Next of Kin (31 page)

Oliver was carrying yet another slender paper cone of freesias and a bottle of New Zealand Chardonnay. He sat on the bus going out towards Judy's flat right down the Fulham Road with the wine held upright between his thighs and the flowers balanced against it, lightly, so that they didn't crush. He was sweating slightly. It wasn't a particularly hot day, but he noticed that, when he touched the plastic bag that the wine was in, his fingers slipped a little. He supposed that that was because he was nervous.

He was nervous because of the things he had spent the last few weeks screwing his courage up to say to Judy. He wanted to be kind in the way he said them, but he also wanted to leave her quite clear about what he was saying. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, and that she aroused interest in him as well as protective feelings, but he also wanted to tell her – and here he had to peel his hand away from the wine bottle – that he couldn't, for the moment, go on having a relationship with her, not a relationship of constant companionship and willing sexual fidelity. There wasn't anyone else, he would say, he could promise that. It was simply that he couldn't go on loving someone who kept sucking him down into the bog of her own personality problems – or at least, he could love them, but he couldn't live with them.

He thought Judy had had quite a hard deal in life, but not as hard a one as she seemed to believe. Of course it was hard to be abandoned by your natural mother, but if that mother had plainly not wanted you, and had then patently never regretted giving you up, could you possibly, unless you were mulishly obstinate about being made happy, insist that your life would have been better with her? Oliver had seen a photograph of Judy's real mother, and several birthday cards of flamboyantly flowering South African plants, and had thought that both looked loud and insensitive. Whereas Caro had clearly been neither and had, into the bargain, wanted Judy as badly as her own mother hadn't. And Oliver liked Judy's father. Judy had complained about him a lot, especially with reference to his treatment of Judy's dead mother, but to Oliver, none of her complaints seemed quite to square with the man he had met during the uncle's funeral. On the way back to London, after the funeral, it had occurred to Oliver that her persistent attitude to her father was just one more of Judy's excuses, excuses for not putting up with things or just getting on with things the way other people did. And Oliver, holding the cone of freesias with his fingertips, was getting pretty tired of Judy's excuses.

The bus stopped just short of Fulham Broadway Station and Oliver got off, holding his wine and his flowers. It was ten or twelve minutes' walk to Judy's flat from the bus stop, time enough, maybe, to rehearse what he was going to say and how he was going to say it. He didn't want to emphasize the effect of her defeatism on him, nor indeed, any other of her deficiencies, but he wanted to make her think. He wanted to jolt her out of her rut of assumptions about herself, to make her see that, if she was resolute in being so sorry for herself, nobody else – and certainly not people she wanted and needed – would ever be sorry for her, for the right reasons.

‘I don't want never to see you again,' he planned to say. ‘I just can't see you for a bit. Not until you've got something to give me back.'

He swallowed. The paper cone of freesias was becoming damp in his damp hand. His mother, he realized, would have admired him for what he was going to do, would have told him that he was acting with courage and principle. The trouble is, Oliver thought, pausing on the pavement and looking up at the house opposite, to the two attic windows of Judy's sitting-room, that she'd be wrong. And on both counts.

Zoe stood in the bedroom that had once been Caro's and looked about her. She had obediently brought with her both a duster, recommended by Dilys, and a damp cloth, advised by Debbie. She had put both on the windowsill. Then she had walked to the centre of the room, somewhere near the end of Caro's bed, and looked about her, examining things, tasting the atmosphere. It was not, she decided, as interesting nor as revealing a place as Caro's grave. She had come in as a deliberate experiment, to see what she could detect in the room. Two days before, she had found Dilys in Joe's room, at Dean Place Farm, and Dilys had said, without self-consciousness, that she came in every day, for herself really, just to see. Zoe had wondered if people who had lost someone they loved often went into their bedrooms, because bedrooms were the most intimate places, the places where little essences or traces might cling. And that was perhaps the reason why bedrooms sometimes stayed untouched after a death, so that whatever fragile memory still clung there wouldn't be torn away, like a cobweb.

‘Why don't you use Caro's room?' she'd said to Robin.

He had his reading glasses on and was engrossed in a dairy magazine.

‘Too soon.'

‘For you, you mean? That you still feel she's in it?'

He put the magazine down. Zoe could see a photograph of a yellow calf with a white blaze on its poll scratching its chin on a fence.

‘Too soon for her,' Robin said. ‘It was her room for so long.'

‘But she's dead.'

He looked at her briefly, over the top of his glasses, and picked the magazine up again.

‘That doesn't necessarily finish things.'

‘It does,' Zoe said, ‘for the person who died.'

‘Look,' Robin said, ‘I don't want to do anything about that room. I don't want to think about it. I've got enough to think about.'

Zoe began to stack plates.

‘Farm things—'

‘Yup.'

‘But not people things.'

‘Not if I can help it.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because,' he said, and his voice sounded sad to her, ‘there's so much I can't change. Especially about the past.'

The past had lived in this bedroom for years, years and years, in fact ever since Caro had moved out of Robin's bedroom when Judy was three. He'd told her that, quite openly. Twenty years of separate bedrooms, almost all of Zoe's lifetime. Zoe gripped the footrail of Caro's bed. What had Caro thought, lying here alone? What had she thought, if indeed she thought at all, of Robin lying there across the landing, alone, too, accepting her decision because he had no option and because, and certainly in the early years, he had loved her. But what had she loved, really loved? Judy, maybe, and this bedroom with its American quilt and the idea of being buried in a plot of earth no-one could ever take away from you? But not Robin, not really. Robin had not turned out to be the kind of person she could love, although maybe she'd tried. There were plenty of people in Zoe's life she'd tried to like or love, and failed. Wanting to wasn't enough. There had to be something else, some other bond or spark, something that kept you really interested. Like she was, herself, in Robin, and he, she thought, was in her. She went over to the windowsill and picked up the duster and the cloth. Velma had said she gave Caro's room a quick once-over, each week, implying that Zoe should do the same. But was there really a point in dusting a room where nobody was and nobody came and Robin didn't want to think about? None, Zoe decided, absolutely none. She did a dance step or two across the floor on her way to the door, flapping the cloth and the duster. You can't change the past, Robin had said, and therefore, in inference, you have to leave it to get on with itself. Zoe pirouetted in the doorway, flourishing the duster towards the bed.

‘So long,' she said. ‘Byeee,' and then she slammed the door behind her.

‘We've got to face it,' Dilys said, ‘haven't we?'

Harry didn't look at her. He leaned his back against the old sycamore at the top of the 15-acre Joe had planted with linseed, and drank the tea Dilys had brought him. She hadn't brought him tea in years, not herself, not toiling up that half-mile along the headland from the point where the farm track stopped. He could see the roof of her car shining in the faint sun and then the acres of peas and barley stretching away to the point where Dean Place Farm gave way to Tideswell, and the fields in the distance, dotted with fat black plastic bags where Robin was making silage. He had done it alone with Gareth this year, day in, day out. All previous years, of course, Joe had helped him at silage time, just as he, Robin, had helped in return with the harvest.

‘It's no good us pretending,' Dilys said. ‘Is it?' She was sitting some distance from him on a big stone that emerged from the hedge where the sycamore grew, a big ancient stone that looked as if it had once had significance for somebody. ‘We can't go on like this.'

‘We're managing,' Harry said. He put his face into his tea mug again. ‘We're getting by.'

Dilys stooped forward and brushed grass seed off her skirt. She said, very quietly, ‘We aren't, you know.'

He waited.

She said, ‘In a month or two, we'll be losing money, we won't have the money to pay for the men, to pay the bills. We never had to pay for men before. We never had to pay for other people's labour.'

‘They're no use,' Harry said, ‘those boys. They're no use at all. You can't teach them.'

‘And we,' Dilys said, ‘can't learn new ways.'

He gave her a quick glance. She was unscrewing the lid of the tea flask again, deft but slow. She said, ‘We've got to face it. We've got to admit that if we wanted to keep the old life we'd have to learn new ways. But there's no point admitting that because there isn't even an old life any more. It's gone. We'd be fooling ourselves if we thought otherwise.' She held the flask out to him and he offered his mug to her in silence.

‘Joe kept this place going,' Dilys said. ‘More than even we knew it, he did. He never stopped working, he gave up his life to it. Without him we can't manage. We can't even begin to manage.'

Harry took a swallow. He said stubbornly, ‘There's Robin.'

‘It isn't the same,' Dilys said, ‘and you know it. He's got his own place and his own troubles. He's been as good as gold to us since Joe's accident, but he can't perform miracles, he can't be more than one man, he can't work more than twenty-four hours a day.'

Harry put his mug down. Something dark and heavy was settling inside him, and he was afraid of it.

‘When I came back from the war,' he said, ‘I thought I'd never have anything bad to face again, I thought I'd done all that, for one lifetime.'

Dilys laid her hands on the big stone either side of her.

‘We've got to give up the farm.'

Harry said nothing.

‘I don't want to be the one who says it, but one of us has to. We can't manage any more. We haven't the body or spirit and Lyndsay can't help us. We probably should never have asked her to, expected it of her. But if she can't, then there isn't anyone else and we have to face it.'

There was a long silence. Harry looked at the view which he could have described minutely, every tree and hedgerow and fold of land, with his eyes closed. He knew it wasn't lovely land, he knew it wasn't like those beautiful Herefordshire farms he and Dilys had once seen on a brief touring holiday, rolling away towards the dark mountains of Wales, but it was land that he had touched every working day of his life, and it was as familiar to him as his own self, his own body. The word ‘dispossessed' came into his mind and hung there. He shut his eyes.

‘Where'd we go?' he said.

He heard her sigh.

‘Stretton, maybe,' she said. ‘A bungalow, in Stretton.'

Debbie had
Farmers Weekly
open at the ‘Situations Vacant' page. ‘Herdsperson,' one advertisement ran, ‘70-cow unit, loose housed and herringbone parlour. Cottage available. Mid-Surrey.' Below was another. ‘Attractive salary, 3-bedroom centrally heated cottage offered to capable herdsperson for 160 Friesian/ Holstein unit. Experience of DIY AI preferred. Essex.' She drew rings round both, and then another that asked for experience in foot-trimming, in Oxfordshire. Gareth could do that. Gareth could do all the things these ads asked for, and more. One of the good aspects of working at Tideswell Farm had been that there was nothing involved in looking after cows that Gareth hadn't had to learn to do, one way and another.

But he didn't need to learn any more. He didn't need to work for Robin Meredith any longer, he'd paid all the dues of loyalty while Caro was ill, and then after her death, and after Joe's. Gareth wasn't family, after all, he was only an employee and there was a limit to the loyalty expected of an employee. If he stayed at Tideswell any longer, Debbie reasoned, he'd get stuck there, he'd never advance to a bigger herd, a better unit with progressive technology and automatic scrapers. He'd just moulder away, increasingly stuck in his ways, and she, Debbie, and the children would have to moulder with him, tied to his stubbornness and lack of enterprise.

Debbie got up from the kitchen table and filled the electric kettle at the sink. She'd stopped begging Gareth to leave on account of her own instinctive dread of the place because she could see she wasn't doing any good that way. He'd told her she was being superstitious and he despised superstition, twitching the newspaper out of her hands if he caught her reading her horoscope. So she had changed tack. She had dropped her own fears and begun emphasizing Gareth's future, and with it, the future of Rebecca and Kevin and Eddie. She said the job at Tideswell was for a young single man, a beginner, not for an experienced father of three. She was careful not to mention the precariousness of matters at both the Meredith farms, nor Lyndsay's defection to Stretton. She was especially careful not to mention Zoe.

The back door opened with the stealth peculiar to Eddie and he slid in.