Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  I had come not to look but to reflect, and reflection is immeasurably improved by the right surroundings, but nonetheless passing through a room of van Dycks I stopped before a painting I had not noticed before.

  A wide canvas, with a blue bird-crossed sky at its centre, above a lake running to a gushing waterfall, artfully framed by feathery green-brown trees. Clustered upon the hills beyond and nestling by the waterside were all the animals of the ark, except it was not the ark and the human figure, placed slightly off-centre to draw the eye, was assuredly not Noah.

  A young man in a rich red robe is seated easily on the ground, his feet casually bare, as if he might have come from paddling in the nearby water where ducks are splashing. By his side, in a companionable sort of way, sits a pelican and by the pelican recline two lions. The young man is playing a stringed instrument.

  I inspected the label. Orpheus by Roelandt Savery, a Flemish artist I had never heard of.

  There are comfortably padded benches for the bottoms of weary visitors in the rooms of the National Gallery, and I plumped down on one and considered the painting.

  It was not too far a stretch into my memory to recover Orpheus. Orpheus and his lyre (for which Savery appeared to have substituted a viol) whose playing was so hauntingly beautiful that it calmed the breasts of wild animals. Orpheus, who lost his dead love for eternity by faltering, faltering and looking back. I do not believe in mystic signs or emblems but I do believe that in certain circumstances we are given a sight of what it is that is needed.

  Error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that falters …

  6

  The solicitor from Bolton’s who had replaced the courteous Anu was cut from very different cloth. Sharply dressed, well made-up, the steely-looking Shama Bhatti arrived at the police station perched on very high heels. It was a situation that required steel. She argued, after Cecilia was formally charged, that her ‘client’ was both harmless to the public and a serious suicide risk and, on the grounds that she would be with me, her most respectable grandmother, Cecilia was released back into my care.

  I was thankful my granddaughter had been spared a night in a police cell for, looking at her wan face and bruised eyes, I was not at all sure she would be able to hold out for long.

  And the thing was, Cecilia would willingly have gone to prison. She longed to confess, to get the whole terrible business off her chest and out of the way. The idea of prison, she kept repeating, seemed welcoming – to be put away, out of it all, to be left alone. But she had given that solemn promise to Will. She had not faltered. She had done as her beloved cousin asked.

  We spent one further fraught long night in that hotel before she was due to appear at the magistrates’ court. The child’s body in bed that night was so cold. I never knew another living human being so cold. But the court appearance was thankfully brief. As we had been warned, the case was referred to the Old Bailey and we were advised it would take months to be heard there. Shama was again splendidly persuasive. Cecilia was deemed sufficiently safe to the community and unsafe to herself not to be remanded in custody. Recognizance was granted, and with the court’s agreement Cecilia came to Ely with me. As she said, she never wanted to go near Bell’s flat again as long as she lived.

  I will say this for Bell: she did finally do what was needed for her daughter. I imagine she could have had the funds for Cecilia’s defence from Graham but instead she decided to sell Staresnest.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, Mum?’ she asked.

  I’d almost forgotten Staresnest had ever been mine. ‘Of course not, darling. It’s very good of you.’

  ‘No, Mum. It isn’t good of me.’ She was aghast at what might happen to her daughter but I think too she was somewhat admiring of her.

  While Bell, with Robert, who I was glad to see had reappeared, was off seeing to the sale, Cecilia and I spent some days together in Ely alone. Alec drove from London once to see her. I don’t know what was said, and I didn’t ask, but they went for a long walk together and when he left to return to London he shook hands with me very formally and thanked me for looking after her. I never saw Alec again after that day. He was a kind man and loyal and I feel sure he would have stayed to be with Cecilia had she wanted that.

  Cecilia and I spoke very little of what she had done for Will, as if by keeping it to ourselves, between ourselves, we were keeping the knowledge from a more dangerous audience. She looked ill and I was constantly aware of what an enormous task Will had laid on her.

  One morning, over the Formica table, she said, ‘The solicitor has asked me to write a statement for Mr Baines. I don’t know what to say.’

  I had not at this point communicated personally with Cuthbert Baines, who came highly recommended by Giles, but I too had been asked for a statement.

  ‘Say just as I shall – that you were asleep. That you saw and heard nothing. I shall back you up.’

  ‘It’s harder than I expected.’

  ‘I know, lamb. But hang on.’

  Although Giles and I had not kept up after our Cambridge days I had occasionally read in the Guardian about his civil rights cases and had had oddments of news from Marion. It was Marion who gave me his details and, knowing in advance of Will’s plan, I had made sure to get in touch myself.

  It was partly to ask him about Cuthbert Baines that I decided to invite Giles to dinner. I would have gone to London to see him – as a matter of fact I would have gone to the moon to see him – but he claimed to have business in Cambridge anyway, so in the end we met at a pub in Grantchester.

  When he walked in I recognized him at once. To my eye, he had hardly changed.

  He must have recognized me too because he hailed me with, ‘Did we come here as students? I don’t recollect.’

  ‘I don’t remember ever coming to Grantchester as a student. I came as a schoolgirl. Did I ever tell you? I came out here with my mother to meet Frances Cornford.’

  ‘If you did I’ve forgotten. Don’t you find that one of the joys of age is that you can be fascinated all over again by ancient news?’

  And I had forgotten how much I had enjoyed conversations with Giles. ‘It’s good to see you, Giles.’

  ‘It’s good to see you too, Betsy, though I’m sorry it has to be in such beastly circumstances. So tell me,’ he said, after we’d ordered bangers and mash with wine for him but only water for me because I was driving, ‘how are things? Is old Cuthbert doing his stuff?’

  ‘I’ve not met him. He wants me to write a statement.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll meet him. He’s a canny old bird and he likes to get a feel for his witnesses. If you were there, in media res, he’ll be sure to want to hear your angle. Is she sticking with the not guilty plea?’

  I shrugged, hoping to steer him away from this. ‘What else can she do?’

  ‘I suppose that rather depends.’

  Giles always did lack Marion’s tact but he had enough not to spell this implication out.

  ‘She can’t plead guilty, Giles, for something she didn’t do.’

  ‘I seem to recall a passionate conversation – what, sixty-odd years ago? – when someone suggested she would be prepared to do just that.’

  ‘How funny you remembering that. But you haven’t quite got it right. What I said was that if I had to be hanged I’d rather be hanged for a crime I hadn’t committed.’

  ‘And Marion said you were off your rocker. Have you seen her lately? She’s gone blonde.’

  ‘You always said that Marion’s hair was her crowning glory.’

  ‘Did I say that? I seem to recollect it was you I was smitten by.’

  ‘Flatterer!’ He wasn’t at all. But it was not unpleasant to hear this.

  ‘But to be serious, what your granddaughter should take on board, I mean Cuthbert’ll see to this but so that you know, is that a plea of not guilty goes down badly with a jury – and with the judge – if there’s any solid proof to the contrary. I
just make the point.’

  ‘The police don’t have much.’

  ‘They must have enough to satisfy the CPS that the charge would run.’

  ‘The only thing that points solely to Cecilia is the word of a snooping carer who claims she saw some pills in her drawer. Bell says she was a thief anyway.’

  ‘Cuthbert will make mincemeat of her testimony if that’s true.’

  ‘Apparently she correctly identified the kind of pills they were.’

  ‘He could swallow then?’

  ‘It looks as if there was a plastic bag.’

  Giles pulled a face. ‘So is the charge murder?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘That’s not so good. There’s a statutory term for murder. See what Cuthbert says but I would advise a guilty plea. It’s a mercy killing and the judge can amend the sentence.’

  ‘But she’s not guilty.’

  ‘So these pills were innocent?’

  Which is when my half-formed plan crystallized.

  ‘Might I have some of your wine after all please, Giles?’ While Giles was gesturing at the waitress to bring another wine glass I rapidly composed my story. My memory is not what it was but luckily my wits are still fairly sharp. ‘As a matter of fact, I think they may have been my pills. Or Fred’s rather.’

  Giles, who was pouring the wine, looked at me over his glasses. ‘What were Fred’s drugs doing there?’

  ‘He was on barbiturates for years. They dished them out like sweeties then, and he got, what d’you call it?’

  ‘Addicted?’

  ‘Acclimatized was the word I was searching for. The GP never suggested his not taking them.’

  ‘Probably he assumed Fred was on the way out anyway so it didn’t matter.’

  I was actually amused by this but it allowed me to assume an air of being slightly affronted.

  ‘Fred can’t have been addicted. For the last months, he had stopped taking his sleeping pills, partly thanks to Will. When Will and Cecilia were younger Fred got them on to his Aeneid translation.’

  ‘I’d forgotten he was a classicist.’

  ‘He always taught a Latin class while he was running the Birkbeck programme, to keep his hand in, he used to say. But he really went back to it when he retired. He never said so, but I think it was his way of detaching himself from a political system that had let him down.’

  I’d not really analysed this before, but talking to Giles I became aware that I had felt embarrassment for Fred at the collapse of Communism and all it had seemed to offer.

  Giles waved his wine glass in the air. ‘Here’s to Fred. I wish I had such energy. I doubt I could read the Aeneid these days, let alone translate it.’

  ‘Oh, Fred’s intellectual energy never flagged.’

  ‘And did he finish his translation? I’d like to see it.’

  ‘He did. And, being Fred, he was already preparing to start on the Georgics. He said the pills were making his mind woolly. But I went on collecting his prescription, just in case.’

  ‘Yah. But the police will ask what they were doing in Cecilia’s drawer.’

  ‘I used to take one from time to time, after Fred died when I had trouble sleeping. I must have left them at Bell’s when I stayed there the time before last. They always insisted on putting me in Cecilia’s room.’

  And the great virtue of this was that by and large it was true. There were a few of his pills left over when Fred died. Who was to say how many? Despite what I had suggested to Giles, the truth was that Fred had relied on the drugs to the day he died and his mind remained as sharp as a pin. But the police could hardly interrogate my dead husband to disprove my story.

  I crossed my fingers mentally that my last but one visit to Bell’s had overlapped with the poisonous Noreen’s term. I was almost sure it had because I had in that split second consulted Cuthbert. Not Cuthbert Baines, whom I had yet to meet, but the other Cuthbert. My friend the saint.

  ‘But why,’ asked Giles, looking at me more pointedly, ‘haven’t you divulged all this before? I mean it’s neither here nor there to me but the police will want to know.’

  ‘I’m pushing eighty,’ I said smoothly. ‘I simply forgot I’d left the pills there. Just as you forgot that I’d visited Frances Cornford, Giles.’

  As we parted Giles said, ‘Look after yourself, Betsy. And do send me Fred’s Aeneid, if you trust me with it.’

  I didn’t go straight to Cuthbert Bainbridge’s. I needed to gather my wits and prepare my ground. Once Bell was back from arranging the sale of Staresnest, I left her to look after Cecilia and drove up to Northumberland. I wanted to see Beetle, and Dowlands, again.

  It was not an easy visit. Beetle and Susan were in mourning, and not only for the son they had lost. Cecilia had been like a daughter, especially to Susan.

  ‘We should never, never have allowed him to live with Bell.’ Grief had heightened her anger.

  ‘You did it for his comfort,’ I attempted.

  ‘And that Cecilia could have done this to Will. She was like … oh!’

  She wept and it was awful seeing her so distressed.

  ‘Susan, love, come here.’

  I was glad to see Beetle embracing her.

  ‘But she was,’ Susan said. ‘She was like his sister.’

  ‘But she didn’t do it,’ I insisted. ‘She has sworn not. And did you ever, all the time you’ve known her, know that girl to lie?’

  ‘Anyone might lie if they are in line to go to prison for murder,’ was Beetle’s rejoinder. ‘And if she didn’t do it then who did? You? Bell? The cleaner? And the police wouldn’t have charged her unless they were fairly sure. They don’t. They can’t. They have to have good evidence.’

  I have always been of Forster’s party when he said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. But I had to choose between betraying my son and betraying my grandson, and that is an even harder choice. If there is a Saint Peter at heaven’s gate (if there were a heaven and I were to get there, which is doubtful) the most dire sin I would have to own up to is not that I lied before the law of the land but that I lied to my own son.

  Before I left Northumberland I went again to Cuthbert’s chapel. And this is the moment to correct a misapprehension which has lingered in our family too long. More than a misapprehension, an injustice. It concerns Aunt Char.

  When I decided to write what I knew about the terrible events that overtook our family, I had to have recourse to my ship’s captain’s desk, where with Hetta’s help I had stashed away any important family papers. While I was looking through my own letters and notebooks, I happened on a bundle tied in old tape, which had been among the items from Grandmother’s desk when we cleared Dowlands. I had put this with other papers to see to later. It was typical that I had never done so. The bundle was not, as I supposed, a collection of old legal documents but carbon copies of letters from Grandmother Tye, addressed to the authorities at the home where she put away poor Char.

  The ‘insanity’ for which Char was put away was apparently based on her repeated report that she heard the voices of saints. In particular, this correspondence relates, it seems that Charlotte claimed a friendship with Saint Cuthbert.

  I read with distress the stern ink phrases written in my grandmother’s firm hand.

  ‘Charlotte claims again that the Sainted Cuthbert was with her. She claims he visits her regularly in her room. She appears to “take his counsel” and has several times refused to do our bidding on the grounds that “Cuthbert advises me not to.”’

  ‘Charlotte was reasonably docile on her visit to us but then started up at luncheon exclaiming loudly, “He is there outside. I must go to him.”

  ‘Both Hubert and I feel that it is best that she not return here to Dowlands again, which appears only to make her excited. We should like you, with Dr Mallory’s approval, to increase
the dosage of her sedative.’

  Oh, Aunt Char. All those years cruelly shut away because you spoke with Cuthbert who became my own friend and adviser.

  ‘It’s like this, Cuthbert,’ I said, the last time I sat on the boulder by his chapel, having said a last goodbye to Dowlands. Cuthbert doesn’t muck about and over years of acquaintance you get to drop a measure of formality, even with a saint. ‘My dear granddaughter gave a solemn promise to my equally dear grandson that she would never admit to what she had done, done for him, at his request. But, you see, I made no such promise. My friend Giles says if she is convicted it will be for murder, not simply aiding and abetting a suicide but murder, because my grandson was helpless and could not raise a finger to take his own life. Murder, Giles tells me, carries a mandatory sentence. Who knows who might be sitting on the jury, over-convinced of their right to evaluate the sanctity of life and keen to have a chance to occupy the moral high ground, or ready to be persuaded by some specious legal argument.

  ‘So what should I do?’ I asked. ‘You know something about the sanctity of life but is there not a sanctity of death? There are occasions where there is such a thing as a good death, wouldn’t you say?’

  I don’t want you to suppose that I saw Cuthbert. He didn’t appear to me, with his tonsure and his sandals and long monkish robes. Nothing so crude. I like to hope that perhaps he did appear in seeming person of some sort to my Aunt Charlotte, for no other man visited her bedchamber. But to me he simply spoke in my mind, in a roughish low voice with a Northumbrian accent. Always cordial. The kind of voice that the sheep would be sure to be calmed by.

  That was the last time Cuthbert spoke to me, though I hope he might visit me again before I go. But thanks to him, when on my return from Northumberland I went to the Inner Temple, to the rooms of that other Cuthbert, I was well prepared.