by Judy Astley
‘Tom Goodrich, so sweet of you to come.’ Antonia’s husband shook Kitty’s hand briefly but with strength. His hand was hard and dry, an outdoor hand. He was tall, broad but not fat and with that lucky handsomeness that some men have when the lines on their face deepen in all the right places with age. Lamentably tempted, Kitty looked him straight in the eye and hoped he couldn’t tell she was trying hard to imagine him naked aboard the schoolgirl Large Antonia that she remembered. Somehow she could only summon up a ludicrous cubist tableau of a tanned muscly slab balanced precariously on a mottled red and white jelly. ‘Er, Kitty Harding um . . . old friend of Antonia’s. So sorry . . .’ she mumbled, feeling ridiculous and ashamed. How could she claim to be ‘so sorry’ about someone she hadn’t actually seen for more than twenty years? And ‘so sorry’ was such a pathetically limp phrase of general pity for untimely death. Anyone’s.
Rose, with no such compunctions and a boldness that Kitty well recalled, was kissing Tom on each cheek, carefully as if deliberately choosing for her lips the most tender spot. Her face was a picture of barely-contained profound grief and Kitty marvelled at her temerity. This, after all, was the woman who had once, in a moment of after-hockey ‘helpfulness’, threaded a big dead goldfish from the biology lab tank into his late wife’s untidy carroty plait. Hours later in Maths Antonia’s shrieks had made the windows quake. Julia waited behind for her handshake, watching Rose closely, a small knowing smile hovering on her lips, which she banished quickly as her turn came and she made her own obsequious mutterings.
‘I take it back. It is just like a wedding reception,’ Julia whispered to Kitty over the sandwiches. ‘Only needs a string of cute bridesmaids and Antonia’s mother in a hat. I wonder whatever happened to her, by the way. I should know, come to think of it.’ She looked intensely thoughtful, mentally thumbing through back numbers of the Old Hartsvale newsletters.
‘Fizzled out quietly in a nursing home, couple of years back,’ Rose chimed in, her impatient fingers playing with an unlit cigarette. Her eyes scanned the room for a fellow-smoker, squinting slightly. At school Kitty remembered she’d possessed glasses but only worn them for games, to make sure she wasn’t called upon to do anything too strenuous.
‘How do you know that? You really did keep up with Antonia then?’ Kitty asked. After the way Antonia had been treated, Kitty could hardly imagine she’d have been thrilled to chat with Rose over a diet lunch, or ring up to swop intimate gigglings on pregnancy problems.
Rose grinned, those huge teeth glinting. ‘Well you know, sort of. Here and there. More Tom really, I suppose. To do with work, of course. My company makes garden programmes for TV. We came down here and did this one. It’s gorgeous out there, you should just see. I was amazed of course, you can imagine, to find out who Tom had married. I suppose I’ve run into him in London once or twice since.’ The hand with the cigarette was gesturing airily and her voice had a peculiar over-casual drawl to it, Kitty thought, as if she was saying something she’d rehearsed. It left a sense of information omitted.
Kitty felt slightly nauseous after guzzling three deceptively delicate cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches far too fast, and wandered off in search of fresh air. She squeezed past guests who, loosened by drink and relieved to be neither dead nor outside in the cold, had progressed to general discussion of schools, racing and the price of land. The children were not in the room and Kitty imagined the younger ones in a vast basement kitchen, cuddling up to a rotund cook and being allowed to dip their fingers into bowls of chocolate cake-mix. If the teenager was anything like Lily – and he’d looked about fifteen – he would be skulking in his room, submerging his grief in loud music and wishing all these sociably mingling guests to hell.
She headed towards the back of the house, hoping to find the elaborate conservatory she’d spotted from the driveway and draw breath among cool greenery, away from the cocktail-party atmosphere in the library.
‘Looking for the loo? There’s one just round that corner on the left.’ Tom emerged from a brightly lit corridor, presumably leading from the kitchen (not in a basement then, and probably with a hostile au pair, not a cook) carrying several bottles of wine.
‘Oh er, yes. Good idea.’ Kitty felt awkward, wary. Tom might haul her into a corner and cross-examine her on her relationship with his wife. She bit her lip.
‘You OK?’ Tom hesitated, waiting for her to follow his directions.
‘As much as one can be at these things,’ she replied with a smile that she hoped looked sympathetic enough. The English simply weren’t good at grief, she thought, they were just too fearful of emotion. Tom might have wanted to collapse onto a bed, clutching Antonia’s oldest nightie, and simply howl like a lonely spaniel. Instead he had to top up glasses and look pleased to have guests.
A collection of framed family photos hung on the lavatory walls. As in Kitty’s own home, they were just informal holiday and home shots, people having fun together, children at various stages of growth in gardens, on horses, on beaches, skiing. Kitty had a good look at them, noting with some surprise how Antonia had, as her own mother would have put it, ‘grown into’ her looks. As a girl she’d been constantly out of place, appearance-wise. Always cumbersome and red. On school photos she’d had to be the one at the end of the row, sticking up too far to be placed in a line, found space for after the neat symmetrical ones with manageable hair and clothes that fitted properly had filed in. She’d been the one, on the school ski trip (oh brave Antonia) who’d been too big for the hire company that had supplied all their skiwear and had had to be equipped with a man’s salopettes and jacket. As an adult, Kitty could see, she’d found her niche, her man and her role. She hadn’t found Weight Watchers though, that was also clear from the photos.
Looking at the pictures of this robust and jolly woman with a proud cloud of auburn hair, Kitty shuddered at the dreadful casual suddenness with which such a strong, vibrant life could be snuffed out. The world was full of frail, skinny people who, as they said, looked as if a puff of wind would knock them down, as if the slightest chill could be the edge of pneumonia. But really there was no difference when the cat-like gods chose to play with the mouse-like mortals: size and vulnerability just weren’t linked. She flushed the loo and had a last look at the photos, sad for the young, laughing children whose childhood had been blighted the day their mother drove her car up an oak tree. The baby Madeleine’s adoptive mother might be dead too, she suddenly thought. But surely, if that had happened, she’d come looking for her, there were ways of doing that now, unless she’d never been told she was adopted. Quickly she rinsed her hands under the green-mottled brass tap. She was taking too long, thinking too morosely and outside the door she could hear people waiting, murmuring.
‘Of course it wasn’t exactly an accident, you know.’ Kitty’s hands froze on the towel and her ears tingled with the effort to listen.
‘Everybody knows that. Doesn’t even need saying.’
‘Broken heart.’
‘Bastard. They all are. Who’d kill themselves over a man?’ A sharp inhalation of cigarette followed.
Kitty opened the door and a trio of women smiled politely, assuring each other of nothing untoward heard or said. So that’s how Antonia got thin, Kitty decided. Some cheated-on women hit the fridge, cramming food into their faces double-handed: leftover chicken, taramasalata scooped with their fingers and chunks of hard cheese wolfed down too fast to notice the irony. Presumably Antonia had been one of the other sort, the starvers and fretters and the takers to the vodka. In a rush of fondness for Glyn, who’d be wondering where she’d got to, Kitty thought of hearth and home. On reaching the library again she looked round for Julia.
‘If you still want a lift to Bodmin Parkway we have to go now,’ she told her. ‘I promised I wouldn’t be back too late. I’ve got this out-of-season prizewinning author checking in tomorrow and loads to do.’
‘I forgot you’re a landlady.’ Julia’s small mouth pursed up as much as i
t was able, reminding Kitty of a cat’s bottom.
‘Usually only in the summer. In the winter I’m still a painter. When you specialize in local scenic views it’s a lot easier when the tourists aren’t cluttering up the horizon.’
‘Oh yes, I remember you were arty at school. I called you a creep for volunteering to paint the scenery for the play. A landlady though . . .’ Julia mused. Kitty could see exactly the picture Julia was conjuring up.
‘Hey, I don’t wear fluffy high-heeled mules and charge for use of cruet you know, and they’re all writers, there for either their own projects or a workshop session so they’re pretty much self-contained,’ Kitty reminded her patiently. ‘So are you coming, or shall I make my goodbyes and disappear?’
Julia peered past Kitty and gazed around the room. ‘Oh look, there’s Rose, still here, must just say bye-bye to her. She’s got a lot of nerve, I’ll say that for her,’ Julia murmured, gazing at her oldest friend with admiration. Kitty waited, holding her breath. Rose was standing by a small and delicate walnut desk, her hand resting carelessly among silver-framed photos. Kitty guessed they must be more family shots. She looked like a cat toying idly with treasures in a room from which it was normally banned. As if she was listening to her thoughts, Rose shifted slightly and smiled across at Kitty over the shoulder of the man she was talking to, Tom.
‘She’s got a perfectly good husband of her own at home. Her second one of course, but then women like Rose rarely stop at one,’ Julia confided through discreetly gritted teeth. ‘But of course you knew that, didn’t you?’ This was the second time that afternoon that this assumption had been made. Kitty felt even more in the dark than before. ‘Old boyfriend of yours from the sixth form, you know the one, just before your little bit of trouble.’ Kitty felt a horrible urge to put her hands over her ears to make it not true but it was too late. ‘Ben Ruthermere.’ Julia’s wide eyes were slightly bloodshot. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t remember. She ran into him in Paris, oh, five years back. Coincidence or what?’
Kitty couldn’t tell her she didn’t remember Ben so she didn’t reply. Julia was looking mildly triumphant. ‘You should have read all those HOGS newsletters, you see, instead of shredding them up for your organic compost heap or whatever.’
Kitty looked across at Rosemary-Jane who was still eye to eye with Large Antonia’s husband. Ben Ruthermere, fresh out of the sixth form, sexual novice and all-round ordinary boy, had never known he was Madeleine’s father. So he’d married Rosemary-Jane Pigott who could hardly be better cast as a wicked stepmother. Or just simply as wicked.
Chapter Two
Kitty fought her way up from a dream in which her father, towering huge through candlelight, was thumping the edge of the pulpit and denting the wood like dough, leaving a caving imprint of his pudgy hand. His bulk loomed bigger than a Disney monster’s shadow and he leaned hard with the palms of his hands so the wood bulged forward, out like a ship’s prow. Beneath it in the congregation were hundreds of identical grey crocheted hats on heads that cowered and keened and wailed into white twitching hankies with hand-embroidered corner initials in pink. Kitty’s eyes flickered open with relief that this wasn’t how she would ever again have to spend a Sunday morning. Her father had been a vicar with a keen eye for promotion and a congregation of adoring old ladies squabbling over the church-hall tea urn and flower rota, just like characters in a Barbara Pym novel. Humble, penitent and pious during his fiery services, the faithful would emerge from his church shaking off their sins in the sunlight like dogs fresh out of a river. Thus purged, they’d go straight back to claim-staking over the post-service biscuit provision and whose turn it was to tidy away the vestments. ‘Worth your weight,’ he used to smarm and charm at them, though weight in what he never specified. In manky old tea-leaves, Kitty used to think whenever she found furtive pairs of these women hunkered down on the vicarage sitting-room floor, picking through bags of jumble like rooks on a run-over squirrel.
Kitty’s waking mind found its way back to the present and she thought about Julia, the day before, referring to her ‘little bit of trouble’. It was just the sort of dust-under-the-carpet euphemism her parents had favoured. Julia enjoyed the phrase because it hinted at the privilege of knowing a secret; her mother liked it because it avoided uncomfortable truth. ‘Trouble’ was what Kitty had ‘got herself into’, as if no-one else could possibly be involved and she’d done it out of spite. With a father who feared his bishop far more than he feared God, this Trouble had to be got out of the house and away from sight as fast as possible. The right thing had to be done.
The trouble hadn’t felt so little at the time, either. She hadn’t felt so little. Her grossly pregnant eighteen-year-old body, skin distended to near-translucency by a baby that must have been meant for a much bigger and more grown-up mother, had felt like a dragged sack of swedes. She’d felt as if between her legs some precarious collapsing bulge was threatening to thrust its way to her knees. Each day for the last four pregnant months, banished to one of the nation’s last mother-and-baby homes, she’d spent eight hours perched in cramped agony on a hard chair, sure that only the seat’s unyielding wood was forcing this parasitic growth to stay inside her as she sat with the other inmates addressing envelopes and stuffing them with flyers for cut-price garden equipment. ‘Anyone who wants a cheap tool can have my ex,’ one of the girls had giggled.
Kitty remembered they’d all sworn to keep in touch, friends for life linked by their months of exile, but no-one really did. One by one, they peeled off to the hospital to give birth and were sent back to the home to be safely segregated in the baby-care wing, where they couldn’t contaminate those who still had the births to get through with any tricky and emotional changing of mind over adoptions. Arrangements had been made – any girl who made a fuss and insisted on leaving with instead of without her child was deemed thoroughly selfish, having no concern for the dashed hopes of the deserving childless. Leaving that place must have been like coming out of prison, she’d thought at the time, you didn’t want to be reminded, you just rushed to get on to the next thing and of course no-one outside wanted to talk about it in case you got embarrassingly upset or told them difficult truths.
Baby Madeleine had been handed over to the social worker in a tiny night-blue dress, embroidered with silver stars and with the name that was unlikely to stay hers in gold thread at the hem. Kitty’s mother had watched her carefully handstitching it, her eyes full of fear that she might yet change her mind and bring home the child inside the dress. ‘It’s what comes of being artistic,’ had been said more than once in the house before Kitty was sent away, though whether her parents meant the pregnancy or the starry little outfit, Kitty was beyond calculating.
Madeleine’s adoptive parents had probably binned it the moment they got her home, Kitty assumed, eagerly wrapping their own identities round their chosen child with maybe a lovingly crocheted pink shawl, traditional Viyella nighties and a different name they’d had waiting, perhaps something from the Bible or fiction. She imagined, trusted for her baby’s sake, that they, childless and longing, might well have had a long-treasured store of locked-away baby clothes, hoarded against the hope that one day there’d be some reason to get them out of the case on top of the wardrobe.
She closed her eyes again and sniffed gently, inhaling the remembered smell of a newborn’s downy scalp. Madeleine, heading for twenty-five, could well be a mother herself by now, incredulous from those first seconds after birth that anyone could ever, ever consider giving away their child.
‘You awake?’ Glyn rolled heavily out of bed and twitched a curtain aside to look at the day and decide what to wear. Kitty didn’t need to look out at the weather, she could hear from the sea what the day would be like. The tide was high and close but the water was calm and whispering, promising a much-needed spell of gentleness at this end of a long bleak winter. There was no surf, so Lily would at least go to school instead of pleading a headache which would clear up magica
lly when she slipped out of the kitchen door and down into the sea with her surfboard. When she opened her eyes again Glyn was moving around the room, large and loud and shadowy like a hopeless burglar. She could smell his showered cleanness, sense the traces of dampness on his body and realized she must have dozed into an extra ten minutes of sleep. There would be droplets of water between his shoulder-blades and a dewy sparkle left in the fold of his arm.
‘Bloody socks,’ he said, staring down into an opened drawer. ‘Does everyone else’s dryer eat them or what?’
‘Everyone’s does. Didn’t you know it’s one of life’s great mysteries? You should just buy dozens of identical ones then you wouldn’t notice if the odd one went missing,’ she suggested from the depths of the duvet. She glanced at the clock on the blue wicker table beside her, pulled herself up in the bed and looked at him properly in the half-light. He cared about clothes, pointlessly for an early-retired ex-head teacher who lived in such country depths and spent so much time digging vegetables. He made sure that trips to London coincided with the smartest sales, scorning clothes shops outside the capital as fit only for those whose spiritual home was a golf-club bar. Calvin Klein was etched in the elastic round Glyn’s middle, reminding her of an over-large schoolboy whose mummy still went in for name-tapes.
‘You can’t just have all the same socks.’ Glyn looked almost shocked at the idea, pulling back the curtain and using what early light there was to check his colour-matching skills. He held the socks at arm’s length by the window, the way he did when trying to do the crossword without his reading glasses. ‘What about ones for tennis and for skiing and winter walks and gardening? And silk ones for formal stuff and weddings and proper cotton in case of athlete’s foot?’