Next of Kin by Joanna Trollope Page B

“My mother’s just died” written all over me. I expect I shouldn’t mention it. People seem terrified I’m going to, and they’ll get put on the spot. The girls at work are just pretending I’m not there till I get over it and everything’s normal again.’
    â€˜How chronic,’ Zoe said. She glanced at Judy. ‘You look worn out.’
    â€˜I can’t sleep. I’m tired all the time and I can’t sleep.’
    â€˜It’s sorrow,’ Zoe said. She put her herons either side of the blocked-up fireplace in their little sitting-room. ‘Just sorrow. Worse than stress. Do you mind them there?’
    â€˜Have you had anyone close to you die?’
    Zoe looked away from the herons and at Judy instead.
    â€˜My father.’
    Judy seemed to sag with physical sympathy.
    â€˜Oh—’
    â€˜Three years ago. In Australia. He left my mother when I was eight, so I never knew him. We had two days together when I was seventeen and my mother just freaked. But I went all the same, and he was great. He was fun . He never said a bad thing about my mother all those two days. And then he went and died , the sod. I could kill him for that.’
    Judy had wanted, then, to say, ‘I’m adopted,’ but had held back with immense self-control. If she’d said it, she’d remember Caro saying to her, when she was five and first at school, ‘Now look, Judy. I chose you. I chose you.’ And that would bring on the tears again. However sympathetic Zoe promised to be as a flatmate, one mustn’t start such a relationship by crying all over it.
    Now, sitting at her desk and ostensibly working on a piece about a fashion designer’s country retreat in Brittany – it had big white sofas which for Judy had become the carelessly impractical benchmark of the very rich – Judy gazed at the list Zoe had made her. It was written on a long strip of green paper in Zoe’s showy, rather childish hand, and it was headed ‘Sorrow’, in capital letters. Underneath, Zoe had written, each word precisely below the one above, ‘Grief, Distress, Woe, Affliction, Pain, Ache, Misery, Unhappiness, Agony, Broken Heart, Ordeal, Shock, Depression, Gloom, Mental Suffering.’
    â€˜That’s why you feel bad,’ Zoe had said, putting the list into Judy’s hands. ‘That’s sorrow for you. And that’s only some of the symptoms.’
    Judy held the list away from her.
    â€˜Why do I need this?’
    â€˜Because you’ve got to look it in the eye to get better. All of it.’
    Caro would not have said that. Caro would have said, ‘You have to go on. That’s all there is to do, sweetheart, just go on. Hold tight to yourself and on you go.’ She’d talked that way after both the broken love affairs that Judy had had since she came to London, neither of them spectacular things, being more the product of Judy’s hopes than of much reality, but both had been ended by the men.
    â€˜Sorry, Judy, sorry, really sorry. You’re sweet, but I—’
    â€˜Judy, I’m not ready for this kind of relationship. It’s not you, it’s just that I can’t cope with commitment, not yet—’
    She had gone straight home to Caro on both occasions, and railed at herself for her height and her red hair and her untrendiness and her being adopted and anything else she could lay her racing mind on as the reason for first Tim and then Ed just walking away – slowly, certainly, and full of excuse and apology, but away . Caro had listened, Judy remembered, she had always listened, but then she had simply said, in her quiet, slow voice that had lost none of its Californian character, that Judy must simply light her candle again and walk forward into the dark. Caro loved that image, of the candle. She was always quoting it. Even as a little child, Judy was told she had a candle inside her nobody could