Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  Graham’s pre-eminent advantage was that he had what Granny called ‘means’. These included the vast flat in South Kensington where Cele stayed that Easter. Bell may have felt it was worth trading variety for steadiness and luxury but I’d like to think she also felt some compunction over her daughter.

  One of the consequences of Bell’s proposed marriage was that she decided this was the moment for Cele to meet her father. We were all very curious to hear about him. He turned out to be an elderly Russian, much older than Bell in years and appearance, with a straggly Rasputinish beard (quite unlike Will’s bushy one). Cele found her lost father living in a flat, jam-packed with furniture and hung with icons, in a red-brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road. She said that the carpets were filthy, covered with a patina of animal fur, and the scent of incense failed to disguise a pervading smell of cat pee.

  The only feature of Cele’s missing parent that Bell had revealed was that he came from a noble Russian family. If this was really the case, then from Cele’s account he had travelled some distance from his roots. Apparently he sat by a coal-effect electric fire with one bar burning, a long-haired Persian cat on his lap, chain-smoking and rocking all the time on a chair piled with cushions, which made her wonder if he had a bad back.

  He offered her some old biscuits which he must have been hoarding for years, the kind that were once called squashed flies, on a dirty plate with a faint gold emblem that might have been a relic of the noble past. Cele was too shy to refuse the biscuits so she ate two, to pretend she really liked them, while he asked very formally after her mother whom he referred to as Christabel. He enquired too about Cele’s music and when she disclosed that she neither played an instrument nor sang he lost any appearance of interest in her and began to stare at the clock on his table, which she was amused to observe was an hour slow. This was May and the clocks had gone forward two months earlier.

  Bell, who was avidly awaiting Cele’s report, was annoyed at her description and became vocal about her former lover’s looks. ‘Igor was exquisitely beautiful when I knew him.’ She was clearly offended at the idea that she’d had an affair with someone as unattractive as Cele made him sound.

  Bell’s wedding was very luxurious – in Granny’s words, ‘vulgar’ – though I must say I enjoyed it. The ceremony took place in the town hall but the reception was at a hotel, marmoreal in decor, with deep carpets, decorated with pink orchids and overlooking the park. Bell wore a cream Dior suit in which she looked stunning. To be fair, although she enjoyed looking good, I don’t believe she cared particularly about clothes; or jewels either, though her engagement ring was a massive diamond. Graham wanted to show her off. I suppose to him she was a prize.

  Syd flew from Jordan to be at the wedding and arrived with a man in tow, who caused general surprise by being extremely good-looking. He was also quite a few years younger than her, despite having already fathered a family. I liked Omar. I sat beside him at the wedding breakfast, at which he ate very little and chain-smoked throughout; afterwards, when there was dancing to a live band, he flung me about in a kind of exuberant polka. I decided that it was shrewd of Syd to settle in Jordan where large women are considered sexy and handsome young men are attracted to the maternal.

  The job that a rather moth-eaten Kenny, who also appeared at the wedding and was introduced to Graham as an ‘old friend’, had put in Cele’s way was with a GP practice in the Finchley Road. Bell’s new circumstances were proving useful: they provided Cele with accommodation, which in London, even in the nineties, was not cheap. And in turn Cele began to provide Bell with a bulwark against a rashly acquired husband. Although Cele had grown up with her mother’s casual indifference, she must have longed for a closeness that had been at best fleeting. And now, thanks to Graham, she and her mother became, for a spell, almost companions.

  They went together to concerts and, on Graham’s Coutts account, to the stalls at the Royal Opera House. They also made trips to Staresnest, where it was said that Graham never wished to go and where occasionally Kenny joined them. Bell no longer wanted Kenny to herself but he’d clung on like an old burr. As Kenny had grown shabbier Cele had grown fonder of him. She said once that she had wondered if her mother wished she had married Kenny rather than Graham. But as Will said, Bell had not married Kenny for so long that she couldn’t alter the habit.

  Not long after she returned to Jordan, Syd caused a family upset by writing to announce her own plans to marry. She’d come back that Christmas especially to tell our parents, but faced with Mum’s vocal rejoicing at the return of her eldest child, Syd had flunked the revelation that her stay abroad was to be permanent. She wrote, not too tactfully, to say that it was Bell’s wedding that had given her ‘the courage to break the news’ of her own imminent wedding. Omar, she explained, although married already, could under Jordanian law take another wife. But in practice, Syd assured us, he was planning to live only with her.

  Our parents took this hard, Mum especially. Syd, as I’ve said, was the child closest to her in character and inclination but also, although like most parents she cherished the notion that she was liberal-minded, the prospect of a polygamous Muslim marriage horrified her. There was a terrific argument over the phone which ended with Syd declaring that if they were going to take that line she wasn’t inviting them to the wedding, which led to further dramas. I had contracted glandular fever and had been off school pretty much since the wedding, and was in that restless, bored state that attends convalescence. So when Granny invited me down to stay at St Levan I was glad to accept to be away from all the family fuss. It was on that stay that Granny and I had a conversation about love.

  I was recounting how badly my parents were taking the news of Syd’s proposed marriage and relishing my disloyalty.

  ‘Well, you know, Hetta, there’s no knowing where love will take us,’ Granny said when I mentioned the polygamous marriage. ‘Love is stronger than morality, thank heavens.’

  We were in their garden, folding sheets from the washing line. It was really rather an ugly garden, a dog-leg shape, marked out with a rickety fence, but Granny had made it beautiful with the kind of flowers you see in the illustrations of old-fashioned children’s books: nasturtiums, marigolds, zinnias and heliotrope, which she called Cherry Pie.

  I can see her so clearly that day – with the spires of hollyhocks behind her, Ribena-coloured and that papery sherbet yellow. She grew them from seed in shallow wooden trays in her shed.

  ‘“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing,”’ she said, flapping the sheet down against her flat-as-a-board stomach and piling it into the basket, which had done past service for many cars, trains and piratical ships.

  I guessed she was talking about herself and Grandpa, though at that time I knew very little about their history. I knew very little about Pascal either but I liked those words.

  15

  I stayed at St Levan long enough to recover. Grandpa and I watched football on their black-and-white TV set – they were the only people I knew who still only had black-and-white TV – and I watched the racing with Granny. Her mother was Irish and grew up with racing stock and she and Granny used to bet on the horses. Granny could still enjoy what she called ‘an occasional flutter’. And I lounged about in their garden, eating unripe apples from their tree and chocolate fingers and reading Sense and Sensibility. I decided that even if I was supposed to prefer Elinor, I much preferred Marianne. And to break the journey home I stopped off at Bell’s flat in South Kensington.

  Cele had suggested that I go to meet her after work so I went by tube to Swiss Cottage and walked down the Finchley Road.

  When I finally found the practice, Cele was busy with an anxious-seeming old man who was fretting about his wife’s prescription. I was impressed at how she dealt with him. The old man’s flies were half undone and a bit of his shirt was poking through the zip. His raincoat was stained and the collar askew and covered in dandruff. But Cele had
her hand on his arm and was speaking to him in what we as children used to call a ‘proper voice’, that is, not one adopted for children or idiots.

  I sat down in the waiting room and read a feature on acne in an out-of-date magazine, which advised me to be sure to keep my face and hands clean and not to eat chocolate, until an elderly man with badgerish hair and a yellowing moustache came through a door. He smiled at me in a grandfatherly sort of way.

  ‘I’m afraid the clinic is finished today but if you’d like to make an appointment …’

  ‘Oh, no …’ I began to explain.

  ‘This is Hetta,’ Cele said, still occupied with the patient. ‘She’s with me. Dr Jacobs, Mr Ryan needs a new prescription for his wife. She’s still in a lot of pain.’

  While Dr Jacobs was attending to Mrs Ryan’s pain another man, clearly also a doctor, came into the waiting room. A younger sandy-haired man with the kind of blond eyelashes that make you think of pigs.

  ‘You must be Cecilia’s cousin.’

  Mr Ryan’s worries having been temporarily allayed, Cele introduced me. ‘Hetta, this is my other boss, Dr McCowan. This is my cousin Hetta.’

  ‘Your cousin’s a godsend, Hetta,’ the younger doctor said. He smiled at her and his eyes crinkled in the way they do when a smile is real so that my prejudices about his lashes fell away.

  Later I remembered this but what at the time seemed the most memorable part of my stay in London was that Bell bought me my first decent bra.

  ‘What do you fancy doing, dear?’ she asked me the following morning.

  I was expecting to amuse myself and said so.

  ‘No, let’s go shopping,’ Bell said. ‘We’ll go to Harvey Nicks.’

  So that’s where we went, where, thanks to Graham, my aunt now possessed an account card, and she bought me a new bra. The bra I chose, from a delectable selection, was primrose yellow with cream lace around the cups into which slices of spongy uplift had been inserted. It was kind of her and I can see now that she felt I was in need of some more feminine influence but naughty Bell must also have taken pleasure in knowing that my mother would not have approved: it was so unlike the white cotton serviceable bras I already owned. I have a memory of matching knickers, also bedizened with lace, but Mum must have thrown them out because I never remember wearing them. The underwear my mother bought for me was strictly M & S.

  The bra filled me with such pride that I was reluctant to take it off so I was wearing it when Bell took me to a nearby café, where she bought me a Danish pastry and told me about my uncle. And if the bra is incidental to the story I’m trying to tell, my uncle is not.

  No one in the family ever spoke about our father and Bell’s brother, the eldest of that generation of Tyes. But thanks to Bell, the yellow bra, the Danish pastry and my dead Uncle Nat have become irrevocably linked in my mind.

  I doubt if there was anything about me that caused Bell to open this family safe and say, ‘Jack would have been fifty-one today. My God, it’s extraordinary to imagine him being over fifty.’

  I had my mouth full, which was just as well as I didn’t immediately know who she was talking about. No one had ever mentioned that Jack was my uncle’s family name. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to react anyway.

  ‘We called Nat “Jack”,’ Bell said, observing my puzzlement, ‘because he had a craze for toads.’ I didn’t understand this either but I wasn’t going to interrupt a fascinating confidence to further my knowledge of natural history. ‘Do you know how he died?’ She looked at me with her slant cat eyes. Bell’s eyes are extraordinarily blue, bluer even than Grandpa’s: the colour as I imagine it of a lovely alien’s eyes.

  Still chewing stupidly, I shook my head.

  ‘I could do with a cigarette,’ Bell said.

  She got up and walked over to a table where a man was smoking. I saw her bend towards him and the man hand her a cigarette and light it for her.

  ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said, returning to our table. ‘It just got to me suddenly. You know how these things can.’

  I nodded my head again, though I didn’t know any such thing.

  ‘You don’t know how he was killed, do you?’ she said. ‘No, you wouldn’t.’ And she laughed a sharp, unhumorous laugh. ‘He was climbing King’s College Chapel. Silly boy.’

  ‘Will’s college?’

  ‘And your grandfather’s.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, though I didn’t. I had always believed that my uncle had died in a mountaineering accident.

  ‘There was a lunatic organisation, club, society, I don’t know what you’d call it, that was started in the thirties. They called themselves “The Night Climbers” – ridiculous name – and it involved climbing the highest and most dangerous college buildings at night, barefoot sometimes and without proper safety gear. It was revived again after the war by an undergraduate whose father had been one of the original group and Jack got involved.’

  ‘Why did he?’

  My aunt expelled a stream of smoke. ‘He was an experienced rock climber. He’d been climbing since he was a kid. But this was different.’ Bell flipped her hands apart expressively. They were beautiful hands and she had a way of using them like an Italian. I suppose that was intentional.

  ‘Did he fall?’

  ‘They said he died instantly.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, feeling that this was a suitably grown-up response.

  ‘Jesus would have come in handy,’ Bell said. ‘If we could have got him to bring Jack back from the dead your grandfather would probably have turned into Saint Paul and become his most devoted disciple.’

  She looked at me again with her slant eyes and if you can locate any precise flicker of time when you can be said to have become adult, for me it was in that moment.

  We sat oddly together, my aunt, whom I hardly knew, and I, a girl on the edge of adulthood, in the suddenly cruel-seeming Knightsbridge sun, while well-dressed, well-made-up women with high heels and large cardboard carrier bags with the names of expensive shops on them passed by unperturbed by the recounting of this small domestic tragedy.

  Bell cadged another cigarette from our neighbour and drank her coffee and I tried to make sense of what I’d heard. I could feel the unfamiliar sensation of my new bra cutting into the rolls of residual puppy fat round my ribs.

  ‘What did he look like?’ I asked my aunt.

  ‘Very like your grandfather at that age. Tall. There are photos. You should ask Granny. They’re not on show because Daddy can’t bear to see them but she has them stashed away. Ask her. She’ll show you, I’m sure. You know you’re her pet,’ my aunt said.

  And then she said a funny thing, which when I considered it later that evening in bed, going over our conversation in my mind, faintly troubled me. ‘Not that I mind.’

  16

  Almost a year after this conversation with my aunt, I was lying on my stomach in the garden, on one of the moth-eaten rugs kept for garden use, writing a letter to Omar. My correspondence with Theo had faded and I was in need of a substitute. Omar and I had discovered at Bell’s wedding a mutual love of football and I took a sneaky adolescent pleasure in sharing with my sister’s husband an enthusiasm which I knew left her cold.

  Mum was erecting the cane wigwam for the runner beans in the corner of the garden where we grew vegetables, and when Dad shouted for her from the window she didn’t at once respond.

  I saw Dad come out of the back door and from the way he was walking I could tell something was up. He sticks his head forward in an odd way when he’s disturbed, like a goose. I could hear my parents’ voices across the lawn. They went back into the house so I made my way to the kitchen window and crouched by the parsley. I don’t know how they never came to suspect that they could be heard from this position.

  ‘It’s so near his exams,’ our mother was saying.

  ‘I’ll try to get hold of his tutor,’ Dad said. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Just ask for
the Senior Tutor.’

  ‘No, Will told us his name, you must remember.’

  So Will was in some kind of trouble again.

  My parents had given up trying to keep all their concerns from me, as they rigidly did when Syd and Will were about, so when I went inside it wasn’t too hard for me to ask, ‘What’s up?’

  They were standing with their backs to the Rayburn which, summer or winter, was kept on. The Rayburn acted as some sort of material pledge of the family’s warmth.

  Dad said, ‘It’s your brother.’

  Simultaneously Mum said, ‘It’s Will.’

  ‘What’s he done now?’ I asked. I was tired of Will corralling my parents’ attention.

  ‘He’s been rusticated,’ Mum said.

  ‘She means kicked out,’ Dad explained, in case I’d not got the point.

  ‘Not for good, we hope,’ Mum said. She sounded almost pleading.

  ‘What’s he done this time?’

  It seemed that Will had been apprehended painting on the wall of the college chapel. And there had been other previous misdemeanours. On one occasion he had apparently vomited into a washbasin (not his own) and left the tap running, causing a flood which damaged the ceiling of the room below.

  ‘It’s your bloody father,’ Mum said. ‘I’m sorry, Bert, but it is. His bloody “intellectual” ideals. I’m sick to death of them, if you want to know.’

  When Will was brought home by Dad, who had driven down to Cambridge to collect him, it emerged that Mum’s instinct was at least half right. A fervent belief in God’s non-existence may be as much an emotional prop as its opposite, if opposites are what they are and not aspects of the same need. And if it is a need it is one that Will and Grandpa seemed to share.

  But vandalism was never Grandpa’s way, and everyone was puzzled by the childishness of Will’s act. He had contrived to spray-paint in scarlet ‘Blessed are the atheists’ before being caught by the college porters. He told me later that evening, when I tiptoed up to his room to take him the rhubarb crumble he’d refused at supper, that he’d intended to continue with ‘for they see Reason’. He was unusually nice to me about the crumble.