The Right Thing

by Judy Astley

  Madeleine had told her about hitch-hiking through Italy and stealing food from supplies left on restaurant doorsteps at four in the morning. She said she’d tied her younger brother to one of the Brighton Pier uprights when there was no-one around in winter and gone away and left him, watching from the promenade till the tide went right to the top of his legs. And she’d told her about the Irish wake she’d gone to where the dead man had been dressed in his best suit and propped up in his favourite armchair so that he wouldn’t miss the fun – and Madeleine said she’d sat a small boy on the cold lap and told him to tweak the stiff dead nose to wake him up. Lily hoped things like that were made up just for effect, but she was afraid they weren’t. She’d only laughed at it all because she didn’t want to upset her and make her leave. Madeleine never mentioned friends. She seemed to have done most of her living by herself so far, as if she couldn’t be bothered to collect people and have to trail them around with her like baggage. She’d collected George now, though. Or maybe he’d collected her.

  Cautiously, Lily took her fingers out of her ears. There was silence now. Either it was all over or Madeleine had decided shouting and yelling wasn’t any use. Or maybe it was worse and she’d died like they always did in Charles Dickens. She crept to the top of the stairs and listened. She wanted to go down and help, but felt scared. Seeing a baby born in real life and not just on the biology-lab video had to be something you didn’t miss if you got the chance, but in the bio lab the woman in the film had smiled and grunted a bit and that was all. She hadn’t howled like a lost dog.

  Her mother rushed past her, making her jump. ‘Are you coming down, Lily? Madeleine might like yours to be the hand she hangs onto. After all, you’re the one who’s got closest to her.’

  Lily held onto the banister rail, swinging her foot as if she was still deciding whether to go up or down. ‘Apart from George. She’ll probably want George now.’

  Kitty came back up a few steps and put her arm round her. ‘Perhaps, but let’s go and see, shall we?’

  ‘Yeah OK. After all it’s my niece or nephew.’

  George and Ben were sitting out on the sea wall, smoking like a nervous pair of true labour-ward first-timers. Glyn sent them off to the fallen tree in the lane to meet the ambulance and direct the paramedics to the house. He felt an urgent need for order, for someone with a uniform to take charge and sort everything out. Madeleine looked like a strapped-down animal, heaving and writhing on the rug, turning one way and then another, sometimes getting up and squatting, and then rearing herself up onto all fours. Kitty had produced Lily and Petroc with the full assistance of the National Health’s pain-relief systems, propped up on the right sort of solid bed with a bank of crisp white pillows and a bustling team of beaming, confident nurses. Fathers were welcome but kept at the head end for brow-mopping and contraction-counting and for holding the Evian spray, dealing with the Brahms tapes (or Eric Clapton or whale sounds) and being a useful wrist to grip when pain went beyond the edge. He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes had gone by since Kitty had phoned for help. It was at least twenty-five minutes from the Penzance hospital, or an awful lot more from Truro. He listened hard but couldn’t hear a siren. Then suddenly everyone was there. There was the gritty pounding of men running on shingle and Ben dashed round the corner towards the back door, leading a pair of green-uniformed paramedics, each clutching a bagful of items that Glyn prayed were relevant and useful. George, panting, brought up the rear, followed by Rita looking as eager as if she’d just discovered her true vocation.

  ‘No midwife?’ Glyn asked Rita, following her into the house.

  ‘Only at the hospital. I expect they’ll take her there.’

  But they didn’t. ‘We don’t move women this far gone in labour; against the rules,’ Brian, the older of the two said, assessing Madeleine’s condition the second he walked through the sitting-room doorway. ‘Besides, we’ll never get her over that tree in her state.’ Madeleine, curled up on her side on the rug, glared at him. The younger one looked panic-stricken. To Kitty’s anxious eyes he resembled some sort of hapless youth on day one of work experience. ‘Don’t worry,’ the older one said, catching her glance, ‘it’s Trev’s first time but I’ve done a couple of dozen, nothing to it. First off, at least half of you lot can disappear. Don’t want a crowd. And me and Trev could murder a cup of tea.’ He knelt down next to Madeleine. ‘OK love, let’s see how things are going.’

  ‘I wanted a woman.’ Madeleine glared at him, looking as if she might bite if he came too near.

  Brian laughed. ‘Sorry to be a disappointment. But I’ll do my best. I’m good at it. And just think, it could be worse, they could have sent a doctor. Now they’re worse than useless.’ Madeleine’s face tightened into agony once more and she moaned and thrashed around, sending Glyn and Ben scuttling for the kitchen where they collided with Lily on her way to join Madeleine.

  ‘I wouldn’t go in there, it’s too crowded already,’ Glyn told her.

  ‘But I want to! She might need me! Mum said!’ He gripped hold of her wrist to stop her and she tried to twist herself free but Glyn hung on and the two of them danced awkwardly backwards into the kitchen, crashing against the table.

  ‘Kitty said she’d ask Madeleine if she wanted you. She’ll come and get you if you are.’

  ‘No! Let me go!’

  ‘Maybe it would be a good idea if you hung on just a bit longer, just in case it’s a bit difficult in there . . .‘ Ben ventured.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you!’ she yelled. ‘She’s my sister and I want to be with her!’

  Glyn let go abruptly and Lily fell back against the fridge. There was a breaking-glass sound from inside it. Lily fled from the kitchen to the sitting-room, flinging open the door and slamming it shut after her.

  ‘So Madeleine is your oldest daughter?’ Ben was clearly puzzled. ‘I didn’t realize. I thought Kitty said she was just someone staying here.’

  Glyn opened the fridge and started clearing up the mess that a smashed glass bowl of salad dressing had made. Like Kitty with the egg on the day Madeleine had arrived, he marvelled at how much chaos a small trail of vinaigrette could cause. All the salad vegetables would need to come out, every tomato would have to be washed and it had even splashed over the cartons of milk and apple juice and bottles of water in the door rack. Carefully, he collected up the fragments of glass and started wrapping them in kitchen paper. ‘She’s Kitty’s daughter,’ he said at last. He didn’t feel the need to volunteer more than that essential basic fact. Anything else was down to Kitty.

  ‘Oh I see.’ He didn’t look as if he did, Glyn thought. ‘From before you?’

  ‘Yes.’ He reached into the cupboard under the sink and took out a clean J-cloth, rinsed it out and started very slowly wiping the mess from the shelves. He wanted to be out in the vegetable garden. He could be sowing a rocket bed, hoeing between the land-cress lines.

  ‘So how old is she?’ Ben wasn’t going to let go. The cogs of his brain could almost be heard grinding gradually faster.

  Glyn shrugged. ‘Oh er, early twenties, something like that.’

  ‘Surely you know exactly how old? Has she always lived with you?’

  ‘No, no she hasn’t.’ Would the man never give up?

  ‘So where . . .’

  Trev’s timid skinny face appeared round the kitchen door. ‘Brian says please can you hurry up with that tea. He says it’s thirsty work and he wants two sugars.’

  ‘Coming right up. Look Ben, I’m sorry but if you want to know about Madeleine you’re going to have to ask Kitty. After all, she was her baby, so the story’s all hers, OK?’

  Madeleine’s baby boy fought his way into the world and landed in Brian’s huge pink hands, where he lay and kicked and glared and drew his first gurgling breath. He didn’t cry, but frowned as if he already had a grudge.

  ‘Who’s first, Mum or Grandma?’ Brian asked once he’d checked the child’s airway. Kitty choked back tears. George
was blowing his nose noisily and Lily and Rita were weeping happily all over each other. Madeleine just grinned and held out her arms for her child, nuzzling him to her and gently sniffing at his hair, like a mother cat with a kitten. It was almost as if Madeleine herself had been reborn, as a soft, loving, start-again creature, folding the baby to her body as if she’d never handled anything so delicately in her life. She looked up at Kitty and smiled. ‘What do you know?’ she whispered, ‘it was a real live baby in there all the time.’

  Kitty laughed, the thought so exactly echoed how she’d felt when Madeleine had been born: that strange near-shock, that the lump pushing her stomach skin from concave to massive really was a miraculously fully-formed miniature human being and not some alien fungusy growth. Back then though, Kitty had had no-one to say it to. ‘He’s beautiful,’ she said, inspecting his tiny perfect fingers with their clean rosy nails.

  ‘How come their nails are always just the right length?’ Rita asked, marvelling at nature’s brilliance. ‘I mean if they’re a couple of weeks late you’d think they’d be needing a trim, wouldn’t you.’

  ‘I think he’s early, actually,’ Brian said, making notes on his clipboard. ‘Wouldn’t you say so, love?’ he asked Madeleine. She shrugged. ‘Sorry, couldn’t tell you. He looks OK though. He is, isn’t he?’

  Brian squeezed her hand. ‘Course he is. He’s great. What are you going to call him?’

  Kitty glanced at Rita and the two of them giggled, sharing an instant understanding that if, as tradition had it, the grateful mother gave him the name of the emergency deliverer, Madeleine was clearly stuck for choice between Trevor and Brian.

  ‘Oliver,’ Madeleine announced. ‘This is Oliver Cochrane Murray.’

  ‘Who is Oliver?’ Petroc stood in the doorway, clad in blue striped boxer shorts, a Surfers Against Sewage teeshirt and a very bemused expression. ‘And who is everybody else? Have I missed something?’

  Madeleine wouldn’t stay in the house. She wanted to go back to the barn with George, who insisted he was more than willing to take care of her. Kitty felt disappointed, still picturing the studio transformed into a nursery. It would only take a day to clear it and paint it, if she really worked and if Petroc and Lily helped. Instead, with Lily she carried across to the barn all the baby items that they’d bought on the trip to Truro. She kept telling herself they would only be across the yard, it wasn’t as if she was losing them. And perhaps after a couple of days Madeleine would decide she missed the home comforts of the house. Missed her family.

  ‘When’s Madeleine’s mother coming?’ Glyn asked after the second barn trip.

  ‘Later on today. I suppose she could have room two over in the barn.’

  ‘Well it keeps the family together, I suppose.’

  ‘We’re family too, aren’t we?’

  Glyn sighed. ‘No Kitty we’re not. You’re living in a dream world. One day soon Madeleine will be gone. There’s more than a fifty-fifty chance you won’t see her again. She’s found out all she needs. It was information she was after, not a whole new family. Sorry to be brutal, but someone had to say it.’

  Kitty felt as if someone had picked her up like old paper and crumpled her. ‘You’re so wrong, Glyn, you’ve got no idea. Even her baby’s got my name . . . You’d feel different if you were her father . . .’

  ‘I might. So maybe you should be talking to the person who is Madeleine’s father.’ He went to put his arms round her but she shook him off roughly. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m only trying to help you not to get hurt. You’re like someone inside out at the moment . . .’

  Ben was out on the sea wall, trying to get his mobile phone to work and not having any luck. Kitty watched him from the doorway, jabbing his fingers crossly at the instrument. If she was interpreting body language, she’d say this was now a call he was making out of resigned duty rather than real inclination.

  ‘Why don’t you use the phone in the house?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I’m not so sure any more that I really want to get through,’ he replied. ‘What’s up there, beyond the end of your garden?’ He pointed to the cliffs rising beyond the curve of the bay.

  ‘It’s the coast path, then round to an old ruined chapel where walkers always stop to have a pee and a look at the view. Do you want to see?’

  He slid off the wall and smiled at her. ‘If you promise the wind won’t blow us off the clifftop and into the ocean.’

  ‘Hey, I thought you were a sailor. You should know this is an onshore wind.’

  Together they walked past Glyn’s vegetable garden and through the matted bramble bushes on the far side of the gate. The wind was dying down now but still crept up in sharp surprise blasts. Kitty pushed her hands into the sleeves of her fleece to keep them warm as she walked. Ben’s hands were crammed into his pockets, and it occurred to Kitty, still thinking of body language, that an observer might say the two of them were pretty determinedly avoiding contact on the narrow path.

  ‘Great smell.’ Ben stopped and sniffed at the air.

  ‘The gorse is just coming into flower. And even the thrift flowers early up here. Soon it’ll be all pink and yellow.’ The flowering had crept up on her this year. She hadn’t been out as much as usual, not roaming across the cliffs and the rocky heathland up there like she usually did. Away in the far bay, St Michael’s Mount was bright and stark against the pale spring sky, looking close enough to touch, like an old-fashioned toy fort. She should get a dog, she thought, like absolutely every other person who lived in the country. She could roam for miles along out-of-season empty beaches with maybe one of those giant poodles like Ben’s, or a mad spaniel.

  ‘It’s breeding weather,’ Ben said. ‘Glyn must have a constant battle with rabbits.’

  ‘He does. But he won’t shoot them, he just can’t bring himself to. Locals think he’s a soft townie, even though we’ve been here for nearly twenty years.’

  Ben stopped abruptly on the path in front of her, too quickly so that her body stopped only an inch away from his. She could smell the wind-damped wool of his jumper. ‘Tell me about Madeleine,’ he demanded. ‘Who is her father? I know she’s your daughter but I also know she isn’t Glyn’s.’

  She could just tell him it was nothing to do with him, to go away and sort out things with Rose, who was, in turn, nothing to do with her. ‘Come up the path a bit further. Let’s get as far as the chapel and we can sit down out of the wind,’ she said, playing for time.

  The chapel smelled of urine and dogs and the floor was littered with cigarette packets, crushed drinks cans and a couple of condoms. ‘Amazing you can buy them in any old petrol station now,’ Ben commented as they looked inside and then retreated to sit outside against the back wall, sheltered from the wind but facing the searing sun.

  ‘Yes. Pity you couldn’t back in the old days,’ she said.

  ‘Back in our days you mean, when everything like that was whispered and under the counter. Tell me about Madeleine.’

  ‘OK.’ Kitty took a deep breath, for a run at it all at once, ‘I had her when I was eighteen. She was adopted, babies still sometimes were then.’ She went on quickly, feeling that she’d choke if she didn’t, ‘You know what my family was like. If you’re going to ask why I didn’t just have an abortion, well it wasn’t so easy, especially when you’ve got a dinosaur for a GP who also happens to be your father’s church-warden. Everyone seemed to agree that adoption was the best thing all round. For everyone.’

  Ben was silent for a moment and then said, ‘And was it?’

  ‘How can I know?’ Kitty was angry. ‘How can anyone know the might-have-beens? They don’t exist, so there’s no best or worst. All I know is that whatever they said at the time, you don’t give a baby away like it’s a kitten or a toy. You don’t forget about it, you don’t have others as replacements. I love Petroc and Lily enormously, but they weren’t some form of compensation.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you keep her?’

  ‘Because I
had neither the nerve, the practicality or the support. When you’re a single parent now there’s a vast amount of information about benefits and housing possibilities. They could have told us quite a bit then but no-one wanted you to know about it – they made sure you didn’t. There’s a huge difference between the Single Parents of now and the Unmarried Mothers of then.’

  A group of overdressed hikers, cagouled, booted, hatted and with maps dangling in waterproof folders round their necks, panted round the edge of the cliff and passed them on the path. Each of them nodded with curt politeness, not breaking their determined stride. Ben stood up and started pacing restlessly up and down in the patch of sun in front of the chapel. Kitty felt vaguely faint, realizing she hadn’t had lunch.

  ‘You still haven’t told me. I’ll put it this way,’ Ben sounded like a lawyer. ‘Have I got any right to ask who her father is?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, Ben you absolutely have. But I can tell you don’t really need to.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  The rise-and-fall whine of Mick’s chain-saw keened like a pained gull way above the deep pounding of the waves below the cliffs. The huge piece of tree would soon be reduced to a meticulous log pile stacked against Rita’s barn wall. During the summer, parties of passing walkers would look at it and note its elegant symmetry with approval, reassured that they could just about trust those who inhabited the depths of the country to carry on doing things the way they liked to see them done.

  Kitty leaned back against the sun-warmed chapel wall, pulled ragged golden stalks of grass from the earth beside her and plaited them round her fingers, waiting for Ben to ask the inevitable next question. He was still pacing, scowling and angry. Then he turned abruptly and came and slumped down next to her, too close so their legs touched.