Next of Kin (18 page)

‘I hurt, Zoe. I hurt all over.'

Zoe looked at her, and even in the dimness of the room, Judy could see the shine of her eyes.

‘It's grief again, Jude. I was thinking about it, lying there trying not to think about Joe. And I thought that one of the things about grief is change, it changes your life and the people in your life, it makes you move on when you don't want to. And that hurts. It's the change you don't want that hurts.'

Hughie sat on his bean bag behind his closed bedroom door, leaning over Seal with his eyes tightly closed and his thumb in. He wore his pyjamas still, and his anorak and the red-and-black baseball cap Lyndsay had been given at Dean Cross garage with her petrol coupons. She had wanted two mugs instead, which were also on offer with coupons and which she had thought Joe could take outside with him as it wouldn't matter if they got broken, but the garage had run out of mugs and she had to settle for the baseball cap instead. In any case, Hughie had made a fuss about it, pleading and whining like a baby, knowing Lyndsay wouldn't want a scene in public, in the garage shop.

He had refused to let Mary Corriedale dress him that morning, or to dress himself. She had laid out his jeans and checked shirt and a green sweatshirt and socks and his new trainers with the Velcro strips to fasten them, and he had, when her back was turned, stuffed the clothes down the back of his bedroom radiator. He could see bits of them sticking out, the top of his jeans, a green sweatshirt arm, and the dark lump of his socks. His trainers, being new, he had left on the floor but he had covered them up with his dressing gown so that he needn't see them.

Across the landing, Mummy was in bed. Her curtains were pulled. She had been in bed a lot ever since Daddy hadn't been there, except for getting up in her nightie and sitting at the kitchen table either staring or crying. If Hughie wanted a cuddle, she would cry. If he just watched her, she stared, not back at him but at nothing much, like a piece of wall or the milk bottle. She had told Hughie that Daddy was dead and wasn't coming back again.

‘What's dead?' Hughie said.

‘It's not living any more. It's not breathing and walking about. It's like a sleep you don't wake up from.'

‘Was he killed?' Hughie said, thinking of things he trod on in panic, in the garden, beetles and centipedes and woodlice which you killed to stop them creeping and scuttling.

‘Yes.'

Hughie remembered scenes on television before Lyndsay had swooped down to turn it off.

‘With a chopper?'

‘No. With an accident.'

‘What's an accident?'

‘Something that shouldn't happen. A mistake. A mistake that does damage, like falling out of a window, or a car crash.'

Hughie put Seal on his head.

‘Can I see him?'

‘No, darling. I'm afraid not.' Her voice was very peculiar, Hughie thought.

‘Why not?'

‘Because he's gone. When you die, you go away, your body isn't here any more.'

‘Where is it, then?'

‘In heaven,' Lyndsay said uncertainly.

Hughie gave up. At the playgroup in Dean Cross where he went three mornings a week, there'd been talk of heaven at Christmas, when they'd made angels for their mothers with paper doily wings. Angels lived in heaven, and heaven was somewhere in the sky. With aeroplanes, Hughie supposed. And now Daddy, Mummy said. She couldn't seem to explain better than that, nor how he stayed up there, nor why he wasn't coming down again.

This not coming back was about the only thing Hughie began to have sight of. He didn't want to see it. He had an idea that, if he stayed somewhere very still, holding Seal and sucking his thumb, he would find, when he stopped being still and started moving again, that the world would have gone back to normal again as well. And Daddy would be there. He pulled the baseball cap down hard until he and Seal were huddled together in the privacy under its peak. He didn't know how long he would have to stay there, but he didn't mind. It would just take as long as it had to.

Lyndsay had Rose in bed with her, while Mary Corriedale cleaned up the kitchen and did some cooking. Lyndsay didn't want any cooking done because she wasn't hungry, but Mary said Dr Nichols had said she had to have some soup, and a bit of fish if she could face it. She couldn't. She couldn't face anything now except the pills he'd given her which sent her to sleep as if she were being drawn into it down a black velvet tunnel.

Rose was difficult to face, too. Because she was only a baby, and naturally ebullient, she seemed heartless, rampaging across Lyndsay's bed on her hands and knees and crashing shouting into the pillows. Lyndsay couldn't leave her to go in search of Hughie because she would immediately do something wild and destructive, and it wasn't possible to bring Hughie into bed, too, because, at the moment and even more than usual, Rose was anathema to him. Lyndsay knew most things, Hughie knew some things and feared and dreaded others, but Rose knew nothing, which made her terrible.

Lyndsay knew that Hughie was shut away in his bedroom trying to work some kind of magic, and her heart bled for him. Her heart bled all the time just now, she could feel it, could feel the dark, hot liquid seeping out of it and leaving it shrivelled up inside her like a dried-up nut kernel, dusty and dead.

‘Grieving is a journey,' Dr Nichols had said, his narrow young face turned seriously towards her. ‘When you're through – and you will be one day, I promise you – you won't be in the same place as you are now.'

Lyndsay had gazed at him. She wasn't in any place, that was part of the pain of it, she was just hanging somewhere suspended in nothingness and, now that Joe was dead, always would be. Dr Nichols was kind, and he didn't talk to you as if you were mentally subnormal, but for all his kindness and respectfulness, Lyndsay couldn't tell him that Joe had been everything to her, that, even if she couldn't talk to him, she never stopped adoring him,
needing
him. Nor could she tell Dr Nichols of a new suspicion that had come to haunt her, a hideous suspicion that she couldn't get out of her mind where it clung like some revolting fungus, and that was that, if he had lived, Joe's fatalism would in the end have damaged his children. And she, Lyndsay, would then have had to decide between them.

Harry stood in the space where Joe had died. The police had taken away the sack of fertilizer against which his head had rested and Harry had cleaned up the remainder himself. He had wanted to. There wasn't much to do, only a few smears of blood on nearby sacks and some scuffing on the dirt floor to rake over, and although he wept silently while he worked, he wanted to be there in that narrow space where Joe had last been.

‘Sorry, lad,' he kept saying to the empty air. ‘Sorry, lad. Sorry.'

The police had taken his gun away, too. He hoped they never brought it back. He'd got another old twelve-bore that would do for rats and rabbits, the gun he'd taught the boys to shoot with. They'd both been quick learners. If Harry had to put his hand on his heart and choose between them, he'd have to say Robin was the better shot, cool and accurate. But Robin had never had Joe's style. It used to give Harry pleasure watching Joe handling a gun, he looked such a natural; he made a gun look an innocent thing somehow, graceful.

Harry put his two hands against the sacks where Joe had leant and then his forehead on them. He didn't seem to want to be anywhere but here, he couldn't think of anywhere but here, where Joe was.

‘Don't worry, Dad,' Robin had said. ‘Don't try to do anything just now. I'll see to the urgent jobs.'

Robin was out right now on the tractor, on the 12-acre field Joe had planted with peas. He'd put in a lot of peas this year, nearly 50 acres of them, and more barley than usual, and linseed whose flax-blue flowers Lyndsay had always liked. Harry had only seen Lyndsay twice since Joe died, calling in at the house out of some instinct he couldn't define, and being tongue-tied when he got there, even with the children. Lyndsay looked like a ghost, as if she didn't belong to this world any more and didn't want to. Poor girl, Harry thought, poor girl. A widow and she isn't even thirty. She'd always seemed such a child beside Joe, so much smaller and younger, so dependent. Joe shouldn't have done it, Harry thought, watching Lyndsay making a sandwich for Rose with infinite, weary slowness, he shouldn't have left them alone like this, three little corks cast away on the ocean. But then he, Harry, shouldn't have left his gun unlocked either.

He felt that that thought was in Dilys's mind, all the time. Ever since the accident, as she called it, he had felt she was blaming him. Their lives had outwardly gone on much the same except that neither of them had any appetite to speak of, but Harry felt in some way that Dilys had banished him from being her husband, from being Joe's father. Joe had always been the topic that brought them together. For forty years and more, delight and anxiety about Joe had been a bond between them, the subject they could always feel themselves quite united in. But now it seemed that Dilys didn't want Harry anywhere near either her grief or her memories of Joe. He knew, at night, that she was lying beside him as wakeful as he was, and as preoccupied with the same thing, but if he spoke to her, she just said, ‘You get your sleep, Harry. It'll be six o'clock before you know it,' and left him there in his grief and loneliness, pulling away from him into her own. Harry had never known real grief before. Once or twice, in the last few days, he had wondered, without alarm, if it might kill him, and had known, simultaneously, that he would, at the moment, be glad if it hurried up and did.

He raised his head and looked at the shed roof. It was made of corrugated iron, and Joe had replaced some sheets in the autumn, but more needed it already. In some places, the iron was perforated with as many holes as a caterpillar leaves on a cabbage, and the rain had come in and left the fertilizer sacks dotted with rusty orange speckles. He'd have to get Robin to see to it, and to the blocked drainage ditches that Joe had never got round to. ‘I will, I will,' he'd say each week when Harry reminded him, and then something else had come up and they'd been forgotten. Like making a barn ready for these beef stores he'd set his heart on suddenly – days and days he'd spent on that. £400 apiece, he'd reckoned he'd have to pay for medium weight, maybe more. And he'd wanted twenty, Hereford or Limousin. Harry had set his face against the whole scheme, said he'd never had stock and he wasn't about to start. He hadn't shouted but he'd been obstinate, as obstinate as an old rock, an old root. It sickened him to think how obstinate he'd been, how resentful and unhelpful. And over twenty head of cattle, too. That was all. That was all Joe wanted. And he was prepared to do all the work himself, he wasn't asking Harry for anything except the initial investment. Harry leaned against the sacks again and closed his eyes. He couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear the way he'd been to Joe over those cattle. And he couldn't bear the fact that now, because of what Joe had done, he couldn't make it right.

Dilys put tea and cherry cake in front of the Vicar. It was his third visit since the accident and he still, Dilys observed, hadn't the first idea of what to say. He'd had some idea that Dilys might be worried about the sinfulness of suicide. She'd hardly known what he was talking about.

‘What do you mean, talking of sin?' she said. ‘What's sin got to do with it? Joe had his accident because he was driven to it. If you're driven to do something, you're the victim. Victims are innocent.'

The Vicar had wondered whether to outline the difference between innocence and helplessness, and decided against it. Instead, he had eaten a slice of cherry cake and complimented Dilys on it. She was being wonderful, everyone said so, going about her life as if nothing had happened, not hiding but being plainly, ordinarily visible, shopping in the village, baking cakes.

‘I am praying for you,' the Vicar said. ‘Daily. And for Harry and Joe and all your family.'

Dilys didn't snort exactly, but she looked as if she had never heard such an ineffectual suggestion in her life. She reminded the Vicar of an old woman from Dean Cross whom he had visited once as she lay dying of pneumonia in Stretton Hospital and to whom he had also said that he was praying for her. ‘Praying?' she'd said. ‘Praying? Prayer never buttered no parsnips.'

‘If you would ever like to talk to me,' the Vicar said now to Dilys, ‘any time, about anything, you only have to pick up the telephone.'

Dilys looked at him.

‘Grief is natural,' he said, looking at his teacup. ‘But it can frighten us by taking forms we were not looking for. And God—'

‘No,' Dilys said. ‘Not him.'

The Vicar sighed.

‘You are very brave,' he said. ‘But you cannot rely on your own strength alone.'

‘Can't I?' Dilys said. ‘Can't I?' She stood up, indicating that the visit was over. ‘If you'll excuse me, Vicar, that's the one thing I've left to me. The one thing.' And then she took his teacup away and put it by the sink.

Chapter Ten

The day of Joe's funeral dawned as clear as crystal. Even Robin, who was disposed to look at the weather with a remorselessly practical eye, felt obscurely that there was almost a cruelty in the brilliance of the light, as if it was pointing out that there could and should be no hiding from the manner of Joe's death.

Robin regarded himself without much recognition in the bathroom mirror while he shaved. He shaved with an old-fashioned razor, scraping away the dark shadow of stubble that had always appeared again by evening and which Caro, in the early days when she was still looking at him with some interest, had wanted him to remove a second time. He'd been up since four, woken by the thought of the day ahead, by the memory of the days behind and the people in them – Lyndsay, his parents, poor little Hughie. And he himself. He hardly knew what he felt himself, except that reality had simply drained out of things, that, even though he could still observe places and objects, they had lost their true nature and become extraneous. Nobody had asked him how he was. He hadn't expected them to.