Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  The one place where Cele said she felt a little at home at St Neot’s was the garden. This garden reminded her of Dowlands, and Mum’s Swaledales, as it sloped down to a ha-ha below which lay a field let out to a local farmer. When Cele felt homesick for Dowlands, she got into the habit of slipping down to the cover of a boulder just above the ha-ha, where she would read in the company of the mildly grazing sheep.

  One afternoon, she looked up from her book to the enquiring face of Miss Finch, who politely asked if she was interrupting.

  Cele could only deny this. She said that her headmistress stood there, saying no more, with Cele hoping like mad that she’d go away and leave her in peace. As always, in this as in almost every situation, she began to count.

  And then Miss Finch came out with an unnerving observation, ‘Counting the sheep, Cecilia?’

  The question made Cele blush. She never did work out how her headmistress had seen within her so accurately. But in the light of what Cele went on to tell me I have wondered since if Miss Finch maybe shared with her pupil this or some similar disability: events revealed that they may well have had some undisclosed feature in common.

  Miss Finch asked Cele whether she ‘might like to go and talk to someone clever at helping people with hitches’.

  Years of living with Bell had made Cele moneyconscious and all she could think of in answer to this terrifying invitation was ‘Wouldn’t it be very expensive?’

  Her headmistress apparently brushed this objection aside. It wasn’t for years that Cele learned who it was who had funded her.

  A week or so later, Miss Finch informed my cousin that Mr Chance was to drive her to Truro the following morning where she would be seeing a Dr Keynes.

  Colin drove her in his Morgan. To be squashed in a sports car so physically close to the man reputed to be her headmistress’s lover left Cele paralysed with embarrassment. Happily for her, Colin drove in silence, which he broke only when they reached Dr Keynes’s office. She had the impression that he was angry at having been saddled with this task and when she got out of the car he sped off again almost before the car door was shut, yelling, ‘I’ll pick you up in an hour. If I’m not here, wait.’

  Dr Keynes turned out to be a short man with a clipped beard, which gave an impression, Cele said, of a well-disposed Mephistopheles. He tried to put her at ease by saying, ‘This is probably a frightening experience for you, Cecilia. New experiences are, especially if to do with doctors. But I am not a medical doctor.’

  The unmedical doctor opened a door into a room with many paintings on the walls and two chairs. Outside, through the window, she could see a garden.

  He indicated she should sit. ‘That chair’s yours. Nicer for you to have the view of the garden. Do you like gardens?’

  ‘I thought it was a trick question,’ she told me, as we sat drinking beer that February day. ‘But he was just breaking the ice.’

  ‘Then,’ she said, ‘there was an awful silence while I tried to think of what to say and at last, out of sheer embarrassment, I asked, “What kind of doctor are you?”’

  ‘I’m a psychologist,’ Dr Keynes explained.

  Cele was none the wiser. There wasn’t much psychology in her background. Nor in mine, come to that.

  ‘I’m called an educational psychologist,’ he told her, ‘but I don’t have much to do with education. It merely means I see schoolchildren.’

  There didn’t seem to be much to say to this either. After a further silence Dr Keynes apparently relented and asked, ‘I wonder why you suppose you’re here, Cecilia.’

  Cele told him she didn’t know.

  ‘Obviously,’ she told me, ‘I did know. But also I didn’t. He asked me if I’d like to guess why I was there and I was too frightened to say “No, I wouldn’t” so we sat in more silence for so long I thought he’d gone to sleep. I was in agonies about what to do but in the end he took pity on me and asked, “Might you like to guess why?”

  ‘I would have liked to say “No” to that too but I was far too shy. So we sat in more silence until he took pity again and asked, “What do you enjoy doing, Cecilia?”

  ‘I didn’t know what he wanted me to say so I said something like, “Oh messing about, I suppose.”

  ‘Anyway, then he grilled me. No, “grilled” isn’t fair. He was cleverer than that. I liked him actually. I sometimes think I might have died if it hadn’t been for Dr Keynes.’

  ‘And messing about means …?’ Dr Keynes asked my cousin, all those years ago.

  ‘Doing things with my cousin Will.’

  ‘You see a lot of Will?’

  ‘Mostly in the holidays.’ All holidays it had been till then.

  ‘And Will is where?’

  ‘Northumberland. He lives there.’

  ‘And your own family? You see them?’

  The truth was that Aunt Bell, having dumped Cele at the school, had contented herself with writing a few postcards during the first term, after which she rarely communicated. Years of practice meant that Cele hardly missed her mother. But children are ashamed of their parents’ defects.

  ‘My mother. I don’t really have a father. My grandparents live in Cornwall. Granny comes to see me here sometimes.’

  ‘And your grandfather?’

  ‘He doesn’t drive and he doesn’t like cars. I see him in the holidays.’ And then, because it was something to say and the pressure to say something felt unendurable, and maybe too from a desire not to show off exactly but to show she was not, as Grandpa would say, a duffer, she said, ‘We read the Aeneid with him.’

  ‘Do you indeed,’ Dr Keynes said. ‘Lacrimae rerum.’

  7

  The next time Colin took Cele for her appointment with Dr Keynes he was late seeing her. He apologized for this as he showed her to the chair overlooking the garden.

  ‘Sorry for the wait. Am I in your bad books?’

  No one had ever asked her such a question. But he had mentioned books. ‘I brought this.’ She held out the red-jacketed Loeb edition of the Aeneid that Grandpa had sent on one of Granny’s visits.

  (‘Really I only took it to have something to say,’ she told me that day on Holy Island.)

  Dr Keynes took it and it opened at the page where a line was marked by a faint pencil star, inscribed, I suppose, by Grandpa: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent.

  Dr Keynes read it aloud. ‘“There are tears for things and mortal matters touch the mind.” A line that fame hasn’t tarnished.’

  ‘It’s our grandparents’ code. LR.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s not code really.’

  ‘Shorthand?’

  ‘It’s a sort of a joke between them. They joke a lot.’

  This was true. ‘LR’ was the kind of thing they would say if, for example, Grandpa broke a plate. He was always breaking things.

  ‘“Tears for things” is rather a sad comment, isn’t it?’ said Dr Keynes. ‘Aeneas lamenting his lost comrades who died in the war.’

  As Cele said, we never really thought about its significance.

  ‘Granny and Grandpa don’t say it sadly,’ she said.

  ‘And how about you, Cecilia? Do you feel sad?’

  There was another of those pauses during which she was aware that she was supposed to come out with something significant and was rescued by the sight of a large tortoiseshell cat balancing on the fence. ‘Is that your cat?’

  ‘That’s Hector. Do you like cats?’

  We liked all animals. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you have a cat?’

  ‘They do at Dowlands.’

  I should explain here about Mrs Mahoane.

  Mrs Mahoane – Old Moanie, as we called her – who had some forgotten connection with Mum’s family in Wooler, was what was once called a PG, or paying guest. I don’t imagine PGs exist nowadays. She occupied two rooms, including a sitting room where she ‘took her meals’ on a trolley. She hones
tly spoke like that. We used to imitate her saying she had ‘a partiality’ for beetroot and because she was greedy and a messy eater the embroidered tray cloths on her trolley, which were a counterpart to her language, were always stained slightly pink. Her bedroom was originally a small room off her so-called sitting room. But at some point she must have given our parents money because after Syd left home her bedroom became Old Moanie’s and Old Moanie’s former bedroom was converted into her private bathroom.

  A dark shadow of insecurity about money hovered over my family. The house ‘ate money’, we were told, and it was tacitly understood that the roof or the blocked guttering or the rotting windows justified the presence of Mrs Mahoane. Whatever the reason, we children were solid in agreeing that she was a nasty old woman, one we resented being told to feel sorry for.

  Among our many reasons for disliking Old Moanie was her antipathy to animals. She claimed to ‘suffer’ from an allergy, which meant that our cat Ribby and her several kittens were constantly having to be removed from her room. Ribby, like many cats, had an instinctive grasp of where she was least wanted.

  Will in particular hated Mrs Mahoane because he once saw her throw Moppet, one of Ribby’s kittens, out of the window. Will yelled at her that she was a ‘vicious old cow’ and was ordered by Dad to apologize when she furiously complained. When Will refused he was forbidden TV until Dad either caved in or forgot about it.

  When Cele told Dr Keynes about Ribby’s kitten he said, ‘Ah yes. Ribby from Samuel Whiskers. That was nasty of her,’ in a tone of such sympathy that she told him how we used to say that Samuel Whiskers and Anna Maria lived behind the skirting boards in the Blue Room at Dowlands.

  ‘Dowlands is where Will lives?’ Dr Keynes asked, and she explained how it had once belonged to Granny and Grandpa’s family but that Granny had given it to Dad. It was only when Cele was recalling this that I wondered how that gift had come about. It’s interesting what you take for granted as a child.

  When we had finished our beers that February day, we left the hotel, Cele and I, and walked down to the seashore, where little buff-coloured birds were running to and fro along the wave line, probing the damp shingle with their beaks for prey.

  ‘Dunlin?’ I asked.

  Cele nodded. She knew far more than me about the local birds.

  ‘I think it was his knowing about Samuel Whiskers that made me tell him about the tree house,’ she said. ‘Do you remember, you came to see me in the Blue Room when Will was in hospital because you thought I might be scared of rats on my own. I was so grateful.’

  ‘You blamed yourself?’ Dr Keynes suggested. ‘For Will’s accident?’

  ‘I took the wrong saw.’

  ‘But it wasn’t you who cut Will’s arm.’

  ‘I don’t think he blamed me.’

  ‘But you blamed yourself.’

  ‘I was stupid.’

  ‘Cecilia, is there a voice in your head telling you that you are stupid?’

  That frightened her. ‘No.’ She didn’t want him to think she was mad.

  ‘You made a mistake,’ Dr Keynes said, ‘and the trick of life is to make the mistakes as fast as possible, not try to avoid making them.’

  ‘But he might have died.’

  ‘He might. But he didn’t. And it strikes me that Will also made a mistake. You can’t nab all the mistakes for yourself, Cecilia.’

  Holy Island is a misnomer. It is only an island twice a day when the tide comes in, flooding the causeway that connects the quasi-island to the mainland. Cele had to get back to work and I had to get back across the causeway before the tide turned. We walked up to the ruined priory and I kissed her goodbye and made as if to go. But she stopped me, her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Do you remember the otter at Staresnest?’

  I hadn’t in fact completely remembered. I had forgotten, until she reminded me, about Bell’s diamond brooch.

  ‘I told Dr Keynes about it. I told him how Will had held the otter when he had to have an injection.’

  ‘I wasn’t there for that,’ I said. I realized that this still rankled.

  ‘Weren’t you? I didn’t remember. But you were with us when he had to be put to sleep?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What I remembered thinking at the time was that I would never have had the nerve to do that, to hold a creature while it was being put to death, and when I said this to Dr Keynes he said – he was looking out of the window at the time which he did when he had something to say that he didn’t want to sound too heavy – “Maybe if it had been down to you alone you would have found the nerve.” And then he said, “I do wish Hector would refrain from shitting on my young delphiniums.” And I said something like “I don’t think I cared about the otter the way Will did.”’

  A cloud of redwings and starlings was passing over high above in the slate-grey sky and Cele shaded her eyes to watch them.

  ‘I’ll never forget what he said to me after that,’ my cousin said, still watching the birds. ‘He said, “Yes, you need either to care very much or not at all to kill a fellow living creature.”’

  8

  That summer, it seems Cele told Will about Dr Keynes. She was worried about doing so because she guessed he would disapprove but she was unused to keeping anything back from him.

  Will was more than usually scornful. ‘Freud is complete bullshit. You know that, don’t you? He’ll expect you to fall in love with him.’

  I wouldn’t have seen this then, any more than Cele would have done, but Will would have resented any threat to his position in Cele’s affections.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘He’ll expect it so I expect you will. Unless you have already?’ He looked at her with his unblinking stare.

  ‘I haven’t in the least,’ she protested. ‘Anyway, he’s not a shrink.’

  ‘What is he then? Do they think you’re barmy?’

  Even without the excitement of his driving her way in excess of the speed limit to her weekly appointment with Dr Keynes perhaps she would have fallen in love with Colin anyway – though when I say ‘in love’ I mean ‘in fatuation’ – because if anyone was, Colin was fatuous. But not to a lonely girl who had never had much attention paid her nor ever had a very high opinion of herself.

  One day that autumn term, after Colin had collected Cele from her appointment, the Morgan began to shudder and they finally came to a halt. Colin got out, inspected the tyres and opened the car’s bonnet, from which issued scalding steam.

  ‘Shit. I’ll have to ring the AA.’

  This was before mobile phones were common. A roadside pub was visible a hundred or so yards up the road.

  ‘Fucking bloody nuisance,’ Colin kept saying. Teachers were not supposed to say ‘fuck’ in front of pupils. I expect that had an allure for Cele. It would have done for me.

  It had begun to rain and she was wearing only a cardigan over her school dress. Before they reached the pub Colin took off his waxed jacket. ‘Here, don’t get wet.’

  ‘But what about …’

  ‘Don’t fuss. I can’t stand fussers.’

  Colin used the phone at the pub to ring the AA and the school to tell them what had happened. He came to find her in the pub lounge where he had parked her. ‘They’ll be here within two hours – sweet Jesus. So, Cecilia, here we are. How old are you?’

  ‘Fifteen.’ Her birthday had been that summer.

  ‘Right. Then we can risk a drink without me being sent down for corrupting a minor.’

  ‘I’ve often been in pubs,’ she said, blushing.

  This was true. Something I’ve not explained is that Will had begun to frequent pubs. And when Cele was with him of course she went too. Although he was small and slight, he somehow gave an impression of being older than his age. And although Cele was both taller and older than him he made her sit outside. Lemonade shandy had been Will’s choice of drink for her.

  Colin bought her a shandy a
nd himself a beer.

  ‘Entertain me, Cecilia. Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘There isn’t much to tell.’

  ‘There must be. What d’you talk about to old What’s-up? Dr K?’

  ‘Nothing much.’

  Colin laughed. ‘You mean I drive you there all that way week after week for you to sit in total bloody silence?’

  Stung, she said, ‘We talk about Virgil sometimes.’

  ‘Virgil? Not your usual schoolgirl reading.’

  Anxious now not to be dismissed as a show-off, she told him about Grandpa and learning Latin with Will, which made her blush still more. To her horror, Colin placed his hand under her chin and turned her face towards him, forcing it upwards so she was looking into his eyes.

  ‘So you’re in love with your cousin Will.’ He laughed again, and while I wasn’t present myself I hear it as a mean laugh. ‘No harm in that. It’s legal between cousins. Another shandy? Though why in God’s name you like that undrinkable stuff …’

  She accepted another drink, though the shame of having chosen something he so clearly despised fuelled her hot skin with more fire. Poor Cele. It’s truly terrible to have all your emotions displayed so readily for all to see. When Colin came back with two refilled glasses he said – I know this is right because she said she could never forget it – ‘Have you fucked your cousin yet? Here’s your kiddies’ pop.’