Next of Kin (34 page)

Sylvia threaded her needle neatly in and out of the canvas, and folded it up.

‘No need to upset yourself—'

‘I am upset,' Lyndsay said, ‘of course I'm upset! I'll probably be upset, as you call it, for years and years. I don't
know.
None of us do. But I do know sometimes what I can't do, and I can't sign that contract. Not tonight.'

Sylvia stood up. She didn't look at Lyndsay.

‘Then we'll wait till the morning.'

‘But,' Roy said, ‘it has to
be
the morning.'

Lyndsay looked at them both. She opened her mouth to say something, and then she shut it again. Instead of replying, she walked to the sitting-room door and opened it.

‘Night,' she said.

They waited for her to say something else, to say sorry. But she didn't.

‘Good night, dear,' Sylvia said.

Upstairs, Hughie lay asleep propped up on four pillows. It was his compromise over lying down. Sylvia, Lyndsay knew, disapproved of this, but Lyndsay didn't mind. She didn't mind, either, the fact that Hughie had bitten her. It was startling, but she wasn't hurt, certainly not in her feelings. In fact, when Sylvia and Roy had burst into the room, Lyndsay had been looking at Hughie with something little short of admiration.

She sat down by him now. He looked miserably uncomfortable, half sliding off the precarious pillow mountain he had made himself, his baseball cap tilted upwards by the angle at which he lay, so that the peak stood straight up, scraping his fair hair up behind it. Lyndsay was glad he was asleep, however awkwardly. Only when he was asleep, could she be sure he wasn't oppressed by all the things he chose to be alarmed by.

But did he choose? When she looked at him now, and saw Joe's colouring, if not his features, she was very doubtful that Hughie invented anything. If he was afraid of things, he had good reason – those things were alarming to him. Just as the black spectres in Joe's life had been alarming to him. Lyndsay might have chosen not to see Joe's shadows, nor to believe in them if she did, but she couldn't so choose with Hughie. Hughie was her child, and for the moment wholly dependent upon her for his faith in life. And now he was pitting himself against her because, quite simply, he had to, to survive. He wasn't being troublesome, he was being truthful. It was almost as if, in his childish instinctive way, he was trying to force her to see that what she was about to do was as wrong for her as it would be for him. He loved her. Young as he was, Lyndsay knew that no-one in her life had ever loved her as Hughie did, and that, even if he grew temporarily ashamed of such love as he grew older, she would never forget the intensity of it and the utter trust it placed in her. She put a hand out and held his foot. In some way, she knew she had failed Joe. She had never meant to and would have done everything in her power not to have done so, but, for whatever reason, she had failed him because she couldn't reach him. Well, she could reach Hughie. She could reach him because he allowed her to, he let her in, in a way that Joe had never been able to. And if he could let her in, she must make sure that she proved trustworthy, so that he would, as a grown man, be able to let in someone else and not be driven to the edge of a fatal isolation as Joe had been. Whatever she chose to do in the morning, she must remember that. She had the chance now not to let Hughie down, when he needed her, and she must take it.

They hadn't really spoken all evening. Robin had come in late, and tired, and sweaty, and had gone up for a shower, and come down to ruffle her head as he passed her, as if she were a dog that he was very fond of which could be relied upon not to speak. She put soup and a sandwich in front of him, and while he ate, he went through the pile of papers that had been collecting recently on the table, weighted down by a small monkey wrench that happened to be lying around. The papers were mostly invoices, bills. They were for sums that seemed improbable to Zoe, just too big, and for things that had gone, been used up, feeds and vet's visits, drugs and machinery repairs. Robin went through them steadily, over and over. She watched him for a bit and then she looked away, at the television, which was on, but with the sound turned right down, so that people were mouthing silently out of the screen, like fish in a tank. Zoe felt badly for Robin, but there was nothing she could do, not in this department. She had tried that afternoon, and failed – failed, really, because of the effect that the help she really could be to Robin in another department had had on everybody else.

‘Coffee?' she said.

He shook his head. She stood up and collected his bowl and plate and took them over to the sink. It was still quite light in the yard outside, and there was a little thin hard new moon hanging above the barn like a sharp, curved blade. She watched it for a while. After a moment or two, she realized that there was another light coming from somewhere, a moving light coming down the drive from the lane above. It was a car, and it was coming slowly, as if it didn't know the way. She watched it until it emerged into the yard and stopped. There was one person in the back, and the driver.

‘A taxi!' Zoe said.

Behind her, scribbling figures on scrap paper, Robin grunted. Zoe leaned forward, holding on to the edge of the sink. A girl got out of the taxi, a tall girl in black, pulling a bag out behind her, one of those big, soft rollbags with canvas straps.

‘Robin,' Zoe said, and her voice shook a little, ‘Judy's here.'

Chapter Eighteen

Everything was late this year, Harry thought. He stood looking across the acres of linseed and observed that they were hardly yet in flower. Too much rain earlier, now not enough. And a warm, choppy wind on and off for weeks, drying everything up. He leaned his arms on the top of the five-barred gate giving on to the field, and felt the folded papers in his pocket crackle. He had said he'd read them. He'd promised Dilys he would.

‘On my own,' he said. ‘Out there. I can't read them with you watching.'

The papers were the particulars of two bungalows in Stretton that Dilys had chosen from a great sheaf sent to her by the estate agency. At first glance, they looked not only indistinguishable from one another, but also from almost any other bungalow Harry had ever seen. It was so difficult to care where he lived, if he couldn't live here, and difficult to the point of impossibility to imagine life after Dean Place. It seemed to him that there might, quite simply, not be a life. That was why he hadn't written yet to their landlords giving notice of quitting Dean Place. Dilys had drafted a letter, but he couldn't bring himself to sign it. It appeared to be like signing some kind of death warrant. Dilys told him he was stubborn. He probably was, but there was more to it than that. There was the belief that he had lost so much already that nothing and nobody could or would expect him to lose any more. Certainly not the last shreds of his freedom.

He pulled the folded papers out of his pocket and slowly opened them up. 67 Otterdale Close and The Lindens, 20 Beech Way. ‘Better garden', Dilys had written on one and ‘Sun room and bigger kitchen' on the other. What did it matter? What was he going to do with a garden, he'd like to know? And kitchens were Dilys's affair, as were sun rooms, whatever they were supposed to be. Sun rooms! The very words put him in mind of geriatric outings in coaches to Llandudno. He folded the particulars back up again, clumsily, and stuffed them in his pocket. Dilys could decide. He didn't care and nor, he suspected, did she at bottom. But she could decide, all the same, and then he could grumble.

He heaved himself back up into the tractor cab, and rattled his way rowdily down the track towards the house. It was like a cantankerous old horse, his tractor, every joint stiff and cracking, full of aches and pains and obstinacies, but familiar. He'd always refused to think of replacing it, citing the ludicrous price of new ones as an example and concealing its frequent breakdowns with furtive evening tinkerings when Joe had gone home. Well, now he wouldn't have to replace it. It and he would be put out to grass together, except it wouldn't be grass, it would be some damned suburban garden, round a bungalow. He'd a good mind to take the tractor with him. He'd say to Dilys, ‘All right, 67 Otterdale Close it is, as long as there's room enough in the drive to park the tractor.' He'd said he'd give Dilys his answer by dinnertime but, fired by the notion of taking the tractor, he thought he'd go and tell her right now.

There was a car in the yard. It was, to his surprise, Lyndsay's car. He thought she was in Stretton, signing up on some beauty parlour her parents wanted her to have. Harry hadn't much time for Lyndsay's parents. Nice enough people, but not his sort. He'd been to their house once, at Dilys's insistence, during Joe and Lyndsay's engagement, and had never seen a sitting-room so full of knick-knacks. Little thises and thats on every surface. Dilys had put him in a chair and told him not to move, or else. She'd been afraid he'd break something.

‘Well,' Harry said, clumping into the kitchen, ‘surprise, surprise.'

Lyndsay was sitting at the kitchen table with Rose on her knee. Rose, breathing heavily, was strenuously kneading a lump of Dilys's bread dough on the tabletop. Lyndsay had tied her hair back with something and looked different on account of it, a bit older, more alert. Across the table, Hughie was drawing big red H's all over an old agricultural seed catalogue.

‘Hello,' Lyndsay said. She smiled at Harry, but shyly, as she used to when Joe first brought her home.

‘Nice to see you, dear,' Harry said. He bent over Hughie. ‘Kiss for Grandpa?'

Obediently, Hughie held up his face.

‘Mmm,' Rose said urgently, leaning across the table for equal attention. ‘Mmm, mmm,
mmm
.'

Harry went round to her.

‘Nah,' she said, craning away from him. ‘
Nah
.'

‘Rose. Oh,
Rose
.'

‘Leave her.'

‘She's so awful. My parents—'

Dilys put two glasses of fruit juice down in front of the children.

‘Never mind, dear.'

Hughie pulled his glass towards him, and tipped it towards his mouth without lifting it from the table. He watched Lyndsay over the top of it.

‘I'm – I'm rather in disgrace,' Lyndsay said to Harry. ‘I was just telling Dilys—'

Harry sat down in his accustomed chair.

‘Who with?'

‘My parents.'

Harry waited. Rose began to slap the bread dough first with one fat palm, and then the other.

‘I wouldn't sign the contract,' Lyndsay said, ‘on the building in Stretton.'

‘Perhaps,' Harry said, uncertain where this was leading, ‘it wasn't the right one.'

‘No it wasn't. But there won't be a right one, you see. The whole idea wasn't right, the whole idea of Stretton.'

‘No,' Harry said heavily, thinking of the bungalows.

Hughie set his glass upright again, very quietly. Dilys had come to sit next to him and he felt that she was being very quiet, too; extra quiet. Only Rose was making a noise, slapping the dough.

‘I've changed my mind,' Lyndsay said. She looked down, at the back of Rose's curly head, and her stout and solid little body in its green-spotted dungarees. ‘I've changed my mind and I'm not going back to Stretton.' She gave Dilys a quick glance. ‘I'm staying here.'

‘Well,' Harry said.

‘I want to try and farm. I want to try and run the farm. Like Joe did.'

Dilys and Harry exchanged glances.

Dilys said, gently for her, ‘But you don't know anything about it, dear. You've never taken any interest. You wouldn't know where to begin.'

Lyndsay said nothing, just stared down at Rose's back.

‘It's a mug's game, now, farming,' Harry said. He'd felt a leap of hope when she first spoke, but he knew it was an insane leap. Lyndsay farm! A girl take on a farm like Dean Place, a town girl with soft town ways who'd never been able to do anything for herself! He couldn't help feeling fond of her for thinking of it, but he couldn't let her think it, all the same. ‘It's not what it was. It's all paperwork and subsidies. You can't grow food to eat like we used to, like farming used to be.'

Lyndsay looked across the table at Hughie.

‘I could get a manager. For a few years anyway, while I learn what to do.'

‘You'd have to pay him.'

‘I know.'

‘What'd you do that with?'

Lyndsay took a breath.

‘If I lived here,' she said, ‘I could have lodgers. Or people for holidays, family holidays. Couldn't I?'

Harry heard Dilys gasp.

‘Live here—'

‘Yes,' Lyndsay said, ‘here. Because you're going to Stretton, aren't you? Buying a bungalow?'

Harry closed his eyes.

‘You'd live here.'

‘I'm a major shareholder now,' Lyndsay said. ‘And you are moving out.'

‘We're giving up the lease,' Dilys said. Her voice sounded faint, as if she couldn't quite remember how to use it.

‘But you can't,' Lyndsay said, ‘without my consent. Can you? And I don't want to give up the lease. I've decided. That's what I've come to tell you, you see.' She looked at Dilys. ‘I thought you'd be pleased.'

Dilys nodded, speechless.

‘Flabbergasted,' Harry said.

‘People learn,' Lyndsay said. She sounded almost certain. ‘Don't they? All their lives changes happen and then they learn something else, either because they want to or they have to. Well, I'm a bit of both. I may not succeed, but I'm going to try.'