Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  The idea of doing anything so gross with Will felt sacrilegious. He laughed again. ‘Have you fucked anyone, Cecilia?’

  ‘No,’ she said, hating him.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ Colin said. ‘You’re a pretty girl. Very pretty, in fact.’

  Looks were never thought important in our family. But Cele was Bell’s child, and in her mother’s eyes she was counted as plain.

  9

  Will was unlucky in being a December child. Mum and Dad used to combine his birthday and Christmas, which meant he received more extravagant presents than might otherwise have been given but I suspect left him feeling short-changed. As a rule, Cele spent his birthday with us, staying on after Christmas while Bell swanned off to enjoy herself elsewhere, and there was a tradition that we all went to the Harbour Café at Seahouses for scampi and chips to celebrate. But that year for some reason, possibly one of Bell’s infrequent outbursts of conscience, Cele spent the whole of the holiday abroad with her mother and maybe this was why Will’s fifteenth birthday fell rather flat.

  GCSEs were due to come in the following year, but because he was so bright Will had been moved up a year at school and he sat what must have been the last set of O levels. I remember him in those days revising hard. He spent a lot of time in his room, playing his flute late at night, or jazz on the music centre Mum and Dad gave him that year.

  During those same Christmas holidays Will took me to a jazz gig up at Berwick. It was the first time I heard live jazz and I was beside myself with excitement and deeply flattered at being asked. I wonder now why he wanted me there and how he persuaded Mum and Dad to allow me to go. Maybe I was some sort of substitute for Cele. Maybe it was the fact that he knew our parents would not be in favour of my going and he needed to assert himself and just wore Mum and Dad down. Will could always do that when he set his heart on anything.

  Stu, the older brother of Will’s friend Jesse, drove us to Berwick in his van and on the way back, after the gig, Will recounted the massacre of the Highlanders at Culloden by the Duke of Cumberland’s men, which he must have been studying for his history O level. He told it so vividly that I have never forgotten that story. You could tell that Jesse and Stu were captivated too.

  Will sat nine O levels that June and it wasn’t till the summer holidays at St Levan that the cousins met again.

  Granny and Cele drove to meet Will at Truro and it was then that she became conscious of how much she had grown. There had been scarcely an inch between the cousins. Now she was a good two inches taller. Will hugged them both, and holding him she smelled the familiar smell of his skin. But she also smelled something less wholesome.

  That evening, after dinner, which would have been shepherd’s pie, Granny’s customary welcome dish whenever any of us visited, Will suggested a walk. It was a chilly evening and the weather had turned to drizzle.

  Cele made some expression of reluctance, because she would rather have stayed in and talked, but Will said, ‘Oh come on, don’t be pathetic. A walk will do you good.’

  He was parodying Mum, whose solution for all ills – ‘a breath of fresh air’ – we children mimicked. But Cele says she felt something beyond his usual teasing in his tone. And she half guessed where they were heading. Not to the Hind and Hounds, which lay close to our grandparents’ house, but to the Green Man on the outskirts of the village.

  Will strode in with the confidence he always displayed at any potential challenge and ordered a Jack Daniels. Cele, whose taste for shandy had been squashed by Colin, asked for a tomato juice. When Will came over with the drinks, she suggested that he ought to be careful because of Granny and Grandpa and he rounded on her.

  ‘Jesus, Cele, don’t you give me a hard time, I’m up to here with that.’

  The way he downed his drink bothered her. He got himself a second Jack Daniels and she ordered a packet of crisps and they sat in silence, which was quite unlike them, until she asked, ‘Who’s been giving you a hard time?’

  ‘Oh, Mum and Dad. Me and Jesse got a bit pissed at the Anchor and the publican shopped us. To hear my doting parents carry on you’d think I’m an incipient alcoholic.’

  Cele was fond of Jesse but he could be wild. ‘I hope you’re not.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Cele. I expected you at least to be on my side.’ The injustice of this made her eyes well and Will said, I expect nastily, ‘You know I can’t stand girls who cry.’

  ‘It’s just … I was looking forward to seeing you.’

  ‘Well I’m here, aren’t I, so let’s have fun. God knows I could do with some fun.’

  But they didn’t have much fun. Not even on her birthday. He bought her some rubbishy scented bath stuff from the village shop – she told me she would rather have had nothing than that – and was rude about her reading Terry Pratchett. Most nights he went off to the pub, sometimes with Cele on the pretext of an evening walk, more often alone, because even for Will she couldn’t summon up the face to deceive our grandparents. He took to letting himself out of the house when Granny and Grandpa had gone to bed. They retired early so it wasn’t difficult. And he would ask Cele to wait up to let him in.

  He was never obviously drunk, she said. But he was moody and his face had a look she’d not seen before.

  Cele had promised to ring Colin at some point in the holidays and, while Will’s presence had inhibited her, the trips to the pub left her feeling deserted. One day, when Granny had asked her to post a letter, she nipped into the village phone box and rang Colin’s number.

  He was offhand when they spoke but suggested a meeting in Penzance. She said it was easy to fob off Granny with a story of meeting a friend from school but Will asked questions.

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Oh, just a girl at St Neot’s.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Florence,’ said Cele, ad-libbing the name of someone she would never bother to go out of her way to see.

  ‘You’ve never mentioned her.’

  ‘I’ve not seen you for ages. She’s new.’

  ‘New friend or new at the school?’

  ‘Both. Look, it’s just for the afternoon. We’re going shopping. You hate shopping.’

  ‘I’ll come anyway,’ Will said.

  He did, following her from the bus to a shop where the mythical meeting with Florence was supposed to take place and where luckily he left her. ‘I’ll be at the pub. Come and find me when you’re done with your friend.’

  There was something aggressive in the way he said ‘your friend’. There was no way he could have known about Colin rationally but I don’t believe that it is only the females in our family who have second sight.

  Although we talked about it that day on Holy Island, there have been very few occasions when Cele has spoken about her affair with Colin, and always briefly. I have never wanted to question her further, so I don’t know when precisely she and Colin became lovers. I do know, because this she did confide, that undressing her in the flat in which he lived in a run-down house owned by the school – but clearly not too close by for his movements to come under scrutiny – he announced with monumental crassness that he’d been waiting for her to ‘come of age’. So it must have been some time after her sixteenth birthday, that summer of ’87. What she did tell me is that from this time on she began to skip her appointments with Dr Keynes. It was because of this that she and Colin were found out.

  The cancellations appeared in the monthly invoices which were sent to Robert, to whom Bell had appealed for funding Cele’s so-called education. Robert, noting the missed sessions, felt duty-bound to alert the school. Thank God for Robert, though it’s also the case that without his deep pockets Cele would never have been sent away. Anyhow, she came back from an afternoon with Colin to a request that she report to the Head’s room.

  Miss Finch didn’t actually accuse Cele of anything but she had clearly worked it out. She was, Cele said, fair, even with the pretty sure knowledge tha
t Cele had been carrying on with her own lover. But it was plainly unacceptable for a pupil to be conducting any kind of sexual liaison.

  At sixteen, the school-leaving age, she was able to leave St Neot’s without giving rise to any more comment than that it was unusual for a girl to be taken away mid-term. It was presumably considered best that Cele come to us at Dowlands. Our grandparents would have been too close to Colin and Dowlands was always basically home for Cele.

  Colin apparently told Miss Finch that Cele had a crush on him and that he had been in a quandary over how to handle it. She herself had admitted to nothing more than that she had skipped some appointments with Dr Keynes and had been ‘driven about’ in Colin’s car. Nonetheless she arrived at our home under a vague cloud. There must have been some anxiety about what had actually been going on but any discussions were kept firmly from me. My parents were not prudish exactly but they were not too comfortable about sex. What stays in my mind is that Will must have guessed about Colin since he behaved as if he was absolutely livid with Cele.

  If Will couldn’t attract someone’s full attention he could generally summon discord. He had always been prone to lash out, but in the past his tricky moods had swiftly evaporated and he was just as often sunny. He had no obvious reason for ill humour. He had done spectacularly in his O levels and talked excitedly about his liberation from the ‘dreary’ comprehensive, where I was soon bound. But, icily and pointedly, he ignored Cele.

  I could tell she was miserable. She was probably missing Colin too, though she told me that the person she missed most was Dr Keynes. He wrote to her once and she showed me the card on which he had written in neat black italic script Remember to make the mistakes as fast as possible.

  It was during this period of exile from Will’s attention that I really got to know my cousin. And I was grateful for someone to make my tea when, exhausted in that wrung-out way that besets you on the edge of adolescence, I arrived home after a mile and a half’s trudge from St Aidan’s, the local primary school. Mum had returned to supply nursing and for a period Cele became my surrogate mother. She baked scones, made bread, she even made my bed for me and tidied my room, which was a godsend as the state of my room was a regular bone of contention.

  Cele was naturally tidy but a further expression of her obsessive compulsive disorder was that she had become a demon cleaner. I find it astonishing that no one, not even Granny, commented on this or ever thought to ask why. Cele asked me once, during this period, if the various pencil scribblings on my bedroom walls were precious, and after I had dismissed them as childish nonsense I arrived back from school one afternoon to find that my walls had been washed clean. Even the skirting boards were pristine. For this short while, our house was treated to the cleaning regime of a Swiss clinic while Cele worked out her misery in an extensive programme of housework. Only the Blue Room, where once she had slept with Will, was exempt because it was pointedly denied her.

  She and I spent a good deal of time during those few weeks tramping the long beaches while Teasel and Trug, our terriers, ran for sticks which we hurled obligingly into the foaming waves. I went with her once to the chapel. She never made any mention of the saint but I’ve learned since that he was in her mind.

  10

  Cele’s stay with us at Dowlands ended abruptly when out of the blue it was decided by Bell that she should be sent abroad. This was, as Dad put it, a ‘very Bellish’ solution, though it was in fact Granny who came up with the suggestion of where Cele might stay. Marie Bazinet was the daughter of Marion, an old university friend of Granny’s, and Marie was looking for an au pair with whom her children could read and discuss English literature. Cele, having spent so much time at Granny and Grandpa’s, was always a reader, though to be fair to Bell she was a reader too and that was the one aspect of Cele’s education you could say her mother had taken a modicum of trouble over. So Cele was packed off to Paris as a kind of literary ambassador, where I imagine she was considered to be out of Colin’s reach.

  I didn’t visit her in Paris then, though I did later, but when she returned that summer she had acquired a new sheen. She arrived bearing gifts – a Babar clock for me, picked up in a Paris flea market, a leather-bound notebook for Will, a silk scarf for Mum – and wearing a blue workman’s jacket over a very short lace skirt. Mum looked askance at the skirt and Will initially sustained his cool manner to her but he allowed her to accompany him on evenings when he was out with his Seahouses gang. I suspect he was showing her off – though I doubt that Cele would have recognized this.

  Among the things that had changed with regard to Will and Cele were their sleeping arrangements.

  One consequence of Mrs Mahoane’s presence was that for years we had no spare bedroom. Dowlands was one of the smallish country houses built in the eighteenth century in these parts; apart from Mrs Mahoane’s occupancy, two of the back rooms were so damp they were only used for storage. Perhaps it was this, or perhaps it was merely the effect of the status quo, but Will and Cele had continued to share the Blue Room longer than might otherwise have been thought suitable, one of those behaviours that with hindsight appear strange but are taken for granted at the time. Cele was so much our sister that I doubt if any of us considered there might be any other kind of relationship between the cousins. Certainly it had never crossed my mind. But with Cele’s expulsion from St Neot’s the matter of where the cousins slept must have been discussed because thereafter Cele was assigned the room off the kitchen, known as the ironing room. The decks were cleared of the bundles of crumpled clothes that generally were deposited there and this change marked in my mind other changes between my brother and my cousin.

  One was Cele’s new command of French. She didn’t – her character hadn’t altered so much – make anything of this, which would have provoked the kind of put-downs at which our family excelled. But her reading gave it away.

  We were in our kitchen and Cele was sitting in her time-honoured place on the floor with her back to the Rayburn. She always felt the cold. The thermometer had dived that summer and we were experiencing one of Northumberland’s cold snaps. I was at the table trying to draw Ribby in her basket – I was going through a phase when I had decided to become a children’s writer and illustrator like Beatrix Potter – when Will came in with muddy boots and issued a rather imperious demand to put on the kettle for tea.

  Cele was reading Le Grand Meaulnes and whether because she was reading French or for some other reason this must have touched a nerve in Will and sparked what to my knowledge was their first outright row.

  Cele ignored him and carried on reading. I think she was genuinely absorbed and may not even have heard Will, but that in itself would be enough to make him cross.

  ‘Away with the fairies?’ This was an expression which we all loathed since it was used by Miss Hunt, the sadistic teacher at the primary school we’d attended, the one who had given me nightmares.

  Cele stopped reading and stared up at Will.

  Will could outstare any of us. ‘Aren’t you going to say something?’

  ‘I don’t have anything special to say,’ Cele said and put the book back up as if she intended to go on reading.

  Will leapt across the kitchen and grabbed it from her. Had Cele grabbed it back I suspect that the clash would have resolved in laughter. Instead she simply got up and walked out of the room.

  Will stood there holding the book and probably feeling stupid. He glanced at the page and then slammed the book face down on the table – we’d been brought up by Granny to be fussy about books and he would never normally have done that – and marched out after her.

  He didn’t come in for supper that evening. It was a rather dismal meal and Cele excused herself, saying she was tired, and went off to her bedroom. I guessed she was wishing herself back in Paris with the sympathetic-sounding Bazinets.

  I don’t know what made me wake in the night but I saw from the Babar clock that it was 2 a.m. It was the summer bef
ore I moved to my secondary school and maybe that prospect pulled me out of sleep. I was very concerned about the uniform.

  Our mother was of the view that we not only could but should ‘make do’ and I was to be kitted out in the various hand-me-down skirts that had belonged to Syd. Syd and I were quite different shapes and I was not convinced that the skirt, which my mother had claimed she had altered, would be either short enough or the waistband tight enough to fit my waist. The skirt was in the room where Cele now slept, waiting for the end of the holidays to be ironed ready for school. My plan was to smuggle the skirt out of the house and throw it away and then act innocent over its disappearance. I was by now practised at this and felt only slightly ashamed that my mother never worked out what had happened to the various unwanted hand-ons I discreetly disposed of.

  The moment I opened the door I knew there was no one there. You can always tell a sleeping body, however quiet. I was so sure that I switched on the light. The bed was as neatly made as it had surely been left that morning.

  Curiosity, a childish voyeurism, who knows what mixture of emotions known and unknown, or more likely half known, led me stealthily up the creaky stairs to the landing at the top of the house by the Blue Room. Privacy never having been an issue, no one had ever thought to block the gaps between the ill-fitting door and its frame. Through these cracks I could see a faint light and hear sounds. Will and Cele’s voices. At first I supposed they were arguing. But listening more closely alone on that dark stairwell I began to blush.

  There was a moth which had flown in at the window and was now unable to navigate its way out. As the voices rose to an odd pitch, the moth began to flap at the cracks in the door frame, drawn, in that inexplicably suicidal way moths have, towards the light. Something about this frantic futile fluttering scared me; it seemed to echo the strange fluttering of my heart and I turned and hurried back down the stairs as quietly as I could.