Free Next of Kin by Joanna Trollope

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.
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜Dad—’
    â€˜Judy,’ he said.
    â€˜Don’t sound so surprised—’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜I was wondering—’ Judy said.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Can I come down? Can I come down this weekend?’
    â€˜Course!’ he said. His voice sounded too hearty to him. ‘Lovely.’
    â€˜And bring a friend—’
    â€˜A friend?’
    â€˜My new flatmate. Zoe. She’s a photographer.’
    â€˜Why not,’ Robin said. ‘Why not.’
    â€˜Good.’
    â€˜A photographer?’
    â€˜Yes. We’ll come on Friday. We’ll get the coach to Stretton.’
    â€˜I’ll meet you,’ Robin said. ‘Tell me which coach and I’ll meet you.’
    â€˜Thanks. I’ll let you know. Don’t – don’t do anything, go to any trouble—’
    â€˜Velma can make beds,’ Robin said. ‘And no doubt Granny can do her bit for three instead of one.’
    â€˜See you Friday then,’ Judy said.
    â€˜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 –