Next of Kin by Joanna Trollope Page A

of dirty white brick, the corner of a balcony too small to stand on where someone had left a nondescript plant in a plastic pot to fend for itself, a further wall of brown brick and a T-shaped slice of sky. The sky was the only thing in the view that ever changed, and during the winter months, it hardly seemed to trouble itself even to do that. Indeed, during the last winter, while her mother was dying, the slice of sky seemed determined to reflect the relentless strain of Judy’s life by being steadily dark, even at midday, and either weeping with rain, or threatening to.
    Judy’s desk was made of pale-grey plastic with a matching computer screen and keyboard fitted into the surface. On the computer she sub-edited features for the interior design magazine for which she worked. Sometimes she was permitted to write feature pieces herself, on decoupage, or Shaker tinware, or the revival of interest in eighteenth-century stripes and checks. Her last piece, written really for Caro, on American quilt-making, had received a postbag of twenty-seven letters from readers congratulating her and wanting to know more, and a warm note from the editor on one of the buttercup-yellow cards which were her speciality. Judy had saved the card to show Caro when she went up to Tideswell for the weekend, but the weekend never happened, only the Thursday-night call from Robin for Judy to come to Stretton Hospital without delay. When she got back to the office, after the funeral, Judy tore the yellow card up and put it in her grey plastic wastebin. It was too reminiscent of sharing.
    Besides the computer, Judy’s desk held a tier of filing trays, a pile of the magazine’s back numbers, a mug that a porcelain company hoping for promotion had given her, patterned with classical columns and which she used for storing pens, a photograph of Caro, and another one of Tideswell Farm photographed from below. It was summer, and the pasture in the foreground was full of young heifers. A small figure in the distance by the Dutch barn was probably Robin, but might have been Gareth. Robin had sent the photograph soon after Judy had first gone to London, and had written ‘Home Sweet Home!’ on the back. Judy wondered now about the possible irony of the exclamation mark.
    The desk was orderly. Either side of her, at slight angles, two other sub-editors worked at desks of monumental chaos. Papers, coffee mugs, vases of dead flowers, galley proofs, empty crisp packets, fabric swatches and a confetti of little yellow memo notes were layered haphazardly across the surfaces, and out of the muddle, the computer screens rose calmly like periscopes. While Caro was dying, the inhabitants of these desks, Tessa and Bronwen, had showered Judy with attention and treats, as if she herself were some kind of invalid, bringing her flowers and fruit and single cream cakes, in paper bags. Now that Caro was dead, they were paralysed by not knowing what to do instead, and in consequence did nothing, averting their gazes from the photograph of Caro and whispering into their telephones as if by withdrawing in awkwardness they were somehow conveying both respect and sympathy.
    â€˜How chronic,’ Zoe said.
    Zoe was Judy’s new flatmate. She had arrived the week after the funeral, on the recommendation of a sister of Judy’s last flatmate. ‘She’s great,’ they’d said. ‘You’ll like her.’
    She had dark-brown hair dyed claret-colour and cut very short. Her possessions were all carried up the four flights of stairs to the flat in carrier bags and cardboard boxes except for a fuchsia-pink Chinese silk quilt which unrolled to reveal two wooden herons at least half life-size.
    â€˜I don’t cook,’ she said to Judy. ‘Can’t. So no stink of vindaloo.’
    Judy had told her about Caro the first evening.
    â€˜I can’t help it. I can’t think about anything else. I feel I’m going about with