Next of Kin (30 page)

‘I'm going,' she said. ‘I'm not taking any more of this.'

Zoe stayed by the table.

‘I'll tell Robin. I'll tell him about your money.'

Velma was struggling into her anorak. Her face was almost hidden from Zoe but something about her angry, jerky, muddled movements made Zoe think she might be close to tears.

‘I wish you wouldn't,' Zoe said. ‘I wish you wouldn't go—'

Velma thrust her second arm triumphantly into its sleeve.

‘I'm glad to be shot of it,' she cried. ‘I'm glad to be going. I'm glad to be getting out of it all.'

And then there was a whirl of plastic carrier bags and the door opened and immediately slammed after her, deafening and final. Zoe looked at the table. Beside the dusters lay Robin's post, arranged in Velma's graded manner, and beside that her final lunch for him, pointedly for one only, a Scotch egg, cut in half, and a handful of pickled onions. Zoe picked it up. It seemed to her food so alien that she couldn't think who it was intended for. She peeled away the covering of plastic film, and used the film, like a protective glove, to pick up the onions and drop them in the rubbish bin. Then she found a knife, and cut up the egg into very small pieces and carried the plate outside to the garden Caro had once made and which now languished neglected under a riot of new weeds, to give it to the birds.

‘Where's Dad?' Robin said.

‘Out. With one of the new fellows. He doesn't know much but he's willing to learn. Barley doesn't look too good.'

‘I know,' Robin said.

Dilys had lost weight. As she sat at the kitchen table surrounded by the farm accounts as was her wont the last week of every month, Robin looked at her hands moving slowly among the papers and saw that her rings were slipping up and down her fingers with little clinking sounds, like light coins clashing together.

‘We'll have to think about some permanent help, Mum.'

She said nothing. Robin lowered himself into the chair opposite her and put his elbows on the table.

‘We have to have a meeting, Mum, now that Lyndsay's back. We have to talk.'

‘You're not a shareholder,' Dilys said, not looking up.

‘No. But I'm your son. And I'm also virtually running this farm as well as my own just now.'

‘We're doing that,' Dilys said. ‘Like we always have.'

Robin said gently, ‘No, Mum. Not like that any more. You know that.'

‘Dad's a lot better. He was out for four hours yesterday.'

‘But he didn't do much. Did he? He can't.' Robin paused. It was in his mind to say, ‘His heart's not in it. Nor is yours,' but he held back.

‘We'll have your meeting,' Dilys said. ‘Even if it won't change anything. How can it? What can Lyndsay do?'

‘We have to ask her. She's a shareholder. She's got Joe's shares.'

Dilys gave him a quick glance.

‘You've upset Lyndsay.'

Robin waited.

‘God knows what she expected,' Dilys said, ‘but you've upset her all right.'

‘She wanted my support,' Robin said, ‘and she'll get it. She knows that.'

‘And Zoe?'

‘What about Zoe—'

‘What's upset Lyndsay about Zoe?'

‘You know what, Mum. Don't pretend you don't.'

‘I'm not pretending,' Dilys said. ‘I've thought this would happen all along.' She gave Robin a glimmer of a smile. ‘She's a good girl, Zoe. I never thought I'd say it, but she's a good girl. She's patient with your father, patient as a saint. Lyndsay can't see that, of course. Nor will Judy.'

‘I haven't spoken to Judy yet.'

Dilys picked up several invoices and clipped them together.

‘Women don't like letting go. They get used to the men in their lives, they get used to having them there.'

‘I'm not any less there because – because—'

‘Because you're having a fling with Zoe.'

‘Yes.'

‘That's not how it seems to Lyndsay. Or Judy. Or Velma. Velma's just been in, all of a tizz. She walked out of Tides well this morning.'

‘Damn woman—'

‘Didn't like being upstaged,' Dilys said.

‘Zoe wouldn't upstage anyone—'

‘Didn't need to. Didn't try. She just had to move into your bedroom.'

‘Mum,' Robin said, ‘what's made you so philosophical? I thought I'd get an earful about Zoe.'

Dilys lifted her head and looked at him.

‘I'm tired, dear.'

‘Of course.'

‘Things aren't what they were, the life's not there, the colour's gone.' Her hand, holding the sheaf of invoices, was trembling very slightly. ‘We've just got to make the best of what's left. Haven't we? We've just got to do what we can, Lyndsay included. And you.'

Robin came round the table and stood close to Dilys's chair.

‘You send Zoe up to me this afternoon,' Dilys said. ‘I could do with her this afternoon, now that the cricket's finished on the television. Dad'll be tired by this afternoon.' She glanced up at him. She was almost smiling. ‘That is, if your new housekeeper can spare the time.'

Zoe wasn't in the house. The kitchen looked oddly distracted, somehow, even above and beyond the chairs standing about at angles unrelated to the table, and a tower of washing-up drying in the rack, perilously balanced.

‘Out with Gareth,' a note on the table said. ‘Back later. Vet coming at three-thirty. Velma's gone. Sorry about that.' And then three kisses and a huge flourishing Z. Robin looked at the answering machine. Three messages, one from a feed salesman, one from an adviser on alternative uses for arable land whom he had contacted on behalf of Dean Place Farm, and one from Judy.

‘I need to talk to you,' Judy said. She sounded very emotional. ‘I need to talk to you when you're on your own. I suppose I'm sorry for you, but I don't know. I just don't know. Ring me, will you? Ring me tonight.'

Robin sighed. She was sorry for him, was she? Sorry for what exactly, sorry for what he'd been through or for what she had, so much of the time, put him through? He sat down at the table and picked up Zoe's note. The kisses and the Z must be at least three-quarters of an inch high. And all Judy could feel was pity. Pity! Pity, for God's sake! ‘Pity if you must,' Robin said aloud to the ghost of Judy in the empty kitchen. ‘Pity if you want to. I can't stop you. But I have to say that the best response, the kindest, most useful response is just, for once in your life, to accept. To accept, without damn well judging.'

Chapter Sixteen

Lyndsay's father had made a list of four properties in Stretton that might be suitable for use as a small beauty salon on the ground floor with a flat on the first floor above. One of them had a balcony and another a small garden, fenced with woven wooden panels, with a square of shabby grass and some tired flower borders and a lilac bush. Both Lyndsay's parents had said that they would help her with the capital needed until she could extricate herself financially from Dean Place Farm, and also that they would be very happy to help with the children while Lyndsay got her business going. Her father also said that the building with the garden, though small, was structurally sound and that he had plenty of contacts left in the building trade who would do her a reliable and reasonable conversion job.

‘And when the children need a big garden,' said Sylvia, ‘they can come to ours. Can't they?'

Lyndsay had given a small smile and nodded. Her mother's garden measured perhaps a quarter of an acre, the scrap behind the building in Stretton maybe 15 feet. She stood in the first-floor flat of the building in Stretton and looked out of its windows, down into the street or the garden, or sideways, on its detached side, at the brick side of the next building, looming very close and pierced by two small windows only, shielded by slatted plastic blinds. Everything seemed very near and very airless. She thought of putting the children to bed in one of the tiny bedrooms, and then of coming into the small front sitting-room, alone, on weekday evenings, and turning the television on, as she so often had in the last alarming lonely months of Joe's life, just for its company.

‘Nice joinery,' her father said, slapping the heel of his hand into a window frame. ‘Solid. A proper job.'

‘It's a bit small—' Lyndsay said faintly.

‘Bound to be,' Roy Walsh said. ‘Bound to be, dear. After living on a farm. You can't expect 16 acres of oats to look at in the middle of Stretton. This is a nice little property. Sound. And a good location, too, just off the high street.'

Lyndsay began to say, pointlessly, that Joe had never grown oats, and stopped herself. She touched a nearby wall, where the wood-chip paper had lifted a little, at a join, exposing green emulsion paint underneath.

‘Is it fair to the children?' Lyndsay said. ‘Is it fair to bring them in from the country and ask them to live here?'

‘Of course it's fair. As long as they've got their mother with them, it's fair. And you've got us ten minutes away, and the park. It's far more than most children have got, far more.' He looked at Lyndsay. His heavy, kind face creased with mild anxiety as it always had when he looked at her and told himself how defenceless she was, unprepared, and how unfitted for this age when women seemed to have taken their own lives over to such effect, their own and anyone else's they could lay their hands on. Lyndsay wasn't fitted for this, she wasn't made for modern womanhood. But she had to live it, all the same. She'd had a man to take care of her, but now he'd gone and she'd got to face the world for herself.

He said gently, ‘You can't put the clock back, dear. You can't pretend you're still a wife because you're not now. You're a widow. A widow with young children and maybe thirty working years ahead of you.'

She picked at the stiffened flap of wallpaper with a fingernail.

‘You said,' Roy persisted, ‘that the meeting at Dean Place Farm didn't go very well.'

She said, ‘No, it didn't. They wanted me to become a partner, to stay there in the cottage, to keep the farm in the family.'

‘And you don't want that?'

She said nothing.

‘Lyndsay,' Roy said, ‘if you don't want to stay on the farm, then you have to do something else. Don't you see?'

She turned away from him and crossed the grubby flower-patterned carpet the last occupier had left, to the window. Below her, on the pavement, two girls with babies in strollers were leaning against a litter bin and smoking. An old man was going past, very slowly, towing a tartan shopper on wheels, and so, rather faster, was a middle-aged woman in a striped shop overall. And there was traffic. Cars and vans and a delivery messenger on a motor bike. For the last six years, when Lyndsay looked out of her windows, she'd hardly ever seen anybody except the postman or Rose in her pram, and the traffic had been Joe's Land Rover and her car and the weekly travelling fishmonger. Sometimes she'd hated that, hated the emptiness and the shimmering uniformity of the fields. But she hadn't thought of trading it for this; it had never crossed her mind that, if she had to give up the blank agricultural view, this was the alternative.

‘I asked you a question,' Roy said patiently.

‘I'm afraid of the change,' Lyndsay said.

‘But the change has already happened, dear, nobody can help that—'

‘Robin could,' Lyndsay said angrily, without having intended even to mention his name.

‘Robin?'

‘He persuaded me to go back,' Lyndsay said, rushing on, ‘and now he's made it impossible for me to stay.'

Roy waited. Robin had always seemed a nice fellow, quieter than Joe, a bit less friendly, perhaps, but a nice fellow all the same.

‘Why's that?'

‘I can't explain,' Lyndsay said. She put her hands up to the combs in her hair. ‘He's just let me down.'

‘Do you mean he took his parents' side in your discussion?'

Lyndsay shook her head. He hadn't really, beyond saying that their future had to be thought of, that they, with their chief administrator and workhorse gone, needed to think about how they were going to manage their lives, lives they had never had even to consider might change.

‘It's worse for them, in a way, than anyone,' Robin had said to Lyndsay. His voice hadn't been unkind, but it had been firm. ‘Because they're too old for change. They're too old to have a future but they've still got to keep going.'

‘They've still got each other!' Lyndsay had screamed.

Robin had barely glanced at her.

‘And do you think,' he'd said, ‘that that's what either of them really wants?'

‘He's got to look to them,' Roy said now. ‘He's all they've got. Like your mother and I are looking to you. You've got your family and Joe's parents have got Robin.'

Lyndsay said foolishly, ‘Robin's got a girlfriend. She's young enough to be his daughter.'

‘Has he? Well, well. Nice for him to have a bit of company.'

But not nice for me, Lyndsay thought savagely, abandoning for me, displacing. She thrust her combs back in.

‘I felt he wasn't thinking about me,' Lyndsay said. ‘He wasn't putting himelf in my shoes, he wasn't concentrating. That's all.'

‘But you've got to concentrate. You really have, dear. You might not like responsibility but you've got to take it. You've got to take the next step.' He moved heavily forward and swung the door of the room back and forth, eyeing the level of the floor below it. ‘They're asking eighty-eight thousand for this and I reckon I could get it for eighty-two or three. And then a bit more for the conversion downstairs and a spot of decorating up here, after we've applied for permission to use the place as business premises.' He looked at her. It wasn't a particularly fatherly look, but more one of shrewd speculation, as if he were discussing a business tender. ‘Well, dear,' he said, ‘what do you say?'