps she’d got cold and
had gone back into the barn to snuggle up with George, because whatever she or anyone else said, Lily knew that there was going to be snuggling, whether it was now or later when there wasn’t the great mound of baby between them. Madeleine had that look when George was around, exactly like the one that Petroc had come in with the night before. Lily had asked who it was who’d made him look like that and he hadn’t been able to lie and say ‘no-one’, even though he’d tried, because he couldn’t stop the great goofy smile splitting his face. She’d never have guessed it was Hayley Mason though. You couldn’t get more of an opposite to Amanda Goodbody if you advertised. Big, beamy, curly-haired and dark. Quite like Madeleine, she supposed.
Lily pulled her winter hood over her hair and felt, as she always did, that she looked like a tortoise that lacked a shell, and for the first time she wished she had more curves to soften the wormy black outline of the wetsuit. She pulled on her latex gloves. She was going out there on the surf whether anyone watched her or not.
Kitty thought Madeleine and George looked so very much as if they knew something that no-one else knew. They sauntered along the beach together talking and looking at each other the whole time. Lovers did that, moving in that way people do when they really don’t want to look where they are going and don’t care if ahead of them there is a mine shaft to be fallen into, just so long as they can keep concentrating on each other’s faces.
‘We used to look like that. Do you remember?’ Ben murmured to Kitty as Madeleine and George approached.
‘We did?’
‘Course we did. Young love. You can tell.’
Kitty spluttered a laugh. ‘George is hardly young!’
‘Not the people; the love. When it’s new, when it’s fresh and perfect.’
Kitty felt uneasy. Sitting on the sea wall with Ben, this didn’t seem to be a conversation they should be having. At the same time it made her almost tearfully nostalgic. It seemed a long time since she and Glyn had said anything so emotionally charged. Maybe people simply didn’t when they’d been together as long as they had.
‘So where is she? The silver surfer?’ Madeleine hauled her bulk up the steps and sat on the wall next to Kitty, rudely ignoring Ben.
‘She’ll be out. Though quite honestly she probably shouldn’t be, not in that sea.’
‘So tell her not to then.’ Madeleine shrugged. Kitty felt an urge to slap her that was very close to parental. The girl was so thoughtless, almost heartless.
‘It’s you she’s showing her skills off to, if you’re Madeleine and I take it you are.’ Ben leaned across Kitty and put out his hand. ‘I’m Ben. Old friend of Kitty’s.’
Pouting at his abruptness, and clearly only showing a degree of manners because Kitty was there, Madeleine shook his hand. Kitty expected to feel something poignant, something significantly electric at this first touch between father and daughter, but nothing happened. They were, after all, just two grown-up people who’d never met before.
Lily bounced out onto the beach clutching her board with both hands. ‘It’s taking off in the wind!’ she yelled as she passed them.
‘Go for it, babe.’ Madeleine smiled at her and went back to chewing off the varnish from her thumbnail. George came and sat close to her and she wriggled along till her thigh was against his. Ben turned to Kitty and raised his eyebrows. ‘Sure about her not being a conquest?’ he whispered.
Glyn followed the sound of the chain-saw along the lane as far as the tree. Lying there, slammed into what was left of the wall and cruelly ripped away from the main trunk, the huge branch looked like a felled monster, pitiful after slaughter. Rita in her oldest jeans and a pair of stout lime green Doc Martens was astride one of the larger limbs that jutted out across the lane, clutching an implement that leaked the stench of two-stroke. Her hair was tied up in a pink fringed scarf that flapped around her face and was obviously annoying her. She kept spitting frayed ends of it out of her mouth and furiously shoving them back under the knot behind her with quick, stabbing fingers. Mick from the pub was standing surveying the scene, leaning with his arms folded against the bonnet of his old green van and waiting to think of something constructive to say, something cleverly incisive that would express his opinion that cutting up half a tree wasn’t a job for anyone born without a penis. Glyn, noting the expression of elated determination on Rita’s face, felt like warning him not even to think of it.
‘Hi Rita, want any help?’ His offer was tentative but genuine. She looked transformed from the cowed misery of the day before, and her face, turned to the wind, was almost manically exhilarated.
‘Yeah, let the men get to it! Have it done in ‘alf the time!’ Mick yelled out, assuming Glyn could be called on as backup if Rita got lippy. ‘Sod off Mick!’ Rita shouted. ‘I can take off these side branches Glyn,’ she said, ‘and chop them up for the autumn. But there’s not much I can do about the main section. I’ll need a much bigger saw.’ Mick sniggered. ‘It’s not the size of the tool . . . !’ Rita stood on the branch, wielding the saw menacingly. ‘Mick, just bog off will you!’ Glyn had an instant vision of Annie Oakley, facing a band of outlaws with brass nerve and a shotgun.
‘I’n’t she lovely when she’s angry!’ Mick called to Glyn. Obediently though, beaten by a worthier warrior, he climbed into his van, backed it into a gateway and trundled away.
‘Nutter!’ Rita shouted after him. She sat back down on the branch and started up the saw again. She was, Glyn could see, doing more than cutting up wood. She looked as if she was sawing up the absent Josh’s limbs, joyously severing them one by one from his torso. Glyn found a foothold on a bunch of jutting twigs and pulled himself up onto the branch. It was amazing how high up he was. It wasn’t even the main trunk that had fallen, just a huge arm, but lying in the road it was easily as big as any full-grown tree. It would take more than himself and Rita to shift it, and he guessed the council highways department would be pretty overstretched from last night’s storm. Great fronds of twigs and tangles of smaller branches were crushed onto the lane and spread out for a radius of at least twenty feet. The leaves looked too young and spring-fresh to be coming to such an abrupt and sad end to their lives.
‘Isn’t it amazing that a tree can go on surviving with such a huge part missing,’ he commented to Rita. She’d turned off the howling saw and was pushing the piece she’d cut down towards the ditch. ‘What? Oh I see what you mean. Well we get by without bits of us, don’t we?’ she said. ‘Amputated arms and legs, one lung out, no appendix or tonsils, all that. There are even lovers we can do without, given enough time and fury.’
‘I suppose so. And the tree can grow a new branch.’
‘Not like this.’ Rita patted the bark gently. ‘This bit was its best piece. It’ll never get another with a girth this huge. This is almost a twin to the main trunk. It must be feeling sad.’ She leaned down and hugged her arms as far round the giant branch as she could. Glyn felt uncomfortable. He wasn’t the kind of man who attributed emotions to vegetation. Once people started doing that, there’d be nothing on the planet that could be eaten. He’d have to apologize to every cabbage for pulling it up and cooking it.
‘Lily’s surfing, a kind of skills demo for Madeleine. Why don’t you come and watch?’ he said eventually, wishing she’d just sit up and get back to being her new brisk practical self. He’d help her load logs onto a barrow if she wanted, enjoy sharing the basic physical warmth of gathering fuel.
‘No. Not just now. I’ll get on with this, it’s incredibly therapeutic.’ She sat up and retied her headscarf, shoving her rebellious hair roughly under it. The hair had a newly washed spring to it and even her face looked scrubbed of all misery. Perhaps it was the weather, Glyn thought, blasting away the last bits of Josh’s power. Perhaps she’d raced out naked into the rain in the early hours and danced in the drops, cackling wildly. She grinned naughtily, showing the glinting gold tooth. ‘Perhaps I’ll give Mick a call, tell him I thimply can’t shift the main branch and then enjoy watchin
g him make a macho twat of himself.’
‘Good idea. Whatever gets the lane cleared!’ Glyn waved and walked back towards home. In spite of its current complications, it suddenly seemed an awfully attractive place to be.
The sun was blazing through whenever the clouds shifted, feeling fierce enough to burn whenever the wind dropped.
‘You don’t get days like this in London,’ George was saying as he stripped off his big hairy sweater, revealing a faded green Rolling Stones teeshirt that was clearly from a very long-ago gig. ‘It’s either wet or not, hot or not. Here it’s everything at once.’
‘You get it in Brighton. Coast weather, where we’re all on the beach and everyone a hundred yards inland is complaining about how dull it is. But then you get it the other way round, that’s the downside.’
Madeleine was fidgety, staring out at Lily who looked frighteningly small paddling alone out on the waves. Kitty could feel how uncomfortable she was, shifting this way and that trying to adjust the baby so that it didn’t press on painful nerves.
‘Sorry but I can’t sit here. I’ve got to walk.’ Madeleine almost fell off the wall. George put a hand out to steady her. Her face looked pained and tight, but she smiled at him before strolling off down the beach to get closer to where she could watch Lily.
‘Lily will be pleased. She’s got her full attention,’ Glyn said. He was standing behind Kitty, kneading the back of her neck gently. He’d brought out a tray of coffee and biscuits for them all, and she wondered if he was regretting his outburst the night before. Contrarily she was beginning to think he’d had a point. For what possible reason should a middle-aged adult be kept in ignorance of the fact that he had fathered a child? Whatever had made her and even her furious parents so adamant that Ben need never know? She could only put it down to some strange quirk of the age: that which is ignored and unmentioned will surely go away.
