Next of Kin (3 page)

Harry grunted. Where Joe would go had been the chief preoccupation of most conversations he and Dilys had had since Joe had left for America.

‘I've found a place. Land's not too bad but the yard needs a lot of work. I'd have to build a milking parlour.'

Harry looked up again, chewing.

‘We've never had stock. Never.'

Robin said, ‘But I'd like to.' It occurred to him to say, ‘And you watch my profits,' but he thought he would neither tempt providence nor provoke his father. Instead, he said, ‘I've got a loan. And a buyer for the cottage.'

Dilys got up to put a great wedge of cheese and a jar of pickle on the table. She said serenely, ‘We wish you luck, dear,' and smiled at him as if he had solved a problem for her and she had known all along that he would.

Joe came home bringing a brief exciting aura of America with him to find Robin and some hired earthmoving machinery digging a slurry pit at Tideswell Farm. He also found that Robin had a girlfriend, a tall, brown-haired girl in jeans and cowboy boots painting window frames in the farmhouse.

‘She's American, of course,' Dilys said. ‘They met at Young Farmers.'

Dilys was doing the farm books, the ledgers and papers spread across the kitchen table weighted by the jam jars in which she kept the small change of housekeeping – egg money, newspaper money, money for the church collection and for shoe repairs.

‘Seems nice enough.'

Joe thought she was more than nice. She carried with her something of that freedom he had known in America, that air of always keeping moving, keeping searching, that had briefly infected him like a sea fever. In the early weeks after his return, he tried to paint window frames with her, to keep America in his blood by being with her, but she sent him out to help Robin or home to take up his place beside his father. Even later, when she and Robin were married, she had retained a special quality for Joe, a reminder that there were places where life was different from this, where possibility was in the air, like oxygen.

Lyndsay said now, looking straight ahead through the car windscreen into the damp dimness of early evening, ‘I never got to know her very well. I mean, we got on but we weren't close, were we?'

‘She was older,' Joe said. ‘She and Robin were married for twenty-four years. Judy's twenty-two after all.'

The lights of their house shone out suddenly as the lane turned between the hedges. Mary Corriedale, who worked at a paper factory in Stretton and lived in a bungalow in Dean Cross, would be there, putting the children to bed. Rose would no doubt already be in her cot, hurling toys to the floor as she defied the day to be over, and Hughie would be in his pyjamas and frog slippers commanding Mary to admire him while he balanced strenuously on one leg, his latest accomplishment.

Poor Caro, Lyndsay thought suddenly, with a stab of real pity, poor Caro not able to have her own children. What would she have done herself if she had discovered she couldn't have them either? Or that Joe couldn't? Being so much younger than Joe, she'd always assumed she'd just have babies when she wanted them. And she had.

‘Did Robin know,' Lyndsay said. ‘Did Robin know before he married her that she couldn't have children?'

‘I don't know,' Joe said. He turned the car off the lane and up the concrete slope to the house. ‘I don't know. I never asked. It's not the kind of thing you do ask, is it?'

The milking parlour lay quiet, wet and orderly after the last hosing down of the day. The rubber and metal clusters of the mechanical milker were looped up next to the big reinforced glass milk jars – some of those, Robin noticed with his relentless eye, were still spattered with slurry – and the channels and ribbings of the floor along the stalls gleamed wet and clean. In the pit between the stalls the hose lay in the loose coil Robin required of it, the bottles of iodine and glycerine spray were lined up on the steps going down to the pit, the kick bars were hanging in a row on the wall at the far end. In the winter, if the river rose enough, the pit flooded and he and Gareth, swearing steadily, milked heavily impeded by chest waders.

He turned off the fluorescent lighting, checked the bulk tank, and went into the barn. It was dark in there, apart from the dim washes of light cast by the low wattage bulkheads screwed to some of the timbers. Most of the cows were lying down in their cubicles, heads to the wall, their great black-and-white bodies spreading solidly between the rails. Some were standing up, back feet out of the straw and in the slurry channel; others were small enough to have got themselves the wrong way round so that they'd drop muck at the head end and stand in it. He must remind Gareth to put some lime down.

Out in the yard beyond, where some of the cows chose to spend their aimless days, two of the outside cats were crouched on the fodder trough, containing the remains of the day's ration of feed made from chopped wheat-straw, given to bulk out the maize. The cats fled at his approach, streaking through the darkness towards the feed store where their harvest of vermin lived. Robin looked up at the sky. There was a moon, but a soft-edged one, presaging rain, and a few stars. In the business of the day, he'd hardly heard the weather forecast, that accustomed obsession. He sniffed deeply. The wind was soft, but there was rain on it, and soon.

He went back through the barn and the parlour to the stretch of concrete that led to the yard door of the house. By the door, the house cat waited, a rusty tortoiseshell, permitted inside because she was housetrained, possessed no anti-social feral attributes, and was a consistent mouser. Robin stooped to take off his boots and scratch her head.

‘Hi,' he said.

She murmured politely, arching under his hand, and then shot in ahead of him as he opened the door.

Judy was still at the kitchen table, where Robin had left her twenty minutes before. She had cleared away the supper things, but had returned to her chair and was now sitting in it, elbows on the table, staring down into the glass of red wine Robin had given her. She didn't look up when he came in.

He pushed his socked feet into slippers.

‘All well,' he said.

‘Good.'

‘A hundred and ten now. I'm trying to build up the Dutch ones. Three to calve next week.'

Judy said, still staring at her wine, ‘What happens if they're bull calves?'

‘You know that,' Robin said. He poured himself some wine and sat opposite her. ‘You grew up here.'

‘I've forgotten.'

‘They go to market.'

‘And then?'

‘You know that, too. They go as store cattle or to the slaughter-house. Unless of course some rat gets hold of them and sends them for forty hours to Italy.'

‘Mum once said to me that one of the first things she learned about farming was that the male of any species was only of any use for his semen. And meat.'

Robin said nothing. He turned his glass in his fingers. Supper had been difficult, largely because he didn't know what Judy wanted of him. She had said, at one point, pushing the casserole Dilys had made for them round her plate, ‘I don't think we're even mourning the same person.'

‘Of course not,' he said. Such a situation seemed utterly clear to him, and not at all surprising, but he had offended her by failing to rise to her implied accusation. She had twitched her grief away from him, as if he might sully it by trying to touch it and inevitably misunderstand it.

Now she said, ‘Dad—'

‘Yes.'

‘I want to ask you something.'

‘Yes?'

Her mouth quivered.

‘Did you love her? Did you love Mum?'

‘Yes.'

She said, ‘You said that too quickly.'

Robin got up, and leaned on his hands on the table, his face towards Judy.

‘I don't think I could say anything to your satisfaction just now.'

She looked up at him.

‘If you loved her—'

He waited.

‘If you really loved her—'

‘Yes?'

‘Then why are you so angry?'

Chapter Two

Carolyn Bliss was born in a small, peeling wooden house, painted duck-egg blue, in Sausalito on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Her father was a painter, a peaceful, aimless, pot-smoking man whose instinct for moral relativity was so strong that he had never, Carolyn's mother decided, made up his mind about anything. She came from further up the coast, from a featureless little place on the Washington State border, a girl of strong, tall, Scandinavian-settler stock. Her roots were agricultural. She wanted to move back up to Oregon with the painter and their baby and start a vineyard, a little 12-hectare vineyard planted with Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. The blue wooden house, in Caro's childhood, was filled with manuals on viniculture, leaflets on pruning techniques, photographs of bunches of grapes hanging dusty with bloom in harvest sunlight.

Caro grew up with the strong impression that life – and therefore the world and the future – lay over the Golden Gate Bridge. The skyline of San Francisco shimmered across the bay like the towers and spires of a mythical city of dreams, the place which, if only one could reach it, would turn out to contain one's own personal Holy Grail. Her mother's talk of Oregon reinforced this feeling that the blue wooden house was only a starting point, no more than a nursery nest, and that it had nothing at its back, either literally or figuratively, only the bay and the bridge and the city beckoning before it; that was the only reality. In the summer, the pretty coastline around the blue house filled up with people who owned second homes there, people with children whose fathers didn't spend the winters in a dopey haze on the waterfront getting in the way of the fishermen, and whose mothers sailed and swam and cooked barbecues, instead of hacking at the earth behind the blue house all year, as if determined to wrest productivity from it by brute force.

There was a week or two of mild euphoria when Caro's father left. He just vanished, taking with him his paints, a stash of the marijuana he had grown painstakingly himself in one of his wife's clearings, and the small hoard of dollars she was putting by for the vineyard in Oregon. The police added his name to their interminable list of the missing, but perhaps they sensed that neither his mistress nor his daughter felt very urgent about his discovery, and after some months it was assumed, without needing to say much about it, that even if he were alive he would not return. Caro had a water-colour of his, a small blue oblong of seawater, and sometimes she would look at this patch of water and wonder if he was in it, lying tranquilly on the floor of the bay with a joint in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. She did not miss him. He had not allowed enough of himself to be known to be missed.

Carolyn's mother sold the remainder of the lease on the blue house to a Chinese family from San Francisco who wanted it for the summers and moved herself and her daughter northwards. Caro was eleven. Somewhere on this journey, Caro's mother acquired a friend, a small tough woman called Ruthie who seemed to share the dream of the vineyard. They bought a battered trailer, and fixed it up for sleeping in, and for four years, Caro rode the roads of North-west America looking for the 12 hectares. At some point in these travels, it occurred to her that she had never crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to the future, so that, although she was definitely away from Marin County, she was still within the thrall of the blue house, waiting for life to begin in earnest.

She did not like Ruthie. In the course of some of her brief bouts of schooling, girls her own age said Ruthie and Caro's mother were sleeping together. Caro saw no sign of it, but then she took care not to look too closely, just as she took care not to observe the welfare-food stamps, nor her mother and Ruthie's itinerant labouring lives, vine-pruning in January, pea-picking in June, the backbreaking harvesting of late summer. She kept a corner of the trailer her own, with fierce possessiveness, and drew endless pictures of houses with yards and picket fences and apple trees and dog kennels, houses absolutely hedged about with all the paraphernalia of a settled domesticity.

When she was fifteen, she had had enough. On a grilling late August day, she braided her hair into a fat pigtail, dressed herself in clean clothes she had ironed by putting them under her mattress and then sleeping on it, and went to ask the wife of the farmer her mother and Ruthie were then stripping corn for if she might live at the farmhouse that winter, and go to school in a regular fashion in nearby Harrisburg. She would earn her keep, she said, cleaning the house, looking after the poultry, doing the dishes and minding the children. The farmer's wife looked out wearily from her brood of five sons under nine years of age and said yes. A fearful row ensued. Ruthie tried to lock her in the trailer and her mother took away her shoes. But Caro moved into the farmhouse before the end of the month and viewed her austere bedroom, on whose every surface dust from the fields lay pale and thick, with profound satisfaction.

She stayed there for a year. When it was up, she moved in with the family of a schoolfriend, and then, for her final grade, with a teacher who taught history at her high school. Two or three times a year, her mother and Ruthie and the trailer turned up at these various addresses and were entertained with cookies and root beer or pizzas and low-calorie Cola before Caro judged they had trespassed on her life long enough and dispatched them. They were growing alike as they got older, gruff in manner and mannish in speech. Neither of them ever suggested that Caro should rejoin them and return to her corner of the trailer. She would have rejected the idea out of hand if they had.

When she was eighteen, she got a state grant to do a course in graphic design at an art college in Portland, having something of her father's artistic aptitude, overlaid by her own stoutly defended desire for order. She did not like being in Portland, however, and found that she did not like the course much, either, and the idea began to haunt her that she was in the wrong place to get anywhere in the simplest geographical sense, and that, if she did not return south and cross that damned Bridge, she was never going to have a real life, nor a future, and that all the efforts of her adolescence in forging a way forward would be thrown away.