Next of Kin (38 page)

But for all that, here she was, in the bedroom that had once belonged to Gareth's Eddie, peeling stickers of martial arts practitioners off the window. Debbie had left the room spotless, but the stickers were there, and some very odd curtains that looked as if someone had sprayed bleach on them, and two different sorts of wallpaper. Debbie had liked wallpaper, plainly. It was everywhere, even in the bathroom, a design of shells and sea-horses, impractical and fanciful. Yet for all the wallpaper and the window stickers, Dilys couldn't dislike the house. She had tried to, and she couldn't. She had tried, very hard, to feel that they had been rescued but in quite the wrong way – but had failed to feel that, too. She had wanted, at some level, to feel that nothing whatsoever could or should be salvaged from the loss of Joe, and in that wish, the one closest to her heart, she had succeeded least of all.

She laid the stickers in a row on the windowsill. Perhaps Hughie would like them. Perhaps, on the other hand, he should not be encouraged to like anything both so ugly and so violent. There was nothing, after all, remotely violent about Hughie. In fact, quite the reverse. Often, when Dilys went up to Dean Place for the children's bedtime, and was reading to Hughie in Joe's old room, she had a feeling of peace she could neither account for nor remember ever having had before. Triumph she'd had, satisfaction, a sense of achievement, of victory, but not peace. Sitting on Hughie's bed and reading the funny little stories he liked, of moles and tigers in shoes and scarves going about their accident-prone but ultimately secure anthropomorphized domestic lives, unquestionably gave her peace. She felt a state of quiet there, a freedom from disturbance, a tranquillity and ease of mind. There was no explaining it, but there it was, lying round her and Hughie, sitting up in Joe's bed, like still water or a snow field, silent and unbroken.

She unscrewed the top of a bottle of white spirit she had brought upstairs with her, and dipped a cloth in it, to rub away the smears of adhesive the stickers had left on the window. In two weeks' time Lyndsay's new farm manager would move in, to Joe and Lyndsay's former house, a young chap, two years out of agricultural college, on a three-year contract. He hadn't got a wife, but he had a live-in girlfriend who was also in the farm business, a specialist, apparently, in quality salad crops. Once, Dilys told herself, she'd have put her foot down about the couple not being married – but not now, not since Zoe, not since this strange advent of calm that made her feel less urgent, somehow, about putting her foot down about anything.

There, across the maize field, and in her direct line of vision, lay Robin's house. She hadn't lived within sight of Robin for twenty-five years and had never, she thought, looked at the house except to feel, with disapproval, how different its appearance and management would be in her care. She didn't feel that any longer. He was negotiating to sell it, and the land and the house she was in herself, right at this moment, and she felt full of the most fervent desire that he should succeed. The omens looked good, but you couldn't tell, you couldn't be sure. If the last six months had taught Dilys anything, it was the folly of being sure of the future.

Dilys picked up all the cleaning things and looked at her watch. Ten to twelve. In ten minutes, Harry would be in for his lunch, her transformed Harry who had set his face against keeping stock all the years she had known him and who had now taken to Robin's cows with a vengeance. He'd become Robin's right-hand man, going off down the track through the maize field half a dozen times a day and returning with that look of almost sleepy satisfaction she couldn't remember seeing on his face in years. He had all the work he wanted, and none of the care. Robin had the care. Robin, Dilys now thought, had always had the care, all his life. Yet in the singular way that things had turned out, maybe he had had a reward or two as well, not least in Judy, going off to agricultural college in September, financed half by the bank and half by her Aunt Lyndsay. What would my father have thought, Dilys wondered, treading carefully down the stairs, what would he have thought to see these girls, these
girls
, on a farm? Judy in a boiler suit, Lyndsay talking of buying a computer . . .

Dilys went into her little kitchen. The sun was coming in through the south window and lighting up the parsley pot she had put on the sill and the washed jam jars and the folded dishcloth. She had never had a south-facing kitchen window before, never lived in a room where the sun was a presence, a factor. She turned on the taps and washed her hands slowly, dreamily, looking out across the tall rustling heads of maize to the roof of Tideswell, to the barns and the buildings. Change and loss, she said to herself, change and loss, like a chant, over and over, life carrying you away, carrying things away from you, then bringing something back, some little things you didn't look for, didn't know you needed until you saw it washed up there, waiting at your feet. Change and loss. And growth. Growth where you had never looked for it before, never thought to look. Because you weren't ready. Because you hadn't known the loss. Dilys turned off the taps and dried her hands carefully, polishing her thin, old, pinkish-gold wedding ring. Then she began to open cupboards and drawers in search of the bread board, and a loaf, and a knife.