The Right Thing

by Judy Astley

  ‘Why did you never tell me?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Because there wasn’t any point in you knowing. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. After all, there wasn’t anything you could do about it.’

  ‘Well there might have been, we could have . . .’

  ‘What? Got married? Ben, we were just kids and anyway, we’d already decided to split. We were a summer thing. It was great and then it was over.’

  ‘Not necessarily married, but something, maybe something useful. At least I’d have been there for you. A baby would have changed things.’

  Kitty felt weary. She wished suddenly that she’d simply invented a fling with someone else, not even thought of letting Ben in on the truth. But there was Madeleine with her own questions, and if she was owed the answers there was no avoiding Ben knowing too. She plucked some more grass to play with and tried to be patient and calm.

  ‘It did change things. But only for me, and even then it was supposed to be just a simple thing. I couldn’t know then that for ever after I’d think about her, wonder what had happened, if she was all right. Everyone said it would be OK, that you just put it behind you and get on with your life and I believed them because it didn’t occur to me that they didn’t really know. So for a while you do just what they say and you try to look forward, not back.’ Kitty could feel her voice getting faster and less controlled, ‘But then her first birthday comes, and then her second and you can’t even give her a present. You think about her learning to walk and talk but you don’t know what her voice is like, or even if English is her first language, and later you start thinking, surely she must be starting school now, and much further on things like GCSE results come out and you wonder how she’s done. And then every time there’s a plane crash and you don’t even know what name to look for, and when you read about child abuse in children’s homes and you think, suppose it didn’t work out and she went into care . . . ?’ Kitty was crying now, her words too fast and close to incoherent.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Ben’s arms were round her and she was pressed tight against him. His face was blotting away her tears and she could smell the soft homey scent of fabric conditioner on his sweater.

  ‘So that’s what you missed, Ben. It’s all negative isn’t it? There’s none of that you’d have chosen to share.’

  She felt him sighing into her neck.

  ‘I can’t tell. I suppose if Rose and I had had children I’d have said no, I wouldn’t have wanted to know. It’s just that we didn’t. And now I know that all the time there was Madeleine.’

  Kitty pulled back and looked at him. He still didn’t get it. ‘But that’s the point,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t Madeleine. Don’t you see? For you there wasn’t Madeleine. Or for me. She came to find me out of curiosity, to fit together the complete version of her history for herself and her own baby, not to find a “real” mother. She’s already got one of those – that was who she asked for the moment she went into labour. I think that’s when I realized that I can’t ever expect to have any real part in her life, even though I feel I’ve been existing alongside her, like being just the other side of a wall, ever since I handed her over. I’ll only ever know what she lets me know and we start from the day she turned up – those twenty-four-years will stay lost.’

  ‘But it was you she had her baby with.’

  Kitty sighed. ‘Nice thought, and I hope that’ll be some kind of bond for later, but I can’t kid myself that was her choice. You should have seen her face when she asked me to phone her mother. There was fear and need. She thought she’d got longer to go before it was born – plenty of time to get home. It’s where she should have been.’

  Later Kitty decided that Ben only kissed her because he couldn’t think what to do next. Everything had been said. There they were, curled together on the hard dry earth, squashed against the chapel wall out of the wind. The last time Ben had kissed her, so very many years before, his Mark Bolan curls had flopped against her face. He’d smelled of patchouli and tasted of the joint they’d just shared, sensations entirely of their time, and, Kitty realized, there was no lingering back-burner passion between them just waiting to be fired up. Crushed between his body and the grit-sharp chapel wall, Kitty wondered if he was wishing she was Rose as much as she would have preferred him to be Glyn. ‘Sorry,’ he said eventually. ‘It just seemed . . .’

  ‘Appropriate?’ she smiled. She disentangled herself in a tactfully leisurely way and stood up. There wasn’t anything else to be said and it was time he went off to find Rose. Far below in the vegetable garden she could see Glyn earthing up the earliest of the potatoes, and she very much wanted to be down there with him.

  Glyn’s back hurt again. As he straightened and stretched his spine he looked up towards the cliff path and saw Ben and Kitty coming down to the house. From that distance they looked lithe and very young. Kitty still had a coltish long-legged stride, sure-footed on the familiar steep rutted path, and Ben was moving fast to keep up with her, fuelled, Glyn assumed, by a dollop of male ego.

  ‘Is he staying long, that bloke?’ Petroc shambled up the path looking perplexed. ‘I mean, who is he?’

  ‘Good question. There’s more than one answer, but the one we’ll settle for is that he’s that Rosemary-Jane woman’s husband.’ Petroc shrugged, his attention already diverted. Along the newly cleared road, rattling and revving, came a battered old Land Rover. Glyn looked at his son’s face, recognizing the dopy doggy grin of infatuation.

  ‘And who is that?’ he asked, watching the car zooming in too fast through the yard gates and narrowly missing the wall. But Petroc, rushed on by the thrill of new lust, was already on the far side of the garden gate, opening the Land Rover’s rusty door and scooping out a large but lively chestnut-haired girl. Turning away just in time to avoid having to watch a fervent teenage clinch, Glyn looked over the wall and up towards Rita’s house. The chain-saw had stopped some time before but Mick’s van was still parked in the lane. He flexed his back again and wondered if Mick was even now getting his massaged. Tricky work, cutting up a tree, you could do a lot of damage. Next time he was in Truro he would buy a book on aromatherapy. He had a feeling Kitty would like it.

  ‘You will tell me if I’m in the way.’ Lily must have said it at least three times. She felt welded to her chair watching Oliver sleeping. There was a yeasty waft of the pizza George had got warming in the Rayburn oven and the sharp tang of onion that he had cut up to put in a salad. She wondered if baby Oliver could smell them and if he instinctively associated the scents with food or hunger. She didn’t know anything about babies, hadn’t a clue (did anyone?) what knowledge he was born with, or if every sense was a kind of blank until one by one experiences got thrown to him to do his learning from. She thought of parents at Guy Fawkes night parties, taking hold of toddlers’ hands, leading them safely away from bonfires and saying ‘No, hot’. She would have thought that if the Great Designer had got it right, a child ought to be programmed with at least enough information to keep it safe and fed.

  Madeleine was lying on the barn kitchen sofa, her bare sandy feet comfortably up on a cushion and her baby snuffling softly against her body. ‘Stay here if you want, it’s fine,’ she told Lily. She didn’t look up though, but kept her eyes on the tiny head, stroking his little pink ear and feeling his small firm body moving beneath her hand as he breathed.

  ‘Amazing,’ she kept saying.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lily agreed. It was amazing. It was amazing that for all the morning there’d been shouting and pain and swearing; probably more physical agony than Madeleine would ever feel again and yet now, just a few hours later, she looked as if she’d got the most happiness she was ever going to get in her whole life, right there on the sofa. Being in labour just had to be the most ultimate out-of-control feeling that your body could throw at you, something Lily would have described as her absolute worst nightmare – putting up with periods didn’t even come close. And yet it was obviously worth it. Anyone look
ing at Madeleine could see that.

  ‘I wish my mother would hurry up and get here. I can’t wait for her to see him.’ Lily felt thrown for a moment.

  ‘Oh right. You mean your Brighton one.’

  ‘My real mum,’ Madeleine corrected her. ‘Yours gave me away. No real mum could do that.’

  Lily felt her face sparkling with instant anger. She wanted very much to hit Madeleine but just couldn’t move. Any kind of violence, even the thought of it, wasn’t possible in the presence of this tiny newborn child. It was like having a baby saint in the room.

  ‘You shouldn’t have said that. You’ve got no right or reason to. My mother only did what she thought was the best thing at the time.’ Lily kept her voice as calm as she could, hardly daring to risk souring the air with bad feeling. ‘She didn’t really get any choice. And I know she’s regretted it ever since. That’s why she’s never kept you a secret. She always made sure we’ve known you were out there somewhere. She used to cry on your birthday.’

  Madeleine shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter now, does it? I just know that I couldn’t do it.’

  Lily stood up, overwhelmed by longing to be back in her own kitchen, close to her own family. ‘You might think you know now that you couldn’t do it, but that’s because you don’t have to. You don’t know that with other conditions and other kinds of family and upbringing you wouldn’t have done exactly the same. You know, Madeleine, you really should try using your imagination more.’

  ‘You’ve told him then.’ Glyn went on with the stir-frying, fussing away at the vegetables more than he needed to because he didn’t particularly want to look at Kitty’s face. It might be treacherously rapturous from whatever she and Ben had been doing up there on the cliffs by the chapel, or it might be tearful and full of regrets. They could have had poignant, old-times’-sake kind of sex up there. From the state of the chapel, he’d guess practically everyone else in the county had. She might have come back brimfull of twenty-five years of wishing that she had stayed with Ben and made a family with him, starting with Madeleine. He’d seen Ben looking at Kitty in that doleful puppy-like way and he didn’t blame him. A life with Rose must be tough and restless to say the least. And of course if he tended to look at Rose like that, well it probably just drove her nuts, provoked her to behave even worse than she meant to.

  ‘Yeah I told him.’ She sounded weary and he heard her slump heavily into a chair. ‘It was you who thought I should, remember.’

  He turned and looked at her, puzzled. ‘You mean you want me to share the responsibility for him knowing?’

  She covered her face with her hands for a moment. ‘No of course not. Glyn, please let’s not make this a battle. There really isn’t one to fight. And there’s certainly nothing to win. I expect I just said that to remind you you’re supposed to be pleased that I did what you thought was right.’

  ‘OK, sorry. Listen, go and call everyone. For those who want it there’s plenty of food.’

  Hayley looked a bit like Madeleine, it occurred to Kitty as Hayley and Petroc sat at the table and edged their chairs closer together. She had the same kind of wild corkscrew hair and the same confidence in a large body. Ben said a brief hallo to her and to Petroc but nothing more, perhaps dreading more bizarre secrets from the past being dragged out for him to deal with. He kept looking at the door as if he half expected Rose to wander in. It wasn’t beyond possibility. It would be just like her, Kitty thought, to amble in, hand in hand with Tom Goodrich, and expect them all to be thrilled to see her.

  Glyn had cooked a vast dish of chicken and stirfried vegetables, more than enough for the whole family.

  ‘There’s loads here. Shall I go and ask George and Madeleine if they want to come?’ Petroc volunteered.

  ‘No!’ Lily and Kitty said together. They looked at each other, each surprised by the other’s vehemence.

  ‘She shouldn’t move about too much yet,’ Kitty said.

  ‘And George has defrosted a pizza and made a salad,’ Lily added.

  ‘I’ve already had lunch,’ Hayley said, spooning a generous portion of food onto her plate, ‘but I can’t resist this.’

  Thank goodness, Kitty thought, another big girl who isn’t the slightest bit twitchy about her weight. Lily, as if she’d never heard of pickiness, took an amount that, a few weeks ago, would have made her feel queasy at the thought of eating.

  ‘Mum’s a grandma. Since this morning,’ Petroc told Hayley, casually.

  ‘Oh cool. Congratulations. Boy or girl?’

  ‘A boy. Oliver,’ Kitty told her. From her seat she could see Petroc’s leg and Hayley’s twined together. Only another year or two and he too would be gone to university or college or travelling. She could feel tears threatening again and was glad to escape when the phone rang. She made a dash for the sitting-room rather than using the kitchen extension.

  ‘Kitty it’s me, Julia.’ Julia Taggart had her usual voice of urgent importance as if what she was about to say could at least bring down the Government or threaten the monarchy. ‘I’ve got Rose with me and she’s gone mad.’

  Kitty laughed. ‘She’s mad. You should be here!’

  ‘Why? Oh never mind that, let me just tell you while she’s in the loo. She says Ben has left her. He’s put the dog in kennels, taken clothes and stuff and gone so she got into a taxi and arrived here because she thought she’d catch him at it with me!’

  ‘Why with you? You haven’t . . .’ It was quite a thought, the Labrador-puppyish Ben and terrier-like Julia. She’d nip him to shreds.

  Julia snorted a laugh. ‘No, I absolutely haven’t! No, what happened was she had a good look at the itemized phone bill and found all these calls to my number. And more than a few to yours as well, as we both know. Anyway I was a lot nearer than you geographically so she came storming in accusing.’ Kitty could just imagine her, shoving her way past Julia the second she opened the door, rampaging round and barely stopping short of peering into wardrobes and under the bed.

  ‘She’s got more than a bit of nerve, considering.’

  ‘Oh what, the Tom thing? That’s all over, including the shouting apparently. And now she wants Ben back in the nest. Any ideas?’ Kitty reached out and closed the door then told her, ‘Yes. He’s here. He came down to find her, all ready to go over to Tom’s place and drag her home screaming. Don’t tell Rose, I’ll just tell him she’s with you and he can decide whether he wants to call her or not.’

  It seemed typical of Rosemary-Jane, Kitty thought sadly as she went back to the kitchen. All the things she’d taken from Antonia – the pen, the Zippo lighter, the leather jacket that she’d stolen from her at the school disco and managed to tear before she let Antonia ‘find’ it again – she hadn’t really wanted them, she’d just wanted to know she could have them. And now her husband. Unless he’d had enough of her. That possibility was quite cheering. Rose hadn’t faced a lot of comeuppance in her life, perhaps she was due some.

  ‘She’s such a silly girl,’ was Ben’s odd reaction when Kitty told him, on the beach later that afternoon, that Rose thought he had left her for either herself or Julia. He sounded almost fatherly-fond, smiling indulgently and looking soppily pleased.

  ‘Ben, does this sort of thing happen a lot? You seem to have a bizarrely unsettled sort of marriage for one that’s been going so long.’ She and Glyn seemed practically welded into a boring dotage by comparison.

  ‘Mmm. I suppose it does,’ he agreed, then added, with a sly glance, ‘Actually, to be honest, it isn’t always Rose who makes trouble. Till now, we’d almost thrived on it. I suppose this time I was scared it might just be the real thing for her. It keeps us rocking along, you know?’

  ‘Whatever it takes,’ she agreed, grinning. ‘Though I bet your poor poodle would prefer a more quiet life.’

  Ben brightened, taking her too seriously. ‘That’s a very good point. We should get another. We’ll get him a mate, he’d like that.’

  It was time for
Ben to meet Madeleine. If they left it much longer, Paula Murray would be arriving and there’d be more confusion and explaining to be got through. Kitty was beginning to feel as if she was in one of those plays where the doors are always opening and closing on characters who really need to meet but constantly manage to miss each other. She was glad of a few minutes walking along the beach before taking him over to the barn, just to collect her thoughts between home and where Madeleine now was, and to think a bit about how to say what there was to say. The wind had dropped to almost nothing, though the few small high clouds were still streaking fast across the sky as if they had somewhere urgent to get to. Further along the beach, Petroc and Hayley sat on a rock, wrapped up close together and gazing out to sea.

  ‘Sometimes we get seals out there, just where the surf line is,’ Kitty told Ben. ‘When you think you’ve spotted one, you can sit here for hours trying to see it again.’

  Ben squinted towards the horizon. She could tell he was looking way too far out. ‘The more you look, the more you think you can see something,’ he said. ‘Every wave could have a cute black head bobbing about on it. We could get a white one this time.’

  ‘Huh? Oh the dog.’ She laughed. ‘Come on, let’s go and tell Madeleine that she was spawned by a poodle-fancier.’

  ‘Ugh, sounds obscene.’

  Madeleine was still on the sofa but dressed now in her black leggings and big purple sweatshirt, and with her hair shining and still damp from the shower. She smelled faintly of vanilla essence. ‘Hello!’ she called softly as Ben and Kitty came into the room. Oliver was in his Moses basket beside Madeleine and Kitty recognized the blue and white striped sleepsuit she had bought in Truro. Madeleine had had to fold back the cuffs and probably, enviably Kitty thought, hadn’t a clue how dreadfully fast he would grow both into and out of it. He was sleeping, his raspberry mouth making dreamy sucking shapes, and his small pale fists were curled into a soft punch.

  ‘The midwife’s been and she says he’s perfect,’ Madeleine told them. ‘That’s because he is,’ George, making tea, interrupted. ‘This baby’s going to ruin my career – I now know there is such a thing as the state of human sinlessness.’ Kitty looked at him with suspicion, searching out signs of irony, but didn’t find any. George, arch-cynic and exploiter, writing-wise, of all who could be corrupt, was actually looking quite worried. ‘Without being too Wordsworthian about it, I mean,’ he went on. ‘A day-old baby. Someone who’s never ever had a dodgy thought or had a go at anything devious. I’ve never met anyone like that before. You just have to pray life throws him all its best bones.’