Next of Kin (4 page)

She sold most of her possessions to buy a long-distance bus ticket back to California, and to have a few dollars by her. Back in Sausalito she paid a cursory visit to the blue house – now painted hot pink – and then, with her backpack, walked the whole length of the Golden Gate Bridge back into the city. It took her twenty-seven minutes. After that, and prompted by the memory of the welcome extended to her by the educational community in Harrisburg, she hitched a series of lifts out to the University of Berkeley and got herself a job in one of the futon stores that abounded there among the banks and bookstores and purveyors of hippie beads and ginseng and magic mushrooms.

Two things of immense significance happened to Caro as a result of working in the futon store. The first was that she made friends with an English couple, a professor of semantics and his physicist wife, in Berkeley for a year as part of an academic exchange programme. They came into the store to buy a couple of futons for their apartment in order to have somewhere for their visiting adolescent children to sleep, and a friendship was struck up in the big, light store among the pale, quiet rolls of bedding that led to Caro's going round to their apartment for meals, and then for weekends.

The second thing was Caro's first love affair. It was with a Japanese student at the university who worked in the store on Saturday mornings and, at odd times, on the order books with the manager, who spoke no Japanese and did not understand all the invoices. The student was called Ken. He was tall, for a Japanese, but still much shorter than Caro, and they made love in the stock room behind the store on futons due to be returned to the factory because of faults, mostly in the stitching. She found his skin and hair especially attractive, and also his courtesy. He escorted her to the student clinic to obtain her first ever prescription for contraceptive pills. She began to believe that she had crossed the Bridge.

But then she fell ill. At first she felt tired and queasy, which she attributed to getting used to the contraceptive pills, and then she felt worse, and her periods ceased. She no longer felt like making love and Ken, though unfailingly polite, made it plain he did not simply wish to lie on the faulty futons in the stock room with her and smoke. He withdrew himself a little, and then announced that he must find himself another outlet for his natural impulses and took himself off to a different Saturday job, in a sushi bar, where he sat behind the till, wearing a green waistcoat and matching bow tie, taking the customers' dollars.

Three days after his departure, Caro fainted at work. Brought round, she said the pain was simply terrible and fainted again. She was taken to hospital, where tests revealed that both her Fallopian tubes were blocked by a chronic inflammation caused by infection, and that the same infection had gravely affected both ovaries. She was operated upon at once, informed that she was now, regrettably, infertile and sent away to convalesce on one of the futons she had sold to the English couple.

They were good to her. She was, they said, the age of their eldest daughter, now studying law at an English university Caro had never heard of called Exeter, and that alone aroused their sympathy. They nursed her back to health, found her work in the bookstore of the student centre and then, as a twentieth birthday present, gave her an economy-class return air ticket to London. They had friends and relations in England she could stay with, they said, and she would have a chance to see her life and her country from another perspective. It would help her, they said, to make up her mind. To Caro, it was the most extraordinary present she had ever been given, not just for its generosity but because it appeared to prove that, despite Ken, and despite the operation – whose consequences had as yet hardly dawned upon her – the promise of the Golden Gate Bridge still held good.

In April 1971, Caro Bliss arrived in England with a modest bag of clothes and a list of addresses. She spent ten days with her benefactors' relations in a suburban house near Richmond Park, and then went to stay in chaotic student lodgings – a rented farmhouse with lukewarm hot water and intermittent electricity – outside Exeter. The culture shock of both places was immense. Even the language seemed to divide more than it united. For three weeks Caro endured the incomprehensible loud rompings of English students at play – so different, in every way, from the spaced-out laxity of their counterparts at Berkeley – and then, leaving a stilted thank-you note in her simply turned American hand, set off into the mysteries of the English railway system to her third address, a farm in the Midlands.

It was a big, commercial place, raising pork and beef and growing fruit and vegetables for a series of farm shops. The family who ran it – father, mother, grownup son and two daughters – had known the physicist at Berkeley since she was a girl. The farmer's wife's mother, now dead, had been her godmother. They took Caro in as if tall, homeless American girls without particular direction came their way every day of the week and included her, without fuss, in their life and work.

They didn't, as the students in Exeter did, talk all the time. They talked when necessary, about subjects that affected their working lives, the life of the farm. This suited Caro. Living, as she had since she was fifteen, on the edges of so many other people's lives, she had become used not to talking much herself, as if to talk was to thrust herself into the limelight, into the centre of attention in lives that she depended upon for sustenance and thus could not afford to alienate by the wrong sort of behaviour. Even before that, Caro's childhood had not been an eloquent matter. Her father's articulateness, such as it was, lay in his painting, her mother's in an urgent practicality, designed to wrench some kind of reality out of romantic dreams. On this large, efficient commercial enterprise in the English Midlands, Caro found much to recognize as trustworthy. Cautiously, feeling her way through the unaccustomed rhythms of the days and the peculiar food, Caro began, despite herself, to relax.

Some evenings and at weekends, the son of the house and his girlfriend – a vet specializing in pigs – took Caro with them on outings with the local Young Farmers' group. She attended lectures on farm management, competitions on stock judging and an enormous number of evenings in the pub where she learned to play darts and failed to learn to like warm, strong English beer. It was often the same crowd, friendly, cheerful and healthy, a youth group of a kind Caro had never encountered before, with scarcely even a nod to urban life. They were the farming children of farming parents; for most of them the decision to devote themselves to the land had scarcely been a decision at all but rather an acceptance of the preordained path of things. Looking around the smoky bars of pubs and clubs, Caro saw, with a kind of awe, that she, the nomad, had at last come to rest among settlers, among people who identified themselves more by place than by personality or trade. And, to her surprise, she liked it.

Robin Meredith watched her for five weeks before he spoke to her. Being tall himself, he was struck by her height, and then by the exoticism of her accent. She was a different build to English girls, and she used her body differently, and her hands. He was told she was a hired hand in the farm shop at Thripps End, so he supposed she was part of the itinerant community of international students postponing both the return to the familiar and facing the future. When he finally bought her half a pint of cider, he discovered that she was neither a student nor in work. She had come to England, she said, at someone else's suggestion, and because of their generosity.

‘Why?' he said.

She shrugged. ‘To look, I guess. To look at over there from over here.'

‘Why?' he said again.

She had paused and looked down into her cider. Then she said, with her new-found self-knowledge, ‘Maybe to see if I really am a nomad.'

He didn't know what she meant, but he asked her out anyhow. He drove her through the countryside pointing out farms and crops and woodland planted especially for the rearing of pheasants. He took her to the cinema, where he sat with his long thigh pressed to hers but did not take her hand, and to the local annual horse fair where she saw the first gypsies of her life, and to the top of Stretton Beacon where he showed her the county laid below them like a map, orderly and tamed from this height, the agricultural spaces punctuated by the roofs and chimneys and spires of settlements. Up there, in the wind, he kissed her and told her he was leaving home to set up his own dairy herd.

‘Down there,' he said, pointing at the grey loops of the River Dean winding below them. ‘Down there.'

‘I've never touched a cow,' Caro said.

‘I'm starting with twenty,' he said. ‘Twenty. I'll build a herringbone parlour.'

She looked down at the landscape below her. She'd seen lovelier landscapes, certainly, more dramatic, more powerful. But had she ever seen landscape that seemed to offer itself so benevolently for people to live in, and use? Had she ever seen any place so manageable, so involving, so harmonious? And it just lay there, at her feet, 20 or 30 square miles of peaceful, tractable cultivation, not fighting mankind, not riven with exaggerated weather and earthquakes, not elusive because of impossible distances. It was a world down there, a complete world of man and land and beast under an unremarkable, unthreatening English sky. Caro put her hands into her jacket pockets and shut her eyes. How was she to fashion, with no means at her disposal except the simple fact of herself, the chance to stay?

A week later, Robin drove her to Tideswell Farm. They inspected the house and the derelict yard, and they walked through the neglected fields down to the river where ducks and coots and moorhens prattled among the reeds. It was late March, and the willow trees had their yellow-green spring haze about them, and on the opposite slope, a tractor was ploughing the red-brown earth into a satisfactory ribbing, like corduroy.

‘What about the house?' Robin said.

Caro watched the tractor. A decorative flock of gulls was wheeling above the turned earth in the wake of the plough. Robin's house was almost too strange for her to have an opinion of, so old, so solid in its stone walls, so rambling, with its gaunt, chill Victorian additions, that passage with the mosaic-tiled floor in red-and-ochre, the bay-windowed room with the wooden fire surround like a Gothic church.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I haven't anything to compare it with—'

‘Does that matter?'

She looked at him.

‘No,' she said slowly, ‘I don't suppose it does. It's just when you keep travelling, you keep comparing. You can't help it. It's what all the differences do to you, it's how you think.'

He reached up into the willow above their heads, and broke off a long, smooth, flexible twig.

‘What's the best place you ever lived?'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘I haven't found that yet. I'm still looking.'

Robin bent the twig into a circle, a willowy coronet, and skimmed it out across the water like a quoit.

‘You don't have to wander,' he said. ‘You don't have to.'

She looked at him. She looked at his rough, near-black hair and uncompromising features, at his corduroy trousers and his boots and battered weatherproof jacket with the collar turned up around his ears. She thought: Do I know him? and then, almost simultaneously: Who have I ever known?

He turned to look back at her.

‘I said, “You don't have to wander.” Not any more.' He gestured back up the fields in the direction of the house. ‘You could live here. I'd give you somewhere to live. You could—' He paused and then he said, ‘You could marry me.'

Chapter Three

Velma Simms stood at the sink in the kitchen at Tideswell Farm and washed up Robin's breakfast dishes. Caro had installed a dishwasher, but Velma never used it. She didn't use it because she disapproved of the fact that it in turn used electricity. By the same token, she preferred using the mechanical carpet sweeper to the vacuum cleaner and to performing almost all tasks in the half-light. In her council house, the electricity meter, resentfully fed with coins, was regarded as an ill-intentioned household god forced upon her by the authorities. Anything Velma could do without submitting to the tyranny of electricity seemed to her a blow struck for personal victory over a force of darkness.

Behind her, at the kitchen table, Gareth sat eating a bacon sandwich. Debbie made him a stack of them late each night for the following morning, and Gareth had taken to eating them in the farm kitchen after the first milking, to save going home. Home, a three-bedroom brick tied cottage that Robin had built for the previous herdsman, was only a few hundred yards away, but the farm kitchen made a change from his own, and fifteen minutes in it daily meant that he kept up with everything that was happening. When Caro was alive, he hadn't liked to do this, being dimly aware at some level that he was intruding on territory that was both mysteriously female and forbidden. Sometimes, he had stood in the doorway in his boiler suit and stockinged feet, and left messages for Caro to give Robin about a cow with mastitis or the failure of the artificial insemination technician to show up, but he'd never intruded further. He was always struck by the refrigerator. While he was talking to Caro, he kept his eye on it in wonder, this huge, double-doored American thing, big as a wardrobe.

‘You should see it,' he said to Debbie. ‘You could get a couple of blokes in there, easy.'

He sat with his back to it now, chewing. Without Caro there and its cavernous spaces only housing Robin's utilitarian supplies, the refrigerator had lost its magic. Its chief purpose now was for taunting Velma, to try and get her to open the door or, even better, both doors. She hated opening the doors because it made the lights come on.