Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  We sent Grandpa to his study, to be out of our hair, while I heaved boxes of books, which they stubbornly refused to cull, took down ragged curtains and tried to help Granny decide what ought to be jettisoned – difficult, as she was brought up in an era when waste was considered a crime worse than theft and she insisted that the most decrepit and beaten-up articles be preserved. Her ‘holey relics’, Grandpa called them.

  The most arduous task was dealing with the mounds of dusty papers, which had been left untouched for years. The amount of paper we must have burned – at least four bonfires, late at night to avoid annoying the neighbours, with me toasting, on a pea stick, the aged marshmallows I’d found hoarded in the larder from God knew how many Christmases past. Not even the pea sticks were to be sacrificed for the move.

  I wish now I had bothered to take time to sort through those papers which may have held secrets sadly long gone up in smoke. But we did at least sort all Granny’s notebooks, her more personal letters and her diaries into chronological order and stored them in the old boxes she had retained from her mother’s time and in the ship’s captain’s portable desk, which she says is one day to be mine. The accounts you have read couldn’t have been written without them.

  At the back of a high cupboard, jammed with junk – an old ballet tutu of Bell’s that was shedding sequins, a set of wooden ninepin soldiers with two soldiers missing, a single croquet mallet, six ancient tennis racquets, two bicycle bells, assorted boots, the leather mud-caked and cracking, and, most unfathomably, since we could think of no one who could have had a use for it, a child’s crutch – I discovered, while balancing precariously on the top of some dangerously wobbly steps, a black tin box which revealed rather more valuable salvage. Among this was the scarab ring which I have on my desk because it’s too fragile to wear. It belonged to Granny’s godmother, Nancy, who left her Staresnest, and she gave it to me as a thank you, ‘You should have this, Hetta, as Beetle’s child.’ I’d not known till then how Dad came to be called Beetle.

  Also in the box was a silver watch and chain that had belonged to Granny’s father, which she asked me to take to London for Will, and with it, for Cele, a gold locket of Great-Granny Maud’s, which opened to reveal a four-leafed shamrock, along with a scrap of paper on which was written in faded brown ink M & G, Mourne, 1918.

  I arrived bearing these historic gifts at Bell’s flat to the immediate aftermath of Will’s attack on Colin. The row had left Bell uncharacteristically nervy. She was smoking, though she had, on my last visit, informed me that she was giving it up because of her fear of wrinkles, and almost her first words to me were, ‘Hetta, darling, can you help me with this lot?’

  And there and then, between us we lugged the rug he had bled all over all the way down Kensington High Street to the Oxfam shop.

  When we got back from offloading the contaminated items Bell said, ‘I need a drink, would you like one, dear?’ She would have been well aware that I was permitted only a token glass of wine at Christmas.

  The return home was a return to the ignominy of being a schoolgirl. My parents must have been trying to protect me from any further family tempests, because I was mostly shielded from news of the charges being brought against Will. What they didn’t know was that Bell had described Will’s assault on Colin, accompanied by dramatic gestures where our cargo permitted, while we were lugging the bloodied rug down the high street. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to censor anything out of regard for my age.

  Nor would it have occurred to her that I was ignorant of the details of Cele’s affair with Colin, which she also described as we walked back along the high street. She was furious with Colin, and, which I didn’t quite appreciate at the time, furious with herself for exposing Cele to him.

  I had been fobbed off with some watered-down version of events by my mother. Scampering after my aunt, I heard with fascination that my cousin had been expelled for a dangerous sexual liaison. If this was disturbing it was also exciting. More so than the news that Will had been in a fight. He’d been getting into fights all his life and the fact that this had caused bloodshed was nothing new to me – I’d witnessed bloodied noses and bruises countless times. But knowing what I did about his relationship with Cele I did wonder what was going to become of them.

  3

  The first clear memory I have of anything to do with Cele’s marriage was over the Christmas that followed it.

  Will had resumed his degree that October. He was in his second year when he was sent down and part of the punishment was that he had to go back and retake the year. Harvey, having completed his final year, ‘should by rights have buzzed off’, as Bell remarked, and while nothing overt was said you could tell that my parents were not best pleased when Will appeared that Christmas accompanied by his old friend.

  If Harvey was there it was maybe because his was a familiar figure in a probably humiliating return to Cambridge for Will. And no doubt part of Harvey’s pull, as Theo says, was his apprehension of the side of Will drawn to risk and danger. Harvey used this. Got off on it probably.

  And he got off, too, on his ability to hit just the wrong note, to unsettle people. It was during the Christmas Eve dinner that he threw into the general festive chatter a spanner he must have been saving for this purpose. ‘And how is Mrs McCowan the doctor’s wife faring?’

  There was something shocking about hearing Cele’s married name, especially from Harvey. Everyone instinctively averted their gaze from Will. Dad, being Dad, ignored what had been said but betrayed his discomfort by scraping back his chair on the unforgiving flags to get up and open a window. Mum, who was always better at confrontation, waved the carving knife and said briskly, ‘She’s very well from what we hear. More goose, Harvey?’

  Granny always says that no one is ever really ‘the one’ and that this is youth’s delusion. A ‘pop song fantasy’ she calls it. But I would like to believe that I am the one for Theo, as he is for me. And that the same was true of Cele and Will. But I believe that it is also the case that Cele loved Alec, if in a different register.

  Alec promised security. Not the security of money and creature comforts, of the kind that had tempted Bell, but steadfastness and quite possibly admiration. Cele had never been made fully alive to her own loveliness, another consequence of being the child of a beauty. Alec was enchanted by her. I doubt if Will had ever thought of paying her a compliment or took much conscious notice of her beauty.

  And you have to remember that Cele was Bell’s child. She had never had a home to call her own and was living with Alec already, and this may have seemed to settle something for her, after a life that had been one of unsettlement. It looked like a finality, and finalities, good or bad, offer a promise of calm.

  Theo, who has the French enthusiasm for philosophy, once tried to explain to me the concept of moral luck.

  ‘It goes like this, Hetta,’ – when Theo explains anything he conveys the ideas with a pencil, which he waves about like his conductor’s baton – ‘you see, it was morally OK for Gauguin to leave his wife and children and go off to Tahiti because out of that came great art.’

  ‘I don’t personally regard Gauguin’s art as all that great.’ This was early in our renewed relationship and I was still, rather pathetically, trying to keep my cultural end up.

  ‘OK, Picasso then. Picasso was a shit but …’

  ‘I don’t like him much, either,’ I said. ‘I prefer Matisse.’

  He put the pencil down, looking hurt. ‘Now you are being deliberately dense, Henrietta.’

  I was. And although I grew out of trying to best Theo because I felt inferior, it is still not an idea that persuades me. But if the idea is worth anything then you would have to agree that Cele suffered from moral ill luck.

  It was a conversation about this with Theo that led to my trying to set all this down. As the grandson of Granny’s great friend Marion, he already knew some of the score.

  ‘From what my grand-maman
says, there’s an interesting history there, your family. Your grand-papa, for instance. His political views are worth recording. He went to jail, no?’

  Too late to ask Grandpa now what he had felt was worth losing his liberty for. ‘I wish I’d asked him more about all that.’

  ‘But there is your grand-maman. She will talk to you. It seems to me worth doing if only for yourself, Hetta. All that stuff swept under the carpet.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I can ask Cele.’

  ‘You can ask. She can only refuse.’

  But when, very apprehensive, I broached the prospect, Cele said in her cool voice, ‘Do what you like, Hetta. You know I trust you.’

  The next time I saw her she handed me some letters and notebooks. ‘You might as well have these. I was going to burn them.’ And when I began to speak, ‘No, please, do what you like with them. I never want to see them again.’

  I left the letters and notebooks unread in my desk drawer for some time. I was a minor sufferer in my family’s collective injury and I felt reluctant to pick at any scab. But one day, when Theo had gone down to Avignon to organize a concert, I turned on the radio and heard someone playing the sax so eloquently that my eyes filled with tears. It brought Will to mind, that day I saw him in Bell’s flat, when he was still his old self and had a chance to find another kind of life – to get away.

  I made myself a large cafetière of coffee and sat down on the old green leather sofa, where I had once sat as a shy schoolchild, and began to read my cousin’s notebooks. Sad, sad reading. And if I ever divulge the content to a wider audience it can only be when – but I don’t know when. When no one can be hurt any further by them, I suppose.

  Her letters to Will are naked in their pleas for his understanding. Equally painful are his replies. Most poignant is his awful stab at being Humphrey Bogart.

  Reading Will’s ‘“I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”’ made me weep all over again because we don’t live in films with bittersweet endings, however much it might flatter our picture of ourselves to quote from them. Will was right, he wasn’t any good at being noble.

  At some point, I remember, Cele said to me, ‘The worst thing, you know, Hetta, is that Alec would have let me go, ever so nobly. He was like that.’ And when I mentioned this to Theo he said, ‘That was her trying to be noble by not wanting to seem to abandon Alec. Don’t ever try to be noble with me, will you, Hetta?’

  As I sat on the Bazinets’ sofa, attempting to take all this in, what seemed to me most touching was the revelation of how hard my brother tried. He tried to hang on, he tried not to complain, he tried, and this for me was the strongest proof of his love, to put himself in her shoes but with such a strained jocularity that it made me flinch when I read it. He did his best, or tried to, and as Granny always said to us about exams, ‘You can only do your best, or try to.’ But on another occasion, when Grandpa was digging in his heels about something, she said to me, ‘Never try to push anyone beyond their limits, Hetta.’

  We don’t know our own limits so how can we judge the limits of others? And what it is easy to forget is that they were so young. Too young to bear all those horribly complicated family strains. I guess Will’s resolve snapped. Or maybe all my speculations have nothing to do with it at all. Maybe, in the way that people often stuff themselves with cream cake and chocolate before embarking on a diet, Will was treating himself to a last hedonistic binge before his new life with Cele began. I don’t like to suppose that was the case, but then I am a romantic.

  4

  On the night of the total lunar eclipse in September 1996 I had gone with friends down to the beach by St Aidan’s Dunes, where we made an illicit fire and drank cheap wine and smoked and danced and mucked about in the sea. A couple of the boys got thrown in and more than one couple went off into the dunes. I gather the idea was to have sex in tandem with the rare celestial conjunction.

  I had no such ambition. School was over for good at last and I was looking forward to a year out, away from the over-scrutinizing regard of my mother and my father’s lowering moods.

  I was tired of home, tired of school, tired of my friends, tired even of Northumberland. The shadow of the earth, so precisely crossing the pale luminous disc that was weirdly recast upon the glinting surface of the sea, seemed to herald some portentous new chapter in my own history.

  I had started to write poetry again. So I ignored the amorous invitation of Rick Stannock, for whom only a few months earlier I would have walked barefoot to Berwick, electing instead to go home to try to convey in words the elusive magic of what I had seen. I reread my efforts recently. I would never have made a poet.

  But either the effect of the moon or the prospect of my coming liberation left me wakeful that night and it seemed as if I had barely slept when brilliant sunlight roused me the following morning.

  I’ve always been an early riser, even with little sleep I have never been able to stay in bed. So I biked into Bamburgh to get the papers.

  I was reading a review in the Guardian when the phone rang. And this time I had no precognition.

  Dad answered in the hall and perhaps because by now I was out of the habit of monitoring my parents, I caught nothing sinister in his voice.

  He must have gone upstairs to Mum, who was still in bed. I finished reading the paper and was halfway up to the Blue Room but hearing a sudden awful wail turned into their bedroom.

  My mother was sitting up in bed holding her face in her hands.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Oh, Hetta …’

  ‘What? What, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, Hetta. Will is dead.’

  I don’t remember what I said. I think I simply went over to the bed and we held each other. Dad too, the three of us clutched in a huddle.

  It was Granny who had rung. Will, she said, had been found that morning in his chair. They were waiting for Dr Li, the GP friend of Bell’s who had always seen to Will. They thought, Granny said, that perhaps Will had choked. Will had recovered some of his ability to swallow but it was precarious. I had watched him choking when he and Cele had stayed with us when she brought him up for that visit to Dowlands, and it had scared me.

  We left immediately for London. Graham was away. As we now know, he was off with his PA, which, given all that happened next, was maybe just as well. Dr Li, who had been to examine Will, had left by the time we arrived.

  My brother was still in his chair, very pale, but his face which had been freakishly twisted when I had seen him last looked at peace to my apprehensive gaze and, while I am aware that that is a corny phrase, I cannot find one more apt. I was a bit in fear of touching a dead body but I managed to stroke his face and kiss the top of his head and then I laid my cheek on his hair – his hair was dark and curly, as Bell used to say like a black lamb’s. It smelled of the old Will, I remember that. He hadn’t smelled good when I had seen him last.

  I left Mum and Dad alone with him in his room and went to look for Cele. She had met us wordlessly on our arrival but had disappeared off with Granny and only Bell was about.

  It’s Theo’s view that our family has been hard on Bell. She wasn’t much use when it came to her daughter but she was very generous to Will. It must have been dreadful for her, his dying there. Mum in particular, as I came to see, resented it and still punishes her.

  Bell was generous to me too. And this is an odd thing to say, because by all normal standards she was selfish. But it was a selfishness which, while it put her own comfort first, didn’t make the mistake of imagining that the rest of the world would.

  She greeted me that day with a characteristic ‘Hetta, dear, this must be utterly, utterly bloody for you. I’m so sorry.’ She was smoking and she hadn’t bothered to put on mascara. I’d never actually seen Bell without mascara before and I thought, in that absurd way you do when there are matters too huge
to take in, that she needn’t really have bothered with make-up because her cat’s eyes looked as lovely, maybe more lovely, unadorned.

  I sat down beside her while she sat and smoked. At one point she said, ‘I’m sorry, dear, would you like one?’ meaning a cigarette, and I said, ‘I don’t smoke,’ although I did. We all did. I suppose she knew that.

  After a bit someone rang the doorbell and three men arrived and Will was taken away. It turned out they were undertakers, funeral directors as I believe they are called, and perhaps that is not such a stupid name since death, unquestionably, as I observed that day, is a drama. It’s not for nothing they call it ‘the theatre of war’.

  We all sat about not knowing what to say. Cele looked dreadful, deathly pale, and I saw she was shaking. Granny had an arm round her and at some point took her off again to lie down. Dad, who had spent some time with Will’s body, announced that we three would need to find a hotel.

  ‘You must let me pay,’ Bell said, and when Dad began to demur, ‘Beetle, do let me, please.’

  He must have accepted because we spent the night in a fantastically grand hotel overlooking Kensington Gardens, with vast vistas of carpet and dangling chandeliers. Only much, much later did I realize that it was the very same hotel where Bell had held her wedding reception. The rooms had that viciously efficient air conditioning which bites the skin and froze me to the bone, and not knowing how to turn it off, and feeling the need for comfort, late that night I knocked on my parents’ door. Mum was still up. She held me to her and her nightie was wet with tears.

  The next morning Dad had a call. Will’s death had been reported as being from ‘unexplained causes’ which meant that his body had been sent for examination by a pathologist. And from that point everything became terrifying.