The Right Thing (6 page)

‘First sign of craziness, if you'll forgive the cliché.' The voice (male) was alarmingly close, right beside him, shoulder to shoulder and too chummy. Glyn felt instant fury that anyone should have crept up so close without him noticing, almost into the middle of his reverie. He'd assumed years running a school had given him a sort of second sight where being sneaked up on and surprised was concerned. It was something basic you just didn't let happen, like turning your back in a physics lab full of frisky fourteen-year-olds.

‘I'm George Moorfield.' The man leaned back against the worktop, picked up a shallot and began casually unfurling the papery top of it as if it was a wrapped sweet. ‘Amazing these things, aren't they? Did you grow them?'

‘Not these, they're sets for this year's crop,' Glyn told him grudgingly. He'd looked forward to meeting this man, read his books which probed the problems of the Doubt-Racked Male and thought he might, just possibly, be something of a soulmate. Now he just wanted to snatch the baby onion out of George Moorfield's careless hand and put it back in line. The feeling reminded him uncomfortably of confiscating penknives from first-years. Recalling good manners he forced a smile and offered an earthy hand. ‘I'm Glyn Harding, I suppose you didn't find anyone up at the house?'

‘No, neither sight nor breath but the doors were open and I wandered round a bit and then came out here. The phone rang and I answered it – message on your kitchen table. I'm a bit early. Well, a lot early. Sorry.'

‘Well yes.' Glyn wiped his hands on a ripped tea towel and led George out of the greenhouse, closing the door behind him firmly and not just to keep the warmth in. People should know that greenhouses, like sheds and attics and little huts down at the ends of paths, were private retreats, never to be invaded. He didn't mind about the wandering through the house, that was more public space, or the answering the phone – who could ever leave one to ring? It wasn't even eleven o'clock yet. He was pretty sure tenants weren't supposed to arrive till after three, though this one might have thought he'd be above mere instructions. Kitty usually dealt with the clients, and this one, well this was one he'd actually
read,
which made him feel he was talking to someone who wasn't quite real.

George Moorfield was wearing clothes that looked as if they'd been selected specially to be deliberately contrary to what was appropriate for some of the deepest countryside Britain had to offer. His suede boots were as pale as lion fur and his black leather jacket was so glaringly new it was still as stiff as cardboard. Its front barely met over the substantial portly belly that was squashed into denim shirt and jeans. It must have been a very uncomfortable drive, Glyn concluded, unless the man had worn an old tracksuit for the actual journey, changing into image-wear the moment he crossed the Tamar, like Joan Collins travelling on Concorde. The famous author looked several years older than the photo that appeared in his books, his long grey hair well receded as if it had slipped backwards, exposing vulnerable pink scalp at the front.

‘Kit will be back in a minute,' Glyn said, now wondering what on earth he should do with him, ‘And she'll show you to your room and all that. Come into the house and have some coffee.' The man had an extraordinary car, he noted, passing the strange blue-green Bentley parked just where it most inconveniently blocked the gateway. Glyn didn't comment, feeling that to mention the thing might seem depressingly parochial. They got their fair share of strange motors in Cornwall too. If you could stick a truck back-end on a Beetle, like the Neanderthal Josh bloke who ‘worked' on Rita's land, it was surely no big deal to tag one onto a Bentley.

Lily's G-Shock watch said 10.30. She was hungry now and her stomach was going to rumble till break, all the way through Maths. She would eat half of the Bounty bar as soon as break started and see if the uncomfortable full feeling lasted all the way to lunch. She didn't like feeling hungry because it was something she couldn't decide to feel or not to feel, it was just automatic, so the feeling had to be kept just a little away from her, usually just a dry biscuit's-worth here and there, with only occasional giving into sweet temptation like today. She wrote her best poems when her head was full of the clanging panic of hunger. ‘Thin as a nun' had come to her the night before when she'd been looking at her pale narrow body in the bathroom mirror. It made her think of sacrifice and purity and a no-sex state. She hated having periods too, for the same lack of controllability. They just came, all by themselves, bringing cramps and a terror of some disastrous bloody accidental embarrassment every month, whatever she did.

She didn't want to starve, but she knew from things she'd read and from the girl who'd had to leave school when she got so skeletal she couldn't stand, that there was a clever balance if you worked at it hard enough and were careful. She wouldn't end up like that girl, with peach-fur skin and a head like just a skull and tights that hung drooping off her legs, not a chance. But if she got it right and didn't eat just
quite
enough, the periods would go away and she'd be all right,
not anorexic,
definitely not that, but in control. Perhaps she'd have just a little tiny corner of the Bounty bar. Charlotte could have the rest. It would be greedy to eat the whole thing in front of her anyway.

She chewed the ends of her fine fair hair and thought about the summer. She'd be able to surf every day, and always feel exactly the same. She wouldn't have moods, cramps, blood, pads or any of that hassle. She'd be OK, she always had breakfast and she'd make sure her energy level ticked over. Well she'd have to, or she wouldn't even be able to lift her board, would she?

Smiling, she raised her hand to reply to a question that had been asked and answered about ten minutes previously, earning a rebuke for lack of concentration and a concerned narrowing of the eyes from the teacher. ‘Sorry.' Lily smiled more broadly, her expression turning cheeky. The concern vanished, to be replaced with one of relief. Lily noted the alteration and understood it: teachers much preferred their pupils, especially sensitive teenage girls, to be merely naughty rather than suspiciously loopy. Their lives were difficult. enough.

‘Glyn! Glyn, whose is that car in the yard?' Kitty staggered into the kitchen shedding daffodils, shouting and kicking off her boots at the same time. She'd left muddy prints and sticky trails of sap all over the beechwood floor in her hurry to be cross with the stranger who'd splattered her with mud.

‘Hi. George Moorfield. You were expecting me?' Kitty adjusted a woolly sock and stood up properly to look at this house guest who'd arrived so unforgivably early.

‘Mr Moorfield! Goodness we weren't expecting you till later.' She immediately wished she hadn't said that. It reminded her of her mother who, out of good old Christian charity, had liked to be sure people were aware of their shortcomings. She dropped the boots to shake hands, ‘Excuse the mud – there's lakes of it out in the lane.'

‘Oh dear, was it you I zoomed past so rudely? I'm so sorry – I was so afraid of getting lost in these teeny roads, the high banks and the narrowness made me feel just a bit trippy.' He had a rather drawly don't-care voice, she thought, like someone who is well used to being able to charm his way out of trouble. She recalled tabloid tales of two wives, each of whom in their turn had walked out claiming mental turmoil that they could no longer stand, presumably after that charm wore thin and tattered.

She pulled a vase from the dresser shelf and quickly shoved the daffodils in, arranging them rather uselessly.

‘These are for your room which is ready if you want to come and see it,' Kitty told him. He stood up and gave Glyn a glance of amused conspiracy. ‘Should they have water, do you think?' he suggested kindly.

‘God I feel so
twittish
,' Kitty told Glyn the moment she got back from the barn. ‘He must think I'm a complete lunatic – covered in mud, flapping about with waterless daffs and dropping boots everywhere.'

‘Well it was his fault about the mud. He's got one of those knacks some blokes perfect over the years,' Glyn told her wearily, handing her a fresh mug of coffee across the table. ‘He makes women go all dippy and then they're grateful when he's all understanding and sweetness to them.' Kitty looked at him, frowning. ‘I hope you don't really think I'm that susceptible. Anyway, I thought he was someone you admired,' she said. ‘What happened?'

‘He invaded my greenhouse.' Glyn laughed. ‘No, I admire his books. No-one else does Thinking Man as Victim these days and gets away with it quite like he does. But it's a bit like meeting actors, they're always shorter than you expect. With writers, they're shorter in the sensitivity department and his hands have got thinker's twitch.'

‘Actually he told me he didn't want to see so much as an empty wine bottle while he's here, in case he's tempted to take a sniff at it. He's come here to be very seriously off the booze.'

‘Telling you his troubles, was he?'

‘While we sat cosily on the bed, you mean?' Kitty grinned at him. ‘No, just warning me not to invite him in for a g. and t. at sixish.'

‘In his dreams. But there's the pub in the village, he must have passed it. If he's tempted, it isn't far. And the Spar has a decent chardonnay, not to mention six brands of vodka.'

‘We could let his tyres down.'

‘Only after he moves that monstrous thing away from the gate.' Glyn hauled himself out of the chair. He was carrying his shoulders very stiffly, Kitty noticed, as if George Moorfield made him feel old and decrepit. There couldn't really be anything in it, age-wise: Glyn was early fifties, and George was clearly even more than that in spite of the leather and Levis.

‘He said there was a phone call and he'd taken a message?' Kitty searched among the junk mail and lists and loose bits of paper by the phone on the dresser.

‘Oh, sorry, forgot – it's on the shelf, next to the blue mug.' Glyn pointed from the doorway, ‘I'm going back to the shallots. Decisions must be made. See you later.'

Kitty smoothed out the scrap of paper on which George had scrawled Julia Taggart's number and started dialling. The usual irritating electronic voice told her that the number she was calling knew she was waiting and she hung up. There wasn't much left for her and Julia to talk about anyway; they'd discussed who'd worn/said what at Antonia's funeral on the drive to the station, and Kitty could only surmise Julia had some earthy piece of gossip about Rosemary-Jane that she'd forgotten to pass on, something that just couldn't wait till they next met in London. Minutes later, as Kitty was setting out to ask George to repark his car so she could get out to the supermarket, the phone rang.

‘I did 1471,' Julia announced without saying hello. ‘I am glad you rang back. You'll never guess what.'

Kitty laughed. Julia still sounded so like the eager schoolgirl she'd been when she'd discovered a secret romance between the gorgeous young Latin mistress and the visiting violin teacher.

‘OK, what won't I guess?' she indulged her.

‘Rosemary-Jane hasn't come back from the funeral yet. I've had her husband, Ben-that-you-used-to-know, on the phone wondering if she'd stayed with me.' Julia paused for breath then asked, more subdued, ‘Is she with you?'

‘Me? No of course not. Yesterday was the first time I'd seen her since she went off to shine and sparkle at Oxford. I didn't even know she'd married Ben-that-I-used-to-know, as you call him. I couldn't honestly claim to know either of them now, not in the being adults-together sense.'

‘Worse than I thought then.' Julia's drama hysteria was rising. ‘She surely couldn't have stayed with
him.
Not even Rose would be so callous.'

‘With Antonia's husband, do you mean?' Kitty wondered, not for the first time, if Julia, divorced and with her solitary son away at Edinburgh, now had too little of substance to think about.

‘Widower. And she's not the type to hang about waiting for the decent interval. He's a lone man; she'd be sure to pounce before someone else does.'

‘Look Julia, I really wouldn't know.'

‘Yes you would. You remember what she was like.'

‘Julia, it was more than
twenty
years ago. We were into David Bowie and dyeing our hair purple!' What
would
Ben look like these days, Kitty wondered again.

‘She married your bloke.
Kitty,
he surely wasn't the one who . . .' Julia suddenly said. She sounded as if this was the first time it had crossed her mind. Kitty could feel her pulse getting up speed.

‘Oh, he and I had a brief thing, that was all, just a teenage number before he went off to do VSO.' With forced breeziness she headed off Julia's train of thought.

There was a pause, in which Kitty could have sworn she could hear the mechanics of Julia's brain ticking over.

‘But wasn't that about when you, you know that bit of trouble . . .'

‘That baby, do you mean?'

‘Yes, that baby.'

‘Oh I had the baby loads later. You know I only told you, or rather my mother told yours, Rose never knew and I hope she won't, even now.'

‘Well
I've
never mentioned it. I promised, didn't I?' Julia needed distracting from speculation. Kitty thought quickly and got in before Julia could take things any further, ‘Actually Julia, I was going to call you to do with all that. It was just a thought, really, I don't know whether you'd have any ideas.'

‘Ooh what? Tell me now.' Luckily Julia was as easy to lead as a child's pony.