Next of Kin (24 page)

She looked into the sink, to find a mug to rinse out, for water. Robin's lunch plate lay there, and a knife, and a tumbler. They looked, to Zoe, incredibly lonely, evidence of an existence rather than a life. She picked up the tumbler, and rinsed it under the tap, and then filled it with water and drank it off in a single draught. It tasted faintly metallic. Zoe swilled the tumbler out, and then rinsed the plate and knife under the tap, too, and put them in the draining rack, and then she picked up the disposable cloth Velma always left folded in an exact square and polished the sink, and then the taps. She had never done such a thing before in her life and was amazed at the brilliance of the chromium. She leaned forward and peered at her distorted reflection in the mixer tap. She had enormous eyes and a vast nose and a minute mouth and no chin or neck to speak of. She tilted her head and put her tongue out and it swelled across the whole reflection like a wet pink balloon, huge and hideous.

Behind her the telephone rang. Robin had an answering machine which he often forgot to put on. Zoe waited. Two rings, three, four, five. He hadn't put it on. She crossed the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

‘Tideswell Farm—'

‘Who is that?' Dilys said sharply.

‘Zoe,' Zoe said.

There was a beat.

‘Zoe? What are you doing there?'

‘I just came,' Zoe said.

‘I should have thought,' Dilys said, ‘I should have thought you'd have had more tact at a time like this. I should have thought you'd have seen this is no moment to come. Where's Robin?'

‘Checking the cell count, or something. In the milk. He's gone somewhere—'

‘I wanted to leave him a message,' Dilys said. ‘I wanted to leave him a message about his supper.'

‘I'll take it.'

There was another pause.

‘It doesn't matter,' Dilys said. ‘It doesn't matter now. I'll speak to him later.'

Zoe shifted the receiver against her ear.

‘I'll come up and get it. I'll bring his supper down. I'll borrow Gareth's bike.'

‘I'm going out,' Dilys said. ‘I'm going to the hospital.'

‘Now?'

‘In half an hour—'

‘I'll be less than half an hour,' Zoe said. ‘I'll be ten minutes.'

‘All right,' Dilys said. Her voice was uncertain. ‘All right. It's only a pie, a slice of pie—'

‘Ten minutes,' Zoe said. ‘I'm starting now.'

She put the receiver down and ran out through the doors to the yard. Gareth had finished the milking, and was standing above the pit directing the hissing blast from the power hose at the stalls where the cows had stood. Zoe went as close to him as she could and cupped her hands round her mouth to amplify her shout.

‘Can I take your bike? To go up to Dean Place?'

‘How long'll you be?'

‘Half an hour!' Zoe yelled.

Gareth nodded. He didn't look at her. The water from the hose swirled and slapped against the concrete.

‘It's in the feed barn. Behind the tractor. Don't you mess up my gears.'

She ran out to the barn, past the bulk tank where the milk was stored. There was no sign of Robin. Gareth's bike, a battered early mountain model, lay on its side against the maize feed. Zoe seized it and ran it out into the yard, so that there was a momentum going for her to mount it, swinging her right leg over the cross bar which Gareth had wound with fluorescent tape, for visibility at night.

It was good to be on a bike again. Zoe hadn't ridden a bike in years, not years and years, until she'd borrowed Gareth's the last time she'd been at Tideswell. There was a freedom to it, and a sense of participation, and the hedges, in which the flat, coarse, creamy plates of elderflower were now opening, had a different perspective at this height, this speed. She bent her head into the small wind she was creating and pedalled like fury, as if she were on a mission, as if something vital depended upon her, the messenger.

Dilys was waiting at the kitchen window. She saw Zoe come flying into the yard, and wrench the bike to a skidding halt as if it were a runaway pony. She looked exactly as Dilys remembered her, and just as disconcerting, all in black with her hair as short as a boy's. You shouldn't, Dilys thought, be able to see a girl's neck like that, not the actual skin of the neck. It wasn't decent, somehow, it looked too naked. Zoe propped the bike against one of Dilys's geranium tubs and came running up to the door.

‘There's not that hurry,' Dilys said, opening it. ‘It's not life or death.'

Zoe was panting.

‘I didn't want to make you late—'

‘You won't,' Dilys said.

She led the way into the kitchen. On the table a plate lay neatly covered in aluminium foil, and beside it, a plastic box.

‘I've put up enough for two,' Dilys said, indicating the plate and box. ‘And a bit of salad.'

‘Thank you,' Zoe said.

Dilys looked wretched. Zoe remembered a confident woman, a woman of health and purpose, a woman in control. She looked now like an echo of all that, her tidy clothes and tidy hair and tidy kitchen almost mocking the destruction that had taken place within.

Zoe said, ‘Did you say you were going to the hospital?'

Dilys began to refold a dishcloth, opening it up, and then folding it again exactly as it had been.

‘Yes.'

‘How is he?'

‘He's not well,' Dilys said. Her voice was odd, almost as if she were stating something she was pleased about, grateful for. ‘They can't make him eat. He won't eat.' She laid the dishcloth back where it had been, in the exact centre of the rim of the old-fashioned white sink. ‘They put him on a drip yesterday.'

‘Oh—'

‘He can't come home,' Dilys said, again with her air of queer triumph. ‘He can't come home until he's off that drip.'

Zoe looked at her. She noticed that her hands were shaking as she put the dishcloth back.

‘D'you want me to come in with you?'

Dilys stared.

‘What?'

Zoe said, ‘Shall I come in to the hospital with you? To see him? I can't drive but I'd be company.'

Dilys said, ‘But I don't know you—'

‘You do,' Zoe said. ‘A bit anyway.'

Dilys moved to the table and began to realign the plate and the plastic box.

‘It – it wouldn't be suitable.'

‘Why wouldn't it? It'd be better if I came. Much better. It'd be easier to leave, easier to come home.'

‘Oh,' Dilys said, too quickly. ‘Coming home's easy, it's not the coming home—'

‘I know,' Zoe said.

Dilys raised her eyes from her busy hands at the table and looked at Zoe.

‘You never know,' Zoe said, ‘what's going to scare you. Do you? It just sneaks up when you're not looking, and there you are, scared.'

Dilys said nothing.

‘I can bike these down,' Zoe said, ‘on the carrier on Gareth's bike, and then you can follow me, in the car. And then we can go together.' She paused and then she said, ‘I'd like to go. I'd like it.'

Dilys touched the foil on the plate lightly. She dropped her eyes from Zoe's face.

‘You take that bike back. I'll bring these down in the car. Don't want the pie spoiling, being knocked about.'

Zoe grinned.

‘OK,' she said. ‘OK.'

She moved towards the door. Dilys was still standing by the table, her gaze directed at it but not seeing it.

‘Ten minutes?' Zoe said.

Harry didn't mind the drip. In some odd way, being connected up to it reminded him of Robin's milking parlour, with all those tubes and hoses, except in that case milk was flowing out, and in this case, they'd said, glucose was flowing in, glucose and some vitamin or other. Harry wasn't much bothered, to tell the truth. He'd never concerned himself much with vitamins; new-fangled things they'd invented in the war because of the food shortages. There'd never been vitamins in Harry's childhood, there'd been the pig and there'd been bread and cheese and potatoes and cabbage. In Harry's childhood you would tell the days of the week and the hours of the day by what you were eating. When Harry or his sisters fell sick, his mother brewed up one of her concoctions, nettles and sorrel and mint and stuff. Harry lay and looked at the delicate engineering they'd harnessed him to, and thought of his mother's back kitchen. She'd have forty fits to see him now. She'd have been able to think of nothing but the cost of it, the expense.

‘Harry,' Dilys said. She was standing at the end of his bed, as she always did when she arrived, so that he had to squint to see her. ‘Hello, dear.'

‘Hello,' he said.

‘I've brought a visitor,' Dilys said. ‘You remember Judy's friend, Zoe?'

Harry shut one eye, to narrow the squint. Dilys moved sideways out of his view and Zoe replaced her. She was smiling.

‘I saw you down by the hedgerow,' Zoe said. ‘Remember? You were hedging. Judy and I brought you your tea.'

Harry nodded. It came to him that he hadn't got his teeth in.

‘I asked to come,' Zoe said. ‘I asked Dilys if I could.'

She came round the bed, the other side from Dilys, and looked down at him. She was still smiling.

‘D'you want your teeth?'

He nodded again, staring at her. He'd remembered that odd hair but he'd forgotten her big eyes, big eyes like a cow except they weren't soft eyes, but sharp, eyes that saw things.

Dilys handed him his teeth in a tissue. He put one hand up to his mouth to shield his gums while he slipped them in, awkwardly, because of the drip.

‘You staying with Robin?'

‘Yes.'

‘Judy there?'

‘No,' Zoe said, ‘she's working. But she sent you her love.' She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘She wants to know how you are.'

‘The nurses won't like that,' Dilys said. ‘They don't like you sitting on the beds.'

Zoe glanced at her. She was still smiling.

‘I'll wait till they throw me off.' She looked back at Harry. ‘What'll I tell Judy? About how you are?'

‘Tired,' Harry said.

‘But you're not eating.'

‘Don't want to.'

‘Who's that going to help?' Zoe said. ‘Who's going to have a better time if you don't eat?'

Dilys pulled up a grey plastic stacking chair, and sat down in it, leaning back, Harry noticed, as if his reply was no concern of hers.

‘None of your business,' he said to Zoe.

‘True.'

‘Nobody's business,' Harry said. ‘Nobody's business what I do. Not now.'

‘Except other people have to look after you. And you're a pain when you won't eat, a pain for those people.'

He grinned suddenly.

‘Always been a pain,' he said. ‘Been a pain all my life.'

‘Me, too,' Zoe said.

She looked down at him. Somewhere, in that collapsed old face, lay Robin's, the same bone structure, the same fleeting smile, the same private eyes. Harry was quite a small man, certainly a small man to be the father of such tall sons, but he had a large head, the head of a much bigger man than he was, a head, Zoe thought, full of things right now that he couldn't bear and was imprisoned with. She gave a quick glance across Harry's bed at Dilys. It was the same for her. She sat there in her organized way on her grey plastic chair and she too was shackled to her thoughts just as Harry was, or Robin, or the girl Zoe had had tea with, who was now Joe's widow. She folded her hands in her lap.

‘You know something?' Zoe said.

Harry watched her.

‘You don't eat,' Zoe said, ‘and in the end you'll die. Is that what you want?'

Harry's gaze wavered.

‘Can't decide?'

His mouth opened and shut, soundlessly.

‘OK then,' Zoe said, ‘I'll decide for you. While we're alive, we live. That's what you're going to do.' She looked across at Dilys. ‘Isn't he?'

Chapter Thirteen

Lyndsay lay on a sun lounger in the garden of her parents' house on the edge of Stretton. The sun was out, but it was a nervous, late-spring sun, and Lyndsay's mother had brought her a rug, and a cardigan and a vacuum flask of coffee. She had also brought her a magazine. She was treating her, Lyndsay thought, as if she was ill.

Lyndsay's father had built the house thirty years before, on a plot of land that had once been the orchard to a big house that had been pulled down to make way for a tennis club. Lyndsay's brother and sister, both rather older than she, had been members of the tennis club when they were growing up, and her sister had married someone she had played mixed doubles with there, and had gone to live in Droitwich with him. They had had two children and Lyndsay's sister had become Personnel Manager in a company manufacturing garden machinery. Lyndsay's brother was an accountant. Lyndsay's mother, who had always done the books for her husband's building firm, said that her son had inherited his head for figures from her.

Nobody commented on what Lyndsay had inherited. She looked rather like her pale, pretty maternal grandmother, but that grandmother had been artistic, with a talent for water-colours and embroidery, and Lyndsay, although good with her hands, wasn't inclined to pick up either a paintbrush or a needle. She had been so very much the youngest child, both by temperament and by treatment. Babied, her brother and sister said, indulged. Photographs of Lyndsay at every stage of childhood still stood about the sitting-room of her parents' house, and clustered on radiator shelves. They embarrassed her now, those images of the party-frocked child, all hair ribbons and white socks. It didn't surprise her that her sister got so irritated.