Next of Kin Read Free Page B

oxygen.
    Lyndsay said now, looking straight ahead through the car windscreen into the damp dimness of early evening, ‘I never got to know her very well. I mean, we got on but we weren’t close, were we?’
    â€˜She was older,’ Joe said. ‘She and Robin were married for twenty-four years. Judy’s twenty-two after all.’
    The lights of their house shone out suddenly as the lane turned between the hedges. Mary Corriedale, who worked at a paper factory in Stretton and lived in a bungalow in Dean Cross, would be there, putting the children to bed. Rose would no doubt already be in her cot, hurling toys to the floor as she defied the day to be over, and Hughie would be in his pyjamas and frog slippers commanding Mary to admire him while he balanced strenuously on one leg, his latest accomplishment.
    Poor Caro, Lyndsay thought suddenly, with a stab of real pity, poor Caro not able to have her own children. What would she have done herself if she had discovered she couldn’t have them either? Or that Joe couldn’t? Being so much younger than Joe, she’d always assumed she’d just have babies when she wanted them. And she had.
    â€˜Did Robin know,’ Lyndsay said. ‘Did Robin know before he married her that she couldn’t have children?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Joe said. He turned the car off the lane and up the concrete slope to the house. ‘I don’t know. I never asked. It’s not the kind of thing you do ask, is it?’
    The milking parlour lay quiet, wet and orderly after the last hosing down of the day. The rubber and metal clusters of the mechanical milker were looped up next to the big reinforced glass milk jars – some of those, Robin noticed with his relentless eye, were still spattered with slurry – and the channels and ribbings of the floor along the stalls gleamed wet and clean. In the pit between the stalls the hose lay in the loose coil Robin required of it, the bottles of iodine and glycerine spray were lined up on the steps going down to the pit, the kick bars were hanging in a row on the wall at the far end. In the winter, if the river rose enough, the pit flooded and he and Gareth, swearing steadily, milked heavily impeded by chest waders.
    He turned off the fluorescent lighting, checked the bulk tank, and went into the barn. It was dark in there, apart from the dim washes of light cast by the low wattage bulkheads screwed to some of the timbers. Most of the cows were lying down in their cubicles, heads to the wall, their great black-and-white bodies spreading solidly between the rails. Some were standing up, back feet out of the straw and in the slurry channel; others were small enough to have got themselves the wrong way round so that they’d drop muck at the head end and stand in it. He must remind Gareth to put some lime down.
    Out in the yard beyond, where some of the cows chose to spend their aimless days, two of the outside cats were crouched on the fodder trough, containing the remains of the day’s ration of feed made from chopped wheat-straw, given to bulk out the maize. The cats fled at his approach, streaking through the darkness towards the feed store where their harvest of vermin lived. Robin looked up at the sky. There was a moon, but a soft-edged one, presaging rain, and a few stars. In the business of the day, he’d hardly heard the weather forecast, that accustomed obsession. He sniffed deeply. The wind was soft, but there was rain on it, and soon.
    He went back through the barn and the parlour to the stretch of concrete that led to the yard door of the house. By the door, the house cat waited, a rusty tortoiseshell, permitted inside because she was housetrained, possessed no anti-social feral attributes, and was a consistent mouser. Robin stooped to take off his boots and scratch her head.
    â€˜Hi,’ he said.
    She murmured politely, arching under his hand, and then shot in ahead of him as