The Right Thing (11 page)

‘I can't think what you need to see a counsellor for, actually,' Julia, not waiting for an answer, commented as she poured coffee into artistically uneven rustic mugs. ‘They can't tell you anything that you can't tell yourself. If you've decided you want to find your daughter what difference does it make what anyone else thinks?'

‘I think the idea is that with this person I work out for myself the things I don't already know, if you see what I mean,' Kitty told her. ‘Like why do I want to do this
now,
what's different from earlier. Why find her at all and what do I think either she or I could possibly have to gain from it, that sort of thing.'

Julia sniffed. ‘There might not be anything to gain at all, not on your side. She might turn out to be one of those squawking girls who present kids' telly. Or she might be in prison for murdering her adoptive mother. You should be careful, digging things up. Or wait another ten years till she's more sort of fully formed. More like us, settled.'

‘Digging things up' made Kitty think of an old Labrador rooting in the earth for a long-buried bone, scattering earth and trampling peonies. This thought was swiftly followed by the poignant image of a child's exhumed coffin, a dusty version of what she'd pictured during Antonia's funeral. Quashing her demons, she grinned at Julia. ‘You sound just like Glyn. I think I'd rather risk it than not and if I want to see “settled” I can look in the mirror at my ever-increasing wrinkles and feel depressed. Don't forget I can't actually do any finding myself. I'm just opening the doors for her to do it, if she wants to. Of course she might not.' Kitty found she always added some kind of rider like that, even when she was only thinking, not speaking. It felt like touching wood or crossing fingers, except this time she hadn't quite decided which particular outcome she was touching wood for. Julia could easily be right, Madeleine could have turned out to be a complete disaster. Or not. Fingers crossed again.

She reached across the table for more butter. The croissants were fat and flaky and sinfully delicious, enough to make you sure that diets were only for those sad souls who were losing the will to live. Julia had gone out early to collect them from the French patisserie round the corner. In a moment of frank envy for the joys of urban life, Kitty thought of the huge old earthenware bread bin on the pitted wooden worktop at Treneath, which tended to contain nothing more exotic than basic whole meal and Lily's favourite spongy white sliced. Sometimes she bought croissants in supermarket bags of eight and then put them in the freezer where they languished forgotten until they resembled fossilized pallid Plasticine and were long past any possible eat-by date. She could imagine the various versions of the Madeleine she'd conjured up for herself, peering into that bread bin: one version sneered at the lack of smart ciabatta and olive focaccia; another, less sophisticated Madeleine hauled out a half-defrosted
pain au chocolat
and scoffed it down cold with cooings of delight.

‘So anyway, what time do you have to be there?' Julia persisted.

‘Eleven thirty.' Kitty sensed possible trouble. Julia's sense of curiosity might make her suggest going along as well. She'd say it was for ‘support', which was so very much a blackmail word in that the offerer knew exactly how almost impossible it was for the offeree to find a tactful way,
any
way, of turning it down.

‘Oh good. That fits in.' Julia looked pleased and started bustling about clearing plates and mugs while Kitty was still finishing her last piece of croissant, licking butter from her fingers. ‘It gives you plenty of time to get back after and get ready.'

Julia was being careful, as she rinsed plates and shoved knives into their dishwasher slots, not to look at her, but Kitty could just see the edges of a little smile.

‘OK, you've got that I-know-something look, Julia. What are you planning?'

Julia looked up, wide-eyed. With her bobbed chestnut hair hanging like a spaniel's ears beside her face and her pink-cheeked suggestion of guilt, she reminded Kitty of the day they'd stashed one of the biology lab's dissection catfish behind the gym radiator. ‘Nothing!' she insisted, dragging it out to several syllables. (Shades of ‘It wasn't me' from way back then.) ‘Just a little surprise supper. Especially in your honour.' Kitty recognized another blackmail phrase. ‘I've just invited a couple of people, that's all, so we won't have just each other to put up with all evening.' Julia bent back to the dishwasher and swopped a couple of plates round, pointlessly as far as Kitty could make out. ‘Just Rosemary-Jane and Ben. Unless you feel you've seen too much of her lately, just that she mentioned they might be out this way today . . . Oh and a chap called Martin from up the road who I wheel out when I need to make up the numbers. No-one special. Or do you think you might be too tired? I just thought you might find it fun to see your old ex again. That's all.'

Kitty grinned at her, defeated by Julia's cunning. ‘No, I won't be too tired. I think I can manage north London and back without needing an early night. Though I don't for a moment imagine Ben will remember which of his girlfriends I was. It was hardly a great romance. Typical teenage thing.'

It was important to underplay it. Julia had shown staggeringly untypical reticence in not chiselling away to find out who Madeleine's father was, but it didn't mean one or two possibles hadn't crossed her mind. She wouldn't ask directly, that would be too simple and would involve no satisfying detective work. If Kitty simply said, right now, ‘Julia, I think I ought to tell you, Ben was Madeleine's father,' Julia would be as disappointed as a child who demands and actually gets their Christmas presents early. Perhaps she hoped that plenty of tongue-loosening alcohol over dinner would lead to indiscreet reminiscing.

‘Oh, he'll remember. Men only pretend they don't in case we've got something to hold against them. It's just like when they get drunk and claim everything's a blank and they weren't responsible. I had a husband like that.' Julia sighed and her face took on a rather remote, distant-memory kind of look. Briskly, she grabbed a J-cloth and wiped Jif round the sink as if scrubbing away the last memories of this substandard man.

‘Now I've got today off work,' Julia said. ‘So I'll just go down to the market for veg and over to Kingston for fish. Simple. I'll see you later.'

‘So you're on your own then. I saw Kitty going off in her car yesterday with a bag and a look of travel.' George sat next to Glyn on the rock. Glyn shifted along slightly, regretting it instantly as he felt the seeping of a patch of damp through his Levis. It wasn't worth getting soggy just to make a point, but the beach was plenty big enough. George could have parked his bum anywhere. Why didn't it occur to him that a man sitting by himself on a rock might be there because he wanted to do some thinking in peace and quiet? Glyn had assumed a writer would be sensitive to moods. Presumably George was only sensitive to his own. That must be the problem with living so much in the inside of your head, you ended up thinking no-one else had anything going on in theirs. Lily, off school for an inset day, was further along the shore, perched in another patch of sunlight on a rock of her own, huddled up with her sweatshirt pulled over her knees and a notebook open. Glyn guessed she was writing something creative, sea-gazing for inspiration. Perhaps if he'd brought his garden journal and a pencil with him George might have kept a respectful distance while he planned his bean bed.

‘She's left the car at the station in Redruth and gone to London for a couple of days. To see a friend,' Glyn told him grudgingly. Now perhaps George would go away and scribble something, which was what he was renting his room for, paying all that money. He was always wandering about, looking as if sitting down and actually writing something was the last thing he was there for. Weren't writers supposed never to be off duty? Shouldn't they carry handy notebooks around with them? Glyn was willing to concede that any kind of hand-sized computer might seize up from sand damage out here on the beach, but even Lily wouldn't be parted from a biro and a notepad in case a perfectly turned phrase struck. George, he could see, had given into the elements and was sporting a new pair of those sheepskin boots that Lily liked in a moss green shade. His chunky cream oiled-wool sweater was one of those sold as ‘Cornish traditional' in Penzance. It looked so stiffly new it must have felt like wearing a doormat. Glyn would never wear anything like that; he preferred anything wool to be from the softest lamb, and ideally from Paul Smith.

‘One of the most sod-awful things about London,' George stared out at the stripes of mauvey-grey sky on the horizon, ‘is there's all those people and no-one to talk to just when you need to pass the time of day and make sure your powers of speech are still intact. You go down to the Kensington 7-Eleven for a
Guardian
and all they do is grunt and look as if they're about to call the police if you so much as comment on the weather. Here though, now here whenever I see someone they're up for a chat. Rarity value I suppose.'

Don't be too sure, was on the tip of Glyn's tongue. ‘Curiosity more like,' he said instead. ‘They just want to know what the hell you're doing here. Once you've been in the Spar a couple of times, everyone knows who you are and what you're up to. You'll end up desperate for a bit of Kensington anonymity.'

George laughed. ‘No, it's OK, I like it. I suppose gossip is a sort of rustic hobby.'

Glyn felt uncomfortably as if he, a former habitué of Dulwich, was being called on quite unsuitably to defend rural habits. He wasn't really in the right mood: it was only mildly irritating, certainly not worth the effort of arguing about, that George assumed any old odd-bod from east of Plymouth must be just the most fascinatingly exotic creature to the culturally deprived peasants. He shrugged. ‘Not really. Scratch the surface round here and you'll find most of the inhabitants are refugees from towns upcountry. Rita in the farmhouse up the lane lived in Chiswick till ten years ago. That Josh she's got living there apparently has an old mum in Macclesfield.'

‘Yeah, well we're all refugees. Everyone's got something to get away from, and I'm not just talking places.' George stared out over the sea and Glyn recognized a cue for him to ask a suitable question inviting confidences. He kept quiet. He didn't want to know about the carping ex-wives or writer's block or the difficulties of avoiding vodka. Whatever or whoever it was George was on the run from, he wasn't remotely interested, not right now. It was just the wrong moment. What he wanted to do was sit and think about Kitty and this long-lost baby that was nothing to do with him. He wanted to work out how he was supposed to feel about the possibility of being confronted by Petroc and Lily's half-sister.

It was all right for Kitty, whizzing off to meet the Post-Adoption people for counselling, to be dosed up with information and advice – at least she got to put her fears and ideas to someone. If
he
had turbulent feelings of his own about all this, no-one was going to help him calm them down. ‘It's only just in case there's any chance of taking it further. I might not,' she'd said breezily as she left, as if there really still could be a moment where she'd decide to call it a day and give tracing the girl no more thought. It was about as likely as the FA saying they weren't that bothered about the next World Cup.

Over the weekend there'd been one of those momentous family suppers that he'd always associated with heavy television dramas. Whoever thought it a good idea to combine the consumption of food with the discussion of the most serious, life-changing events? That was something that, when he was safely in an armchair doing the viewing, he'd always wondered about. He'd scorned it as a dramatist's lazy device for gathering half a dozen diverse characters together. Now he knew he'd always associate the taste and texture of monkfish and coriander with the feeling of being absolutely excluded, completely left out from right inside his own family. It was like a grown-up version of being last to be picked for the rounders team, with the same heartburning anxiety, the same stubborn waiting to be asked rather than making what he wanted known.

When Kitty had said ‘What do you think?' she'd been addressing Petroc and Lily but not him. He'd kept his eyes on her, waiting for her to turn his way. Instead she handed him the dish of spiced rice (what for? consolation?) and waited for the children's responses. Petroc had been wary, fidgety, reminding Glyn of pupils who'd been put on the spot with a test they'd forgotten they should revise for. It might have been because he was the elder one thinking he was about to concede his leader's place. He'd gone on eating, clearly thinking hard and barely tasting what he ate. Bits dropped off his fork and he picked at them idly as if he'd already had a meal and was being too polite to say so and offend the cook.

‘Yeah, go for it. I'd like to meet her. We should,' Petroc had eventually decreed and had then put down his fork and left the rest of his food untouched, all effort exhausted. In the gap where no-one spoke, Cilia Black and
Blind Date
could be heard being raucous and risqué from the TV in the sitting-room. Lily had been straightforwardly thrilled and eager to try to find this sister, childishly heedless of any possible problems. She wanted to see her
now,
she wanted time off to go with Kitty to London as if this ‘Madeleine' might be brought home in a giant carry-cot in a sort of reverse of her original adoption. She was just too naïve to think there might be any dreadful consequences of all this. He, Glyn, with his appetite deadened, had sat and waited for his opinion to be sought and it wasn't. He was the one whose misgivings didn't count, the only one in the family who wasn't related to this child, or this young woman as she'd now be. If she was alive. If she wanted to meet her birth mother. If, for heaven's sake, she'd had such a miserable life she decided she wanted to move in with them and have another go at Happy Families. There were so many ifs to consider that no-one seemed to feel the need to discuss with him. He wasn't relevant.