Next of Kin (8 page)

‘I suppose so.'

‘That tart's burning,' Judy said suddenly, pushing past her.

From the kitchen she called, ‘It's pretty boring, the farm. There's nothing there, just fields and cows.'

‘Nothing's
really
boring,' Zoe said and then added reflectively, ‘except possibly Ollie. Can I come?'

Judy appeared in the kitchen doorway, holding half the tart on a plate, and half in the cardboard tray in which it had arrived. She held the latter out to Zoe.

‘OK.'

Zoe sat down in Judy's armchair and balanced the cardboard tray on her knees.

‘What's your dad like?'

‘Tall. Dark. Grumpy.'

‘Grumpy—'

‘Most farmers are grumpy.'

Zoe said, holding up the half-tart in one piece and biting out of the centre, ‘Can I come next weekend?'

‘OK.'

‘Will you ring? Will you ring your father?'

Judy put her plate down on a pile of magazines. She hadn't rung Robin for ten days, although on each one of those ten she had been sharply conscious that she should. She thought of the kitchen at Tideswell Farm, and Robin eating supper there – tinned soup maybe, or something Dilys had cooked – and the telephone going and him getting up to answer it with a little murmur of annoyance, leaving his reading spectacles to mark the place he had got to in a farming-magazine article about getting tricky heifers in calf. ‘Yes?' he'd say sharply into the telephone. ‘Yes? Tideswell Farm.' What would he make of her request? Even more, what would he make of Zoe with her wine-red hair and her knucklefuls of silver rings, having a look at him with her big, penetrating eyes?

‘I'm no trouble,' Zoe said. ‘I can sleep anywhere.'

‘It isn't that—'

‘Look,' Zoe said, chewing, ‘I'll get a return ticket on the coach and if I'm a disaster, I'll push off after one night. OK?'

Judy nodded. She said, as if to make up for deficiencies of hospitality, ‘There's a river. And a big hill quite close. Sometimes it's quite pretty—'

‘Just ring him. Just ring your father and say I'm bringing a friend down. Why don't you? Why don't you do it now?'

Robin had fallen asleep in front of the nine o'clock television news. Along with the box of farm papers, he had brought the television into the kitchen since Caro died and an extra electric heater. He set the television up so that he could see it from his accustomed place at the big central table, and at night, while attempting to eat the pies and stews Dilys sent up to Tideswell via Velma or Joe, would often slide into sleep where he sat, and wake some twenty minutes later with his head on a bent arm and the food cold on his plate. Yet when he finally abandoned the evening, offering his supper to the house cat and making his last customary round of the cows chewing and dozing in the barn, he couldn't sleep. When finally he reached his bed, he would fall into it, dog-tired, every limb complaining, and on still nights, hear the steady far-off chimes of Dean Cross church clock marking off hour after unyielding hour. The pattern was then for him to plummet into fathomless slumber half an hour before the alarm clock shrilled at five-forty-five and almost threw him out of bed with its impact. In the faint light of dawn in his bedroom, the thought of Caro waited for him, as it did in the bathroom and down the stairs to the kitchen and then out with him to the yard and the tractor parked under cover in the feed store against the great rough brown wall of maize. Not her face, not her voice, just some essence of her, fragmentary, unmistakable and painful. And finished, he told himself over and over.
Finished
.

When the telephone rang, Robin was down in a pit of sleep full of the deep reverberations of the television news. He came up to the surface as if through thick oil, and sat for a moment gazing stupidly at the screen and wondering why, during an interview with the Foreign Secretary, nobody bothered to answer an insistent and interrupting telephone. Slowly, it dawned upon him that the telephone was his own, the mobile phone he had bought when Caro became so ill, and that he had carried about with him all that time, and which was now ringing manfully away on the table under scattered newspapers and a discarded sweater.

‘Yes?'

‘Dad—'

‘Judy,' he said.

‘Don't sound so surprised—'

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I was asleep. I'd gone to sleep in Granny's fish pie.'

There was a pause. In London, Judy watched by Zoe, and at Tideswell, Robin watched by the television, waited for the other to say, ‘How are you?'

‘I was wondering—' Judy said.

‘Hang on,' Robin said. ‘Can't hear. Just going to turn the telly down.' When he came back, he said, ‘What can I do for you?'

‘Can I come down? Can I come down this weekend?'

‘Course!' he said. His voice sounded too hearty to him. ‘Lovely.'

‘And bring a friend—'

‘A friend?'

‘My new flatmate. Zoe. She's a photographer.'

‘Why not,' Robin said. ‘Why not.'

‘Good.'

‘A photographer?'

‘Yes. We'll come on Friday. We'll get the coach to Stretton.'

‘I'll meet you,' Robin said. ‘Tell me which coach and I'll meet you.'

‘Thanks. I'll let you know. Don't – don't do anything, go to any trouble—'

‘Velma can make beds,' Robin said. ‘And no doubt Granny can do her bit for three instead of one.'

‘See you Friday then,' Judy said.

‘Yes. Yes,' Robin said, aware with sudden keenness of the inadequacy of the conversation. ‘See you Friday.'

He put the telephone down again. He thought, with an abrupt rush of feeling, poor Judy, poor bloody Judy with a father like me, a father she despises for having all the wrong attitudes, the wrong feelings. She'd fought him off, all her life, as if she knew, even as a tiny child, that he was doomed to be a stranger to her always, a misunderstanding, alien stranger who filled her often with apprehension and sometimes with distaste. From the moment of her arrival, a watchful red-haired baby of eight months, Joe had been better with her, easier, than he, Robin, had. Joe had seemed quite relaxed with her, able to talk to Caro about her in a way that Robin couldn't do naturally. He remembered finding Joe lying on the kitchen floor one day, in his boiler suit, holding Judy in his arms high in the air, and she was shrieking with laughter and her legs were going like pistons. Robin had never done that, had known it would be false in him to behave that way. But he had tried to read to Judy, to show her things on the farm and in the hedgerows, to lay her small spreadeagled hand on the broad wet nose of a cow. Every time, she endured him tensely for a few minutes and then became convulsed with the determination to go back to Caro, straining at his encircling arms, her face and eyes closed against him.

But then Caro intimated – and Caro's intimations were as plain as most people's declarations – that Robin's mind was closed against Judy, long before she came. Caro had announced, in her quiet way, that she would like to adopt a baby and only after Robin, in amazement and confusion, had asked why, had said that she would very much like a child and that, as she couldn't have one herself, she would have to do it this way.

She had said this standing by the first cooling system that Robin had installed in the milking parlour. It was like her not to wait until mealtimes to say anything of significance, but instead to come in search of Robin wherever he was, in her queer unhurried way, and simply make her announcement.

He had stared at her, his hands dropping from the gauges as if they had become disconnected from his brain.

‘You can't have children?'

‘No,' she said. She stood before him in her denim shirt and her jeans and her cowboy boots, with the end of her plait tied with a red bandanna. ‘I had an operation when I was nineteen as a result of an infection. I'm infertile.' She spread her hands. ‘Nothing works.'

He tried to control himself, to react to this bombshell with some semblance of civilization, but instead found himself shouting, ‘Why didn't you say? Before we were married, why didn't you
say
?'

‘I thought you were marrying me and not my childbearing potential.'

‘I was, Caro, I
was
, but—' He stopped, silenced by unhinging bewilderment.

She said, voicing his unspoken .thoughts, ‘But all normal men want children. All normal women have children. That right? That what you mean?'

‘I didn't mean you aren't normal, I didn't mean that—'

‘But I'm not normal. I was once, but I'm not now. I'm just normal enough, still, to want a child. That's all.'

He said again, almost in a whisper, ‘Why didn't you say?'

‘I didn't think to. I wanted to stay here and stop wandering and I didn't think to.'

‘Don't you think you should have? Don't you think you should have thought of me?'

She considered for a moment, and then she said, not unkindly, ‘Maybe.'

He had shouted again, then. He had shouted about being deceived, about the impossibility of being married to someone who behaved so unilaterally, about there being no heir for Tideswell, his farm, that he had made, with his own hands, his own money. Then he had yelled, ‘I don't want to adopt!'

‘It's the only way to have a child,' she said. ‘Do you really want us not to have a child?'

He had turned away from her and put his hands flat against the milking-parlour wall where the pale-blue wash he had painted it with was already beginning to flake away.

‘I don't know,' he said, and then, miserably, ‘I just assumed we'd have one. When you had settled. I suppose I was just waiting for you to be ready.'

‘But I am ready,' she said reasonably to his back. ‘That's why I'm talking to you about adoption. I'm ready for a child now.'

He closed his eyes. He thought of making love to her – she never initiated sex but she almost always acquiesced – and how he had been thinking one thing all those times, and she had known something quite different. There was no point in shouting at her any more, no point in raging; she had the inexorableness of some natural force which knows no laws but its own. He took his hands away from the wall.

‘OK,' he said.

‘You want it?'

‘No,' he said between clenched teeth, ‘I don't mean that. I mean, given that you will do it anyway, go ahead and do it. But don't expect me to join in just yet. I can't go from believing one thing to having to accept another in a flash, I can't—'

He stopped.

‘What can't you?'

He turned slowly and looked at her.

‘What else haven't you told me?'

She said, ‘You know everything. I just forgot that. Robin, I'd like a daughter. I would most terribly like a daughter.'

He opened his mouth to say that he didn't know much about girls, and closed it again. What was the point of restating something that the previous twenty minutes had made so manifestly plain? He knew nothing about girls,
nothing
. He didn't know what they wanted, because he couldn't even fathom how they thought. And yet he wanted to. Standing there in the milking parlour that summer afternoon and looking at Caro's smooth brown face, he would have given anything to understand her, to know why she did some things, so tellingly, and omitted others, with equal significance. And then a desolation came over him, a great black wave of it, that he would never have a child by her, that they would never, essentially, be able to do even this together, and he turned away from her and went through the parlour and out into the collecting yard, where the cows waited for milking.

Poor Judy. What kind of start was that for any child, even a child disadvantaged by first being conceived so carelessly and then given up with such palpable relief? Robin stood up at the kitchen table and tried to marshal the clutter on it into some kind of order so that Velma would have less to get her teeth into in the morning about his state of mind. As it was, she read his recent habits of life like tea-leaves in a cup. Velma. He must leave her a note to make up beds for these girls, look out bath towels. Yawning, his reading glasses pushed up into his hair, Robin began to hunt through the confusion for a serviceable piece of paper.

Chapter Five

Rose was resisting clean dungarees. Her face suffused with scarlet determination under the halo of fair curls which gave her such a misleading air of amenability, she thrashed and screamed in Lyndsay's arms.

‘Tiresome,' Hughie said. He stood watching his sister, wearing a pirate's hat they had made at his playgroup out of stiff black paper.

‘Very,' Lyndsay said.

‘Nah, nah, nah!' Rose yelled.

‘Can't she just be in her nappy?'

‘No,' Lyndsay said, thrusting a stout kicking leg into the dungarees, ‘because Judy is coming with a friend and Judy gave Rose these dungarees for Christmas.'

‘I suppose,' Hughie said, eyeing the rose-printed dungarees, ‘that they are meant for girls?' He leaned forward as if to make a point. ‘I would
not
like flowers.'

‘Nobody shall make you. Rosie, you are a
devil
.'

She bent the baby, still roaring, over her right arm and pulled the dungarees up over her bottom.

‘I imagine I was quite a good baby,' Hughie said.

‘Yes, you were.'

He stooped and picked up the grey plush seal that Joe hated him carrying everywhere.

‘He's only three,' Lyndsay said. ‘And with Rose—'