Next of Kin (16 page)

‘You can make chances, can't you? If you really want them. You know what?'

‘What?'

‘It really bugs me I wanted to ask him this, but I did. I wanted to ask him if he loved me.' She looked at Robin. ‘Do you want to ask Caro that?'

Robin moved past her to where the plastic bottle and the dosing gun lay as he had dumped them. He picked both up, and then he crossed the kitchen and pulled his boiler suit out from under the cat. The words ‘I always wished she did' rose up in his mind, and hung there across the darkness inside his skull like a string of lights, bright and urgent but unspoken.

‘I'll see you later,' he said. ‘Seven-ish, maybe. Got to go into Stretton and get more needles.'

‘Bye,' Zoe said.

He didn't look at her.

‘Bye.'

On one of Judy's sitting-room walls, Oliver had painted a big square of pale grey. Opposite it, above the fireplace and the herons, he'd done the same in dark blue.

‘Keep looking at them,' he said. ‘See which you like. Or if you don't like either.'

He'd met her after work, and come home with her and drunk three cans of diet Coca-Cola and painted the squares and then gone off to have supper with his father.

‘I kind of ought to. He never comes to London, as a rule.'

When he had gone Judy made herself some toast and sat down to eat it in front of the blue square on the wall. It was a good blue, a summer-night sky blue. She'd never had a blue room. There was no blue at Tideswell, except the milking parlour where blue was supposed to ward off the flies. Caro had painted things yellow and green and red and melon pink, like ripe fruit and vegetables, sun colours. In her opinion, blue wasn't a sun colour, even if sea and sky were blue. She used to say that blueness was just for contrast really, like that awful blue swimming pools always were, artificial and harsh as if emphasizing that the water in them wasn't naturally there, but had been trapped there, by people, in rectangles and squares, for playing in, not using. It was like so much on Judy's magazine, pages and pages of objects and fabrics and furniture that were eagerly amassed by people for quite other – and often bizarre – reasons than those best and basic ones that they were either useful or beautiful. Yet darkblue walls were not really useful. Staring at Oliver's bold, rough square, Judy wondered if she really thought they were beautiful either.

‘What if they're a mistake?' she'd said.

‘Then I'll paint them again. It wouldn't
be
a mistake. Stop thinking things are mistakes. It's an experiment. Most of life's an experiment, otherwise how do you know if anything's going to work or not?'

Judy got up and took her toast plate out to the kitchen. She had thought, for a moment, that Oliver was going to ask her to meet his father. But then he hadn't. She didn't know if she was glad or sorry, whether she'd have felt cornered if he'd asked her rather than – unfairly – mildly disappointed now that he hadn't. She went to the window and looked down into the small dark courtyard of the building where three dustbins lived and an old sink containing a broken plastic bucket and a fern, a brilliant green fern which thrived down there on the damp and the dimness. Oliver is so nice to me, Judy thought, so
nice
. Why is he so nice?

Behind her, from the tiny hall across the sitting-room, a key turned in the front-door lock.

‘Hi!' Zoe called. The door slammed.

Judy went to the kitchen doorway.

‘Hi.'

Zoe looked exactly as she had when she had left, boots, and a black-leather jacket over a black T-shirt and jeans with the knees ripped across, showing Zoe's skin. She dropped her rucksack and camera case on the floor.

‘It took all day. All bloody day. There were roadworks everywhere.' She looked at Judy. ‘I got a coach from Stretton. Gareth ran me in.'

‘Oh.'

Zoe glanced about the room. She gestured towards the blue square on the wall above the fireplace.

‘That's nice.'

Judy said deliberately, ‘Oliver did it.'

‘Ollie?'

‘Yes.'

Zoe said, without effort, ‘Good.' She put a hand into her jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of notes. She held them out to Judy. ‘A hundred and forty-six quid. That I owe you.'

‘Doesn't matter—'

‘Judy,' Zoe said. ‘It's my rent and I owe it to you. Take it. And—'

‘And what?'

‘I said good, about Ollie. I meant it.
Good
.'

Judy took the money slowly and put it, without looking at it, into her pocket. She said, by way of manners, ‘He came to bring you some flowers. The day after you went. And then – well, it just sort of happened.'

‘I know,' Zoe said. ‘Things do. I'm glad. He likes looking after people.'

‘Do you think I need looking after?'

Zoe stooped and loosened the neck of her rucksack.

‘Yes. You do. So does your whole family. You all need looking after.'

‘My family,' Judy said with emphatic precision, ‘is tough.'

Zoe found a thin white plastic bag containing something light and bulky. She held it out to Judy.

‘If you say so. These are for you. From your Gran.'

‘What is it?'

‘Buns,' Zoe said.

‘You mean my Gran gave you buns to give me?'

‘I offered.'

Judy took the buns and dropped the bag on the nearest chair.

‘It really annoys me you went to Tideswell.'

Zoe looked up at her, from her squatting position beside her rucksack.

‘You don't want to go.'

‘I might—'

‘Don't be such a bloody child.' She gestured. ‘They're nice people. Can't you see that? They're nice people, getting on with living. It's not their fault they didn't understand your mother. And they miss her. They tried to make her one of them and they didn't succeed but they miss her.'

‘Where d'you get all this from?'

‘I just thought it. I noticed. Perhaps I can see better, being an outsider.'

Judy sat down on the arm of the chair where she had dropped the bag of buns from Dilys. ‘Outsider' had been one of Caro's words. She had made it seem mysterious and glamorous, as she had the word ‘nomad', another of her favourites. She had also made Judy feel that this quality of not belonging to a tribe, of not being shackled to an inherited orthodoxy, was a desirable one. ‘Poets are outsiders,' Caro had said. ‘They have to be.' She had inferred that to be adopted was to be part of this elusive, enviable, moving band, roaming through life with their eyes full of visions. But Zoe had described herself as an outsider, too. At this moment, Judy did not want to feel that Zoe was any part of anything that Caro had been part of and had, with her particular inscrutable charm, included Judy in.

She said, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice, ‘Why don't you mind about Oliver?'

‘Mind?'

Judy waited.

‘Why should I mind?' Zoe said. ‘I'm not in love with him. I like him, he's a nice guy. I like you. Why should I care if you two get together?'

Judy said, ‘What did you get up to at Tideswell? What did you
do
?'

‘Nothing,' Zoe said. She looked straight at Judy with her wide uncomplicated gaze. ‘I ate and I slept and I took pictures and I helped Gareth a bit and I talked to people.'

‘And my father?'

‘You've got a dirty mind,' Zoe said. She stood up and lifted her rucksack onto one shoulder by a single strap. ‘Your mother's left your father in as bad a state as she left you in. It's just that he's quieter about it.'

Judy yelled, ‘He didn't love her! He never loved her! He never knew what she was like!'

Zoe stepped sideways a little and retrieved her camera case.

‘Oh yes he did,' she said. ‘He loved her all right. You've got that in common.'

‘We've got nothing in common!'

‘His trouble is,' Zoe said, as if she hadn't heard Judy's cry, ‘his pain is that she didn't love him back.'

‘She couldn't!' Judy shouted. ‘How could she?'

Zoe paused a moment, looking at the floor under her boots, at the worn golden-yellow carpet left by the last tenant. Then, without saying another word, she turned away and went into her bedroom, closing the door behind her and leaving Judy quite alone.

In the morning, Robin decided, he would turn the cows out. The weather would be fair, and the grass, though not wonderful, had come on better than he had hoped in the last week or two. It would also give him and Gareth a chance, with the cows out to grass, to do some work on the cubicles in the barn, enlarging some, mending head rails and brisket boards which the cows had damaged, lunging forward to get up. Six hundred kilos of Holstein could do a fair amount of damage, quite inadvertently, in seconds.

Gareth said five of them had laminitis. Robin remembered an old general in his boyhood, a retired soldier of the old school who had tried to run Dean Cross village like a military operation and met resistance at every turn. ‘Army?' Robin had heard him bellow once. ‘Army? Wonderful career, if it wasn't for the soldiers and their bloody feet!' Something of the same, Robin thought, could be said of farming and cows. Cows always had something the matter with their feet. Cows' feet cost the dairy industry over thirty million lost pounds a year, succumbing to diets that were too high in concentrates or not high enough, to standing in slurry or knocking into corners or each other, to broken surfaces, to hazard. This last month, Robin's bill from the vet had been almost £600, and most of that for feet, for ulcers and inflammation and digital dermatitis, those crusty sores at the back of the foot that gave cows such misery. And now it was laminitis.

‘Shouldn't have given them that barley,' Gareth said.

Robin, bent over a cow's rear foot as she breathed heavily above him, clamped in the metal crush, said nothing. He had continued to say nothing for ten minutes and then he had simply said that he wanted a footbath set up, between hurdles, at the exit to the milking parlour. And that he would turn the cows out, after.

The kitchen seemed oddly quiet without Zoe, even though she had hardly made much noise, hadn't been talkative. She'd left a note on the table that morning, thanking him for having her, ‘for letting me just stay'. He hadn't minded her staying. He'd quite liked it in so far as he could like anything just now because she had asked nothing of him and yet she could see things, sometimes, without his having to explain them. It was as if she respected him not particularly as Robin Meredith the farmer, but just as a man, as a human being with his own right to pain and joy and privacy. It came to him – and surprised him – that Caro would have liked her, Caro would have warmed to the fact that she didn't pry, didn't seem to need something from you. If only he could have been like that, if only he hadn't needed to need . . .

He stood up at the kitchen table and pushed his half-eaten plate – Dilys's sausage casserole – into the welter of papers and booklets that littered its surface. He would go out into the barn, he decided, and look at the cows, well and sick, watchful of them and comforting himself. The house cat, seated on the newspaper pile, courteously regarded him pulling on his boots and jacket, waiting, with no impolite show of impatience, for his departure. Robin stooped to scratch her head. He indicated the table.

‘You won't,' he said, ‘like the onion.'

The barn was as he liked it best, dim and quiet except for the gentle crunching and gruntings of the cows who had not yet settled themselves. He ran a hand over one or two of them and inspected the rear feet that he had trimmed earlier that day, hollowing out the underside of the claws to keep them self-cleaning.

‘Good girl,' he said. ‘OK, old lady? That's my girl.'

The cows shifted and grumbled, banging into the bars of their cubicles. But nobody kicked him. Robin hadn't been kicked for years, not since the early days before he knew what cows were like, what they'd take and what they wouldn't. It had amazed him then, he remembered, discovering about them, how brutal they were to one another, picking on the sick or weak ones and knocking them over. But he loved them. He'd learned to love them. And, not being genetically harnessed like pigs and poultry whose stockmen had become not much more than technical engineers, they'd managed to stay lovable, being still within the natural, human range of things.

He went slowly up and down the aisles between the cubicles. The cows, as used to him as they were to one another, took virtually no notice. At one end, an old favourite, a red-and-white cow who dropped her sturdy calves as easily as laying an egg, turned and eyed him for a moment comfortably, as if he were no surprise to her, but merely a familiar unremarkable part of her accepted world. Then she turned her head away and forgot him.

Outside in the yard Gareth, having had, in his own view, a small triumph over the barley in the feed, had cleared up with extra assiduousness. The grooved concrete was scraped clean, as were the feeding troughs and the passageway he had created from the milking parlour through the footbath that he and Robin had dug and concreted together three years before. There was a small wind and in it various things gently flapped and clanked, bars and gates and sheets of zinc and plastic, the result of years of mending and patching, of making do. But the night was fine and the wind would keep any showers that were about on the move. Robin walked to the edge of the yard, and put his hands on the wall and looked over. Below him, the fields, dense in the darkness, and apparently unmarked by hedge or fence, ran down to the river. Only the line of water gleamed visibly at the foot of the fields and beyond it the land vanished again, thick and black, until it met the sky. Robin held the wall and stared out into the dark, moving air.