Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  We took some time over the menu. Eddie ordered sparkling water and I noted that the food he chose was that of a currently fashionable diet and hoped that the reason for this was a new partner and not just new London ways. Over the cured fish he asked after Graham, and then after Cele. I explained about her marriage and although I had never mentioned Cele in connection with Will he said, as though he knew of it, ‘I’ve seen a bit of your nephew.’

  ‘Will?’

  ‘He’s stayed over a few times when he’s been down in London.’ I had noticed that since Will’s return to Cambridge he had not visited us and once again was inclined to blame Graham. ‘He wanted to hear more about his uncle.’

  ‘I can understand that.’ I did understand – I had felt the same.

  ‘Thing is, his friend …’

  For a moment I thought he must mean Cele. ‘Friend?’

  ‘Harvey, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh God, him.’

  The waiter arrived and offered bread, which we both refused.

  ‘Thing is,’ Eddie resumed, ‘Will brought him one time and he stayed over too. I didn’t take to him, to be honest.’

  Mum says that when anyone says ‘to be honest’ you can assume they are lying but in this case she might have been wrong.

  ‘He’s a creep,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe worse.’

  ‘Why do you say that, Eddie?’ He looked awkwardly at his plate while the penny dropped for me. ‘Did he …?’

  ‘He’s not my type but he tried it on.’

  ‘Eddie, would you mind if I had a glass of wine after all?’

  ‘No, I’ll join you.’

  He ordered a bottle and as we drank it he told me about Harvey.

  ‘Will had a gig with his band,’ Eddie explained.

  ‘How was he – is he?’

  ‘Seemed fine to me.’

  ‘Was he drinking?’

  ‘Not with me. He had a Diet Coke.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘It was more this other guy, Harvey.’

  Harvey had appeared one evening at Eddie’s and, Eddie said, he had the impression that Will was not over-pleased to see him. He expressed some surprise at Harvey’s being in London at all but he had obviously given him Eddie’s address. Harvey had stayed the night on Eddie’s sofa and the next day the two of them had gone off together, apparently back to Cambridge. But Harvey had reappeared at Eddie’s flat a few days later, to ask if Eddie had perhaps found his allegedly lost watch.

  ‘It was a pick-up line,’ Eddie said, ‘or I was supposed to read it that way. But I wasn’t interested.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘So he kind of hung around and I gave him coffee – I don’t drink these days, well …’ We both looked at the half-empty bottle.

  ‘Once in a while won’t hurt,’ I suggested.

  ‘Sure. Anyway, he wanted to hear about Jack.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s got a thing for Will.’

  ‘But Will isn’t gay.’ Eddie flushed and I felt I’d been too blunt. ‘I mean, I know we all are somewhere but …’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s this. He, Harvey I mean, had worked out about me and Jack, you know.’

  I nodded vigorously.

  ‘He’s – what can I say – he’s …’

  ‘A creep?’ I suggested again.

  ‘Worse,’ he said again.

  ‘How worse?’

  You can see why Will was fascinated by Jack’s fall. And the fact that it had been kept so secret. In the absence of any other willing ear, he must have confided in Harvey. And for what it’s worth I recognized Harvey. I have never knowingly corrupted anyone but I know that I am capable of it and I recognized him as a corrupter – a corrupter of innocence. If he couldn’t have Will physically, he wanted him emotionally.

  ‘See, I had this book,’ Eddie said. ‘The Night Climbers of Cambridge. It was written by one of the blokes who started the whole business in the thirties. I found it in a second-hand bookshop, in Oxford funnily enough. I wanted to see what climb it was that Jack was trying for and I wanted to work out where he’d gone wrong. I had it in my flat. It was their kind of peak climb, the spires of King’s Chapel.’

  ‘I’d love to see it too,’ I said. ‘If you’d lend it to me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Eddie said. ‘Harvey took it. I know it was him because …’

  ‘Because Will wouldn’t?’

  ‘That’s right. But I know for sure because I didn’t show it to Will. I mentioned it. But then I was worried because he was kind of obsessed and I thought maybe I shouldn’t. It was after Harvey was at the flat on his own that it disappeared.’

  ‘What did he want it for?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Eddie said. ‘But it was the book he was interested in, not me. I mean it was Will he was wanting it for. I was worried for Will. You know he’s kind of …’

  ‘On the edge?’

  ‘I like him. I like him a lot. But he’s …’

  ‘Fragile?’ I suggested.

  ‘Suggestible,’ Eddie said.

  ‘I wouldn’t call Will that.’

  ‘OK. Susceptible then.’

  Eddie was right. Will was susceptible. There’s a family myth that Will was like Daddy, but Daddy was never susceptible, or not in that way.

  All this, the conversation with Eddie over lunch, took place before the Easter when Cele and Will found each other again. Harvey must have ferreted out that reunion. I would know this about him anyway because that’s the sort of thing I know. But I also have a kind of proof that he wanted to hurt Cele, because I saw him.

  I’d seen very little of my daughter since her sudden marriage but there was the occasional concert I could tempt her to. The Nash Ensemble was playing Haydn and Bartok at the Wigmore Hall and Cele had a preference for chamber music, so I used this as an excuse to ring her.

  She accepted in her customary cool manner but when I saw her she was different. I doubt that I consciously registered this at the time but I can see it now. The prophet hindsight, as Robert says. It was the one and only time that, on looking back, I could see her father in her: she was rude about him when they met but when I knew him Igor possessed a kind of intensely alluring fire.

  We ate in the café below the hall and I can’t recall what we spoke of. Trivia, I imagine. She never discussed anything serious with me. On the way into the concert hall, I turned aside to go to the loo and left Cele buying a programme. And when I emerged I saw Harvey.

  He was watching her back as she was searching her purse for change. Except that he wasn’t watching her back in the sense of guarding it. It looked more as if he was calculating where to stick a knife in. I was caught for a moment wondering whether to tackle him head-on and decided in the end that he was best ignored. And maybe he saw me, as when I looked again he had sloped off. But it gave me the creeps, I can tell you.

  And I know, with every fibre of my being, that it was Harvey who persuaded Will up on to that chapel roof that awful night. Harvey was into drugs all right and it may have been those that did for Will. But it wasn’t just the chemical drugs that got to him. It would have been a kind of thrill, his way of coping with the hole left after the thrill of recovering Cele, a thrill based on our family tragedy. Harvey was in love with Will, or obsessed anyway. I don’t say that Harvey physically pushed Will off the roof (though he had it in him to do so). It was more that he wanted to murder the prospect of Will’s happiness with anyone but himself. Very few, very, very few people grasp the dangers inherent in being so attractive.

  But in this regard I must also hold my child to blame, though I cannot in the end blame her. Knowing Will as she did, she should never have left him waiting, with a space in which the spores of doubt could mushroom and multiply. She ought to have foreseen how the return to King’s would tax Will’s resources, that there was always Harvey lurking in the background, ready to unsteady any new and unwelcome resolve that excluded
him.

  And at heart, Will was so unsure of his own worth. It’s easy to forget how world-without-end, as Mum would say, everything seems when you are young and unsure of your worth.

  10

  For months Will lay unconscious, fitted out with terrible tubes inserted into every part of his body – his bladder, his bowel, his stomach, his throat – more dead than alive. I am squeamish and a coward. The sight of Will’s body so transformed frankly did for me. After one visit I couldn’t bear to see it, not that he could care. But I have never doubted that my daughter is made of better stuff than I am – and it is a matter that gives me pride. She gave up her job at the practice and, to be near Will, more or less moved in with Daddy and Mum in the house in Ely they had moved to from St Levan. I don’t know what she said to Alec about this. He would have wanted to help her and maybe his acceptance of her absence was his way of lending his support.

  The principal damage had not been to Will’s spine, as we first thought, but, far more serious, to his brain. Harvey, needless to say, denied all responsibility for the LSD and alcohol in Will’s system but two other students who were also on the roof that night were questioned and reported that Will had suddenly climbed on to the parapet, raised a hand to the moon and declaimed, ‘To the spirit of my uncle’. Then, according to one, he swayed and then seemed to topple forward, but the other said it looked to him as if Will were trying to fly. Whether it was the impact of the fall or the drugs themselves remains unclear, but one or other, the medics concluded, had precipitated a massive stroke.

  During all that time Will lay in a coma and my daughter sat there, day in, day out, playing on a portable CD player music of all kinds, jazz, blues, pop, country and western, classical. Most regularly, she played stuff he’d performed with the Black Tye Boys or flute music she had heard him play in the past. And she read to him, poetry, bits of the Bible, Homer, fairy stories. Mum says she and Cele pondered endlessly the kind of language, the words and images and rhythms that might reach a shut-down brain.

  My guess is that the medical experts had more or less given up and were about to consign Will to a mental rubbish dump when, one afternoon, in December, six months after the fall, she was reading aloud The Song of Hiawatha. Mum’s idea. Cele was apparently intoning

  Of all beasts he learned the language,

  Learned their names and all their secrets,

  How the beavers built their lodges,

  Where the squirrels hid their acorns,

  How the reindeer ran so swiftly,

  Why the rabbit was so timid,

  Talked with them whene’er he met them …

  when she looked over to Will, as she always did, to include him in whatever she was reading, and saw the faintest flicker around his eyes. Imagine after all those months, seeing those eyelids fluttering like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

  I can only guess at what she might have said to him. He couldn’t speak but she knew, she said, she just knew, that somewhere he was conscious. She would know, of course.

  There were still few cases recognized then, let alone studied, of Locked-in Syndrome and if more is understood today then my belief is it is in part thanks to Cele. Because she never gave up hope of reaching Will and she had an instinctive sense of what was needed to bring his drowned mind back up to a point of conscious connection.

  She took from their former life his famous ‘will of steel’ and made it her own. She pressed the loyal Alec into service to find names of all the research and international specialists, oversaw Will’s physiotherapy and sat in with the speech therapist, hoping to learn from her how to help Will recover some speech. She pursued all prospects of technological help, enquiring, charming, badgering if need be, insisting and pleading with whoever necessary when it seemed to her that not enough was being done. In short, I observed my meek, diffident daughter become a force to be reckoned with, a campaigner, a veritable ambassador for Will’s life.

  And gradually, gradually, over many months, thanks to Cele’s sustained involvement, Will regained a slight degree of control over his ruined body. In time, they were able to remove the catheter from his bladder and, while the technology was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is today, there came a point when he was able to be moved into an electric wheelchair which, painfully, painfully, by blinking he learned to control.

  Because, with Cele’s help, Will had slowly learned to communicate by winking.

  There was a chart consisting of the commonest letters used at the beginning of words and another of the commonest letters used in the English language. With someone pointing out the letters, through one blink for ‘No’ and two for ‘Yes’, Will was able to spell out first words and then sentences. Those close to him learned to foresee what he wanted to say. Cele was naturally the quickest of us; Mum was pretty far ahead too. But Daddy also proved to have a surprisingly easy ability to communicate with Will.

  I shall always be thankful that before Daddy died he and Will were able to converse because Daddy would have been one of the few people Will would really have wanted to see. Daddy was so preoccupied with the ethereal that, once he was over the shock of it, he barely took in that Will was mute and paralysed and would have overlooked all this, quite genuinely and not as a matter of tact. Daddy would have just gone on reading the Georgics aloud to Will and discussing various points that he felt might also interest him. I hope they did interest him, though I rather fear that Will had matters closer to home on his mind. Dear Daddy. He was always rather an innocent.

  Towards the end of that first year, it was proposed that Will could, with the right help, move from the rehab centre and there arose the question of where he should live.

  Susan and Beetle, understandably, wanted him at Dowlands but Dowlands was too far from medical aid. Daddy and Mum’s Ely house was far too small, even if they could have physically coped, and while Cele would have wanted Will with her, Alec’s presence would have made that impossible.

  Don’t ask me why Cele stayed with Alec. If she didn’t leave him it may have been because she was too much in need of support after Will’s fall. Or maybe, and who can blame her, she simply didn’t have the strength to go through any further emotional turmoil. I didn’t of course know then, nor did anyone except Will, that she had been planning to leave her husband.

  But it was for Cele’s sake that I offered help this time. It seemed to me to make sense. We were in London, I had spoken to Anthony, who was a crack GP and would see to it that the best medical help was on hand for Will, the flat was huge, the lift was convenient, the hall was wide and there were enough spare rooms. It was obvious Will was going to need (awful term) a carer.

  To my surprise, Susan and Beetle sounded quite grateful. And Cele seemed not to baulk at the suggestion. As for Mum, for once she was actually pleased with me. She rang when she heard of my offer and I shan’t forget her words.

  ‘That is better than generous, Bell, darling, it’s gracious. Thank you. And thank Graham from us both, please.’

  She knew that I knew how little she cared for Graham.

  But let me say, and all credit to him, that Graham was very decent about my proposal. I made the offer without consulting him but I suppose I was banking on his agreeing, as he agreed with practically everything I ever suggested. If I’d announced I was contemplating acquiring a baby elephant he would probably have gone along with it. What I didn’t know then was that all the time, under cover of visiting his mother, Graham had been conducting a squalid affair of his own with his PA, Zara, a dyed blonde with a preference for Lycra. (I say ‘squalid’ but that is me being spiteful. I’d had my fling with Anthony and I’d always held poor old Graham in disdain.) What was truly decent, though, was that he allowed me to make over his study to accommodate the help Will would need. My excuse was that Graham hardly ever used his study, having an office on tap, complete with Zara in her Lycra. But still it was a sacrifice, one he needn’t have made. It meant that we still had Cele’s
old room on hand – and I wanted that for Cele.

  If Graham’s mother was a cover for Graham, I became a cover for my daughter. Ignorant still, at that time, of the chapter and verse of her passion, I recognized her need to be with Will. It wasn’t hard to see the reasons. I noticed that Alec had become only an occasional visitor at the flat but he would not have been surprised at her insistence on being near her cousin. She had never concealed how close they had been. And if Alec didn’t hold with her guilt, he understood it, or thought he did. My God, did he go through it, that man. I hope he’s over it now.

  During most of the year after Will left the rehab centre, Cele stayed at our flat and while she was there she and Will communed. I learned to ‘talk’ to him a little myself but all the blinking tired him, and, let’s face it, he would hardly want to spend time chatting to me, so I never attempted a very long conversation. But I can say this, he said enough for me to confirm that whatever that crack on the head had done there was nothing wrong with his ability to think. To the end, Will absolutely and utterly knew his own mind.

  11

  Since I am in the best position to give an account of Noreen then I suppose I had better do it, though it makes me want to vomit. Poisonous bitch.

  ‘Beware, beware of those who care,’ as some wise person said. Not that I’m suggesting there is anything wrong with caring. But as Granny Maud used to say, ‘Fine words butter no parsnips,’ and she might have added, ‘Caring should be felt and not heard.’

  There exist marvellous carers, selfless, dedicated, modest souls. We had two admirable people with us before Noreen: Amir, a slender, softly spoken rather beautiful Iranian, who looked after Will with the greatest tact, and Dana, an iron-grey-haired middle-aged woman from Romania, very upright, who contrived to weave a certain dignity around those she looked after.