Next of Kin (6 page)

‘All yours,' he said.

He moved across to the fridge and took out a block of cheese. He seemed to be living off the stuff, cheese and cereals, anything bulky and easy. When he was a boy, Dilys had kept a house cow who'd provided all the butter and cheese they'd eaten, and the skim milk went into the bread. Now Dilys bought cheese and bread like everyone else. The economics of keeping a house cow were hopeless.

Velma had left a list of messages on the table.

‘Man rang from farming development scheme. Said you knew what about. Gareth says new slurry pipe's come and he's got four cows bulling. Salesman came about the fertilizer. I said come back Wednesday. Joe came but I don't know what he wanted. Got the doctor tomorrow morning but I'll be down later. Sitting-room chimney needs the sweep.'

Robin turned the radio on, heard the prediction of strong westerly winds he'd heard on the way home and turned it off again. He lifted the muslin dome off the loaf and looked at it. What had Joe wanted? What had he wanted he couldn't say on the telephone? He picked up the bread knife and began to slice thick, practised, even slices from the loaf. The meeting had been depressing, as such meetings tended to be these days, with all the big dairies reporting turnover down for the half-year and government health guidelines urging the public to consume less dairy fat. He hadn't needed to go to the meeting to be told that, nor to have salt rubbed in the wound of his own vulnerability. Those early years of farming, he thought he'd had it made, with profits on the herd doubling year after year so that the sleep-disturbing loans, for a brief and heady period, had seemed they would melt like sugar. Some hope, he thought now, putting cheese between the bread slices, some hope, with costs going up all the time, Gareth on £13,000 plus his house, cows needing several hundred pounds' worth of bought-in feed a year each, interest rates . . . and now this cold wet spring would mean the maize would go in late. He took a single bite and then put the sandwich down. It tasted of nothing and the texture was as dry as dust.

Out in the yard, all was quiet. In an hour Gareth would be back to herd the cows into the collecting yard, and then go round the barn and all the hard-standing scraping away the slurry with a great rubber fender attached to a tractor. It was an ancient tractor, Robin's very first, third-hand even when he'd had it. You couldn't buy a tractor tyre these days for what he'd paid for that tractor. He liked old things, like the experienced cows, often stubborn as hell, who went to the same stall in the parlour every milking, regular as clockwork, and the same cubicle in the barn. They had an authority about them that he respected, that calmed the young ones. He liked to put a few old girls among the young ones for that very reason even though old was hardly the word for them these days. He'd have liked to think of them going on for thirteen or fourteen years as was their natural span, but nowadays they didn't make much more than five.

The cows watched him with the peaceableness of familiarity as he climbed into his Land Rover and set off past them down the farm track to the river. Because of the spring rain, the pollution-control people were in a ferment about slurry getting washed down into the river, and if it wasn't the pollution-control people, it would be something about health-and-safety regulations, inevitably involving the spending of money he didn't have.

‘I haven't got any money,' Caro had said to him, all those years ago on the river bank. ‘Not a cent.'

‘Nor have I.'

‘But—' She had gestured up the sloping fields behind them, to where the house stood beside its ruined yard.

‘I'm borrowing it,' he said, understanding her. ‘All but £6,000. Borrowing every other penny.'

He swung the Land Rover off the track and stopped it in a field gateway. The field, this close to the river, had been flooded until early March and lay bleak and starved-looking, desperate for warmth for the new growth of grass. Borrowing! That had only been the beginning. Borrowing had become a way of life, hadn't it, borrowing for animals, for machinery, for buildings, for tractors and fertilizers and parlour equipment all on hire purchase, all gone or obsolete before he'd ever got to the end of the payments.

‘Do your own milking,' Harry had said, over and over. ‘Save on a herdsman. What d'you want with a herdsman on a herd that size?'

Because of Caro, had been the reply, but Robin had never uttered it. He'd never uttered it because it was nothing to do with Caro in a way, she'd never asked him to give more time to her and to Judy, never declared, as he knew Lyndsay did, that she felt excluded from this arduous, dedicated, relentless farming life of his. It was he who had wanted it, he who had employed herdsmen he could ill afford, to try and be part of Caro's life, to make himself available to her, to be something other than a farmer for her if only for a few hours.

‘Why do you want to farm?' she'd said to him at the beginning, and he had replied, almost shyly, ‘Because I like producing things,' and she had looked at him for a long time with a kind of quiet sorrow that he hadn't understood at all.

He got out of the Land Rover, and made his way across the field towards the further hedgerow – which needed attention, he noticed – down which a small brook, not much bigger than a ditch, ran from the slope below the slurry pit to the river. The pit needed enlarging, he knew that, had needed it for a year or so, as well as the installation of a new dirty-water pump. Next thing, the rivers authority would be down on him and fines would be added to that pile of bills he now kept in a plastic storage box in the kitchen, and which he only paid any attention to when the red demands came.

Caro had never kept his farm books. He had wrested them from Dilys with great difficulty, hoping that Caro would take them up, would learn the prices of feed and water rates and straws of bull semen so that the farm would become a reality to her, a commitment of his that might naturally turn into a commitment of theirs. But she declined, gently but firmly. She said she was no good at figures.

‘But you'd learn—'

‘No,' she said, smiling, ‘I wouldn't.'

She had set aside a room for him, for a farm office, a narrow room like a slice of passage, on the ground floor, with a window looking out on to the drive. She had fixed shelves for him there herself, and made curtains and cushions, and set out filing trays as if encouraging a child to believe that homework is fun. Obediently, for twenty years, until Caro's death, he had confined the farm's paperwork to the narrow room, had withdrawn there to read agricultural ministry pamphlets and market reports and articles on new feeding systems and, when it became unavoidable, to write cheques. These came from a cheque book stamped ‘Tideswell Farm Account'. Caro thought it was some kind of piggy bank. Robin knew it was only a record of debt.

He reached the hedgerow, and pushed his way through to look at the brook. The water, running freely in its narrow channel, looked clear enough, but that meant nothing much. There could be seepage down through the sodden earth and he would rather find that out for himself before the authorities officiously found out for him. What he would do when he discovered he was indeed polluting the river, he didn't know. But then, he didn't know right now what he was going to do about anything.

He straightened and looked up the long slope of the hedgerow towards the point on the horizon where the roofs of the farmyard were outlined against the persistently grey sky. In the weeks since Caro had died, it had been grey, day after day, deadening to the spirit and failing to nourish the chilled earth. It had rained, too, as it did at her funeral, cold, sharp rain that had held up the spreading of fertilizers and had made him feel, at some obscure level, that he was out of step with things, that he was being punished.

Judy had almost accused him of not loving her mother. He had denied it, badly, not because he didn't believe in his own denial but because the story went back so far, was so complicated. Perhaps he should, fatigue of heart and mind after the funeral notwithstanding, have tried to explain to Judy, have at least attempted to describe how much he had once loved Caro and how much he himself was at a loss to know when that love took a wrong turn and then persisted in its wrongness. Yet he hardly knew himself. He just felt, looking back on those years of an endeavour he believed he'd put his whole heart into, the endeavour of Caro, that there was a moment he realized he'd grown to like being on his own and to be quite calm – even indifferent – about the unending puzzle of understanding her. Judy would probably call it a betrayal; that was the sort of language she went in for, defiant, unhappy language. But there was no deception, Robin believed, in what he had done, no treachery or base abandonment; only a struggle to live with something one had chosen and which had then turned out to be both entirely different from one's expectations, and utterly intractable.

He began to walk slowly up the rough bank of the little brook, head bent, eyes fixed upon the mud and the water. Judy had declared that he was angry. Well, he was, in a way, in a complicated way borne of years of battle and effort. Anger at specific things, such as Caro's failure to tell him until they were married that she couldn't have children, or the sudden demand he should meet her mother's hospital bills in America, had long since faded. Hadn't they? But he was angry about her illness, that anyone should have to die this ravaged, distorting way, a slow cruelty that seemed to put most other hideous cruelties in the natural world to shame. Yet was he angry with her, for leaving him, by dying, and for subjecting him, before she left, to this long life of the form of companionship without the content? Was it that? He put out a hand at random and grasped a supple young rogue sapling sprouting from the hedge, bending it over decisively and weaving it through the nearest stout upright stems. No, he wasn't angry about that, or at least only as byproduct of the thing that had really cut him to the quick, really caused him the most bitter pain and mortification. And that was that she had never, despite all his efforts and even at the beginning, ever loved him. What is more, he wondered now, had she ever even tried to?

He looked back down the long slope to the river, which ran dark and shining between the muddy banks, only raggedly defined now after the ravages of the floodwater. Slightly to the right of the point where his hedgerow reached the bank, the straggling line of willows began, stooping and craning over the water in their oddly oriental way. It was beside one of those willows that he had proposed to Caro, had said that she could live in his house because by saying that he had believed she would know that he wanted to look after her. He did. Even after she had withdrawn from him to the little bedroom over the kitchen, he had still wanted to look after her. Was that love? Judy would call it possessiveness and male patronage, but would she be right? Wasn't the desire to cherish and protect, even in the face of the death of many intimacies, in fact a kind of love?

He turned resolutely back towards the hill and resumed his progress upwards. Pollution was his problem,
must
be his problem, he must not be deflected by these futile searchings back into the past, opening doors into rooms Caro had just abandoned, following paths that she had left before he reached her. Grief, the Vicar had said in his one, brief, embarrassed visit to Robin after the funeral, took many forms and he must try to remember that even the most disconcerting reaction was perfectly normal.

‘Perfectly,' he said, rising to his feet to show that the interview, to his intense relief, was over. ‘No need to blame yourself.'

Robin watched him in silence, as he had at the funeral.

‘The answer,' the Vicar said, pulling on a dark-blue anorak with a drawstring waist, ‘is probably, in your case, work. Work is a great healer. Work is often the answer to troubles of the spirit.'

He held his hand out to Robin. Robin stood, slowly, and took the offered hand for a mere second.

‘I know that,' he said. His voice was full of a contempt he took no trouble at all to hide. ‘I've known that all my life.'

Chapter Four

Through the window beyond her office desk, Judy Meredith could see a wall of dirty white brick, the corner of a balcony too small to stand on where someone had left a nondescript plant in a plastic pot to fend for itself, a further wall of brown brick and a T-shaped slice of sky. The sky was the only thing in the view that ever changed, and during the winter months, it hardly seemed to trouble itself even to do that. Indeed, during the last winter, while her mother was dying, the slice of sky seemed determined to reflect the relentless strain of Judy's life by being steadily dark, even at midday, and either weeping with rain, or threatening to.

Judy's desk was made of pale-grey plastic with a matching computer screen and keyboard fitted into the surface. On the computer she sub-edited features for the interior design magazine for which she worked. Sometimes she was permitted to write feature pieces herself, on decoupage, or Shaker tinware, or the revival of interest in eighteenth-century stripes and checks. Her last piece, written really for Caro, on American quilt-making, had received a postbag of twenty-seven letters from readers congratulating her and wanting to know more, and a warm note from the editor on one of the buttercup-yellow cards which were her speciality. Judy had saved the card to show Caro when she went up to Tideswell for the weekend, but the weekend never happened, only the Thursday-night call from Robin for Judy to come to Stretton Hospital without delay. When she got back to the office, after the funeral, Judy tore the yellow card up and put it in her grey plastic wastebin. It was too reminiscent of sharing.

Besides the computer, Judy's desk held a tier of filing trays, a pile of the magazine's back numbers, a mug that a porcelain company hoping for promotion had given her, patterned with classical columns and which she used for storing pens, a photograph of Caro, and another one of Tideswell Farm photographed from below. It was summer, and the pasture in the foreground was full of young heifers. A small figure in the distance by the Dutch barn was probably Robin, but might have been Gareth. Robin had sent the photograph soon after Judy had first gone to London, and had written ‘Home Sweet Home!' on the back. Judy wondered now about the possible irony of the exclamation mark.