Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  But Noreen ‘cared’ with a vengeance. From the word go I disliked her. That it was mutual, I didn’t give a rap. What mattered was how she took against Cele.

  She resented Cele’s being attuned to Will’s needs, her ability to judge them more accurately than she, ‘the professional’, ever could have done (she was always on about being ‘professional’, was Noreen). She would have sussed the nature of Cele’s feelings for Will because she made it her business to fall in love with Will herself – and love sensitizes the antennae. If ‘love’ is what you’d call it. Please understand that I’m using the word loosely.

  There were procedures required for Will’s comfort and hygiene which naturally he wouldn’t want Cele, or anyone close to him, to perform. Noreen took an ill-disguised pleasure in these and in then discussing various intimate matters arising – blockages in his bowel and I don’t know what – in front of Cele. Always with that despicable furrowed brow of concern that made me want to slap her.

  I don’t know how far Noreen is responsible for what transpired. I do know that, though there were other, more serious, reasons, it was partly the irritant of her presence that led to Cele’s decision to take Will off up to Northumberland to see them all at Dowlands. Hetta, who was there, will know more about this. I can only speak about their return from Dowlands, because that same evening Cele said to me, ‘Will would like us to get rid of Noreen but he thinks it best for you to tell her, if you don’t mind.’

  That was fine by me. I didn’t mince my words and there was a lot of predictable protest and tears bravely held back, and when that performance cut no ice with me, which it wouldn’t, there was legal talk. I confirmed that we would pay the wretched woman in lieu of notice but, just to be provoking I suppose, she became hell-bent on working out her notice.

  To avoid trouble, it was agreed that Noreen should stay on for a further week. She spent the time having a good nose around and lifted quite a few items in the process. Some silver napkin rings of Graham’s, a pretty cream jug which had been Grandmother Tye’s and the odd bit of not terribly important jewellery all disappeared along with Noreen. Cele kept her underwear, nightwear and so on in the tallboy in her room and more weirdly, though I suppose a psychoanalyst wouldn’t be too surprised, Noreen also pinched some of Cele’s tights.

  We were frankly so glad to see the back of her that we didn’t bother reporting the thefts. I doubt we’d have involved the police anyway. What I did do, which was a mistake, was inform the agency through which we’d found her, which obviously added fuel to her resentment.

  With Noreen’s departure, Anthony found for us, through the medical grapevine, Rose, a bouncy Cork girl with a boyfriend in tow, a breath of fresh air after the clammy Noreen and not over-exercised about her duties. So it was not surprising that Cele was around more than usual to lend a hand.

  Then, one evening in late September, Cele told me that Mum proposed coming to London for a new production of Othello and wondered if I might like to join them. Graham was going to be off on a ‘business trip’, presumably one of his Zara jaunts, and Cele suggested that Mum might stay for a night or so in her room, that she herself would happily sleep in the study, near Will, which would leave Rose free to go with her boyfriend on the city break to Barcelona that she’d been after.

  Rose’s boyfriend had booked them on an early plane so she had to stay the night at his place in order to be sure to be off at dawn. Which meant that in the end Cele didn’t come to the theatre after all and Mum and I went together, which was nice for me. Since Daddy died, I’d not seen much of Mum. To tell you the truth, I never did see much of her. I see her more now.

  From what I remember, the guy playing Iago was OK but Othello was a bit unconvincing. There’s something too cringe-making about a white actor blacked up which gets in the way. Mum and I discussed the play afterwards and I remember her saying that Desdemona’s only failing was that she didn’t see her husband clearly enough and that, had she done so, a good deal of grief would have been spared. ‘Real love is also clear-sighted,’ Mum said. Not that I disagree but it’s a very her-ish thing to say.

  When we got back to the flat, Cele was still up and we all had quite a bit to drink, so my recollections of that night are vague. What I do remember is going in to say goodnight to Will and Mum coming into the room after me, and saying, ‘I’ll sit with you a bit, if that’s all right, Will, darling.’ A while later, coming out of my room to get some water, I heard her say, ‘Goodnight, Will, God bless, my darling. Sleep well.’

  I wouldn’t have expected to hear him reply.

  Part Four

  * * *

  HETTA

  1

  When Granny rang to say that Grandpa was to be buried in Bamburgh churchyard I was so taken aback I couldn’t help asking, ‘But would he have wanted that?’

  I had left Ely only the week before. Since Will’s fall, home was not a happy place. Dad had retreated into a twilight depression of limited engagement, with us anyway, though he seemed to function as well as he ever did at the hospital. Mum had become more than ever inclined to dictate the terms of my existence, which grated on my eighteen-year-old self. Will’s ability to command our parents’ attention seemed more powerful than ever and it angered me that his accident was now serving to restrict my liberty even further. When Mum deduced, from the fact that my red heels were missing from my room, that I had taken them hoping I might bump into Rick Stannock – a boy she considered ‘wild’ – and interrogated me, we had a blazing row and I rang Granny.

  ‘Not so much a “neighbourhood of voluntary spies” as a household, Granny.’ It was the Easter before my A levels. One of my set texts was Emma and this was the kind of shorthand Granny would understand. But it was also me getting one over on my mother. As far as I knew, Mum had never read any Jane Austen.

  ‘It’s understandable, darling. You must …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Will’s accident, etcetera. But checking up on my shoes, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Parents do check up, darling. It’s part of their job.’

  ‘You didn’t!’ There was a pause where I thought the line had gone dead. Our line was dodgy. ‘Granny?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘May I come and stay?’

  ‘Of course, darling. You know you are welcome to come any time. But make sure it’s OK with your mother first.’

  My excuse to Mum was that Granny was a help with my English revision. She had been a teacher and we had always talked books together, and while Mum mutely resented this she was also ambitious for me and must have recognized that Granny’s love of literature had fostered my own. But in the event I was very glad I went for another reason. Four days after I left Ely Grandpa died in his chair in the sitting room, where he had been reading his beloved Virgil.

  About ten days before he died, Granny and I were in their kitchen. Grandpa had gone to bed and it was a time when we tended to chat, over tea for her and cocoa for me, at the red Formica table which they had had for as long as I could remember. In fact when I reflect on my childhood that red table, with a scorch mark where one of us had once carelessly put down a roasting tin, is a visual refrain. The mugs we were drinking from also went way back. Grandpa had a weakness for the kind that are adorned with pithy-sounding quotes, which as children we were always pleased to find as he was tricky to give to and we could mostly rely on examples of these to make acceptable presents. The mug I was drinking from had a quote from Margaret Thatcher, ‘The problem with socialism is that you run out of other people’s money’, and a picture of her handbag. I don’t know who gave him this particular mug, or what it was doing in his anti-establishment kitchen cache, but perhaps he found the sheer crassness of this Thatcherism amusing. Grandpa had a bizarre sense of humour.

  Granny’s mug had a quotation from Oscar Wilde which made more sense to me. ‘Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.’

  The mug was on the table and I turned it towards me t
o read the words again.

  ‘It’s from The Soul of Man Under Socialism.’

  She’d told me this before but I didn’t let on. Although her memory was not as acute as Grandpa’s, on the whole it didn’t slip much.

  ‘Why soul?’ I asked. I had arrived at the stage when you are most curious and enquiring about the metaphysical.

  ‘Have you read De Profundis?’

  I hadn’t then, though I have made sure to since.

  ‘He wrote it in prison,’ Granny said. ‘That stupid pointless case. It drives me wild thinking about it.’

  ‘What’s it about, the book?’ I knew about the case. I think Granny nursed the notion that had she been around to advise him Wilde would never have got himself into that particular mess.

  ‘People imagine because his wit was so sharp that he wasn’t a deep thinker, which is a very English kind of prejudice, Hetta. But he thought deeply about many things, especially in prison. Especially about soul.’

  ‘But do you think we have one?’ I asked. Talking about ‘soul’ in Grandpa’s vicinity felt like a kind of sacrilege.

  ‘It depends on what you mean by “soul”,’ Granny said. And we left it there.

  But the following evening over the red Formica table, she said, ‘I was looking at this again last night after our conversation.’ She produced a battered De Profundis from a pile by the lamp. There was always a pile of books on their kitchen table. ‘“To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” I can’t help thinking, Hetta, Fred was so pleased and proud when Will was offered the place at King’s. And yet all of that represented an elitism he has set his face against his whole life.’

  I didn’t really understand then what she was getting at. ‘Grandpa meant it for the best.’

  ‘Oh, certainly. Fred always does mean things for the best. But it’s as if his way of not denying his own experience is to expose others to it. I must have been mad not to have stopped him from encouraging Will to go to King’s.’

  I didn’t like this. ‘Granny, Mum and Dad were beside themselves over Will. You and Grandpa were only trying to help.’

  ‘Yes, well, as you know, “The way to hell is paved with good intentions”.’ She had got up to fetch the old round cream-and-green tin, the kind that nowadays fetches pounds in fancy junk shops. ‘Digestive?’ Granny looked young for her seventy-six years but as she offered me the tin her face appeared suddenly aged.

  ‘Are these still Grandpa’s favourites?’

  ‘He claims to prefer custard creams but I draw the line at those.’

  ‘Does he still say, “I’ve lived by the sword and I’ll die by the sword”?’

  ‘He would if I bothered him about his diet. But he’s not diabetic and with all his other complaints why deny him a few indulgences? Anyway, as you know, Fred’s always been his own master.’

  It was true. Grandpa never swerved from what he regarded as right – whether for himself or for the world. And although Granny complained about this, and it had often made her life more trying than it need have been, she also loved him for it. Or maybe I mean she loved him in spite of it. It’s difficult to say because I suspect those two states often merge over time.

  I was aware, anyway, how hard Grandpa’s death would hit her. They’d been together, as she always said, ‘through thick and thin’ almost from the very day she was born. So I felt badly over my tactless outburst on the phone over where Grandpa should be buried because after all it was up to her.

  But she took my objection phlegmatically. ‘He won’t know and besides I like to think of him looking at the sea.’ This is quite typical of Granny: having it both ways.

  It’s a fine old church, Bamburgh, and even an atheist body might welcome its austere hospitality; but it was the graveyard she had in mind. If you stand by the west end of the church and look out, as I did that clear April day when we buried Grandpa, there is an uninterrupted view of the distant horizon, that strange liminal point which our eyes create and has no tangible existence, where the sea meets the sky. And you can hear the call of birds etching the bass line of the sea’s thrash and rumble, and breathe in the freshness of the salt-seaweedy air.

  I had been making to move off with the others to allow Granny a moment of quiet alone but she gestured me back. ‘Listen.’

  Far out, over a sea chopped by wind, a bird was keening. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Curlew, I think. Wait.’

  The forlorn-sounding cry was repeated. Much later that night in bed I remembered her telling me as a child, ‘It’s us, Hetta, who hear the sounds as sad. To a curlew it’s simply curlew.’

  We stood side by side at the grave, listening to the unlamenting curlew as the wind from the sea blew into our faces.

  2

  It is some time before you can erect a stone on a newly dug grave for you must wait until the earth settles. Granny had decided that, when she had chosen a suitable local rock, LR would be engraved there. It was Will’s idea. But that was before Will himself died.

  I had followed Granny’s advice and ignored Cambridge in my university applications. I would have been very happy to get into York or Bristol so I was over the moon to be offered a place, conditional on my A levels, at Oxford, where I had supposed I had badly messed up my interview. I had blushed and sweated, muddled up two Edith Wharton novels, trying to show off my range of reading, misquoted Keats and then revealed that I’d never read Tom Jones but only seen the film. And while the man interviewing me at Wadham had laughed very nicely at that and said, ‘I wish everyone were as candid,’ I was sure I had blown it. He was called Dr Bennet and I discovered much later that it was he who had insisted I be offered a place. I owe him a lot because Wadham was where I found Theo again, or rather where he found me when he came to Oxford to do his Masters in music.

  The news that I had the grades I needed had only just reached me when Cele brought Will up for a visit to Dowlands and seeing him prompted the awful feeling that I have mentioned before, that I’ve had more than my fair share of our family’s luck.

  When she last stayed with us in Paris I summoned up the courage to say something of this to Cele.

  ‘I often think that if you’d not had the affair with Colin I would never have met Theo. It seems …’

  But she stopped me. I should have known better than to mention Colin.

  ‘Hetta, things happen and then because of that other things happen and so on and so on and that isn’t just “the way of life”, as people say. It is what life is.’

  My cousin is less obviously beautiful these days. She’s older and thinner – too thin Theo says – and her expression if not sad is reserved, sealed off. But she still has a luminous quality about her and her eyes will always be that bewitching green.

  She knew what I had been going to say – ‘It seems unfair’ – because it feels to me as if Theo and I have been happy at her expense. Her expense and Will’s.

  They stayed during this visit in Old Moanie’s old room. Cele slept there too in case Will needed help in the night. I was too young not to be afraid of what Will must be feeling at needing her to assist him in such intimate ways and it made me shy with him at what turned out to be our last meeting, which I regret bitterly now. So if I am trying here to set down as much as I can of the complex set of events that we were all involved in, it is in part my attempt at reparation, my effort to make up for what I never said to my brother then, though I am aware that this is quite pointless since he’s not around to know of it and his life anyway cannot now be repaired.

  All memory is partial, or just plain wrong – I take that as a given – and there is much of this period of my life of which I’ve only the haziest recollection and many events that I do not recall at all. If I remember the time of the cousins’ last holiday through a miasma of awkwardness and self-reproach, what I do recall, most vividly, is my last holiday at St Levan.

 
; It was the holiday when I’d just discovered the Romantic poets and I was inwardly preoccupied with saving Coleridge from his drug addiction, a preoccupation which, rather obviously, was connected to my errant brother, though I would have indignantly denied this at the time. My fondness for Coleridge has lasted – so there must have been something more substantial than family psychology, though family psychology can and does lead us to more objective affections. But I can see now that the psychology fits. So perhaps it is to Will that I owe my abiding love of Coleridge, as well as to Granny, who on that same holiday gamely read aloud with me the whole of The Ancient Mariner.

  There was a melancholy feel about that visit, partly because it was goodbye to a place where I had been happy. Being with Granny and Grandpa was a rest from some of the tensions of home, which at the time I felt in my pores but did not fully understand. But the sense of sadness was also because it was the first time I took in the fact that Grandpa’s health was failing. He’d been, as he liked to say, fit as a flea all his life, and for all of my life too, which counted more in my reckoning, and I was taken aback by his frailty and visible decline.

  There was no corresponding failure of his mind. He was more than ever engrossed in his Virgil translation and read me out long passages, which I hope I gave an impression of enjoying and for which I’m grateful now. But his arthritis was affecting his ability to write – Dad once tried to interest him in a computer and he reacted with, ‘I may claim to have some small grasp of Lucretius but in a million years I shall never grasp modern technology’ – and the episodes of atrial fibrillation had, Granny confided, increased.

  My first real apprehension of the indignity of mortality was when I observed Granny undertaking any physically taxing task behind Grandpa’s back. I was at the stage of relishing my youthful strength and was only too pleased to be allowed to help, and they had plenty to pack up. Grandpa was never one for possessions; ‘Possessions,’ he used to say, ‘possess the possessor,’ but Granny had her fair share of the barnacles that cling to us from our past.