The Right Thing (24 page)

‘Would you like a drink, George? If you don't want alcohol there's apple juice or Coke or mineral water . . .' Madeleine was peering into the fridge, eager to supply her garden-trophy with a drink. Glyn, coming back into the kitchen, raised his eyebrows at Kitty and gave her a look of amused confusion.

‘We've got George for supper,' Kitty told him, juggling boiling water and the broccoli.

‘I thought we had chicken,' he said, looking immediately as if he wished he hadn't.

‘Oh ha ha!' Madeleine's voice rang out. For once she looked as if she actually found Glyn funny, rather than something to be avoided and ignored. If it took George to be a benevolent catalyst between the two of them, Kitty thought, as she took the chicken out of the oven, then perhaps he should move out from the barn and join them in the house. He certainly looked comfortable enough, moving chairs around and opening a drawer to find more cutlery.

‘How's the book going?' Glyn asked George as they started eating.

‘Poor George,' Madeleine interrupted before he could answer, ‘I bet writers are always being asked which chapter they're on by people who don't intend to read the finished thing.'

‘I might well read it. You couldn't possibly know,' Glyn countered.

‘It's going quite well actually.' George looked nervous, intuitively getting in before the hostility level went up any further. ‘I get a lot done in the night.'

‘What, after you've driven Amanda Goodbody all that way home?' Lily quipped.

‘And I thought it was a perfectly innocuous question,' Glyn muttered to Kitty. She grinned at him – he was actually trying for once.

‘Amanda doesn't need any more help from me with her writing ambitions,' George told Lily. ‘She has more than enough personal power to see her through to whatever ends she has in mind.'

‘Ouch! Oh God, ouch!' Madeleine's fork clattered to the floor and her hands clutched at her front.

‘What is it? Surely it's not the baby . . .‘ Kitty was out of her seat and close to Madeleine, her arm round her shoulders. Both men, she noted, looked horribly nervous, as if they'd like to adjourn immediately to the pub.

‘No. No, it's all right, it just kicked me, really, really hard. I wish it wouldn't do that when I'm eating, there just isn't the room with food and stuff going on as well.'

George actually sighed, a sound of undisguised relief. ‘All those limbs inside swimming and swirling, so . . .'

‘Hey I haven't got a bloody aquarium in there,' Madeleine was laughing now. ‘It's a tight fit. That's why it hurts.'

‘Imagine twins,' Lily murmured. ‘Eight limbs.'

‘Yeah, imagine,' Madeleine agreed, then turned abruptly and said to Kitty, ‘I wasn't a twin was I? There weren't two of us that you got rid of separately?'

Kitty felt angry. The girl was just showing off, thinking of the shocking thing to say to impress George. She didn't need to, he was looking concerned enough for her, gently rubbing her back to ease her aches. She leaned against his hand like a stroked cat. If Kitty had done that, she wondered if she'd have shrugged her off. ‘No Madeleine, you weren't a twin,' she told her. ‘And even if you had been, you wouldn't have been separated.' She felt weary suddenly. She hadn't the energy to counter the ‘got rid of' comment. It was such a thoughtless, throwaway phrase that hadn't been given any consideration beyond its capacity to invoke an audience's sympathy. Just suppose this had turned into a game to Madeleine, the being here and the working her way into family life and affection when she really might just disappear without a care, perhaps even deliberately, like some long overdue but well-thought-out punishment. I haven't a hope of really getting to know her, Kitty thought sadly, that would have taken all of those lost twenty-four years.

Glyn didn't usually go to the pub. He didn't particularly want to go now – it was simply preferable to staying in the house. Strangely, no-one had thought it odd that he was popping out into the cold windy dark for something that could hardly be counted as urgent, whereas pre-Madeleine he'd probably have faced a barrage of questions about what for? and why? and can we come? Now the only person whose every coming and going seemed to matter was Madeleine. Lily followed her everywhere, only Petroc seemed to be as self-absorbed as usual. Kitty was forever asking her what she'd like to do, or eat, or if she needed to rest. It seemed to worry Kitty that Madeleine didn't seem to want anything particularly, just to be, as if simply to get from one day to the next was enough. Perhaps it was being pregnant, he thought. With all that going on in her body, and with a birth mother to live with whom she'd never met before, maybe that was more than enough to occupy her mind.

Tonight he'd told Kitty they were out of tonic and that he fancied a bedtime gin later. He wouldn't be missed, they were all still sitting around having coffee and watching what he thought of as The Madeleine Show. As he'd left the room he'd heard her lecturing Lily about becoming a victim of thin-culture, telling her that body strength was as important as mental strength, which, if Lily listened and took in, perhaps wasn't such a bad thing. What he mostly couldn't bear to stay in and see was the rapt attention of Kitty, gazing greedily at Madeleine like a doting, besotted suitor, as if she was trying to reconstruct out of her features a missed near-quarter of a century of change, trying to envisage the girl's life from now to babyhood, going backwards. He could see vast clouds of hurt approaching her, devastation as certain as if she was marching a group of infants across the M25 in the rush hour. He couldn't think of any way to help her avoid it.

The wind was blowing hard against him as he walked towards Rita's house on the way to the pub. The sea was hurling itself loud and angry onto the beach below and would keep Lily awake if it got any worse. He hadn't heard the shipping forecast that night but guessed at force six, and whatever it was he wouldn't want to be out in a boat or even up on the cliffs. Glyn could see only one small light in Rita's kitchen as he got closer to the house. Seeing the light through the waving beech-tree branches gave an impression of flashing, like a signal. She'd been right about Josh going – Kitty had been told all about it in a long lunch-time session on the sea wall with a bottle of wine. She was probably feeling terrible, lonely and hurt.

He pushed the rickety gate open carefully, so that it wouldn't squeak and disturb the goats. So long as they stayed quiet he could change his mind on the path and creep away again. Still unsure, he tapped gently on the front door. All his movements seemed half-hearted, uncertain, as if he was half hoping she wouldn't answer his knock. If she didn't, he could just wander off again and think, oh well, I tried. He was almost turning away to continue on to the pub when she opened the door. She was looking particularly bedraggled, even for Rita, her skirt crumpled and her hair tangled. She looked as haggardly grey and distraught as if Josh had died. She was even wearing a stained old baggy green sweater that he used to wear, as if clinging to the smell and feel of him.

‘Sorry, I was dozing with the dog on the sofa. Come in.' She opened the door wide and went inside ahead of him, patting her hair down uselessly as she walked.

‘I didn't want to disturb you . . .' he said. The air was dense with the musty scent of warm damp animal. Half-grown cats sat at intervals on the stairs, staring at him coolly as he passed through to the kitchen. ‘Take a seat and I'll see if I can find you something to drink.' Rita's voice was dull and lifeless. She started moving dirty plates from the table and putting them with an awful lot more in the sink. The rubbish bin was overflowing with tea bags and newspapers and soup-for-one packets. Used cups were lined up on the arms of the old pink sofa and the edge of the Aga. There were opened tins of dog and cat food littered among a few washed saucepans left draining next to the sink, some with forks sticking out, crusted with dried-on meat.

‘It's an awful mess in here,' Rita commented unarguably, collecting up a handful of the cups and rinsing them with no attempt at real thoroughness under the cold tap. ‘I seem to be getting into a state of lone-woman sluttishness.' Glyn looked in the fridge, which contained three eggs and some cheese with a generous bloomy growth, pulled out the last two cans of the beer that Josh had favoured and found a couple of dusty glasses in a cupboard. As he shut the door, the handle fell off and Rita burst into tears. ‘Everything's falling to bits!' she wailed as Glyn dutifully put his arms round her. Behind her back his hands still clutched a glass and a can. He made some vague soothing noises while Rita sobbed, managing to get the glass onto the edge of table. He felt very much in need of the beer, but it would have taken extremes of cynicism to interrupt the flow of her misery with the frivolous
swoosh
of opening the can.

‘He's gone then, has he?' Glyn asked rather pointlessly.

‘Oh yes, he's gone,' she said. ‘That day when I saw you and I knew, when I could feel the silence, I knew it was more than just the sound of him not working.' She stepped back and reached for a piece of kitchen roll from the draining-board. Glyn unleashed the beer and took a quick restorative swig from the can. ‘You just know, don't you? The silence was the space he'd left,' she went on, blowing her nose hard. She slumped down on the sofa, her body leaning forward with her head in her hands and her hair drooping and wispy as if it too had lost all its bounce. Her face was now pink and blotched, with large purple shadows hanging on the loose skin beneath her eyes. Glyn felt enormously sorry for her. Josh had taken all her vitality, all that was left of the illusion of youth, when he'd so casually packed up and gone. He imagined him whistling as he stuffed clothes into his bag, thought of him hauling it out to the gate and perhaps even ambling back into the kitchen to assemble a lumpy sandwich of bread and cheese for the journey.

‘I expect he'll come back,' Glyn ventured. ‘Perhaps he's just gone for a little visit somewhere.'

Rita's laugh was one of the saddest sounds he'd ever heard. It was exactly what they meant by ‘hollow' when applied to mirth. ‘What's to come back to?' she said, waving her arm around to include both the squalor of the kitchen and her own sad spiritless self. ‘He didn't even leave a sodding note.'

‘In time . . .' Glyn ventured, sitting close to her and trying to think of something helpful to say, ‘in time maybe you'll think of him as just a stupid, selfish kid. You deserve better.'

Rita gave him a look that was near to contempt. ‘In
time,
' she told him, ‘in
time
I'll just be older. Nothing else. There
is
nothing else. What's the point of deserving something that you know you're never going to get, never ever, whatever you do? Josh, or something better than Josh, is what someone very much younger than I am gets, whether they deserve it or not. That's life. That's sad bloody reality.' Her eyes were filling up again and Glyn pulled her close to him. Her hair smelled oily, unappealingly dirty. Usually she smelled of thyme or lavender, as if she carried them somewhere on her, like seeds sewn into a hem as he imagined fastidious women of past dead eras had done. With a sense of being polite, neighbourly even, he stroked her arm, moved his hand down and ran it along her thigh. Her skirt was silky and thin and he could feel her muscles stirring beneath it.

‘He used to kiss me, like teenagers, you know? Proper snogging, the sort that almost wears your mouth away. Bliss,' Rita murmured, close to his ear. Glyn tried not to hear this as a request. He absolutely didn't want to kiss her, that would be just too intimate. Kissing was too close to the brain, it went with love and emotion and . . . and with Kitty. ‘I don't suppose that will ever happen again,' she went on, compounding the hint.

‘Of course it will!' Glyn hated himself for sounding so falsely jolly. She might well be right, after all. He started disentangling himself and stood up. ‘Just give it time. You're feeling hurt right now, but who knows.'

‘I know,' she sniffed.

‘Listen, I must go. I'm sorry not to be more use. Er, can I get you anything down at the pub? I'd better pick up the tonics I said I was going out for, so if you like . . .'

‘No. No you go, you've got a family to get back to,' Rita said. She hauled herself out of the sofa and went to the sink, clattering about making a trembling start on washing the dishes. ‘I'll get on with this lot. Stop me going to bed and brooding.' She laughed suddenly. ‘I can't believe I've let myself get into this state at my age! You think it can't happen, you know?'

‘Yeah, I know.' Glyn gave her cheek a hasty kiss and left, walking fast down the long dark lane towards the pub. He hadn't coped very well, he felt. When Kitty had been in London and he'd been just the teensiest bit down, certainly by comparison with what he'd just seen, Rita had taken his pain over, soothed it away and shared her body quite easily and selflessly. He hadn't had to do a thing, not even open his eyes. And he wouldn't even kiss her. Walking fast towards the comfort of the pub lights, he was aware that if he persuaded himself he was on moral high ground at all, it was very unstable, volcanic stuff.

Kitty hadn't heard Madeleine follow her into the kitchen. When she turned round from hanging the mugs on the dresser hooks and saw her there, hovering nervously by the door, she felt a mixture of terrified foreboding and delight. This could be confiding-time, something major and secret to be told from that lost childhood. There might be things she felt she wanted to share with Kitty that she hadn't been able to talk about with her mother. It astonished and rather dismayed Kitty that there was a deep need in her to have something of Madeleine that the mother who'd brought her up hadn't had. Surely it was enough that she'd had the experience of her birth?