Next of Kin (13 page)

‘I don't want to interfere,' Dilys said, ‘but you ought to take Joe off on a bit of a holiday. Fishing, maybe.'

She sat at Lyndsay's kitchen table with a cup of tea in front of her. She had refused a slice of the banana bread Lyndsay had made. All her life, Dilys had eaten regular amounts of excellent old-fashioned food without really thinking about it, but just recently she had noticed that her clothes were tighter, that, when she stooped to pick things up from the floor, or unplug the Hoover, her lungs felt as if they were being compressed from within, by bolsters. This was a pity. The banana bread looked just as she liked it, nicely risen with sultanas scattered through it. That was exactly how it ought to look, mind you. After all, it was she who had taught Lyndsay to make it.

‘Harry and I went to Ireland once, fishing. On the West Coast. It was beautiful. I expect these days you could fly straight there, from Manchester.'

Lyndsay said, ‘He wouldn't come.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He won't think about holidays. You know that.'

‘I know nothing of the sort,' Dilys said sharply.

Lyndsay finished cutting banana bread into strips for Hughie and small squares for Rose, and laid them in front of each child. Dilys had rung that morning saying she'd be in Stretton that afternoon and was there anything Lyndsay wanted? No, Lyndsay had said, mindful of Dilys's tendency to buy you the things she thought you ought to have rather than the things you had actually asked for. In that case, Dilys had said, she'd just call in to see the children on her way home anyway, and Lyndsay, who had intended to spend the morning investigating a new part-time hairdressing course at Stretton College, had made a banana loaf instead.

‘Where did the banana go?' Hughie asked, looking at his bread.

‘I mashed it up, and then it got cooked in the bread.'

He pushed his plate away.

‘I must
see
it.'

‘Now, now,' Dilys said.

Hughie got down off his chair and retrieved Seal from the top of the vegetable basket. He put his thumb in. Lyndsay held her breath.

‘Now,' Dilys said to her grandson, her hands calmly folded on the table, ‘are you a man or a mouse?'

Hughie regarded her. He took his thumb out long enough to say, ‘A mouse,' and then he put it back in again.

Dilys looked at Lyndsay. Lyndsay looked at Rose who was packing her cheeks with banana bread, like a frantic hamster.

‘I didn't hear you ask to get down,' Dilys said to Hughie.

Hughie sidled sideways behind Lyndsay's chair until he was hidden from Dilys's view. Rose took a deep breath and blew a sodden lump of banana bread out of her mouth across her high-chair tray and onto the table, where it landed wetly not far from Dilys's teacup.

‘Rose!'

‘It's Joe,' Lyndsay said desperately, carelessly.

Dilys took the spoon off her saucer and began to scrape Rose's banana bread off the table.

‘What's Joe?' Her face and voice were tight with outrage.

‘Everyone's upset,' Lyndsay said, not caring. ‘Can't you see? We're all feeling it. And nobody will say, nobody will say what's the matter. Especially not him.'

Dilys got up. She walked round the table to Lyndsay's chair and picked up Hughie, still sucking, still clutching Seal. For a moment, he hung in her hands like an amazed, petrified rag doll and then he found himself back in his chair, in front of his untouched plate. He couldn't move. He was paralysed by terrified surprise.

‘There's nothing to say,' Dilys said, ‘because there's nothing the matter. Except he's overworked. He works all hours, and he's got Harry to contend with. Harry never was a forward thinker. And you've got tense. I can see it. We can all see it. It hasn't been easy since Caro went and you've got yourself into a state. You need a holiday. You both need a holiday. I'll look after the children. Mary can help me with their bedtime.'

Hughie put Seal up to his face so that his hot, alarmed tears could leak silently into Seal's plush.

‘It's not me!' Lyndsay cried. ‘It's not me! If I'm tense, it's because of him!'

She sprang up and seized Rose out of her high chair. Rose, enraged by being picked up when she hadn't demanded it, began to yell.

‘Look at you,' Dilys said. ‘Just look at you. And these children. Is this any way to bring these children up?' She had wanted to say ‘Joe's children' with a harsh, proud, possessive emphasis.

‘Please go,' Lyndsay said, almost gasping. She began to dab madly at Rose's face with a cloth and Rose roared in response. ‘Please go. I can't bear any more of this, I can't cope, I can't take you all pretending everything's fine, I can't stand this conspiracy, this family conspiracy—'

Dilys stood up.

‘You've had nothing but support, dear. Ever since you came into this family, you've had everything anyone could ask for. This house, help with the babies, no responsibility on the farm—'

‘The farm!' Lyndsay screamed. ‘Oh, the farm, the farm!'

‘Ow,' Hughie wailed inaudibly into Seal. ‘Ow, ow, ow, ow,
ow
.'

‘It's no good shouting,' Dilys said. ‘When did shouting ever get anyone anywhere? And it's no good blaming the farm. The farm's the Merediths. Where would we be without it?'

She moved to the door, where she had laid her handbag and wicker shopping basket on a nearby chair.

‘Now listen,' she said. ‘Just listen. You're a good girl, Lyndsay, but you've let yourself get all worked up. And it's affecting Joe and it's affecting the children. Joe needs a holiday and you could do with one, too. And a tonic, maybe. You might be anaemic, it's very common in young women. I'll talk to Joe and then we'll see.' She put her handbag into her basket beside the paper bag of fresh yeast and the packets of tea and darning needles. Then she stooped and kissed the top of Hughie's head.

‘You be a good boy, now. No more upsetting your mother.'

‘He doesn't upset me,' Lyndsay said, her face against Rose. ‘He doesn't. He's good. It's—' She stopped.

‘I'll ring you,' Dilys said. ‘You make yourself a fresh pot of tea. Bye-bye, Rosie! Bye, dear.'

When she had gone, Lyndsay set Rose on the floor.

‘Nah!' Rose bellowed.

‘Please—'

Rose considered for a moment and then twisted herself on to her knees and began to crawl vigorously towards the vegetable basket. In two minutes the floor would be a rolling sea of carrots and onions, as it always was since Lyndsay had run out of places to put things out of Rose's reach. Lyndsay went back to her chair and put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands. Hughie watched her over the damp, warm body of Seal.

‘She loves us,' Lyndsay said faintly. ‘She does. She wants to help us. But she doesn't know how. None of them do.'

Hughie laid Seal beside his plate and slid off his chair, to come and lean on Lyndsay. She took an arm off the table to hold him.

‘I love you,' Lyndsay said.

He waited. After a moment or two he said, struggling with himself, ‘And Rose?'

An onion hit his ankle.

‘Yes. And Rose.'

Hughie nudged the onion away. It was pale brown and satiny, but it had horrible little wavering roots sticking out of it at one end, and Hughie didn't want them to touch him.

‘And Daddy?'

‘Oh yes,' Lyndsay said. She gave a long, sighing breath. ‘I love Daddy, all right. Daddy's just about everything there is to me.'

Mary Corriedale's husband, Mac, had just finished his fortnightly mowing of Dean Cross churchyard. It was only the second cut of the year, and he had mowed as he always did, in great broad swirls, leaving the headstones of the graves in ruffs of long grass. Later, in May, they would stand in a froth of cow parsley, and then in tall buttercups. The Vicar would have liked more precision in the churchyard, more clipped edges, more the air of a garden than a half-tamed field. He said this, tentatively, every summer at Parochial Church Council meetings and was told that if he could find anyone other than Mac Corriedale prepared to cut the grass all summer for nothing he was welcome to try. The Vicar, who found asking anyone for anything, especially God, appallingly difficult, continued to endure the clumps of nettles and the stands of willow-herb and Mac's haymaking mowing methods.

Zoe thought it was lovely. She liked the haphazard look of it and the cool, earthy smell of it, and the way that the mown places were casually punctuated with molehills. The old graves were especially appealing, crusted with lichen, their lettering weathered into almost nothingness, faint grooves you could only make out as words when the sun was low and the light struck at just the right angle. The modern gravestones were often made of marble, polished slabs of black, or pink like potted fish paste, and some were shaped like open books and had flowerpots cemented in front of them with grilles in the top to hold the flowers upright. These graves, Zoe noticed, didn't mention death. ‘Passed away', they said nervously in bright gold letters, ‘Went to sleep', or just dates, so that you could make your own assumptions. Some graves were marked with crosses and one with an angel, whose head had been vandalized, thereby giving it a strangely pagan look, like the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Caro's grave, which Zoe had gone looking for, wasn't marked at all.

‘You can't,' Robin had said. ‘You can't put a headstone up for six months at least.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because the grave sinks.'

‘Why?'

‘Because the coffin lid falls in as the body decays.'

‘God,' Zoe said. And then, ‘Can I go and see her grave, all the same?'

He had looked at her.

‘Of course.'

It was a shallow mound. The grass hadn't yet had time to grow and it and the earth looked patchy and ragged, irregularly dotted with clumps of flat weeds. At one end, a jam jar of dead late daffodils leaned against a small white plastic pot, fashioned in crude imitation of a Grecian urn, planted with big blue pansies.

Zoe bent down and touched the pansies. Robin would never have put those there, he didn't know anything about flowers, didn't notice them. Perhaps it was his mother, Dilys, or that pretty sister-in-law with the little kids who Zoe had seen driving through the village the day before, looking haunted. She had mentioned seeing Lyndsay to Robin, but he'd only grunted. He was reading some letter from the River Authority at the time – she could see the letterhead through the paper from the back – and had hardly heard her. She hadn't repeated herself. Two nights under Robin's roof had already taught her the futility of that.

He had made no fuss about her staying. She had moved her camera case and her rucksack into the room she'd been given when Judy had brought her to Tideswell and then she had gone out into the yard to find Gareth. He was preparing a shed outside the barn for two cows about to calve, and she picked up a pitchfork and helped him. His little boy, Eddie, had appeared and shown Zoe his set of plastic warriors who could be transformed into robots by twisting their helmets.

‘Don't you touch,' Eddie said. ‘You just watch. I got them off of the telly.'

Zoe had taken pictures of him. She took her camera everywhere. She had brought it up to the churchyard now and had taken some shots of good angles of the church buttresses and the lych-gate and the gravestones. It wasn't a pretty church, but it was squat and old and looked indomitable. Caro's grave didn't look in the least indomitable. It looked forlorn. It looked, Zoe thought, as if the person underneath had just been tossed aside because there was, quite literally, no more the living could do except futile things like give them pots of blue pansies. Robin said his wife had been American, a Californian, and here she was in this English churchyard, with a field of cows on one side and the village-school playground on the other and a grey sky above like a soft, dense lid. It was like her father, born in England, buried in Australia. Except he wasn't buried. He'd left instructions for his ashes to be scattered somewhere in the outback miles and miles north of Sydney. His girlfriend had done it. She wrote Zoe a long, long letter about it saying it was a place where they'd had a wonderful camping trip once, and slept under the stars, and how Zoe's father wanted to be scattered under those same stars. Bloody cheek, Zoe had thought, reading, bloody nerve. She had torn the letter up.

She moved to the head of the grave and picked the jar of rustling, dead daffodils up. Then she nudged the pot of pansies with her foot, so that it was central. Nice flowers, pansies. They had faces, like sunflowers did. She'd wanted to go to Italy last summer, or Spain, and photograph all those sunflowers, fields and fields of them, all facing the east and the dawn, like good little kids all listening to their teacher. But she hadn't done it. Like she hadn't done a lot of things. She looked down at the dismal jar. But she must. She must start doing things before she, too, became stuck somewhere, getting by, like Caro seemed to have done, like her father had done, working as a mechanic in a Sydney garage when he was really a qualified engineer, living with a girl half his age so's not to be lonely.

‘Bye,' Zoe said to Caro's grave. ‘Judy sends her love.'

Joe didn't get home until after nine. Lyndsay had given up waiting for him for supper and had taken her mug of soup – leek and ham, made with leeks from Dilys's garden – to the sofa in front of the television, which she had turned on, for company, but not really watched. Instead, she read a novel that had come bound with a plastic cummerbund to a woman's magazine, a pretty-looking novel, with a white shiny cover showing a bright water-colour of an idealized country kitchen with the door open to a garden beyond and spires of delphiniums and a beehive. The story concerned an unhappy woman moving from the city to the country and finding self-fulfilment there. And a lover. Of
course
, Lyndsay thought irritably, a lover. The country world of the book bore no resemblance to anything Lyndsay had ever encountered in country life, it was a wish-think world of birdsong and caricature villagers, a honey-for-tea idyll. It wasn't what Lyndsay knew. It wasn't those relentless greedy acres at Dean Place Farm and always the wrong weather and loneliness and worry and family and Joe. And it wasn't, either, a world where you couldn't
say
anything. In this novel people talked all the time, about their feelings and frustrations and desires and longings, they explained themselves to one another over and over again, while drinking chilled white wine and filtered coffee. What the hell, Lyndsay thought savagely, hurling the book from her, is the matter with bloody instant coffee, for Christ's sake?