Next of Kin (29 page)

She unscrewed the top of the mineral-water bottle and took a swallow. The water was too warm, which made it taste somehow less clean. Last night Lyndsay had telephoned. She had telephoned in something of a state, not tearful, but over-excited, wired up, to say that Zoe had started sleeping with Robin, that Velma had found her, stark-naked, in Robin's bed at nine o'clock in the morning.

Lyndsay had sounded outraged. Even in the midst of her own enormous reaction, Judy couldn't help noticing that Lyndsay sounded very much like a wronged wife.

‘How dare she?' Lyndsay had cried. ‘How dare she? Just come down here, uninvited, and take him over like that?'

When Judy had put the telephone down, she had felt quite extraordinary. She didn't know whether she was angry or offended or simply shocked. She couldn't decide if she felt she had been exploited or if she'd been betrayed. She couldn't analyse what she felt for a very long time beyond the unquestionable realization that she'd known all along that this might happen, and that part of her, at some level, had simply been waiting until it did.

She had tried to ring Oliver, but he had had to go out to dinner with a client from the gallery and wasn't back yet. She wasn't at all sure what she was going to say to him, she just urgently needed to tell him what had happened and to hear his reaction, if only to see whether it tallied with any of the things she thought she was feeling. When she finally spoke to him, around midnight, he sounded almost offhand.

‘So?' he'd said, ‘what else did you think would happen?'

‘But it's my
father
—'

‘And,' Oliver said quietly, ‘my ex-girlfriend.'

The conversation had stopped soon after that. There'd either been nothing much more to say, or far too much. And there was certainly a lot of thinking to do, thinking that had preoccupied Judy half the night, and which had driven her at one point to go into Zoe's room and stare intently, almost fiercely, at Zoe's few and impersonal possessions, to see if a clue lay there as to what Zoe was after.

It couldn't just be sex. Could it? In Zoe's life, in Zoe's world, sex wasn't a big deal; you just had some when you wanted some. Simple. But with
Robin
? Thinking about Zoe and Robin made Judy think of Robin disconcertingly as a man, a man who was capable of sex, a man who might actually at that very moment be having sex, with Zoe, at Tideswell Farm. Judy had always tried not to think about sex as being in any way connected with her parents – their separate bedrooms were simply a fact, always had been, and her sympathies had always lain with Caro, because Caro had subconsciously asked for them, had laid subtle emphasis upon her own differentness, her fastidiousness, her liability to become sullied by the grosser mortals among whom she now dwelt. It struck Judy with an angry shame that she had never thought of Robin from Robin's point of view, so seduced had she been by Caro's, and then with an even greater wave of feeling that Zoe had seen what she had not and had imagined what she had declined to visualize. Zoe had wanted something, and in her straightforward way had gone out to get it. But it wasn't as simple as that, it wasn't as selfish. Pushing her thumbs into the sides of the mineral-water bottle so that the plastic dimpled with small cracking sounds, Judy had to admit that Zoe had shown compassion. Unmesmerized by either the presence or memory of Caro, Zoe had seen Robin's situation for what it was and had had sympathy. He was just a human being to her, a nice bloke in a delicate but deep kind of trouble. So she'd gone in there, to help, and to get something she was after, too, in the process. And in so doing, whether she had intended to or not, she had made Judy, quite purely and simply, jealous.

At Stretton Market, the young auctioneer who usually dealt with the calves told Robin he thought there'd be a falling trade on the week. He peered at the trailer in which seven bull calves and two barren cows waited to be unloaded.

‘Friesians'll average a hundred and twenty, maybe. Sixty or so more for top grade. Got a Belgian Blue in there? They'll do better. Averaged nearly two-fifty last week. Prices are always on the move with the change from yard to grass cattle in the summer.'

‘I'd like a hundred and forty for these,' Robin said. ‘Minimum.'

The auctioneer grinned. He was a cheerful, quick-witted young man who, when he wasn't selling off cattle, did farm valuations, quotations on buildings and change of land use and pipelines. He had been to Joe's funeral, Robin had seen him standing beside Stretton's chief agricultural auctioneer, respectful in a dark suit and a Mid-Mercia Farmers' Co-operative tie.

He said now, to Robin, ‘How's your old man?'

‘Picking up,' Robin said. ‘But it's slow. Very slow.'

‘Will he be able to carry on?'

Robin sighed.

‘I don't know. I honestly don't know. It's a hand-to-mouth arrangement right now, but I can't push him—'

‘And you?'

Robin looked away, in case his extraordinary lightness of heart should show in his eyes.

‘By all accounts,' the auctioneer said, his voice a mixture of teasing and envious admiration, ‘not so bad.'

Robin groaned.

‘You can't change your socks in peace round here—'

‘You should be so lucky,' the auctioneer said. ‘You should be so bloody lucky. The rest of us spend our lives chasing the skirt and a bit of it just walks straight into yours. Luck? It's indecent.'

Robin muttered something. The auctioneer gave him a quick slap on the shoulder with the clipboard he was holding.

‘It's only envy. I'm just choked with it, green as grass.'

He went off, whistling, towards the auction ring. Robin released the catches at the back of the trailer, and lowered the ramp to the ground. The two barren cows peered mournfully at him through the slatted retaining screen. One of them had been sickly all her life, a feeble calf, then a dispirited heifer and now a sunken-eyed cow with poor lungs, her great wet nose always festooned with loops of phlegm. He shouldn't have kept her this long, he shouldn't have let her get this far, but it was hard, when you'd bred an animal, not to keep giving them one more chance, not to hope that one more costly round of antibiotics would do the trick. It was the vet who had sealed her fate really, saying that she must go while she still had something left, before she succumbed to summer mastitis and became truly ill as well as worthless.

‘It's called cutting your losses,' the vet said.

‘I know,' Robin said. ‘I've been cutting them all my life.'

Except in one respect, at this particular moment. It hardly seemed safe to reflect upon it, so used had Robin become to one trouble being relentlessly followed by another, but he appeared to have been awarded a bonus, a gift, a prize almost, for uncomplaining endurance and quiet persistence. When he had woken the morning after Zoe had first taken him to bed, he had lain in the clear dawn light and looked at her for some time with delight, relief and amazement. He had to tell himself, over and over again, that that really
was
a girl in his bed, a warm, breathing, naked girl, and that she had been there all night and had, when out of some obscure sense of belated propriety he had suggested she should go back to her own room, declined to leave.

‘Why?' she said. ‘Why? What have you got to hide?'

Then she had gone to sleep against him as easily as if she had been sleeping there for years, and when he had lunged out at the alarm clock, fearful of it waking her, she hadn't stirred. He had lifted himself on one elbow, to crane over her and see her face.

‘Nice,' she'd said, after they'd made love. ‘Really
nice
.' She was smiling then. Something of the smile still lingered, in her sleep, seven hours later. He'd bent to kiss her ear, with its fringe of silver hoops, and thought, swinging himself out of bed on the far side, that to leave his bed, his own bed, on an ordinary weekday morning with a girl still asleep in it was something he had never, in his wildest dreams, thought could ever, ever happen to him.

But it had. It had happened that night, and the next, and all the subsequent nights. Zoe continued to keep her sparse black wardrobe in her own bedroom, but she slept in his. She seemed perfectly comfortable, trailing yawning out of the bathroom damply wrapped in a towel, nicking his pillows, pushing herself against him to get settled in bed, peacefully conversational.

‘Velma's got the hump,' he'd said to her last night.

Zoe had been in the bath, holding one foot out of the water to inspect the length of her toenails.

‘Well, you'd expect that. Wouldn't you? I spell urban decay to her. I'm poison. I'm corrupting you.'

‘Without doubt,' Robin said, smiling at himself in the mirror above the basin. ‘I think she's spread the word. Gareth's been slightly respectful and Debbie won't look at me. What about Mum?'

Zoe put her foot back in the water and lifted out the other one.

‘What about her? What about everybody?'

‘They'll have opinions,' Robin said. ‘And they'll let us know what they are.'

‘Do you care?'

‘Not for myself—'

‘For me?'

‘You,' said Robin, turning towards her and dropping a kiss on the top of her head, ‘can take care of yourself.'

‘Right. Then who are we worrying about?'

‘It's not worry—'

‘We aren't hurting anyone,' Zoe said. ‘We aren't taking each other away from anyone else. There aren't any kids involved.'

‘You're a kid.'

Zoe stood up in the bath and held out her arms for a towel.

‘I'm as old as the hills. You don't want to think about what people think. What they think is their problem. We aren't responsible for other people's hang-ups.'

Robin wrapped the towel round her and lifted her out of the bath.

‘I said I'd go,' Zoe said, ‘whenever you tell me. I still will.'

‘I won't tell you. I don't want to.'

‘Fine.' She stood there, waiting for him to dry her. ‘That's all we need. I'll tell Velma that, if you like. I don't mind. I don't mind what I say to Velma. I like her. She's entitled to her opinion and we are to ours but she can't expect us to adopt hers, even if she could explain to us, which I bet she can't, why she holds it.'

He kissed her shoulder.

‘Shut up.'

She looked at him.

‘I was only talking.'

He said, ‘About Velma. I don't want to talk about Velma.'

‘You started it.'

He dropped the towel and put his arms around her.

‘And now I'm tired of it.'

‘Look,' Zoe said. She put her hands up and held the sides of his face, ‘I expect the whole neighbourhood's been talking about you for years. OK? And now, after all that's happened and the funerals, they're talking some more. And because of me, it's more more. But you don't have to listen. Do you? It's your life, Robin. Maybe for the first time in your life, it's your life so why don't you just live it for a bit?'

Was that, really, what the auctioneer had meant when he talked so jovially about envy? Was it the sight of someone not only doing something for themselves, but that they were free to do, that made him tell Robin he had the luck of the devil? Robin wasn't used to being free. He was used to independence, to be sure, but independence made its own disciplines, created its own structures and demands, so that one was never, in a sense, free of one's own burdens, of the consequences of one's own decisions, of the path one had set oneself to follow. He moved up the ramp and looked at the beasts inside, waiting, as they had waited all their lives, for the next thing to be done to them, the next decision made by somebody else, the next pen or trailer or yard. Perhaps he'd been like that for years, got used to waiting, to reacting, to gritting his teeth and getting by, to obeying himself mindlessly. One of the calves stirred in the straw round its feet and looked at him, fourteen days old, produced out of a tube without touching or coupling, without sex. Robin looked at it with real sympathy.

‘Poor little sod,' he said aloud.

‘You can do the cleaning yourself,' Velma said. ‘High time you learned, anyhow.'

She dumped a pile of dusters on the kitchen table to emphasize her point.

‘Hoover's under the stairs. Dustbin men come Fridays.'

‘OK,' Zoe said. She looked at the dusters. No doubt Dilys would tell her what to do with them. Or Debbie.

‘Robin can drop my money in when he's passing. Two weeks, he owes me.'

‘I'll tell him,' Zoe said. She picked the dusters up and put them down again 6 inches away as if to acknowledge that responsibility for them had been transferred. ‘Will you get another job?'

‘Of course,' Velma said.

‘Round here? Or will you have to go to Stretton?'

‘What business is it of yours?'

‘None,' Zoe said. ‘I just don't want you to lose out. You don't have to leave.'

‘Don't I?' Velma said, her eyes widening in indignity. ‘Don't I just?'

‘No,' Zoe said, ‘you don't. Robin doesn't want you to. Nobody does. What's changed?'

‘You've got a nerve,' Velma said. ‘You've got a bloody nerve, standing there asking me that!'

Zoe said reasonably, ‘But I'm not marrying Robin. Am I? I'm just here. And he's better. You can see that. Even if you can't stand me, you can see that Robin's better.'

Velma went over to the kitchen door, where she hung her anorak. She wore it every day, winter or summer, because, she said, it was cold on her bike, she felt it cold even on the hottest days.