Cousins Read online

  In those days, if you were a graduate you could teach without any further qualification. By this time Beetle had been born and even with the peppercorn rent we were paying we could barely manage financially. So it was as well I found a position teaching English and discovered that teaching suited me. Teachers were highly regarded still and in opening up great works of literature I felt that I was helping to foster an inner world that might serve my pupils well when external life became rough. Smoking was not the evil it is considered today and I refashioned the famous Strand cigarette ad to ‘You are never alone with a book’, which I had the girls make up into a poster for the school library. Imagine getting away with that today …

  Gradually our life settled into a kind of normality. Fred was recommended for a job teaching at Birkbeck and, after years of being ‘delicate’, Grandad Tye died at the grand age of ninety and left us enough money to buy a shabby house in Acton with a big untidy garden.

  In the summer of 1951 we moved in. It was an unusually hot summer, I remember. I was pregnant with Bell and my ankles swelled. Nat had just had his eleventh birthday and was about to go on to Acton County (which to Fred’s delight had a full-blooded card-carrying communist as its Head).

  Eleven is one of those pivotal ages when life changes. Certainly the whole chemistry of our family altered then.

  Ma was always at heart a charming child herself and during this period she and Nat had become very thick. I was glad of her help but working full-time, and with Beetle still a toddler and another baby on the way, I failed to notice that her childlike traits were developing along more sinister lines.

  She had always had her head in the clouds, occasionally losing keys, glasses, books and purses, but she now began to lose them regularly, and indeed to lose herself more than usual. On a couple of occasions she left the gas on when she wasn’t cooking, which was dangerous. But what really alerted me to the early stages of something more worrying was when, bit by bit, she began to lose names.

  I remember describing one of Blanche’s latest paranoid absurdities – the government, she insisted, was introducing hormones into the drinking water as a form of mass contraception – and Ma frowned ever so slightly and began to say ‘Who’s …?’ and then, hastily, ‘Oh, Blanche.’ Another time she seemed not to be perfectly sure who I meant by Margaret. But it was when she began to haver over my own name that I recognized what was wrong.

  Writing this now I’ve had a painful recollection. A couple of years before Ma’s decline, we were discussing an injured racehorse that had had to be shot. She was always one for a flutter and there was a horse called Maudie May that we’d backed to win at Cheltenham. Because that was one of Dad’s affectionate pet names for Ma we’d staked a tidy sum on this horse, which romped home famously and we dined out on the winnings – and later on the story.

  So we were both sorry to read in the paper that Maudie May had a tendon injury that had led to her being put down.

  Ma said, ‘I hope you’ll put me down if it looks as though I’m no longer up to it, darling.’

  ‘I can’t see me taking you out for a torn tendon, Ma,’ I said.

  ‘There are equivalent human horrors. I might go silly in my wits. I would hate that, you know.’

  She died not knowing who any of us were and Dad, unwilling to go on without her, died soon after. Too late to wish that I had been braver.

  While my poor mother faded like a bright summer flower dropping petals, flinty Grandmother Tye lived on, ruling Dowlands in single majesty. Still indomitable, she stuck it out there, in that draughty, impractical house, running her life, and the place, with her iron will and the help of the faithful Margaret.

  Bev and Ted had married and now had three more much younger children and we had Beetle and Bell, also much younger than Nat, so when our family visited Dowlands it was natural that he and Eddie should pal up again and share exploits.

  My friendship with Bev, though always warm, had attenuated with our marriages. While, when alone, we could still share gleeful reminiscences about our wartime escapades, Fred and Ted, whose wars had followed such opposite lines, were awkward together. Ted, to hide either embarrassment or contempt, or maybe both, addressed Fred with a kind of deference that Fred didn’t know how to handle; and Fred couldn’t talk easily to anyone who didn’t uncritically share the views of the Manchester Guardian.

  But we all agreed that it was great our two eldest boys had stayed such friends and it became a tradition over the years for the wartime pals to holiday together independently. There was a quasi-socialist organization that sent children off in the holidays to learn to sail or climb, and through this experience Nat and Eddie became keen climbers. As they grew older, the two of them made off abroad on climbing expeditions, while Fred and I went camping with Beetle and Bell.

  I have thought about this a good deal since and I detect no hint that Nat ever minded the arrival of Beetle or Bell. He never struck me as a jealous child. On the contrary, he was invariably loving with his young sibs, especially so with Bell, but he was also popular at school and occupied, in a normal schoolboyish way, with his many friends. He appeared to move smoothly up the school, passing his O and A levels with flying colours. I suppose we never expected otherwise. Nor did we think much about it when the school suggested putting him in for Oxbridge. As far as Fred was concerned, since this was the local state ‘county’ school with no public-school privilege to object to, there was no moral reason to prevent this. The truth is that he would probably have been disappointed had Nat not been considered Oxbridge material.

  What was a mild shock was that because his history teacher had some connection with the college Nat elected to apply to Peterhouse, to which the LSE was moved during the war. He couldn’t have known the significance of Peterhouse and I was nervous of raising the subject with Fred. ‘Mightn’t there be some memorial or something to Magda there?’ I suggested finally.

  I can see now that Fred was embarrassed at my summoning this ghost but his reaction came across as callous. ‘Why would there be? She didn’t amount to anything.’

  ‘Fred!’

  ‘It’s a coincidence. Don’t go all spooky on me, Bets.’

  But what most strikes me now is Nat’s choice to read architecture, which I didn’t question at all at the time. He showed an early attachment to cathedrals. Fred, for all his atheism, was tolerant of my own interest, and in the days when we were only the three of us we spent many afternoons examining Romanesque arches, clerestories, flying buttresses and stained glass with a thoroughness that the most pious church attender could hardly better. But while I love to explore cathedrals, it is from the vantage point of the ground. One of the most unnerving experiences of my life was watching Vertigo. The mere screen illusion of that hideous perspective provoked in me such a visceral terror that I had to bury my face in Fred’s jacket.

  But from a young age the sight of a steep drop seemed to release a powerful energy in Nat. I can’t remember exactly how old he was when we climbed Salisbury Cathedral’s tower. I must have been there with him alone or I would certainly have dispatched Fred, who had no fear of heights, in my place. What I remember is Nat capering around like a little monkey while I stood with my back firmly against a support, feebly trying to catch at his jersey to pull him back. I suppose in a sense I have never stopped trying to pull him back.

  8

  Nat won his place at Cambridge and we were innocently proud and pleased for him. Eddie, who might as easily have got to Oxbridge, was going off to Newcastle. But they seemed as thick as ever and the climbing expeditions continued. Looking through the box where I have all Nat’s cards and letters, I found an envelope still containing the dusty remnants of a furry edelweiss which he must have picked and pressed to send to us. I would have said that there was nothing that I had forgotten about Nat; but I had forgotten the edelweiss.

  I see from the postmark that was the summer of 1960, the summer before they climbed in the Dolomites an
d afterwards went on to Vienna, which Nat wrote to us of with such serious interest that it prompted a conversation with Fred.

  I remember I had stayed late at school that day and the letter was waiting for me in the kitchen when I got back. Bell was round at a school friend’s house and Beetle was in his room playing music. I knew Fred was preparing a lecture but I gatecrashed his study.

  ‘Nat’s in Vienna.’ Fred was brave but courage comes in discrete forms and when he looked up his eyes flashed alarm. ‘Don’t we have a duty to tell him now?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to.’

  ‘Fred, he’s twenty-one next July. Some time he’ll want his birth certificate.’ It was providential – or so I would have put it then – that so far he had never requested this. I don’t remember how we managed his passport. He was still young when we applied for his first one, though that would have been the moment for an honest disclosure. If his birth certificate had been required for this then I suspect it was I, damn fool that I was, who had filled in the forms on his behalf and sent with them any revealing documents.

  ‘If you think we should?’ I waited, rather meanly, but I didn’t feel like helping him out. ‘I suppose we should.’

  ‘It should come from you.’ He looked back down at the book he’d been studying, Aeschylus and Athens, a Marxist commentary on Ancient Greece, and sensing a potential retreat I said, ‘You are his father, after all.’

  Was this cowardice? Or revenge? Perhaps a bit of both. I’m not proud of it.

  ‘I suppose we should,’ Fred said again.

  ‘No. You should,’ I insisted.

  ‘Then you must let me wait for the right time.’

  But the ‘right time’ somehow drifted down the stream. And after that summer Nat began a slow but sustained withdrawal from us and from our family life. He wrote from Austria to say he was going back with Eddie to Seahouses and would write again to let us know his ‘movements’. This was the era of letter writing. Long-distance calls were expensive and only the wealthy or the careless spoke much on the phone except on local calls.

  I was disappointed. I’d missed Nat, I always missed him, but although I was slightly taken aback by the language, which for him was oddly formal, I thought no more of it than that he wanted to extend his holiday with his best friend.

  Nor did I allow myself to sense anything amiss when Nat contrived to collect his things from home on his way back to Cambridge at a time when all of us were out. I should have spotted it – indeed, I must have spotted it and set the information aside – because he would have had to calculate the time quite carefully to be sure of an empty house.

  He left a note, brief but not obviously disquieting, and then we heard nothing more.

  We had been in the habit of visiting him in Cambridge at least once a term and I waited for the usual letter suggesting possible dates. When none came I wrote him a chatty letter, trying not to put on any pressure but mentioning how Bell and Beetle missed him (which was my cowardly way of conveying that it was actually me who was missing him) and, I hoped casually, enquiring when it might be convenient for us all to come. I remember feeling obscurely bothered that I had had to manufacture the casualness. Nat and I had always communicated easily.

  He took time to reply, which was not out of character either but it was out of character that the tone of the letter, when it did come, was guarded. Again, not obviously hostile but signalling a warning: he wrote that he was ‘working hard’, was ‘trying not to have any distractions’ and would ‘look forward’ to seeing us at Christmas.

  Fred, whose primary relationship was with the world rather than with any individual, never shared my need to be close to the children. Possibly this is an asset. I don’t know that children much welcome their parents’ need for them. And in my case I am aware that I was looking for an intimacy that Fred couldn’t provide. But I tried not to fuss or harass or probe. Yield on unessentials, I told myself, though my relationship with Nat had always seemed ferociously essential. That boy held my heart in a way that felt molecular. But I gritted my teeth, held my tongue and dug into my work. I had just been taken on in the then unusual role of drama teacher.

  That Christmas we went up to Dowlands as usual to be with Grandmother. Nat when he turned up was uncommunicative, though he was unusually generous to his siblings, with a present of an enamelled brooch for Bell and for Beetle, an inspired gift, a rain gauge. I was given Schubert’s Winterreise. I forget what he gave Fred. What I chiefly remember was Nat’s noli me tangere distance.

  I raised this with Fred in bed in our old room, where the blue paper was now a faded grey.

  ‘D’you remember when you came back from Durham how Nat used to tuck into bed between us?’

  We no longer put mattresses on the floor. We slept in the old iron-framed twin beds, parallel, side by side, as we had as children. Fred was reading and only smiled vaguely in reply.

  ‘I wonder when he last did that? You never know, do you, when the last time will be.’

  ‘Last what?’ Still engrossed in his book he wasn’t paying attention.

  ‘Oh, last of anything you used to enjoy, love. I mean, when was the last time he sat on our laps, for instance, when was the last time I kissed him better, when was the last time …’ I began to weep and Fred could no longer ignore me.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? Nat hasn’t let us near him all term.’

  Fred put down his book, a vast volume about the iniquities of the British Empire, the kind I would never read. ‘He’s probably in love. Love makes you introverted. You don’t want to discuss it with your parents. I didn’t.’

  Fred would never have discussed anything remotely intimate with Blanche. And even I, close to my parents as I was, had never really chosen to confide on the subject of love. I elected to go along with this and allowed Fred’s, on the face of it sensible, explanation to damp down my disquiet.

  For of course, intuitively, I connected Nat’s sudden distance from us with his visit to Vienna. It was sheer cowardly wishful thinking that gave that insight the lie. I was afraid, afraid of what we hadn’t said, of what we hadn’t done, afraid of what the revelation about his parentage might mean for me. And with that very fear I ensured the result I feared.

  We were both of us, Fred and I, guilty and scared, and because of this we messed up our chance ever to make that explanation, to apologize for what we hadn’t said and for what, it transpired, so perturbingly had been revealed to a Nat, who was wholly unprepared for such a revelation. You see, it turned out that we had been in error about Magda’s relatives. Not all of them had perished in the camps and by a series of coincidences Nat had found this out.

  I was told the story months later by Eddie, whom at the time Nat had sworn to secrecy.

  It seems that all those years ago Magda had sent a photo of Nat to a second cousin, who, on the outbreak of war, had been at school in Switzerland and had sensibly stayed put. Eventually she had married a doctor and settled in Lausanne. The photo with an accompanying card, on which Magda had written of her marriage and her new name, had been preserved in a book of photos of the cousin’s relatives and Nat’s photo, his name and date of birth, were inscribed there too.

  This piece of family memorabilia had been loaned to a Viennese woman whose family had also perished in the camps and who was compiling an exhibition of memories of Viennese families lost in the war. The album was part of this display. I don’t know if it was permanently open at that particular page, or if that was another turn of fate’s cruel screw, but on the day when Nat visited the exhibition it was his own two-week-old image that he encountered gazing up at him from beneath the protective glass.

  It was Eddie, as he told me himself, who pointed it out.

  Oh, and I do not, cannot blame Eddie. I can only blame myself. I say to myself, had I never moved up to Dowlands, had I never met Bev and Eddie that day on the beach, had I … had I … But then Nat and I w
ould have died in that night bombing of Cambridge and none of this would ever have been.

  It was months after Nat’s funeral that I asked Eddie if I could come and talk to him. I was in desperate need to learn more for I knew in my blood and bones that some dangerous matter to do with his birth had finally reached Nat. I haunted Eddie, poor boy, bombarded him with letters, openly blackmailing him, until, I expect to get rid of me, he finally agreed to let me come. I dare say Bev had a hand in this.

  I drove up to Seahouses but when I arrived Bev had tactfully gone out and only Eddie was there to receive me. He made tea and tried to make conversation but I was too desperate to let myself be side-tracked.

  ‘Eddie, what happened when you and Nat were in Vienna? I know something did.’

  He sat, the cup of tea in his big hand (I recognized the cup as one that Margaret had given Bev when she was clearing out the china cupboard at Dowlands), while he described how they’d gone, quite by chance, to this exhibition after seeing a poster with a photograph that had caught his eye. He apologized for this, poor boy, as though the whole ghastly mess had something to do with his interest in that photograph.

  ‘We were looking round, and saying how fucking – excuse me – bloody the whole thing was and how hard to believe and so on, and we stopped before this case with loads of photos and cards and that sort of thing and I just looked down at this picture of a baby’s face and said, “Look, Jack, that kid’s got the same name as you.” I thought it was just a coincidence, you see.’

  ‘What did he say?’ The pity of it.

  ‘He said, “Ah, get over, man” or something. Under the photo it just said “Baby Nathaniel, aged two weeks.” Then he looked some more. There was a card pasted in the book beside the photo, with all his names on it, Nathaniel Wilfred Tye. And his birthday. So it had to be more than a coincidence.’