The Right Thing

by Judy Astley

  She relaxed against Glyn’s hand but could sense Ben glancing and noting. As far as she knew he hadn’t tried calling Rose, unless he’d sneaked out to his car in the night and dialled uselessly. She imagined Rose and Antonia’s Tom twined together in an heirloom four-poster, a distant phone ringing and ringing while they made love, passion heightened by certainty that Rose’s husband was the caller. Poor dead Antonia. The day she left school she must have been so sure Rose’s pilfering days were over.

  Lily had intended to give them the show of her lifetime out on the sea. She assumed that it was nerves that made her feel particularly clumsy and unlucky. Every set she went for either petered out into a churning wind-whipped mess or she simply miscalculated and missed. She wanted them to stand on the wall and holler and cheer at her. She wanted Petroc to wake up and applaud from his bedroom window. Her parents should be rethinking any plans they might have secreted away in the backs of their minds and be wondering about sponsorship for the World Surfing circuit. Right then the best one came and she just had to have it. She paddled fast and caught the back of the curve, leaping up fast and dropping in easily to the wave as if water and not land was her natural habitat. It was a long, long, graceful carve, slow and elegant, wet perfection. When she got close to the shore, she baled out smoothly onto the white water and waved. Ben, Kitty and Glyn clapped and George cheered. Madeleine ran down to the water and dashed into the foaming surf, splashing at Lily and laughing.

  ‘Should she be doing that in her condition?’ Ben asked Kitty. He looked nervous, as if he’d hardly come into contact with pregnant women before and found them weird and unpredictable.

  ‘Oh she’ll be all right. She’s got ages to go. Or so she thinks,’ Kitty told him.

  ‘The exercise will do her good.’ Glyn reverted too easily to caustic, Kitty thought. She glared at him. ‘What?’ he challenged. ‘OK tell me she’s done more than just idly waddle about the house since she got here. I’m sure you did lots of breathing practice and strengthening exercises when you were pregnant. She’s going to get a hell of a shock.’

  ‘I did do all that, it’s true,’ Kitty conceded. ‘But learning three levels of breathing isn’t actually enough to stop the pain being the biggest shock of your life. She’s young, as likely as not it’ll just drop out.’

  She thought of the dowdy Miss Stanhope with the sensible lace-up shoes and beige ankle socks who’d visited the home to instruct the unworthy girls in the workings of the pelvic floor. The air had been choked with suppressed giggles as this elderly spinster had boomed ‘Squeeze and release; squeeze and release’ over and over at them, her eyes bulging with effort. Twenty incredulous girls lay panting, more with mirth than with concentration, at the idea of Miss Stanhope in her tightly buttoned hand-knitted navy cardigan and calf-length knife-pleated iron grey skirt ever getting herself in a position where she might need to use her own expertise.

  Madeleine was hugging Lily, the waves crashing onto her legs. Her dress was sodden from the spray and the wind made it cling round the contours of the baby.

  ‘I want a go!’ Madeleine shrieked, looking back for comment and approval.

  ‘Don’t even think about it!’ George shouted.

  ‘No, I’m going to! Watch!’ Madeleine reached down into the water and pulled at the board, trying to guide it out to sea, but it was still attached to Lily’s ankle by its leash.

  ‘Hey stop! You’ll fall over!’ Lily shouted. She could feel Madeleine’s crazy determination, completely reckless idiocy. She struggled with her, knowing you didn’t take that kind of chance with the sea. Even she had been pushing it for the sake of showing off. But that was her privilege; it was her skill, no-one else’s.

  ‘No come on, show me how. You said you would.’ Madeleine wrenched at the board harder, dragging Lily further into the waves. Looking back up the beach she could see George, Glyn and Ben advancing at her. Her face took on a hunted look, and she hauled Lily and the board into the swell, pulling Lily under the foam with her as she tumbled into the water, dragged down by the undertow.

  Ben reached them first and hauled Madeleine upright. ‘You stupid brat. What the hell are you playing at?’ He wrestled with her in the water gripping her wrist hard, both of them soaked, till she quietened. Lily unfastened the leash and retrieved her board, sobbing as she waded out of the sea and up the shore. Kitty ran inside for towels and rushed back out past Lily and down to the sea’s edge, where Madeleine was marooned on the wet sand keening a strange sound. She was bent over, clutching her stomach.

  ‘Thanks Mum, I mean just don’t think about me will you?’ Lily yelled after her.

  Madeleine had all the attention she could want. Three men and a mother with all those absent years to make up for crowded round her while Lily stormed indoors, alone and bitterly angry, to change. Kitty draped the towels around Madeleine and saw the beginnings of fear in her eyes.

  ‘This hurts!’ she accused Kitty, almost spitting at her.

  ‘Glyn, I think you’d better phone for an ambulance. This baby’s on its way.’

  ‘Ooooow! Oh God, why don’t they tell you?’ Madeleine rolled on the sand and bunched herself up into a ball.

  ‘They do tell you, but nobody believes it,’ Kitty told her. ‘Come on, let’s get you inside.’ Ben and George took an arm each and half carried the drenched and wailing Madeleine back to the house. Kitty followed, suddenly afraid about what would happen next. The ambulance wouldn’t get past the fallen tree. She could only hope the driver had done more than simply watch a training video about delivering babies. One with approximately the same lack of hands-on experience as Miss Stanhope would be no use at all.

  ‘Mum!’ Madeleine roared as the two men plumped her onto the biggest blue sofa. Kitty pushed past them to get close to her and took her hand. ‘I need my mum,’ Madeleine whispered to Kitty. ‘Will you ring her?’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Childbirth was a messy, mucky business, awash with blood and gunk and fluids, from what Kitty could recall of it. As soon as she had phoned the hospital, arranged for an ambulance and a midwife, if one able and willing to shin over a horizontal tree was available, she raced upstairs to the airing cupboard to find what there was among the household’s older sheets. Madeleine was very welcome to produce her baby on the cream rug on the sitting-room floor. At worst the rug could be thrown out and replaced, but she needed something hygienic to separate her and the child from a surface on which the cat slept and moulted and where so many grubby feet had all been treading.

  As she flung her way through the contents of the cupboard, Kitty was extremely thankful that she had swopped the pale blue fitted carpet for the beech flooring the year before, otherwise she might have been callously hustling poor Madeleine in the direction of the hard and comfortless kitchen table. As it was, she could see a case for the wide spreading of newspaper across the beech which had already had its varnish scraped away by the careless moving of chairs. Perhaps that would give George something to do. She’d put Ben on tea-making, that other great traditional home-birth task.

  ‘In the cellar there are stacks of dust-sheets left over from the decorators,’ Glyn commented, picking up and refolding a heap of scattered pillowcases that Kitty had discarded in her frantic scrabbling.

  ‘She can’t have a baby on something that’s covered in paint stains. Besides they’ll be dusty and not even close to sterile. The poor little thing would be born with instant asthma or something.’ She shoved a pile of clean but threadbare sheets at Glyn. ‘Here, can you take these downstairs to her? I still haven’t called her mother.’

  ‘No panic there,’ he said. ‘She can hardly get here in the next hour all the way from Brighton.’

  ‘Madeleine wants her to know.’

  ‘Yes of course. Sorry. Why are they sending an ordinary ambulance? What is the air ambulance for if not for situations like these?’

  ‘There’s a bad car crash near Launceston, they’ve gone to that.’

  �
�Oh right. I don’t suppose they’d fancy plonking their machine down in Rita’s cabbage field anyway. Hey, aren’t we supposed to rush around doing that “Boiling water and plenty of it” thing like they used to do in films?’

  Kitty giggled. ‘That was just to keep the father out of the way.’

  Glyn looked thoroughly excited, the sheets heaped in his arms and his feet still bare and sandy from the beach. He’d trodden sand all up the stairs, something he was always shouting at the children for doing. Kitty reached into the back of the cupboard and pulled out a selection of ancient towels that had been relegated from bathroom to beach use. Thoughts about equipment they might need crowded into her head, informed only by gory scenes from novels and half-remembered passages from the home-birth section of the last baby-care book she’d read, many years before. How much could things have changed? ‘Some sort of bowl . . .’ she murmured. Glyn, who was about to go down the stairs, stopped and turned. ‘What do you need a bowl for?’

  ‘The placenta. Midwives are very keen on inspecting them, don’t ask me why. A friend of Julia Taggart’s had her baby unexpectedly at home and the placenta ended up in a mixing bowl under the bed. She said the dog had a go at it and the midwife was furious.’

  Glyn leaned against the banister rail looking extremely queasy. ‘I suppose then you bury it at midnight under a waxing moon?’

  ‘Well not me, exactly,’ she teased. ‘That’s down to the household’s most senior male apparently, according to ancient tradition.’

  ‘Oh thanks. Well so long as we don’t have to cook it and eat it like on that TV programme.’ There was a roar and a wail from Madeleine and Glyn looked as if he was inclined to rush back up the stairs, hurl himself into his room and hide in the bathroom, running their noisy shower at full pelt until it was safe to come out.

  ‘Should we wake Petroc, do you think?’ he glanced at the closed door. ‘There might be something useful he could do.’

  Kitty grimaced. ‘I doubt it, I mean he’s not exactly . . . ’ There was another yell of pain from below, a primitive, gut-churning sound. ‘I expect Madeleine will wake him soon enough.’ She pushed past Glyn. ‘We’d better get back to her, after all you and I are the ones who’ve gone through all this before. George and Ben are probably desperate to get out of the building.’

  ‘They could climb over the tree and go down the pub, do the other traditional male thing.’

  ‘Actually, they could climb over the tree and go and fetch Rita. I mean, she’s had three.’

  ‘So have you . . .’ He hesitated and looked at her, then reached out and stroked her tangled hair away from her eyes. ‘But you’ve got to ring Madeleine’s mother,’ he said, taking the towels from her and adding them to his heap.

  Kitty raced up the attic stairs to the studio. This was a call she didn’t want to make where anyone could hear her. She didn’t want to risk Madeleine’s mother hearing her child yelling in pain down a phone line either. She looked at the name Madeleine had scrawled on the edge of the electricity bill: Paula Murray. An ordinary enough name, nothing in it to frighten or intimidate. She sat on the edge of the sofa bed. It was still made up from Ben sleeping in it. Just for a moment she wondered if he still slept on his front with one arm hanging down towards the floor as he had when he was young. The few times they’d managed to sneak a whole night together she’d woken up and stroked the broad sweep of strong-boned flesh from shoulder to shoulder. Shoulder-blades like axe-heads. She’d even sketched him lying there naked, and her mother had found the drawings, filed away among the portfolio of work she’d been secretly putting together for her longed-for flight to art college.

  She tried to conjure up a picture of an archetypal ‘Paula Murray’ as she dialled, and could only come up with someone quite a lot older than herself, a brisk and fussy woman (the beige carpets and no-shoes rule) with a pale grey head like her father’s congregation women and an unflattering maroonish floral dress that bunched and bulged in the middle. Where did the waists of the over-sixties go to?

  ‘Hi! You’ve reached Paula, Andreas and Marcel’s phone. Leave a message after the tone, and we’ll get back to you when we get home!’ This was a jolly, middle-aged, securely middle-class voice. It belonged to a woman who might well own a velvet hairband and a persuasive role in local politics. Kitty pictured a whizzing character on a bright blue bicycle, confident at a busy roundabout. Paula on the phone sounded husky and overexcited, like an actress who smoked a lot. She sounded far more copper-streaked than grey-permed.

  Kitty hung up, almost throwing the phone down, completely off-centred by being answered by a machine, then too fascinated by the lustrous voice to leave a message. The greeting, she noted, hadn’t included Madeleine’s name, which tied in with what Madeleine had said about her mother being comfortably used to her absence. She should have asked her more about Paula, she realized. Not pushing Madeleine for more detail about her home life was just cowardly selfishness, just not wanting to hear that she’d had a perfectly good mother to bring her up. Contrarily, of course, that was exactly what she’d always wished for for the girl. Wished it every day since she’d handed her over.

  As her hand stretched out to redial, the phone rang. She picked it up quickly, annoyed that she would have to talk to someone when she was trying to think how to express sensitively what she had to say. It seemed hardly right for Paula’s answering machine to be the method by which she heard that her daughter was about to produce her grandchild.

  ‘Hallo? Did you just call this number? I did 1471.’ It was the husky, still breathy voice.

  Kitty’s heart pounded. ‘Are you Paula Murray? Madeleine’s mother?’ She heard herself being tentative, nervous.

  There was a harsh laugh. ‘Oh God, what’s she done now? Is she pissed again? Or was someone crazy enough to lend her a car?’ She didn’t sound particularly concerned.

  ‘Er no. Actually . . .’

  ‘And you are . . .?’ the voice interrupted.

  ‘Her mother’ was the tempting answer, but right now would more than confuse the issue. Kitty thought for a second, then decided on cautious truth. ‘I’m Kitty Harding. I used to be Katherine Cochrane.’ It would filter through, the name could hardly mean nothing.

  ‘Ah.’ There was the sound of slow deliberate breathing and then, ‘I thought you’d turn up some time.’

  ‘I didn’t turn up, we can’t, not till they change the law. But Madeleine did. She’s here, with me and my family.’

  ‘Well, it had to happen.’ There was another laugh, this time with no hint of mirth in it. ‘She’s been threatening me with the finding of you ever since she was thirteen and I gave her her original birth certificate. I know they’re supposed to be eighteen, but she can nag for the nation. It wears you down. Every time we had a row, every time she was grounded, and that was often I can tell you; heavens, every time I even asked her if please would she mind doing the dishes, she’d say that was it, she was off to find her real mother!’ She sighed. ‘I must say it’s a relief, actually, now it’s happened. I mean she’s surely old enough now to cope. How is she?’

  ‘Extremely well, except, it’s just . . . did you know she was pregnant?’

  There was no easy way to say it.

  ‘Heavens, that’s the last thing I expected. She’s always hated the idea of being tied, always likes to be free and to wander, so I suppose she’ll want an abortion . . . she should have told me herself, she knows she could, I’ve always said . . .’ Kitty sensed resentment and was sorry, suddenly, to be giving pain to this woman who now sounded so hurt. Gently, she said, ‘It’s too late for an abortion. Madeleine’s about to give birth on my sitting-room floor and she asked me to ring you. She says can you come? I’m so sorry there’s no better way to tell you. And I’m really sorry she didn’t tell you herself.’

  There was a silence and then another sigh. ‘So am I. She hasn’t been easy, you know. I did my best. The boys are no trouble.’

  The words ‘It’s not my faul
t!’ shrieked into Kitty’s mind. Paula made her feel as if Kitty had sold her faulty goods that she’d been gallantly making the best of and failing. She was not going to accept any blame. If the right thing to do had been to give Madeleine up for adoption, surely no-one but Paula was responsible for what went awry after that? No-one had forced her to take the child, and Kitty bit her lip to stop herself from saying it. ‘So can you come?’ she asked instead, ‘it’s almost at the furthest end of Cornwall . . .’ Telling Paula that was curiously satisfying.

  Lily crouched on the old pink Lloyd Loom chair in the corner of her bedroom, with her fingers in her ears blocking out the sounds of pain from downstairs. Her wetsuit, hanging over the back of the wardrobe door, was dripping cold salt water onto the dark blue carpet and there would be a white-edged stain when it dried. Her mum would be angry, and she’d have to get the Vax spray and give it a scrubbing. She hated cleaning marks off carpet, hated the texture of it, the friction of the rough wool scraping harsh against the soft skin of her palm. Once, she’d rubbed her hand hard against it, deliberately making it itch and burn, seeing how bad it could be so she would get immune to it. The feeling had made her toes tingle, her legs weak. And it had made no difference.

  She watched the stain getting bigger and bigger and sensed the noises down below getting more and more desperate and her heart thudded horribly. It was all her fault. Madeleine had run into the sea to be with her. She should have let her take the surfboard and just get on with it, not fought her off like that. The sea was much too cold for anyone to go more than knee-deep without 5mm of neoprene covering them, and Madeleine would only have paddled a few feet further out and then come giggling back up the beach, shivering. Or would she? The reason Lily had fought her was because you couldn’t be sure. Madeleine had a mad streak, something reckless and crazy that Lily really envied but was also afraid of.