The Right Thing (7 page)

‘If, just
if
I wanted to find out where the baby was now, is there some kind of organization where you can let them know you're willing to be traced? Because I think that it's the child who has to do the finding, not the mother. I'm not saying I'd want to, I just feel I need to know how to go about making it possible, opening doors. I think it's to do with feeling mortal after poor Antonia.'

‘Hmm. I know what you mean. You just think people are always there, of your own generation anyway.' More ticking of Julia's brain cells was going on. ‘Listen, leave it with me and I'll find out and ring you back. I'm pretty sure there was a woman up here in Richmond who met a long-lost son. It isn't necessarily all joy and bananas, you know. You might end up with disappointment.'

‘You sound like Glyn! It's not as if I haven't thought it through. Ask anyone in the same boat, if you can find them, and they'll tell you they've gone over it a million times. And I might not do anything about it – it's a just-in-case sort of thing. So will you ask this woman?'

‘I'll ask her. I'll let you know.'

‘Thanks Julia. And Julia?'

‘Hmm?' Julia sounded eager to go now, on to the next thing, a nice bit of sleuthing.

‘I'm sure Rosemary-Jane will turn up soon. She always did.'

‘Yes I remember. Like an alleycat slinking home. With her knickers in her handbag and her tights on back to front . . .'

Petroc had always understood that having a car was a great and essential woman-puller. It was something he couldn't remember
not
knowing, same as the way he knew stinging-nettles hurt and that Coke tasted nicer than milk. He'd seen the power that local boys on the summer beaches had when they'd got their own wheels. Holidaying girls from distant dusty towns, flicking their Sun-In hair and tweaking the ridden-up bottoms of their bikinis into place, didn't want some bozo with a bicycle to take them clubbing. They didn't want to be
walked
back to their B and B where their giggly mates peeping from behind net curtains could see they'd only pulled a sad under-age yokel with legs for transport, however muscly and gorgeous those legs might have looked down on the daytime sand. Sunshine kit required a wetsuit that was truly sleek in all the right places, a Kamikaze board that was for serious creaming on the waves, not just for posing, and, top of the range, a Cal-look rainbow-paint-job Beetle horsed up with some ludicrous 1800cc fuck-off engine and wheels the size of the ones on Rita's tractor. He'd seen girls roll over and pant for the guy last year who'd turned up on Fistral beach with exactly that. Not much was special about the bloke himself, but, starting up, that car had sounded like big cats mating and its exhaust had smelled of rude hormones.

Petroc was the first in his year to pass his test and he was daily grateful that his grandmother was given to indulging him with generous presents. As he sat in the college library reading up on the importance of the Industrial Revolution in
Tess of the D'Urbervilles,
he could see his adored Mini down below in the car park waiting, like Lily's cat on the gatepost, for their end of the day reunion. There might be many places in the nation where this car wouldn't rate high on desirability, but in a county where most villages were lucky to see two buses a day and none at all after dark, the Mini was a true prize.

‘Not going into Penzance are you?' Jamie Kent's perpetually beery breath wafted in front of Petroc and he recoiled, waving the air.

‘Jesus, Jamie, are you using pints of Tinners for mouthwash?'

Jamie grinned, his big over-pink face like an eager Labrador's. Glyn had once said that Jamie already looked prime for his first heart attack. ‘No-one in their right mind will ever sell him life insurance,' he'd added, as if Jamie, at seventeen, was likely to care.

‘Got to have lunch somewhere haven't I?' he said to Petroc. ‘I leave the non-drinking to you drivers. Anyway,
are
you going to Penzance? Caniver lift?'

‘Well I wasn't, but I suppose I need a couple of things. OK.'

‘Good – and Hayley and Amanda too?'

‘Amanda Goodbody?' Petroc's hands grew hot and he prayed not to be blushing. Never was a girl so perfectly named.

‘By name and by nature.' Jamie smacked his chubby lips. Petroc knew it was beyond hope that Jamie would organize himself to crush into the back with big, bouncy Hayley when he could haul Amanda in to squash up next to him and jiggle his great rugby-player thigh against the most delectable girl in the college. Petroc sighed, feeling used, being Jamie's transport by proxy for the purpose of his trying to pull Amanda. There wasn't much hope that Jamie would succeed, of course, which had to pass for compensation, but then from what he'd heard, there wasn't much chance of anyone short of a Rock God pulling
her.
She had a waist-long flag of soft pale hair, the bleached-out white-gold of a sand dune, and one of those pearly mouths that looked as if it had just said the poutiest bit of ‘oh'. Even girls looked at her. He wondered where she and Hayley were going in the town. He couldn't imagine them wanting Jamie to give them a yes/no opinion on some dress they'd found in Beauty and the Beast. Still, a quiet word offering a return trip just to Amanda might secure him the possibility of hanging around the town till she took a whim to go home, then at least her spectacular legs would be alongside his as he drove, and with his being so long, their limbs might just crash into each other a bit.

‘Do you think George is OK over there in the barn all by himself? Not lonely or anything?' Kitty put down the
Times
crossword and looked across the room at Glyn. ‘I know what he said about drink but I wonder if we should invite him up, just for some coffee or something.'

‘Hmm, maybe, whatever.' Glyn was noncommittal and clearly not listening. Kitty grinned. She should know better, she realized, than to try to talk to Glyn when Manchester United were one nil down to Southampton on TV.

‘Though this might be the time of night he does most work. Unless he's a morning sort. It's only that we never seem to have just one all by themselves. He must be rattling around.' No reaction from Glyn. ‘Or he might have hung himself from that rafter in front of the Rayburn.'

‘I'll go over and see him, shall I? See if he wants anything?' Lily asked, wandering into the room carrying an apple from which Kitty could see only a tiny bite had been taken. For supper Lily had eaten just one small lamb chop but a reasonable quantity of broccoli, no potatoes. Kitty realized she was now noting all that she ate. In the pools of lamplight in the sitting-room Lily's face looked all hollows and shadows, like a bruised skull. She'd always been thin, it was hard to work out if she was imagining that the girl looked somehow
less
of herself than she used to. She wondered if she should have tried to get her to eat more, or would that be putting pressure on and make her fight against it even more? At this stage it might be better to ignore what she ate, just carry on as usual, expecting her to turn up for meals and at least eat
something,
like normal people did. There'd been no rush to the loo to do any secret throwing-up, anyway. The thought almost made Kitty smile. Lily had always so hated being sick that she would, if she felt it was even remotely likely, wander the beach groaning loudly and breathing so deeply she almost passed out, just to try to get rid of the awful nausea. It was impossible to imagine her being able to do it on purpose. What was possible, though, was to imagine Lily starving herself to a state of near-hallucination in an attempt to stimulate her brain to celestial heights of poetry.

‘He won't want a serious type of drink, obviously,' Kitty carried on musing to whoever might be half-listening. ‘But he might like to feel it's OK to mingle a bit if he wants to.' The first half of the match had finished and a heavy-metal ad for a Real Man's car came on. Glyn pressed the remote and turned the sound down.

‘The writers don't usually come in here and mingle with us,' Glyn reminded her, looking faintly hostile. He made a bit of a ritual of getting through several cans of Budweiser when he watched football, and resorting to coffee or fizzy water just to keep an alcoholically challenged guest feeling comfortable would render the match unwatchable. ‘They usually make their own entertainment. Once you start letting them in . . .' He sounded as if he was talking about stray cats.

‘Well, making your own entertainment's fine when there's more than one of them. We've never had a lone author out there before.'

‘If he'd wanted to be with people, he could have gone to a hotel. Or just stayed home and let the pursuing wives catch up with him.'

Kitty sighed and gave up, returning to a tricky anagram.

‘So
shall
I go?' Lily persisted. ‘Is no-one going to answer me?'

Kitty put the paper down again and looked at her. ‘No don't go, Lily; it's OK. I expect Glyn's right. We should leave the man in peace.' Lily went to the window and peered out, bored, into the darkness. There was more than enough peace out there for anyone if you imagined nothing but trees and grass and the sea, frozen for the night like a dismal painting. But you only had to do a bit of listening to work out that there wasn't anything that was really peaceful at all: there were owls and foxes and mice, and sea birds roosting on sea that wouldn't rest, and the waves that always had something to say and small, pinching winds that wouldn't let the trees sleep. It was only ordinary people who thought that darkness meant everything stopped; creatures, plants, poets, they knew better. She crunched her apple extra loudly so her parents knew she was still breathing.

Kitty recalled what she'd read about about George Moorfield's most recent novel. She hadn't actually read the book yet, but it would have been hard to miss the enormous number of reviews and interviews it had generated. Something about the kind of extended family, she recalled reading, where
not
to have sex with every single member would have been, as the
Sunday Times
had put it, ‘significant as a sin of omission'. Lily would want to show him her writings. It was easy to catch herself speculating what he might want to show her.

‘There's someone in the yard. And the car's not Petroc's,' Lily announced as an arc of headlights reflected on the mirror over the fireplace.

‘Perhaps our illustrious guest is already stir crazy and has imported some “own entertainment” of an interesting sort,' Glyn chuckled. ‘I'll go out and point them in the right direction.'

Kitty flipped channels while Glyn was out of the room and was therefore caught watching a brash and trashy game show as Rosemary-Jane hurtled into the room some way ahead of Glyn, who padded in behind her looking cross.

‘They made me leave!' Rose announced. ‘His bloody family just didn't understand!'

‘Whose and what?' Kitty asked. Glyn reclaimed his chair, turned back to the football and turned up the volume, making it rudely clear he couldn't be bothered with proper introductions. Kitty got up to manoeuvre their guest out of the way of the football. Rose followed her, shedding a wondrously expensive-looking sleek camel coat and chucking it carelessly at the newel post at the bottom of the stairs as they went through to the kitchen. It dropped in an elegant heap, like something cast off by a 1930s movie star, and Kitty ignored it. She felt much the same as Glyn did about unexpected visitors, especially rather late in the evening. How difficult was a phone call?

‘Tom's family, you know, Antonia's husband. Widower, I should say, though the word's too dire, poor man. I thought I'd stay on, you see, after the
thing,
just for a few days to help settle the children, just doing my bit as a family friend and then these
aunts,
his side of the family, naturally, turned up and insisted I should go, and go at once. They lined themselves up like guard dogs. And it's the
middle
of the
night!
' She parked her slim bottom on a chair by the table, placed her pointy chin in her hands and sighed loudly, a deep hard-done-by gasp of despair. Her eyes swivelled, taking in her surroundings, all pale maple and sunshine paint. ‘Super kitchen,' she commented in a tone of mild surprise, as if good design was not to be expected west of Weybridge. Kitty took a bottle of white wine from the fridge and a couple of glasses from the shelf and settled herself at the table next to Rose, prepared for a long bout of listening. ‘Middle of the night' was an exaggeration, especially as Rose must have been driving for well over an hour already, and the wrong way for London. A faint TV roar and a delighted yell from Lily told her she'd just missed Manchester United equalizing.

‘So how come you're still down here and not back home?' Kitty asked, trying to feel calm yet politely interested. Back home with Ben. She tried to imagine again what he might look like now. The ‘remarkably average' comment her mother had so disparagingly made furnished her mind only with a medium-sized, mildly paunchy executive in a greyish dull suit, some round-the-edge hair loss and no face at all, just blank pink cloth like a rag doll with unravelled features. He'd had, at eighteen, peculiarly soft downy skin as if he'd already been lying about his age and had actually barely started shaving. His mid-brown hair had had a stubborn curl at the ends, making him furious that he looked a bit like a housewife with a bad perm when he'd tried to grow it long.

Rose placed her hands flat down on the table and studied her nails which were painted a subdued pale pink, perhaps in deference to Antonia's demise. It was easy to imagine them painted a vibrant pearly cyclamen. ‘Well if I went home
right now,
I wouldn't get there till about three in the morning. I mean it's more than three hundred miles to Highgate.' (More exaggeration, Kitty noted with a grin.) ‘So I rang Julia on the mobile from the car for suggestions about hotels, seeing as she's a walking encyclopedia, and she suggested you.' Rose took hold of Kitty's wrist, making the glass in her hand tremble dangerously. ‘You don't mind, do you darling? I mean it's just for a night, though I know it's all a bit out of the blue after all these years.'