Next of Kin (27 page)

She did need help. She actually, though her mind shrank from admitting it, needed help that was nothing to do with the physical. She needed Zoe there as a diversion to reconcile her to having Harry back; Harry, and not Joe. She thought Zoe understood this. It was odd, really, with Zoe being the last sort of person Dilys would ever have, in her right mind, dreamed of relying on. But there was something about her that suited the moment, fitted Dilys's need, soothed Dilys's anguish at finding herself so helpless.

The wheelchair came down the ramp and into the yard.

‘There's someone in the kitchen who'll be pleased to see you,' Dilys said.

She put a hand on his shoulder. She couldn't kiss him, especially not in front of the ambulance men. There was a brief mad gleam of hope in Harry's eyes and then it died and he said, ‘Kep? Old Kep?'

She nodded. The auxiliary began to wheel Harry towards the open back door.

‘I thought Zoe was coming. She said she would.'

Harry said, ‘In the hospital they asked if she was my granddaughter.'

‘She's been good,' Dilys said. She pushed the back door flat against the wall to allow the chair to be wheeled through.

‘We've got a diet sheet,' the auxiliary said, ‘and a walking frame. Haven't we?'

‘I'm not using no frame,' Harry said. ‘I've got sticks. I've got my old dad's sticks. Sticks is what I'll use.'

The auxiliary winked at Dilys.

‘Frames are steadier—'

‘I don't want to be steady,' Harry said. ‘I don't want no more molly-coddling.'

In the kitchen, Kep rose creaking from his bed and came towards Harry, heavy with relief, wagging and grunting.

‘There's a lad,' Harry said, touching his head. ‘All right, boy? All right then?'

The auxiliary took a sheaf of neatly folded papers out of his uniform pocket and laid them on the kitchen table.

‘All the forms—'

‘What forms?'

‘For the loan of the chair and the walking frame, dear. Hospital property.'

‘You can take them now,' Dilys said. ‘We don't want them. Help him into his chair by the table and take that thing away.'

The auxiliary looked at her.

‘You'd be better, you know, for ten days or so—'

‘No, thank you,' Dilys said. It was alarming to kick away the props but it had to be done. If Zoe had been there, she wouldn't have had a single qualm. ‘You take them back. We'll manage.' She looked at Harry. ‘He's only seventy-one, you know. He isn't a hundred.'

The auxiliary shrugged. He picked up all the forms but one, a sheet of pale-green paper printed in neat columns.

‘I'll leave you the diet sheet, then.'

‘I'm a farmer's wife,' Dilys said. ‘Do you think I don't know about nutrition?'

The auxiliary sighed.

‘As you say,' he said and then added with an edge of exasperation, ‘Madam.'

He went back out into the yard, clumping Harry on the shoulder as he went. They heard him calling for the driver.

‘Do you want that thing?' Dilys said to Harry, pointing at the wheelchair. He shook his head.

‘I got your sticks out. Zoe polished them. The blackthorn and your father's with the stag-horn handle.'

The ambulance men came back into the kitchen.

‘OK then,' the driver said to Harry. ‘All for independence then, squire? Which is your chair? That one? Very well, squire, that one you shall have.'

Dilys watched as the two of them stooped and lifted Harry smoothly from the wheelchair and then into his accustomed wooden carver at the head of the kitchen table. He looked so light in their hands, as if he were made of paper or balsa wood, light and perishable.

‘You going to manage, dear?' the driver said to Dilys. ‘Baths and the toilet and all that?'

‘He's going to manage himself,' Dilys said. ‘He's home and he's going to get better.'

‘Better take it easy for a day or two. Better have a bit of help, just for a while—'

‘I have help,' Dilys said. ‘She couldn't be here this morning, but I have help.'

‘Good,' the driver said. ‘That's the way.' He gave Harry a wave. ‘Cheerio, squire. Take care.'

The auxiliary looked at Dilys. She was plainly on his mind.

‘You sure?'

She nodded emphatically. ‘Thank you for bringing him home.'

They grinned.

‘All in a day's work,' the driver said. ‘No problem.'

They went out into the yard and could be heard banging up the ramp and the rear doors of the ambulance, and then the driver and passenger doors slammed and the engine started.

‘They're off then,' Harry said. ‘They're going.'

He was leaning forward, his hands clasped in his lap. Dilys couldn't look at him. The ambulance turned slowly in the yard, reversing, as everyone always reversed, towards the old poultry-feed store, and then drove away, its engine getting fainter and fainter as its sound was swallowed up by the hedges either side of the lane, and then by distance.

In the kitchen, neither of them moved. It was quite silent, except for old Kep, panting under the table where he lay across Harry's feet.

Harry looked at Dilys.

‘Lyndsay back yet?'

‘No.'

‘Men in today? Men from the agency?'

‘No,' Dilys said. ‘Robin sacked them. He's trying to sort something else out this morning.'

‘Bad, that,' Harry said. ‘Bad, with silage starting next week.'

Dilys said nothing. Harry went on looking at her.

‘So there's no-one?' he said. His hands moved a little in his lap. ‘No-one but you and me?'

Velma left her bike where she always did, leaning against the fence by the back door at Tideswell Farm. She propped it up with a brick under the pedal and then put an old supermarket plastic bag over the saddle in case it should come on to rain. There were, as Caro and then Robin had endlessly pointed out to her, plenty of places nearby where Velma could put her bike under cover, but, as with electricity, Velma preferred to do things her own way, and to leave her bike in the open, in a particular spot, with its saddle shrouded in a supermarket bag.

She took another bag out of her bike basket. It contained, at Robin's request, a box of cornflakes, a carton of orange juice, a loaf of bread and a jar of marmalade. The loaf was sliced white and both the juice and the marmalade were the cheapest the village shop provided. Velma couldn't vouch for their quality but then, their quality wasn't of any consequence. Robin didn't notice and anything was good enough for that girl, that girlfriend of Judy's. When Velma had looked up at the house as she parked her bike, she'd seen that Zoe's bedroom curtains were still drawn across. Nine o'clock in the morning and still in bed and on a Thursday. Sundays would have been different, Sundays were excusable for a lie-in, but not Thursdays. Velma opened the back door. Better not, maybe, think about Sundays. Sundays were, as far as her husband and son and son-in-law were concerned, days for lounging about half dressed until noon and then going down to the pub and coming home legless three hours later to snore in the front room. It meant she had her daughters and her daughter-in-law round her neck all Sunday, smoking and moaning. She dumped the carrier bag on Robin's kitchen table. Sundays had come to be almost the worst day of the week.

The little red light on the telephone-answering machine was winking and the liquid crystal display said that there were three messages. Velma considered whether to play them back and decided not. That madam upstairs could do it when she deigned to appear. It was, after all, one of the few things she could do, apart from take up space. Debbie said she was being quite a help up at Dean Place, but Velma doubted it. She couldn't see that Zoe could possibly be a help anywhere, she'd never met a girl that useless except perhaps for Patsy who'd married her Kevin and spent her whole life whining for fitted carpets and holidays in Ibiza. Kevin had to come home if he wanted a square meal since Patsy refused to do more than open packets. Patsy and Zoe, Velma thought, looking resignedly into the sink, were two of a kind, and not a kind she had any time for. If you weren't even going to wash a casserole dish, what prevented you from even running water into it to stop everything sticking on hard? At least the casserole had been eaten. Robin must have eaten a decent meal at last because Zoe wouldn't have eaten it. Zoe lived on rubbish, like Patsy did. Good food was wasted on someone like Zoe.

Velma ran hot water into the sink and attempted, as she did every morning, to marshal the chaos of papers on the table into some kind of order.

‘Putting mess into squares,' Caro had called it. ‘Makes you feel better, somehow, doesn't it? As if you're in control and not the muddles.'

Velma thought of Caro most days, whether she wanted to or not. It was something about the house, she supposed, being the place where Caro had lived all those years. Women did leave their mark on houses, even houses they didn't like, and Caro hadn't liked Tideswell. But she'd somehow had to live there, all the same. She'd been a puzzle to Velma. Nice to work for, considerate, but not quite with you, somehow, always a bit, well, foreign. She'd never belonged. Even if she'd never got that tumour and had lived to be an old lady, she'd never have belonged. Not like Joe. Joe had belonged, through and through. Velma still couldn't think of him without wanting to cry her eyes out.

She added washing-up liquid to the sink of hot water and whipped it up to a foam with a bottle brush. She'd thought she'd leave everything there for a while, to soak, and she'd go upstairs and give the bathroom a bit of a go, loudly, to wake that dratted girl up. Robin left the bathroom like a pigsty every morning anyway, you'd have thought he brought half the farm home with him every day. It had never been like that when Caro was alive. But then Caro had been an American, and Americans had strict notions of hygiene and dream bathrooms, she'd seen them in magazines and on the television.

Velma collected her cloths and spray bottles from under the sink, and went slowly upstairs. There was a shoe on the stairs, or a boot rather, one of the ugly great things Zoe wore. Velma picked it up, and then put it down again. Zoe could pick it up for herself. Velma climbed on and emerged on to the landing. All the bedroom doors were open, except Zoe's and the one that had been Caro's. Velma could see that Robin hadn't made his bed, she could see the end of it, all tossed and rumpled, and the duvet half on the floor. Most days he made an attempt, at least, to straighten it. Perhaps today he'd been in an extra rush what with having to turn those fellows off from Dean Place and now find replacements. She thought she'd just go in and make his bed for him before she started on the bathroom. He had, she reflected, a lot on his plate just now.

She put her cloths and bottles down on the floor outside the bathroom and went into Robin's bedroom. Only one set of curtains was drawn back; the others, at the window closest to the bed, were still pulled across. Velma looked at the bed. It wasn't made at all, and it wasn't empty either. Zoe was in it, fast asleep, with her back to Velma, her dark-red hair deep in the pillows. It was warm in the room, with the sun coming in through the east window, and Zoe had pushed the bedclothes down; not very far down, but quite far enough to reveal to Velma that she was completely naked.

‘I came to see how you are,' Robin said.

He sat in Lyndsay's parents' sitting-room in his usual position, on the edge of an armchair with his elbows on his knees. He looked, Lyndsay thought, different, though she couldn't quite define why. Less tired, somehow, less unhappily preoccupied.

‘I'm OK,' she said.

Hughie sat on the floor at her feet. He wore his baseball cap and boots his grandfather had bought him, tough-boy boots of brown suede with brass eyelets where the laces went. He found these boots quite amazing. He couldn't recognize his feet in them at all. Some distance away, Rose was taking books out of a bookcase, rapidly and rapturously, supposing it to be forbidden. Her excited guilty pleasure made her, temporarily at least, very quiet.

‘When are you coming back?'

Hughie looked up from his boots.

‘Soon,' Lyndsay said.

‘We've got a lot to talk over,' Robin said. ‘There's a lot to be sorted. Dad came home this morning.'

‘Oh,' Lyndsay said. She looked down at her lap. ‘I'm not sure I'll be staying—'

‘Where?'

‘At Dean Place?'

Robin leaned forward.

‘Not staying?'

‘I don't know,' Lyndsay said. ‘It's only an idea, an idea my parents had. Of – of a new life, in a way. A new life for me.'

‘Lyndsay,' Robin said, ‘you own fifty-two per cent of the shares in that farm. Joe's shares are your shares.'

‘I – I'm not sure that I want them.'

Robin got up and crossed the thick, pale patterned carpet to the sofa where Lyndsay sat. He sat down beside her.

‘You can't think like that.'

She looked sideways at him.

‘Lyndsay,' Robin said, ‘you can't decide something like this so soon. In a way it isn't even your decision.' He glanced down at Hughie. ‘There's him, and there's Rose. Farms—' He paused. ‘Farms aren't like other businesses, they aren't, in a way, ours to get rid of. I suppose it's because they're a way of life.'

‘And death,' Lyndsay whispered. She turned a little on the sofa, so that she was half towards Robin. ‘I don't think I can face it.'

‘What?'