Next of Kin (14 page)

‘Hi,' Joe said, from the sitting-room doorway.

She sat up.

‘Where've you been?'

‘Spraying. I said. I told you.'

‘But it's gone nine. It's been dark nearly two hours. I told Hughie—'

‘I went to Mum's,' Joe said.

Lyndsay swung her feet slowly to the floor so that her back was to him.

‘Oh.'

She got up and switched the television off.

‘D'you want some supper?' she said, her back still turned.

‘No, thanks. I ate at Mum's.'

Lyndsay turned round.

‘Why didn't you ring?'

‘Mum said you knew she wanted to talk to me.'

‘But not tonight!' Lyndsay cried. ‘Not without telling me!'

‘Lyn—'

‘I'm your
wife
. I'm not some child you and your mother have to decide things for. I'm the mother of your children and your
wife.
I'm the one you should talk to—'

Joe came further into the room. He was still in his boiler suit, the front open and showing his checked work shirt, those shirts she ironed even though there was no point to it considering the state they got into. But she ironed them because they were his shirts and she was his wife.

‘I didn't mean to talk to her. I meant to come home. But she cornered me. I was having another go at Dad about those hedgerows and she got me there. About this holiday.'

Lyndsay put her hands up to her hair and took the combs out.

‘She came here at teatime.'

‘I expect it was on her mind, then.'

‘It isn't,' Lyndsay said, shaking her head so that her hair fell cloudily over her face, ‘any of her
business
.'

‘She says she'll have the kids.'

‘I know. Hughie cried.'

‘She's trying to help.'

Lyndsay pulled her hair back hard and jammed the combs in, first one side, then the other.

‘What did she say?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Did she say I'd got in a state and you'd better take me away for a bit? That I wasn't coping with the children?'

He said nothing.

‘I'm not coping,' Lyndsay said. ‘She's right there. But it's
you
I'm not coping with. I can't. You won't let me.'

‘I've agreed to this holiday.'

‘Fishing in Ireland?'

‘If you want.'

‘I don't know if I want it. I just know I want you to talk to me. If we go to Ireland, will you talk to me?'

He looked at her. His face was heavy with fatigue, dragged down by it so that she could suddenly see how he would look when he was an old man, Harry's age.

‘I'll try,' Joe said. ‘But I don't know what you want.'

He put his arms out suddenly and pulled her against him, against the cloth she laundered so endlessly and which now smelled, as it did at the end of every day, of sweat and oil and all the chemical processed things he worked with on that hateful land. He held her there for some minutes, hard, uncomfortably hard, straining her against him, her head jammed under his chin which he had lifted a little as if he was staring upwards. She had the feeling that his eyes were closed.

‘Joe—'

He let her go as abruptly as he had seized her.

‘You go to bed,' he said.

‘But—'

‘I want to catch the headlines at the end of the news.'

‘And the weather?'

‘OK,' he said. ‘The weather.'

‘Hughie asked me if I loved you today,' Lyndsay said, ‘and I said yes, I did.'

Joe looked away.

‘Thanks,' he said.

Dilys lay beside Harry in the bed in which both Robin and Joe had been born. It was an old-fashioned bed, with a footboard as well as a headboard, and a new interior-sprung mattress resting on the old steel-mesh base stretched across the frame. The mesh crunched faintly when she turned over, as if it was grinding its teeth. There were sheets and blankets on the bed, and an eiderdown that had belonged to Harry's mother and which Dilys had re-covered herself in a satin-finished furnishing cotton patterned with roses. The same cotton hung at the windows and made a stout petticoat curtain for the dressing table. Dilys had bought a roll of it fifteen years ago, in Stretton Market, beating the stallholder down to £2 a yard.

Fifteen years ago, Joe hadn't been married. He hadn't met Lyndsay and, if Dilys was honest, she'd been thankful when that meeting finally happened. You couldn't have said that Joe had been straightforwardly sweet on Caro, but he was kind of fascinated, almost spellbound by her. It was, Dilys thought at the time, this American thing. He hadn't got America out of his system when he came home and then there was Caro, at Tideswell, an emblem of all the freedom he thought he'd left behind.

He'd told her something of America. Sitting at the kitchen table for mid-morning coffee – ‘Men's tea' it had always been known as on Dilys's father's farm between the wars – he'd talked a bit about the size of it, the great spaces, and the way so much of it couldn't be tamed and managed, all those rivers and mountains and deserts which made men realize they weren't masters of the universe after all. Dilys wouldn't have stood this kind of talk from Robin or Harry, but she listened to Joe. Joe had an ambition in him, a driving force she recognized in herself, a desire that things should be as good as they could be – and then better. Yet there was more still, in Joe. There was something restless and hungry in him, a quality of dark need that made him vulnerable. This vulnerability made Dilys wince. She saw it in the way he went at the farm, more as if it were an enemy than a challenge. She'd hoped – oh, how she'd hoped – that marriage and fatherhood would calm him, would channel some of this dangerous emotional energy into a harbour at last, a safe place, out of the storm.

She turned over carefully and the steel mesh ground complainingly under her. She wouldn't wake Harry by turning over. Nothing ever woke Harry. All their married life Harry's behaviour had been as steady and regular as a metronome.

‘He ain't going to give you no surprises,' Dilys's father had said when she announced their engagement. ‘If that's what you want.'

She had wanted it. It seemed to her, in those dark, depressed, uncertain years after the end of the war, that Harry promised a security that was all too rare a commodity then, a security for her to be what her mother had so singularly failed to be, a good farmer's wife and then the mother of farmers. She'd done all that. Harry had given her every chance to be that, and she'd taken it. When the boys were young, and the poultry yard was full and the house cow – a Jersey – was in calf and the windows of Dean Farm glittered across the fields in the searching spring sunlight, Dilys knew with every instinct that she'd done the thing that was right for her.

But it was harder now. Harry was older and his regularity had stiffened into fixed habit and obstinacy. The boys weren't comprehensible, manageable children any more, but grown men with complicated lives and hidden personalities. Even the farm, that land whose changelessness had been one of the sources of Dilys's greatest contentment, was different, hedged about as it now was with impossible bureaucracy, with rules and regulations and subsidies and fines. The land seemed now as defenceless as an element in Joe had always been, no longer a source of security and livelihood but a capricious, helpless thing governed by arbitrary forces far away, and no longer by the men who farmed it.

Dilys raised her head and pushed her pillow about to plump it up. She shouldn't have blamed Lyndsay that afternoon, she shouldn't have told her it was she that was upsetting Joe. When she'd seen Joe later, shouting at Harry in the open store where the fertilizer was kept, she'd known she'd been wrong. It wasn't Lyndsay's fault. Yet it wasn't Joe's fault either. Nor Harry's. They were only trying to get by, all of them, only trying to live life with the hand they'd all been dealt. Just as she was. And Robin. Her eyes flew open suddenly. What about Robin then? And that girl? Velma had come in just before supper to return a pie dish that had been sent down to Tideswell and said that that friend of Judy's had turned up, just out of the blue, and was staying there, cool as a cucumber. What was Robin doing with that girl in the house?

In his bed at Tideswell Farm, Robin lay and watched the moon through undrawn curtains. It was roughly half full, and the clouds were speeding past it in rags and tatters on the wind that was rattling the climbing rose against the house below his window, a yellow rose Caro had put in because it was called ‘Mermaid' and she liked anything, in this landlocked place, that reminded her of the sea. With any luck, the wind would keep the rain away, or blow whatever rain there was quickly past. Robin didn't need more rain. The maize and grass wanted warmth now, steady, quiet warmth. All that had been steady that day had been the drizzle.

‘Stone Age weather,' Zoe had said at supper.

‘What?'

‘Can't you see them, all huddled up in caves and stuff, in this weather? Toes like monkeys, hair all matted, just staring out into the murk. Waiting for a mammoth. How many people would a mammoth have fed?'

‘Lots.'

‘A hundred?'

‘Maybe.'

He took a forkful of Dilys's steak and kidney. Zoe seemed to be eating only potatoes. And watercress.

He said, ‘Where did the cress come from?'

‘The river.'

‘Don't eat it.'

‘Why not?'

‘Fluke. It carried fluke. Gives sheep liver-rot. It's a worm.'

Zoe looked at her plate.

‘Spuds OK?'

‘Perfectly. Did you cook them?'

‘Yes. I remembered how.' She picked up the thick sprigs of watercress and dropped them on the side of her plate.

‘You laid the table back to front. Forks go on the left.'

‘Does it matter?'

Robin looked at her. He grinned.

‘Nope.'

‘Gareth says that cow is barren. She didn't take last time either.'

‘I know.'

‘Seems unfair, doesn't it. I mean, she can't help it. It isn't her fault. Can I come to market with you when you take her?'

Robin took a long swallow of water.

‘And can I ask how long you're staying?'

Zoe looked at him.

‘D'you want me to go? Am I in the way?'

‘No. But there'll be talk. Velma knows you're here, so does Gareth.'

‘You mean your mother will disapprove—'

‘She'll think it's odd. I hardly know you.'

‘Well,' Zoe said reasonably, ‘you know me better than you did the day before yesterday. I'm just a friend of Judy's who likes it here. It's kind of interesting. I'll go whenever you say.'

Robin put his fork down.

‘Does Judy know you're here?'

‘No. She thinks I'm in Birmingham. I'll ring her. I'll go and see your mother. There isn't a mystery. Put me to work if,' Zoe prodded a potato, ‘you think I ought to earn my keep.'

‘I don't think that.'

‘Well then,' Zoe said.

‘I just wonder why you came.'

Zoe had looked across at him. Her eyes were large and their expression was at once straightforward and penetrating.

‘Look,' she said, ‘it's perfectly simple. I wanted to see you again. When I came with Judy, I liked it here and I liked you. So I came back. See?'

Simple, she'd said. I liked the farm and I liked you, so I came back for more. Simple as that. That's the truth. For a moment, outside his window now, the moon hung clearly in an unclouded space, a simple silver disc except for its blurred unfinished edge, polished and pure. Robin pulled a hand out of his bedclothes and scratched his head, hard. Two rooms away, down the narrow landing, Zoe slept, her strange red head dark on a white pillow, sleeping because – being Zoe – that was what the night was for. You did what you needed to do and didn't mind who saw you. There was nothing to hide. Life was for living and there were many, many ways of living it. Zoe lived hers her way and let other people do the same. Simple. See?

Chapter Eight

The girls in Judy's office were loud with relief that she'd got a boyfriend. He rang every day, sometimes twice, and now Bronwen, or Tessa, answering Judy's phone if she had gone for coffee or to the lavatory, said, ‘Oh hi, Ollie! How are you?' in voices bright with enthusiasm. They left messages for Judy on yellow and pink adhesive notes: ‘Ollie called! Ringing back 12.30!' with little smiley faces drawn underneath, and sometimes kisses. They commented on the flowers he gave her – always freesias – and asked what she was going to wear for the next date at the cinema, at a wine bar, at the weekend. They told her she was thinner. Bronwen gave her the address of a really good aerobics studio and Tessa said black suited her, honestly. Ollie, whom they had never met, who was no more than a slightly diffident voice on the telephone, had erased for them the awkward fact that Caro had died and left Judy motherless.

Judy herself wasn't sure if Oliver was, indeed, her boyfriend. She liked him – you couldn't, she thought, not like him unless you were simply being perverse – and she liked his attentiveness, but something in her held back from him. He had been not only so recently Zoe's, but even more recently discarded by Zoe. He had tried to explain that he had been fascinated by Zoe, attracted by her otherness, but that he was sure it hadn't been love. After he'd said that, he stopped and gazed at Judy as if willing her to understand how different it was with her, how at home he felt, how companionable. She had looked back at him for a moment and thought that, for all his sweetness and openness, she couldn't trust him yet. If only Caro had been there, to run him past, like a pony in a sale ring. And to show her that she, Judy, wasn't solely dependent on Caro for praise and appreciation, even for love.