Next of Kin (7 page)

The desk was orderly. Either side of her, at slight angles, two other sub-editors worked at desks of monumental chaos. Papers, coffee mugs, vases of dead flowers, galley proofs, empty crisp packets, fabric swatches and a confetti of little yellow memo notes were layered haphazardly across the surfaces, and out of the muddle, the computer screens rose calmly like periscopes. While Caro was dying, the inhabitants of these desks, Tessa and Bronwen, had showered Judy with attention and treats, as if she herself were some kind of invalid, bringing her flowers and fruit and single cream cakes, in paper bags. Now that Caro was dead, they were paralysed by not knowing what to do instead, and in consequence did nothing, averting their gazes from the photograph of Caro and whispering into their telephones as if by withdrawing in awkwardness they were somehow conveying both respect and sympathy.

‘How chronic,' Zoe said.

Zoe was Judy's new flatmate. She had arrived the week after the funeral, on the recommendation of a sister of Judy's last flatmate. ‘She's great,' they'd said. ‘You'll like her.'

She had dark-brown hair dyed claret-colour and cut very short. Her possessions were all carried up the four flights of stairs to the flat in carrier bags and cardboard boxes except for a fuchsia-pink Chinese silk quilt which unrolled to reveal two wooden herons at least half life-size.

‘I don't cook,' she said to Judy. ‘Can't. So no stink of vindaloo.'

Judy had told her about Caro the first evening.

‘I can't help it. I can't think about anything else. I feel I'm going about with “My mother's just died” written all over me. I expect I shouldn't mention it. People seem terrified I'm going to, and they'll get put on the spot. The girls at work are just pretending I'm not there till I get over it and everything's normal again.'

‘How chronic,' Zoe said. She glanced at Judy. ‘You look worn out.'

‘I can't sleep. I'm tired all the time and I can't sleep.'

‘It's sorrow,' Zoe said. She put her herons either side of the blocked-up fireplace in their little sitting-room. ‘Just sorrow. Worse than stress. Do you mind them there?'

‘Have you had anyone close to you die?'

Zoe looked away from the herons and at Judy instead.

‘My father.'

Judy seemed to sag with physical sympathy.

‘Oh—'

‘Three years ago. In Australia. He left my mother when I was eight, so I never knew him. We had two days together when I was seventeen and my mother just
freaked.
But I went all the same, and he was great. He was
fun
. He never said a bad thing about my mother all those two days. And then he went and
died
, the sod. I could kill him for that.'

Judy had wanted, then, to say, ‘I'm adopted,' but had held back with immense self-control. If she'd said it, she'd remember Caro saying to her, when she was five and first at school, ‘Now look, Judy. I chose you. I
chose
you.' And that would bring on the tears again. However sympathetic Zoe promised to be as a flatmate, one mustn't start such a relationship by crying all over it.

Now, sitting at her desk and ostensibly working on a piece about a fashion designer's country retreat in Brittany – it had big white sofas which for Judy had become the carelessly impractical benchmark of the very rich – Judy gazed at the list Zoe had made her. It was written on a long strip of green paper in Zoe's showy, rather childish hand, and it was headed ‘Sorrow', in capital letters. Underneath, Zoe had written, each word precisely below the one above, ‘Grief, Distress, Woe, Affliction, Pain, Ache, Misery, Unhappiness, Agony, Broken Heart, Ordeal, Shock, Depression, Gloom, Mental Suffering.'

‘That's why you feel bad,' Zoe had said, putting the list into Judy's hands. ‘That's sorrow for you. And that's only
some
of the symptoms.'

Judy held the list away from her.

‘Why do I need this?'

‘Because you've got to look it in the eye to get better.
All
of it.'

Caro would not have said that. Caro would have said, ‘You have to go on. That's all there is to do, sweetheart, just go on. Hold tight to yourself and on you go.' She'd talked that way after both the broken love affairs that Judy had had since she came to London, neither of them spectacular things, being more the product of Judy's hopes than of much reality, but both had been ended by the men.

‘Sorry, Judy, sorry, really sorry. You're sweet, but I—'

‘Judy, I'm not ready for this kind of relationship. It's not you, it's just that I can't cope with commitment, not yet—'

She had gone straight home to Caro on both occasions, and railed at herself for her height and her red hair and her untrendiness and her being adopted and anything else she could lay her racing mind on as the reason for first Tim and then Ed just walking away – slowly, certainly, and full of excuse and apology, but
away
. Caro had listened, Judy remembered, she had always listened, but then she had simply said, in her quiet, slow voice that had lost none of its Californian character, that Judy must simply light her candle again and walk forward into the dark. Caro loved that image, of the candle. She was always quoting it. Even as a little child, Judy was told she had a candle inside her nobody could snuff out,
nobody.
It was her candle. If only Caro had known, Judy thought, how she, Judy, had striven to believe her, had struggled to feel, even for a moment, that she had an inner flame that was both unquenchable and hers alone. All she had felt was that she had failed Caro in some way, and the fact that two profoundly unremarkable young men like Tim and Ed could ditch her was a kind of proof, however illogical, of that failure.

After Tim and Ed, she'd tried a bit of a vamp phase, wearing red lipstick and sleeping with men she didn't know very well. She never told Caro any of this; indeed had a feeling that, if she kept quiet, she would somehow break free of Caro and the burdening sensation of being her chosen daughter, but not essentially her daughter all the same. ‘We don't have rows,' Caro had once said of herself and Judy, to Lyndsay, ‘we just don't row.' Even then Judy had wondered if not having rows was a mark – an almost fatal mark – of the courtesy in their relationship, the courtesy between the chooser and the chosen. She remembered Lyndsay had looked at her very carefully. Lyndsay had been pregnant then, with Hughie, and was wearing a smock Caro had made for her, cream cotton printed with stiff little blue cornflowers. Caro had been very generous when Lyndsay was pregnant.

But this list . . . Judy held the green slip up and looked at it. She couldn't quite tell why, but it impressed her. It wasn't exactly unsympathetic but it was blessedly free of the anxious, soggy,
caring
quality of the expressions on colleagues' faces when she caught their eyes inadvertently in the lift or beside the water fountain. Zoe's list was practical, almost brisk. It seemed to imply that these feelings were the ones inevitably attendant upon the condition and therefore there would be something the matter with you if you
didn't
feel them. Only a freak, Zoe's list seemed to say, would not feel all these terrible things after the death of their mother. Failure – a sensation Judy was painfully accustomed to – lay, in fact, in insisting on keeping your candle alight when a time in the pitch-black was actually the right and proper thing to do.

Judy laid the list aside with a small feeling of respect, and turned back to her screen. The fashion designer said her heart absolutely
sank
every time she had to leave her Brittany paradise and return to her shop in Bond Street. ‘Devastated,' she said. ‘There's no other word for it. It's heart-breaking.' Judy was strongly tempted to add a sardonic sentence in brackets about the effect of this confession upon the fashion designer's loyal clientele who had presumably previously supposed that her commitment to their clothes was the centre of her life, and whose wardrobes had also paid for the white-sofaed house in Brittany. She glanced aside at Zoe's list. ‘Agony,' it said. ‘Broken Heart. Ordeal.' She glared at the screen.

‘You stupid cow,' she said aloud to the fashion designer. ‘You stupid, ignorant
cow
!'

That night, Zoe came home from her job as a photographer's assistant with a spinach tart in a cardboard box.

‘I just passed it. They'd taken £1.30 off the price because the shop was closing. D'you hate spinach?'

‘No,' Judy said. ‘Only swede.'

She had drunk two glasses of white wine since she'd got home, and eaten half a box of matzos which were strangely unappetizing and appetizing all at once. She had done this in front of the news on television followed by a game show and a programme proving that plants have feelings. Even swedes?

‘Good day?' Zoe said. She was dressed, as Judy was, all in black but boyishly, with heavy boots and a biker jacket.

Judy pulled a face.

‘Not good, but less bloody, maybe. I've got a commission to write a piece on marble.'

‘Halls?'

‘And walls. And bathrooms and kitchens and no doubt snug little marble bedrooms, too.'

Zoe held out the box.

‘Shall I heat this?'

‘Yes.'

‘Can't turn the oven on.'

Judy heaved herself out of her chair in a shower of matzo crumbs.

‘You're hopeless.'

‘So my boss says. I think I'm going to evening classes to learn Spanish.'

‘Why?'

‘Then I could go and take my own pictures of donkeys and hot villages instead of holding all the kit while someone else takes art shots of dustbins and tube trains.'

Judy went out to the kitchen. It was very small and she had painted it California yellow in homage to Caro, but rather badly so that shadows of its former royal blue showed through. Zoe had added nothing to the kitchen since she came, not a mug, not a spoon, not a poster. She bought food every day, for immediate eating, and ate it wherever she was, often standing up. Otherwise, she drank water out of the tap in one of Judy's mugs.

‘Don't you like coffee?'

‘Yes. Course I do.'

‘But—'

‘I'll go out and buy you as many gallons as you want,' Zoe said. ‘I just don't want to make it.'

Judy turned the oven on and slid the tart inside on a baking tray.

She shouted, ‘Want some wine?'

Zoe appeared in the doorway, holding Judy's box of matzos.

‘I don't drink.'

‘Heavens.
Don't
you?'

‘Don't like the taste. Judy—'

‘Yes?'

‘Have you got a boyfriend?'

Pause.

‘No,' Judy said and then, ‘I bet you have.'

Zoe took one of the matzos.

‘Yes. But it isn't working. It isn't going anywhere. It isn't even very interesting. He's called Ollie.'

‘Like an owl,' Judy said, pouring more wine.

‘No. More like a run-over stork. He was nice to me when my dad died.' She shot Judy a direct glance. ‘What about your dad?'

Judy said quickly, ‘He's a farmer.'

‘A
farmer?
Wow.'

Judy began opening cupboards in search of plates.

‘Why wow?'

‘Well, a
farmer
. I mean, most fathers do insurance and banks and computers and stuff. Not tractors. I don't need a plate.'

‘He's a dairy farmer. He has cows.'

‘Where?'

‘In the Midlands. Going towards Wales a bit.'

‘Did you grow up there?'

‘Yes.'

‘Can you milk?'

Judy said shortly, ‘Machines do it.' She stooped down and opened the oven door and laid a finger on the tart.

‘So your father's alone on this farm with these cows now your mother's dead?'

‘There's Gareth. And there's Joe and Lyndsay. And Granny and Grandpa.'

‘Sounds like Postman Pat,' Zoe said. ‘Why are you sulking? Why are you talking as if you hate all these people?'

Judy shut the oven door and pushed past Zoe into the sitting-room, holding her wineglass.

‘I don't belong there. I never did but it was OK while Mum was there because she didn't belong either. It isn't home, it's just where I had my childhood. Most of it, anyhow.'

She stopped. Zoe turned in the kitchen doorway, so that she was facing Judy, and leaned against the frame.

‘You adopted then?'

Judy nodded violently.

‘It's a lot, isn't it?' Zoe said. ‘To be adopted and then to lose your mother? It's a lot for one person to carry. What about your real mother?'

‘She lives in South Africa. She sends me birthday cards with proteas on and tells me about the weather.'

Zoe put the cracker box down on the floor and came to stand in front of Judy.

‘You want to get a hold on all this mess,' she said. ‘You want to sort of get your arms round it. It's no good pretending it isn't there.'

Judy held her wineglass tightly with both hands.

‘I'm not part of the family. You don't understand about farming families. They're different. They're all tight together, you have to be born in them to belong.'

‘Can I have a look?' Zoe said.

Judy stared at her.

‘A look at what?'

‘At this farm. At your dad, and these cows and everything.'

Judy said, ‘Are you saying you want to come to Tideswell?'

‘Yes.'

‘For the weekend?'

Zoe shrugged.