Next of Kin (32 page)

‘Well,' Debbie said.

Eddie put a packet on the kitchen table, a big envelope stiffened on one side with cardboard.

‘What've you got there?'

‘Pictures,' Eddie said. He had a rag tied round his head like a hippie bandanna.

‘What pictures?'

‘Pictures of me,' Eddie said. ‘Zoe did them.'

He upended the envelope and several black-and-white photographs slid smoothly out onto the table. Debbie peered.

‘Did she give them to you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Have I got to pay her?'

‘I dunno,' Eddie said, ‘she just gived them me.'

He heaved himself onto a chair and leaned, breathing heavily, over the open copy of
Farmers Weekly
.

‘Cor,' he said triumphantly, ‘you've gone and drawed in this book. You're not supposed to draw in books.'

‘It's not a book,' Debbie said, ‘it's a magazine.' She picked up one of the photographs. Eddie, halfway up a gate, had turned to look at the camera over his shoulder. It was excellent. It was Eddie precisely. If Zoe hadn't taken it, Debbie would have been thrilled with it.

‘I don't think you should have accepted these.'

Eddie wasn't listening. He picked up Debbie's felttip pen and was doodling across the advertisements for pig managers and flock assistants.

‘I'll get Dad to give them back. I'll get him to take them to the house in the morning.'

Eddie drew a dense blob, and then another one close to it. He sniggered.

‘Cow's jobs—'

Debbie whipped the pen out of his hand.

‘Dirty little brute. Where've you been all afternoon, anyway?'

‘Nowhere.'

‘Time you went to school,' Debbie said. ‘Time you had some discipline. Time—' She stopped. Eddie watched her. Something about her suggested to him that what she had been about to say affected him and was therefore worth focusing on. He regarded her steadily, not observing her so much as staring at her, to make her finish what she had been saying.

Debbie tossed her head. What did it matter? Eddie was hardly five after all, and it would be a relief to give vent to her feelings. Telling Eddie could do no harm.

‘Time we were all moving on,' Debbie said.

Robin was very tired. When he flexed his shoulders and back against the driver's seat of the Land Rover, he could feel the bones and muscles cracking and creaking in protest, stiffened by those hours and hours of mowing, day in, day out, and with a mower he should have replaced four or five years ago. When he'd stopped, at dusk, and sent Gareth home, he'd gone into the house for a shower and a mug of tea, and then told Zoe he had to go up to Dean Place, to see how things were.

‘Fine,' she'd said. She always said fine. Sometimes, when he went back into the house, she wasn't there, but quite often she was, drawing at the kitchen table, or casually involved with her own newly devised and eccentric version of domesticity. But she never seemed to be waiting for him; she was just there, pursuing her own life until there should be occasion for it to collide with his again. She'd got quite useful around the farmyard lately, could manage the slurry tractor and the milking machine. Robin wouldn't let her anywhere near the feed, though. Nobody touched the feed but him, not even Gareth. Too much depended on it.

He put the key into the ignition of the Land Rover and turned it. Outlined against the lit kitchen window of Dean Place Farm, Dilys stood waving. She never used to wave to him and if – as it seemed to him – her waving was a sign of how she'd changed, then he wished she wouldn't. She was altogether softer to him, and it unnerved him, as if something of spine had gone out of her and she was turning to him as Lyndsay had tried to. Robin was uncertain, driving the Land Rover steadily out of the yard and up the lane, that he could stand any more dependency just now.

Yet he'd known, sitting there with his parents that evening under the harsh overhead light, that their dependency was inevitable. Slowly, as if reciting something learned by rote, Dilys had told him that they'd decided to give up the farm. They couldn't manage it alone any more, and they couldn't manage hired help either. They would move as soon as the landlord could find a new tenant, sooner than the six months' required notice of quitting had expired, if possible. They'd start looking for somewhere in Stretton, somewhere manageable but with a bit of garden so that Harry could grow some vegetables. Perhaps Lyndsay's father would help them.

‘I never thought,' Harry said, ‘I never thought it would come to this.'

‘No.'

‘I thought I'd die in my bed here.'

‘Now, Harry,' Dilys said, but there was no reproach in her voice.

On we go, Robin thought wearily now, on we go because we don't really have a choice, it's all we can do. You can assume nothing, take nothing for granted because nothing is certain as it once used to seem. In a few months, the face of our lives, of our farms, will be utterly changed, Mum and Dad gone, Lyndsay gone, only me left doing whatever it is I think I'm doing. I knew once, I know I did, but once was long ago.

He swung the Land Rover in through the yard gates at Tideswell, tiny moths dancing in the headlight beams. The light was on in the kitchen, and in the bathroom on the first floor, and he remembered, with a sudden unbidden pang, how it had been to come back, in those first weeks and months after Caro's death, to a dark house, an empty house, with only the house cat offering her composed and silent company. He got out of the Land Rover stiffly, slammed the door and leaned against it for a moment, collecting himself. Then he moved slowly forward and opened the back door and let himself into the house.

Zoe was standing by the cooker, holding a mug in both hands.

‘Hi,' she said. She was smiling. She took one hand away from the mug and motioned towards the table where Gareth sat, unfamiliar in an off-duty leisure shirt with his hair parted and smooth. He stood up when Robin came in.

‘He's been waiting nearly an hour,' Zoe said. ‘I thought you'd be back long before now.'

Robin looked at Gareth.

‘Sorry,' Gareth said. ‘Sorry to come so late and without warning. But I wondered—' He paused and then he said with difficulty, ‘I wonder if I could have a quick word with you?'

Chapter Seventeen

‘No,' Hughie said.

Lyndsay put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Lie down, Hughie. Lie down. It's bedtime, it's time to go to sleep.'

Hughie didn't move. He sat bolt upright in bed in his grandmother's smallest bedroom wearing his baseball cap. That day, he had been taken somewhere he had not liked, not at all, and told that this would be his new bedroom. He had said no. He didn't need a bedroom, he already had a bedroom in his own house where his bean bag was. It was his own room with his own bed in it. In the place where they had been today with Granny Sylvia, the bedroom they said would be his wouldn't be his at all because Rose would be in it, too. She would have to be because the only other room would have Lyndsay's bed in it. Hughie quite saw why Lyndsay didn't want Rose in her bedroom, but by the same token, he couldn't see why he was expected not to mind having to have her. He did mind. He wasn't sleeping in that room and he wasn't sleeping with Rose. In fact, he wasn't going to sleep anywhere at all until he was taken back to his proper place for sleeping, in his own room.

‘No,' he said again.

‘Please,' Lyndsay whispered. She dared not speak too loudly in case her parents heard her, and drew conclusions. Her mother had always said she thought Rose was out of control; now she had begun to hint that Hughie was, too, implying that Lyndsay was failing already in her task – hard, said Sylvia, but not impossible – of bringing the children up alone.

‘If I lie down with you,' Lyndsay said, ‘will you lie down then?'

‘No,' Hughie said. He held Seal against him.

‘You'll be so tired, if you don't sleep—'

‘Sleep at my house,' Hughie said babyishly.

‘We can't.'

Hughie said nothing. When Lyndsay began to talk rubbish like this and not to make sense, as she hadn't when Daddy went away, he had learned to say nothing, but just to wait. Hughie had got good at waiting recently. Uncle Robin had said he had to do it, to feel better, and it had seemed to be something Hughie could do, as long as things stayed the same, as long as he was in his house and Seal was there, and Lyndsay didn't keep putting him in the car and telling him, in a bright voice he mistrusted, that he was going to see Granny Sylvia. He didn't want to see Granny Sylvia, he didn't want to see any grannies. He had grown tired, just recently, of being carried about like a parcel and given instructions. When Rose was told to do things she didn't want to, she roared. Hughie wasn't going to roar, he wasn't going to do anything Rose did. In fact, he wasn't going to do anything at all, and he wasn't, if he could help it, going to be where he didn't want to be either. He gave a quick glance at his left shoulder. Lyndsay's hand still lay there. He could see her ring with the blue jewels in it, and her plain one, golden colour, that she said you got given when you were married. Hughie wondered, briefly, who gave you the golden ring when you were married, and then he darted his head sideways, quick as a flash, and bit Lyndsay, as hard as he could, on her hand.

Bronwen was engaged. The whole features department at the magazine had erupted in excitement and were clustering round her, admiring her ring – Victorian, set with pearls and garnets – and drinking sparkling white wine out of paper cups.

‘He said he was going to wait until our holiday to propose,' Bronwen said, ‘and then he couldn't. He said he just couldn't wait. So we'll have a honeymoon before our wedding, and another one afterwards.'

‘You make the most of this,' the features editor said. ‘This is a wonderful time, before reality sets in. You relish it.'

Tessa was keeping an eye on Judy. She noticed that Judy had admired Bronwen's ring just like everyone else, and that she had her paper cup of wine, and she looked all right. But Tessa also knew Oliver had stopped phoning. Comforting Judy over the death of her mother had been one thing, an awkward, inarticulate, impossible thing, but comforting her for the loss of Oliver was quite another. This was territory Tessa understood. Being chucked had a currency of comforting Tessa was perfectly easy with. She watched Judy carefully and prepared heartening, who-cares, sisterhood things to say if Judy looked as if she needed them, if the sight of Bronwen's triumph became too much to bear. Tessa had a new boyfriend herself in fact; she'd known him for three weeks and he was shaping up quite nicely considering that he was younger than she was, and going prematurely bald. But before him there'd been no-one for almost ten months, and the memory of those ten months made Tessa very anxious indeed to be kind to Judy. She leaned across from her desk and touched Judy's arm.

‘You OK?'

Judy glanced at her and nodded. She was looking good, Tessa thought, especially now she was growing her hair a bit. It was dramatic hair, thick and shiny, not the kind you could cut into a bob like half the office, but the kind you had to have more of and let go a bit wild.

‘I just wondered—'

‘It's OK.'

‘Do you want to talk about it?'

Judy drank from her paper cup.

‘There isn't much to say. I don't even know if I was in love with him, not properly. I liked him. You couldn't not like him, but he wasn't – well, he wasn't—'

‘A passion,' Tessa said. ‘The big pash.'

‘No.'

‘But nobody wants to be chucked, all the same.'

Judy said, surprising herself, ‘He did it very nicely. In a funny way, I wasn't even altogether surprised.'

‘But you must be hurt, you must be—'

Judy gave her a quick smile.

‘Sorry to be disappointing,' she said, ‘but I don't seem to be. Not badly, anyhow.'

Tessa said, determined to get some mileage out of her need to sympathize, ‘And so soon after your mother—'

Judy took a pen out of her pen mug and balanced it carefully on its end.

‘Oliver was good about that. He made me talk about her. He made me think about her as a person, not just as my mother.' She let the pen fall. ‘He made me think about a lot of things.'

‘Don't you want to kill him?' Tessa said. ‘Don't you want to wreck his car and ruin his career and cut the crotch out of all his trousers?'

‘Isn't it funny?' Judy said, ‘but I don't. I'd have thought I wanted to, but I don't. There are people I want to kill, but not Oliver.'

Tessa looked round, with elaborate furtiveness.

‘Starting in here—'

Judy said, ‘I'm wondering whether to stay.'

‘What!'

‘I don't know but I'm thinking about it. I'm not sure why I'm here, if you know what I mean, I'm not sure what I'm doing.'

Tessa finished her cup and crushed it up between her hands.

‘It's a job, isn't it? Pay's OK, work conditions OK, people pretty lousy, but what d'you expect on a magazine like this? And you're good at it. I wouldn't be prepared to say this every day, but you're better than Bron and me. You've got more ideas.'

‘Pointless ones, most of the time,' Judy said. ‘I can't help feeling the whole thing is pointless.'

Tessa threw her crushed paper cup in a competent arc into Judy's waste-paper bin.

‘Don't tell me you've got a social conscience, next stop Greenpeace activist—'