The Right Thing (23 page)

‘I'm a better writer than that.' He leaned forward with his arms on the table, looking intensely into her face. ‘If I do use any of this there's no way you'll recognize it.'

‘OK, I believe you,' Madeleine conceded. ‘And anyway I probably won't buy it.'

The arrival of the food coincided with the departure of the men next to them. The waitress skipped nimbly round the shuffling figures pushing their way out from behind the table. A couple of empty glasses tumbled silently to the carpet and George leaned down to pick them up, getting his hand trodden on by a big boot for his trouble.

‘Watch it.' Madeleine pushed the culprit roughly aside with her foot.

‘Sorry love, didn't mean to injure your old dad.'

‘He's not . . . oh what the hell. You OK George?'

‘Sure.' He rubbed his hand. ‘Lucky I only type with three fingers.'

‘He thought you were my dad. Bloody nerve.'

Kitty pictured Ben-at-eighteen, swiftly followed by Ben-as-now, and wondered if he'd sorted out things with Rose. The bar was now silent, the men had clattered and chattered their way out of the door leaving a heavy peace.

‘Yeah. I'm glad I'm not.' George chuckled and grinned at Madeleine. ‘Begs the question though, doesn't it?' The two of them looked at each other intently for a few moments then, smiling as if they'd just discovered their own private joke, they both turned and stared at Kitty, questions in their eyes.

‘What?' she demanded, a chunky piece of cheese and pickle halfway to her mouth.

‘So you're my mother, right . . .' Madeleine said, and George joined in. ‘And on the basis that it takes two to foxtrot . . .'

‘Exactly. That still leaves me with a father to find, doesn't it?'

‘So. Have you got anything to tell me?' Julia Taggart's voice was terrier-fierce as if whatever it was Kitty was due to report she already knew quite well, and was simply looking for an opportunity to be snappy and sarcastic about being the last in the queue for news.

‘Give me a clue, Julia. Something to tell you as in . . . ?' Kitty balanced the phone between her ear and her shoulder while she scrubbed potatoes under the sink tap. It amused her that Julia, who lived and worked among the ever-chaotic variations of the busy metropolis, should be expecting to hear of scintillating scandals from the remote tail-end of the country.

‘As in the Rose and dead-Antonia's-Tom situation of course! What else would I mean?'

Kitty glanced across at Madeleine sitting at the table with Lily, the two of them being incredibly slow about removing skins from tomatoes. Madeleine seemed to do everything at half-speed, taking hours about getting up in the mornings, unloading the dishwasher plate by careful plate. She only sped up in the company of George, cutting in and finishing his sentences as if her mind worked the same way as his, but faster. He didn't appear to mind, which was surprising considering his entire life was to do with finding the right words.

Madeleine and Lily were solemnly agreeing about the futility of maths, an opinion that Lily didn't need any encouragement about. Madeleine's arrival was another little news bulletin that had yet to be communicated to Julia. Kitty told her, ‘But I don't know anything about Rose and Tom, except that Glyn saw her down here in some garden centre doing what she called research and I haven't heard from Ben for at least a week. I assumed he'd got himself sorted out, or that they'd kissed and made up.'

‘Huh!' Julia snorted like a small child imitating a pig. It wasn't a pretty sound. Kitty transferred the phone to her other shoulder while Julia continued, ‘You only thought that because he's taken to calling me instead of you. He was on for an hour last night, can you believe.' Julia, thriving on other people's confidences, could hardly have minded. Kitty could hear her rustling about, all her briskness diverted for a few seconds into the noisy lighting of a cigarette. ‘
And
what's more, he kept going on about you and all that “what might have been” stuff. I got terribly bored, I mean he must be on another planet, though he was rather pathetically gooey-eyed over you that night you were up here . . . but there was a decent episode of
The Bill
so I watched that while he rambled.' Kitty could just imagine it, Julia elegantly draped on her pale green sofa with her feet up on the little Victorian stool embroidered with faded foxgloves (shoes off in case of scuff marks), channel-surfing while Ben imagined he was getting her full attention. She laughed, the picture so much resembled the way she too had ‘listened' to Ben.

‘What's funny?' Julia was still prickly.

‘Sorry Julia, nothing's funny really, just the thought of your attention being so neatly divided like that. Quite a skill. You could have just hung up though, pretended your phone gave out.' That was a tease. Kitty scattered rosemary and garlic over the potatoes in the earthenware dish and put them in the oven. Julia would never hang up a phone while more information might be forthcoming. Ben would have had to repeat himself twelve times before she realized he'd run out of fresh words.

‘Anyway,' Kitty was getting a crick in her neck and now needed both hands to prepare the chicken properly, ‘Julia, it's not really any of our business is it?'

There was another ‘Huh!' followed by a rather crowing, ‘Well you might think that now, but wait till he turns up on your doorstep looking for the precious Rose.'

‘Is it likely? Why doesn't he just go to where Rose actually is?'

‘
Absolutely
it's likely – Rose has been a bit vague about her actual whereabouts and keeps switching her mobile off, telling him she can't get a signal on your side of the Tamar. He said he might try you. Of course that might just be an excuse to see you . . .'

So
that
was why Julia had phoned: to see if he'd arrived. Kitty looked across at Madeleine again and thought about her deceptively throwaway question about finding her father. She blamed George, geeing her up in the pub like that. The question had managed to drift away unanswered, Kitty getting out of it with something vague about it all being so long ago. George had cut in too, reminiscing about long-lost girlfriends from his youth, and his own missed opportunities for being a family man, and neither he nor Madeleine seemed seriously to expect her to come up with an instant father. A scene came to mind: herself, Ben and Madeleine in a row out on the sea wall, arranged in some sort of parody of a family photo. Madeleine had lined up all the skinned tomatoes into a neat triangle as if she was about to start a snooker match with them. Lily flicked at them with her finger and sent them rolling across the table top towards the edge. The two of them giggled and made a clumsy grab for the tomatoes, squashing one flat and sending juice and pips spurting over the floor.

‘Lily stop it! Bring them over here,' Kitty hissed at her. Madeleine pulled a face and smirked at Lily.

‘Sorry if it's a bad time.' Julia didn't sound at all sorry and then said, ‘By the way, did anything ever come of that trip to the adoption people? Any news? Or is that something else I'm not going to hear about?'

‘Oh Julia, don't sound so
disgruntled
.' Kitty laughed out loud at her. ‘And actually, I was going to ring you about that but . . .' From across the room Madeleine, sensing that she might be the topic, was staring at her with startlingly blue intensity. ‘I'll call you tomorrow Julia. Must go now and do things to the supper. Bye.'

‘Were you talking about me?' Madeleine stalked across the room looking accusing and reached over to the sink to get a cloth. She waited close to Kitty, the cloth juggled from one of her hands to the other as if she might feel the need to hurl it at someone.

‘No. I wasn't. That was one of my oldest friends, talking about another of my oldest friends.'

‘I don't have oldest friends,' Madeleine said. ‘I don't know if that's because I'm too young and I don't settle or if it's because I'm still waiting to meet the right ones, the ones who'll last.'

‘Like Mr Right?' Lily suggested.

‘Someone a bit longer-lasting than that.' Madeleine pulled a face.

‘Didn't you meet people at university, that you keep in touch with?' Kitty asked.

‘Well, yeah I suppose so. One or two. I've been to a couple of their weddings. But then people change when they're half a couple. I've been half that couple, I know.'

‘Not always for the worst.'

‘Maybe not. Not if one of you's old enough not to stifle the other.' Madeleine looked thoughtful. Kitty opened the fridge and pulled out the chicken breasts.

‘Is that chicken?' Lily demanded, butting in between them. ‘I'll only eat it if it's not those little baby ones, what are they called?'

‘Poussins,' Madeleine told her. She went to the table and slowly wiped up the rest of the squished tomato. ‘Nobody should eat those, they're too much like they're still at the yellow chick stage. They look even worse when they do that spreading-out thing, spatching or something.'

‘Spatchcock,' Kitty cut in.

‘That's the one, where they look like tiny torsos of miniature buxom women with spikes through the middle like torture. Gross.'

‘Well tonight it's just regular, normal-size chicken, free range, good farmyard scratching around, all that.' Kitty smiled. One good thing about having Madeleine around for meals was that Lily no longer skimped on food. Madeleine, catching her hiding the best part of a pork fillet under mashed potato, had loudly teased her for being picky with her dinner, saying she should have grown out of the eating-like-a-bird stage before she was ten. Lily followed Madeleine round like a puppy, relishing a second opinion on clothes, friends, school and homework and was happy to sit at the table and eat whatever there was going, since Madeleine, in return, seemed willing enough to doze on the sofa as a captive audience, taking a flattering interest in Lily's surfing and listening to endless stories of rips and cutbacks, breaks and barrels.

‘I've got spinach.' Glyn came in through the back door waving a huge bunch of leaves like a winner's trophy and bringing a chill waft of early evening air.

‘Ugh.' Madeleine shuddered rudely at him. ‘Why do you grow that stuff? Nobody really likes it.'

‘
I
like it,' Kitty told her.

‘Haven't you got anything else out there in your little veggie patch?' Madeleine's tone was dangerously close to antagonistic and Kitty, skinning the chicken, shot her a warning look which was ignored. The relaxed mood in the kitchen had vanished the second Glyn had come in, and Madeleine's petulant scowl was back in place.

‘Leeks? Or what about broccoli, do you like that?' Glyn suggested, pulling off his boots.

‘Yeah but I can tell you're not going out to get it just for me, are you? You've got your boots off now.'

He grinned at her, refusing to rise. ‘Well, you go and get it then. Far side, left-hand bed down at the end. Broccoli is that green crinkly-looking stuff, all right?'

‘Yeah, OK, OK I know what it looks like.' Madeleine sounded defiant and stood up, pushing past him to the door. ‘Coming Lily?'

‘History test on Monday, Lily. You said you'd get down to it tonight,' Glyn reminded her. Lily looked frantic, turning from one to the other, loyalties torn.

‘No it's all right, go do the history. I'll go and see what I can find out here in the nearly
dark,
by
myself, in my condition.
' Madeleine opened the door far wider than she needed to and went outside with an exaggerated waddle and her hand to the small of her back like a bad actress doing ‘pregnant'.

‘Maybe you should . . .' Kitty looked at Glyn.

‘No I shouldn't. There's something wrong if she can't even pick a few stalks. Give her something to do. After all,
you
want her to feel at home, she can join in as if it
is
home.'

Everything he said these days seemed to have an edge that could cut, Kitty thought. He hadn't once asked how long Madeleine intended staying with them, but the question hung around like the hint of a bad smell. Kitty didn't want to think about it, in case Madeleine somehow read her mind and came downstairs one morning clutching the scruffy rucksack and asking about train times. Even now, in the warm and hazy moments before she got up, Kitty still dreaded being first into the kitchen in case all that was left of this new daughter was a goodbye note propped up against the jug of primroses on the table, and no clue, apart from possibly home to Brighton, as to where she might have gone. She should have phoned her mother, told her what was happening and where she was, Kitty thought guiltily. She should have argued the case for that more firmly, even at the risk of prompting the very going-away scene she so dreaded – Madeleine might even think she was pushing her that way. They must have a very easy-going relationship, Madeleine and her mother, for nothing had been said to suggest any hostility between them, just this benevolent neglect. If this was Lily, she caught herself thinking again . . .

‘Look! I found this as well!' Madeleine hurtled through the back door, one arm crammed with broccoli stalks, the other dragging George whose hair, tossed around by a gathering wind, looked wilder than ever. ‘Is there enough food? Can he stay?' Kitty mentally counted potatoes and said, ‘Yes, why not. Petroc's gone to see a film with a girl from college so there's plenty of chicken.' George shoved his hands in his pockets and looked mildly embarrassed. ‘Really, I don't want to intrude, she just pounced . . .' He sat down at the table, looking as eager to join them as Madeleine was to have him stay. ‘Did not!' Madeleine laughed, her face transformed into something quite radiant. Perhaps she'd been feeling a bit bogged-down working her way into this new, intact family, Kitty thought. Perhaps she needed an outside ally just now. George might help her not to want to leave.