The Right Thing by Judy Astley Page B

sulk. She pictured Rita sitting in her kitchen, sipping coffee by the wood burner and waiting for her young lover to finish sleeping. ‘I think she’s hoping he will. Josh might be starting to pall by now.’
    â€˜If you’d put your friend Rose up in one of the barn rooms last night, rather than cramming her in here with us, there might have been some fun goings-on with George.’ Glyn, she was glad to see, seemed to have regained some of the usual cheery glint in his eye.
    â€˜I thought you were glad she’d gone. Just think, if there’d been any of that kind of fun she might have stayed for weeks.’
    â€˜I don’t suppose she would. The delights of metropolitan life call, I expect,’ he decided. Kitty wasn’t so certain. Julia had been more than hinting that any ‘call’, like an on-heat cat, would be from poor Antonia’s husband, whatever Rose insisted about being just friends.
    Glyn wandered off down to the garden to tend to his cauliflower seedlings and Kitty started on her painting. The phone number Julia had given her had been brought up from the kitchen and was now on a shelf beside her in the attic, tucked into a jar of sable paintbrushes. She painted the hull of the first boat and then went and picked up the slip of paper and looked at it again. She copied the number down, painted in the same blue gouache, onto a piece of water-colour paper, then pinned it to the big cork notice-board on which she kept pieces of inspiration: bits of coloured cloth, pictures from magazines, shells and slivers of wood from the beach and photos that might lead to a painting. It seemed a significant act. Nothing went on that board that wasn’t meant to be made use of. For Kitty, pinning things up where she could see them was a sort of editing process: it might narrow down the selection of shades of yellow for painting the kitchen, or it might be to do with choosing oblong sunglasses or oval ones. She stood by the easel, sucking the end of the brush and looking at the painted numbers. It couldn’t hurt just to find out what she should do, if, only if, she decided to try to discover what had happened to Madeleine.
    She looked out of the window. Glyn was down in the greenhouse in the vegetable garden far below, she could just make out the shape of him, pricking out or potting on or whatever these mysterious gardeners did. She thought of his big gentle hands tenderly settling the earth round the fragile stems. Whatever she found out now about the baby, there wasn’t any point discussing it with him at this stage. He’d only try to dissuade her, worried, she realized, that it might imply an unsettling. However he denied it, she’d been right that he liked life to be reasonably simple and predictable. It was for that he’d given up the trials and troubles of running a large school. She rinsed the brush, put it upside down in the purple jar that Petroc had made as a GCSE art project, and went to the phone.
    â€˜Surely it doesn’t matter about exams just as long as I can read and write and count,’ Lily was saying to Josh across Rita’s kitchen table.
    â€˜You’ll need more than that, otherwise you’ll end up like me,’ he grinned at her. He had very even teeth and she guessed that he’d had the kind of good and careful parents who’d taken him for regular orthodontic treatment, vaccinations and neat haircuts and then had to watch him turn into a drifter. She thought he looked very proud of himself, as if he was actually a cake that had turned out perfectly cooked without anyone looking at a recipe.
    Lily knew she was supposed to care about getting good GCSE grades, had to care even more than the others, because of her father being a teacher. It was what teachers were for, for telling you you had to make them a success by working your own brains to a mush just to get their schools up the ratings so other parents would want their