Next of Kin (12 page)

Judy said heartlessly, looking at the flowers through the four-inch crack, ‘They'll probably be dead by then.'

‘Yes,' he said, and then, ‘Would you like them?'

Judy slid the bolt at the end of the chain to release it.

‘Well,' she said, ‘I don't want them to die.'

‘Thanks,' Oliver said. He stepped in through the door and stood in the tiny hall, looking uncertain. ‘I haven't seen her for three weeks. Not since she moved in here.'

‘No,' Judy said, ‘I don't expect you have.' She smiled at him. He had a sweet face behind his round, modish spectacles and the kind of clean, smooth, childish hair you saw on choirboys. Ollie the run-over stork. She said, ‘Like a coffee?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Please.' He pushed the flowers at her. ‘Do take those. They make me feel a geek.'

Judy led the way into the sitting-room and turned off the television.

‘Don't do that,' Oliver said. ‘Not if you were watching.'

‘I only half was.'

‘I expect,' he said resignedly, ‘you know why I've come.'

‘Well—'

‘Girls always know about each other.'

Judy ran water into a jug and unrolled the flower paper to reveal several fragile stalks of yellow freesia.

‘These'll smell nice.'

‘Is she avoiding me?' Oliver said.

‘Maybe—'

‘You mean yes. Why doesn't she just say?'

‘I don't know,' Judy said. ‘You'll have to ask her. It's none of my business.'

He leaned against the kitchen doorway, as Zoe always did.

‘What's your name?'

‘Judy.'

‘Hi, Judy,' Oliver said. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?'

He moved past her as she inserted each long green stem into the jug, and plugged the kettle in.

‘Now what. Where's the coffee?'

Judy jerked her head.

‘There.'

‘Have you noticed,' Oliver said, ‘how Zoe can't even boil a kettle? Or won't?'

‘My dad made her. He got her peeling potatoes and frying bacon. He made her fry him some bacon after milking.'

‘Milking?'

‘He's a farmer,' Judy said.

‘And your mother?'

There was a tiny beat.

‘She's dead,' Judy said.

‘Oh,' Oliver said. ‘Oh, oh I am
sorry
.' He turned round in the small space of the kitchen and put his arm around Judy's shoulders. ‘Poor you,' he said, holding her. ‘Poor Judy. Poor girl.'

She looked fixedly down at the freesias.

‘Six weeks ago. Brain tumour.'

‘Awful,' Oliver said. ‘You must have had such a bloody awful time.' He squeezed her shoulder. ‘Poor girl,' he said again.

She glanced at him. His eyes, clear and guileless behind his glasses, were looking straight at her.

‘Zoe's been kind—'

‘Well, she knows how it is. She lost her father—'

‘She said you were kind to her about that.'

‘Did she?'

Judy moved gently out of his embrace to rescue the steaming kettle.

‘Yes.'

‘It isn't hard,' Oliver said. ‘No-one in my family's died, but I can imagine how I'd feel. At least I think I can.'

‘Most people,' Judy said, ‘are frightened to. So it's like some contagious disease they think they'll catch if they come too close. Do you want milk?'

‘And sugar. Two, please.'

Judy held out a mug.

‘It's nice when someone isn't afraid. Like you.'

‘I'm afraid of heights,' Oliver said, ‘and depths. And I could do with a world without spiders.'

Judy went past him into the sitting-room and set the flowers down on the empty hearth between Zoe's herons.

‘I gave her those herons,' Oliver said. ‘They come from the Philippines.'

‘I like them,' Judy said. ‘So does she.'

‘Good,' Oliver said. He took a noisy swallow of coffee. ‘Good. I'm glad she does. But I don't think, somehow, that I'll be giving her anything else.'

From her sitting-room window, Gareth's wife Debbie watched Robin's Land Rover emerge from the yard and turn up the drive towards the road. It was the fourth time he'd been out that morning; she'd counted them. This time, as far as she could see, there was nothing in the back of the Land Rover, no hay bales, no calf with its bony little rump turned towards the tailgate. You weren't supposed to carry livestock in an open trailer like a Land Rover, but Robin Meredith was not the kind of man who seemed much interested in what you weren't supposed to do. He'd got a reputation locally for being bloody-minded but Gareth said that wasn't fair. He said he just didn't say much.

Debbie sprayed a blue mist of window polish – ‘contains real vinegar' the label on the bottle said – onto the wide expanse of picture window against which the dust from the track past the cottage blew so relentlessly. She had a list of seven household chores to do before she went to Dean Cross Primary School for her daily job of helping serve and wash up fifty-seven school dinners. Velma had got Debbie the job when she and Gareth first came to Tideswell, before Eddie, now four, was born. Her elder children, Rebecca and Kevin, were both at Dean Cross School already and didn't like their mum appearing at dinnertime in the school kitchen in an apricot-checked overall with her hair done up in a muslin bag with an apricot peak to it. They wouldn't look at her when she ladled out their mashed potato and pasta bake but shuffled on down the queue, heads bent, as quick as they could. Gareth told them they were nothing but a pair of little snobs.

Gareth was good, Debbie reflected, at standing up for her against the children, against Kevin wanting a television in his bedroom and Rebecca wanting her ears pierced for her tenth birthday. He was good in other ways, too, not smoking, not getting drunk except very occasionally, buying her flowers on their wedding anniversary, handing his wage packet over each week except for a few quid he kept for himself, just as Debbie's father had done. Gareth said she was a good manager. Well, she was, she'd always been good with money, even if she'd felt that this was a sensible rather than a sexy quality. She used to pride herself on being sensible, and was critical of Gareth for his lack of desire to be responsible about money, but just recently, she felt she'd changed. Just recently, since Caro Meredith died, as she'd watched Robin's lonely light from the farmhouse kitchen window at night, she'd been conscious of things she'd never thought of before, of the fragility of life, of what it would be like if Gareth died and left her alone with Rebecca and Kevin and Eddie. For years, she had told Gareth that sex once a week was quite enough, on a Saturday night because he didn't have to milk on Sunday mornings; Robin did Sunday mornings. But now, something about Robin, something about the spectacle of his solitude, almost as if he had been excluded from ordinary life by Caro's dying, made her want to make love to Gareth, even on Tuesdays or Thursdays, as if by loving him physically she could somehow put extra strength into him, extra life, like an insurance against fate.

She stood back from the window and surveyed the glass for smears. She never said any of this to Gareth, though she knew he was surprised at the change in her. ‘What's this all about?' he'd said two nights ago, when she'd turned to him, on a Wednesday. ‘What's up, Debbie?' But he'd sounded pleased, he'd been pleased. It made her colour a bit now to think of, but she couldn't help herself. Nor could she say anything. Saying things was so difficult; it was much better to let cards and flowers say what you couldn't say yourself. She had spent £25 on a wreath for Caro's funeral, a wreath of pink carnations and white chrysanthemums, and sent a special funeral card to the farmhouse which said, ‘To Robin, thinking of you in your sad loss. Gareth, Debbie and family.' She didn't know if Robin had seen it, but even if he hadn't, she knew she'd done her best, said what was in her heart to say, with the wreath and the message. Robin's Land Rover appeared again at the top of the drive and came back down towards the yard. He'd only been ten minutes. Poor Robin, Debbie thought, poor Robin. Gareth said he and Caro hadn't shared a bedroom in years.

In the kitchen at Tideswell Farm, Velma had left a packet of powdered mushroom soup and two sausage rolls in a cellophane packet that had plainly been squashed under something much heavier in her plastic shopper. Beside the food lay the morning's mail which he had opened by tearing the envelopes with his thumb, and which Velma had arranged, as she always did, in a graded line, the biggest envelope at the back. In the front of the pile – the smallest letter – lay the one item he did not wish to see, a single sheet from the River Authority to say that their inspectors would be down on the River Dean below his property on the morning of the 17th to verify the findings of their previous, unannounced, inspection.

Robin put the mushroom soup down on the River Authority letter and dropped the sausage rolls in the bin. Then he opened the fridge. There were no surprises there and he shut the door again. He wandered over to the window and stood looking out into the yard, rattling the keys in his pocket. He was restless rather than hungry, had been all week, fidgety and unsettled. Ever since that strange little encounter with Joe at Stretton Market something had tugged at him, disquieted him, some elusive little trouble that had nothing to do with grief, with Caro. It was more that he felt there was something the matter that Joe wouldn't tell him, something specific that he ought to know, that affected him, and because he didn't know it and couldn't get it out of Joe, it buzzed in his mind like a wasp in a jar. He'd been in and out like a yo-yo, up and down to the village, to Dean Place Farm, to the river bank.

‘Trying to wear your tyres out?' Harry had said.

It was only half a joke. Harry wasn't in much of a joking mood this week since someone had reported to him seeing Joe at Stretton Market, hanging round the store-cattle pens, and, when confronted, Joe had flown into a rage and said that where he went and what he looked at was his own bloody business. It had bothered Harry, both Joe's attitude and what he might be planning. Two years ago, Dilys and Joe had persuaded him that they only needed two signatures out of the three on the Dean Place Farm cheque book since Joe did most of the buying these days. Suppose Joe did have some tomfool scheme about cattle in his head? Lord knows what did go on in his head right now, and Dilys had always been foolish with him, soft, she'd never refuse him her co-signature on a cheque if he pleaded with her. It made Harry edgy. So did Robin, driving in and out of the yard at Dean Place like something from Wells Fargo, and never for an errand Harry could see any sense to.

Robin knew Harry was troubled. That last visit to Dean Place, he'd tried to say something comforting, that they'd all settle down again, that Joe was just toying with a few ideas like all farmers did. But Harry had simply grunted, tinkering on with his spanner at the old drilling machine Joe had wanted to replace for two years.

‘We all do it,' Robin said. ‘We all think about change, about shaking things up a bit.'

Except Harry, Robin thought now, looking at the yard and the clumps of docks in the corners he kept meaning to spray. Harry had farmed the same way all his life and would never wish to do otherwise. Harry liked things to be the same, manageable and familiar. What would happen, Robin wondered, if something Harry really couldn't manage happened, something alien that really touched him, affected his life? Would he simply go on imperturbably, ignoring the problem as far as he could, like an oyster wrapping a grain of sand in layers of pearl? Or would he, instead, fall to pieces?

A car had turned off the road at the end of the drive and was coming down towards the house. It was a taxi; Robin could see the red dome of the taxi's illuminated telephone number on the roof. Who would be coming here in a taxi, and at lunchtime? Velma sometimes used a taxi, but she used the local man from Dean Cross who drove an orange Vauxhall Astra with ‘Dean Cross Taxis' painted on a piece of thick cardboard propped up behind the windscreen. This taxi looked like one from Stretton. It passed the yard gate and vanished behind the leylandii hedge to the front drive and the front door.

Robin went out of the kitchen and down the long-tiled passage to the Victorian part of the house and the front hall. It was dark, as it always was, illuminated only by a panel of coloured glass above the front door, a stylized pattern of tulips in pink and red with stiff green leaves. Robin switched on the light to find the front-door key, unused since Caro's funeral tea, and kept in a drawer of the hall chest among outdated maps and single gloves. The light shone down on the results of Velma's unillumined housework, upon random swirlings of a mop in the dust, like scribblings with a stick in sand.

Robin put the key in the lock and turned it. It needed, as it ever had, a wrench to open the door. Outside, on the drive, and moving away as if she meant to go round to the yard and the back door, was Zoe holding a metal camera case and a black haver-sack.

‘Hey!' Robin said. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘Sorry,' she said. She put the camera case down. ‘I didn't mean to make you open that door. It was the taxi. He wouldn't go into the yard in case it made the cab mucky. I was in Birmingham.'

‘Yes?'

‘And I saw a coach to Stretton at the bus station. And I thought—'

‘Yes?'

‘Well,' Zoe said. She didn't sound in the least uncertain of her welcome. ‘Well, I thought I'd come and see you. So I have.'

Chapter Seven