Next of Kin Read Free Page A

OK?’
    â€˜Robin?’ Joe said. ‘In time, I should think so. In time—’
    Lyndsay said shyly, ‘You were fond of Caro, weren’t you?’
    There was a small pause, then Joe said, ‘She made a change. Being American.’
    Joe had been to America for a year, after agricultural college. Harry hadn’t seemed to require him to take a serious job during that year – Robin had noticed this in silence – so Joe had roamed the great distances at will, picking up casual work in bars and diners and on farms in order to buy his passage onward. At one point, seduced by a girl and the mountains of Colorado, he had thought he might stay, but after a few weeks, he seemed to recollect his own legacy of knowing the difference between land and landscape, and had called from Denver to say he would be home by Christmas.
    It was then that Robin had announced he was going in for cattle. One evening, at supper in the kitchen of Dean Place Farm, he had said that he had come to a decision, and that he’d be leaving home to start a dairy herd, and maybe a few beef cattle, too. Harry had put his knife and fork down and, in the harsh glare of the overhead light which Dilys saw no reason to soften because it was practical to work by, looked at his wife. Then he looked, much less intently, at Robin, and then he picked up his knife and fork again.
    â€˜Done your sums?’ he said.
    â€˜Yes.’
    Dilys held out a bowl of buttered cabbage.
    â€˜Joe will be home soon,’ she said.
    â€˜I know.’
    Robin waited for one of his parents to say that there wasn’t room for all three Meredith men on Dean Place Farm, but they didn’t. He took a spoonful of cabbage and said, rather more harshly than he meant to, ‘I want to do it, and it’ll leave space for Joe.’
    Harry grunted. Where Joe would go had been the chief preoccupation of most conversations he and Dilys had had since Joe had left for America.
    â€˜I’ve found a place. Land’s not too bad but the yard needs a lot of work. I’d have to build a milking parlour.’
    Harry looked up again, chewing.
    â€˜We’ve never had stock. Never.’
    Robin said, ‘But I’d like to.’ It occurred to him to say, ‘And you watch my profits,’ but he thought he would neither tempt providence nor provoke his father. Instead, he said, ‘I’ve got a loan. And a buyer for the cottage.’
    Dilys got up to put a great wedge of cheese and a jar of pickle on the table. She said serenely, ‘We wish you luck, dear,’ and smiled at him as if he had solved a problem for her and she had known all along that he would.
    Joe came home bringing a brief exciting aura of America with him to find Robin and some hired earthmoving machinery digging a slurry pit at Tideswell Farm. He also found that Robin had a girlfriend, a tall, brown-haired girl in jeans and cowboy boots painting window frames in the farmhouse.
    â€˜She’s American, of course,’ Dilys said. ‘They met at Young Farmers.’
    Dilys was doing the farm books, the ledgers and papers spread across the kitchen table weighted by the jam jars in which she kept the small change of housekeeping – egg money, newspaper money, money for the church collection and for shoe repairs.
    â€˜Seems nice enough.’
    Joe thought she was more than nice. She carried with her something of that freedom he had known in America, that air of always keeping moving, keeping searching, that had briefly infected him like a sea fever. In the early weeks after his return, he tried to paint window frames with her, to keep America in his blood by being with her, but she sent him out to help Robin or home to take up his place beside his father. Even later, when she and Robin were married, she had retained a special quality for Joe, a reminder that there were places where life was different from this, where possibility was in the air, like