Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  Before I agreed to help I had gone to see Will, ostensibly to give him an account, as I explained to Bell, of the funeral.

  ‘Grandpa’s fine,’ I told him. ‘He’s looking out to sea.’

  Will blinked back, ‘Good.’

  I said, ‘I got your message. I’m going to have LR, just the letters, on his stone.’

  ‘Good,’ again.

  ‘And Cecilia has spoken to me. Are you sure, darling, that this is what you want?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You truly want to go?’

  ‘Truly.’

  I had sat and pondered what Cecilia had told me for longer than I could reckon but it was not until the moment my grandson blinked out those letters that I felt sure the decision I had come to was the right one.

  ‘If this is what you truly want, then I will help.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you would like me to do.’

  According to Hetta’s Theo, Will’s last instruction is a version of the prisoner’s dilemma, a proposition from Game Theory, which he has since tried to explain. If I have it correctly, two suspects of a crime who are interrogated separately will be best served if each unswervingly sticks to an agreed account of their innocence. Only if one cracks and accuses the other is that other compromised, in which case the outcome for the compromised prisoner is likely to be a worse punishment than a confession would have drawn.

  What Will said, once more painfully blinking it out – he confined himself to the shortest possible words – was this.

  ‘I do not want C 2 suffer for helping me to an end I wish for.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I hav made C promis 2 deny it. If C denies it and u are also here and u deny it 2 I do not think police wil hav a case.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘If C denies she has done this wil u deny that u no wot she has done? I can not let her do it if u will not agree.’

  ‘I have one question, darling. What about your parents?’

  ‘Must never tell them.’

  ‘I shan’t. But your father is my son and they will mind terribly.’

  ‘I can not liv for wot they mind.’

  The best laid plans … Even the most talented generals may find that their theoretical stratagems are bested by the accidents of reality, and I doubt that Will ever considered what sticking to the story he had devised might be like for us. We loved him. And he loved us. But I cannot pretend he thought much about the comfort of those he loved.

  Police officers are skilled questioners. They employ a variety of techniques, designed to break resistance down. Marion’s husband, who, before he fled to England, was involved with the French Resistance, once described to me what it was like to be questioned by the Gestapo. He said it was the sympathetic Nazi who nearly did for him. Not that the police were anything like Nazis, you understand. I was an old woman and they treated me with the greatest courtesy. But for all that, I was invited, quite subtly, to betray my granddaughter. It was as if, they implied, I would be doing her a good turn by relieving her of the guilt that she must be feeling. I played the poor old widow woman card for all it was worth because, as Hetta said afterwards, I was after all an old widow woman, and sometimes the truth is our best disguise. But it was an ordeal.

  Five days we spent sticking to our story, and five nights Cecilia and I spent in that unlovely hotel to which we’d retreated because, apart from my thinking it would be too much for her to be where Will died, it meant we could speak freely. Bell, of course, was in the dark. I’ve often wondered what she has made of it all since.

  As I lay in bed with my arms round my granddaughter, I found myself in conversation with Fred.

  It was as well that he was out of it. With age he had become uncharacteristically anxious and Will’s death and all that followed, all that I could see was going to follow, would have set him worrying. But it was not the physically eroded man I conversed with that night but the old antinomian warrior, the Fred I had so often chided for acting out of his blessed conscience and defying the prevailing rules. In my mind, there is no doubt that the spirit lives on, if only in the hearts and minds of those left behind, the survivors, and I have an idea that a person’s spirit might be heard more truly once the flesh is left behind.

  ‘Tell me what I should do, Fred. Advise me.’

  Over the nights we spent at that hotel, Cecilia had unburdened herself of the details of the whole miserable business. She had obtained the barbiturates from a prescription made out for a man who had subsequently moved away, which had never been collected and which, over a year back, while still working at the surgery she had taken, under Will’s instruction, to be dispensed at a pharmacy outside London, pretending that it was on this patient’s behalf. That was about the time that Will had begun to implore her more pressingly for her help. The evening he died, after I had kissed him goodbye and left them together in his room, acting under his instructions she had ground the pills down and mixed them with water and a little wine. But his ability to swallow had never fully recovered and in the stress of the moment he had had trouble swallowing the lethal concoction down.

  Will had anticipated that this might be the case and had decreed that if there was a problem with his swallowing, when he had ingested enough of the drug to knock him out, as he put it, she should smother him with a plastic bag. He did not, he declared, want his plan to go off ‘at half-cock’.

  When I think of Will now, it is often of him saying ‘at half-cock’ in his fierce voice, though of course he never spoke these words aloud.

  By this time, Cecilia had disposed of the tell-tale pill bottle, though not before the snooping Noreen had clocked it, as we were to learn. And the plastic bag was then still to be recovered by the police from the rubbish bin, where she had put it after having rinsed it out and filled it with used tea leaves. Too late to suggest that she would have done better to burn it. If only I had not gone as I was bidden to my bedroom and been there to advise.

  I had been told the bare bones of their plan in advance, but hearing from her of the lonely decision to use the bag, her last farewells to an unconscious Will, and then having to peel the evidence off his dead face and wash the bag out, was so appalling that I asked why in heaven’s name she hadn’t called on me for help.

  ‘We thought the less you knew the better if you were questioned. Ignorance is bliss.’

  ‘Hardly bliss, darling, in this case.’

  ‘I wanted to do it alone, Granny. Really. It was right.’

  Which only went to convince me more than ever that Will was right to insist that Cecilia make him that promise never to admit to what she had done.

  As my granddaughter sobbed weakly in my arms, the faint intimations of what must be done began to form in my mind. I had at that time not bargained for Noreen; none of us had. But my bones told me the police strongly suspected who had helped Will to die, who in fact had killed him – because she had done more than assist or abet his death, she had bravely snuffed the life out of him. Carrying out the deed, God knows, should be punishment enough.

  She fell asleep at long last and I lay hearing her occasional fretful murmurs against the insistent background whine from which London is never free. I called up the many long years with Fred, wishing again – I had wished this so often latterly – that I had been kinder to him. Not that I was ever unkind exactly. But there was some small element of understanding that I was aware I had denied him.

  And I considered again those years with my little Nat and how the long shadow of his death had fallen on my poor Will and my poor Cecilia. And all the while the ancient well-worn words ran through my head, the sins of the fathers … Those biblical authors, when they weren’t fanatical zealots, or list-makers and lawgivers, were shrewd psychologists.

  When I went up to Northumberland to bury Fred, the night before the funeral Nat’s friend Eddie called at the hotel where he had discovered from Bell t
hat I was staying. He and Bell clearly hit it off.

  He had come, he said, to ‘pay his respects’ and I laughed at that and said, ‘Oh Eddie, pet, don’t be so formal,’ because, after all, when he was a littlie I had often wiped his nose and his bottom clean. Not that I mentioned this. It strikes me that it is one of those matters which must inhibit men, when they have to deal later in life with the women who have tended to them: the fact that they were once seen by them in a state so nakedly vulnerable.

  I made tea from the hotel kettle and offered Eddie a ginger nut, unable to prevent the thought that Fred would have enjoyed these – and he relaxed somewhat and we chatted awhile about his life in London.

  I’d gleaned from Bev’s regular Christmas cards that he’d done well and I was always pleased at this news. Bell had mentioned to me that he’d spoken about Nat when he stayed with her for his interview for his London job and I had hoped from her words that Eddie might perhaps renew his acquaintance with us. I had not been surprised that we’d heard nothing – it would have been hard for him and maybe he feared too hard for us to want to rehearse old miseries. But he must have decided a moment had come to speak. Death does that. It opens sealed doors.

  ‘Your Bell was saying you maybe had an idea that Jack’s making that daft climb had something to do with, you know, his other mum and all that.’

  ‘I’ve always felt so.’

  ‘Or something to do with his dad, you know, being a CO.’

  ‘That too. There was this vile other student who we think taunted Nat …’

  He interrupted me. ‘I don’t think it was that either. I think more likely he was proving something to me.’

  ‘It’s nice of you to say so, Eddie.’

  He frowned and said, ‘I’m not. Being nice, I mean. I should have said before. But, I don’t know …’

  ‘It was a difficult time for us all,’ I said.

  ‘But you came to see me up in Seahouses and I didn’t say. You ought to know that he did think of you as his mum. He knew his … his other mum had left him, left him with you to look after him. Really, he wasn’t angry with you for long. It wasn’t that.’

  I noted how he had avoided saying ‘his real mum’ or ‘his natural mum’. He was always a sensitive boy, Eddie.

  ‘Thank you, Eddie. That really is kind.’

  ‘No, it’s true. I mean it. He loved you. And his dad. He was proud of his dad. Really proud. I mean it,’ he said again. ‘I mean, yes, it was a shock discovering, you know, he was Jewish. But he did understand, I mean about your husband. He didn’t, oh, I don’t know. He didn’t blame him. I’d have known.’

  We sat quietly together for a spell. I could hear the sheep mindlessly bleating in the fields outside. Maybe this is why children unable to sleep used to be urged to count them. There is something settling to the nerves about the sheer woolliness of sheep.

  Then Eddie said, ‘There were these stones we found together, me and Jack, on the beach down here. I found this one in that toy seal he had. The one, you know, your granddaughter found at Dowlings, sorry, I mean Dowlands. Jack used to post things we found as kids inside it.’

  He produced something from his pocket. ‘They call them friendship stones. We had one each. I thought you might like this one.’

  I took from his hand a small dark grey stone, with a hole worn through by the long action of the sea.

  ‘This was Nat’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it was in that seal, the one Cecilia had, that Margaret made?’

  ‘We, me and Nat, used to post bits and pieces inside it. I saw it at Bell’s when I stayed and I took it. I shouldn’t have done. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize, you know, that it was still wanted but I wanted to see what was maybe inside. I gave the seal back, but I kept the stone because, well … Anyway, I reckon Jack’d want you to have it now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said again. ‘Thank you, Eddie. I shall treasure it.’

  We sat some more in silence and when he got up I thought it was to leave and moved towards the door. But instead he walked over to the window and looked out.

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘Of course. Please, whatever you like.’

  Dusk was falling and as he turned I could see behind his head the tea-rose flush of the sky above the hill outside. His face was in shadow so I couldn’t see his expression.

  ‘It’s about your grandson.’

  ‘Will?’

  ‘You know that book? About the climbers?’

  His face was obscured still but I heard the anxiety in his voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, Eddie, I don’t know. What book?’

  ‘The Night Climbers of Cambridge. You know that Jack …’

  ‘The book Will had in his room?’ Hetta had shown it to me. She’d collected it when we cleared Will’s bits and bobs from King’s.

  ‘It gave the moves of the climb Jack was making, you know, up King’s. I bought it because I wanted to see where he went wrong. D’you see?’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘See, I had this obsession that it wouldn’t have happened – I mean I could’ve helped Jack if I’d been there.’

  ‘Oh Eddie.’

  ‘But, you see, that book, I think Will got hold of that book through me. His friend gave it to him.’

  ‘What friend, Eddie?’

  ‘He’s called Harvey. He’s not a friend. He’s a bad’un.’

  I had heard of this Harvey from Hetta and hadn’t cared for the sound of him.

  ‘Will was fascinated by Jack. He used to come to see me to ask me about him. There are pictures, photos in the book. I think having that book’s what took him up there, Will, that night. To see it, you see? Where Jack died.’

  ‘Eddie, come here.’

  I held him and he wept, and I wept, because we none of us knew what had really happened, to Nat, to Will, to ourselves. We don’t know. We think we know, but we don’t.

  I had Nat’s stone with me as we buried Fred. And it was in the pocket of my trousers while the police questioned me. From time to time I fingered it and its smooth resilience helped to hold me fast – stonily fast – to my appointed task. Which was to refute, stoutly and categorically, any suggestion that I knew how Will had died, or that I had reason to believe that my granddaughter had had any part in his death.

  The little grey relic was by the bed that last night, the night before they arrested Cecilia, and once I was sure she was asleep I gently detached my arm from around her shoulders, picked up Nat’s stone and walked over to the window.

  When I moved aside the heavy curtain, which stank of a foul room spray, I could see low bars of light already impressed across the bleak London sky. I observed them without pleasure. Light can look very minatory.

  I was visited by a profound sense of shame. All these years a silent tribunal in my heart had judged Fred, had held him to blame for what had happened. And he may have been quite blameless after all. Nat may have died through no more than youthful folly and recklessness. It was possible it was the discovery of our deception that had unbalanced him. But it was possible too that Eddie’s guess was right and that the fatal climb was a piece of daring, a rash bit of showing off to his oldest pal. I would never know. How far more likely it was that my own derelictions towards my other children had led to the catastrophe of Will. I had never outwardly abandoned them but they had felt my absence; both in their differing ways had been misshapen by it. And, in turn, those absences had defined the lives of their children, the cousins who had loved each other.

  Even in that love they were unlucky as a result of my own luck – for I knew now that I had been lucky in my marriage to Fred. Had we not been cousins, Cecilia and Will might well have had the courage to embrace their own love. Or Cecilia might have done.

  Because as I stood that morning by the window, watching the bars of light bleed into a tangerine-and-shocking-pink-skeined sky, it belatedly came to me that it w
as she of course who, of the two of them, must have been the one who held back. Will, like his grandfather before him, would have entertained no such conventional qualms. It must have contributed to her odd flight to Alec, that and her part in Will’s attack on Colin, which had plainly scared her. These were the silent burdens she had been bearing since Will’s fall. It was why she felt she must at any cost help him.

  Like everything else in London, dawn comes on at a pace. Traffic was already groaning in the streets below and I could hear along the corridor the faint bustle and chatter of hotel staff. Someone in the next room had ordered breakfast. I thought to follow their example and had bathed and dressed and put down the phone, having ordered coffee for two in our room, when it rang loudly, making me start, and I was told that there were two police officers in the lobby and that they were waiting, when she was ready, for Mrs McCowan.

  5

  On that terrible day in September, when the police came and took away my darling granddaughter, I saw to the practical things. I set great store by attention to the practical because, if nothing else, it composes the mind. And my mind was dearly in need of composure. I rang Giles, and Giles agreed that the old family firm, stalwart as they had been, was not best equipped to help us through this calamity. On Giles’s recommendation, Bolton’s, a firm famed for criminal defence, was accordingly instructed. That done, and with no other distracting duties, I had my thoughts to attend to, to untangle and recast.

  Cecilia had confided that she and Will had found each other again in the National Gallery. It was a long time since I had been there myself and with no other guide to follow than my own inclinations I took a bus to Trafalgar Square.

  I have a fondness for Nelson on his column and for the general ambience of that island, with its lions and fountains, amid the London traffic, and on another day, in a different mood, I might have lingered there. But it was dead cold, the sky was that bitter white that offers no solace, so I hurried across the square, with no more than a nod to the lions, into the sanctuary of the gallery’s warmth.

  I drifted through the long rooms, marking anew the magnificent wealth of the offerings and reassured, as if by meeting sympathetic friends, to encounter old favourites: the Wilton Diptych with its heavenly blue angels, Tobias with Raphael and his scrappy little dog, the imposing Man with the Blue Sleeve who in any fight one would want on one’s side.