Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  The result was that no one who had a part in Will and Cele’s formal education had any notion of their prowess in Latin. At some point, Grandpa must have decided to teach Will Greek too. Or perhaps Will asked to learn; he might have done, because even at primary school he was always more taken by any subject that was not on the curriculum – I remember that at one stage he had an ambition to go to sea and taught himself the Morse code. In any case, he kept it from our parents. I don’t think it ever occurred to Grandpa to mention it to anyone. And Granny – well, Granny never disclosed anything that she felt wasn’t hers to give away.

  So it happened that most mornings at St Levan, after breakfast and before they were let loose on the world, Will and Cele sat in the cold kitchen at the red Formica table taking it in turns to read aloud from the Aeneid and then translate. Thanks to Will’s native ability and Cele’s desire to please, they were by this time accomplished enough to have become Grandpa’s sounding boards.

  The summer after we found the otter Cele turned thirteen. Her birthday was 2 August, an inconvenient date for Bell, who, released from the duties of house-mothering, was desperate to be off on one of her jaunts with whichever of the applicants was available. So if Cele was not with us at Dowlands during the summer holidays, she and Will would often be down at St Levan with Granny and Grandpa.

  I know from Cele’s diary that she spent her birthday of ’84 there because she describes choosing her birthday supper – fish and chips, followed by summer pudding – and her presents: a watch from Granny, and from Grandpa The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. She doesn’t say what Will gave her. Maybe nothing. He wasn’t one for presents. It goes without saying that neither card nor gift arrived for her from Bell. There’s a pathetic postcard from Ravenna stuck in the diary, postmarked late in August, with ‘Darling, have the happiest birthday ever. Present when I get home’ written in Bell’s extrovert hand.

  The day after the birthday it was business as usual and Cele and Will sat down with Grandpa to the Aeneid. By this time, Grandpa had reached Book Seven and Cele had the lines saevit amor ferri et scelerata insania belli,/ira super to read aloud.

  ‘This happens to be a rather important moment,’ Grandpa apparently said, his voice, I can imagine, a little over-emphatic.

  Cele said she didn’t understand it. She hadn’t the same natural aptitude as Will and went along with this exercise, as with so many things, to fit in.

  ‘Virgil is giving his opinion on war,’ Grandpa explained. One of the reasons he was so keen on the Aeneid is that he considered it a great anti-war poem.

  Will suggested, ‘War is insane?’

  It strikes me now that, without really understanding what he was doing, Grandpa was unconsciously recruiting Will, not so much to a cause as to be of his mind, one of his inner party. Cele records Grandpa saying with unusual fervour, ‘Virgil is describing how easily the desire for destruction is kindled – the “accursed madness of war” he calls it.’

  Later when they had set off down the coast path to swim, the cousins discussed this moment. It was Cele who uncharacteristically wondered, ‘Do you think Grandpa really regrets what he did in the war?’ As a rule, she took any such observations from Will. Or maybe she was different when it was just the two of them.

  ‘You mean what he didn’t do in the war?’ Will asked.

  He was at the age, they both were, when, if you are going to be political at all, you begin to become politically aware. Although Grandpa’s pacifism was a well-established fact, it was one of the several no-go areas with our parents and I doubt that Cele and Will had talked much before about the First World War and Grandpa’s father dying and how it might have affected him. But now they did, all the way to the beach. Apparently Will said, ‘You can see what all that has done to Dad.’ Cele’s diary doesn’t enlarge on what he meant by this and I wish I could have been there to ask him. Cele knew all too well what it was like to grow up without a father but she makes no mention of this either.

  5

  The long train rides from St Levan often resulted in Will arriving back at Dowlands with some new scheme. Travelling back from Granny and Grandpa’s that summer, he decided it was time he and Cele executed a long-conceived plan to build a tree house. Although Dowlands itself was not large, it had once commanded considerable acres but by the time my parents came to live there the land had shrunk to a grassy area surrounded by a ha-ha, now more a ditch full of nettles and thistles, which encircled a run-down walled garden. Long ago this garden had been laid out, not by Capability Brown but by a lesser-known contemporary, but its elegance had been lost through years of inattention, though our occasional odd-job man, Steve, did his best to keep the beds in some sort of order.

  Our mother’s family had farmed sheep for generations and Mum had rented back one of Dowlands’ lost fields where she grazed her Swaledales. It was in this field, in one of the tall sycamores, that Will had planned the tree house. Granny, who’s a gardener, detests sycamores because of the way their seedlings spring up uninvited, but they make excellent trees for climbing.

  Naturally, it was Will who masterminded the construction: the selection of discarded planks, lifted from the outhouse, or tranches of rotten fencing. Tools were filched from the cellar, from whose steps our father would occasionally shout, ‘What fiend in human form has pinched my hammer?’

  One of the reasons I was so attached to Cele was because she was kind to me. Syd had been kind enough but in a managing sort of way, and Will, who could be incredibly kind, could also be quite cruel. But Cele, perhaps because she understood the misery of feeling excluded, was always sensitive to my – or any – distress.

  There was a period, a short period mercifully, when I suffered from nightmares, probably due to a sadistic teacher at my school. I remember once I was in the grip of a nightmare – some current Doctor Who monster was pursuing me – when I was woken to Cele’s voice saying, ‘It’s OK, Hetta, it’s only a dream.’ It was at her insistence that I was permitted to observe the construction of the tree house. But I was under strict orders from Will not to be a pest.

  A plank they were hauling up swivelled round on its axis and crashed down again. I was standing below and the plank just missed my head and I must have screeched.

  Cele shouted up, ‘Will, be careful, that nearly brained her!’

  ‘Hetta, what did I tell you? Get out of the way. Where’s the saw?’

  Cele had been charged, as less likely to be intercepted and questioned, with the task of lifting the saw from our father’s toolbox. She passed it up to Will.

  ‘Shall I come up?’

  ‘Hand me up the plank again first.’

  She heaved it up and Will swung it over and began to saw, while I did as ordered and cleared off to collect honeysuckle. There isn’t a scent in the world to match that of damp honeysuckle. I heard a yelp and a thud but I thought it was just Will chucking the ends of the planks down.

  But when I looked it wasn’t a plank; it was Will himself. He was lying on the ground and it was apparent from the blood spurting from his arm that the saw had severed something vital.

  Cele had ripped off her T-shirt and was wrapping it round his arm. To my horror it hardly staunched the blood. In the blink of an eye the faded cotton was becoming a threatening scarlet. She started to pull at the belt of her jeans, which stuck fast in the loops, so she kicked off her shoes, dragged down the jeans to yank out the belt and bound it round the improvised bandage. Then in nothing but her knickers she tore through the nettles and thistles in the ha-ha.

  Steve was weeding the bed by the house as she charged through the front door. To this day, she told me, the sweet scent of phlox makes her feel slightly sick. The next part I can’t really remember. There were raised voices and people making frantic telephone calls and I seem to see, though this may be one of those later reconstructions, a dead pale, somehow shockingly shrunken Will being carried off on a stretcher. I don’t know if Cele went with him in
the ambulance to the hospital. I know she’d have begged to go.

  The Blue Room, where Cele slept with Will when she visited, was at the top of the house under the roof, which was a constant source of stress to Dad as it was always needing repairs. At night you could hear skittering sounds behind the chimney wall. I was scared of rats and thought Cele might be too, sleeping alone, and I stole up after lights out and got into bed with her. She was curled up with her seal, holding Will’s pyjamas to her face and crying.

  Aunt Bell was out of reach and out of contact but Cele would have stayed on at Dowlands anyway. I doubt they could’ve got her to go. Each day she disappeared and I would wonder where she had gone. But I know now that she had climbed to Saint Cuthbert’s chapel.

  Granny found this ruined chapel when she lived at Dowlands during the war. And when, for a term, I had a crush on a teacher who ran the local archaeological society, which led to my joining it, I was able to tell Granny that there was evidence of some sort of structure there as far back as the eighth century, when all those old Celtic saints were supposedly roaming abroad. She was thrilled. Granny knew a lot about the Celtic saints and she was particularly fond of Cuthbert.

  I can see why, as even by saintly standards Cuthbert sounds special. There are many stories about him. ‘Apocryphal they may be,’ Granny used to say, ‘but even apocryphal stories can have truth in them. The deepest truths, sometimes.’

  We children were all animal lovers and we liked it that Cuthbert was too. There was one story we liked in particular. Cuthbert’s monastery was on Holy Island, which on a clear day you can almost see from the beach near Dowlands. The saint, it seems, had a strong feeling for the sea and made a practice of wading into the water at night to pray. Two of the nosier monks followed him, no doubt hoping to find their bishop up to no good. They must have had a long cold night of it as Cuthbert only waded back to shore as dawn was breaking. But while their hope of a juicy scandal may have been disappointed, what these spies did witness were two sea otters which had followed Cuthbert out of the water and were apparently trying to dry his feet by rubbing them with their pelts. It was this that led Cele to Cuthbert’s chapel when Will was injured. A saint so honoured by otters might, she hoped, be called on to help a boy who had tried to save an otter.

  The chapel stood by one of Northumberland’s many holy springs where miracles of healing were supposedly performed and Cele used to go secretly to collect water to take to Will in hospital. And while the damage was severe – Will had severed an artery and damaged a vertebra in his neck and had to wear a collar for months – he did recover, so maybe the saint did help. Will’s arm thereafter bore the track of a long scar, which brought on a wave of guilt in Cele whenever she saw it. Evidently she had taken the wrong saw from Dad’s toolbox, the big jag-toothed one which was unwieldy. It had caught in the plank of wet wood and stuck and it was in yanking it out that Will had plunged the ragged blade into his arm.

  6

  During the nights that followed this accident, Cele began to try to calm her fears by counting. Our mother had taught us the old shepherds’ way of reckoning – ‘yan, tan, tethera’ – and while the rest of us dismissed this as one of Mum’s sheep-farming idiosyncrasies, which we tended to mock, it seems that poor Cele found it soothing. The sheep helped for a while but then, finding their effectiveness lessening, her nightly accounting turned to the hootings of the tawny owls which lodged near our house, or the sharp cries of gulls, in from the sea to escape coming storms.

  I knew nothing of this until a few months ago. I had come ostensibly to visit Mum and Dad but I was anxious to speak to Cele and I arranged to meet her on Holy Island, where she works now, guessing that she would talk more easily there than at Dowlands.

  We met at the Castle Hotel by the ruins of the medieval priory that stand over Cuthbert’s monastery and after I had bought us both a drink we sat on a bench outside. You get a good view there of the same sea into which thirteen centuries ago Cuthbert waded in order to pray.

  My cousin told me then how the urge to count had imperceptibly passed into the daylight hours: the number of strides up the hill to the chapel, and then, as part of her psychic bargain with the taciturn saint, the number she could reach while holding her breath. ‘If I can count to one hundred, two hundred, three hundred and hold my breath, will you save Will?’ Once she fainted by the stream and when she came to heard her own voice saying in her head, ‘If I lie here while I count ten thousand, will you save him?’

  Like water first trickling then, gathering in weight and momentum, finally bursting some barrier whose flimsiness becomes apparent only with its destruction, the need to quantify experience flooded her daily life. From the moment when light seeped through her closed lids, and even beforehand at the hinterland edges of sleep, she had to count: forwards, backwards, in all kinds of permutations, engaged in absurd subtractions – start from a hundred and go backwards subtracting by the two times table, no, start from ten thousand and go backwards in multiples of three. Start from … Start from … Start from … It never stopped.

  The result was that long after Will was out of hospital and mended Cele became less and less able to communicate properly in everyday life. Her ability to form friendships was trammelled by the remorseless inner idol that demanded an absolute subjection. If you can hold your breath till you count to three hundred the ceiling will not fall in; if you can do the nine times table up to twenty-four that aeroplane will not drop out of the sky; if you, if you, if you … Her formerly wide-ranging attention was cruelly enslaved to perpetual calculations.

  As the obsessions mushroomed – count to exactly sixty before the clock ticks on; hold your breath till you get this exact, do it again, do it again; stand on one leg until the next plane passes over, then hop to the next corner till the next; do it in all four corners, now backwards – her anxiety mounted. Worn ragged by the strain, she grew more and more reserved.

  By this time she was at the local comprehensive, one of those massive concrete constructions, the pride of seventies architects and endorsed by educational reformers, where it was easy for a shy, recessive girl to disappear. It was an irony, but not an atypical one in Cele’s life, that she lived close by in a precious little prep school where her mother supposedly acted as ‘mother’ to pampered rich kids. Homework, with which she struggled alone because it never crossed Bell’s mind to help or to enquire how her own daughter was managing, became an enduring battle since every task required in preparation some enervating mental sum. Her capacity to discuss, to form sentences, never mind to imagine, dwindled; her mathematical ability was confined to mental arithmetic (where constant practice made her shine); the one subject, Latin, where thanks to our grandfather she might have excelled, had no place in the school’s curriculum.

  Once when Kenny had come to stay and Cele apparently treated him to monosyllabic answers to his uninterested questions, she heard him suggest to Aunt Bell that ‘the poor little monkey’ be sent away to school. She had by this time perfected the habit of listening behind doors and Aunt Bell’s voice was distinct. The suggestion from Kenny terrified her, but to her surprised relief Bell pronounced a seemingly categorical ‘Out of the question.’

  She said she couldn’t imagine why her mother would voluntarily keep her at home and for a few days she basked in the comfort of being wanted, until something happened which made her realize that the grounds of her mother’s protest were other than maternal.

  She was listening outside Aunt Bell’s bedroom again, this time to a conversation her mother was having on the phone. Bell was talking to Granny and Cele heard her mother say, ‘She irritates me,’ and then lower her voice so poor Cele was left straining her ears and wondering what was to follow from that cruel dismissal.

  Hearing all this for the first time that day by the ruins of the twelfth-century priory, I reflected how I’d always smugly considered myself rather superior in my sensibilities.

  ‘Cele, I had no idea,’ I
said. I felt deeply ashamed at how insulated from her suffering I had been.

  I’ve said she was always kind. ‘How could you have, Hetta? You were what? Seven then? No one knew. I didn’t really know what was going on myself.’

  We sat there in the weak February sun as she described what followed from Bell’s casually hurtful words.

  It seems that Granny was dispatched to inspect St Neot’s and the following term, without much discussion or any explanation, Cele was packed off to board there.

  St Neot’s was closed down long ago. I doubt it would fulfil any modern educational criteria, state or private, but back in the eighties things were generally laxer. From what I can work out, it was really a school where reasonably well-heeled parents could dump girls they were tired of or could think of nothing else to do with. Not delinquents, not crazy girls, just girls who for whatever reason didn’t fit in.

  Poor Cele was terribly unhappy there. Bell was supremely unmaternal but to be sent away felt like a final abandonment. Even Granny and Grandpa in St Levan were miles away and the much vaster distance from Dowlands, which had basically been her home, was an anguish for her. Especially the distance from Will. It was very wrong of them to allow this. I know Granny felt she should have made more protest.

  Miss Finch, the Head of St Neot’s, was an oddity. My guess is that there had been some past scandal which had led to her departure from more conventional educational establishments. Certainly she had a lover, which added to her glamorous reputation among her pupils as it seems she took no trouble to conceal him. The lover, Colin Chance, was supposedly a social anthropologist and taught the girls what passed for science, though this seems mainly to have involved self-regarding anecdotes about his fieldwork in Africa. An old alcoholic called Mr Mackenzie, probably unable to find employment elsewhere, taught maths. Of all the St Neot’s staff Cele liked Mr Mackenzie best because he was also in charge of cricket, at which Miss Finch, ahead of her time, believed passionately girls could excel, and lacrosse, which she maintained developed firm breasts. Mr Mackenzie, lacking breasts, knew little about either sport, which suited Cele perfectly as although she had a good eye and was a swift runner she had been encouraged by Will to despise any form of organized games. Mr Mackenzie perhaps shared this prejudice as he made no fuss about her always choosing a position at cricket in deep field to which she customarily took a book.