Cousins Read online

  Salley Vickers

  * * *

  COUSINS

  Contents

  Part One: Hetta

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Two: Betsy

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Three: Bell

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Four: Hetta

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Five: Betsy

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  In memory of my parents and their friends Ram Nahum,

  my godfather Arnold Kettle and his wife Margot

  (from whom I learned to ‘yield on unessentials’).

  And for my Party siblings, Heather and Andrew Gollan and

  Martin and Nick Kettle, whose lifelong friendship has been

  among the best of legacies, with my love.

  Heart of the heartless world,

  Dear heart, the thought of you

  Is the pain at my side,

  The shadow that chills my view.

  The wind rises in the evening,

  Reminds that autumn is near.

  I am afraid to lose you,

  I am afraid of my fear.

  ***

  And if bad luck should lay my strength

  Into the shallow grave,

  Remember all the good you can;

  Don’t forget my love.

  John Cornford

  Part One

  * * *

  Hetta

  1

  When a persistent ringing startled me from a sleep of unusual contentment I swear I knew it was Will. My grandmother claims that the women in our family are blessed with second sight. Certainly my intuition has always been sharp. But maybe it was simply that Will was the person in our family most likely to be the source of a late-night phone call.

  The phone had stopped ringing and had started again by the time my father got to it. I could hear him in the hall below sounding apprehensive and annoyed. And then I heard his voice change and become urgent.

  He was calling my mother, who joined him in the hall, and hearing the note in their combined tone I got up and went halfway downstairs and sat on the landing, which is where I used to sit when eavesdropping.

  Through the banisters I could partly see my parents in their pyjamas. My father was holding my mother, who was crying. She rarely cried so I knew this was serious.

  I waited a little on the landing but the worry of not knowing what had happened was too great so I ran down the remaining stairs.

  ‘Hetta!’

  ‘Dad, what is it?’

  I was right, it was Will. At first I thought he must be dead but it turned out to be worse than that.

  At the time I was immersed in the Brontës and saw myself as Emily, wild and poetical and in love with her brother. So it’s hard to say how far I felt the gravity of what had happened as a real event, rather than a drama in my Brontë persona. All I understood then was that Will was in hospital and that both my parents were to go at once and that I was to drive with them to Cambridge.

  We left Dowlands, our house in Northumberland, there and then and I have always believed that we were still all in our pyjamas but reviewing everything now I can see that was unlikely. Maybe only I was. I certainly slept in the back of the car because I awoke to hear my parents talking in the voices people use when they don’t want to be overheard.

  My father was saying, ‘It’s Nat all over again’.

  I know I heard this and that it isn’t the construction of hindsight because my Uncle Nathaniel was hardly ever mentioned and his name had a special allure for me. He was my father’s elder brother and was killed in a climbing accident, the kind of event which my tragic imagination relished.

  I had written some poems in my Emily Brontë mode for my dead uncle, one of which began:

  Oh you who are lost to us, still you are with us,

  Lost in the flesh but here in the heart,

  Still we shall mourn for you, though we are silent,

  Dumb though we be we are never apart.

  As far as I remember it went on in a similar vein and I doubt it improved.

  I don’t recall my mother’s reply but maybe for the first time I had some sense of what the death of my uncle might have meant to his family and it was fear that made me exclaim, ‘Will’s not dead, is he?’

  My mother was more level-headed than my father and would certainly have tried to soothe my fears. But anxiety had been awoken, a real and not a dramatic anxiety, and I was no longer consumptive Emily Brontë with a poetical tempest raging in my breast but robustly hale, sixteen-year-old Henrietta Tye, whose brother Will, it seemed, had suffered some appalling injury.

  My father said now, ‘How long for Christ’s fucking sake before we get there?’

  I know I am remembering that accurately as he never said ‘fuck’.

  My mother was driving. Like Granny, she was a better driver than her husband, just as she was more competent at all forms of handiwork. She taught me, as, more successfully, she had taught my elder sister Syd, to use a drill and to plumb; while at the time I found this freakish, subsequently I’ve been grateful to her since it has saved me hundreds of pounds in plumbing bills.

  I should explain that my sister’s real name is Sydella but inevitably she has always been referred to as Syd. And because I felt that this had shaped my sister’s rather hearty personality I insisted on ‘Hetta’ early in my life to avoid any possibility of ‘Henry’.

  Syd by this time was married and living in Jordan and Will had essentially been away since he left for university. So I was the only child still at home, which was sometimes a bonus but sometimes horribly lonely.

  It felt lonely now with no one beside me to share this catastrophe.

  ‘Is Cele coming?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll have been called,’ my mother said.

  Cele was our cousin Cecilia, the only child of our father’s sister Bell, and when she was younger she stayed with us almost every holiday. She and Will were always very close. They were only five months apart in age so it seemed quite natural that they should do things together.

  I could tell our mother didn’t quite approve of Aunt Bell. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that she disapproved but taking Cele in as often as she did was probably her way of indicating that Bell wasn’t much of a mother. But maybe there was another reason why Cele was so readily made part of our family.

  Will was originally one of twins but his sister died soon after they were born. I took, as we all do, the world I grew up in for granted. But looking
back on events now I seem to see that for as long as I can remember there was a kind of blur, a tinge of melancholy at the outlines of Will’s personality.

  Of course none of this occurred to my sixteen-year-old self that night when we drove to Cambridge. We arrived just before five in the morning and as we drove into the hospital car park I heard the ducks laugh. It is still very dreadful to me to hear that sound, that harsh sardonic noise which seems to say ‘You think you know everything, you human fools, but you know fuck-all’.

  The laughter of the ducks met us as the sky was turning from green to a cruel orange. There was some heat between my parents over parking at the hospital. My father wanted to leave the car just anywhere and when my mother said, ‘We don’t need the car being towed away on top of everything else,’ he snapped, ‘For Christ’s sake, Susan, he might be dying and you’re worrying about parking restrictions’.

  His words and the tone he used – my parents rarely rowed – frightened me to the tips of my fingers. From where I supposed my heart to be all down my arm like an electric shock ran the terrifying thought: Will is going to die.

  2

  Will didn’t die. When I eventually saw him, which was not till the following morning, he was unrecognizable. He lay unconscious, his face puffed and hideously discoloured, with a huge white collar supporting his neck and a kind of helmet over his head, like a boxer or a biker. A tube had been slotted into his throat and a terrifying mechanism was helping him to breathe. The sheet and hospital blanket were draped over a frame, forming a sinister-looking tent over the bed, his shoulders were bare and a liquid was being dripped into his left arm. He looked neither as if he were asleep nor as I imagined a dead person might look but like a non-person, belonging to no-man’s-land.

  There had been a move by my parents to prevent my witnessing all this but Granny said with unusual firmness, ‘Of course Hetta must see her brother’. She must have feared that I might never see him again.

  Holding her hand tight, I went in to see Will.

  Cele was sitting by the bed. She barely looked round as we entered. Her hand on Will’s reminded me of the Rodin hands she had taken me to see when I stayed with her in Paris. Except that Will’s hand was covered with sterile dressings.

  There were only two chairs in the room so I stood awkwardly by Granny, not knowing how to react.

  ‘Can he hear us?’ Granny asked.

  Cele shrugged; her eyes, which she always dismissed as ‘gooseberry-coloured’, were glassy with tears she was trying not to shed.

  ‘Let’s suppose he can,’ Granny said. ‘Will, darling. It’s Granny here. Granny and Hetta. We’re all here with you, beside Cele.’

  ‘He knows I’m here,’ Cele said, with what I sensed was irritation.

  ‘Of course he does,’ Granny said. ‘I was just placing us for Will.’ She sat down, deliberately calm although I knew how she was feeling.

  Standing in the narrow room, with Will all white on the stark metal hospital bed and Cele and Granny so obviously holding back tears, I began to weep. I was always a crybaby; as the youngest, I was the conduit through which the collective family tears were let. I stood there, weeping them out and trembling.

  Granny and I left Mum and Dad and Cele at the hospital and Granny took me back to their house in Ely. She drove very steadily until quite suddenly she pulled off the road with, ‘Sorry, pet. I need to stop for a moment’.

  We had pulled up by a field of cows and she opened the window on the passenger side, my side, and said, ‘How now, brown cow’.

  It was a brilliantly sunny day and we sat there in Granny’s little white Fiat by the ruminating cows and the ditches full of cow parsley and hovering flies. I remember that for the first time I wondered why cow parsley was called cow parsley and what, if anything, it had to do with cows. It was the kind of question that in other circumstances I might have addressed to Granny.

  When we set off again she drove in silence and when we got to their house, near the cathedral, Grandpa was in the living room waiting for us. His arthritis made him slow and he was struggling out of his chair as we came in, his face crumpled with concern, but before he could frame a question Granny said, ‘Will’s still unconscious but he’s alive.’ Then she said, ‘Fred, darling,’ and took his face in her two hands and, very tenderly, kissed his forehead. I’ll always remember her doing that.

  Despite the sun, I was shivering and she said, in the brisk voice she employed when attempting to keep our spirits up, ‘Fred, I need tea and Hetta probably needs a bath. Is the immersion on?’ They never did put in central heating.

  She ran me a bath, dissolved an aspirin in water and poured me a glass of milk to wash it down. I drank it in the bath. My brief sleep in the car, on the journey down to Cambridge, seemed weeks away now but when she tucked me into bed I felt I was never likely to sleep again.

  ‘What will happen to him?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, lamb,’ Granny said, ‘but he’s alive and these days they can work miracles.’

  She sat by me till I fell asleep, as she always did when we were small.

  The next few days are a blur. My recollection is that Cele found a room in the hospital and Mum and Dad stayed in a hotel. Syd, who flew over from Jordan, must have stayed there too. Mum would have wanted her nearby. I stayed on in Ely with Granny and Grandpa, which I was glad of.

  I was no use to anyone. Nor did they want us at the hospital where Will’s condition was ‘critical’. I think now we must have been allowed to see him that first morning because they were afraid he might not survive.

  During those anxiety-ridden days Granny liked to take herself off to the cathedral. ‘You don’t need to be of a religious disposition to enjoy the quiet of a great cathedral,’ she said to me once. She could be defensive over anything like that in front of Grandpa.

  I would have gone to sit in the cathedral too but I stayed with Grandpa, because I knew Granny would like me to, and let him read to me from the translation of the Aeneid he’d been occupied with since he retired.

  The school I attended was the local comprehensive, the kind that didn’t teach Latin, and while I knew of this project of Grandpa’s I’d never had anything to do with it. But Will had been involved in the Virgil undertaking since he was very young and perhaps I obscurely felt that this was a way of being in touch with him. Of us all, he most shared Grandpa’s enthusiasms and, although Grandpa would have fiercely denied it, Will was his favourite. I knew that this accident would hit Grandpa especially hard. It was from the roof of King’s Chapel that Will had fallen and it was because of Grandpa that Will had gone to King’s.

  There was some bother about Will’s college rooms, which meant that at some point I went with Granny to help to clear them.

  The only time I’d visited Will at King’s his rooms had been a mess – littered with socks and underpants and old newspapers, with unwashed plates, congealed brown sauce on them, lying about and dead matches and cigarette ends all over the floor. At home, Will’s room had always been an inviting jumble of books, collections of flints and stones, shells, feathers, animal skulls, birds’ nests, a glass tank where he had once kept newts, a cage which had been home to Hermione the hamster, motorbike parts and ancient implements, rescued from neighbouring farms, hanging from the rafters. Now, by comparison, these college rooms looked very stark; the books were stacked in neat piles on the clean floor, there was a single armchair and no pictures or anarchist posters on the walls. The bedroom gave an impression of a monk’s cell: very few clothes in the chest of drawers and nothing in the wardrobe but a leather jacket which looked brand-new and which I’d never seen Will wear.

  I requisitioned some boxes from the porters for the books while Granny went to move her car. But as I was carrying the second box, which I’d over-filled, a book toppled out and a passing student picked it up off the cobbles.

  ‘Are you Will Tye’s sister?’

  Reluctantly I admitted I was. I didn�
�t want to have to talk about Will.

  ‘I remember you visiting him once. Is he OK? Only we heard …’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s still in hospital.’

  ‘Oh God, how awful. Can you …’

  ‘I’m sorry, parking wardens,’ I said, hurrying away to avoid hearing whatever it was he wanted me to do.

  I had the book I’d dropped still in my grasp. The Night Climbers of Cambridge. It was not the first time I’d heard of these madcap climbers and when I’d loaded the box on to the back seat of Granny’s car I took another look at the cover. A black-and-white photo of a young man climbing a building.

  Covertly I opened the book and recognized, from another picture, the spires of King’s Chapel which stood so majestically before me.

  ‘Is that all, darling?’ Granny asked. She looked dreadful. Instinctively I tucked the book down the side of the box so that the title was not on view and got in beside her.

  That was May 1994, when everything changed for my family.

  3

  It has been suggested that I set down what I recorded in my diary and what I can remember and what I have subsequently been told of all that led up to this event which affected all our lives. And while nowadays I have some slight reputation as a writer, I cannot say if I shall ever make our story known to a wider public, or to anyone beyond those who played a part in it. Maybe not even to them, at least for a while. Enough harm has been done, God knows. But for myself it will be a comfort to try to lay out my complicated thoughts about what happened in our family, to unpick some threads where they have become tangled in my mind and follow others to see if they form some pattern.

  And if at times I have had to imagine what occurred to those who have chosen not to tell their own stories or are not here to tell them, I hope I may be forgiven. I have tried not to take liberties and only to fill out as best I can, from what I know of them and from what has been vouchsafed to me, what their thoughts and reactions and responses might have been.