Next of Kin (33 page)

‘Not that,' Judy said. ‘But not this, either. Not this sort of life which just passes the time.'

Tessa was growing bored. A broken heart had powerful potential conversational charm, but a meaning-of-life discussion had, by its very definition, absolutely none. She gave a tiny yawn.

‘You let me know then,' she said, ‘when you're sorted,' and then she got up and sauntered over to Bronwen's desk, to perch on the edge of it in the little crowd that still lingered, and ask Bronwen if she intended, when she married, to take her husband's name.

A small building firm, known to Roy Walsh, had provided Lyndsay with an estimate for converting the ground floor of the building in Stretton into a beauty salon. There was room for a reception area, two cubicles, a lavatory and a secluded space at the back for a sunbed. The conversion costs were not, Roy Walsh thought, unreasonable. It was the equipment that was going to be costly, the sunbed and the adjustable treatment couches and the electrical slimming gadget with its pads and control panels and loops of pastel-coloured wire. Roy wanted Lyndsay to sit down and work out costs with him, to see how long it would take to recover the initial investment and whether it was worth taking a girl on, to answer the telephone and make coffee and do the manicures. But Lyndsay seemed reluctant. She agreed to a lot of the things he suggested, but with an acquiescence that was hardly encouraging.

‘It's early days,' Sylvia said to him, ‘very early. It's very soon for her to be able to put her heart into anything. And the children are worrying her.'

The children were worrying Roy and Sylvia, too. Rose they thought very unfeminine, a very overpowering baby, almost brutal. And as for Hughie – well, Lyndsay hadn't wanted them to know Hughie had bitten her, but how could they help it? They'd heard her cry of pain and surprise and, when they'd hurried upstairs to see what was the matter, he had tried to do it again. Biting, on top of bed-wetting. Of course he'd lost his father, poor mite, but he was only three and couldn't really have understood the reality of that. It was more, they were sure, that Hughie was reacting to Lyndsay, reacting to her uncertainty and inability to make decisions. She made him feel insecure, you could see it, she made him anxious. The sooner they could all be settled above the salon the better because only then would the sense of order return that the children needed so badly.

‘I'm going to push her to sign,' Roy said. ‘She'll think I'm hard-hearted, but I'm going to. It's for her own good, after all. She has to face the future. It isn't as if she's destitute after all – she's a very lucky young woman in that respect.'

His voice had an edge of impatience. Sylvia knew it well, remembered the relief they had both felt – but not liked to express – when Lyndsay had announced she was going to marry Joe. It wasn't that they didn't both love Lyndsay dearly, nor feel very sorry for her, but they had hoped so much that that stage of parenthood was over for them, that with all their three children settled in their own homes and with their own children, they could have some freedom at last, some time to do the things that there was never time to do before, what with a family and a business to see to. Sylvia had thought of a spring trip to Holland to see the bulb fields in bloom, and Roy had bought new fishing rods and had talked of the local golf club. But if Lyndsay was in Stretton, they'd have to look after the children for her, especially at the beginning. Of course they would do it, they'd do it gladly, but they couldn't help knowing that it wasn't what they'd planned.

‘I've got to push her,' Roy said, ‘haven't I? I don't want to, but it's for her own sake. I've got to push her to sign, so we can all get on with it, with what has to be done.'

Zoe parked the slurry tractor under the lean-to roof of battered corrugated iron where it lived. She'd got quite good at manoeuvring it and she'd noticed that the men who had come with the earth mover to dig the new slurry pit had stopped work to watch her. She'd put a bit of a performance on for them, a few flourishes, like a girl on the back of a circus pony. It gave her a little buzz to find herself good at something she hadn't even known about six months before, especially as she couldn't even drive a car. But cameras and tractors – now those she could handle.

She went back into the house and washed vigorously at the kitchen sink. Velma had hated to see Robin or Gareth washing at the sink after being out with the cows, but Velma wasn't here to impose her likes and dislikes any more, and Zoe was perfectly happy to use the sink as the men did, for hands and faces as well as dishes and pans. She sniffed her hands, to see if the last faint echo of cow had gone. They smelled of washing-up liquid. Then she took off her jeans and T-shirt – no point going all the way upstairs to do this if you then had to bring the dirty clothes straight back down again – and dropped them in the corner where the dirty washing had peaceably begun to collect in a random pile.

Upstairs, in her bedroom where she still kept her clothes, Zoe put on a less weary pair of black jeans and a clean grey T-shirt. She looked, she thought, regarding herself in the mirror let into the front of the wardrobe door, different, less skinny and washed-out, less like something that had been kept in the damp and dark too long. She hadn't exactly got fatter, her clothes fitted just the same, but the lines of her face and body looked smoother, less spiky, and she had a few freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks. She used to hate her freckles, but now, on skin less green-white than usual, they didn't look too bad, somehow. She gave herself a smear of lipgloss and a squirt or two of the men's cologne she liked, made, said the label on the bottle, from Caribbean limes. Then she went downstairs and out into the yard.

Gareth's cottage lay 400 yards from the farmhouse across a flat field planted with a rustling crop of maize. A track had been left through the middle, and along this Gareth walked or cycled half a dozen times a day. Zoe could see his boot prints in the earth, and the swooping tracks of his cycle tyres, and when she raised her eyes, the flat red-brick façade of his cottage, with its shining windows and the television satellite dish suspended on one side like a great white saucer. It was a very ugly cottage. Zoe had asked Robin why, if he was going to build a cottage, it had to be so ugly. Robin had been mildly amazed.

‘Ugly?'

‘Yes. Very. Colour, proportion, setting, everything.'

‘But it works,' Robin said. ‘It does what I need it to do.'

Like his car, Zoe thought, and his clothes, and his poor neglected garden where the roses Caro had planted were now suffocating in the relentless coils of bindweed. Things had to work, had to perform their function and earn their keep; beauty, if present in any forms, was an accident.

Zoe came up out of the maize on to the little sloping garden Debbie had made around the house. There was a paved path in faintly coloured stone slabs, and a scattering of tubs and pots planted with petunias and French marigolds. There were also several items from Eddie's arsenal lying about, plastic guns and shields and something that looked like a rocket. Kevin, Gareth had said, wasn't interested in all this war-games stuff, it was only Eddie and you couldn't keep him away from it, try as you might.

Zoe went round the house, past the never-used front door with its lace curtains behind a glass panel, to the back. The door to the kitchen stood wide open, and there was a mop and bucket on the step, and a mat hung out to air. Zoe put her head inside.

‘Debbie?'

There was a pause. Zoe waited. After a moment or two, Debbie appeared from the living room, neat in a sleeveless pink T-shirt and a short denim skirt. She stared at Zoe.

‘What are you doing here?'

‘I've come to see you,' Zoe said.

‘What about?'

‘I've come to ask you something.'

Debbie moved a little closer across the kitchen and put her hands on the back of a chair.

‘You'd better come in—'

‘I don't need to,' Zoe said. She leaned against the doorframe. ‘I'm OK here.'

Debbie shrugged. She put her hands up to her hair, and pulled it more tightly through its elastic band. Then she smoothed down her skirt.

‘Well?'

‘It's about Gareth.'

‘What about Gareth?' Debbie said sharply.

Zoe leaned her back against the doorframe and put her hands in the pockets of her jeans.

‘He came to give in his notice—'

‘What's that to do with you?'

‘Nothing. But it's bad for Robin. Everything's bad for Robin just now, I don't understand the half of it, but I know it's money and his parents and Lyndsay going and the farms. And now Gareth.'

‘Gareth's got to think of himself,' Debbie said quickly. ‘Gareth's got responsibilities, he's got a family—'

Zoe watched her for a moment, and then she said, ‘Did
you
want him to leave?'

‘No.'

‘I just wondered,' Zoe said. She leaned forward a little, as if inspecting the toes of her boots.

‘It was time he got a better job,' Debbie said. ‘It was time he moved on.'

Zoe didn't look at her.

‘But why now?' she said to her boots.

Debbie said nothing. She looked down at the kitchen table where Gareth's first two job applications waited to be posted.

‘If I went away,' Zoe said, transferring her gaze from her boots to Debbie's face, ‘would Gareth stay on? Just for a bit, until Robin's sorted? Would he?'

Debbie gave a little gasp.

‘I don't know—'

‘I thought it might be that, you see,' Zoe said. ‘I thought it might be me. The last straw.'

‘No,' Debbie said. ‘Yes.'

‘But would Gareth change his mind?'

Debbie looked at the letters. She held on to the chairback hard.

‘No,' she said, ‘he wouldn't.'

‘And you wouldn't?'

‘No,' Debbie said, ‘it's too late.' She shot Zoe a quick glance. ‘There's a limit to what you can do for other people.'

‘Oh I know,' Zoe said, ‘I know that. It's just that this is such a bad time for Robin—'

‘It's bad for all of us!' Debbie cried. ‘It's been bad for ages, months and months, long before you came!'

Zoe eased herself upright from the doorframe.

‘Yes.'

Debbie moved suddenly. She went over to the kitchen worktop where the electric toaster stood, and retrieved a big envelope that was balanced behind it.

‘Here.'

‘What's that?'

‘It's the pictures. The pictures you took of Eddie. He shouldn't have taken them—'

‘But they're his,' Zoe said. ‘They're of him. Who else do they belong to? They aren't any use to anyone else.'

‘We don't want them,' Debbie said.

Zoe took the envelope. She said slowly, ‘What's bugging you?'

Debbie said nothing.

‘Is it the sex?'

Debbie made a little gesture.

‘You want to let that go,' Zoe said. ‘It doesn't affect you, it doesn't interfere with your life.'

Debbie shut her eyes.

‘Good luck,' Zoe said.

She turned, and Debbie heard her walking away, down the little path, past the flower tubs and the plastic guns, towards the maize field. She opened her eyes. The letters still lay there, two white squares with Gareth's careful, unpractised handwriting across them, and first-class postage stamps. She picked them up. She'd said to Gareth that she'd post them.

‘If you like,' he'd said.

She turned, and went into the sitting-room, still holding the letters. From the big window, which she kept so scrupulously polished, she could see Zoe still, walking without hurry down the green aisle of maize. She wondered how she would tell Gareth of the visit, how she would colour it, how she would try and explain her own reaction, justify it. Then she wondered if she would, in fact, tell Gareth about it at all.

‘In the morning,' Lyndsay said. ‘I have to sleep on it.'

Her father sighed.

‘It will be the same in the morning—'

‘I can't,' Lyndsay said. ‘I can't do it just now. I'm tired.'

Roy glanced at his wife. She was sitting in her accustomed armchair, embroidering a fire screen. She'd been at it for over a year and Roy couldn't think why her absorption in it was so profoundly irritating. But it was.

‘Help me, dear.'

Sylvia said, pushing her needle in and out, ‘Lyndsay, we're only trying to help you. Your father hasn't done all this for himself, he's done it for you.'

‘I know.'

‘You'll do no good by putting off signing. It has to be in your name because of the business. If I could sign for you, I would, but I can't.'

Lyndsay stood up. She said in a voice that was almost angry, ‘I
said.
I said I'd do it in the morning.' She glared at them. ‘I'm not a
child
.'

Silence.

Roy took off his reading glasses and laid them on the unsigned contract. He said, ‘Then you have to stop behaving like one.'

‘By doing what you say?'

He glanced again at Sylvia, but she was negotiating an auricula and wouldn't look up.

‘Not necessarily,' he said tiredly, ‘but by doing something. We only came up with the plan because you hadn't got one of your own.'

‘Not yet,' Lyndsay said furiously. ‘Not
yet.
Joe's been dead six weeks. Six
weeks.
Why should anyone have to decide anything when their husband has only been dead six weeks?'