The Right Thing (15 page)

Kitty wished she was up in the studio, where at least she could be adding a few seagulls to the Coverack painting while Ben talked. Just within reach on the window-ledge behind the sink was a bottle of Lily's nail varnish, so she entertained herself painting her left toenails purple. When Ben eventually took a breath she cut in quickly. ‘Well Rose is working too, isn't she? It's not as if she's swanned off for no reason. Suppose it was the other way round and she had suspicions about you; how would you feel if she tagged along to all the wine auctions just to keep an eye on you? It would be like having your mum along at a scout camp.' She tried to keep it light, though there was only an outside chance she'd achieve a quick cheer-up breakthrough with him and be able to get back to work.

Not much painting had been done in the couple of weeks since she'd got back from London, having decided it might be a good idea to spend a bit of time with Glyn and convince him she wasn't about to run off back to the city and move into a flat with Julia and Rose in an effort to recapture some sort of lost school-buddy idyll. Nor, she made it clear, was she going to brood about Madeleine and race up the lane every morning to meet the postman's van in case all the form-filling and list-registering had worked and the girl decided to write a letter. What would it say if she did, she wondered as Ben prattled and she mopped purple globs of varnish off the table, ‘Hello Mum'? ‘I'm now on the Adoption Contact Register,' she'd told Glyn and the children. ‘If anything comes of it, well fine. If not, well fine as well.' Glyn seemed convinced, though she wasn't quite so sure she was.

‘And you'd think after so many years,' Ben was droning on. ‘Perhaps if we'd had children. Perhaps if it had worked out with you and me . . .' Kitty started sketching Lily on the back of a bank statement. She could see her through the open doorway, sitting outside on the wall wearing her wetsuit and looking out at the sea, her fine pale hair drifting this way and that in the breeze. In a moment she would slide silently into the water and paddle out into the waves on her board, using reserves of strength that hardly seemed credible in someone who looked so fragile.

‘And she's taken all her make-up: the going-out sort, not just the stuff she puts on quickly for work.' Kitty sighed impatiently and prodded at her big toe. The purple stuff was nearly dry but had turned a nasty insipid bluey-mauve, as if she'd been stepped on hard by a big pony. Ben was whining now, there was no other word for it. If it was Petroc she'd tell him to get over it, find someone else.

‘You know, maybe you should just give up on her,' Kitty said callously, her mind on Petroc and his gloom over Amanda. ‘Maybe all the worst possibilities you can think of are absolutely right and your marriage has simply run its course.'

‘Oh. You don't really think so? Not deep down?' Ben prodded for signs of hope. Kitty felt as if she'd smacked a puppy.

‘Look Ben, why don't you just ask her? It can't really be worse than just imagining, surely.' It could though, she knew that. No-one wants to be told that the worst they think is true. It was so much more comfortable to keep pretending that the best might be true instead.

Lily didn't care that it wasn't safe to be surfing alone. It was her beach, nothing the sea did here could surprise her. If someone was with her she'd only have to feel responsible for them, especially close to mid-tide when there was a vicious undertow over by the rocks on the west side. There was a medium offshore wind and the waves were coming in clean and just big enough, early-morning perfection. The sounds of the sea were muffled through her winter helmet and her webbed gloves helped her paddle through the water, out beyond the rock-line, with the grace and speed of a cormorant. Petroc had told her that in her full cold-weather kit she looked like a seal, all cased in neoprene like this. But seals were fat and they lumbered and wobbled on land. Lily felt she was more of an eel, slinky and slim. She got that from her mother who was just starting to admit to being middle-aged now but hadn't got the spread. Somewhere out there, she thought as she paddled along, she'd got a sister and she didn't even know what she looked like. She hoped she looked like her, so if they met they could see each other reflected, know how each felt in their own skin. Also she could see what she might look like in a few more years – decide if she liked what the future held and make arrangements, eating-wise and hair colour and such, if she didn't.

Pulling her concentration back and forgetting about this mystical Madeleine, she kept her head down on the board, feet together, streamlined and low, feeling no aches or strain as if only this one thing was what her body was built for. Knowing without looking that she had reached the right place, she turned the board sideways and lay on the waves. On its way from beyond the horizon, she could see, was the perfect set as if it had just been waiting for her. She smiled, steadied the board and braced as the first wave came, let that one go and then took off on the second. It was better than flying. Someone at school had said it was better than sex, though this particular someone was one who might not be relied on to know. It was like running across the surface of the sea, the ultimate walk on water. ‘Eeeeagh!' she shrieked as she made a perfect cut-back before planing right up onto the sand. She picked up the board and shook her hair out of the helmet. That was enough for now. It couldn't be beaten, not on that day.

‘Do you think that's what Jesus was doing?' George was on his rock in a patch of thin sun again, bravely barefoot this time. She was sure he must be pretty freezing – he looked all stiff as if he'd been there the whole night. He reminded her of the summer holiday-makers who even in the dankest sea mist still came to the beach, because that was what you did every day for a fortnight.

‘Was
what
what Jesus was doing?' she called as she walked up the sand.

‘Was Jesus the first surfer? You know, walking on the water?'

‘Did he have a board?'

‘Don't think the Bible mentions one.'

‘Then he wasn't a much of a surfer, was he?' Lily stood in front of George, looking down at him and dripping cold sea water on his pale feet. City feet, she thought, guessing how much it must have hurt him to step across the gravelly yard and the layer of crushed shells, pebbles and weed at the top of the high-tide line. Serve him right, she thought, for not having the soul for poetry. She reached for the cord behind her back, pulled down the zip of her wetsuit and wriggled her shoulders and arms free from the neoprene. Her soaking rash-vest clung to her thin body and she shivered. George grinned up. ‘Listen, I'm sorry about the poetry, about not being keen. If you want to show me some of your writing I promise to ignore my prejudices.' Lily could feel herself blushing scarlet. She hated him instantly. He was patronizing and he'd wrecked her mood.

‘No fucking way,' she spat at him and stormed back to the house. Where the skin on her shoulders and back had been cold it now felt as if it was burning, as if she could feel George watching her walk. She felt aware of how she moved, seeing in her mind her skinny legs in their tight black casing. She wished the sand would part and she could walk down into a pit and cover herself. There was nothing worse, nothing at all worse than feeling like a total fool.

‘Rita's here! Be quick Lily, you'll make her late,' Kitty was calling up the stairs. Rita was in the kitchen by the window, watching the blue tits squabbling over the nut feeder hanging from the cherry tree. ‘It's coming up to blossom time. All swollen buds and sexual readiness,' Rita murmured. She was sitting inelegantly slumped with her legs apart and her purple crushed-velvet skirt draped across her thighs. Kitty thought the big expanse of fabric looked as if something was missing from her lap, a baby perhaps, or a basket of fruit, whatever they used to hold in those dark old paintings of unsmiling, put-upon women. Rita was wearing flat, round-toed sandals, half blue, half red, like children's holiday shoes, with enough room inside for her toes to splay comfortably. The shoes were scuffed and shabby, the stitching along the thick crêpe soles was coming undone, and her navy wool tights drooped over the straps. Sad shoes, Kitty thought, shoes for feet that no longer had the heart to dance. How different they were from Rose's frivolous Manolo Blahniks that she'd worn at Julia's. Those had been shoes to seduce by, shoes for tautening the leg muscles and making you think of sex. If she'd packed those for Cornwall, she was definitely up to no good. She wouldn't trouble Ben with that particular question.

‘What's wrong Rita, you've lost some of your sparkle?'

Rita managed a half-hearted smile. ‘Not much. Just that it'll soon be summer and Josh will be off.'

‘Why? I thought he seemed pretty settled.' Kitty laughed. ‘You've made him very comfortable.'

‘He's just like the cats,' Rita said, watching Lily's ginger cat pacing stealthily along the beach wall, slinking low to creep up to where the blue tits were feeding. ‘They only want to be in snuggling up to you when it's cold, making you feel loved and special. Come the summer he'll be off hunting just like they do and I'll be all on my own again.' She stood up and stretched, stiff. ‘Where's Lily? She does want a lift to school doesn't she?' She sounded unusually impatient as if she wished she hadn't said anything.

‘Talking about it doesn't make it happen you know,' Kitty told her.

‘Doesn't make it not happen either, does it?' Rita sighed. ‘Perhaps I shouldn't have had the children so young, then these middle years would still have some purpose. But everyone I knew was hauling a baby around with them when I had the boys. Toddlers were an essential part of the scene at all those summer festivals. All their little plump bodies running around naked. Mine had daisies in their hair. You never thought about them growing up and turning into accountants and teachers and stuff.' Her twisted grin lit up her face again. ‘Malory, the eldest, he rang the other night and told me he's taking a party of year nines on a geography field trip to Swanage. And he's worried they'll misbehave. He's turned out so straight I can't believe he's mine sometimes.'

Amanda was being as friendly and normal as if nothing had happened and Petroc found it very hard to deal with. All the times he'd seen her since what he called in his head the Night of George, she'd just been casual, saying hello and then walking on by with Hayley or someone like she always did, and he'd had to be as if none of it mattered or had even happened. He had a feeling that if he said anything, reminded her how close they'd got to some serious sex, she'd go blank and look at him as if he was loopy. Perhaps it had all been some wanker's fantasy he'd had. A big sticky horny dream. He wanted to get her alone somewhere and do some talking about what, if anything, their relationship actually was, or could be, but she was like something slippery and couldn't be cornered. He'd think she was being evasive if she was anyone else, because anyone else would do silly-girl drama things like suddenly turn and stride off the other way if he met them in a corridor. He could deal with that all right, because he'd be the one in control of it all. But Amanda just chatted on, or not, as she always had, borrowing 20p for the phone if he was the nearest, or offering her own notes on Wordsworth's
Prelude
to anyone who wanted them, including him. He was simply not special.

Now though, during the morning break she brought an extra cup of coffee to the table where he was reading the
Daily Mirror
sports pages and asked if he minded her sitting with him. He grunted a casual's OK' at her but could feel himself getting as warm as if he was sitting on a radiator that had just been switched on. She was being
sisterly,
that seemed to be the only word for it, as if absolutely no-one in the whole building meant more to her than anyone else did. It blocked off all possibility of getting back to anything more intimate. Inside his head a voice of the Petroc who secretly absorbed every blokey word of
Loaded
in Smiths was doing some up-front laddish reasoning with her, saying, ‘So. Shall we go on from where we left off, with my hands up your shirt groping for your tits?' But back in the college canteen the real-life pink-faced Petroc sat and pretended he couldn't give a flying fuck about anything but this all-absorbing report about British hopefuls for that summer's Wimbledon. What he
should
do, it suddenly occurred to him, was ask her about the adopted thing, about whether she'd ever wanted to go and find her first mother, just to see what she was like. He could tell her about his mother's given-away baby, who now might possibly turn up. He didn't think Kitty would mind – at home, since she'd got back from London, it seemed like something that was a now-topic, one with a bit of hope and expectation in it, not a rather sad past one like it had before. It would be something important he and Amanda could share, something special to link them. He took a breath but he'd spent too long thinking and she got in first.

‘I've started my novel,' Amanda announced. She was drinking her coffee from a spoon, the way Lily used to with hot chocolate when she was six.

‘Yeah? What, writing one you mean?' He tried to stop looking at her mouth, opening and closing round the spoon, licking and tasting. She laughed,
at
him for being stupid, rather than the sharing-a-joke type. ‘Well
of course
writing it. I'd hardly tell anyone if I was just reading one, would I? That wouldn't be news.'

‘Right.' Petroc sipped his coffee and racked his brains for a clever angle on novel-writing. It might be that he was the first, the only one she'd confided this to, so his interest had better be deep. It might be as good a piece of confiding as the adoption stuff. Nothing original came to mind. ‘What's it about?' was all he could come up with.