The Right Thing Read Online Free Page A

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.
    â€˜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 magically 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.
    â€˜Bloody socks,’ he said, staring down into an opened drawer. ‘Does everyone else’s dryer eat them or what?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    Kitty groaned and laughed