Cousins Read online

  My brother and my cousin were not arguing. They were making love. I knew it as surely as I had ever known anything and the knowledge brought with it feelings I could neither recognize nor accommodate.

  Cele was like a sister to me and equally, I had supposed, a sister to my brother. Overhearing the passionate consummation of two people I was so close to was a profound shock, one that registered in my physical being so violently that I can feel the trace of it still today. I was eleven so of course I knew about sex. Or rather I knew the details. But sex is not about detail. The ‘facts of life’ are myth and fantasy, poetry, stories half grasped, the unanswerable questions of fear and desire – most powerfully fear of desire.

  What I blunderingly overheard that night brought with it intimations of realms of experience that I had only dimly sensed. It was to become a moment which haunted me, haunts me still. I came to feel like a traitor within the gates of a paradise that was never mine to enter and at the same time, though this I only felt much later, a witness who could vouch for the truth of that paradise.

  But the chief feeling I had at the time, as I crept back to my bed, was shame and embarrassment – an embarrassment which transferred itself to the school skirt, which I had failed to be rid of and which I rejected with unusual scorn when I was asked to try it on for size.

  11

  The autumn when I started at the local comprehensive was the start of Will’s second year at the sixth-form college in Berwick. I think I have said that there was no Latin taught at our comprehensive, and since no one knew of the lessons with Grandpa it hadn’t been among Will’s O levels. But at the Berwick college Latin A level was one of the options.

  Will, who had excelled at every subject, was taking, as boys who showed any talent for the subjects did, maths and science for his A levels and it was characteristic of him to antagonize his teachers by skipping his regular classes and making friends with the teacher of a subject for which he was not down to sit. The Latin teacher was young and approachable, it was his first teaching appointment and one day Will met him at the pub where the teacher confided that the college had decreed that they would drop Latin the following year if there continued to be insufficient demand.

  Thanks to Grandpa, Will was very familiar with the set text, Book II of the Aeneid. He wouldn’t have divulged this to boast – more, I imagine, to be matey. The teacher was concerned for his job and Will was naturally sympathetic to anyone in trouble with the establishment. So the upshot was that, without anyone at home knowing, and really only to help someone he had taken to, Will signed up to sit Latin A level.

  I don’t know how much Will and Cele communicated at that time. I scanned the post with a curiosity which added to the guilt I felt at being privy to their secret. Will was less available to me than ever. When he wasn’t in Berwick he was perpetually going off to see Jesse Arnedale, who I guessed was his alibi for the pub. By now I believe he had begun to drink seriously.

  If you ask me why, I would have to admit that I cannot say for sure. Partly boredom: the Northumberland countryside, idyllic for us as children, offered little for us to do as we grew older. Partly, I suspect, a kind of swagger. Partly, I am sure, because he was missing the old intimacy with Cele. But maybe too it had something to do with his being so spectacularly bright. It’s easy to underestimate the pressure this brings. I have always been grateful that any talent I have been granted has taken time to show.

  In our family’s case, the pressure to succeed came from Mum. Mum’s family were tenant farmers and had had little formal education. Her parents, our other grandparents, were not unintelligent – but they were, I suppose, what not Granny herself but her and Grandpa’s sort would call ‘uncultivated’. I can see now that, while she would have attacked anyone who suggested this, Mum was in fact secretly ashamed of her own parents’ lack of sophistication. Considering how close they lived to us we saw very little of them, though Mum always put this down to the pressures of their hard-working farm life, for which the rest of us, including Dad, were made to feel guilty. What is certainly the case is that Mum had a need for us all to excel which had something to do with a competitiveness with Granny and Grandpa and their background. Mum had a way of saying ‘intellectual’ which was a form of condemnation and yet, perversely, Will especially was her bid for intellectual confirmation. But Will never wanted to stand out, or not in that way. Jesse and the gang down at Seahouses had barely more than four GCSEs apiece.

  Whatever the reasons, Will’s drinking meant that relations with our father were becoming more strained. The drinking itself was rarely tackled but the unpredictable moods it brought out in Will clouded the atmosphere. Dad, who generally ducked confrontation, was at a loss to know how to deal with a son whose energy and blitheness had developed into a surly belligerence.

  I was having a bad time too. I’d fallen victim at my new school to a bully, a pale-eyed, flaxen-haired girl called Pauline Crowsdale. Years later, I spotted Pauline Crowsdale at Newcastle station. I didn’t introduce myself. The slight fair girl had become a bulky beat-up woman, depressed-looking and too aged for her years. But in those feral childhood days her word at that school acted as law.

  I don’t know why she took against me. Maybe it was no more than that she had found a weapon she could use and that alone made me the object of her spite. By one of those strokes of bad luck that can dent a childhood, she discovered that my sister was known as Syd. Taking her cue from this, my tormenter decided to call me Henry and declared that I was really a boy and had a penis tucked away in my underwear. The only sure disproof of this, she declared, would be for me to reveal my unadorned vagina, something I was naturally desperately keen to avoid. My unwillingness to expose myself was, according to Pauline, a sure sign of the accuracy of her diagnosis. And of course I never told my family about this humiliation.

  So I, who had always been the cheerful easy child, moped about the house that Christmas. Will was hardly around and my parents, noticing I was less than happy, though they wouldn’t have fathomed the reasons, decided that a change would do me good. That half-term, with the help of Granny’s friend, I was dispatched to Paris. Cele could be relied on to take care of me and the visit, it was suggested, would help improve my French.

  The Bazinets were bilingual so I don’t know that it helped my French but it helped me in crucial other ways. In fact it was a life-saver. Paris was heaven for a pubescent girl: fabulous fashion, strange foods and scents, paintings, architecture – the sight of the proportions of a French window still takes me back to being not quite twelve – and above all the hospitable Bazinets.

  The first impression I received of the Bazinets was that their apartment near Saint-Sulpice was alive with music. Both Marie and her husband Philippe, as well as their children, played. Marie was a piano teacher, and also played the harpsichord which contributed to the graciousness of their big light sitting room. It was a lovely room, overlooking the church.

  Marie, the daughter of Granny’s old friend, must have learned from Granny something of my cousin’s history. I see now that Granny, distressed over what had happened to Cele at St Neot’s and maybe too distressed at her mother’s neglect, had thought of Marie as a safe haven for Cele. Her role as literary resource for Marie’s children was probably cooked up with Granny’s connivance.

  Marie was a naturally solicitous woman anyway. I could see why under her care Cele had begun to thrive and the Bazinet children, Cele’s supposed charges, were unlike any children I’d encountered. At home, we were always being reminded of our manners but in practice this amounted to being no more than not openly rude. It was the young Bazinets who first acquainted me with the subtle value of charm. Sabine and Théodore were polite but not too polite, pleasantly but not officiously sociable and, compared to me, shamingly well-versed in art. They were already accomplished musicians, without any of the showing off or fear of seeming to show off that I was familiar with in England. Rather than scorning my philistinism, they seemed
to take pleasure in transforming me into a fit companion for their world. Secure in this enchantment, I fell head over heels in love with Théodore.

  There’s a song Granny sometimes plays on her old vinyl: There’s a last love/And a first love/A best love/And a worst love. I suppose we all imagine that our first love will be our last but as it happened Théodore really was – and is. Of course by that age I had had crushes: Peter Tyke at my primary school and Jeff Denny, the garage hand from the car repairers Dad used, who faintly resembled Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. But Theo was different because he also fell in love with me.

  It was Theo who introduced me to football and football became one of my ways of escaping my family. No one in my family cared about sport. Syd, who was physically heavy, made a virtue of disliking exercise and Will was too rebellious to believe in teams. I was thrown when Theo asked what football team I supported and it was simply local geography that made me say ‘Newcastle’.

  ‘The Magpies they are called?’ he suggested.

  I grasped gratefully at this prompt and from that day became a devoted Newcastle supporter.

  Years later, when I confessed my ignorance, Theo said, ‘I knew you knew nothing really, but I was sorry for you coming from this cold-sounding family.’ I was defensive at the time only because he was right: compared to the Bazinets my family was cold.

  I came home restored by Theo’s affections and bolstered by my new-found enthusiasm. Quite quickly my football expertise, and maybe the boosting effect of Theo’s affections, gave me a position in my class. A gang of influential boys became my allies and with their backing Pauline Crowsdale’s taunts faded fast.

  But matters were not going so well with Will. He was spending more and more time in Seahouses, from where he would ride back dangerously drunk on the motorbike that he and Jesse had put together from what looked like scrap. There were many late evenings when I helped him in through my bedroom window, from the outhouse which abutted the house and was child’s play to climb. More than once he passed out on my bed, leading me to spend nights on the floor, sick with worry that I would not be in time to wake him early enough for him to make his way undetected up to the Blue Room.

  It was one such exploit that led to the row over Mrs Mahoane. Mrs Mahoane had continued to be a thorn in our sides. Although she insisted that, being a light sleeper, she was ‘obliged to wear earplugs’ – revolting little waxy balls which she left by her bedside – she was always complaining about noise at night, from which we deduced that she left off the earplugs in order to catch us out. After one evening when Will had come home drunk and had thrown gravel up at my window, she claimed to have opened her own window ‘to see what all the noise was’ and to have been hit by a stone.

  There was certainly a mark on her neck but nothing that a handful of gravel could have caused, even supposing, as the aggrieved Will put it, ‘I was such a bad shot that I’d got her fat face by mistake’.

  Dad had his suppressed-anger look. ‘If you’d been drinking, your aim might well have been boss-eyed.’

  Will suffered from the drunk’s certainty that alcohol only improved his faculties. ‘Fucking liar. I never threw anything at the fat cow but I will if she doesn’t watch out.’

  A couple of nights later, Old Moanie advised Dad that Will had woken her again. In fact he had not been out, as I could testify, but he was punished anyway. It wasn’t the punishment he minded as much as having Old Moanie’s word taken over his. Will was rarely untruthful, and he rarely bothered to deceive, which was part of his problem with Mum and Dad. If I had less of a rocky ride it was partly because I was a much smoother liar.

  Two nights after this, a small rock crashed through Old Moanie’s window, spraying glass fragments everywhere. She came knocking on our parents’ bedroom door in her big floral nightgown and Will was immediately summoned and asked to account for himself. He had had just enough time to climb into his pyjamas and to hiss at me that I was to please keep my mouth shut. I would have done anyway. Dad grilled me the following day but I am glad to report that I gave away nothing, and his confidence in my veracity remained unquestioned.

  Mrs Mahoane left, after issuing a bill for the repair of her mother’s bureau, allegedly damaged by the rock.

  ‘Good fucking riddance, mad old cow,’ was Will’s verdict.

  ‘The “mad old cow” helped us keep up the house. I shall have to ask you to help me in future with any repairs because, thanks to you, we are now going to be considerably short of funds,’ was Dad’s aggrieved rejoinder.

  But although Will would have been happy to help Dad he was never asked.

  These were some of the most discordant times I remember in my family. We had had rows, like any family, but the whole drift of the family ethos was to steer clear of dramas. The atmosphere now became tense. My solace was the letters I received from Theo. I have them still in a lilac box faintly scented with mignonette, which he gave me before our first parting.

  Cele also wrote – to us all collectively but more often privately to Will. I steamed one of these letters open but I was overcome by such dismaying guilt that I barely took in the content and I cannot now say if I read what I believe I read, which was Cele making a solemn promise never to see Colin again.

  12

  I was waiting in the kitchen, hoping for a letter from Theo when the post came and I immediately registered the significance of the manila envelope addressed to Will with the London postmark. I left it on the table but had gone out long before he came down for breakfast so I wasn’t around when he read the news.

  He wasn’t around either when I came back for lunch but the envelope was open. His results were unheard of levels of failure – Ds in Pure Maths and Physics and a fail in Applied Maths. When he did come in, clearly the worse for his visit to Seahouses, he referred to this with an appearance of unconcern. ‘Dunno that I want to go to university anyway. Academic life is pretty shit.’

  Dad’s response to this was typical. ‘In that case, old son, you’d better look for a job because I’m not going to support you.’

  It was fair enough for Dad to feel that he could not support us indefinitely but there was no question that he had some problem about money. He was a consultant at the hospital and by this time Mum was working almost full-time, so they can’t have been that short. The generous explanation is that this was a reaction to an unnecessarily straitened childhood, but you could also say that Dad was simply rather mean. And I felt too that Mum’s comment to Will – ‘You’ve only yourself to blame’ – was another form of meanness. As Bell said to me once, ‘When it comes down to it, Hetta, there is only oneself or someone else to blame.’

  Some days later, with Will about to embark on what Dad dismissed as ‘another hare-brained scheme’ – which was no more than a plan to go off on his motorbike around the world (an outcome that might have spared everyone a truly impossible grief) – a second manila envelope arrived. For the Latin A level, Will had sat a different board. Our parents had been kept in the dark over the fact that he’d been entered for this exam but I don’t think it was to slight them that on reading the result Will immediately rang Grandpa.

  I was eavesdropping, as usual.

  ‘Hi Grandpa, how are you? And Granny?’

  Grandpa by this time was already growing slightly deaf and with the converse logic of the deaf he tended to shout into the phone so I could hear not his words but his unmistakably emphatic voice.

  I noted a certain pride in Will’s response. ‘Pretty good, yes, thanks. Yeah, yeah, I know that wasn’t so clever. But listen. I just got the Latin result. I got an A.’

  Even I, from my hiding place, could hear the enthusiasm resounding from the other end of the line.

  The Latin result took the wind out of our parents’ sails and for all their reservations about Grandpa they didn’t hide the fact that they were relieved. Anything, I suppose, to quash the proposed motorbike adventure. And for the first and only time in all the
years I knew him, Grandpa initiated something that wasn’t political or to do with his own work. He asked Will down to St Levan, because, he said, he’d ‘come up with a plan’.

  Grandpa, quite out of character, had got hold of the A level syllabuses for Greek and Ancient History and he was offering to coach Will in these subjects with a view to his sitting the exams that summer. And, painful as it is to say this, I imagine that our parents were only too glad to have their obstreperous son out of the house and off their hands. In the event, it turned out that he had read most of the Greek texts already and, as Grandpa put it, ‘the Ancient History is only a matter of general knowledge’ (which tells you a lot about Grandpa, who never grasped that his standards were maybe unusual). Will entered himself for two more A levels and at Grandpa’s suggestion applied to read Classics at King’s.

  I don’t think, I really don’t, that Grandpa pulled any strings. That would have been too great an offence against his principles. What he did do was take up this matter of Will’s future as a project and poured his energy into it for reasons that I only later understood. Reasons of … well, I suppose it was his attempt to put something right. Something ‘right’ for himself, that is.

  I dare say the name Tye rang bells. The Director of Studies in Classics had apparently been taught by a contemporary of Grandpa’s. Whatever the reasons – Will’s intellectual ability was unquestionable and he had that string of outstanding O levels – he was offered a place at King’s on condition he got As in his exams. And when that was exactly what he did the family breathed a sigh of relief, assuming that the recent turbulence had all been merely a troubled adolescent spell which was now safely over.