Next of Kin Read Free

abusers of the weak?’
    â€˜It’s having integrity,’ he had said. ‘And principles. They do their duty.’
    She’d said sadly, ‘But that isn’t enough. Is it?’ and when he had stayed silent, she had insisted, more vehemently, ‘Is it? Is it?’
    He looked at Dilys now, grey hair waved, dark suit brushed, concentration given over entirely to the proper management of the funeral tea.
    He said, only half meaning to, ‘No, it isn’t.’
    Dilys didn’t hear him. She was gesturing across the table to Robin with those well-kept, deft, domestic hands, a tiny drinking gesture.
    â€˜Sherry?’ she mouthed. ‘Time for sherry.’
    Later, in the car returning to their modern brick house on the edge of Dean Place Farm, Lyndsay said, ‘We should have brought Judy back with us.’
    â€˜Couldn’t do that,’ Joe said. ‘Couldn’t leave Robin alone.’
    Lyndsay took the combs out of her hair and put them between her teeth. Then she bent her head so that her hair fell forward over her face. Joe was right. Of course he was. Yet there was something about Robin that seemed to contribute to his own loneliness, to conspire to leave him in it, whatever one did – or didn’t do – to try and help. She always thought of him as alone, somehow, driving alone, farming alone, standing alone at Stretton Market watching his cattle go through the ring. He was the only one of the Merediths to go in for cattle, too. Harry and Joe were arable farmers, as Harry’s father and grandfather had been before them, tenant farmers on the same 250 acres even if the landlord had changed over the years from being a private individual to a company, a local manufacturing company, who had bought up several farms in the early seventies, when the price of land was low. Robin wouldn’t be a tenant. Robin wanted to buy.
    â€˜Let him,’ Harry had said. ‘I shan’t stop him, but I shan’t help him either.’
    Yet when Joe had needed a house for himself and Lyndsay, Harry had paid for that. He’d done a deal with the landlord and Lyndsay had been shown the plans, spread out on the table at Dean Place Farm.
    â€˜Utility room,’ Dilys had said, pointing. ‘Southern aspect. It’ll make a lovely home.’
    Lyndsay took the combs out of her mouth and shoved them back into her scoops of hair. It occurred to her, thinking of Robin, that Joe was solitary, too, in his way. She never quite knew what he was thinking, whether he was happy or sad. She knew he liked it when he was more successful than other arable farmers in the district, but that wasn’t happiness, that was merely competitive triumph. Yet there was nothing odd in that, not round here. It might be difficult to get Joe to talk except on a factual level, but most farmers were like that, most farmers she knew didn’t talk. Not like women talked. Or at least, some women. Dilys didn’t talk that way either. She talked, as Harry and Joe did, about what was going on, on the farm, in the village. Happiness and unhappiness were for Dilys, Lyndsay thought, like the weather; emotions that happened or didn’t happen, which were unpredictable and which, above all, had to be borne. If Dilys, in the manner of most wives, had ever had a moment of wanting to strangle Harry, she would have bided her time to let it pass, like waiting for the rain to stop. If you went to Dilys and said that you couldn’t quite explain it, but you had the distinct sensation of being at the end of your tether, she would suggest you made chutney, or washed some blankets. Life had to be got through, great lumps of it pushed behind you, undigested if necessary. Life wasn’t for battling with; the farm was there for that.
    â€˜Don’t dwell on it,’ Dilys would say to Lyndsay. ‘Don’t brood.’ Had she ever said that to Caro?
    â€˜Will he be