Next of Kin (20 page)

Robin went out into the hall, where the seldom-used front door had been propped open with a cast-iron doorstop he had been very fond of as a boy, shaped like a rampant lion. The Vicar and his wife came slowly forward.

‘Good of you to come,' Robin said. His hand went instinctively to his throat, to loosen his tie. ‘Are there more behind you?'

The Vicar's wife looked up. She had been a pretty woman once, but seemed to have decided at some moment that it was a pointless asset, being pretty, that it availed her nothing, so she had resolved to let it quietly fade, like a party frock kept in a cupboard and rotting to rags because there were no parties to go to.

‘I didn't see anyone,' she said. She looked at her husband, as if he somehow had had a different perspective and had seen something she hadn't seen. ‘Did you?'

‘No—'

‘Nobody coming?' Robin said. ‘Nobody following you from the village?'

‘Well, there was the gap, you see,' the Vicar said carefully. ‘The gap, you know, while we went to the crematorium. I expect they went then, I expect a lot of them had to get back to work, you know, after their dinner hours—'

Robin said slowly, ‘I see.' He looked at the Vicar's wife. ‘But they all knew; there was an announcement. They all knew they were expected back here, that Mum expected them—' He paused.

The Vicar looked up at him.

‘How can I put it, how can I—' He stopped and then said softly, ‘This is a different kind of funeral, you see. It creates – it creates an apprehension.'

Robin stood for a moment, thinking. Then he said, ‘Will you come in, at any rate? Will you come in, while I tell my mother?'

They nodded, moved behind him into the house and along the polished floor towards the dining room.

‘Ah,' Dilys said. She seized a glass of sherry and a plate bearing a white paper napkin, folded into a triangle, and held it out to the Vicar's wife. ‘Now you must help yourselves. Just go ahead and help yourselves.'

The room seemed very quiet.

‘Mum,' Robin said.

Dilys turned from the Vicar and his wife.

‘Well?'

Robin moved a step or two and lifted his arm as if to put it round Dilys's shoulders. Then he let it fall again.

‘Mum, I don't think there's too many people coming. We didn't think of the time we took at the crematorium. They had to go back to work. We didn't think of that.'

Dilys gave him a bright, hard glance. Then she picked up a second glass and plate and thrust them at the Vicar.

‘Nonsense,' she said.

‘Nobody came,' Robin said. ‘At least, almost nobody. Five or six. Mum was expecting fifty.'

He sat on the edge of the sofa in Lyndsay's sitting-room, still in his funeral clothes, with his tie pulled down and his elbows on his knees. She had given him a glass of whisky and he held it loosely between his hands, and stared at the carpet.

‘Poor Dilys,' Lyndsay said.

‘She wouldn't take it. She wouldn't accept it. We sat there till gone four, just waiting.' He raised his glass and took a swallow. ‘It was Judy in the end, it was Judy who had the courage. She said, “Gran, I don't think anyone's coming now. It's time we cleared up and stopped waiting.” And then she just got up and took things out to the kitchen. Mum didn't say anything but she didn't try to stop her. She just sat there while we went in and out with all the plates. Enough food to feed the village.'

‘And Harry?'

Robin looked down at the carpet again.

‘He was outside. Where he always is. In – in the store.'

‘Where Joe was,' Lyndsay said. ‘Where he found Joe.'

‘Yes.'

‘I keep wondering what I'd have done, if I'd found him. Sometimes – sometimes I think I envy Harry, for finding him.'

Robin glanced at her.

‘Don't do that.'

‘And why didn't he shoot himself here? Why didn't he do it at his home, our home, where he belonged?'

Robin gave a tiny shrug.

‘Perhaps that's why.'

Lyndsay leaned forward in her chair and put the mug of tea she had been drinking from carefully on the carpet beside her feet.

‘I feel – oh Robin, I feel so sorry, so bad, just utterly bad that I couldn't cope—'

He said slowly, ‘Maybe it was him that couldn't cope. Maybe he couldn't cope with being a farmer but he knew there was nothing else. You might hate the land, but you can't leave it either.' He paused and then he said, even more slowly, ‘I should think suicide isn't far from a lot of farmers' minds.'

She stared at him.

‘Robin!'

‘Not many farmers have anyone to turn to,' Robin said, looking down into his whisky and observing his fingers, splayed and amber-coloured, through the side of the glass. ‘And then they grow to doubt relying on themselves. You begin to think whatever you do is likely to go wrong, you decide to spray or not to spray and then the weather turns and all your time and money is wasted. You feel fate's against you. You feel the land is fate.'

She said, ‘Do you feel that?'

He sighed.

‘I see it, but I don't feel it. At least, not often. I'm not the same kind of animal as Joe.'

‘But do you feel that about farming, about the land?'

He sighed again.

‘I suppose so.'

‘Are you trying to tell me,' Lyndsay said, ‘that Joe was just an accident waiting to happen?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Oh my
God
—'

‘But more,' Robin said, ‘more I'm trying to make you see it wasn't your fault.'

‘But I'm his
wife.
I'd have done anything in the world for him—'

‘There were things you couldn't do, Lyndsay. Nobody could. He'd got to the point where nobody could help him and he couldn't help himself.'

‘Somebody can
always
help!'

Robin looked at her.

‘I don't believe that. And what's more, apart from the pain he's caused you and his family, I don't think Joe necessarily did a wrong thing. In the end, your life is your own. It's all you've got that really is your own. It isn't something you owe other people.'

The sitting-room door opened a little way, and then stopped.

‘Hughie?' Lyndsay said.

Seal came round the door, held by a pyjamaed arm, and was wagged at them.

‘Hughie,' Lyndsay said. ‘Do you want to come in?'

‘Who is it?' Hughie said, still outside the door, his voice thickened by speaking round his thumb.

‘It's Robin,' Robin said.

‘Oh.'

‘You know
me
,' Robin said.

‘Where is Daddy?'

Lyndsay got up and crossed to the partly opened door, standing looking through it to where Hughie stood, in his pyjamas and the red-and-black baseball cap.

‘You know where Daddy is. Daddy died. He went to heaven.'

‘I don't want that,' Hughie said.

Lyndsay stooped down and picked him up.

‘No, darling.' Her voice shook. ‘None of us do.' She put her face into his neck, by the soft red knitted band that finished the neckline of his pyjamas. ‘We have to bear it, Hughie. We have to get used to it.'

‘Bring him,' Hughie said. ‘
Bring
him.'

Robin stood up. He put his whisky glass down on top of the television and moved towards Lyndsay and Hughie.

‘Would you come to me, old son? Would you come and give your old uncle a hug?'

Hughie shook his head.

Robin said, ‘I wish you would.'

Slowly, still sucking, Hughie swivelled his head and looked at Robin, the fingers of his free hand working, tiny, busy movements in Seal's plush side. Robin held out his arms. Hughie bowed his head, submitting to the transfer, and was carried to the sofa.

‘It's a change,' Robin said, settling Hughie against him. ‘That's what's frightening. Nobody likes things being different.'

Hughie lay against him, his face invisible to Robin under the peak of the baseball cap.

‘But you'll get used to it. Like you got used to going to playgroup. Like you got used to Rose being here.'

Hughie took his thumb out to say distinctly, ‘I didn't,' and put it back again.

‘You just have to wait,' Robin said, holding him. ‘That's all we can do, all of us. We have to wait until we're used to it, until it feels normal that your dad's not here. We have to wait until we feel better.'

Hughie took out his thumb and pressed his face and, uncomfortably, the peak of his cap into Robin's chest and held himself there, tensely and silently. Robin waited. He looked up and caught Lyndsay's eye.

‘Poor chap. Poor old chap.'

He put a hand up and cradled Hughie's head against him.

‘You just wait,' he said.

Before she went to bed that night, Lyndsay removed the two pillows from Joe's side of the bed, stripped off their covers to wash and put the pillows in the airing cupboard. She had promised herself that she would do this, on the night of his funeral. Then she got into bed, and told herself that she would give herself half an hour before she swallowed one of the sleeping pills Dr Nichols had given her. After fifteen minutes, she got up again and retrieved the pillows and their covers and got back into bed with them and lay holding them against her while she wept.

Some time later, she put the pillows back where they had been all her married life; and went along the landing to the bathroom. Both the children's bedroom doors were open. Rose lay on her back, her stout arms flung above her head, lost in sleep. Hughie was on the floor of his room, curled up on his duvet, still wearing his baseball cap. Lyndsay adjusted the duvet, so that there was enough to tuck round him, and put his pillow against his back, for comfort. It had been Robin who had finally put him to bed, and he hadn't protested. In fact, he had been so submissive as Robin carried him from the sitting-room that Lyndsay would have given a good deal to have heard a roar from Rose, a roar to remind herself that there were other emotions in the world than the grinding ones of pain and pity.

Lyndsay did not look at herself in the mirror above the washbasin. She had decided not to, for a week or two, to spare herself the signs of her grief that seemed to her to have quite distorted her face. In the cupboard, whose door the mirror formed, Joe's shaving things still stood, beside her creams and lotions, and the indigestion tablets in their royal-blue plastic bottle that he had chewed all day, every day, ever since she had known him.

‘Shouldn't you tell the doctor?' Lyndsay had said. ‘Shouldn't you tell someone that it never stops?'

‘No,' Joe said, ‘it's fine. I don't think about it. It's nothing.'

Lyndsay went out on to the landing again. Nothing had ever been nothing to Joe, and nothing had really ever been fine, either. She leaned against the wall, the wall papered by Joe with the paper of her choice – clumps of daisies on a cream satiny ground – and felt suddenly quite overwhelmed, not just by the present or the future, or even by Joe's suicide, but by the past and by all she hadn't understood about it and couldn't have changed, even if she had understood it. It had all been too much for her, all along, and only her incomprehension had enabled her to keep going. She sank down where she was, still leaning against the wall, the landing carpet – only a cheap one, to Dilys's disgust – harsh on her thighs through the thin cotton of her nightgown. She closed her eyes and let the sad silence hum in her ears. Was this growing up?

Judy and Oliver were waiting for Robin in the kitchen at Tideswell Farm. They had made coffee and were sprawled either side of the kitchen table, sometimes briefly touching hands across it. Oliver had taken off his sweater, and thrown it on one end of the table across the litter of papers that lived there now, and on this the house cat lay, curled up but watchfully, waiting to be told to go.

‘I thought you'd be in bed,' Robin said. He had been wearing his black funeral tie loosely round his neck all evening, and now he pulled it off and dropped it on the table.

‘We were waiting for you,' Judy said.

‘I was with Lyndsay—'

‘Yes.'

‘Trying to tell her she wasn't to blame.'

‘Are you hungry?' Judy said.

He shook his head.

‘Coffee?' Oliver said.

‘No, thanks. I had a whisky at Lyndsay's and I feel as sick as a dog.'

Judy said uncertainly, ‘You've been good to Lyndsay. And Gran.'

Robin grunted.

‘Poor old Gran—'

‘Do you mind that?' Judy said. ‘Do you mind what Gran thought of Joe?'

Robin said, ‘It's no good minding. It's what is. Was.'

The telephone shrilled.

‘Shall I go?' Oliver said.

He stood up, pushing his spectacles up his nose as if to see better was also to hear better.

‘Hello?'

He waited a second or two and then he held the receiver out to Robin.

‘It's for you. It's your mother.'

Robin put the telephone to his ear.

‘Mum? Everything OK?'

He paused, listening. Oliver moved round behind Judy's chair and put his hands lightly on her shoulders.

‘You'd better come,' Dilys said, her voice clear across the Tideswell kitchen. ‘You'd better come at once. I can't find your father.'

Chapter Eleven

Eight feet in front of Zoe, the string quartet posed inside a huge gilded cage. They were all young women, and the cage was their trademark, since they called themselves Birds in a Cage. They were about to appear at the Royal Albert Hall, playing Venetian Baroque music, which was their speciality, and dressed in vaguely Renaissance clothes made of rich dark satins and brocades, which they had made their speciality, too. They were being photographed for posters and programmes, and, influenced by the vogue for portraying classical singers and musicians as sirens, they were getting as much sex appeal into the session as possible, as much hair and teeth and potential trouble as the photographer would let them get away with.