Next of Kin (17 page)

It was only crossing the yard some ten minutes later that he became aware that the telephone was ringing, inside the house. For some reason, he had the sudden feeling that it had been ringing for some time, insistently, and he began to run, opening the back door and the kitchen door and running through, clumsily, still in his boots. The house cat, sitting neatly on the kitchen table beside Robin's almost empty plate, stopped a careful washing to watch.

He seized the telephone.

‘Hello? Hello? Tideswell Farm—'

‘Robin?'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘Lyndsay, yes—'

‘I need you to come,' Lyndsay said. ‘I need you to.
Now
.' Her voice rose almost to a scream. ‘Come now, Robin, come now. Joe's done something terrible!'

Chapter Nine

It was Harry's old dog who had found him. Harry's custom, at around nine-thirty every evening, was to take a heavy-duty torch and go round the yard and the buildings, accompanied – very slowly now – by the old spaniel. He'd been an active dog once, perhaps the best rough-shooting dog Harry had ever had, but arthritis had seized his back legs and slowed him up, and there were cataracts forming in filmy discs in both his eyes. But his sense of smell was as good as ever. Slow and stiff, he creaked behind Harry on those nightly rounds, his nose on the ground, never missing a detail.

He had halted beside the store where the fertilizer was kept. It was a big open shed, roofed in corrugated iron where the great solid white 500-kilogram sacks of woven plastic were stacked in double columns, slightly higher than a man's height, leaving narrow aisles between for access. The dog had paused by the entrance to one of these aisles, head down, intent.

‘Come up, lad,' Harry said, from twenty feet further on.

The dog took no notice. Despite his age and decrepitude, a kind of urgency seemed suddenly to seize him and he began to sniff with the concentration that had made him once so useful in the field. Then he gave a curious little whine, a sound both of excitement and distress, and thrust himself with force and purpose down between the white sacks towards the back of the shed. Harry retraced his steps.

‘Come on, lad, come on. Out of there. What've you got?'

The dog was scuffling frantically at something in the darkness. Harry raised his torch and shone the beam down the gleaming white corridor created by the fertilizer sacks. There at the back, slumped sideways in the narrow space, was something bulky, and horrible. Harry took an unsteady step forward, and forced himself to shine the torchbeam directly in front of him. It fell on Joe, still in his work clothes, slumped behind an old twelve-bore lying askew against his shoulder, and shot through the mouth.

‘Dr Nichols is here,' Dilys said. ‘And the police are coming.'

She was sitting at the kitchen table, bolt upright under the harsh overhead light. Opposite her, Harry sat in his usual chair with his eyes closed. Between them, her head down on her arms, Lyndsay half lay across the table, her hair spread over her face so that Robin couldn't see it.

He stooped by his mother and put his arm round her. She accepted his embrace but did not in any way relax into it.

‘One shot, Dr Nichols said. Just the one. He took Dad's gun.'

Harry said in a whisper, not opening his eyes, ‘I didn't lock it. I didn't lock it up. I was going to have a go at them crows. In the morning.'

Robin moved round the table and put his hand on his father's. Harry seized it.

‘I didn't lock it—'

‘It wasn't your fault,' Robin said. His voice sounded harsh and loud. ‘If he wanted a gun, he'd have got one. Yours was just handy.'

Tears were streaming down Harry's face. He opened his eyes and looked intently at Robin, and then he opened his mouth, too, and jabbed a fore-finger inside it and his wet eyes widened in horror and rage.

‘Dad,' Robin said, ‘it wasn't your fault. It wasn't anybody's fault. It wasn't even Joe's.'

‘It was mine,' Lyndsay said. Her voice seemed to come from miles away, as if her cloud of hair was muffling her mouth, like a duvet.

‘No,' Robin said.

She sat up partially, staring at the scrubbed tabletop between her spread arms.

‘I didn't see,' Lyndsay said. ‘I didn't see how bad it was for him. All I could see was how bad it was for me.'

Robin left his father and crouched by Lyndsay's chair.

‘It
was
bad for you,' he said. ‘It was bad for all of us, but especially for you.'

She turned sideways then, and put her arms around his neck and fell against him, heavy and helpless. He stood up with difficulty, holding her, feeling her despair in the yielding weight of her body.

‘I loved him,' Lyndsay said. ‘I loved him more than anything in the world.'

Dilys made a tiny sound in her throat, but her position never changed.

‘I know. He knew, too.'

‘No,' Lyndsay said. ‘No. I couldn't reach him. He couldn't hear me. And I didn't keep trying, I didn't keep helping, and he got so lonely, didn't he, he got so lonely he couldn't bear the pain, and he knew I couldn't help him, I wasn't strong enough, he knew he'd chosen someone who was wrong for him, someone who'd let him down in the end, who'd leave him to be alone – oh God,' Lyndsay said, gasping and crying, sagging against Robin. ‘Oh God, oh God, what have I done?'

Robin glanced across the table at his mother. Dilys nodded and got up.

‘Brandy. And I'll put the kettle on.'

‘Old Kep found him,' Harry said, rolling his head back and forth across his chairback, his eyes closed again. ‘Old Kep did. I thought it was rats he was after, just rats—'

‘I didn't think,' Lyndsay wept. ‘I just didn't think! He didn't come in for supper but he often didn't. I was watching television. I was just watching television when Dilys rang. Oh I hate myself, I hate myself, I do, I do, I do—'

Dilys put a flat half-bottle of brandy on the table and a handful of tiny glasses, rimmed in gold and painted with mallards.

‘Tea coming up.'

Robin adjusted his embrace of Lyndsay, and lowered her gently into her chair again. He reached past her, and poured brandy into two of the glasses, pushing one towards his father.

‘Drink this.'

Lyndsay's hands were shaking as violently as if they had an existence of their own, uncontrolled by her. Robin bent and put an arm round her shoulders and lifted the brandy to her mouth.

‘Just a sip. The shock of drinking it will steady the rest of you.'

Lyndsay swallowed and coughed.

‘I don't want to live without him, I can't, I can't—'

Robin held the glass up again.

‘Just drink.'

She obeyed and then pushed his hands away, putting her own up to her face so that it was quite covered by them.

Harry said, leaning forward and speaking urgently to Robin, ‘I should have locked that gun up, lad. I should have. I
should
.'

Robin said gently, ‘We never lock our guns up, Dad. Do we? We're supposed to, and we never do. Shouldn't think Joe's is locked up, even now.'

Dilys said from the far side of the kitchen, pouring boiling water from the kettle into the teapot, ‘You're wrong there. Quite wrong. Joe did things properly. He always did things properly.'

Robin reached out to touch both Lyndsay and Harry's shoulders, either side of him, and then he went across the room to his mother. He put an arm around her again, pressing her towards him.

‘I know,' he said.

She gave him a quick, glaring glance.

‘You none of you knew,' Dilys said, bending away to put the lid on the teapot. ‘You never understood.'

Robin waited, his arm still about her unyielding shoulders. He glanced behind him and saw that Harry had reached out across the table, to hold Lyndsay's nearest wrist, even though she wasn't looking at him, couldn't see anything but the blackness behind her hands.

There was a sound of cars approaching, and two sets of headlights, their beams full on, swung into the yard outside the kitchen window. Dilys moved herself out of the circle of Robin's arm.

‘There,' she said. ‘The police.'

The night after Robin's call, Judy couldn't sleep. She lay alone, not daring to close her eyes, terrified of the images that printed themselves immediately, luridly, on the insides of her eyelids.

‘How,' she had said to Robin, hating herself, paralysed by shock, ‘how did he—'

‘He put the barrel of Grandpa's shotgun in his mouth. The shot took off the back of his head and went into the sack behind, the fertilizer sack he was leaning against. The police – the police said the shot hadn't gone far because he'd, well, he'd such a thick skull—'

Robin had offered to come to London.

‘I'll come and get you. You shouldn't be alone.'

‘I'm not. Zoe's here—'

‘Good,' Robin said.

‘Dad—'

‘Yes?'

‘Why?' Judy wailed, her voice rising to a sobbing scream. ‘Why? Why?'

‘I don't know,' Robin said. ‘I can only guess.'

‘And Lyndsay? And the kids?'

‘Not good. She's got some sedative. Mary Corriedale's there for the children.'

‘What's going on?' Judy yelled. ‘What's going on with first Mum, now Joe?'

‘It's – it's just how things go,' Robin said. His voice was faint with fatigue. ‘Sometimes. It's just chance. And people. Different people. Some of us can cope with things, some can't—' He broke off. ‘Sure you don't want me to come?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'll ring you tomorrow.'

‘OK.'

‘Judy—'

‘Mmm?'

‘Judy, I'm sorry it's me that makes these calls. I'm sorry it's always me.'

Oliver had offered to stay. He had made her tea and tried to make her eat and said that he would sleep there, just for comfort. But she had felt that she could bear nobody there, not even Oliver, that she couldn't bear kindness and sweetness and sympathy, that such comforts were in another, and temporarily irrelevant, realm from the thing that Joe had done, to himself, to all of them. It was something beyond horror, beyond outrage, because it spoke of a pain Judy couldn't even conceive of, and of despair. In all her own wretchedness, in all her own insecure, self-loathing miseries, Judy knew that she had never seen the face of the despair that Joe had known. She had seen the greyness of disappointment and anxiety and doubt; he had seen the blackness of no hope, no hope whatever now and not the remotest possibility of hope in the future, a prospect that quite simply broke his heart and mind and spirit.

So he had decided to end it. It was so easy, Judy thought, for farmers to act, once they had decided that any more life was out of the question. Those hours of solitude, whole stretches of day alone on the land, and, in Joe's case, alone without living things, without cows and sheep and pigs and all their needs and noises and dependencies. And then those stores of drugs and poisons, bottles and sacks and sachets and phials of remedies for pests and diseases, a whole liquid and powdered armoury for self-destruction. And guns. In Judy's childhood, Harry's gun had lived on two hooks screwed into the wall by the kitchen door, angled to hold it when it was broken. Guns for vermin, for rats and crows and rabbit, guns for the pot, for pigeon and pheasants, guns for that ancient instinct for self-defence, of land and family and livelihood; guns, as a final gesture of defiant independence, against all the accepted laws of human behaviour, to turn upon oneself.

The handle of Judy's bedroom door turned slowly, and the door opened three inches.

‘You awake?' Zoe whispered.

‘Of course—'

Zoe crept in. She wore an oversized grey T-shirt and her feet were bare.

‘This is bad,' Zoe said. Judy felt her slight weight as she sat down on the end of the bed. ‘This is so bad.'

‘I can't stop thinking, picturing—'

‘Me, too.'

‘It's so violent—'

‘Death is violent,' Zoe said. ‘There must be a moment of dying when it is for everyone, even for people who just die in their sleep. But this is the worst.'

‘I can't imagine how he felt—'

Zoe drew her feet up and pulled her T-shirt down over her bent knees so that her outline became a rough cube to Judy, silhouetted against the light from the street lamp that shone up through the curtains.

‘I hope we never can,' Zoe said, and then, after a pause, ‘Do you believe in God?'

‘No.'

‘Me neither.'

‘Nor does my father,' Judy said. ‘He thinks that if there is anything up there it's definitely against him and not for him. If he's ever in a church you can see he can't wait to get out.'

Zoe put her head down on her knees.

‘Will Joe have a funeral?'

‘I don't know. I suppose so. Gran and Grandpa would expect it.'

‘Poor them—'

‘Gran thought the sun rose and set with Joe. You could see, when she just looked at him.'

‘I won't come to the funeral,' Zoe said.

Judy waited.

‘I didn't know Joe,' Zoe said. ‘I'd look like those people who stop and gawp at car accidents.'

‘I don't want to go alone—'

‘Take Oliver.'

‘He doesn't know any of them—'

‘He knows you.'

Judy sat up slowly, propping herself on her arms.