The Right Thing (10 page)

‘You need a pair of Timberlands or Celts. Celts are boots, all soft and sheepskin but tough as well. Snowboarders and surfers and stuff, they . . .
we
 . . . wear them. They feel like old slippers but they're OK in mud.'

She could almost feel him shudder, perhaps it was because she'd thought he might like the idea of slippers, as if he was really old. ‘Celts it is, or they are, then,' he said. ‘Thanks . . . what's your name?'

‘Lily. And yes I am Petroc's little sister.' And I write poems and I want you to look at them and read them and then come and tell me I have insight and maturity way beyond my years and that you wished I was your daughter, she wanted to add. She looked up at him to risk seeing what kind of expression he had. Please, she begged whatever god was listening, please don't let it be ‘amused condescension'. Disappointingly, he didn't look as if he was thinking about anything. ‘Amused admiration' would have been acceptable. She noticed his feet made no attempt to avoid the puddles, which pleased her because she'd have hated someone who she imagined should have higher things on his mind to pick his way along a muddy lane like a fastidious cat. At least he didn't have to worry about the price of shoes.

‘Where are you actually going?' she asked.

‘Wherever the lane leads,' he said.

‘Well, seeing as we don't have a proper village even, no duckpond, no green, just a pub and shop, it just goes to the main road, nowhere special. But after that there's the road to anywhere in the world.' Embarrassing overstatement, she thought, feeling her face getting hot. ‘Well, to Truro one way or Penzance the other anyway. So what's happened to your car?'

‘My car?' he looked at her, puzzled. ‘Oh, I see. Nothing's happened. Sorry, I thought you meant you'd noticed something wrong with it this morning, flat tyre or a wing fallen off.' He grinned at her. ‘Writers' tendency, always to see the worst dramatic possibility. I just felt like a walk, see where I've set myself.'

Lily forced a smile back, thinking he sounded almost as pleased with himself as Josh had. But then he had a track record for more than just dossing about, anyone would be pleased to be George. He was always in the papers: ‘Moorfield Against Monogamy' was one whole-page in-depth article she'd read, along with another called ‘George's Dragons' where he'd been awful about his wives, and then there were the wacky lifestyle ones, ‘A Writer's Room', ‘Lone Living'.

‘So, are these normal school hours?' he then enquired, eyeing her scruffy uniform with curiosity. ‘Or shouldn't I ask?'

Lily weighed up the benefits of lies versus truth. ‘I could tell you I had a free morning,' she ventured.

‘And I could tell you the pig in that field there is just lining up for take-off. I won't tell your parents.' He gave a sudden deep chuckle and added, ‘I seem to be making a habit of this, and here such a short time too.'

‘Habit of what?'

‘Accompanying beautiful blonde young girls and promising to keep schtum about what they're up to. Is Cornwall full of girls like you? Last night's had me driving about two thousand cross-country miles while she told me the plot of the novel she thinks she might write one day. Amanda someone. Not a bad plot either. If she doesn't use it soon, she might find that I will.' Lily felt heart-clanging envy. She could actually feel her hands getting clammy. Amanda Goodbody, two years older than her, had left their school for the sixth-form college with every boy fancying her, every prize for English and her first short story having won a national magazine competition. They'd all had to clap in assembly. Now she'd got in first with George. She looked along the main road and was, for the first time she could recall, genuinely pleased to see the bus. It would probably never, now, be the right moment to mention her poetry.

There was still a lot of detail to add but Kitty was already thoroughly pleased with the painting of Coverack. She always liked catching sight of her work almost unexpectedly, just glancing at it as she entered the room, rather than inspecting it close up and then getting too involved with it to be able to see it with fresh eyes. As she came back into the studio late in the afternoon, just to take a glimpse of it in the same way that an anxious mother does when checking a sleeping baby, she was struck by the blocks of vivid colour of the boats, the satisfyingly deep unnatural blue of the harbour water and the rich scarlet of the roof of the old lifeboat shelter. Close up, it still needed more work on the boats, varying tones added to brickwork, and some lobster pots and fish boxes piled on the quayside.

‘You always make a pattern out of everything,' her foundation-course tutor had sneered at her. ‘Set yourself free!' He just hadn't understood the all-absorbing calm of painting every brick on a wall, individual leaves on a tree. It might not be art, in the grandest meaning of the word, Kitty conceded, but it made her a reasonable amount of cash and, better yet, made her happy. It would be most satisfying if this tutor knew that postcards of her work were in every gift shop and gallery between here and Dorset.

Right now, though, there wasn't much point starting anything that would take more than ten minutes. Petroc's car, stranded with him at the college, was in dire need of a new battery. ‘It's not just that it won't start, Mum,' he'd moaned down the phone, ‘It's totally flat and even with push-starting it's going to keep on doing it.' Kitty, fearing for Glyn's back and blood pressure if he had to help get the car going every morning, agreed to pick up a new battery, drive over to the college and help Petroc install it.

Even after nearly seventeen years, since she and Glyn had left their small house in Dulwich and taken over his family's collapsing homestead after the death of his father, Kitty still found the distances that had to be covered for the simplest country errand daunting. Visiting the Truro Sainsbury's seemed to take more than half a day. You didn't just pop down to the Spar for an extra pint of milk without checking the fridge and the bread bin in case you later found you had to make another trek out. Her three-year-old Fiesta had covered nearly sixty thousand miles, and at every garage economy-minded local drivers queued patiently in line at the single diesel pump. Right now, having driven five miles to collect Petroc's new battery and making her way another ten miles in the opposite direction, Kitty found herself wondering what it would be like to live again in a place where all one needed for life's efficiency and comfort was to be found in a five-mile radius. Urban politicians who whinged about housewives cluttering up the streets with the school run and gadabout weekend families polluting popular beauty spots clearly had no idea how real people in the country had to function without flag-down public transport.

Kitty drove up the hill towards Redruth station where an Intercity train heading for London was waiting to get going again. It looked far too big for the small station, making impatient revving noises as if it could hardly wait to get out of the county and up to serious speed. Among the schoolchildren who casually used the service just between Penzance and Bodmin every day, there would be many who had never travelled any further, never crossed the Tamar or seen a terminus bigger or busier than the harbourside shed at Penzance. When Kitty had phoned the Post-Adoption Centre she'd been offered counselling, either locally or in London. She didn't want it to be local; the baby had been something from a distant time and a distant county. She could park right now, if she wanted to, forget about Petroc and his battery and simply get on that train.

A bus loading a rush-hour queue of passengers forced her to wait, and she recognized a tall slender blonde girl sitting on the bench across at the station outside the ticket office. Amanda Goodbody. Petroc had mentioned her name at his final school speech day when Kitty had been tactless enough to wonder aloud how a girl could so completely
not
resemble her parents. She of all people should have known better and when he'd said, ‘Oh, she's adopted,' it had been inevitable. ‘Even her mum calls her a cuckoo,' he'd laughed. Kitty had felt ashamed of her careless comment. The parents, she recalled as she waited for the slow procession of heavily laden bus passengers to pay their fares to the driver, had been classic Cornish farming people, stocky and with plum-skinned weather-battered complexions whatever the season. Amanda's hair was baby-fine and light, whereas her family's earth-brown hair resembled impenetrable nests of sprung wire.

‘Hey! Mrs Harding!' Just as Kitty was about to move off behind the fully loaded bus, a streak of pale yellow flashed across the front of her car. ‘Are you going anywhere near the college?' Amanda's eager blue eyes were peering through the window at her, so close Kitty could have counted her eyelashes. ‘I've forgotten
Macbeth
!'

‘Haven't we all!' Kitty laughed, opening the passenger door. A fresh scent of teenage skin and Body Shop soap wafted in with Amanda. ‘I hope you don't mind. I was hanging round the station desperately hoping to see someone I knew, even if it's only really slightly. I've got an essay. Something about Lady Macbeth and motherhood.'

‘
Was
she a mother? I haven't read it since school and I can't actually remember.' There was a gap in the traffic and Kitty pulled out and overtook the bus.

‘Oh yes, she was. She says some stuff about breast-feeding anyway, though who knows what happened to the kids. Perhaps the babies died.' Amanda didn't seem remotely perturbed by the idea.

‘Perhaps,' Kitty agreed. ‘That might have made her jealous of that other one who had lots of children, the ones that Macbeth killed. I hated that bit. What was it he said, “All my pretty chicks and their dam . . .” I always thought that was terribly sad. I remember sitting in class feeling quite tearful. It's about all I remember of the play.'

‘Yeah, that was old Macduff,' Amanda told her. She fished around in her bag and took out some sticks of chewing-gum, offering one to Kitty who declined. Amanda peeled off the silver paper and folded it into a boat shape. ‘I suppose my mum could have killed me,' she said suddenly, crumpling up the tiny silver ship between her fingers. Kitty, negotiating a right turn, was startled. They'd looked like a pretty close family when she'd seen them at the speech day, proud and happy parents, a daughter loving enough to allow them to hug her in public when her name came up for the English prize. ‘Why? What have you done?' Kitty asked.

‘Before she had me. Not this mum, not the one that adopted me, the one I was born with,' Amanda said. ‘She could have had an abortion but she gave me away instead. I think I'm glad she actually went ahead and had me, but then you never know if you'd have got a chance to be someone else instead if you'd died, do you? I mean if your soul, or inner self or
me-ness,
whatever you like to call it, was going to exist anyway, you don't know if you'd have got a better deal if you'd been given another shot at it. Like karma, you
might
have been awarded a completely wonderful life just because it was owed to you.'

Kitty felt exhausted. The girl's train of thought was faster than Great Western.

‘Come on, Amanda – look at yourself, beautiful, talented, clever, what more could you ask for?' They were pulling into the college drive, so Kitty assumed she could count on a short and uncomplicated answer. Amanda sighed. ‘Paris?' she said after a small pause for thought. ‘I wouldn't have minded being French. I do so admire Colette.' She sighed again as they stopped and she stretched her long legs out of the car door. ‘You're right though, I am lucky. But I do wish I'd done A-level philosophy,' she said. ‘I'm sure it would have helped.'

‘It might have made things worse,' Kitty told her. ‘Anyway, good luck with the essay. And with anything else you think you need it for.'

‘Cheers!' the girl was out of the car and sprinting for the building. ‘Hi Petroc!' she yelled as she ran.

‘Huh,' mumbled Kitty's son, barely looking up. Amanda didn't even look back.

The trouble with staying with Julia Taggart was that she liked to know exactly what you were there for. It was the price of the visit and, as Kitty preferred the comforts of staying at Julia's house to the dodgy anonymity of a cheap hotel, she was going to have to donate some information along with the flowers and contributory bottles of wine.

Julia, so long divorced and with only her own inclinations to indulge, hadn't yet moved on from the squashy over-stuffed décor of the 1980s and although the surfeit of curtain fabric and the number of cushions to be removed from the bed before it could be got into were slightly oppressive, at least Kitty knew this was one house for which she didn't need to pack the transparent hot-water bottle with the floating scarlet hearts in it that Glyn had given her last Valentine's Day. The spare-room walls in Julia's Victorian house in Richmond were painted the faded terracotta of old flowerpots, and the pile of the pale blue carpet was deep enough to lose even the flashiest earrings in. Kitty sometimes suspected that the rush to streamline her own home with stark beech floor and unlined calico, abandoning the cosy fitted carpet and padded curtains, had been an impulse not properly thought out. She'd been inspired by too many interior-décor features on the American seaside look, all clapboard, linen and hot picnic summers. It was a look that required a serious input of sunshine, and sometimes in the mild but dank Cornish winter she felt her sitting-room resembled a skinny girl who'd worn a sleeveless silk frock to a chilly marquee wedding in early May.

‘So, what time's your appointment?' Julia demanded over breakfast in her sunny kitchen which was the exact soft blue of love-in-a-mist. Behind the request, Kitty sensed a reminder to Tell All the moment she returned. Julia had never quite understood the word ‘confidential', but there'd be plenty of time on the tube back from north London to work out suitable edited highlights.