Next of Kin (10 page)

‘What d'you mean?'

‘Granny, of course. She's got such fixed ideas—'

‘I liked her,' Zoe said. ‘She mightn't think like me but that doesn't stop me liking her. You don't think like me either.'

‘No,' Judy said enviously. ‘I don't.'

‘Talking of like,' Zoe said, putting her feet up onto the edge of the passenger seat and holding her bent knees in her arms, ‘why don't you like it here?'

‘Zoe, you don't know it—'

‘Of course I don't. But I see it. I see it as a hard place. But not a place to hate.'

‘I don't hate it,' Judy said.

Zoe looked at her for a moment, and then back out of the windscreen.

‘Don't you? Well if you don't, all I can say is you give a pretty good imitation.'

Harry had done seven yards of hedge along the far side of the 10-acre field, the side where the north-east wind got you if it saw the smallest chance. He worked in the leather gloves his father had given him forty years ago for hedging, stiff as boards until you got them warmed up, and a mass of splits. He could have bought new ones any day but he liked the old ones, he liked their associations.

He wasn't much of a hedger, never had been. His father had taught him the old Midland way of laying a hedge, cutting the main stems almost through with a billhook, and then bending them horizontally for strength and density. But there were always too many splintered raw ends in Harry's hedges and he didn't weave tight enough to provide proper protection. But he did all right. It had always been enough for him to do all right, he didn't have Dilys's desire to do better, or even best, the desire she'd passed on to Joe. But not to Robin. Robin, as far as Harry could see, just had the desire to do things differently. You couldn't make Robin toe the line, you just had to shrug your shoulders and let him go his own way, even if that way was full of difficulty and debt. In Harry's view, Robin ought to sell the milk quota, and the herd, and the house and land, and then lease it back as a tenant arable farmer. Give someone else the headaches. But he'd never say it, any more than he'd say to Joe these days, ‘What's up, lad?' You couldn't do that in life, you just couldn't. It wasn't so much a matter of respecting another man's privacy, even that of your sons, but more of recognizing that each man was for himself, solitary and responsible, destined to resolve or just bear whatever came his way.

A car came slowly down the lane beside the field, and stopped in the gateway twenty yards away. Harry straightened up. It was Robin's car. What did Robin want with him on a Saturday afternoon? Two car doors slammed, and then Harry saw Judy's red head above the hedge as she climbed the gate, and another head, darker.

She jumped down on the field side and waved a flask at him.

‘We've brought you some more tea!'

‘Champion!' Harry shouted. ‘Champion!'

He began to walk stiffly and quickly along the hedgerow towards her, pulling off his gloves and stuffing them into his overall pockets. He'd forgotten Judy was coming, forgotten everything on account of the plaguey row he and Joe had had that morning when Joe had refused, point blank, to let him grub up that hedge.

‘It'd only take me a couple of days. With a digger.'

‘No, Dad. No.
No.
I'm putting things back, not taking them out. Can't you ever think beyond tomorrow? Can't you ever see further than your bloody nose?'

‘Grandpa,' Judy said, with pleasure. She put her arms round him and felt his hard old frame, like a tree or a piece of rustic furniture.

‘Good girl,' Harry said, patting her. ‘Good girl.'

‘And this is Zoe.'

Harry grinned.

‘Hello, Zoe.'

Funny little object. Girl's face and boy's hair. She was looking at the hedge, at the yards he'd split and woven.

‘That difficult?'

‘Not so difficult as I make it,' Harry said. ‘Seen Granny?'

‘Yes.'

‘And Joe?'

‘What's all this about Joe?' Judy said. ‘Granny asked us, too. No we haven't. We just saw Lyndsay and the kids.'

Harry grunted. He looked across at Zoe. ‘Your first time on a farm?'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘It's a terrible life,' Harry said. ‘Terrible. We must be mad to do it.'

‘I think so,' Judy said.

‘Why do you do it then?' Zoe said.

Harry grinned at her.

‘Can't do nothing else. It's bred in you, father to son. Even in the war, when I got caught up in Italy, all I could think about was the dratted farm. And I wasn't nineteen then.'

‘Mum—' Judy said, and then stopped.

Zoe looked at her.

‘Go on.'

‘Mum said, even on holiday, Dad was only looking at the scenery to see how it was farmed. She said the only time he didn't was when they went to Tunisia, when I was seven and I came to stay with you, and there was no farming to look at there, only sand and camels.'

‘Obsession,' Zoe said. ‘Obsessions are interesting.'

Judy said, ‘And scary.' She held the flask out to Harry. ‘Your tea, Grandpa.'

He looked at her for a moment as he took it, and his eyes suddenly looked very old to her, faded in the centre with a ring of dull colour outside. It struck her, with a shaft of pain, that he was the age to die, the proper age when things begin to wear and dim and weaken, not Caro's age, not the age where you've still got things to do, people who need you.

Harry said gently, ‘I'd better get on, girls.'

‘Yes.'

‘Or I'll have your Uncle Joe on my back.'

Judy leaned forward and kissed him again.

‘We might see you tomorrow.'

‘All right,' Harry said. He lifted his hand to Zoe. ‘Bye for now, dear.'

She smiled at him.

‘Bye,' she said.

As the two girls walked away from him along the hedge, and back to the car, Harry saw Zoe put a hand out to indicate his day's labours.

‘I bet,' he heard her say, ‘I could do that. I bet I could.'

‘Do you think,' Robin said, ‘that between us we could do something about that?'

On the kitchen table, a supermarket chicken lay trussed up in plastic and rubber bands.

‘I might eat it,' Zoe said, ‘but I couldn't cook it.'

‘That's rather how I feel. Judy?'

‘OK,' Judy said, ‘if you wash up. Are there any potatoes?'

Robin indicated a plastic keg of cider that stood on the dresser.

‘In the larder, I think. Drink, girls?'

‘Zoe doesn't,' Judy said.

‘Doesn't she?'

‘No,' Zoe said. ‘Don't like it.'

Robin looked at her. ‘Uncommon,' he said.

‘Thank you for the boiler suit. And my socks.'

‘No trouble.'

‘I liked it – the milking,' Zoe said. She perched on the edge of the kitchen table. ‘I think I'll do it again tomorrow.'

‘After you've peeled some potatoes,' Judy said.

Robin turned the spigot of the plastic keg and ran cider into a glass. He held it out to Judy. She almost met his eye when she took it.

‘Thanks.'

‘You look better,' he said to her.

She turned away from him and began to peel the plastic off the chicken. She said, ‘You wouldn't really know.'

Zoe leaned forward across the table.

‘Hey, hey, no need to bite his head off—'

Judy said nothing. Robin looked better to her, too, this evening, less haggard, his eyes less shadowed. He needed a haircut – at least, he did by his usual standards – and the longer hair became him, softened his face. But she didn't want him buttering her up in front of Zoe. That was cheating.

‘I'll get the spuds,' Robin said. ‘How hungry are we?'

‘Not very. We've been eating tea ever since lunch. At Lyndsay's and then at Granny's. And before you ask us, we didn't see Joe.'

Robin, his hand on the larder door, opened his mouth to say that nobody saw Joe much these days, and shut it again. He had in fact called in to try and see him after the girls had left his house that afternoon and had found Lyndsay helping Hughie to write his name at the kitchen table, while Rose crashed about the room in a wheeled walking frame.

‘Look,' Hughie said. ‘The big J. That big H is me.'

Robin stooped.

‘Not bad, old son.'

Lyndsay looked tired, with the transparency of fatigue that affects true blondes.

‘I'm afraid Joe isn't here. I can't remember what he said he was doing this afternoon but I don't expect he'll be back before dark.'

‘It can wait,' Robin said.

Rose careered across the room, bellowing, raising her arms for Robin's attention.

‘Hello, Rosie.'

‘She's been awful,' Lyndsay said. ‘All afternoon.' She had always felt a little shy of Robin, of his height and his darkness and his solitariness, and in consequence, apologetic for things she felt he might disapprove of, like Rose's unruliness. But he stooped now and lifted Rose out of the walking frame. Rose was delighted.

‘Yah,' she said to him. ‘Yah, yah, yah.'

‘You are a solid woman,' Robin told her.

She beamed. Robin said, ‘What did you think of Judy's friend?'

‘Nice,' Lyndsay said. ‘Unusual. Hughie loved her.'

‘I did not,' Hughie said with emphasis.

‘Good for Judy. Lightens things. She was up at five-thirty for the milking.'

Rose put her hand on Robin's cheek.

‘You're sticky,' he said.

‘She's always sticky,' Lyndsay said and then, in a burst of confidence inspired by the unique sight of Robin with a baby in his arms, ‘Robin, I'm a bit—' She remembered Hughie and stopped. ‘Joe,' she mouthed over Hughie's head. ‘I'm worried about Joe.'

He nodded.

‘I know.'

‘And your mother—'

‘Yes.'

‘Can – can you talk to him? Can you? See what's the matter?'

Rose began to roar to be down again. Robin bent and lowered her back into her frame.

‘I can try.'

Lyndsay stood up. She looked at Robin standing there in her kitchen in his working clothes and had a sudden impulse to step forward, children or no children, and lean on him, her face pressed into the navy-blue drill of his boiler suit, and say, ‘Help me, help me, I don't know what to do, I'm at the end of my tether.'

‘I must be getting back,' Robin said. He put a hand on Hughie's head. ‘Keep writing. And tell your dad I'd like a word with him, will you?'

‘What about?' Hughie said, drawing rapid H's in scarlet crayon.

‘Fertilizer,' Robin said. He touched Lyndsay's arm. She'd looked so close to tears only a moment ago. ‘I'll see what I can do.'

It wouldn't be much, he thought now, opening the larder door. How could it be, since he didn't know what to ask and Joe probably didn't know what to reply? By the outward look of things, Joe was doing fine. The fields at Dean Place were clean, the boundaries mended, the bills got paid. At least, Robin supposed they did. In Dilys's hands, they could hardly avoid it. Robin and Joe, by some unspoken agreement, never discussed money, indeed, almost shied away from it, but it was unthinkable that, with the farm in the outward shape it was, and Dilys doing the books, money could be Joe's trouble. If Caro was still here, she'd probably know what ailed him by instinct, but then if she was here, whatever was the matter mightn't be the matter in the first place. We are cursed by our reticence, Robin thought suddenly, surprising himself, cursed by it. It's like being in leg-irons. He stooped to scoop potatoes out of their dusty paper sack. He could hear Judy laughing a little in the kitchen, presumably at something Zoe had said. He rather liked Zoe. She had a boldness about her, a directness you usually only found in animals. Or children. Like Rose that afternoon, wanting to be picked up, wanting to be put down, no shilly-shallying, no complicated accommodation of other people.

He went back into the kitchen and dumped the potatoes in the sink.

‘All yours,' he said to Zoe.

‘OK,' she said. ‘What do I do them with?'

‘A peeler.'

‘Wet or dry?'

Robin looked at her.

‘Where did you grow up?'

‘In a flat in Tottenham. I'm the original take-away kid. That's why I'm so wizened, like a First World War squaddie. I'm seriously malnourished.'

‘Take no notice,' Judy said. ‘She eats all day, like a horse.'

Robin grinned. He opened the kitchen drawer and hunted about in it for a potato peeler.

‘There,' he said, holding it out.

She made no attempt to touch the peeler.

‘Nasty,' she said. ‘Looks like the kind of thing they used for the forcible examination of nineteenth-century prostitutes.'

‘Zoe!'

‘Get over to that sink,' Robin said. ‘And run it full of cold water.'

‘
Cold
water?' Zoe said. ‘I
knew
, I knew why cooking was a bad idea.'

‘Hurry up.'

She went over to the sink and put the plug in.

‘Potatoes don't look like this in London. They have cheese in and live in take-away ovens.' She looked at Robin. ‘Well, show me.'

Judy paused in putting half a lemon and a lump of butter – ‘sweet butter', Caro had always said – inside the chicken, and looked across the table. Robin was bending over the sink at an angle, a potato and the peeler in his hands, and Zoe, her elbows propped on the draining board, was watching him with the absorption of a child in front of television. Was she sending him up? Or was she flirting? And why, with her in the room, should the shadows seem fainter, gauzier, as if a little life had been allowed back in as well as the memories? She turned the chicken over and laid it on its breast in a roasting tray, just as Caro had always done, as Caro had taught her.