Next of Kin (11 page)

‘Right,' Robin said. Judy heard the splash of the peeler being thrown into the water. ‘Right. Over to you.'

Chapter Six

Stretton Cattle Market lay off the ring road, between an ice-cream factory and the offices of the Regional Electricity Board. It occupied a vast site, an untidy complex of auction houses and car-parks, and had a reputation for being good for live weight stock sold on the hoof. At one end, a large new building housed the main auction rings for cattle and calves; at the other an immense roof spread over the pens in which sheep and pigs were packed like dates in a box. Between the two ran a pedestrian precinct lined with banks and agricultural suppliers, horticultural shops and pet-supply stores and at either end, marked by a menu board propped up outside in the shape of a great white bull, an eating place, called the Charolais Diner, served all-day breakfasts for £2.95.

Robin drove the trailer into the park nearest to the main auction building and drew up next to the sales-times notice-board: ‘Butchers' sheep: 10.15. Beef cows and sucklers: 10.45. Beef calves: 11.15. Store cattle and barren cows: 12 noon.' In the trailer, five fortnight-old bull calves stood with their heads to the far wall, as far from the tailgate and the alarming business of being loaded and unloaded as possible. Robin and Gareth had loaded them in an hour before, running them up into the trailer holding their makeshift collar halters of baling twine in one hand and their tails in the other.

‘I never like this,' Gareth said. ‘I never like seeing them go.'

Robin grunted. He didn't like it either, not these days with the eighteen months of fattening life ahead of the calves so uncertain; but he liked it even less with the barren cows. There was something about sending a cow off to market for a failure that was entirely not her fault that affected him more as he got older, not less. But he wasn't about to have a discussion on stock-farming ethics with Gareth, who would then stop what he was doing in order to lean against the nearest upright and expound. There was something in Gareth that made him incapable of talking and working simultaneously, and Robin, though considerate of Debbie and the children in many ways, was ever mindful of the fact that Gareth was paid to work.

‘I don't want to come back,' he said, ‘with less than seven hundred for the lot of them.'

He climbed down now from the Land Rover and went round to the back of the trailer to unhook the bolts. Two market herdsmen in flat caps and buff overall coats came up to line hurdles between the trailer and the pens in which the calves would wait until it was their turn to be herded, by a boy relatively not much older than themselves, through the clatter and shouting of the auction ring. One of the men held a bucket of glue and a wooden paddle to slap an auction label on to each small rump as it emerged from the trailer.

‘Robin—'

Robin, his hands still up against the tailgate, turned to look over his shoulder. Joe was standing there, in working clothes, his hands in his pockets.

‘What are you doing here?'

Joe said, ‘Nothing much. Maybe looking at some beef cattle—'

‘What do you want to do that for?' Robin said. ‘Here, give us a hand with this—'

‘I thought I'd like it,' Joe said, moving to take the weight of the far side of the tailgate. ‘I thought maybe I'd like some animals, maybe the farm would be better with some life on it. Just a few store cattle.'

‘Does Dad know?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Dad doesn't want anything to change.'

‘If it's change for its own sake—'

‘I don't know,' Joe said. ‘I don't know about that. I just know I want a change.'

The tailgate swung slowly down to form a ramp and the five calves pressed themselves against the farthest wall.

‘Poor little sods.'

‘Don't you start. Gareth's bad enough. You'd think I was taking his children to the auction.'

Joe watched Robin climb into the trailer and manhandle the calves one by one towards the ramp, their winglike ears pierced with plastic identity tags. He remembered bringing Lyndsay to the market during their engagement to show her the reality of farming, the inescapable fact of cows driven dazed through the clanging gates of the auction ring and sold off to buyers for slaughterhouses and meat-packing stations at so many pence per kilo. She had cried all the way back to Dean Place, mortified both by what she had seen and by the death of her own romantic preconceptions of farming.

‘It was the calves,' she had sobbed to Caro, fetched by Joe in an effort to console her, to reconcile her to the reality of food production.

‘I know,' Caro had said, ‘I know. They're just far too pretty to be sensible about.'

‘Perhaps I shouldn't have taken her,' Joe had said later. ‘Perhaps I should just have let her think farming is fields of oats. After all, that's about all she'll see.'

‘I don't know,' Caro had said slowly. He remembered her veiled brown gaze. ‘I don't know. I don't think I'll ever really know how much truth is good for us.'

The hurdles swung into place behind the last of the calves.

Robin said, ‘I just always hope they'll go to a beef unit in this country.' He looked at Joe. He was standing gazing after the calves with an expression of studied remoteness, the expression Robin had caught on his face at Caro's funeral, as if he were driving his mind through and beyond what he was looking at in order not to have to react to it. Robin went down the straw-littered ramp and put his hand on Joe's arm.

‘Want to say anything?'

Joe shook his head.

‘Want to look at the ring? I'll come with you—'

Joe sighed.

‘I should be getting back. I don't quite know what I'm doing here—'

‘Looking at beef cattle. You said.'

‘Yes.'

‘Because you want to make things different.'

Joe said nothing.

‘So do I,' Robin said. ‘I want things to change. I want this – time to be over.'

Joe looked at him, a long, dark, unhappy look.

‘If buying cattle'll help,' Robin said, ‘you buy cattle.'

‘I can't be sure—'

‘No,' Robin said, ‘none of us can. It's the first time we've done it. It's the first time I've lost a wife.' He looked away from Joe. It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he craved Caro back, not so much for herself, but so that he could ask her things, demand answers to his questions about abandonment, about betrayal of trust. But it wouldn't be fair. Whatever Joe was struggling with was plainly all he could manage just now. Revelation of all that was seething unresolved in Robin's mind was the last thing Joe needed.

Joe said suddenly, ‘I didn't love her. I mean, not like that, not
love
—'

Robin waited. The straw on the ramp lifted in little eddies of wind and blew about their legs.

‘I just—' Joe spread his hands and then clenched them into fists. ‘It seems, now she's gone, that she held things together, somehow, that she made things kind of hopeful.'

Robin hesitated. A small anger at Joe's impudence began to smoulder at the edges of his sympathy. He took the Land Rover keys out of his pocket and jingled them in his hand.

‘Watch it,' he said.

‘I never meant—'

‘No,' Robin said, ‘no. I don't expect you did. But just don't make too much of it, OK? You've got it all on a plate, you always have had, so don't go and make too much of
anything
.'

He left the Land Rover and the trailer in a car-park next to a very similar vehicle in which a yellow-eyed sheepdog sat alert and upright in the passenger seat, and made for the auction ring. It was housed in a big, plain, glass-and-concrete building, like a bus station, with internal staircases that led up either side to the top of the amphitheatre of great tiered steps from which to watch the auction ring below. There were perhaps thirty or forty people scattered about these steps and leaning on the metal guard rails, farmers of every age and type, with a few women, dressed much like the men, among them, and a handful of hard country girls in rubber riding boots, pushing long hair off their faces with one hand and holding cigarettes with the other.

Below them, on fixed stools around the ring itself, were the bidders, some farmers buying for themselves, others buyers on commission from abattoirs. They sat there, market day after market day, dressed winter and summer alike in shapeless, weatherproof country clothing the colour of mouldy thatch, elbows propped on the edge of the ring, making those infinitesimal gestures of the practised bidder, taciturn, businesslike and tough. To their left, cattle were herded one by one through an automatic weighing crate which flashed each cow's weight in kilos up onto a screen above the auctioneer's head, and then the animals were goaded through the ring for only a matter of seconds, blundering and turning in the clanking confusion of metal gates, before being driven out again, weight sold, fate sealed, to the herding pens behind the rings.

‘Morning, Robin,' someone said. ‘You got business down there?'

Robin shook his head.

‘Only calves today.'

The man, bulky in a padded waistcoat over shaggy layers of knitting, said, ‘Not much quality this week. Even the best won't make much more than ninety pence.' He looked keenly at Robin for a moment. There'd been rumours for years that Caro Meredith had been an odd one, but rumours or no rumours, a wife was a wife and her loss was a loss all the same.

‘You keeping all right?'

Robin nodded.

‘That's the spirit.' He looked back down towards the ring. ‘Now there's a grand cow, that straight Angus. That's Jim Voyce's herd.'

Robin touched his arm.

‘I'll be off, Fred. Only came in for a second.'

Fred James touched his cap.

‘All the best, Robin. Give my regards to your father. Keeping well, is he?'

Outside in the air once more, he found it was beginning to rain, small, constant, cold rain. He turned his collar up and cursed himself for leaving his cap in the Land Rover. Why had he been in the ring, he wondered? Why had he obeyed that impulse to help Joe, when he did not believe that to diversify into stock was going to help Joe in any way? Why, for God's sake, should he help Joe when Joe had had everything, right from the start, without even needing to stretch out his hand to ask for it? The rain was, steadily and unmistakably, getting harder. People were beginning to hurry towards cover, people who spent their lives working in the rain but who reacted to it differently in a built-up environment. Robin hunched his shoulders and sank his chin deep in his collar. He must buy some wheat straw before he left, if he could get it for under £25 a ton, delivered.

Judy lay on the sitting-room floor of her flat, her head and shoulders propped uncomfortably against an armchair, watching a play on television. Zoe had said she must watch it because a friend of hers was the assistant cameraman, and had then gone off to a two-day photography course in Birmingham, leaving Judy to watch it alone. Of course, Judy told herself, she didn't have to watch it. She could wash her hair or read a book or do a bit of cleaning instead, but somehow, in the last few weeks with Zoe as a flatmate, she had grown used to doing things with Zoe. Zoe had a way, Judy had discovered, of making her, Judy, use her time.

It wasn't, anyway, as if it was a very good play. It was about two teenagers on the run from the police in an unspecified northern city, but the reason for their being on the run was never explained and there was more breathless panting than dialogue. It was also shot either in the dark or the half-dark, so that it was difficult, on Judy's small television screen, to appreciate the skills of Zoe's friend, the assistant cameraman. She lay there, her chin on her chest, and willed herself to summon the energy to get up and turn the play off.

The two teenagers, androgynous-looking girls, were now stumbling along a railway line in the dark. One of them had a haircut rather like Zoe's. Zoe had hers cut every three weeks and rinsed with a vegetable dye to bring it back to the deep burgundy colour that Judy was now quite used to. Basically, Zoe had said, her hair was brown. Not rich glowing brown with tawny highlights and the sheen of a new conker, she said, but plain brown like dead leaves, boring brown. She had dyed it black once, long ago, having seen a video of Liza Minnelli in
Cabaret
, but she said black was too much and made her look phoney. Judy reached up and pulled a lock of her own hair down so that she could see it. Red hair looked pretty phoney to her even in its natural state.

Someone rang the doorbell. Judy sat up slowly. It would be the elaborately spaced-out man from the flat below wanting a loaf or a light bulb or another look at Zoe. He appeared three nights out of five these days, grinning and languid, a rolled-up £5 note between his fingers, which he had, Judy noticed, no intention of ever letting go of. She stood up and, without any hurry, turned the television down, but not off, and went to the front door, opening it the four inches the security chain would allow.

There was a young man standing there, a thin young man in jeans and a leather jacket. He wore spectacles and was carrying a cone of the shadowy printed cheap giftwrap beloved of flower sellers.

‘Hi,' he said.

Judy regarded him.

‘Who are you?'

‘I'm Oliver,' the young man said. He held out the paper cone of flowers. ‘I'm looking for Zoe.'

‘She's in Birmingham,' Judy said.

‘Oh.'

‘She won't be back until Friday.'

‘Oh.'