Playing with the Grown-ups Read Free

over miniature cups of coffee, thick with milk and sugar, how to do the twist in her studio. Her studio was
     at the edge of the orchard, and it was yet another facet of Hay House's magic, filled with silk butterflies and orchids, old
     love letters, and postcards from people who knew her so well they didn't sign their names. To be invited in was a treat, to
     be drenched in a world that reeked of her mystery. Kitty got the same feeling she had at church when they went at Easter or
     Christmas. Sometimes when her mother was up in London, Kitty stole in like a ghost, breathing in the air so still and full
     of her.
    Bestepapa bought Hay House from a farmer in the fifties for £500. Then it was a simple Georgian farmhouse, but over the years
     he and Morris, his oldest friend and gardener, had added to it with higgledy-piggledy ambition, so it resembled a doll's house
     that had been placed as an afterthought by a giant amongst long outbuildings and crazed half-finished pathways and mazes.
    The house was surrounded by ancient orchards whose sturdy trees were made for climbing. There was an aviary in the main garden,
     home to a rainbow of sherbet-coloured canaries who keened lovingly when Bestepapa came to shut them up at dusk.
    Kitty's school was a sixteen-minute walk down the lane, a walk that she loved most in the winter where, still bathed in the
     porridgy half-light of morning, she walked feeling that she was the first to see the world as it was just shaking awake. Stepping
     firmly on the frost, in her red winter boots, she was the first to hear the longing whistle of the train as it flew over the
     bridge, the first to hear the neighbour's car splutter alive in protest at the cold, Classic FM sending her on her crackling
     way.
    Kitty liked school. Her mother and her aunts were legend in the village and some of this stardust by association rubbed its
     coppery sheen on her, even though she had glasses, and unlike her mother she could not play netball, or, like Ingrid and Elsie,
     win a prize for the high jump. She did have her mother's eyes, silvery grey, and a fortune teller at the village fete once
     told Kitty they would get her in trouble. She hoped so. She felt a pretender to the family glamour, even when girls from the
     fifth form showed her a picture in Vogue, her mother gazing soulfully out of its pages, her sadness palpable perhaps only
     to her oldest child.
    Her illegitimacy too, was a badge of separation, though not one that she could divine. The absence of her father, given his
     marital status, was not something that she questioned - she had Bestepapa and Bergerac. The girls at school found it ceaselessly
     fascinating, so Kitty answered their questions with studied affront, because she realised early on that it was considered
     a social hindrance to have an unmarried mother. She manufactured hysteria when Katrina Donnelly called her a bastard after
     fouling her in netball as the other girls stared on in mawkish sympathy waiting for her tears.
    When her mother wasn't prone, painting, or in London, she waited for Kitty by the gate after school. She wore vintage thirties
     chiffon dresses, her long pale legs and knickers whispers through the fabric. Her short scarlet nails and gypsy hoops cemented
     her fate: she was a magnet for the pursed lips and scorching eyes of other mothers and the slavish open-mouthed worship of
     their daughters.
    If her mother was up in London Elsie and Ingrid would dress Kitty up and smuggle her into the pub. They had done this since
     she was small and they barely qualified for pub drinking themselves. Elsie was seventeen to Kitty's eleven, Ingrid eighteen.
     Her mother was twenty-seven.
    Walking down the lane holding her hands, they told her who they fancied. In the dark their blonde hair glinted and swirled
     behind them like mist. They shared a B & H, but Ingrid got angry with Elsie and said that she was disgusting because she always
     'bum-sucked' cigarettes.
    'Who do you