Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Why, what’s happened?’ My first alarmed thought was that Fred had been in an accident. But the only accident was to my hopes.

  ‘He’s not coming up for Christmas. Mrs Tye is most put out. Says he wrote to say he was off to Vienna.’

  Bloody hell, Magda! I thought.

  I was right about that. Fred had squired Magda back to Vienna to see her parents and to try to persuade them to leave. He wrote me a postcard, making no mention of Christmas or his absence from Dowlands, but enthusing about the architecture of the city and deploring the political situation. The card is not in the memorabilia box because I tore it into pieces and burned it on the Dowlands drawing-room fire.

  I spent a miserable Christmas pretending to be jolly and going for long walks by myself, moping over sights that I had shared all my life with Fred. What Fred had done, I told myself sternly, was utterly worthy, utterly right – and utterly dismaying, my more honest self said.

  Only Dad noticed that something was amiss. He cornered me one day when I had come back from a lonely trek to Holy Island. ‘All right, old girl? Anything up?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Really. I’m just being selfish.’

  ‘We’re all selfish,’ Dad said. Actually, he was the least selfish person alive. ‘It’s the people who claim to be selfless you want to watch out for.’

  That cheered me up a little. At least I knew that I wasn’t selfless.

  2

  In April 1939, with the political situation in Europe darkening, the government introduced conscription and all men of a certain age who were not students or physically unfit were required to undergo military training. When in September war was declared, any man between eighteen and forty became liable for call-up to full-time military service. Fred had by then taken his degree gaining, to no one’s surprise, a starred first, and on the strength of this he had been offered a fellowship at King’s. I had hardly seen him that year. He was spending all his time with Magda.

  On a couple of occasions I spotted them together, once at a play at the ADC, a production of Saint Joan, when luckily I had Marion to skulk behind. Another time I saw them strolling along King’s Parade, her hand hooked familiarly under his arm, and I whipped into the market and busied myself buying plums. That summer there was a glut of plums and when Marion came to stay with me over the long vacation we experimented with jam.

  It was Marion who told me they had married.

  If there are love matches made at first sight there are also friendships. Marion and I disagreed about almost everything: I can’t read Tristram Shandy, while it remains for her a Desert Island book. I love Trollope and she dismisses him as predictable. She can’t bear the taste of vinegar while I’m a glutton for pickles. She was reading Moral Sciences, which was the old-fashioned Cambridge term for philosophy, and she and I and Giles used to debate all kinds of philosophical positions long into the night with plenty of beer to add to the gaiety of nations. I remember us once discussing capital punishment, and my saying that I’d rather be hanged for a crime I hadn’t committed than for one I had. Giles said he understood this, but Marion suggested it was ‘another case of Betsy’s fundamental lunacy’. I loved her and we relished our differences.

  Marion and I were planning to share digs in our final year and we came back up to Cambridge towards the end of September to look for somewhere suitable. It was still early days in the war and I’m ashamed to admit this but it seemed almost exciting. We had come to look at a house in Round Church Street, which a research fellow at St John’s had taken on a lease and wanted to sublet while he trained with the RAF.

  After we had inspected the house, tiny and smelling of damp and, we agreed, just the ticket, we took ourselves off for a drink at our regular, the Eagle. Handing me down a tankard of bitter, Marion slopped it on the table, said, ‘Sorry,’ and then, as she mopped up the beer with her hanky, a little awkwardly, ‘I meant to say, I’m sorry about Fred.’

  A lightning insight painfully struck. ‘What about Fred?’

  Marion, embarrassed, said, ‘Him marrying her.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, as if that were old news and not a final blow to my lingering hopes, because even with Marion, over Fred, I needed to keep face. ‘No good crying over spilt beer. I thought maybe there was something else.’

  If Marion had wind of something else she didn’t let on. She was always kind. Fred never saw her worth because she wasn’t overtly political. It never occurred to him that kindness is an avowal of kinship and in a discreet way its own form of politics.

  Some time towards the end of that October, when all able-bodied men between the ages of twenty and twenty-three were being called up, Fred appeared at the Round Church Street house. I had determined that I would not refer to the marriage until he did but in the event he never mentioned it at all. What he had come to say was that he had decided he had a ‘moral duty’ to refuse to fight.

  ‘There are no just wars, only hideous ones,’ he pronounced solemnly.

  You must remember that Stalin and Hitler were still allies. Stalin had decreed that this was an imperialist war and it wasn’t uncommon to find even enlisted communists, already in active service, campaigning to stop the war. I supposed this was Fred peddling the Party line.

  I was angry about the marriage, angry about his not mentioning it, and I didn’t hold with the Party line. ‘What about John Cornford? He thought Spain was a just war.’

  I never quite worked out how Fred’s Communist principles married with his pacifism and perhaps he didn’t either, though he did in the end leave the Party. But I remember the deadly serious expression with which he met my protest. It had a disturbing resemblance to the expression I had seen on his face that bright July afternoon amid St Aidan’s Dunes when we were still children – a lifetime ago it seemed.

  ‘I have to fight in my own way, Bets,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I’m afraid.’

  The note of appeal in his voice touched me. There was an innocence about Fred and as a matter of fact I often found him touching.

  ‘I never thought that,’ I said, and then felt annoyed all over again as, not for the first time, I found myself backed into a position of reassuring him.

  The ‘something else’ came out when Blanche wrote to my mother referring to Magda as a ‘scheming little Jewess’. Ma kept the news from me. She said she wanted to wait till I’d heard it from Fred himself, which I know was also meant kindly.

  A week or so later Fred was back. I could tell that something was up because he was awkward with me.

  ‘It seems I am to be a father,’ he said finally, after a long diatribe against the military and capitalism, and produced an appeasing smile.

  That really irked me. But I didn’t comment, as in the past I might have done, with our old asperity. Instead, I congratulated him, in what I hoped was a magnanimous manner, and privately sent them both to hell.

  He looked so sheepish that I almost felt sorry for him. He gave an impression of carelessness but he understood people’s feelings better than he let on. But I was too badly knocked to feel very sorry for anyone but myself and went back to our house in Round Church Street and got drunk on some green Chartreuse left in the cupboard by our absent landlord. I was violently sick and had an almighty headache in the morning. I’ve had an antipathy to anything alcoholic and green ever since.

  3

  It was typical of Fred that he went to prison quite needlessly. The tribunals which assessed the validity of a CO’s case were headed by judges and it was common knowledge that the verdicts were shaped by the judge’s prejudices. With his Classics background, Fred could easily have been given a role code-breaking, or been allotted some other acceptable non-combat work. There were plenty of dons at King’s who would willingly have lent him their support. Had he been a Quaker or any kind of Christian his stand would have been accepted, however grudgingly. But he ditched any prospect of that by mounting his atheist soapbox and preaching the Communist P
arty line. Deprived by his conscience of other possibilities for glory, he chose to be a martyr. He was desperate to be sent to prison. I see that now.

  I left Fred to stew in his own juice for a month or so while he was serving his sentence in Colchester. My excuse was that I had my finals to sit and he had thrown in his lot with Magda and was no longer my concern. But in truth it was pique that made me neglect him. That and the conviction that he had conspired at his own incarceration. The treatment of COs was not openly brutal as it was in the First World War – but after Dunkirk, as the Nazi menace pressed closer, the popular mood was not indulgent towards those who put their private morality above the country’s safety.

  I didn’t feel indulgent myself. Fred’s blessed principles struck me as naive and childish, especially given that soon he would have a real child to support. I don’t suppose that I formulated the thought clearly then but subliminally I had begun to believe that principles are more often than not a cover for something less lofty.

  But in the end I weakened and Giles drove me to Colchester to see him. Giles by this time had acquired a decommissioned London taxi cab in which he sped about with a blithe disregard for pedestrians or other vehicles. He habitually drove with one hand on the wheel, gesturing with his cigarette as he cursed motorists and cyclists; yet outside a car he was the mildest of souls. He had wangled some deal over petrol. I never enquired what it was but when I offered to pay for the petrol to Colchester he waved my offer aside and said, ‘Least said, soonest mended. I have my resources.’

  I found Fred very buoyant. He explained how he was giving classes to the other prisoners and although he had been forbidden by the prison governor to discuss Marx or Marxism he was introducing those who attended his class to Tolstoy, which, he assured me would be almost as effective in expanding their world view. He talked animatedly about Tolstoy’s attitude to the peasants and about the judicial system and its anti-working-class bias and only when it was time for me to go asked, uninterestedly, how I had been. I left with the conviction that he had had no real need of my visit and hoping his fellow-prisoners would bear up under his enthusiasm for Tolstoy.

  He called at the Round Church Street house on his release from prison and when I enquired, rather grudgingly, how the Tolstoy classes had gone, he replied, ‘Swimmingly.’ I had noticed that he’d said nothing about Magda or when the baby was due when I had visited him in Colchester and he said nothing that afternoon. But he was on his way to London and I guessed it was Magda he was off to see.

  When I walked with him to the bus stop that same evening we ran into Rex Napley, a former student at King’s, and his girlfriend, Philippa, a student at Newnham.

  Fred was a fast walker and I had learned to keep up with him. As we tried to pass them on a narrow section of Trinity Street, Philippa drew her skirt aside and Rex muttered in a pretend under-his-breath voice, ‘Yellow.’

  Fred stopped and turned back. ‘Repeat that.’

  ‘Yellow conchy.’

  Fred would have stayed to argue but I dragged him past. As I did so, Philippa said, ‘Makes you ashamed to have been at the same university with them. I know what I would do. Cut their balls off.’

  To which Rex’s ‘witty’ response was, ‘No need, they haven’t got any in the first place’.

  My final year at Newnham was overshadowed by the war, which made any personal aspirations seem paltry. I dealt with my feelings for Fred by studying hard because I wanted to prove myself his equal. ‘Pride is not a bad thing,’ I see I copied into my diary, ‘when it only urges us to hide our own hurts – not to hurt others.’ But I played hard too. I enjoyed a rather glorious affair with Jock Turnbull, a clever Geordie reading History at Christ’s who had won a place at Cambridge from a school even less Oxbridge-oriented than mine.

  At this point, I felt I had to resort to my box of memorabilia to search for a card that I suddenly recalled Jock sending me. There was a devil-may-care mood abroad in those days. Fred took life too seriously to laugh at it but Jock, who didn’t suffer from the impediment of coming from a privileged background, had a sense of the absurd and knew the value of laughter. I couldn’t find the card at first and became quite frantic riffling through all the other cards and letters but when I finally located it it took me right back.

  There was a day we went punting and, taking my hand to help me from the boat on to the bank where we planned to picnic, Jock said casually, ‘You know, Betsy Tye, we could do worse than get hitched, you and me, when you’re done here.’

  The card he sent me before he flew to Belgium was a cartoon of some schoolboys saying, ‘Coo! Who wants conkers? We’re collecting shrapnel.’ It seems rather pathetic now and I don’t suppose I found it especially funny even then. But reading again what he wrote on the card made me want to cry. There was another, different, life I might have lived with Jock.

  On 15 May 1940, the day of my first finals paper (as I see from my diary), we got the grim news that the Dutch army had capitulated to the Germans. On 3 June (the day after my last exam) we heard that the Germans had bombed Paris. Marion and I sat in the cinema, smoking and watching depressing footage showing lines of refugees trudging the poplar-lined French roads, pushing a pathetic cargo of children and old people in perambulators. The brutal Nazi machine seemed to be sweeping across Europe, effortlessly toppling the allies’ cities, and the mood at home was growing starker.

  Some weeks after a low-key graduation ceremony – a pretty pointless-seeming affair given all that was happening in the world – I was cleaning the house in preparation for leaving. Marion had gone off to drive ambulances in London and my own plans were still unformed. Our front door had no bell but our landlord, Ralph, had fixed up a steel hammer and sickle to act as a knocker and when I heard this rattle I opened the door, expecting to find just about anyone in the world standing there but Magda.

  I had my head turbaned in a hideous old scarf and for half a second I experienced a silly feeling of embarrassment. But there was no need. Magda looked ghastly. Her eyes were shrunken in with tiredness and her scarlet lipstick looked all wrong on her unpowdered face.

  ‘Hello, Betsy.’ I loathed Bertha, my given name, but in those days only intimates were permitted to use the familiar one. ‘D’you mind if I come in?’

  I don’t believe I answered but she walked past me into the kitchen as though she owned the place, sank on to one of the only stable chairs, put her hands to her forehead and slowly shook her head. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

  ‘Tea?’ I offered, inwardly thinking, Overdoing the drama, aren’t you?

  ‘Have you got anything stronger?’

  I would have offered the green Chartreuse only thanks to her I’d polished it off. ‘Ralph has some fairly disgusting-looking stuff squirrelled away.’

  I dug out a sticky bottle of something poisonously yellow from the back of the kitchen cupboard and poured it into an eggcup. The washing-up was yet to be tackled and it was the only clean receptacle to hand. Magda swigged it down like medicine and made a face.

  ‘I said it was probably disgusting.’ I could see that she was no longer pregnant and decided not to ask about the baby.

  ‘Betsy, I need some help. It’s only temporary.’

  Some far-off part of me experienced a strange prickle of hope but I spoke cautiously. ‘What with?’ Though Fred never said so explicitly, I sensed that Magda was given to issuing imperious demands.

  ‘The baby. I need to leave it somewhere. It’s only for a while.’

  Noting the ‘it’ I asked, ‘Your baby was born, when?’

  ‘Three weeks ago, I think it was. I’m not quite myself.’ It was true, she didn’t seem the ‘self’ I’d been so jealous of.

  I must have said something like, ‘But shouldn’t she be with you?’ because I know I am right in what she said then.

  ‘It’s a him. I left it with one of the porters at King’s. He’s sleeping. He didn’t seem to mind.’

  ‘
The baby or the porter?’

  ‘The porter. Betsy, you couldn’t look after him for a couple of days?’

  ‘The porter or the baby?’

  Again she missed the irony and I wondered how on earth Fred got along with her and how she coped with his terrible jokes.

  ‘The baby. Would you? Only I don’t know anyone else to ask. He sleeps all the time and I can leave you his milk. I promise it won’t be for long.’

  And the oddest thing is that I didn’t ask what it was she had to do so urgently that it necessitated leaving her newborn child. I went with her to the King’s Porter’s Lodge, like a lamb to the slaughter, although it was Nat who was the lamb and slaughter was what it turned out I was saving him from.

  Magda came back to see him once before returning to London on her mysterious mission. She left with me his birth certificate in lieu of a ration book which she hung on to for herself. She never confided what it was that detained her and some stubborn element in me – or maybe a need not to know? – never wanted to enquire.

  When I rang the number she had left, which I put off doing as I grew less and less happy at the thought of parting with Nat, the young woman who answered said, ‘Oh, but Magdalena has gone away.’

  And when I asked, ‘Do you have her number?’ she said, ‘No number, no, but there’s an address somewhere in Harrow. Hang on, I’ll find it.’

  The bomb that fell on Harrow on 22 August 1940 was a promise of what was to come, a grim harbinger of the devastating Blitz that Hitler was about to unleash on London. It was some weeks before the news was official and I realized that Magda was not coming back. But by that time Nat had become mine.

  4

  All families have secrets. Ours was Nat. Nat was not my child but I brought him up as mine. For a long time no one, not even Nat himself, was aware of this. We didn’t consciously keep it from him or the other children. But for years Fred never discussed Magda. And it seemed not my place to tell Nat that he was not my child.