Next of Kin (25 page)

They'd all been amazed and relieved when she brought Joe home. She had only embarked gently on the beauty business, done a two-year course at Stretton College after leaving school and was waiting for her father to decide to buy her premises for her own salon, when she met Joe. It had been at a petrol station. She was filling her mother's car, which she had borrowed, and the automatic cut-off mechanism in the pump hose had failed, and petrol had suddenly leaped out at her all over her clothes, splashing her shoes, and she had screamed. Joe, filling the farm truck with diesel across the forecourt, had dashed to her rescue. She stank of petrol for days afterwards, reeked of it. Joe said – at least, for some time, he said – that petrol had become the best perfume in the world to him.

He asked her to marry him after three weeks. She said yes almost before the words were out of his mouth, indeed, she later realized, had been waiting for him to propose almost from the second he wrenched the gushing hose out of her paralysed hand and thrust it into a drain. To her parents, he was everything they could wish for, older, steady, handsome, apparently prosperous. He would take over where they could now thankfully leave off, in looking after Lyndsay. He'd said, smiling, looking at the clutter of silver-framed photographs, that she wouldn't have to get her hands dirty. They had all believed him.

They were all, now, in a state of shock. Something as savage, to them, as this thing Joe had done had never crossed their lives, entered their minds. They had asked Lyndsay to come and stay for a few days because she was, well, their daughter, and there were the children as well, but it was too bad, really it was. There was something outrageous in it, something extreme that left them bereft of attitude or opinion. When Lyndsay had arrived, they had welcomed her tenderly but also dutifully, as if she were in some way slightly contaminated. And then they had proceeded to treat her like an invalid, breakfast in bed, cups of tea and thimbles of sweet sherry, little lie-downs in the garden, under a tartan rug.

Her father, who was now retired, was very patient with the children. She could hear him now, from the house, singing old war songs to Rose. Rose loved singing. She loved anything that made a racket, music, motor bikes, barking dogs, rugby on television. Probably Hughie would be listening, too, but he wouldn't shout along with the singing, as Rose did. He had wet his bed the last two nights and Lyndsay's mother had put a rubber sheet over the mattress, silently but pointedly.

‘It was a mistake,' Hughie had told her. He wouldn't say sorry. ‘A
mistake
.'

He had said several times to Lyndsay that he hoped they could go home soon.

‘Are you missing playgroup?'

‘No,' he said.

‘Then why do you want to go home?'

He had turned Seal upside-down and eyed Lyndsay over his tail.

‘I live there,' he said patiently.

I wonder if I do, Lyndsay thought now, looking up at the clean, pale sky. I wonder where I live. She let her gaze travel gradually downward in a curve, past the tall evergreen hedge that hid the courts of the tennis club from view, to rest on her parents' house, brick, neat, solid, decent. I certainly don't live
here
. Not any more.

The french windows to the sitting-room opened, and Lyndsay's mother came out, limping slightly from the arthritis that she endured and about which she would never speak. She was carrying a light folding garden chair. Lyndsay sat up a little and tried to look more positive, less of a victim. Her mother shook out the chair, tested it for stability and sat down.

‘There, now.'

She looked across at Lyndsay.

‘You warm enough, dear?'

Lyndsay nodded.

‘Dad's singing to the children. Can you hear him? Rose likes “Pack Up Your Troubles” best, bless her.'

Lyndsay said, ‘She likes anything loud.'

Sylvia Walsh looked at her hands. They were nice hands, as Lyndsay's were, well kept, and when she wasn't doing housework she always wore her engagement ring – two sapphires and three small diamonds – and the Celtic lovers'-knot ring which Roy had given her on their silver wedding day.

‘I think we'd better have a little talk, dear. About your future. Obviously Dad and I want to do all we can to help.'

Lyndsay pulled the rug over her own hands, so that she could clench them in private.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well,' Sylvia said, ‘what is your position? Can you stay there? At the farm?'

Lyndsay said, without thinking, ‘Of course I can stay! It's my home!'

Sylvia adjusted her cardigan so that the edges hung parallel over her bosom.

‘But things are different now, aren't they? I mean, you can't work on the farm. Can you, dear? Perhaps the Merediths will need your house, you see, for a worker.'

‘Nobody's said anything—'

‘No, I don't expect they have. After all things are at such sixes and sevens, with – with your father-in-law in hospital. But they'll have to think about it, won't they? Won't Robin be thinking of it?'

Lyndsay said deliberately, knowing her mother would flinch from hearing his name spoken, ‘Joe had shares in the farm. His father had some, and he had more. Those will be mine, won't they?'

Sylvia stared at her.

‘But you wouldn't want shares in the farm, would you?'

Lyndsay sighed.

‘No. No, I suppose I wouldn't—'

‘I mean,' Sylvia said, leaning forward, ‘you can't stay there now, can you, not now, not now that – well, you'd have to deal with your parents-in-law, wouldn't you? You'd have to go into business with them.'

Lyndsay looked away.

‘I couldn't do that. Anyway—' She paused, and then said, very quietly, as if uttering a disloyalty, ‘Anyway, I hate the farm.'

Sylvia said carefully, ‘Dad and I just wondered what you'd think of our little plan. It's only a suggestion, mind. It's only something for you to think about.'

Lyndsay took her hands out from under the rug and folded them on her stomach.

‘We wondered,' Sylvia said, ‘if you'd like to pick up again where you left off seven years ago. We wondered if you'd like to come back to Stretton and we'd see about a little salon again. Just something small. Even part-time that you could do while the children are little.' She paused. Then she said, in a voice intended to be kind, ‘We just thought it might be good for you to have a complete change.'

Lyndsay put one hand flat on top of the other and pressed them both, hard, into her stomach. Her stomach felt concave, yielding, between her hip bones. She didn't think she had ever, in her life, been so thin.

‘It wouldn't be a change,' she said to her mother. ‘Would it? It would just be going back, back where I began—'

‘Except that you have the children now, you have little Hugh and Rose. And you never finished what you'd begun before, did you, because – because you got married.'

Lyndsay turned her head aside. There were moments, sudden, unbidden moments, of so longing for Joe that she felt nothing short of frantic. Marriage, oh my God, marriage,
marriage
 . . .

‘Just think about it,' Sylvia said. ‘I know how hard it must be to decide anything. But it has to be done. Life has to go on again.'

‘And if I don't want it to?' Lyndsay said. ‘If I just don't want there to be tomorrow?'

Sylvia stood up, adjusting the edges of her cardigan, and the waistband of her skirt, with the little deft plucking movements she had used all Lyndsay's life.

‘You can't think like that,' Sylvia said. ‘Not with children. If you've got children, you can't even begin to think like that.'

‘I do staring,' Eddie said to Zoe.

He was squatting in front of her, holding a red plastic water pistol shaped like a handgun. Zoe was cross-legged on the ground, her back against the farmyard wall, her eyes closed. She had just had her first tractor-driving lesson from Gareth, on the old slurry-scraping tractor, and hadn't shown much aptitude for it.

‘I can stare longer than you,' Eddie said. ‘I'm gonna stare at you
now
.'

Zoe opened her eyes. Eddie's face was some 6 inches from hers, contorted with the effort of staring. His eyes were blue-grey and small.

‘Why?' Zoe said.

He didn't budge.

‘What d'you want to stare for?'

‘I'm gonna stare till you're scared.'

‘I don't scare easy,' Zoe said.

She looked back at him. He had tiny features in a narrow face, and freckles. She put her tongue out at him. He took no notice.

‘This is boring,' Zoe said.

He inched forward a little until she could smell him, faintly rank and babyish at the same time. He looked a bit like Gareth, she thought, but he had Debbie's slight build, the sort of build Zoe associated with city children, darting and zigzagging in howling packs through the housing estate where she'd grown up. She'd thought it perfectly normal then, perfectly natural to grow up in a world full of walls and walkways and stairwells and scuffed spaces and other people. Only now, out here, did it seem just one idea, one way to grow up rather than another. Judy had grown up here, after all. Judy had had air and fields and stony tracks and a river. And solitude. And she'd hated it. Zoe leaned forward and gave Eddie a little push.

‘Give over.'

He rocked on his heels, but recovered himself and lurched in closer, his nose almost on Zoe's.

‘You're a pain,' Zoe said. ‘It's time you went to school and got thumped for being a pain.'

There was the sound of a car engine, and the Land Rover came into the yard at speed and stopped, as Robin always stopped it, on a swerve in towards the back door. Zoe lifted her gaze to look at it.

‘I won,' Eddie yelled. ‘I won! I won the staring!'

Zoe unfolded her legs and stood up, sliding her back up against the wall. Robin got out of the Land Rover, and went round to release the tailgate. Zoe moved across towards him. Behind her, Eddie fired two squirts of his water pistol not quite in her direction.

The Land Rover was full of bales. Zoe peered.

‘What's that?'

Robin picked the nearest bale up by its girdles of plastic twine and indicated with his head that she should do the same.

‘Barley straw. I want it stacked by the maize on those pallets.'

Zoe lifted a second bale.

‘What's it for?'

‘For calves. I'm buying in calves this year to rear them for calving themselves.'

He began to stride away towards the barn. Zoe followed him, and behind her, Eddie, dribbling his water pistol.

‘Haven't you got enough calves of your own?'

‘Too many bulls.'

‘But can't you tell? Beforehand, I mean. If you inseminate a cow, can't you tell what she'll have?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because we haven't got that far scientifically yet. Because buying a straw of bull semen is a pig in a poke. Because I bought thirty bloody straws at twenty-two quid each and they were all bulls but two. Because to buy heifers of calf-bearing age would cost me seven hundred each.' He swung round on her, still holding the straw bale. ‘Seven hundred. Each. OK? Enough? Enough? Enough bloody questions?'

Zoe put her bale down.

‘Sorry.'

‘Just get on with it, will you?' Robin shouted. ‘Just stop jabbering and get on with it? Haven't I got enough to do without being questioned like you were some damn journalist? I know what I'm doing and I can promise you that everything's for a reason and nothing's for fun!'

Zoe stooped over her bale again. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Eddie's small figure skittering for cover, away from trouble. She looked down at her hands and arms sticking out of the short black sleeves of her T-shirt, and they looked weird to her suddenly, white and thin and uncanny. She swallowed hard.

‘Sorry,' she said again. ‘I was only asking.'

Robin grunted and swung away from her into the dimness of the feed store. She followed him, carrying her bale, and dumped it precisely beside his.

‘I'll finish these,' she said, not looking at him. ‘I'll empty the Land Rover.'

There was a small silence. He took a step or two away.

‘OK,' he said.

When she had emptied the Land Rover, she got into the driver's seat and sat looking at the dashboard. It was crammed with stuff, leaflets and chocolate-bar wrappers and squashed juice cartons and parking tickets and a small battered red notebook with ‘Calf Management' scrawled on the cover. The passenger seat and the floor weren't much better, littered with straw and scraps of paper and oily rags. Over the back of the passenger seat, tossed all anyhow, was an old blue jersey, presumably Robin's jersey. Zoe pulled it down and bundled it loosely into her lap, like a cat, patting it down.

She put out a hand and touched the ignition. She nearly – but not quite – dared to turn the key. She thought that, if only she could drive, she could take the Land Rover up to Dean Place Farm and collect the supper. Crisis or no crisis, Dilys was still making the supper, and biscuits and cakes to take in to Harry which Zoe thought he gave to the nurses. Dilys had even offered to teach Zoe to cook.

‘What?'

‘Well, you'll have to learn one day.'

‘Will I?' Zoe said. ‘What for?'

‘For living,' Dilys said. ‘For looking after yourself. For looking after other people. Can you turn out a room?'

Zoe grinned at her.