Free Next of Kin by Joanna Trollope Page B

can’t—’
    He stopped.
    â€˜What can’t you?’
    He turned slowly and looked at her.
    â€˜What else haven’t you told me?’
    She said, ‘You know everything. I just forgot that. Robin, I’d like a daughter. I would most terribly like a daughter.’
    He opened his mouth to say that he didn’t know much about girls, and closed it again. What was the point of restating something that the previous twenty minutes had made so manifestly plain? He knew nothing about girls, nothing . He didn’t know what they wanted, because he couldn’t even fathom how they thought. And yet he wanted to. Standing there in the milking parlour that summer afternoon and looking at Caro’s smooth brown face, he would have given anything to understand her, to know why she did some things, so tellingly, and omitted others, with equal significance. And then a desolation came over him, a great black wave of it, that he would never have a child by her, that they would never, essentially, be able to do even this together, and he turned away from her and went through the parlour and out into the collecting yard, where the cows waited for milking.
    Poor Judy. What kind of start was that for any child, even a child disadvantaged by first being conceived so carelessly and then given up with such palpable relief? Robin stood up at the kitchen table and tried to marshal the clutter on it into some kind of order so that Velma would have less to get her teeth into in the morning about his state of mind. As it was, she read his recent habits of life like tea-leaves in a cup. Velma. He must leave her a note to make up beds for these girls, look out bath towels. Yawning, his reading glasses pushed up into his hair, Robin began to hunt through the confusion for a serviceable piece of paper.

Chapter Five
    Rose was resisting clean dungarees. Her face suffused with scarlet determination under the halo of fair curls which gave her such a misleading air of amenability, she thrashed and screamed in Lyndsay’s arms.
    â€˜Tiresome,’ Hughie said. He stood watching his sister, wearing a pirate’s hat they had made at his playgroup out of stiff black paper.
    â€˜Very,’ Lyndsay said.
    â€˜Nah, nah, nah!’ Rose yelled.
    â€˜Can’t she just be in her nappy?’
    â€˜No,’ Lyndsay said, thrusting a stout kicking leg into the dungarees, ‘because Judy is coming with a friend and Judy gave Rose these dungarees for Christmas.’
    â€˜I suppose,’ Hughie said, eyeing the rose-printed dungarees, ‘that they are meant for girls?’ He leaned forward as if to make a point. ‘I would not like flowers.’
    â€˜Nobody shall make you. Rosie, you are a devil .’
    She bent the baby, still roaring, over her right arm and pulled the dungarees up over her bottom.
    â€˜I imagine I was quite a good baby,’ Hughie said.
    â€˜Yes, you were.’
    He stooped and picked up the grey plush seal that Joe hated him carrying everywhere.
    â€˜He’s only three,’ Lyndsay said. ‘And with Rose—’
    â€˜Three’s a little boy,’ Joe said. ‘Not a baby.’
    Hughie tucked the seal comfortably under one arm, and put his thumb in.
    â€˜Hughie—’
    â€˜I must,’ he said, round his thumb.
    â€˜Daddy won’t be pleased.’
    He looked at her, still sucking, then he turned and went steadily out of the room. She heard him go along the short landing to his own bedroom, and then the sound of the flimsy door shutting decisively behind him. He would then, she knew, sit on his bean bag under his paper hat, pressing Seal to his side, and suck and suck.
    Rose, bored with protest, struggled now to get down. She was a big baby, a big square baby with Meredith colouring, Meredith build. Dilys had a photograph of Joe, taken on his first birthday, dressed in a romper suit with a sailor collar, which looked astonishingly like Rose. She