Next of Kin (5 page)

‘Waste of electric!' she'd shriek, slamming them shut almost before she'd got the milk out.

‘He won't eat cooked,' Velma said now, parking a cereal bowl in the plate rack. ‘He was doing himself a cooked breakfast right up till she died but he won't do it now. Mugs of cold tea he's forgotten sitting about all over the house and these everlasting cereal bowls.'

‘Better than the bottle,' Gareth said. He eyed Velma from behind. She wore purple leggings and a black jersey – not long enough – and turquoise trainers. ‘Me daps,' she called them. Her bottom, Gareth decided, reminded him of his mum's.

‘He thought the world of her,' Velma said firmly. ‘The world.'

‘Did he?' Gareth said. The Robin he knew was not, he considered, the kind of man to think the world of anything or anybody. He'd never go that far. He just wanted things to work, jobs to be done properly. When Debbie complained, as she frequently did, that all he, Gareth, ever thought about was the cows, he said well, he had to, didn't he? With Robin on his back day and night, he hadn't exactly got a choice, had he? Debbie wanted him to stop being a herdsman, and go back to college to learn some modern skills with computers and business studies. She wanted to see him in the management side of farming, not in a mucky boiler suit with hands and arms that had spent half the day up something she'd rather not think about. But Gareth liked cows. He didn't mind the hours and he didn't mind Robin. In any case, the thought of computers made him panic.

‘Where's he gone then?' Velma said.

‘Milk quota meeting.'

‘Load of nonsense, all this quota stuff—'

‘Yeah,' Gareth said. He stood up, screwing the foil in which Debbie had wrapped his sandwiches into a ball. He said, ‘Funny here now. Isn't it?'

Velma took her hands out of the sink and dried them on a tea towel. She looked round the room, at its sunny, fruity, American colours, at the extravagant fridge, at the poster of an enormous swooping bridge photographed black against a sunset under the slogan, ‘California Dreamin''.

‘She never settled,' Velma said. ‘Not really. Me mam's sister was like that. Went to New Zealand to marry a sheep farmer and she never really took to it. Homesick till the day she died, always pining. At least,' Velma said, wiping a handful of spoons, ‘my auntie knew what she was pining for. I don't think our madam here ever did.'

‘Who's that?' Gareth said. It was time he was back out in the yard, getting the three cows whose feet needed attention into the metal-framed crush so he could inspect them, but there was something about this conversation that was oddly alluring. And now, beyond Velma's outline at the window by the sink, he could see a Land Rover in the yard.

‘Joe,' Velma said. She tugged down her jersey. Good-looking fellow, Joe.

‘What's he doing here?'

Velma went over to the kitchen door and out through the porch where the boots were kept, to the yard.

‘He's out!' she yelled at Joe.

‘That's OK—'

He came past her into the kitchen, boiler-suited like Gareth in dark-blue drill and wearing army-fatigue boots.

‘Morning, Gareth—'

Gareth nodded. He picked up his flask and his copy of the daily paper he preferred, partly for its obsessive football coverage and partly for the daily tits shot. Debbie had had tits once, but they seemed to have vanished, subsiding in a gradual and puzzling way as each of her three children was born. Pity, really.

‘I'm getting back to the yard—'

‘Yes,' Joe said.

Velma came back into the kitchen saying, ‘Coffee?'

‘No thanks,' Joe said. ‘I just want to look for something.' He paused and then he said, ‘Upstairs.'

‘I'll show you—'

‘No,' Joe said. He put a hand out, as if to stop her. ‘I know what it is. I know my way. See you, Gareth.'

They watched him go out of the kitchen.

‘Take your boots off!' Velma shouted.

His tread, still booted, went up the stairs.

‘What the heck—'

‘I dunno,' Velma said. ‘I dunno. I shouldn't have let him. But I couldn't stop him, could I? Robin's brother and all—'

‘Sh—' Gareth said. He looked upwards. Velma looked, too. Above their heads, across the floorboards of the room above, Joe's boots moved slowly, and then stopped.

‘Blooming cheek!' Velma said. ‘He's in her room! What the hell's he doing there?'

The footsteps moved again, very slowly and carefully.

‘He's in her room!' Velma said again. ‘In Caro's room! I haven't been in since she went, only to dust and that. I'd better go up—'

‘No,' Gareth said. He put a hand on her arm. ‘Leave him.'

‘But he—'

‘You don't know,' Gareth said. ‘You don't know what he wants. He wouldn't take nothing. Maybe—'

‘What?'

‘You just leave him,' Gareth said. He gave her arm a squeeze and let it go. ‘He wouldn't have come in, bold as brass, would he, if he was up to anything? You just leave him.'

He moved towards the door, rolling up his paper into a baton, his flask under his arm.

‘See you, Velma.'

She picked up her tea towel again, shaking her head as if to rid it of unnerving vibrations.

‘Weird,' she said.

In Caro's bedroom, Joe leaned on the footboard of her bed and looked at where she had lain. He had seen her there, several times, during the fast and frightening progress of her illness, wearing candy-striped nighsthirts with her hair plaited slightly to one side so that she could lie comfortably. That is, while she still had hair. Before the treatment.

He held the polished wooden rail of the bed and stared at the curve of the pillow under the red-and-white patchwork quilt. He wasn't wholly certain why he was here, but only that he had obeyed a sudden impulse to say goodbye to Caro, to explain to her – by being in her bedroom rather than by saying anything – that his mental absence from her funeral, from anything to do with the fact of her death, had nothing to do with
her
. It had to do with something much darker and more alarming, a fear that had settled upon Joe the moment Robin had rung from Stretton Hospital to say that Caro had died twenty minutes before – and hadn't left him since. He had felt, standing at the graveside and holding the yellow umbrella over Lyndsay and Judy, something close to panic. He had felt it again, on and off, ever since, had found himself driving the long way round through Dean Cross in order to avoid the churchyard and almost barking at Lyndsay every time Caro's name came up in conversation. Ten minutes ago, driving down the lane between Dean Place and Tideswell, but heading home, the panic had fallen so violently upon Joe that he had, for a fraction of a second, almost blacked out.

‘I'll nail it,' he'd said aloud to himself, gripping the steering wheel. ‘I'll go and stand in her bedroom and I'll bloody well
nail
it.'

But her bedroom offered him nothing. It was tidy, almost austere, furnished with a random collection of things she had picked up at auction sales over the years; neat things, almost prim. There was no sign of Robin in the room, no evidence of his having shared the bed with the patchwork quilt. But then there was no sign of anything much, least of all the element Joe had so urgently wished to find – a sign of life.

‘Caro,' he said to the empty air.

Nothing stirred. He went over to the window and looked down into the yard from it – a view she had presumably chosen – and saw nothing there, either, not even cows. There was something literally unbearable about her removal, something deeply cruel, as well as fatal. He put his forehead against the glass of the windowpane. It was the fatality that was so terrible. Without Caro there, without her living self being there as proof of this other world, this other life of hope and movement that she had carried about with her like an aura, the fates could just close in. He swallowed hard. Something about Caro, about who she was, where she'd come from, had made him feel – why the hell had she made him feel it? – that he could dodge destiny, that he – if he kept running – was the fleeter of foot.

She'd even made him feel that the money didn't matter, that his seeming ability to manage the farm's finances was not running away with him. He had never spoken to her openly about his fears, about the secret loans, about his tendency to feel that, if he spent more money, he would somehow see a return on it automatically, but he had hinted at it. And she had smiled at him. She had smiled that calm but perceiving smile and told him not to be afraid of the short-term; the short-term was always full of shocks, it was the long-term you had to focus on. And now she had gone, and the consolation of the long-term had gone with her, and he was left here alone with the shocks.

He took his forehead away from the glass, and rubbed it. Below him in the yard, Gareth went by at some distance, holding a cow either side of him on halters. Robin was good at training cows to halters, had rigged up some device like a whirling clothesline where the young heifers were broken in to being led. He said it made them better to show and in the saleroom, that a well-behaved cow was more likely to attract a buyer's eye. Robin . . . What would Robin think if he were to come home now and find Joe in his dead wife's bedroom with no explanation to offer for it? And there wasn't an explanation, was there, not a solid one, not one you could hold out to a sceptical brother who, after all, was entitled to any manifestation of grief he cared to indulge in? Whereas he, Joe, brother-in-law to the deceased woman only, husband and father of living beings, had no such entitlement. No right at all, no claim except this sensation that appalled him so, that she had somehow held a key to the future for him, and that when she had died, she had taken it with her.

He went out onto the landing. The house was very still. Velma would be still in the kitchen, too, affecting to wash up but in reality waiting for Joe to come down and explain himself. Velma hadn't come to the funeral. Said she never did, couldn't take the things. ‘Morbid,' she said. ‘When you're gone, you're gone. Funerals is sick.' What had she said to Robin, Joe wondered, if anything? ‘Sorry to hear of your loss' or, ‘I'll miss her, that's for sure' or simply, ‘You want me to get you another jar of coffee? This one's nearly gone'?

Across the landing, the door to Robin's room was open. His bed was made, after a fashion, but the two wooden chairs Joe could see were heaped with clothes and there were shoes and newspapers on the floor and scattered copies of dairy-farming magazines. Odd, really. Robin had always been so orderly. There was a photograph of Caro on the chest of drawers against the far wall, a black-and-white picture taken of her leaning on the gate from the garden to the fifteen-acre field where the young heifers were first put out, close to the house where an eye could be kept on them. Joe couldn't see the picture very clearly from this distance, but Caro's hair appeared to be loose and she was wearing something checked.

‘You OK?' Velma called.

She was standing at the foot of the stairs, holding a duster and a can of spray polish.

‘Find what you want?'

‘No,' Joe said, ‘I didn't. Doesn't matter.'

She said, ‘Better come down then.'

He descended the stairs, slowly, while she watched him.

‘Robin'll be home dinnertime—'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm leaving him a slice of veal-and-ham pie,' she said and then, firmly, ‘I look after him.'

At home, Joe thought, Lyndsay would be cooking lunch for him and the children, the proper, conscientious lunch she cooked for them every day, with plenty of vegetables. They would sit round the kitchen table, he and Lyndsay and Hughie with Rose in her high chair, and they would eat cottage pie or casserole or cheese-and-potato flan, and Lyndsay would try and talk to him and make him encourage Hughie to talk. She attempted to dissuade him from having the radio on, for the farming news and the weather. She said he could hear that all day, in the Land Rover, on the tractor, that mealtimes were for communication, for paying attention to one another, for talking. Rose couldn't talk yet but she made up for that by urgent shouting and banging of spoons on her high-chair tray. On Joe's darker days, there was a lot to be said for Rose.

‘I'll be off,' Joe said to Velma.

She looked up at him. He'd always had a bit of an air of the young John Wayne about him for her, that rugged look. She said, ‘You could try smiling, Joe. Life's got to go on.'

He paused a moment, gave her a fleeting smile which never got near his eyes, and then went past her through the kitchen and out to the yard.

Robin's slice of pie lay under a sheet of tightly stretched plastic film beside the salt and pepper mills and a loaf of bread under a muslin dome. Dilys had given Caro several of these domes, to protect food in the larder from flies, but Caro had never used them, any more than she had used the larder, since she kept everything perishable in the great Westinghouse refrigerator that Robin had given her, via an importer in London, when they had been married for twelve years.

The house cat had plainly attempted forced entry to the pie, and failed. She now sat on the stack of newspapers by the back door destined for Robin's next journey past the recycling bins, and waited for developments. Robin pointed at the plate.

‘Mine,' he said.

The cat pretended she hadn't heard. She stared at him levelly. Robin peered at the pie. It had the off-putting pallor of all processed food kept at room temperature because Velma preferred to risk its going off rather than supposedly consume electricity by storing it in the fridge. Robin peeled off the film and sniffed. A marked smell, not exactly rancid, but pungent, rose from the pie. He picked up the plate and carried it across to the pile of newspapers, setting it on the floor beside them.