Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  As I say, it was Robert who found my own daughter’s real-life drama.

  We’d been sorting books into the ‘Keep’ or ‘Charity’ boxes for what felt like hours and I was beginning to flag. Robert casually opened a large tome, with a title something to do with Shipping Forecasts, which I’d put to be chucked out. Inside, the pages had been cut away and a notebook was lodged there. One of those utilitarian notebooks, with a dark blue hard cover. I was on my knees on the floor packing up the ‘Keep’ books when Robert handed it to me.

  From the first sight of the handwriting, before I’d read a word of the content, I could see that the notebook was Cele’s. Robert, who would normally have been protective of Cele’s privacy, didn’t demur when I began to read it. He knew how desperate I was to find any clue that might help. He simply said, ‘I’ll make some more coffee, shall I?’ and a little later, without my asking, he made up the fire. It was a late October afternoon and Staresnest was always inclined to be cold.

  Hetta has some of the other diaries and I know from these and her conversations with Cele that she has teased out many of the other events which make up this sorry tale. But it was left to me to discover this account of the last few meetings between my daughter and her Will before the accident that wrecked their lives.

  Just before the Easter of 94, about a year after her marriage it would have been, Cele rang and asked me if she could stay at Staresnest. She had, she said, a few days’ holiday owing and fancied some ‘quiet time’ in the country and there was some writing she wanted to do.

  Of course I agreed. I was always since my marriage glad to be of help to her and I liked the sound of the writing. I felt guilty that she’d got no decent qualifications and responsible for her keeping her light under a bushel, or whatever the saying is.

  She must have brought this notebook with her then and hidden it in the Shipping Forecast on some other occasion.

  April 6th 1994

  Will rang me at the surgery saying he needed to see me urgently. I’ve not seen him since A and I married and have dreaded this. But he sounded sober so I agreed. I knew I had to see him sometime. We met in the National Gallery because I couldn’t think of anywhere else suitably anonymous. I suggested we meet in the shop but he said ‘I hate those shops full of mugs with sunflowers on, as if Van Gogh didn’t have enough to bear without being traduced by marketing morons. Meet me by the Rembrandts’.

  He was there when I arrived looking at The Woman Taken in Adultery which was obviously intentional. I’d hung about outside on the steps in order to be on time. I’d guessed he’d be early.

  The moment I saw him I knew it was a mistake to come. He had the old khaki bag we always called ‘Jeremy Fisher’s’ over his shoulder. His shoulder blades looked like wings cropped to the bone.

  I would have turned round and hoped to vanish back into the crowd but he felt my stare and turned instead and then how could I go?

  I could see him trying not to frighten me off, because he gave a nervous half-grin. There was something so pitiful about that grin. He was always thin. But he looked ill. He walked over and put a hand so gently under the crook of my arm and said, ‘Let’s get out of here, shall we, my love?’ and I went with him. I couldn’t have done otherwise.

  We walked out into air so bright that St Martin-in-the-Fields was adazzle in its whiteness. We walked, I haven’t a clue where, and he held my arm tight close to his ribs and I found myself remembering how Eve was taken from a rib of Adam’s. My hip bone kept banging against his as we walked. His trainers were incredibly dirty, with holes in them.

  I’d forgotten how exhausting desire is. In the end I begged to sit down and we landed up in a fuggy little café somewhere off High Holborn, with orange tea and some lardy cake, which I chose as we loved it as children.

  The cake stuck to the roof of my mouth – he didn’t touch his. He leant down to his Jeremy Fisher bag and said, ‘Here, I’ve brought him back to you’ and he gave me Seal.

  I said, stupidly, ‘I don’t blame you.’ I meant for taking Seal, though he hadn’t taken him, as he told me later, and he said, ‘I don’t blame you either. I was mad, quite mad and you were scared, I know, but “Celandine”, it was hearing that name he called you. I couldn’t stand it.’

  Oh God, these seeming betrayals.

  I said, ‘It was an accident. Colin asked me about my family and I told him about Granny because she’d visited me at St N’s and he asked what she was like and all I could think to say was how she’d taught me the names of wild flowers, I didn’t say she’d taught us, I didn’t mention you. Colin said, “Tell me then, tell me about flowers.” The celandines were newly out and I told him their name and he said, “How interesting, I’ve always thought they were buttercups.” You know how people do? And then he said, “Celandine, it’s like your name. In future I shall call you Celandine.” I was appalled if you want to know. But if I’d told him not to he would have asked me why.’

  And Will said, ‘The man is diabolical in his cunning but I don’t believe he’s a telepath. He must have read it in a letter I wrote you.’

  I’d never even thought of that. All that time I’d been imagining it was a horrible coincidence but of course I had often carried W’s letters around in my bag. It never entered my head that C might pry.

  I began to cry then, because in my stupidity and blindness I’d caused so much harm and W said, ‘Don’t cry, my love, or do if you need to’ and I wept and wept all over the lardy cake and W pressed his finger into the crumbs and licked it and said, ‘It tastes of the salt of your tears.’

  I have wasted our lives.

  April 9th 1994

  I’m writing this in my lunch break and I’m keeping the book locked in the filing cabinet in the file of a patient called Tomlins who, from his records, hasn’t been to the surgery for years. I didn’t tell A I’d seen W. He knows too much about him. I told him I’d gone to the dentist with toothache, which was as well as my face must have looked swollen when I got home. It was late so I said the tooth had involved root-canal work and I’d have to go back in a couple of days, which is today.

  I’ve asked W to keep Seal. He explained about Eddie taking him. I’d almost forgotten that Seal had belonged to Nat. But I can’t bring Seal back to A’s now or he’ll ask where I found him. I still think of the flat as A’s even though he’s put it in our joint names.

  I’m meeting W this afternoon with the dentist as alibi. He’s rung twice at work but I’ve asked him please not to except for emergencies.

  April 10th 1994

  I plucked up my courage and rang Bell and asked if I could borrow Staresnest. I knew she wouldn’t ask questions but I felt I had to give an excuse so I told her I wanted to go there to do some writing. She perked up at that. She thinks I’m a failure because I’m only a receptionist. I told A the same. He trusts me unreservedly and I didn’t even feel bad about deceiving him. I have some holiday owing and I said I wanted to take it before the summer.

  W and I have agreed to meet tomorrow at Paddington at 9 a.m. for the 9.30 train.

  When I reached this point in the diary I said to Robert, ‘I don’t think I can do any more at the moment. I need strong drink, would you mind?’

  And dear Robert simply said, ‘Wine strong or spirit strong?’ and I said, ‘Spirit please and lashings of it’ and he poured me out about a treble Scotch.

  We sat by the fire which he’d got blazing and he said not a word until I did. But he put on some Handel. ‘Saul’.

  ‘I never loved like this,’ I said. I meant like Cele, not like Saul. ‘Not even you.’

  Dear Robert. He laughed and said, ‘You loved me quite enough for me.’

  I still loved him, by the way, but I didn’t say so.

  Robert cooked an omelette and made a salad, he’s a good cook, and we drank some of his wine, which wasn’t at all grand for which I was grateful. I have no palate and I never really appreciated Graham’s wine. Then he ran me a
bath and knew to leave me to soak on my own, which is the thing that I really miss about Robert, I mean the knowing not the being left alone, and after that I went to bed in the huge king-size bed he bought for us long ago, and I lay there, wiped out, utterly exhausted.

  That night we didn’t make love. But we lay there and talked and talked, or I did, and that was some relief, because we’d never talked in that kind of way before, not just about Will and Cele, but about the whole shebang: Daddy’s affair, Jack, Susan losing Will’s twin, Great Uncle Oswald’s pegging out in France, the Spanish Civil War, the whole damn circus.

  At some point I said, ‘She refers to me always as Bell or B. Never Mum,’ to which Robert said nothing. It may have been after this that I told him I was going to leave Graham. He said nothing to that either.

  8

  Around 2 a.m. I woke and got up and made myself a large hot toddy with more of Robert’s Old Grouse and sat by the fire which was still ember-warm enough to flare up when I chucked on more logs. I was wide awake and I wanted to read more of Cele’s diary.

  There were some pages torn out and the next entry read:

  April 23rd 1994, Shakespeare’s birthday

  Will went back to Cambridge tonight. I went with him to King’s Cross to see him off. It was the last train and so empty we wondered if it was really going to leave after all and then the engine started up suddenly and I had to jump out of the carriage. It felt dreadful seeing the train move out of the station, tearing us apart.

  It was too late to go back to A’s – and I’d said I mightn’t be back till the morning. I’ve checked into a hotel. It’s lonely but I’d rather be lonely here than lonely with A.

  What to do?

  A sounded anxious when I rang to say I was ill and wanted to stay on longer at Staresnest. But I don’t think he suspected anything. I’m sure he was simply concerned about my cough. He would have driven down to collect me if I hadn’t stopped him. It hardly seems fair that it’s he who’s helped me become so much stronger.

  I’ve promised W to tell him, tell A that I made a mistake, that we should never have married.

  These days with W – walking to Cow Castle and finding the otter’s grave in the garden, not at all where we’d remembered it (unless B moved it?) with the inscription still visible that we scratched on with B’s brooch – Otter R.I. P.– all those years ago. They were happy times.

  We pledged murder against the hunt that did for our otter then – W cut his wrist with his penknife and made me and Hetta swear on his blood – we laughed about this when we found the gravestone at last but we agreed we would swear so still today – but I am thinking now that the worst murders are against ourselves. We murder our better spirits because we’re afraid of what they summon us to do. Or not to do.

  I remember a strange thing that Florence, the girl I pretended to meet in Penzance that time I was meeting Colin, once said to me. She said, of Will, whom I’d mentioned to her afterwards,‘But you’ve known him for ever, haven’t you?’ as if knowing someone for ever disqualifies them from being important. I have known him for ever and that is why he is important.

  I fled to A for safety because I was afraid – but there is no safety to be found outside the kingdom of the heart. Shakespeare knew that. How clever of him to die on the date they say he was born.

  At this point I had to stop reading and go into the kitchen.

  Cele was right. I did move that otter’s tombstone. I moved it because it was in the way when Gareth, the man who saw to the garden, mowed the lawn. I don’t know why that so preyed on my conscience. If, as she wrote, she had murdered her better spirit it was because I failed her. It was a cruel awakening, not to my selfishness, I was already alive to that, but to the scope of its reach. No doubt there is some appropriate Biblical saying to do with sowing and reaping. That night, reading what my only child had written in her anguish, I reaped a bitter harvest.

  I went to get a pair of Robert’s woollen socks from his boots which he’d left by the back door, because my feet had grown icy, before resuming reading.

  April 26th 1994

  W rang and asked if I’d told A yet. A was in the office writing repeat prescriptions so I had to pretend it was the dentist’s receptionist calling with an appointment. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I can’t make that date. Have you anything after 6 p.m.?’ At 6 p.m. A is deep in surgery.

  W rang at 6.10. He remained calm when I said, ‘I’ve not had a moment to yet.’

  I didn’t tell W this but A’s father is unwell. His father brought them up as his mother had MS so it’s a bad time. The longer I’m away from W the less brave I feel.

  April 30th 1994

  I went to Cam to see W this weekend. A has gone up to Glasgow to see his father so I didn’t have to make an excuse.

  W has a room in college (with the suspended sentence he can’t live out) so we had to squash into his narrow bed. Rather different from the huge bed at Staresnest. He asked if I’d made love with A and I lied. I’ve had to – A wanted to the moment I came back from Exmoor and I could only use the excuse of the cough for so long to hold him off.

  Granny says that ordinary notions of truth are overrated and it’s the truth in your heart that counts. The truth in my heart is that I make love with A out of politeness, at best out of kindness. I never ‘made love’ with C.

  I would never have asked if W had been with anyone else but he volunteered that there were a couple of girls when he was angry with me. I was angry about that. But perhaps it’s as well we have been with other people. We know now what we want – who we want, I should say.

  The weekend was very intense. We talked about what we would do when he has taken his degree. He isn’t drinking and I didn’t either. Neither of us was hungry. He said, ‘You are so thin, my love, I can almost see through you,’ and I said, ‘You can talk, you are like the skeleton of a leaf, I could blow you away.’ He sometimes seems so frail, my W.

  On a stall in the market we found an old signet ring engraved with the letters CW which he bought for me.

  I’ve asked W to please keep my ring safe until I can wear it.

  May 2nd 1994

  A rang to say his father is dying. He is going to take some leave and the practice will get in a locum. I feel awful that the news was a relief to me.

  I can’t get cover while A is off but W is coming to London. He has exams but he says he’ll revise here.

  May 6th 1994

  W was to stay for three nights but after the first night I was nervous. We aren’t close to our neighbours but I was in a state in case we bumped into any of them. In the end we went off to a cheap hotel, cheap because W has no money and I couldn’t use my credit card because A and I share the account and we have a joint bank account too so I could only afford to draw out a certain amount of £s. But that was hopeless too as I was in a state about A ringing and finding me out. And I felt bad about his father. W became fractious because he guessed the reasons for my fret. The hotel was grisly, carpets with swirly patterns and an avocado bath. We’ve agreed that in future we must only meet in Cam. Or Staresnest.

  May 10th 1994

  A’s father died yesterday. The funeral is on Friday and I am travelling up to Scotland tonight after work. LR.

  My limbs were stiff and the fire had burnt low. I got up, feeling old and creaky, and went into the kitchen and looked out.

  The river which runs through Staresnest’s garden was in full spate and a wind had got up and an upstart sycamore, which I had always meant to have felled, was releasing a hostile-sounding patter of winged seeds on to the kitchen roof. It made me think of Mum, who wages war on sycamore seedlings. A dense cloud of birds, probably fieldfares, was passing across a pewter sky. And again I thought of Mum, trying to interest us in birds. ‘What’s the point of knowing their names?’ I used to ask her, winding her up. But things stick, even when you don’t intend them to. And watching the cloud of birds thin and dissolve against the wh
itening sky all at once I felt incredibly happy to be able to name them.

  What I had read humbled me. It spoke of passions beyond my experience, of a tragedy borne that I could never have undergone. I could guess at what the ripped-out pages had described. Those few days of splendour in the grass that my daughter and my nephew had been granted before the life they had built against the life they had been born into collapsed upon them. So far as I know, they never did have a chance to be here together again.

  There was more dismal reading in the blue notebook. I have read it since but see no need to disclose more here. What has been recorded already tells enough of the story.

  It was not that Cele lost faith. She would, I am sure – though how do I have the nerve to feel sure about one so unlike myself? – have left Alec in the end. Certainly from her account she was planning to do so. Only ‘all in good time’, as Mum used to say when we were kids and drive me mad in saying it. Because in this respect my nephew was like me: ‘good time’ was not good enough for him. I’m no psychologist, but my guess is that Will’s nerves were too frayed to manage the waiting. ‘“Everything comes to him who waits,”’ as Daddy sagely used to say ‘is a maxim of dubious prescience,’ which is probably why he was always such a one for revolution.

  9

  But all of that, of course, the sale of Staresnest and the discovery of her diaries, came later, much later.

  I had hoped to see more of Eddie after his stay with us but, apart from one rather strained dinner, he seemed to dissolve back into the mists of the past. I was inclined to blame Graham. I was inclined to blame Graham for most things. But one day Eddie rang me and suggested lunch.

  I met him at a restaurant near his work in Millbank and I could tell from the first sighting of him across the room that the new job had made a mark. He was thinner and looked more prosperous and for a fleet second I found myself regretting that he was gay and simultaneously recalled something that Robert once said, which was ‘The reason people are atheists is that they dread the idea that there is a being somewhere that can truly read their minds.’