Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  I am hazy about how Will spent his time before going up to Cambridge. He stayed away from Dowlands and then, of course, I missed him. I had resented him. But he was always exciting. He had a way of setting the air alight and it was strangely uncomfortable suddenly becoming an only child. Most of the time he spent down in Cornwall with Granny and Grandpa, where he got involved with a music festival.

  Syd never got past Grade Two piano. I banged my way through various piano exams and somewhere around Grade Five my lack of talent was acknowledged and I was allowed to give the piano up. Will, however, could play any keyboard like a demon. He had taught himself the flute and while he was at the sixth-form college he had started to play the sax.

  Granny says, ‘Never say “if only”,’ generally following this remark with ‘If only I never said it myself’. But if only Will had stayed in Cornwall and gone on playing the sax, if only he had gone roaring round the world with Jesse, who was at heart a decent boy, if only, if only people would just let other people be …

  13

  The first time I travelled any distance alone by train I was thirteen. Will had sent me a postcard (a vintage black-and-white photo of Lenin) inviting me to visit him in Cambridge over the school half-term and I was so thrilled that I begged and begged to be allowed to go. I find this quite touching now. Aunt Bell had mentioned that she was going to London and after a lot of parental discussion it was agreed that I would travel down with her on the train from Durham and, provided she put me on the train at King’s Cross and Will met me in Cambridge, I could go.

  I was in awe of my aunt but the journey to London was entertaining as she kept me amused with various stories about Dad when he and she were little, stories which, on reflection, tended rather to glorify her at Dad’s expense. She also lent me her Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, which I devoured hungrily. She was wearing a fitted suit made of a soft lavender tweed. I had tended to consider tweed suits the province of sensible middle-aged women till I encountered Bell in that one. I suppose she was travelling to a tryst with one of the applicants.

  I was alarmed, though not very surprised, when at King’s Cross my aunt abandoned me with a cheery, ‘You’ll be OK now, dear. They’ll flag up the platform number on that board there.’ In fact I felt quite proud of myself for negotiating the crowded station and making my way to the correct platform.

  It was even less of a surprise when there was no Will to meet me at Cambridge. I asked at the station about buses and caught one that dropped me by the market. The clocks had not yet gone back, the evening was still light and I found my way unaided to King’s.

  I remember how impressed I was with Will’s rooms – ‘rooms’: not a single room but a bedroom and a study with an imperious stone fireplace, before which I saw one of Granny’s home-made rag rugs, on which a plate I recognized from Mum’s wedding dinner service, piled with cigarette butts and beer-bottle caps, reposed.

  I dutifully visited the Fitzwilliam, because my parents would expect a report, and Will took me punting because I begged him to. It was autumn, not the punting season, and this was his first experience of what is quite an art but he manoeuvred the boat skilfully before carting me off to the Granta where we sat outside and he bought me a cider. That seemed very glamorous too. And at the Granta he introduced me to a friend of his, Harvey.

  Harvey was chattily affable in a way that I instinctively mistrusted. He questioned me with a seeming interest which I recognized as fake. But that was all I saw of Harvey on that visit.

  I heard more of him when just before Christmas Cele reappeared.

  She had finished at the Bazinets. Theo, who to my untutored ear already played the cello like a professional, had been sent away by a regretful Marie to a school which specialized in music. Sabine was by now apparently eagerly reading all the English classics. So, with sadness on both sides, Cele’s official role with the Bazinets had come to an end.

  My school term hadn’t finished so when supper was over I went to my room to do my homework and it was not till near bedtime that Cele tapped at my door. She was the only one who did this – the rest of the family simply barged in.

  I asked about the Bazinets. It was too important to me for me to be able to disguise my concern.

  ‘We’ll stay in touch,’ she assured me. ‘You’ll see Theo again, I’m sure.’ Of course she had divined the state of my affections.

  She enquired after Pauline Crowsdale, who by now had dwindled to a minor irritant, and I asked, ‘How’s Will?’

  I knew that Cele had visited Will before she came up to Dowlands and I had imagined it as a lovers’ reunion. But in fact, she told me then, they had had a heated argument.

  It was one of the rare occasions when she spoke to me about Colin, which shows how agitated she must have been. Evidently, while she was still in Paris Colin had turned up out of the blue at the Bazinets’ apartment. He had winkled her address out of a girl at St Neot’s with whom Cele had vaguely corresponded. Probably the poor girl was the latest target for his ego. Really only to avoid a scene, Cele had gone out to dinner with him. I don’t know what went on between them and I don’t know how Will discovered this. He may have simply guessed, because he knew Cele so well and she was never able to conceal any guilty feelings.

  He needn’t have worried because Cele hadn’t at all wanted to see Colin. ‘He showed off his French in front of the Bazinets,’ she told me. ‘It was mortifying. I couldn’t wait for him to leave.’

  I think myself Colin was fundamentally a woman-hater. Philanderers mostly are. But Colin for Cele was only ever some kind of fill-in. For Will. Or maybe for her father. Or maybe it was her way of unconsciously getting a bit of her own back on her mother, beating her at her own game. I don’t know. What I do know is that he wasn’t really important. He came to seem important, which somehow counts.

  Anyway, after this row with Will, Cele had determined to put the whole Colin episode behind her and had rung Colin to ask him to return various letters she had sent him. I can see why she might have been worried about these. Colin was vicious and he wasn’t above blackmail. He replied, suggesting a meeting. She was so anxious to draw a line under that relationship that she went all the way to Truro to meet him and she said that her heart started to thud so violently on her way to this assignation that she wondered whether she was about to have a heart attack. But apparently Colin never showed up.

  She had come up to us at Dowlands after this, praying that Colin was out of her life and that would now be that.

  The Cambridge term, which is absurdly short, had already ended but she reported that Will had said to say that he was ‘busy with various activities’. I suppose he was still very angry with her. She was vague with my parents about what these activities were and they didn’t press her. There was always an unspoken hovering sense that with Will they were keen not to rock any boat.

  The other thing that had bothered Cele was Harvey. ‘He sort of hung about,’ she said. ‘It was difficult getting Will to myself.’

  ‘I didn’t like him. He’s creepy,’ I offered.

  She had a way of frowning when she was troubled. ‘He lives out but I got the impression he’s used to sleeping in Will’s rooms in college. I mean I was staying there.’

  ‘Yuck!’ I was flattered to be granted this hint of her relationship with Will. ‘D’you think Harvey’s gay?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But Will isn’t, is he?’ I was being sly because I was pretty sure from what I’d overheard that he wasn’t.

  She looked quite cross at this and said, ‘No, but so what if he was.’

  I apologized and she said, more gently, ‘It’s more that I don’t think Harvey’s a good friend …’

  And there we left it, as far as I remember, at least for the time being.

  When Will arrived, late on Christmas Eve, he was outwardly in sparkling form: amusing, expansive, flamboyant. With hindsight too flamboyant. His mood, as Granny said, could always reach
to heaven and back down to hell in an hour. Our family celebration was always on Christmas Eve because on Christmas Day itself, by long tradition, Dad did duty at his hospital. For years Dad acted as a hospital Father Christmas, which I’m sorry to say I found embarrassing, and on alternate years we visited either a children’s or an old people’s home. It was good of my parents, and characteristic of them, but I can’t say I enjoyed it.

  That was a Christmas that especially sticks in my memory as Syd joined us. She was so much my senior that I saw little of her as a child, and seeing her then it was more as if a young aunt had come to visit. She was larger than ever – ‘bonny’, as Bell spitefully put it – but she looked happy.

  What I noticed was that Mum’s mood lightened immediately on Syd’s arrival. Poor Mum. Will was constitutionally so unlike her and I’m afraid I wasn’t too congenial either. Syd was the child most akin to Mum and it must have been hard to have her favourite living so far away, especially in such an alien place as Jordan. She had gone there originally to work for a schoolfriend’s father’s firm, but she must have had her own reasons for straying so far from home.

  I felt quite jealous too, not because of Mum’s obvious preference for Syd but because Will seemed suddenly so pally with her. They laughed riotously together and recounted episodes from their childhood in which I’d had no part. They’d had some competitive game which he resurrected, to do with throwing stones across the ha-ha, which Syd took to with great gusto and loud belly laughs. But I see now that this was partly Will getting his own back on Cele.

  I don’t know if it was because Syd was to be there but Will had brought us all presents, which was itself a novelty. A basket, I think, for Mum, a bottle of Armagnac for Dad, there was a CD – or was it a video? – of Spike Milligan for Syd and I was given a dear little carved squirrel he’d found at a stall in the market. To Cele he gave a cardboard box beautifully wrapped in green tissue paper. She opened it after the rest of us had opened ours and I was the only one placed to observe her face. Her expression matched the contents of the box which, I could see, was quite empty.

  There was a gift tag attached to the tissue paper with something written on it. I slyly watched Cele read it but nothing showed in her face to enlighten me.

  On Christmas Day loyalty sent me out with our mother on what Will referred to as her ‘calves-foot-jelly rounds’. Syd came too, for which I was grateful as for the last few years Will would have none of these missions and Cele, the most merciful of us, whose sense of loyalty meant that she had formerly always accompanied us, stayed at home that year. I imagine she was hoping to explain matters to Will.

  The fire, which was always lit in the sitting room on Christmas Eve and maintained throughout the Christmas period, was out when Mum and I got back from the grisly old people’s home. Dad was still at the hospital playing Father Christmas in his silly beard and there was no sign of either Will or Cele.

  I was disappointed because I was looking forward to the game of charades that we traditionally played on Christmas Day and which acted as an antidote to the good works. Mum was preparing the lunch of cold turkey and salad and after I had helped to lay the table I slipped into Cele’s room. Mrs Mahoane’s room had become mine and Cele was now in my old room, where some of my outgrown toys were stowed.

  At thirteen I no longer played with toys, but for all Mum’s promptings I was still too attached to them to hand them on and I’d decided that, if discovered, my story was that I was in search of my old blue monkey, who had been my first Christmas gift and whom I often brought out at Christmas. I knew he was stashed in the storage box on top of the wardrobe and I climbed on a chair to fetch him down to act as my alibi while I investigated Cele’s things.

  She had not unpacked her suitcase and I riffled through some lace underwear and found a pack of contraceptive pills and Mitsouko by Guerlain in her sponge bag. There was a book on the bedside table – Le Rouge et le Noir – and marking the page was the gift tag with Will’s handwriting on it.

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves

  by each let this be heard,

  some do it with a bitter look,

  some with a flattering word,

  the coward does it with a kiss …

  Hearing the back door open, I quickly replaced the tag, grabbed Monkey and fled. But it was only Dad coming in. The four of us ate lunch with Dad and Syd gamely making poor jokes and Mum unable to suppress her annoyance at Will and Cele’s absence.

  After lunch I went to my room to read. I was reading my way through The Once and Future King which Grandpa had given me because it was written by his old schoolmaster. I’d just reached the story of Lancelot and Guinevere’s adulterous affair and I was feeling sorry for Arthur. It’s hard not to when you’ve followed him from his childhood as the lowly Wart. I read on, losing myself in the story, until I heard the back door again.

  It was twilight. A crowd of rooks were wheeling past, their ragged wings etched clear against a petrol sky. Looking down I saw that Dad had gone outside and was watching the birds too. He liked birds. It was one of the few ways in which he resembled Granny. As he stood, another figure, wearing a woolly hat that snuffed out the upper part of the face, came towards him down our drive.

  I thought from the shape that it was Cele but the voice filtering up to me as I opened the window was not hers. Running downstairs I suddenly knew who it was.

  Harvey was standing by the fire warming his bottom and our father, at the sideboard, was pouring a drink. Harvey looked at me as I came into the room with that unappealing affable smile as if we were old friends.

  ‘Hetty! Oh, ta,’ to my father who was handing him a glass.

  ‘Hetta,’ I corrected him, hoping I sounded cold.

  ‘Well,’ Harvey said, ‘down the hatch then. Cheers!’

  I don’t believe he was public-school. But he put on this obnoxious public-school manner, which was supposed to be amusing.

  I stood there feeling unamused and he must have picked this up as he smiled in that slimy way he had and said, ‘You all right, Het-Het-Hetta? How’s school?’

  Over a second drink, into which I observed Dad pouring a rather less generous measure of vodka, Harvey explained that Will had invited him to stay, that he had hitched his way from Cambridge, expecting to have to stay a night en route but had struck lucky with a lift from a couple on their way to visit a relative in Berwick.

  ‘An old dodderer and his beady wife. My bet is the only reason she was keen to see his aunt over Christmas was to make sure she dropped her doubloons their way when she dropped off her perch,’ was how he described his benefactors. These people had been generous enough to go out of their way to leave him at the bottom of our drive.

  It was plain when Cele and Will came home that Harvey’s presence was going to be contentious. Cele’s face, coloured by the cold wind and looking quite lovely, instantly shadowed at the sight of the interloper standing before the fire. I can see him, legs straddled in that awful cocksure position that certain men adopt. My mood plummeted at the thought of him staying. Our parents were inclined to be over-hospitable. Whatever they thought of Will’s guest, politeness would ensure his staying as long as he chose.

  But he didn’t choose to stay long. After a few days, with Cele looking glum and Will becoming increasingly loud-mouthed and objectionable, he and Harvey took off, ostensibly to walk Hadrian’s Wall. The bottle of port, Dad’s annual reward for playing Santa at the hospital, was found to be missing from his car. And while Dad believed he had left it at the hospital, I was sure that Harvey was the culprit. Though Will might help himself liberally from the already opened bottles or decanters, it would be out of character for him to steal. As I think I’ve said, he was rather innocently honest.

  I don’t remember what Cele did when they left. Mum and Syd had got into a huddle and Cele, who for so long had been a surrogate daughter for Mum, might reasonably have felt left out. My recollection is that she hung around for
a few days and then went off to London where Bell had commandeered a flat from someone she had met on a cruise. I remember the news of this cruise causing comment. Cruises weren’t at all Bell’s sort of thing.

  I spent the rest of the holiday finishing The Once and Future King. I can’t stand the Disney kind of Arthurian romance but I still enjoy that version.

  14

  For the rest of Will’s first year at university we hardly saw him. He came home for a few days at the start of the Easter vacation having grown a beard and wearing a terrible green woolly hat which, I suppose to annoy Mum and Dad, he declined to take off at mealtimes. He sank fairly quickly into a vague boredom and then gave some excuse to go off to be with Harvey.

  Cele came to us for the Easter weekend. There had been some talk of her training as a French-language secretary (I think that’s what they were called). I don’t know what that might have involved but it had come to nothing. Maybe after her time in Paris she wanted financial independence. Anyway, she had found a job as a receptionist in a GP’s surgery, a position which came through a contact of Kenny’s.

  Alastair had apparently resigned from the list of Bell’s applicants but Kenny lingered on. And there was Robert. But Robert had a wife. And soon after this we learned that a new applicant had arrived in Bell’s life.

  I know now that it was because of Robert’s wife that Bell went on the cruise in the first place and that she went with the intention of finding a replacement for Robert. A mistake. Robert was a match for her and if ever there was a woman who needed a match it was Bell. Graham, the fellow passenger whom she met in the Straits of Gibraltar at a vodka-and-caviar evening, had important pluses in his favour: he was divorced and he was a successful businessman. But he was very slow on the uptake and spoke in clichés. Bell should have had an inkling at least, when to everyone’s astonishment she announced her engagement to Graham, that a character so alien to her own would come to be irksome. But she had that trait that I’ve observed in attractive women: a belief that they can shape their own happiness in the way they can shape men’s fascination.