The Right Thing Read Online Free Page B

and sank back under the duvet. She didn’t care about socks. No-one could. Glyn shouldn’t – he wasn’t much over fifty but with no school to run, like a prime minister suddenly deposed, hadn’t enough to think about. She dreaded to think with how many trivial obsessions he might start filling those intellectual gaps. ‘The sky wouldn’t fall in if you wore odd ones. Or none,’ she told him. She’d just remembered Rosemary-Jane Pigott – Ruthermere – air-kissing goodbye and saying, ‘Now we’ve all met up again, we must keep in touch. Ben adores Cornwall . . .’
    So Ben Ruthermere adored Cornwall. Since when? she wondered now. And would she have recognized him if he’d been nearby, this summer, say, crewing in the Falmouth Classics or browsing among the artistry at the Penwith Gallery? She tried to picture him: portly, perhaps by now balding, scrabbling at his inside pocket for his reading glasses. He’d been what her mother had disparagingly called Remarkably Average: medium build, neutral colouring and average height. ‘They don’t age well,’ her mother had forewarned as if, for one moment, there’d been any likelihood that Ben Ruthermere, if told of the results of his sexual carelessness, would be prepared to do the decent thing by her pregnant daughter and submit to a hasty wedding. It was such an unlikely and unwished-for outcome that Kitty hadn’t thought there was any point telling him. Besides, he’d gone off to do VSO in Ethiopia before Cambridge and had parents so burstingly proud of him that even the conscience of Kitty’s fire-and-brimstone father quailed at the thought of destroying their delight. ‘What is the point in putting two sets of parents through all this?’ he’d said with a profound sigh of Christian resignation. Madeleine had Ben’s brown-haired, hazel-eyed genes mingled with Kitty’s own slim, blond and brown-eyed ones – she could look like absolutely anybody.
    â€˜So how did it go yesterday? You didn’t say much last night.’ Now that Glyn had clothes on he was ready to be conversational.
    Kitty hauled herself out of bed and went to the window to look at the sea. It had a bright and menacing cold sparkle. ‘No, well, I was just so tired. That last bit from Truro, it’s so familiar I got scared I really was driving with my eyes shut.’
    â€˜Dangerous. People die driving too tired.’
    Kitty shivered and reached for her velvet dressing-gown over the back of the small shabby sofa that they’d had too long to be able to throw out.
    â€˜Poor old Antonia was killed driving her car up a tree. On their own land too, which makes it worse somehow.’
    Glyn looked puzzled. ‘How could it be worse? Dead’s dead. An absolute, the absolute.’
    â€˜Yes I know, but don’t you think, and I know it’s not logical, that you should somehow feel safe on home ground? You should be able to trust it, feel secure, the same way you should be able to trust the people you live with.’ Struck by sudden childish irreverence she went on, ‘When we were young and horrible but should have known better, Julia and the rest of us would have laughed and said that in any contest between Antonia and a two-hundred-year-old oak, the tree would be the one to cop it. There wasn’t much to laugh at yesterday though.’
    â€˜No. Well, there wouldn’t be.’ Glyn looked solemn but at a loss, Kitty thought. She could see his face searching for something encouraging to say, just as he would have done to a downhearted pupil. Eventually he came up with, ‘Nice to see old school pals again though.’ He waited for her to look cheered.
    â€˜Well, strange anyway. Nice doesn’t describe it. Nice couldn’t describe Rosemary-Jane Pigott actually, you should meet her.’
    Glyn considered this more seriously than she had meant him