Cousins Page 9

  The Senior Tutor had divulged that Will had been warned several times about drunken behaviour.

  ‘They obviously like him or they wouldn’t have been so lenient up till now. But they couldn’t really overlook this,’ Dad said, when Will had gone off to his room. Poor Dad, he looked so anxious.

  It had been a grim supper. Conversation had been stiltedly polite. There’d been an ostentatious jug of water on the table over dinner, which Will had ignored, and when he left the room Mum said, ‘For God’s sake, let us have a drink at least, Bert’ – which was so unlike her that I began to feel really concerned. Dad fetched a bottle of beer from the pantry and opened it clumsily, bruising his hand, which made him swear and throw the opener on to the floor. I was all of not quite fifteen and mentally dismissed this behaviour as ‘babyish’.

  Mum said again. ‘It’s your bloody father. I dare say he’ll find all this droll.’

  She sort of spat out ‘droll’, which was one of Grandpa’s words. I hadn’t properly grasped till then how angry she really was with Granny and Grandpa.

  ‘It’s that Harvey,’ I suggested, because I wanted someone for them to blame other than Grandpa.

  I was surprised at their surprise. ‘You think it’s got something to do with him?’ Dad asked.

  ‘He’s absolutely dire,’ I said. ‘You must see that.’

  What my parents really ‘saw’ was somewhat opaque to me because their views were always presented in an indivisible formula: ‘We’ve decided’, ‘We think’, ‘We believe’.

  ‘I did wonder,’ Mum said, ‘whether it was Harvey who pinched your port.’

  ‘Of course it was,’ I said. ‘You never found it at the hospital, did you, Dad?’ It was the first time I recall feeling conscious contempt for my parents’ limited understanding. To enlarge their comprehension I explained, ‘Harvey’s a thug and for some reason Will’s in his thrall.’

  ‘Thug’ didn’t adequately describe Harvey. He was more insidious than that. And I doubt that Will was in anyone’s thrall exactly. But my remark served its turn because it gave a new focus to my parents’ displeasure.

  They began to discuss between themselves what they should do while I, feeling smug at my superior powers of perception, helped myself to more rhubarb crumble.

  I was angry that Will yet again had stolen the family limelight. Angry that the family peace was once more being destroyed. I loved Will but I also hated him. Of course this condition is commoner than we are encouraged to believe.

  Will expressed no remorse for his actions. When questioned about his motives, he remarked that Shelley had been rusticated for atheism, which was the kind of justification that was bound to make Mum spit tacks. I don’t recall at what point he went off to London to stay with Bell. But when I next saw him he’d found work as a barman at the Festival Hall.

  Bell had got him the contact, through Robert, or maybe through one of the musical friends she had kept up with from the Royal College. However Will got the position, it was a bad idea. Though it seemed OK at first because it was through this that he started his band.

  He had formed an impromptu band during the months in Cornwall which had fallen apart when he left for Cambridge. But now, down in London, he’d found among the South Bank buskers some sympathetic fellow musicians and started a new band, Black Tye Boys. I stayed at Aunt Bell’s on my way to St Levan that summer holiday and the first thing I heard when I let myself in was the sound of Will’s sax.

  I don’t honestly remember what he was playing then but in my mind it is ‘One Step Beyond’. All I clearly recall was the experience of hearing the plangent notes sounding in Bell’s hallway where I stood listening, as columns of sunlight in which dust motes danced out of time pooled on to the pale gold carpet. And while the music sounded mournful I felt somewhere that Will was happy – freed from the restless spirit that had dogged him and that I didn’t understand.

  Cele was at work. My aunt was out. A key had been left for me with the caretaker so it was only myself and my brother there in the sunny Kensington flat. Unwilling to disturb him, I crept through the sitting room to Cele’s bedroom, where I was to sleep, and sat on the bed and listened while he played on.

  He played for some time and when the music stopped, and I could hear water running, I went through to the kitchen and the look on Will’s face, as he turned from filling the kettle, caught my heart. I would never have considered myself capable of prompting such a delighted reaction in my brother and in a rush of gratitude I flung myself at his unopened arms.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ was his more characteristic response.

  ‘Didn’t they say? I’m on my way to Granny’s.’

  ‘No one tells me anything,’ Will said.

  This wasn’t true. Bell or Cele would have been sure to tell him I was arriving. What was likely was that, drunk or in a drugged haze, he’d not taken in the information or had forgotten he’d been told. But wanting to recover that spontaneous look of pleasure at my presence I said, ‘How awful of them, why ever not?’

  And I remember what he said to this. ‘As you know, Hetta, I’m generally persona non grata.’

  I’ve noticed a strange thing about names. Americans deploy them all the time, even at a first encounter they slip one’s name into the most trivial communications: ‘Hi, Hetta.’ ‘How you doing, Hetta?’ But the English tend to use names more sparingly. Will rarely addressed anyone by name directly. Hearing him voice my name at that precise moment struck me with an almost physical force, springing a sudden gush of tenderness for my prodigal brother.

  ‘Not with me,’ I said, disloyally distancing myself from my cousin and my aunt. I must have very badly wanted his good opinion.

  I don’t know if it was that afternoon. I think not. I believe it was the following morning, when everyone had gone out and we were alone together again, that I confided to Will what Bell had told me about our uncle. We had been brought up to believe that he had died in a climbing accident but no details had ever been vouchsafed to us. I don’t now know if it was that our parents wanted to keep the location secret – though I can think of no reason why they should have done – or if, as is more probable, it was simply that Dad couldn’t bring himself to elaborate on the event that had so disrupted his own childhood.

  It wouldn’t have occurred to me then, but it has since, that maybe Dad’s problems with Will had something to do with a resentment over his lost brother, a resentment that he would almost certainly have been unable to acknowledge and which, maybe, had coloured his perceptions of young men and of which my poor brother had innocently borne the brunt. Whatever our parents’ motive, even to me there was something disquieting about discovering that Nat had died not on some snow-capped mountain, as I’d always imagined, but falling backwards on to a Cambridge quadrangle.

  ‘You must have seen the tower every day when you were there,’ I suggested, tactlessly in the circumstances, since it was his desecration of the chapel that had led to Will’s not being there at Cambridge. ‘Is it so high? I don’t remember.’ I suppose I was trying to curry favour with him by imparting this sensational revision of family history.

  ‘It would be one of the spires he must have been climbing. I’ll look when I go back. If I go back.’

  ‘Do you think you mightn’t?’

  ‘God knows. I don’t.’

  ‘But you want to go back, don’t you?’

  The expression on my brother’s face stays in my mind still and I see it now as unguardedly vulnerable and forlorn. And I hear his voice, which when he wasn’t angry was low and unusually melodious, saying, ‘Honestly, Het, I don’t know that either.’

  Part Two

  * * *

  BETSY

  1

  It is some time since Hetta first asked me for an account of all that I can tell of the history of our family that led up to Will’s accident. I understand her asking. And after Will’s fall I did write an account of sorts, f
or my own understanding. I have believed these reflections were best kept to myself. Yet the other day I thought again of Bede, for whom our mortal life is but a sparrow’s flight through a lighted hall.

  I am old and soon I must be joining those who have flown before me into the dark. Perhaps I shall fly more freely if I leave behind what I know, or what I think I know and what I thought I knew. Maybe it is time.

  Beetle called us before they set out for Addenbrookes that dreadful May morning. I was awake anyway. And I don’t believe it is merely with hindsight that I recall my hearing the ringing in the small hours as heralding some doom long awaited, the Angel of Death deciding finally to call. There is a part of me that is always expecting bad news.

  Fred was dead in another sense – dead to the world in the arms not of Thanatos but of Morpheus, as he would have put it himself. For years, he’d been on heavy soporifics to help him sleep so he was confused when I forced him awake, and he looked so stricken when I explained the reason that I said little more than that I was off to the hospital. Of course I didn’t know then where the fall had occurred.

  Because I never cared for my son’s given name, I still privately call him by his childhood name, Beetle. He was a timid little scrap and his only known act of sadism was when he chased his sister with a stag beetle, one of the few times I knew her scared. He wanted to keep the beetle as a pet and he cried when I suggested that it was kinder to let it go.

  But formally he was ‘Bertrand’ because when Fred was only a small boy he attended a lecture, ‘Why I am not a Christian’, given by Bertrand Russell to the South London Branch of the National Secular Society. He was at this unlikely event with our Aunt Charlotte, with whom Fred had been parked while his mother was off on honeymoon with her second husband. Aunt Char was the younger sister of our fathers.

  Poor Aunt Char spent most of her adult life in a genteel home for the mildly insane. She was given to sudden passions, and at the time she had fallen for Russell and went wherever she could to hear him speak. According to Fred, Russell’s arguments so convinced him of the essential folly of belief in a deity that thereafter he rejected religion in all its forms. I used to joke that Aunt Char’s fixation on Russell was a symptom of her deranged mental state but I regret that now because I believe that she was not really mad at all.

  ‘Yield on unessentials,’ my father always said, when he was letting my mother have her way, which was why, though it was no secret that I considered Russell an old humbug, I let Fred have his way over our son’s name.

  By the time Beetle was born Fred and I had few secrets between us, though some secrets are vital in any relationship. I’m not a fan of this modern obsession with ‘transparency’, one of those window-dressing words that cover a multitude of vagaries and stand for an idea rather than the deed. Ideas can do a lot of harm, if you ask me.

  Fred and I shared many things besides Aunt Char. Among the most important was Dowlands, the family house in Northumberland, where our grandparents lived.

  The house was built for a Tye ancestor who made money in wool. It was not a spectacularly grand house, quite modest by the standards of the eighteenth-century nouveaux riches, and most of the land that was once attached to it had been sold off by our grandparents’ day. But it was an elegant house and commanded an uninterrupted view of the sea and the salt-white beach to which a track ran from the bottom of the field that lay beyond the walled garden. The eider ducks which inhabit the cold Northumbrian waters still bob along the shoreline there. Fred and I had a saying, ‘The ducks, aren’t they ducks?’ Reading this now, the joke seems somewhat lame.

  Fred and I spent our holidays at Dowlands. His father was killed when Fred was not quite three months old and he and I were both only children. He didn’t get on with his stepfather, or his mother much, and I was packed off up there too to keep him company.

  It was company for me besides. My parents loved me, I was never in doubt of that, but they liked their privacy. I never asked why they never had another child because I knew in my bones why. Theirs was a perpetual romance and more children might have threatened its intimacy.

  I didn’t mind. I was happy to be their sole focus. I loved Dowlands and I loved Fred, who was better than a brother to me.

  There’s a magic in the air of Northumberland which gets into your blood. Those endless wide skies and the astonishing light which favours the east coast, and the wild sea, forever washing with its pulsing rhythms the wide white sands. They call the sands ‘white’ but they are only white by comparison with the redder sands of the south or the west. Pale sands, I would call them.

  Being left to the care of our grandparents meant, in practice, the care of our fathers’ old nanny, Margaret, who had come as a girl of fourteen to look after Charlotte. She never married or had children of her own, and all I can hope is that we and they were enough for her. She would have insisted that we were and there is no question in my mind but that she loved all three of her ‘first children’ better than their parents did. She was the one who visited Aunt Char in her home and brushed her hair and fixed her up to ‘make her pretty’. She had a sepia photo of my aunt, aged three, dressed in one of those meringue-puff frocks and the long, lace-bottomed drawers that children wore then, and while she looks very solemn you could see that she was a comely child. Hetta has a look of her.

  One of the virtues of Margaret’s care was that it was confined to the domestic so we were left pretty much to our own devices when it came to anything other than what we wore or what we ate or when we were sent to bed. We knew all the local beaches intimately, made friends with the fishermen, went out in their boats to set lobster pots and waded through mud to dig out crabs, and came home to nothing worse than a mild scolding and an order to change our clothes. And when the weather was wet or cold, or anyway too wet and too cold for Margaret’s permission for us to be out in it, we read. Children don’t read now the way we did, though I’m glad to say most of my family are still readers.

  Our grandparents were not readers but the shelves of their library, to which we had free access, were stacked with leather-bound books, collected by some more literate Tye, and classified according to subject. The books were still in fairly good repair, with that peculiar smell of undusted dust which is so potent. There were books on theology (our grandfather came from missionary stock), ethology, geology, psychology and other ‘ologies’, so our reading was eclectic and by present standards advanced. We read all the classics, which are nowadays thought too difficult for children to grasp, I can never see why. From the age of six Fred attended a prep school (such were the times) where Latin and Greek were taught and he read me bits of Homer, which I loved, and of Virgil, who later became his passion but which I liked less. All those military doings in the Aeneid bored me. But it was the Aeneid which provided our private code. LR, we used to say – our shorthand for lacrimae rerum – when we felt anything was too bad. I know that sounds pretentious but I can’t help it. That was how we were. One of the features of love is that it creates a private language.

  The family myth was that Fred and I had no other loves before we married. Families cultivate myths – I dare say some academic will claim, if they haven’t already, that this is an evolutionary advantage. But there was a kind of truth in this one because for as long as I can remember there was a special tie (a ‘Tye’, we liked to say) between us. Much the same bond as between Cecilia and Will.

  Fred, who softened with age, liked to reminisce about the time we had been swimming near St Aidan’s Dunes, where the holy presence of the saint allegedly made the sea safe. There was no one about and we’d grown up seeing each other naked, so I thought nothing of pulling off my wet, and hideous, black woollen costume. God knows why we were sent to swim in wool. Fred looked at me and said, ‘You look like a Rhine maiden, Bets.’ I remember this because he didn’t look at me particularly as a rule, or not so deliberately. In the library there was a book illustrated by Arthur Rackham that told the story of t
he Ring and I laughed, assuming this was one of his teases because among his many strong views was a fierce dislike of Wagner. He never got over his dislike of Wagner.

  I was embarrassed to see his expression change and become suddenly serious. He put out a hand and traced a finger down my nose, as if he were a painter and about to paint my portrait, and then he said, ‘Dear freckles’ which, given what was on his mind, was a cunning thing to say as I was sensitive about my freckles.

  He went on looking at me in that uncomfortably serious way, then he put his arms round my waist and pulled my naked body towards him and kissed me on the lips and I was so stunned I didn’t have a clue how to respond. He eased us down on to the sand, still holding me, and tried to make love to me, and I lay there like a lemon, with the waves thrashing in my ears, not knowing what on earth I was supposed to do.

  What I chiefly remember is that the experience was rather hard on my back. The most erotic part of it, for me, was afterwards. I had a sandy behind because I hadn’t properly dried myself, and Fred, very tenderly, rolled me over on to my stomach and dusted the sand off my bare bottom with the flat of his hand.

  Fred used to insist that was the first time we made love. But he got that wrong as he often got such things wrong: we didn’t manage it then. We managed things better a little later in the Blue Room where we slept. I don’t believe it crossed anyone’s mind that we were of an age to sleep apart. I was fifteen years and seven months and he was fourteen months older. He would be in danger of a custodial sentence these days but I don’t believe I was any the worse for the experience.