The Boy Who Could See Death
Page 16
Hamish turned back along the cliff in time to see his wife and his mother emerge from the track that led down to the sea. They were both wrapped in towels, so it would have been hard to say quite why it was obvious to him that beneath the towels they were naked.
‘Darling, how nice. Beth and I have been for our swim.’
Hamish stared at Beth. ‘You don’t like swimming.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ his wife said, and she looked at him, as later he was to reconstruct the scene, with an expression on her face that he had never met before. ‘Una and I have been swimming together, quite a lot, in fact, since you left us. I like it now. Don’t I, Una?’
‘Yes, darling,’ said his mother, and she laid a slender brown hand lightly, but proprietarily, on Beth’s white forearm.
Something old and hard and deeply buried within him began to sound warning signals. ‘But you don’t like swimming,’ he said again, staring at his wife, who stared back calmly as the ancient tears of childhood welled treacherously in his eyes.
‘She does now.’
His mother was looking at Beth and smiling a smile which, he was later to see, was only one of a long chain of smiles that had, oh so finely and deftly, wrought his exclusion.
‘Beth?’ There was a horrible note of appeal in his voice. An appeal that, even as he heard it, he knew had the ring of a lost cause.
‘Tastes change, darling,’ his mother said, turning from her son back to her son’s wife with her mysterious little half-smile.
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Cousins
by Salley Vickers
Salley Vickers
COUSINS
When a persistent ringing startled me from a sleep of unusual contentment I swear I knew it was about Will. I’m not blessed with second sight but my intuition has always been sharp. Or maybe it was simply that Will was the person in our family most likely to be the source of a late night phone call.
Or early morning I should say. For when I woke up properly, and found that the recovery of the shoes I lost on my sixth birthday – they were blue-spotted and I never found their like again – was a cruel illusion, I saw from my bedside clock that it was 2 a.m. The clock was the Babar clock which my cousin Cecilia had brought me from Paris. The end of Babar’s trunk moves up and down as the clock ticks, which could sound annoying but I loved it. I found the ticking soothing and have it by my bed still.
The phone had stopped ringing and had started again by the time my father got to it. I could hear him in the hall below sounding apprehensive and annoyed. And then I heard his voice change and become urgent.
He was calling my mother, who joined him in the hall, and hearing the tone of their voices I got up and went halfway downstairs and sat on the landing, which is where I used to sit when eavesdropping.
Through the stair rails I could partly see my parents in their pyjamas. My father was holding my mother, who was crying. She rarely cried so I knew this was serious.
I waited a little on the landing but the worry of not knowing what had happened was too great so I ran down the remaining stairs.
‘Hetta!’
‘Dad, what is it?’
I was right, it was Will. At first I thought he must be dead but it turned out to be worse than that.
At the time I was immersed in the Brontës and saw myself as Emily, wild and poetical and in love with her brother. And while Will and I were never close (I was too much his younger sister for that) he did have some of Branwell Brontë’s qualities. And weaknesses.
It’s hard to say how far I felt the gravity of what had happened as a real event, which was to alter all our lives, rather than a drama in my Brontë persona. All I understood then was that Will was in hospital and that both my parents were to go at once and that, as I could not be left alone indefinitely, and there was no one obvious to call upon to come to the house to keep me company, I was to drive with them to Cambridge.
We left there and then and I have always supposed that we were all still in our pyjamas but reviewing everything now I can see that was unlikely. Maybe just I was. I certainly slept in the back of the car and woke to hear my parents talking in the voices people use when they don’t want to be overheard.
My father was saying, and there was a terrifying note of despair in his voice, ‘It’s Nathaniel all over again.’
I know I heard this and it isn’t the construction of hindsight because my Uncle Nathaniel was hardly ever mentioned and his name had a special allure for me. He was my father’s elder brother and was killed in a climbing accident, the kind of event which my tragic imagination relished. I had written some poems in my Emily Brontë mode for my dead uncle, one of which began:
Oh you who are lost to us, still you are with us,
Lost in the flesh but held in the heart,
Still we shall mourn for you, though we are silent,
Dumb though we be we are never apart.
As far as I remember it went on in a similar vein and I doubt it improved.
I don’t recall what my mother said to my father’s anguished comment but maybe for the first time I had some sense of what the death of my uncle might have meant to his family and it was fear that made me exclaim, ‘Will’s not dead, is he?’
My mother was more level-headed than my father, who had a fair measure of his family’s emotional lability, and she would certainly have tried to soothe my fears. But anxiety had been awoken, a real and not a dramatic anxiety, and I was no longer consumptive Emily Brontë with a poetical tempest raging in my breast but robustly, indecently hale, fifteen-year-old Henrietta Tye, whose brother Will, it seemed, had suffered some appalling injury.
THE BEGINNING
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First published 2015
Copyright © Salley Vickers, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover image: The Friend of the Order, 1964 (oil on canvas) by Rene Magritte © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014. Image © Private Collection/Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images
A version of ‘Vacation’ was previously published as a Penguin ebook in 2012
ISBN: 978-0-241-97228-1