The Right Thing (14 page)

‘
And
they're having a party next door, the people on the corner,' Julia went on.

‘Oh, can't we go to that?' Rose asked tactlessly. Julia glared at her. ‘Actually, it's rather insulting, they called round earlier to apologize in advance and said there'd be quite a lot of noise but they couldn't ask me to go to it because they knew it wouldn't be
my sort of thing.
' She finished her glass of wine very quickly, tipping her head back too fast so that ruby drops slid down her chin and were hastily smeared off with the back of her hand. Kitty feared for the safe cooking of the fish. ‘I mean they hardly know me, so how can they tell I wouldn't enjoy it? They've put masking tape all over the kitchen windows too, so I can't see in. As if I'd look . . . They're no younger than us, they're professional types like me and I can hear their music and it's the same sort of rock classics and opera mixture that I like . . .'

‘Don't take it personally Julia, they might be having karaoke night with their tennis-club cronies or a reunion of last year's Club Med in Sardinia.
No-one
would want to see that. You've probably had a very lucky escape,' Kitty soothed.

‘Yes you're right,' Julia conceded. ‘Who needs them? Now come through to the kitchen and let's eat.'

Kitty was sitting opposite Ben. As she was taking her first forkful of prosciutto, she caught his eye and he smiled at her, a shy, secret smile, too reminiscent of how he'd looked as a sixth-former. It looked most odd on a man over forty, too much as if he was trying to be coy in a way that his mummy might have been thrilled by when he was little. Her mind went way back to a conversation they'd had years ago, lying on the grass in the local park watching parents with young children. ‘Don't you think everyone looks like an animal?' he'd said. ‘That woman must have been a squirrel once, and that curly little kid looks just like a poodle.' Then he'd stroked her face, gazing at her just about as fondly as any eighteen-year-old girl could hope for in a boyfriend, and said, ‘You look a bit like a Shetland pony.' Kitty munched her rocket salad and remembered that she hadn't felt particularly insulted. You took sentences like that and extracted the best possible way of interpreting. If he'd smiled nastily and told her she was snakelike she'd simply have chosen from that the smooth, slinky and lithe attributes. She'd had shaggy blond hair back then, which might just look a bit mane-ish, and she assumed Shetland ponies had large limpid eyes with massive lashes. She'd been careful not to blurt out that he reminded her of a rabbit. He wouldn't have liked that and she'd been careful with his feelings.

‘I'm supposed to set fire to this . . .' Julia slurred over the sea bass as she poured a reckless amount of Pernod over it. ‘Says it needs flambéeing. S'old-fashioned, like steak Diane, ‘member that? Who
was
Diane d'you think?'

‘You can't do that Jules, you're too pissed. Let Ben do it,' Rose said, shoving Ben hard in the side again. His poor bruised ribcage must look like someone had spilled ink on it, Kitty thought, grimacing in sympathy. Dutifully, he got up and went to Julia's aid ‘Sit. down, I'll finish it off for you.'

‘And I'll get the potatoes out of the oven,' Kitty said, joining in.

‘I'll just stay here and be an admiring audience with Julia.' Rose poured herself and Julia another glass of wine. ‘Do you remember that time we got Antonia drunk on the school trip to Blenheim?' she giggled.

‘You're not to speak ill of the dead,' Julia warned.

‘What's ill? Apart from Antonia. Ill
and
dead! And God, was she
ill
!' They fell against each other, convulsed with giggles. Kitty put the dish of
boulangère
potatoes on the table and sat looking at them. She remembered the incident well enough. ‘And she drank all of it!' Julia was shrieking, ‘it was her own fault.'

‘Shouldn't have been so greedy. If she'd sipped it she'd have tasted the rum in the Coke.'

‘She nearly got expelled,' Kitty reminded them.

‘She probably only drank it at all because she thought we were being nice to her.'

‘Should have known better by then,' Julia spluttered.

‘Wasn't it a horrid mess, all that sick on the coach? It kept sliding about,' Rose giggled. Tears had spread her mascara down her cheeks and it had caught in the fine lines of her skin, just like, Kitty thought, seaweed stuck in the ripples on the sand.

‘Anyone got a match?' Ben was still playing with the bass, pushing it here and there with a spatula the way Glyn always did with anything on a barbecue.

‘Here.' Rose handed him her gold lighter, not looking at him, but smirking and biting her lip, just the way Kitty remembered her when she'd offered the rum-laced drink to poor Antonia. The flame that leapt out was spectacular, shooting way up to the ceiling and licking all round Ben's hand, which he pulled away too fast, spilling the bottle of Pernod all over the fish and into the flames.

‘Shit!' he roared, backing towards the sink and turning on the cold tap.

‘My curtains!' Julia shrieked, flapping at the burning cloth with a tea towel.

‘A bit clumsy, Ben.' Rose commented.

Kitty grabbed the small fire extinguisher that Julia had hanging on the wall by the door and aimed it at the cooker. It fizzed for a few seconds, produced a pathetic stream of foam and gave out. Rose flung the contents of the kettle at the curtains and Julia squealed again.

‘Fire brigade?' Rose's voice was excited.

‘No, I'll deal with this. You three out. Now.' Ben was moving fast, scooping the three women out through the front door.

‘It's freezing and people opposite are staring.' Rose stood on the pavement, hugging her body and stamping her feet. ‘Let's go to next-door's party and keep warm.'

‘Good idea,' Kitty agreed. She followed the sounds of music and a good time up the path next to Julia's and rang the bell.

‘Mick's here!' someone on the other side yelled, opening the door wide and standing back.

‘Ah. Not Mick,' said the voice, shutting the door quickly.

‘That was Martin!' Julia shouted. ‘And did you see . . . ?'

‘All those studs,' Kitty marvelled.

‘And the leather mask!'

‘I saw a naked bottom and some boots,' Rose said solemnly.

‘No wonder I wasn't invited.' Julia sounded quite regretful. Kitty took hold of her arm. There was a chic and inviting café bar just across the road. Ben would find them in there if he escaped alive from the kitchen inferno. There'd be food and she was starving. ‘Suppose they had asked you,' she comforted, ‘you wouldn't have had a thing to wear.'

Rosemary-Jane smirked. ‘I would,' she said. Kitty grinned at her. She didn't doubt it.

‘Drinks,' Julia said the moment the café door was open.

‘You'd better have a Coke,' Rose told her, ‘unless you want to get pissed enough to do an Antonia.'

Kitty bought spritzers for her and Rose and a diet Coke for Julia. The menu looked reasonably promising with mussels and lasagne and a selection of chicken dishes and salads. There were quite a lot of customers but Julia bustled her way through to a free table and sat down heavily.

‘Shall we wait for Ben?' Kitty said, studying the menu.

‘Heavens no. If I spent my life waiting for Ben I'd never get anything done. I love him dearly but he's one of life's plodders, everything at his own stolid pace.'

Her mother had been on the right lines then, Kitty thought. Staring at the menu she thought about all the sticky summer days they'd spent together, curled up in his single bed while his mother was out at work, typing for the local education authority. The sun had blazed away outside and they had lain there, sweaty and pale, touching and kissing and experimenting and being pleased to have each other like this at just the right time for learning the sexual ropes. They'd known it was to be temporary, which made it more exciting somehow (nothing of the ‘stolid pace' about him then, she recalled). Ben had had his flight to Africa booked since well before he'd met her and neither of them was going to claim it was the kind of love that could shatter long-laid plans.

Just as they were about to order Ben arrived. He brought with him the scent of fire and cold night air.

‘All done. Though the kitchen's a bit messy,' he told Julia, putting her house keys into a puddle of spilt wine on the table. Rose tutted loudly, picked them up and wiped them down Ben's thigh. Presumably used to this sort of thing, he ignored her, ‘I smothered the fire with towels but the smoke's made the whole house smell a bit. I left the windows open.'

‘Burglars,' Julia grumbled. ‘I'll be robbed.'

‘No you won't,' Rose reassured her. ‘Say thank you nicely, Julia.'

‘Thank you Ben,' Julia smiled.

‘So,' Ben said as Rose went to the bar to order. ‘I suppose living in Cornwall you saw quite a lot of that poor Antonia woman you were all taking the piss out of?' he said to Kitty.

Kitty thought about Rose at the funeral, angling her long body towards Antonia's widower. The words ‘indecent haste' came to mind. ‘Actually, I hadn't seen her,
haven't
seen her since we left school. Julia only dragged me along because she was curious. As ever.' She looked hard at Julia but Julia's attention was elsewhere, her head turned so that the salient details of the row the couple behind her were having were going directly into her left ear.

Ben's eyebrows had shot up in surprise. ‘Really? But Rose said you were practically neighbours. She's been working down there you know, a garden programme.'

‘Everyone thinks you're only ten minutes from everyone else if you live in the same county. I did know about the programme.' Ben was asking for different information, she could see it in his anxious eyes. She didn't have it to give, only an awful sense of power that if she voiced her suspicions she could make this man very unhappy.

‘Antonia had three children, Rose told me,' he said. ‘Poor things. Imagine losing your mother like that.' She felt touched, recognizing real sympathy for these children he'd never met.

‘We haven't got children.' He was watching Rose exchanging easy chat at the bar with a blonde Australian barman. She was pulling at strands of her highlighted hair and then pointing at his, apparently deeply involved in discussing tints. ‘I didn't used to think she minded that much though,' Ben added.

But what about you? Kitty thought. Really, she no longer knew him well enough to ask. She never had.

Kitty had been back from London ten days and Ben had phoned six times to talk about Rose. He was driving Kitty crazy and she'd taken to shouting ‘I'm not in!' at the first ring. Of course no-one in the house took any notice. Petroc just looked depressed and growled, ‘It won't be for me,' which she took to mean it wouldn't be Amanda and if it was anyone else he didn't care anyway. Lily and Glyn always seemed to be on their way out of a room, not so much as turning back with curiosity, when the phone rang.

‘When I think, all those years ago he simply disappeared to do his VSO and never even sent me a postcard,' she complained to Glyn after the first four calls. ‘He must have been looking through Rose's address book. I can't imagine him coming straight out with it and saying, “Hey Rose, what's Kitty's number these days, I think I'll call her a hundred times and talk about the affair I think you're having.”'

‘It's for you. Your admirer again,' Glyn smirked, handing the phone over to Kitty soon after breakfast. Tee-heeing at her and making mocking kissy noises, he drew a fat heart on the Post-it pad on the dresser, scrawled Ben's name on it and added an arrow through the middle, then stuck it on the cupboard door. He went out to the car to go off to do a stint filling in for a depressed colleague at the college, whistling cheerily, and Kitty could hear him shouting hello across the yard to George.

‘Well, you know what Rose is like . . .' Ben was sounding defeated as usual. Rose was away working, back in Cornwall filming something about mulch and manure at the Lost Gardens of Heligan and far too near to Tom for Ben's peace of mind. Kitty assumed she was getting lumbered with his confidence purely on the grounds that she was at the moment geographically closer to his wife than he was. There must have been other, closer friends of hers he could be sounding out, because really she
didn't
actually know what Rose was like, not these days. She only knew what she thought Rose might be like. For Ben, apparently, that was good enough.

‘Perhaps I should have gone with her, but pressure of work, you know. And someone's got to keep the dog company at night.' Ben laughed weakly, as if even he knew how pathetic he sounded. She imagined him with a lonely takeaway, at one end of a long kitchen table, feeding chicken tikka scraps to an equally miserable-looking basset hound. Then she pictured the two of them curled up together on a sofa from which Rose had long ago banned the dog, watching a video about wronged husbands and revenge, stuffing themselves with sour-cream flavour Pringles.

Kitty shoved a cushion onto one of the kitchen chairs and settled herself into it, resigned to a long session of counselling. Ben was one of those people who liked to get well stuck in for a phone chat, going in for moaning in one long uninterruptible stream. He'd probably got himself all ready to call her with a mug of coffee and a scheduled space in his office diary. In her experience, men weren't usually keen on telephones. If Petroc and Glyn were typical, they simply made whatever arrangements the call demanded, or in Petroc's case grunted unintelligibly for fifteen seconds, then hung up. Rita had once said that a low phone bill was the best thing about having sons and not daughters.