The Right Thing (9 page)

She was probably way past Exeter by now, Kitty calculated, driving too fast, carelessly flicking through radio stations or making phone calls. She wouldn't waste time concocting a credible story for the long-suffering Ben. And Kitty had no doubt he must
be
long-suffering – she'd now concluded that he was a man of routine and solidity who tolerated his unreliable wife for the pathetic excitement of her returning to him in need of a shot of stability and comfort. She would be more than tolerated, Kitty thought as she watched Glyn grumpily pacing, she would be positively treasured. Rose would easily have managed to keep an air of maddening elusiveness that had Ben still, after what must be twenty years, absolutely panting after her, body and soul.

There'd always been an interesting unreliability about her, bordering on sly deviousness. Boys had always fancied that aspect of her, back in their schooldays. So hard to pin down was Rose that the will-she/won't-she question about sex would be the last to come up with anyone who asked her out; they all had to start the guessing game with wondering if she'd even turn up. Kitty felt quite envious of this imagined Ben-and-Rose-excitement scenario: she objected to being lined up as the opposite by Glyn, lumped in with the safe and plodding and domestic and predictable. She pointed her paintbrush at Glyn, accusing, ‘You're sounding like some boring old fart who doesn't want any new experiences in life any more. Just because you've officially retired, it doesn't mean you have to get dull and territorial.'

Glyn looked quite hurt. The skin on his forehead furrowed like the field Rita had let Josh plough so very badly the year before. He stopped pacing and went to the sink to scrape bits of Petroc's engine oil out of his fingernails with a palette-knife. ‘Sorry. I just thought she was sort of flighty. Not a bit like you. I didn't know you had friends like that.'

Kitty was even more annoyed: he'd now damningly confirmed her private thoughts. ‘Actually I
don't
have friends like that. You can't call someone a friend just because they were at school with you when you haven't seen them for a million years. Though why I'm not to be allowed “flighty” friends I can't imagine. I don't intend to feel in the slightest bit old and boring.'

‘Now you're being contrary,' he pointed out.

‘Better than giving into being bloody geriatric, especially at your age. Next, you'll be complaining when someone sits in “your” chair and grumbling if we don't have halibut every single Friday,' she countered. She squeezed a dollop of Winsor blue on to the palette and felt calmer. ‘Did you manage to get Petroc's car sorted?'

‘We jump-started it. He's not in the best of moods either. Must be something in the air.' Glyn looked down out of the window again. ‘There's that George, wandering up the lane. I wonder if he'll discover Rita.'

Kitty looked out, down at the lane and along towards Rita's farmhouse. A corner of it was visible through the beech trees that were just coming into leaf. Kitty thought of them as half dressed, shivering in leaves too small and delicate. Only weeks from now she wouldn't be able to see the house at all. She could hardly wait, winter in the country was so desolate. When they'd lived in London, warmed by traffic pollution and heating blasting out from shops, she could almost ignore it. Here there seemed to be weeks of endless damp windy grey with just the occasional reward of a scintillating blue day of brave vivid sunshine. Even the sea, when it wasn't rowdy with storm, seemed to sulk. She pictured Rita sitting in her kitchen, sipping coffee by the wood burner and waiting for her young lover to finish sleeping. ‘I think she's hoping he will. Josh might be starting to pall by now.'

‘If you'd put your friend Rose up in one of the barn rooms last night, rather than cramming her in here with us, there might have been some fun goings-on with George.' Glyn, she was glad to see, seemed to have regained some of the usual cheery glint in his eye.

‘I thought you were glad she'd gone. Just think, if there'd been any of that kind of fun she might have stayed for weeks.'

‘I don't suppose she would. The delights of metropolitan life call, I expect,' he decided. Kitty wasn't so certain. Julia had been more than hinting that any ‘call', like an on-heat cat, would be from poor Antonia's husband, whatever Rose insisted about being just friends.

Glyn wandered off down to the garden to tend to his cauliflower seedlings and Kitty started on her painting. The phone number Julia had given her had been brought up from the kitchen and was now on a shelf beside her in the attic, tucked into a jar of sable paintbrushes. She painted the hull of the first boat and then went and picked up the slip of paper and looked at it again. She copied the number down, painted in the same blue gouache, onto a piece of water-colour paper, then pinned it to the big cork notice-board on which she kept pieces of inspiration: bits of coloured cloth, pictures from magazines, shells and slivers of wood from the beach and photos that might lead to a painting. It seemed a significant act. Nothing went on that board that wasn't meant to be made use of. For Kitty, pinning things up where she could see them was a sort of editing process: it might narrow down the selection of shades of yellow for painting the kitchen, or it might be to do with choosing oblong sunglasses or oval ones. She stood by the easel, sucking the end of the brush and looking at the painted numbers. It couldn't hurt just to find out what she should do, if, only if, she decided to try to discover what had happened to Madeleine.

She looked out of the window. Glyn was down in the greenhouse in the vegetable garden far below, she could just make out the shape of him, pricking out or potting on or whatever these mysterious gardeners did. She thought of his big gentle hands tenderly settling the earth round the fragile stems. Whatever she found out now about the baby, there wasn't any point discussing it with him at this stage. He'd only try to dissuade her, worried, she realized, that it might imply an unsettling. However he denied it, she'd been right that he liked life to be reasonably simple and predictable. It was for that he'd given up the trials and troubles of running a large school. She rinsed the brush, put it upside down in the purple jar that Petroc had made as a GCSE art project, and went to the phone.

‘Surely it doesn't matter about exams just as long as I can read and write and count,' Lily was saying to Josh across Rita's kitchen table.

‘You'll need more than that, otherwise you'll end up like me,' he grinned at her. He had very even teeth and she guessed that he'd had the kind of good and careful parents who'd taken him for regular orthodontic treatment, vaccinations and neat haircuts and then had to watch him turn into a drifter. She thought he looked very proud of himself, as if he was actually a cake that had turned out perfectly cooked without anyone looking at a recipe.

Lily knew she was supposed to care about getting good GCSE grades, had to care even more than the others, because of her father being a teacher. It was what teachers were for, for telling you you had to make
them
a success by working your own brains to a mush just to get their schools up the ratings so other parents would want their kids to go there. She'd told her mum she didn't feel like putting herself out for the sake of unknown parents of children who weren't yet eleven. But then her mum had said there was no point failing all her GCSEs just for the sake of
not
impressing some unknown parents who wouldn't care about her either, and she supposed deep down she was right, which made her feel weak and as if she couldn't stick with her own opinions.

Josh seemed to have got away with having none of the usual grown-up ambitions at all. He talked about the travelling he'd done, the bars he'd picked up work in, the finding out just enough about antiques and working with wood as if he'd learned it by chance. He wore Rita's old rainbow-striped jumpers and chewed holes in the sleeves just like Lily did. He hadn't grown out of things like that, the way adults were supposed to have, and he smelled of unmade bed like the boys at school, not proper men. Her dad smelled of sporty deodorant, fabric softener and earth and his hair wasn't allowed to stray into being too long. Josh's thick gingery-fair hair was on its way to turning into dreads and he wore odd-coloured old baseball boots with no laces and no socks. It was really cold outside, so Lily could only assume he meant to stay in all day, hanging out in the house's warmest place, like her cat when the air turned windy and chilled. Either that or he hadn't thought far enough ahead about having cold feet, which was another thing that meant he was being childlike. She would have thought of it, so she assumed she was already more sensibly adult than he was, which was depressing.

‘You'll end up as one of life's rovers, doing odd jobs for silly women, or more likely men in your case, and living off your charm if you're intending to go the way he did,' Rita said, coming into the room carrying a tiny black goat.

Lily grinned, trying to work out whether Rita minded about Josh and his charm or not. It was hard to tell. Rita seemed to spend so much of her time teasing Josh and telling him off, like a fond aunt, as if she was cross with herself for falling for him. He didn't seem to take any notice. But as she passed the back of his chair, Rita's hand came out and she drew her nails across the back of his neck. Josh did an exaggerated shiver and caught hold of the hand. He pulled it towards him and bit into the soft pad at the base of her thumb. Lily winced, expecting a shriek of pain and toothmarks, but Rita was laughing, her mouth wide open and her face going pink, and pressing her body against the broad back of Josh. Her breasts spread out each side of his neck and made Lily think of those curved pillows she'd seen advertised for old people to read books in bed. She sensed sex in the air in a way you just didn't get at home.

All her friends' parents were like her own when it came to sex: just when you got to the age where you could cope with the possibility that they still
did it,
for fun, not for making babies, they gave absolutely no clue at all that this might actually be true. It was probably a ‘not in front of the children' thing that Rita, whose children had grown up and gone up-country, had forgotten to worry about. It was the same with swearing, which Rita did loudly, all the time, and in front of absolutely anyone.

‘I'd better go,' Lily said, yawning and faking bored weariness. ‘It's nearly lunch-time and there'll be a bus soon.' She felt embarrassed and didn't want them to know. They'd laugh at her because, although everyone said Josh was quite young, to her they were like old hippies from way back and might accuse her of being prudish. Last summer Josh had swum naked in the sea every morning and taken his time walking back up the beach right in front of their house. It wasn't beyond possibility that he might just strip off any old time, even now in the early-spring cold. Rita wrapped her spare arm round Josh's neck and nuzzled his ear. The tiny goat, squashed between them, bleated a protest. Lily stood up and rummaged awkwardly on the floor for her school bag, eager to leave before things could get any worse. Josh might snake his hand up Rita's skirt, or take a bite at the breast that was still leaning over his shoulder and practically already in his mouth. She might as well be not there.

‘I'll give you a lift to the Spar bus stop,' Josh volunteered, disentangling himself from Rita. ‘It's time I went out and got on with the day.'

‘No, no really, thanks it's OK. Bye,' Lily shouted over her shoulder as she bolted out of the door. She sprinted to the gate and out onto the road, not daring to slow down and look back in case she heard them laughing at her and her pathetic running away. Though perhaps they weren't laughing at her at all, she thought as she reached the lane and could catch her breath. Perhaps now she'd gone they were all wound round each other on Rita's big pink sofa that was always covered with wolfhound hair and old bits of embroidered cloth and frayed crocheted blanket with loops of wool dangling for the cats to play with. She stood still for a moment and shook her head hard, trying to dislodge the thoughts about passion and lust that seemed stuck there.

‘Hello. Are you Petroc's little sister?' Lily, startled, opened her eyes and let the world which was still shaking settle back to normal. George Moorfield stood before her, looking as out of place in his surroundings as a haddock in a koi pond. Lily could see he'd made not even the slightest concession to the fact that he was so very far from Sloane Street. He was shorter than she'd thought he'd be (it was enough for his writing to have stature, she decided, charitably), but more lined and grey, which she liked, thinking it gave more of an air of having suffered for art. She'd have hated him to look all smooth and pampered, as if he got all his inspiration from just lying in the sun watching cricket. Lily gave him a huge wide smile; this was the man who might recognize her genius. ‘You'll ruin your shoes,' she said, hating herself for not thinking of something more scintillating for her first words to him. She looked down at the soft suede boots that now had waves of the lane's wetness, that had crept up and marked them like a high tide on clean sand.

‘Who cares. I'll get some more,' he shrugged.

‘Not round here you won't. Not like those.' She started walking again and he strode along beside her, hands in his leather pockets, taking one stride for every two of hers.

‘I'll get some different ones then,' he went on. ‘What do you recommend for the terrain?' Lily scowled slightly, but stared at the ground in case he wasn't really sending her up. She didn't know him, he might talk like that to everyone. He was a writer, they were strange. At least she hoped they were, because what use were they otherwise?