Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  ‘God,’ I said. ‘How could we have let this happen?’

  I could tell Eddie wanted to stop because it was only with a supreme effort that I was holding back tears but I made him go on.

  ‘What happened then, Eddie? You must tell me.’

  Eddie gave a kind of shudder. It has crossed my mind since that perhaps they loved each other in more than just the way of friendship. We never saw a girlfriend. How extraordinary that I hadn’t wondered why.

  ‘We found the name of the woman running the exhibition and tracked her down. Jack had to convince her that he was the kid in the photo but he had his passport and it was all there, name, date, everything. So then, after checking up or whatever, she gave him the name and address of the woman who’d loaned the photo. Jack got in touch with her and he went to see her some time.’

  ‘He told you? What? What did she say, Eddie?’

  He half hesitated. I could see how hard this was for him. ‘I don’t think there was much more she told him than what was written on the card.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said again. ‘Poor Nat. How could we?’

  ‘You didn’t know,’ Eddie said. ‘You didn’t know.’

  9

  But I had known. Blanche and Grandmother, with their genteel, antiquated anti-Semitism, had been concerned to cover it all up. Grandad, in his dotage, had never really taken it in and Ma was always one for live and let live. But my father, I am sure, believed that we were wrong to keep Nat in the dark. Though he would have been forgiving of my reasons, I was conscious that he disapproved. Dad was a moral touchstone, one I had failed to regard.

  I’ve jumped ahead because all this – all that I learned from Eddie – only came out afterwards.

  At Fred’s suggestion I was putting on a production of The Trojan Women, which is a good choice of play for a girls’ school because the principal parts are female. The night that Nat died was the play’s first night. The Greek gods were said to laugh at mortal affairs, so they must have been vastly entertained that night, because about the time little Alexandra Pelham, as the young Astyanax, was being dramatically thrown from the battlements of Troy by various of my pupils dressed as Greeks in cardboard greaves, Nat was preparing to scale the north-east pinnacle of King’s Chapel.

  The son of Rex Napley – the student who had taunted Fred about being a CO – had gone up to Cambridge the year after Nat. Evidently Rex had married the dreadful Philippa and they had produced an equally dreadful child. This ghastly son had revived an old Cambridge tradition of climbing the more perilous Cambridge buildings by night. It was the kind of gung-ho undergraduate cult that Fred and I would have utterly despised when we were students. The Night Climbers of Cambridge, they called themselves. This Napley brat evidently dared Nat to join them. His father had apparently recognized the name Tye and had regaled his son with a tale of Fred’s ‘cowardice’. Or maybe the son simply took the information that Nat’s father was a ‘conchy’ and ran with it. I don’t know for sure.

  The loathsome Napley boy wrote us a lickspittle letter after Nat’s fatal fall, in which he expressed his ‘most sincere regrets’. I didn’t believe for one second that he was regretful at all, except out of the desire to save his own skin. We learned more from another student, a frantically distressed young man called Bob Craft, who was too stricken for me to hate him and who had also been involved in the climb. He, poor lad, had reached the roof of the chapel and had witnessed the fall. Nat, already angry with us, must have been goaded into a demonstration of his difference from his father.

  His father had chosen to turn his back on the fight against the system whose clear and stated ambition was to rid the face of the earth of Jews – a system which had killed his mother, the mother whom he had, in a sense, only just found. The discovery of this shamefully long-concealed truth must have caused an incomparable inner havoc.

  To reach the very top of one of the pinnacles of King’s Chapel was the supreme aim of this foolhardy, utterly idiotic gang. Nat should never have been encouraged to attempt the climb with no experience of climbing at night. I know how it would have been. He would have boasted of his experience as a rock climber – he was rightly proud of his skills – but for this kind of climbing venture a knowledge of the location of footholds on the buildings is crucial. Knowledge which Nat had either had no time to or had chosen not to acquire. He made the climb with no head protection and, according to Bob Craft, at the crucial point was unroped. My darling boy, thrown into questioning the basis of his whole life – his history, his very existence – must have been in turmoil, and could hardly have helped losing an inner balance, which must in turn have thrown his usually expert judgement, for it seems that on the very last stage of the climb, over a hundred feet above the ground, he fatally lost his outer balance and grabbed on to a projecting stone that time and the weather had softened, which broke off in his hand.

  Those roof climbers had a mantra: ‘If you fall you still have three seconds to live.’ I have tried to imagine and I have tried not to imagine those three seconds. In neither effort have I been successful.

  Part Three

  * * *

  BELL

  1

  Hetta dear,

  I don’t at all mind putting down all I can remember, provided that’s OK by Mum and Cele. There’s quite a lot I don’t know about and some you may well want to edit out. I’m not fussed for myself but I don’t want to give grief or let any feral cats out of the bag. Anyway, you’ll know what to do with this.

  Love Bell

  The word among the family was that I was being unusually decent when I suggested Will come to us when he got kicked out of King’s. I wasn’t best known for my decency. I was the black sheep, the bad girl, the one without ‘principles’. When my mother swore blind she had no time for principles she wasn’t being quite honest. What she had no time for was my father’s political beliefs but she had principles of her own. Not that I hold that against her.

  Mum’s trouble was guilt. She felt guilty about our brother Nat, who, as you know, I always called Jack, because she believed that his death was connected to her not telling him who his mother really was. His mother was a girlfriend of Daddy’s and she was killed in the war and Mum took Jack in.

  In my opinion it was saintly of her. If Jack’s mother hadn’t dumped him on Mum and swanned off to London – nobody knows why she did but it’s my bet she was having an affair, which is usually the reason why people suddenly drop everything – what I’m getting at is that if Jack’s mother had stayed put in Cambridge with her baby, where she should have been, she’d be alive today. And if she’d taken him off with her to London, Nat would have died aged seven weeks. Either way Mum was a heroine.

  But she doesn’t like to think of herself like that.

  I was eight when Jack was killed. I remember it as a truly terrible time because it was the first time I ever saw Daddy cry. Daddy never cried. He was always the cheery optimistic one and made us feel everything would always be OK. He had been the sun for me since I could remember, so seeing him cry was shattering.

  There was a Ray Charles song in the hit parade at the time, Hit the Road Jack. Jack had an old 45 record of this. I don’t know what happened to it, but I used to listen at night – on a radio I kept under my pillow that I found in Jack’s room – to Radio Luxembourg, hoping to hear the song again and hoping against hope that my big brother would come back. I always think of him if I ever hear Ray Charles.

  For a long time our father was utterly different after Jack was killed. Daddy blamed himself because some little shit apparently got at Jack by saying that Daddy was a coward because he’d been a conchy in the war – and Daddy had a theory Jack only made that climb to prove that he wasn’t a coward himself, to make himself out as different. Different from Daddy, that is. But I don’t buy that.

  There are two reasons why I don’t: I was only eight but eight-year-olds take in impressions as well as any adult, often better – I know I
did – and Jack never struck me as someone who would rise to a taunt. That’s not how I remember him. Granted, he might well have been angry that Daddy and Mum had concealed the fact of his birth – that’s fair enough, they should have told him. I don’t really get why they didn’t because I would have thought it was bound to come out some time. What I do remember is an atmosphere one Christmas with Mum fretting that we’d hardly seen him and doing her own discreet version of wringing her hands. But I still don’t buy this conchy business being the trigger. If you want my view, they were punishing themselves.

  The other reason I don’t buy it is what a friend of Jack’s told me. But I’ll come to that.

  I must have decided very young that I was going to be different. You hear people go on about the ‘innocence’ of children but I would say it all depends. I believe I was born uninnocent, or anyway I lost such innocence as I ever had before I could remember any consciously. I was famous for my tantrums and I remember, quite distinctly, enjoying them hugely and the fuss they provoked. I would lie on the floor and scream and thrash about and it was just great. Quite transporting. Beetle was terrified of my tantrums and I used them to get whatever it was I wanted from him at the time. Poor old Beetle. It’s horrible what has happened to him. Worse for Will, though.

  I always got on with Will. Robert used to say the celestial cards had got muddled and Beetle and I had been dealt the wrong children: Beetle should have had Cele and I should have had Will. Hetta should have gone to Mum rather than Susan, though I’ll get into trouble for saying that. Mum’s very careful to be even-handed but she has a special tone she uses for Hetta and she takes Hetta along with her on various slightly mysterious trips. Mum can be secretive. She thinks she’s an open book but she’s not – not really.

  As for Sydella – ridiculous name – I never really got Sydella …

  But Will. Let me put it like this, if we’d been of an age I might well have gone after him. ‘Set my cap at him’, as Daddy would say. Dear Daddy. He fancied himself as a man of the people but you can’t bleed the blue blood out of your veins. I don’t mean he wasn’t democratic.

  I remember Will coming to Staresnest once, when Robert was staying. Robert had a soft spot for Will and I was up for having anyone to stay who Robert warmed to. We were having one of our rocky patches when his wife was being more demanding than usual. She was never too well and, apart from the obviously annoying fact that she was Robert’s wife, I suppose because I’ve always been strong as an ox I found all this ill-health business simply feeble. Robert was also hugely fond of Cele, by the way. He felt, quite reasonably, that I neglected her and he tried to make up for that. Anyway, there was a to-do when Will was with us, about an otter which the children had rescued from the otter hunt. I have a vague idea that Hetta was with us too but I may have misremembered that. What I do remember is that Will and Cele got into a lather about the creature, which Robert and I could see was done for. They were both mad about animals and Will, who we used to joke had a ‘will of steel’, insisted that Robert drive them to a vet. Robert was tickled by the ‘will of steel’ and he cheerfully complied.

  The creature had to be put to sleep and the children were desperately upset. Will pinched a diamond brooch of mine to engrave the date of the otter’s death on a stone they had made to mark its grave. That was very like them – burying it with all the proper forms, I mean. Anyway, this was a most unusual diamond and emerald Art Nouveau brooch, set in the form of a willow tree, which Robert had given me when we first became lovers and I was extremely fond of. I remember Will, when I objected, yelling at me, ‘You’re so bloody selfish. You only think about yourself.’ He was quite right. I do mostly only think about myself. I remember Robert laughing at what Will had said. Robert knew exactly what I’m like and he didn’t mind.

  So, given my reputation for selfishness, they will all have been puzzled when I suggested Will come and stay at our flat when he was ‘rusticated’, as Susan insisted we call it. Ridiculous word.

  The brutal truth is I was bored to death with my husband. I had only myself to blame for that. I was bored by him from the start but I’d become afraid of being alone for the rest of my life. I’m not saying Graham is a bad man. He is in fact a fairly decent man and at the time seemed devoted to me, which helped. But it can’t be denied that he’s frantically dull.

  I’d grown tired of my old faithfuls, Kenny and Alastair. As for Robert, the family theory is that Robert would never leave his wife but that wasn’t how it was at all. What I’ve never said is that he did, as it happens, offer to leave her. We’d had one of our rare rows and when we were making up I became maudlin. Timor mortis conturbat me, as Mum would say, or, in other words, I had got to a point where I didn’t fancy becoming an aging former beauty with no one to soften the edges and I said so. And he said, ‘Look, Bella, if you really need me to I’ll leave Peggy. I can make over enough funds to keep her comfortable for life and, with your agreement, stay her friend to keep an eye on her.’

  For about two days I skipped about like a woolly lambkin on cloud nine supposing I would accept. But the part of me I trust said, Hey, my girl, you know damn well he’s going to feel guilty as hell. I couldn’t somehow face living with a guilty man. I’d resent it; I know myself. So I took my courage in both hands, or whatever the expression is, and said, ‘Sweetheart, that’s the nicest suggestion you’ve ever made and you’ve been nicer than I deserve but it would cut you up so horribly I think I’d better not let you. For both our sakes.’

  And I could tell at once that he was relieved so I was right to turn his offer down. Peggy had never for a second looked at anyone other than Robert. He was loyal to her for this reason alone. I liked him for it, as a matter of fact.

  So that was that. But it was the case that I’d begun to lose my nerve. And I confess that Graham’s pots of money were a lure. Or the comfort they offered, anyway. I’d managed OK with Robert’s help but a life with no more money worries was tempting. The consolations of security, I suppose. And then, Graham’s flat was fabulous. He offered to sell it so we could buy somewhere I’d chosen myself but I have no silly proprietorial problems of that sort. It’s not the kind of thing to worry me and in fact I couldn’t wait to get my hands on his flat, to make it over. I’d always fancied myself as a designer manqué.

  And I had a ball. I chucked out all the ugly furniture his ex had cluttered up the place with, had her Regency-style wallpaper stripped off and ditched the hideous curtains to let the light in. That makes me think of a line in a Leonard Cohen song Robert and I liked – It’s through the cracks that the light gets in – sort of sums things up.

  Because it was nice for Cele too to have a decent home. My years of tedious house-mothering were pretty dismal for her and the poky flat we had then was not exactly homely. There was Staresnest, but that had been my bolt-hole and frankly poor Cele had been shuttlecocked between Daddy and Mum and Dowlands. I knew what they thought of me at Dowlands. And they were right: I’d been a fairly hopeless mother and I was pleased that she could now share some of my fortune. She was an ugly little creature as a child but she’s grown to be a beauty. She looks like the photo of her father’s sister as a matter of fact.

  Should I say something about her father? Perhaps I should.

  Igor, oh dear, Igor. Igor was older, foreign, therefore exotic, musically brilliant and rather mysterious. The last two were what most caught my fancy. He was a fantastically fierce teacher, especially with those he rated, and I liked that he was hard on me, partly because Daddy had always let me get away with murder, and the young are perversely drawn to whatever makes for the opposite side of the coin of their upbringing, and partly because I understood that the harshness was a compliment. He was so lofty and seemed so indifferent to everything that I had always been sure of that I had to seduce him. I know how that sounds.

  For about two and a half seconds we behaved as if we were madly in love and, whatever else, at least Cele was conceived in passion.
I always think that must be a good start for a child.

  Though it must be said that the passion fizzled out fairly fast. Igor was bisexual. I knew this, and it was an added spur rather than the reverse, another scalp for me, silly creature, to sport. But he was so narcissistic that he couldn’t help being competitive with anyone of either sex who matched him in looks. I imagined he was my conquest and he imagined that I was his. When I told him I was pregnant, about which I was absurdly proud (I had never somehow envisaged myself as able to conceive), he looked so appalled that I actually laughed. People tend not to believe this when I tell them, but it’s God’s truth that I found it hilarious that he’d never considered that the act of sex might produce a living consequence. Come to think of it, I suppose we were alike in this.

  I’ve no idea if this was guilt or what but about six months later, just before Cele was born, he produced four hundred quid in cash, which amounted to quite a tidy sum in those days. We’d always been hard up in my family, thanks to Daddy’s blessed principles, and I’d never handled such a roll of notes before. It was rather sexy, if you want to know. And that’s not just the money because although Graham’s money was useful it wasn’t in the least bit sexy.

  Daddy and Mum got into a flap when I had to give up my training but, although they used to carry on about how talented I was, I’m not so sure. I don’t know that I would honestly have made it beyond an orchestra, and maybe not such a fantastic one at that. And I was never much cop at playing second fiddle. So perhaps it doesn’t matter. I’ve done all right, in my way. ‘Never say “if only”,’ Mum’s father always said. He was remarkably sane, was Gramps. He once whacked my bottom with a rolled-up newspaper when I was acting up. I didn’t mind because I knew I deserved it and it made us friends. He used to threaten me with his paper after that, which made me laugh. People make too much fuss about smacking children, if you ask me. I far preferred being whacked to being subjected to those ‘look at me’ grave talks.