The Right Thing (5 page)

‘Well they do that to you, funerals. They're a bit fundamental, all that here one minute, gone the next. And where? Gone where?' He was scratching the back of his neck, Kitty noticed. He always did that when he was nervous about difficult things being said. It wasn't that he liked emotions tidied away out of sight, as her parents had done, it was more that since he'd retired from dealing with school problems, he seemed to expect there to be nothing tricky to deal with for the rest of his life at home either. Kitty persisted, determined to make him listen because, suddenly, it mattered.

‘I don't even know if she's alive or dead. All those years ago all you were told was that it was the right thing to do, completely the best thing for the baby, giving it a proper family life. No-one said anything about all the wondering you do for the rest of your
own
life. Everyone made you feel that to do anything else would have been selfish.'

‘Well they were right, weren't they? What could a teenager fresh out of school do with a small child?' Glyn interrupted. He was stroking her hair. Kitty flinched. She didn't want to be patted better and shook him off. ‘
This
life isn't so bad, surely? Rita up the lane had had her three boys by the time she was twenty-one. If I hadn't been so gutless . . . Anyway I started thinking maybe I should find out, you know, make sure the baby – girl – woman, is all right. If I don't do something about it I'll never ever know and then it will be too late. It might be already.'

Glyn sighed. ‘Well you could, but suppose she's
not
all right? Not much you can do about it now, is there? There could be years of blame all built up in her.' Kitty glared at him. ‘Or,' he went on, ‘she might not know you exist, or she might know and not care because she's perfectly happy.'

‘Well at least
I'd
know, either way.'

‘Yes but that's the point isn't it,
you'd
know, and then what, back to what kind of normal? And also I'm sure she'd have to be the one who wants to do the finding, because I'm pretty sure you as the birth mother wouldn't be allowed to. And anyway, what's in it for her?'

Kitty stood up and pushed past him. ‘I'll get some daffodils from Rita for this room. It needs a bit more cheering up.'

Glyn followed her out of the room and down the stairs, too closely she thought, cross and criticizing. He was so headmasterly, so reasonable, so much too good at seeing both sides and cutting out the emotional content.

‘There's ways of finding out. Julia Taggart would know. She seems to know bloody everything else. I might ask her. Or maybe Rita,' Kitty told him.

‘Up to you. But don't say I didn't warn you, you don't know what you might be stirring up. Suppose she just sort of turns up here?'

Kitty shrugged. ‘I don't think it quite works like that. But even if she did, wouldn't that be all right? I mean it's not as if the children don't know she exists. They've always known they've got a half-sister out there somewhere.' She smiled, recalling her mother's instruction that she would be wise not to tell anyone, not ever.

‘And what if you make all the right connections and she
doesn't
turn up. What then?'

Kitty started walking across the yard to her own kitchen. ‘Well then nothing will have changed, will it?' Behind her she heard him say, as if he hadn't decided whether she should hear, ‘Oh but something
would
have changed, no question about that.'

‘Well of course Glyn's not going to be interested in some old baby from way back. Why should he be? It wasn't his.' Rita bustled about her cluttered kitchen, searching among the jumble of blue and purple glass jars on the shelf behind the sink for the one that contained the plain old ordinary tea bags that Kitty seemed so boringly to prefer. Rita could offer twenty different herbal selections and it irritated that her nearest tea-sharing neighbour was a PG Tips type. The pampered Josh's current favourite was ginger and ginseng (which he didn't suspect was to perk up both digestion and libido), with a dash of lemon to ward off his tendency to colds. Rita kept this in his special copper box that he claimed he'd found on a Peruvian mountain. She reached into the fridge and pulled out a jug of milk.

‘Freshly squeezed goat?' she offered to Kitty, who, feeling she was being challenged to dare to ask for semi-skimmed cow, accepted.

Rita went on, ‘You shouldn't expect him to be even slightly curious. Men let things go better than we do and then it's on to what's next. He probably wouldn't be that interested even if it
was
his.' There was in Rita's scathing tone more than a hint that she found men, apart from the adored Josh, unreliable, unfeeling and untrustworthy.

‘Well
I'd
be curious if it was
his,
wouldn't you?' Kitty picked up a pair of small grey sleeping cats from the rocking-chair and sat down on a torn patchwork cushion with them on her lap. Lazily they stretched their baby limbs, extending hair-fine claws, and snuggled back down immediately, purring gently as if she'd never disturbed them.

‘Yes but we're women. Of course we'd be interested, we have tender, enquiring natures. It's why your paintings are so full of detail.'

‘We have overdeveloped nosiness, you mean.' Kitty realized as she said it that she sounded like her mother who, when it came to matters less delicate than bodily functions and pregnancy, liked to call a spade a bloody shovel.

‘If you like,' Rita conceded grudgingly. ‘Generalizing horribly, I think some men just shut inconvenient things out rather than poke at them like old scabs till there's blood and disaster everywhere like we do. And not only that, we then martyr ourselves clearing up the mess and absolutely demanding all the blame.' She grinned, her mouth slightly twisted as it always was, showing a glimpse of a gold premolar. There was a gypsyish look to Rita, something to do with flamboyance with colour and a Carmen-style swagger when she moved, as if she might, given the right amount of moonlight, moonshine and a camp-fire audience, break into a spontaneous flamenco. When she walked, her hips whistled up the air around her. Glyn had once admitted to Kitty, after a party, that Rita was pretty sexy, but only in a draughty sort of way. ‘She could swish a bloke into bed,' he'd said, looking nervous.

Kitty frowned. ‘You're right. And whatever I unearth now, there is no baby any more. Somewhere out there is a grown young woman, all cooked and finished.' She laughed. ‘Glyn still looks at his own children sometimes as if he can't quite believe he's produced them, especially since they've been teenagers. Imagine how he'd feel if a fully formed adult turned up at the house looking for a mum who wouldn't have a chance of recognizing her.'

‘And do
you
imagine that, how you'd feel, if it happened?' Rita's tobacco-coloured eyes were looking intensely at Kitty as if she had to hold her gaze to haul out the truth. Kitty didn't even have to hesitate.

‘Well of course I imagine it. More now than I used to even. I'm sure everyone who's ever had a child adopted does the same thing. Over the years I've pictured her at different ages arriving on the doorstep: a sad little girl run away from being sent too early to boarding-school, or a stroppy thirteen-year-old having her first flukey go at finding me, easy as something out of Enid Blyton. And then a year or two back I kept expecting a cool nineteen-year-old to turn up, doing a casual detour after the backpack trip to India, checking out her real mother . . .'

‘The one who brought her up
is
her real mother,' Rita reminded her softly.

‘Yes, I know, I know.' Kitty gathered up the cats and put them back on the chair again. Her thighs were warm where their little bodies had lain and the outside chill damp air wasn't tempting. ‘I'd better get going. Don't want to miss our illustrious guest arriving. Glyn's so excited you'd think we were getting royalty.'

Rita's eyes glinted and the twisted grin returned. ‘I'm pretty excited too. I've read all his books and they're so full of complicated sex I'm wondering if he'll be short of company.' She put her hands on her hips and thrust her breasts forward in mock provocation. She was wearing an ancient rainbow-knitted sweater but Kitty imagined the fine cleavage beneath, cupped and lifted by the purple satin or lime green bra she'd seen flying brazenly on the orchard washing-line.

‘Hey, he's only paying for the room. Don't go throwing in any freebies.'

‘Are you suggesting I should charge for it?' Rita giggled, ‘though I suppose a girl has to make a living . . .'
Girl
was pushing it; Rita wouldn't see forty-five again, surely explaining why she so treasured the idle (but young and vigorous) Josh who was probably upstairs now, still sleeping off Rita's attentions till she brought him tea and tenderness.

‘I'll invite you over for supper, just as soon as he's settled in,' Kitty promised. ‘But who knows, he might prefer Petroc . . .' She made her escape before Rita could throw a cold tea bag at her and picked her way through the mud in the yard towards the field where the last daffodils waited to be saved from running to seed. Rita's five small fields with their tumbled-down banks of mixed scrap iron, crumbling wall and bramble-woven hawthorn had a scrappy pre-war appearance, as if they'd been salvaged from a group of ancient cottage gardens. The daffodil picking was finished and these leftover flowers that had bloomed just too late had a desperate look to them, like debs at an old-style coming-out dance where there weren't quite enough men. Wordsworth's host they were not, these mud-splashed and pathetic, shivering and rather puny specimens. Lily looked just like that in winter, all pinched and trembling, Kitty thought, as her ancient Timberlands sucked and squelched their way through the puddle of coppery mud that had collected by the gate. Lily had limbs like strings and a new-found appetite for large amounts of fruit that she'd pick up from the dresser halfway through a meal and walk out of the kitchen with, saying she'd eat it in her room, she didn't feel like a big meal just now.

Kitty's fingers were sticky with dripping sap after picking an armful of the damp flowers, and she wondered if she'd bother going to all this trouble for some less legendary scribbler taking a fortnight off from the nine-to-five grind to indulge a fantasy. That would be the sort of client who would most appreciate a huge bunch of hand-picked daffodils, she thought. George Moorfield had the comfort of bestseller status and a bank account boosted by prizewinnings. As she stepped carefully through the least of the mud back to the road a large turquoise car, a strange mixture of what looked like a Bentley at the front and a pick-up truck at the back, sped towards her along the lane, heedless of any possible traffic round the bend ahead. Its wheels whooshed up an arc of muddy water which soaked Kitty's jeans.

‘Shit! Stupid bastard!' she yelled after the car, setting out speedily along the road in the same direction. It could only be going to Treneath, there was nowhere else after that, unless the driver fancied whizzing on up towards the coast path and then up and over the cliff edge. She marched along fast and furious, keeping to the middle of the road. If the driver realized he'd taken a wrong turning and came back, she'd make bloody sure he had to stop so she could tell him what she thought.

Glyn counted out a hundred shallots and laid them out on the clean, empty staging in the greenhouse. He breathed in the soft damp smell of young lettuces, picked a crisp young leaf from the earthenware pot next to him and chewed it speculatively, trying to feel certain that it tasted so very much better than something imported from Guatemala that he could get in a supermarket. It was costing a lot, on the whole, all this going organic and growing their own. Much more than if they just bought vegetables at Safeway. The fact that Kitty never pointed this out made him wonder, sometimes, if she was just indulging him, letting him play, like a child in mud. He had to make sure he thought of it as something separate from simply replacing shop veg, make it not just functional. There were plenty of restaurants that could be interested – the word ‘organic' on a menu was a handy price-booster, especially with the sort of holiday visitors who liked to go home able to say, ‘So
marvellous,
entirely local veg'. That was the sort of comment that went into the restaurant guides.

He loved the process of sowing and raising the little seedlings, the first magic sight of them sprouting, then potting them on at the two-leaf stage, holding them carefully by the leaves so as not to hurt the stems. He'd done a lot of damage that way at first, even though he'd thought he'd done it right and then he'd had to watch so many of them struggle, fall down and shrivel just because he'd been heavy-handed. Ignoring advice from five instruction books, on the grounds that he was an intelligent man and knew many things better than most, he'd also meticulously thinned out his first batch of carrots, thinking they surely needed more room than that, only to leave them as no-mercy prey for carrot fly. The various crops needed more attention than small children, and certainly far more than Lily and Petroc, with their teenage secret lives, were needing these days.

He glanced out of the greenhouse at the nine raised rectangles of earth in the walled vegetable garden. Together they looked like a block of good chocolate. The soil was rich and well-manured and the old stone walls kept the warmth in and the wind out, which prolonged the growing time. He was still picking broccoli from the year before, the garlic was already a foot tall and the cauliflowers had been bigger than the ones in Rita's medium field that she rented to the farm on the hill. He looked at the shallots waiting on the worktop. ‘All in now, or stagger them?' he muttered aloud, pondering the problems of storing a harvest of several hundred when they all ripened at once. He should have started some off back in December, getting them in on the shortest day like the garlic.