‘I still miss him. He was like …’ he hesitated, ‘a brother,’ he finished, untruthfully.
We sat in silence together. I wanted to probe more but began to feel an inhibition. Graham would be home any minute, full of bonhomie and hail fellow well met, and telling us how his mother’s cough was better, or not better, and I couldn’t risk him blundering into this delicate web of memories.
So I said something like, ‘Well you’ll need to have your wits about you tomorrow so I won’t keep you up late,’ and we said goodnight and Eddie went off to bed in Cele’s room.
I said nothing to Graham and lay beside his snoring body thinking about my family. It’s quite hard to take in all that has happened when you’re a part of it.
I lay awake till I could see light edging the blinds and the buses had long started up and I had settled on a strategy to ask, when Eddie came that evening to collect his case, if I could visit him some time to hear more about my lost brother. But there was no need as he rang me at lunch time.
‘Would it be too much trouble if I stayed another night?’
Of course I was delighted. ‘Stay as long as you like, Eddie. I hope it means you’ve got another interview.’
On the contrary, he said, he had been offered the job and wanted to take us out to dinner as a thank you and to celebrate. And by great good luck Graham asked to be excused. ‘If you don’t mind taking the old lady out for me, Ed,’ he said, in his best avuncular style, ‘only I’ve got a call coming in from Oz. She’s quite well-behaved.’
I smiled hypocritically at my husband’s tedious pantomime of male authority, but inwardly I rejoiced.
Keen as I was to learn more about Jack, I knew enough to encourage Eddie to talk about his new job first. It was a big step up, he explained, with a much greater salary and far more scope. By the time we were on to our second course I didn’t have to probe: he raised the subject himself.
‘I wanted to say, I didn’t say, about Jack. He knew right enough why your mother never said anything.’
‘Why didn’t she?’ I was curious to hear what my brother had thought.
‘She loved him. He knew that. He always felt well-loved, did Jack. He guessed she didn’t want him hankering after his other mother. She’d left him as a babe. Upsetting it would have been for a littl’un, you know, the bomb and all that.’
‘Foolish of her, though.’
‘I guess we’ve all been that in our time. My mother always says, “never judge anyone till you’ve stood in their shoes.”’
‘That’s a kind way of looking at it. I’m not kind, Eddie, I’m afraid.’
‘I remember you as a littl’un. Pretty as a picture, you were. Smart as paint too, my mum always said.’
‘Thank you.’ I was touched. His shyness had dropped away with the success of the interview.
‘Your mum had some idea Jack was trying to prove himself, on account of your dad being a conchy. That right?’
‘That’s the story, yes.’
‘That wasn’t Jack. He wouldn’t give a monkey’s what some stuck-up Cambridge prick said.’
‘I must say, I never thought so.’ I was struck by this eruption of vehemence.
‘He was more likely trying to prove something to me.’
‘Why to you?’
‘Things I said. We had a falling-out. Nothing major. We’d’ve made up.’
‘I’m sure,’ I agreed. You were lovers, I thought. That’s what it was that I knew I had always known about Jack.
‘He was different with me, didn’t want to go climbing that summer. I reckon now it was something to do with, you know, finding out about his family and being Jewish and all. But I saw it as him keeping his distance. I was young. I took it personally. You get things skewy when you’re young.’
‘I can drink to that,’ I said.
‘Yep,’ Eddie said, and stared down at his glass of brandy. We’d ordered brandy. I think we both wanted to prolong our stay at the restaurant.
I couldn’t bear for him to stop there so I prompted him, ‘So …?’
‘So I let off steam, said a few things about Cambridge people being gutless, spineless. I don’t know what I called them, but I kind of implied he was too. It was just me getting at him. It wasn’t true. I was sick as a pig because I was only at Newcastle, you know?’
‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
I understood: he had feared that Jack would abandon him.
‘You can’t take words back from the dead, can you?’
His hand on the table was forcing the palm flat and I laid my own over it. ‘You can’t know, Eddie. None of us does. You and Mum and Dad and me and Beetle, none of us can know what happened or why.’
‘No. I nearly told your mum once, you know, about us falling out. She came to visit to ask me about him after he died, but it felt like I would be making myself out to be the important one, you know, Jack dying because of me, kind of. It didn’t seem right.’
You were worried about letting on that Jack was gay, I thought. That’s what didn’t seem right.
‘Maybe the best we can say is that he’s out of it,’ I said. ‘It’s us who’re the losers. At least he was loved.’
Eddie swirled the brandy round his glass. ‘There’s some things that never leave you,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that right?’
We were both slightly drunk, though in a perfectly civilized way, when we got back to the flat. Graham had gone to bed but when Eddie and I settled down for ‘a nightcap’ – I found myself using Graham’s awful medicinal term – Will appeared.
He’d been back late the last couple of nights, playing gigs with his band, and had not been around in the mornings to meet Eddie. I introduced them now.
‘Eddie, this is Beetle’s son, Will. Will, Eddie was Nat’s great friend.’
‘My mother was great with your nan,’ Eddie said. ‘During the war.’
Will looked intrigued. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I asked. I was careful, after the Harvey episode, not to offer him alcohol but not to have done so now would have made it appear that there was some problem and suddenly I very much didn’t want to show Will up in front of Eddie.
‘I’ll have a Coke,’ Will said. He settled himself on the sofa opposite Eddie. ‘You knew my uncle?’
‘We were best mates.’
Eddie’s Northumbrian accent, which during the interview days had been submerged beneath a patina of southern BBC, had surfaced with the drink. Along with a man’s smell I take great note of the timbre of a voice. Eddie’s had good resonant tones. Bass baritone.
My guess is that, like me, Will also responded to voice because I observed that Eddie was going over well.
‘What was he like, my uncle?’
Eddie smiled. He had a lovely smile. He looked in fact a little like a fit Elvis might have looked had he reached late middle age. A fine bass baritone too, was Elvis.
‘He was great, man, you know, just great.’
‘When did you meet?’
‘As little kids on the beach, down by your nan’s nan. Old Mrs Tye’s house.’
Will got up and went across to the drinks tray, put down the half-drunk Coke and poured himself an Armagnac.
‘Dowlands?’
‘That’s it. Your nan and my mother got talking there one day while your uncle and me got fighting.’
‘Did you fight?’ I asked.
‘You know, just puppy-dog stuff. We started school together. Your mum used to meet us, give us lunch and so on. Boiled eggs and toast fingers. And apples from the orchard. She was just great to me, your mum.’
‘Dowlands is where my parents live now,’ Will said. I noticed that he didn’t say it was where he lived.
Eddie looked immediately taken. ‘Yeah? I moved to Hull. Mum and Dad retired to Harrogate. So we’ve not been in those parts since …’
Will said, ‘Were you with my uncle when he was killed?’ I could tell he was getting worked
up because he was fixing Eddie with that very direct stare of his.
Eddie frowned. ‘I wasn’t at Cambridge. I was a Newcastle boy.’
‘Wasn’t he killed in a climbing accident?’
‘He was climbing one of the spires of a chapel. Mad bugger.’
Hetta has told me since that she had confided to Will what I had told her that day in Knightsbridge when I bought her that yellow bra – a hideous bra but she wanted it so much, poor child. So this was disingenuous of Will, though at the time I was unaware of that.
‘What was that about?’ Will asked.
I saw Eddie’s face and decided it was time to give him a get-out. ‘Will, dear,’ I said. ‘Eddie’s tired, he’s had a long couple of days. I’m sure if you want to talk to him another time …’ but Eddie interrupted.
‘It’s fine. Happy to chew the fat with Jack’s nevvy.’
‘You call him Jack,’ Will said, though he must have known this.
6
It was some weeks before I was allowed to meet my daughter’s husband. I was beautifully restrained – didn’t press her at all, though it goes without saying I was dying to clap eyes on him. When the invitation finally arrived it was for dinner at their flat, a nice enough flat in Kensal Rise.
My first impression of Alec was negative. Colin was a bastard but you had to hand it to him, he was a good-looking bastard. I saw what Hetta had meant about Alec’s eyelashes. That piggy blond.
But he had the voice – and, like a lot of apparently ugly men, once you got to know him the attraction emerged. He went out of his way to be exceptionally courteous to Graham. He was polite to us both but I noticed he was making an extra effort with Graham, from which I concluded that Cele had conveyed to him that I didn’t. Fair enough. I didn’t make much effort with Graham.
The food was excellent – risotto, a plain fruit fool and decent cheese. Nothing pretentious. Graham commented on it, getting a bit of his own back by comparing the dinner with my own efforts, and, not to be squashed, I remarked that Cele must have learned to cook from her aunt Susan because she would have learned bugger-all from me.
Cele was used to our banter and smiled in Alec’s direction, as if to say, I told you how they were, and Alec said, ‘I was the cook this evening, so any complaints should go to me’, which put both me and Graham in our place.
I was always slightly on edge when out with Graham. The brutal truth is I was ashamed of him, which does me no credit, I know. He was socially banal – not that most people noticed as most people are socially banal themselves, but it got on my nerves. Cele would have sussed my unease and I guessed this was why Alec had been detailed to dish out an extra dollop of hospitality to my husband.
I was naturally mad keen to discover how this romance had arisen and by the time we were on to the fool I risked, ‘When did you two decide you wanted to hitch up?’ That ‘you two’ again. I must have been feeling uncomfortable.
Alec said, ‘Oh, I fell for her from day one. We had an emergency in the waiting room, a schizophrenic patient who’d missed his injection and was hearing voices and disturbing the other patients, and your daughter, Bell,’ – he had a rather nice way of saying ‘Bell’ – ‘dealt with him superbly.’
He smiled fondly at Cele and I liked him still more because I could see pride in that smile.
‘What did she do, my clever daughter?’ I meant this as a compliment but I have a feeling that Cele heard it as sarcasm.
‘She took the voices seriously. Luckily they weren’t malign – the Virgin Mary, wasn’t it, C?’ I liked the sound of that ‘C’ too.
‘It was a little unclear,’ my daughter said. ‘There were three Marys involved.’
‘He thought she was one of them, anyway,’ Alec said. ‘He took her for the Blessed Virgin, or whichever one it was, and she led him into my room and he was quiet as a lamb while I gave him his dose. She was brilliant. It was love at first sight.’
‘He’s exaggerating,’ Cele said. She spoke, I noticed, with a new calm. ‘I’d been there well over two weeks and he hadn’t taken a blind bit of notice.’
Graham said on the way home, ‘Nice chap. Pity he’s not better looking.’
Mum used to say of the Communist Party that the difficulty was that unless you were in charge of dictating the Party line you could never predict when it might have changed so you would find yourself, all of a sudden, on the wrong side of the track. Poor old Graham assumed that because I generally cared about appearances I would find Alec wanting.
‘You haven’t a clue what makes a man attractive,’ I said cruelly. He must have grasped by then that I didn’t find him attractive in the little least. ‘He’s delightful, especially after that viper Colin.’
From what I could observe, Will appeared remarkably restrained during the post-wedding-announcement period. This was the period before he was to return, with the college’s permission, to King’s and I suppose I believed he was trying to be good, whatever that means.
One event, which had nothing overtly to do with him, struck me at the time. Cele, when she left the flat, had also left most of her bits behind. Shortly after the dinner with Alec she asked if I would please bring her stuff over. She was still steering clear of Will so I understood why she wouldn’t want to come herself.
After I had carted various boxes and bags over to Kensal Rise, for which she thanked me rather coolly, she rang me to ask, ‘Where’s Seal?’
Seal was her childhood toy to which she was hugely attached and even when she was quite old it sat at the end of her bed, more recently on the tallboy which had been at Dowlands in my great-grandparents’ time. The tallboy was typical Victorian mahogany, too heavy for my taste, but Cele had wanted it so we had always had it in her room.
My impression, if I had any, would have been that she had taken Seal with her when she moved out, but she contradicted me.
‘I left him on the Dowlands tallboy. You must have seen him.’
Not having much, or any, interest in toys, I had to confess I hadn’t.
‘He must be in the room somewhere. You haven’t looked properly.’
It was true I hadn’t. But when I turned the room upside down no Seal materialized. Isabel, our cleaner, said she’d seen it at some point but not, she thought, since Cele left.
I have a bit of a blank about the rest of that time when Will was with us. It passed OK, as far as I could judge, though I didn’t see a lot of him. My impression is that he was out most nights playing in his band and for the most part I was probably glad he was out of the way. But for the first time in my life, when he was due to go back to King’s I had a maternal reaction.
I felt anxious for him. Anxious about how he’d fit in. He was never shy but he wasn’t much of a fitter-in. How terrible that I can’t claim ever to have felt that for my daughter.
My way of expressing this novel anxiety was to take Will to buy clothes. Not that he ever cared much about clothes; he was generally pretty scruffy. I took him to a place on the King’s Road and bought him some T-shirts and a leather jacket. I’ve had a thing about leather jackets since I fell as a kid for Jean-Paul Belmondo, so I pressed this one on Will and he seemed quite chuffed with it. It suited him. But he was one of those men who look OK even when scruffy. Daddy was like that. Though I can’t see Daddy in a leather jacket.
I offered to drive Will up to Cambridge but that was a step too far. He liked me better when I was distant. He said, ‘I’m fine, Bell. I’ve only got one case and it’s quicker by train. But thanks. And thanks for putting up with me.’
And I said something idiotic like ‘It’s been a pleasure’, which he probably thought was just fluff. It wasn’t fluff. I missed him. It’s an awful thing to admit but I missed him as I had never missed Cele.
7
It was Robert who found the diary. I had to go down to Staresnest before I sold it to clear it out. I was selling it with all the furniture to save the bother of getting rid of the stuff but
the personal things had to be cleared.
I couldn’t face it on my own and it had suddenly seemed that Robert was the one person I could bear to be with. When I rang him he sounded pleased to hear from me, which was a relief.
He drove us down to Somerset in his comfortable Mercedes. It’s quite a way and I just lay back resting my head on the leather seat crying my eyes out. Robert had never seen me cry but he knew better than to comment and only patted my hand from time to time. I’d forgotten how he used to pat my hand.
There was a platform performance of Die Walküre on the radio. It’s my favourite Wagner anyway but the whole Siegmund–Sieglinde drama seemed uncannily apt.
Robert had bought flat-packed boxes and the morning after we got there he put them together and taped them up while I made coffee, very strong. I can’t stand weak coffee. And yes, we slept together, made love, had sex, fucked, call it what you will. If I’d not consciously decided to leave Graham, then that night with Robert put the lid on Graham, if that’s the expression I want. Never mind.
There was not so much to pack up, when it came down to it. All the kitchen paraphernalia we put into the charity-shop boxes, the same with the clothes. If I wanted to keep anything it was mainly books that had come from Great-Grandad Tye’s library and other oddments from Dowlands, some old-fashioned dip pens, a heavy crystal inkstand with a silver lid and a blotter, the kind shaped like a child’s boat that you rock over the ink to dry it – quite useless these days. And I also wanted the bound volumes of Punch and The Strand, in which some of Granny Maud’s stories had been published.
To the best of my recollection, I’d never read any of Granny Maud’s stories and was unable to keep myself from starting on one there and then. Displacement activity, Robert called it.
I suppose I’d expected her stories to be melodramatic affairs, which is why I’d never bothered reading one, but this, called ‘The Green Fairy’, wasn’t half bad. It was about an absinthe drinker who, in a state of alcoholic befuddlement, follows the spirit, who has promised him a ‘rest from all earthly troubles’, across the Liffey, taking with him his only daughter, whom he loves to distraction, and both the man and his daughter drown.
Cousins Page 18
