The Right Thing (2 page)

‘I am sorry, Antonia,' Kitty whispered under her breath. The man in front flicked his head slightly again and she shuffled guiltily backwards away from the crowd to where a looming churchyard yew provided shelter from the bitter breeze. Around her chilled feet fat bright spikes that would become bluebells were pushing their determined way through the earth, and she marvelled at their ability to thrive so well in the shade of this ancient, almost black, tree.

‘Kit Cochrane! I
thought
it was you! Saw you in the church with old J. Taggart. After so long one can't be sure, can one?' The voice, a sort of piercing hiss like a cross cat, seemed to be coming from inside the tree and Kitty peered through the branches to where she could just make out a glow from a cigarette and a long thin shape swathed in layers of pale grey wool. ‘I mean, we could all have been only steps away from each other on any number of occasions and not known about it. School fetes, Sainsbury's, airport check-ins, all that.'

The garrulous body stepped forward into the light and Kitty gasped. ‘Good grief, Rosemary-Jane Pigott!' she squawked.

‘Ssh! They're still at it over there!' Rosemary-Jane giggled. ‘And it's just Rose now, and Ruthermere, by way of Madison, not Pigott any more, but then you knew that, didn't you? All years ago, of course.'

‘No I didn't know actually. Julia insists on sending me the HOGS newsletters even though I don't subscribe, but she can't force me to read them.' Kitty laughed. She didn't much feel like laughing. No less than three of poor Antonia's childhood tormentors turning up at her funeral was no joke to anyone.

‘So. Come to make sure poor old Large is really dead?' Rose grinned, her teeth huge and menacing. Gums receding, Kitty noted, certain that Rosemary-Jane's pretty little egg-shaped face at seventeen had been nothing like as wolfish.

‘I was dragged along by Julia, actually,' Kitty confessed. ‘She's always trying to round me up for some Old Girls' function or other and insisted that this particular event was “in your area, sweetie”. She even came down into deepest Cornwall and stayed the night with us, just to make sure I couldn't back out. I wish I had. This is awful isn't it. Poor Antonia. And those children . . .' Kitty felt glum and shivery. She wanted very much to ask Rose exactly which Ruthermere she'd married, just so she could be reassured that it wasn't Ben. Of course it wouldn't be. Clever Rose had gone off to Oxford straight from school, then married someone glamorous on the fringes of motor racing. She could have come across dozens of people with Ben's particular surname. Whoever would slink back to their home town with a dazzling degree and one flighty marriage behind her and marry some underpowered local? Even the question would sound dismally parochial.

‘Oh, so you two found each other.' Julia looked disappointed, discovering Rose and Kitty together by the yew, thwarted by the two of them managing this small reunion all by themselves. The graveside gathering was dispersing. Groups of mourners hovered near their cars, giving each other gentle hugs of comfort and chatting quietly. An impatient groundsman smoked against the side wall of the chapel, leaning on his spade and wishing them all away so he could get on with the filling-in that nobody liked to see and go home.

‘We must all go together, back to Antonia's place for the knees-up,' Rose suggested brightly, striding off across the grass without waiting for a reply.

‘Is it really such a good idea?' Kitty hesitated. ‘I mean, Antonia might well have talked about us at home, you know, to her family about how her schooldays were . . .'

Rose turned and looked at her, puzzled. She pulled the blanket-like grey coat around her, folding her arms across her long angled body. Kitty recalled their games mistress, keen on deportment, commenting that Rosemary-Jane always looked as if she was lounging against a gatepost that no-one else could see. ‘Whatever do you mean?' she now asked Kitty, head on one side like a confused dog. ‘We were her
very best
friends!'

‘Absolutely,' Julia agreed, sliding her arm through Kitty's and pulling her towards the cars. ‘I mean, if she'd had that bad a time, she wouldn't have kept up with the Old Girls, now would she?'

Kitty thought about being warm, about a smoked-salmon sandwich, just the one small creamy sherry and perhaps a log fire to thaw her bones. ‘OK. Just for half an hour and then I must get going,' she conceded.

Rose and Julia, one each side, smiled at her, smart women in early middle age who were wearing more than well enough and were pleased with themselves.

‘There you are, you see, not so difficult is it?' Julia said, satisfied at having got her own way. ‘Now isn't this nice, the three of us all together again?'

Antonia's widower greeted his guests with unnerving gratitude, welcoming Kitty, Julia and Rose into a suitably subdued library – all treacle-dark shelves and murky book-spines. A large buffet was laid out on a table beneath rows of ancient volumes that were probably being secretly munched away by paper-mites, and trays of what looked like the traditional post-death sherry were being offered round. Kitty was rather disappointed. There weren't many houses like this one that hadn't been fossilized by the National Trust and were actually properly lived in and still evolving. She'd been looking forward to inspecting a grand pale-panelled drawing-room, overlooking the terraced formal gardens she'd glimpsed from the drive, and having a look at what she assumed would be terrifically good heirloom paintings. Perhaps the family hadn't wanted to blight future enjoyment of such a room with sad memories of this funeral feast. And maybe Antonia's broken body had been brought to lie in state in here and after today the room would be locked and left with romantic poignancy to the dust.

‘Tom Goodrich, so sweet of you to come.' Antonia's husband shook Kitty's hand briefly but with strength. His hand was hard and dry, an outdoor hand. He was tall, broad but not fat and with that lucky handsomeness that some men have when the lines on their face deepen in all the right places with age. Lamentably tempted, Kitty looked him straight in the eye and hoped he couldn't tell she was trying hard to imagine him naked aboard the schoolgirl Large Antonia that she remembered. Somehow she could only summon up a ludicrous cubist tableau of a tanned muscly slab balanced precariously on a mottled red and white jelly. ‘Er, Kitty Harding um . . . old friend of Antonia's. So sorry . . .' she mumbled, feeling ridiculous and ashamed. How could she claim to be ‘so sorry' about someone she hadn't actually seen for more than twenty years? And ‘so sorry' was such a pathetically limp phrase of general pity for untimely death. Anyone's.

Rose, with no such compunctions and a boldness that Kitty well recalled, was kissing Tom on each cheek, carefully as if deliberately choosing for her lips the most tender spot. Her face was a picture of barely-contained profound grief and Kitty marvelled at her temerity. This, after all, was the woman who had once, in a moment of after-hockey ‘helpfulness', threaded a big dead goldfish from the biology lab tank into his late wife's untidy carroty plait. Hours later in Maths Antonia's shrieks had made the windows quake. Julia waited behind for her handshake, watching Rose closely, a small knowing smile hovering on her lips, which she banished quickly as her turn came and she made her own obsequious mutterings.

‘I take it back. It
is
just like a wedding reception,' Julia whispered to Kitty over the sandwiches. ‘Only needs a string of cute bridesmaids and Antonia's mother in a hat. I wonder whatever happened to her, by the way. I
should
know, come to think of it.' She looked intensely thoughtful, mentally thumbing through back numbers of the Old Hartsvale newsletters.

‘Fizzled out quietly in a nursing home, couple of years back,' Rose chimed in, her impatient fingers playing with an unlit cigarette. Her eyes scanned the room for a fellow-smoker, squinting slightly. At school Kitty remembered she'd possessed glasses but only worn them for games, to make sure she wasn't called upon to do anything too strenuous.

‘How do you know that? You really
did
keep up with Antonia then?' Kitty asked. After the way Antonia had been treated, Kitty could hardly imagine she'd have been thrilled to chat with Rose over a diet lunch, or ring up to swop intimate gigglings on pregnancy problems.

Rose grinned, those huge teeth glinting. ‘Well you know, sort of. Here and there. More Tom really, I suppose. To do with work, of course. My company makes garden programmes for TV. We came down here and did this one. It's gorgeous out there, you should just see. I was
amazed
of course, you can imagine, to find out who Tom had married. I suppose I've run into him in London once or twice since.' The hand with the cigarette was gesturing airily and her voice had a peculiar over-casual drawl to it, Kitty thought, as if she was saying something she'd rehearsed. It left a sense of information omitted.

Kitty felt slightly nauseous after guzzling three deceptively delicate cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches far too fast, and wandered off in search of fresh air. She squeezed past guests who, loosened by drink and relieved to be neither dead nor outside in the cold, had progressed to general discussion of schools, racing and the price of land. The children were not in the room and Kitty imagined the younger ones in a vast basement kitchen, cuddling up to a rotund cook and being allowed to dip their fingers into bowls of chocolate cake-mix. If the teenager was anything like Lily – and he'd looked about fifteen – he would be skulking in his room, submerging his grief in loud music and wishing all these sociably mingling guests to hell.

She headed towards the back of the house, hoping to find the elaborate conservatory she'd spotted from the driveway and draw breath among cool greenery, away from the cocktail-party atmosphere in the library.

‘Looking for the loo? There's one just round that corner on the left.' Tom emerged from a brightly lit corridor, presumably leading from the kitchen (not in a basement then, and probably with a hostile au pair, not a cook) carrying several bottles of wine.

‘Oh er, yes. Good idea.' Kitty felt awkward, wary. Tom might haul her into a corner and cross-examine her on her relationship with his wife. She bit her lip.

‘You OK?' Tom hesitated, waiting for her to follow his directions.

‘As much as one can be at these things,' she replied with a smile that she hoped looked sympathetic enough. The English simply weren't good at grief, she thought, they were just too fearful of emotion. Tom might have wanted to collapse onto a bed, clutching Antonia's oldest nightie, and simply howl like a lonely spaniel. Instead he had to top up glasses and look pleased to have guests.

A collection of framed family photos hung on the lavatory walls. As in Kitty's own home, they were just informal holiday and home shots, people having fun together, children at various stages of growth in gardens, on horses, on beaches, skiing. Kitty had a good look at them, noting with some surprise how Antonia had, as her own mother would have put it, ‘grown into' her looks. As a girl she'd been constantly out of place, appearance-wise. Always cumbersome and red. On school photos she'd had to be the one at the end of the row, sticking up too far to be placed in a line, found space for after the neat symmetrical ones with manageable hair and clothes that fitted properly had filed in. She'd been the one, on the school ski trip (oh brave Antonia) who'd been too big for the hire company that had supplied all their skiwear and had had to be equipped with a man's salopettes and jacket. As an adult, Kitty could see, she'd found her niche, her man and her role. She hadn't found Weight Watchers though, that was also clear from the photos.

Looking at the pictures of this robust and jolly woman with a proud cloud of auburn hair, Kitty shuddered at the dreadful casual suddenness with which such a strong, vibrant life could be snuffed out. The world was full of frail, skinny people who, as they said, looked as if a puff of wind would knock them down, as if the slightest chill could be the edge of pneumonia. But really there was no difference when the cat-like gods chose to play with the mouse-like mortals: size and vulnerability just weren't linked. She flushed the loo and had a last look at the photos, sad for the young, laughing children whose childhood had been blighted the day their mother drove her car up an oak tree. The baby Madeleine's adoptive mother might be dead too, she suddenly thought. But surely, if that had happened, she'd come looking for her, there were ways of doing that now, unless she'd never been told she was adopted. Quickly she rinsed her hands under the green-mottled brass tap. She was taking too long, thinking too morosely and outside the door she could hear people waiting, murmuring.

‘Of course it wasn't exactly an accident, you know.' Kitty's hands froze on the towel and her ears tingled with the effort to listen.

‘Everybody knows that. Doesn't even need saying.'

‘Broken heart.'

‘Bastard. They all are. Who'd kill themselves over a man?' A sharp inhalation of cigarette followed.

Kitty opened the door and a trio of women smiled politely, assuring each other of nothing untoward heard or said. So that's how Antonia got thin, Kitty decided. Some cheated-on women hit the fridge, cramming food into their faces double-handed: leftover chicken, taramasalata scooped with their fingers and chunks of hard cheese wolfed down too fast to notice the irony. Presumably Antonia had been one of the other sort, the starvers and fretters and the takers to the vodka. In a rush of fondness for Glyn, who'd be wondering where she'd got to, Kitty thought of hearth and home. On reaching the library again she looked round for Julia.

‘If you still want a lift to Bodmin Parkway we have to go now,' she told her. ‘I promised I wouldn't be back too late. I've got this out-of-season prizewinning author checking in tomorrow and loads to do.'