Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  When Cele was born I did write to ask Igor if he thought Cecilia a good name for ‘our daughter’, as I was careful to remind him. He’d been a pal of Britten’s (maybe more than a pal) and Britten wrote the music for ‘Anthem to St Cecilia’ so I was hopeful that my, as I saw it tactful, hint might produce a further contribution of cash. I wasn’t too put out that he never replied but years later, I gathered from Will, Igor sent Cele a Collected Auden with the poem Anthem for St Cecilia’s Day marked with a picture postcard of Stravinsky. She never mentioned this but why should she? Among the many things I had not given my daughter was a father.

  So now, Will. I suppose because I was a black sheep I felt for the boy as he turned into a black lamb. There’s honour among thieves and black sheep should flock together. I was probably the first to spot that he was drinking.

  It was a Christmas when I was dropping Cele off at Dowlands before driving up to Edinburgh with Alastair. I’m afraid this was one of the many respects in which I was a lousy mother. To show somewhat willing, I’d agreed to stay over for Christmas Eve, which was when they celebrated with their festive meal.

  My staying over was my nod to family solidarity. Susan, I should say, never liked me. She’s a well-mannered woman so she never gave any obvious outward sign but I’m not without Mum’s intuition – negative intuition, Robert used to call it, because it’s true that I’m better at picking up negative vibes. One reason Susan didn’t like me was that she sensed I hadn’t much time for what I believe are called ‘family values’. We, that is Beetle and Nat and I, grew up in an ethos of care-unto-others, but to do Daddy and Mum justice it had more zip and pizazz in it. For one thing, Mum (who, as I say, did have some well-concealed principles but never showed them off) was able to laugh at Daddy and challenge him when he became too pious. And, to be fair, Daddy was hardly ever pious – he was really quite mad in an understated sort of way. His aunt went off her head, or so we were told, and in my view Daddy’s marbles were not altogether there either. All that CO stuff in the war. Mum insists he never need have gone to prison at all but he wanted to be imprisoned because it would look good on his political CV. Insane but like him and kind of endearing. Beetle and Susan weren’t exactly endearing, not in my book anyway, and they certainly weren’t the tiniest morsel dotty. Susan once said that our family wasn’t ‘run on proper lines’ and frankly that sums them up.

  Syd, who I would have expected to take after them, showed her Tye genes by up and marrying her married Jordanian and good for her. Hetta retired into her imagination. But poor Will was simply frustrated by the goody-two-shoes atmosphere and acted up. That’s my reading of it anyway.

  As it happened, on that particular Christmas Day when I spotted the drink thing, Alastair’s car chose not to start, so when he rang to give me the bad news that he wouldn’t be picking me up I was trapped for a second night at Dowlands.

  Beetle and Susan did good works on Christmas Day, which was like them, very commendable but I always thought rough on the kids. Cele and Hetta set out with them when they pushed off – my daughter was the soul of tact and was probably compensating for her rude mother – but Will stayed behind. Not too much fuss was overtly made about this but there was an ‘atmosphere’.

  I loathe atmospheres. I imagine everyone does but I’m more readily vocal about this than most so I expressed a humorous sympathy once they had all packed themselves off in Beetle’s four by four.

  I still recall Will’s response: ‘At least we can have a drink now.’

  It was around ten in the morning and while I’m no puritan I’m not given to drinking before lunchtime. However, it isn’t my style to comment on other people’s foibles so I kept quiet and simply continued to read. I was reading Stevenson because I was off to Scotland. I always liked Stevenson as a child. Daddy and Mum used to take us every Christmas to a performance of Treasure Island at the Mermaid Theatre in Puddle Dock with Bernard Miles playing Long John Silver. Silver’s one of those ‘bad’ characters who at the same time are very attractive.

  Anyway, by this time in my Stevenson jag I had got to Catriona, the part where she and Davey run off to Paris, and was contentedly reading in the big sitting room on their highly uncomfortable chaise longue (uncomfortable because it had been there, magnificently unrestored, probably since Dowlands was completed in 1792). With my peripheral vision I couldn’t help noticing that in the space of a couple of hours Will must have gone three or four times to the drinks tray, which was laid out on the old sideboard that had stood there maybe not since 1792 but certainly since our grandparents’ day. There’s a wobbly little N scratched inside one of the cupboard doors which Jack famously did with the point of a compass when he was five and Great-grandad Tye, instead of tearing a strip off him, apparently roared with laughter.

  Beetle and Susan didn’t drink that much but to do them justice they weren’t stingy either and laid on alcohol for themselves and any guests or visitors for Christmas.

  I said nothing, but when they returned I saw Beetle eyeing the whisky decanter, and I could tell he was busily calculating the level which had dramatically dropped. So I volunteered, ‘Oh, by the way, I helped myself to a drink or two while you lot were out spreading sweetness and light. I hope you don’t mind.’

  He might reasonably have minded but had he bothered to think about it at all he would have recognized that this was out of character. I was far too bothered about getting a swollen red nose to drink spirits. But if you have a reputation for impropriety then people will attribute to you almost any social sin, however much it might contradict your observable behaviour.

  Not that I minded carrying the can. Water off a duck’s back. Will glanced across at me but his face gave nothing away. And I wasn’t looking for thanks. Actually, if I wanted anything it was to spare Beetle what I felt would be a needless anxiety.

  About that I was wrong, I admit. What I had taken to be merely an act of adolescent rebellion, a protest against the goody-goody ‘family values’, proved to be something more dangerous.

  Unless it was made dangerous by the way they took it. But, to be fair, I don’t believe either Beetle or Susan were Lady Marchmains. But what I do wonder now, if this doesn’t sound too weirdly far-fetched, is if when Jack fell that ghastly night his spirit somehow shattered into a hundred pieces and, like the sliver of ice in the boy’s heart in the fairy tale, some dangerous fragment lodged in Will’s being.

  2

  When Will came to stay at the flat that time I didn’t, as family legend has it, find him a job as a barman. Family legend pisses me off, if you want to know. I would never have been so daft. What I actually did was find him a job at the ticket office of the Festival Hall through one of Robert’s contacts, but in the very first week Will got the sack. From what Robert picked up, Will was late several mornings and also late back from his lunch breaks and, to cap it all, was surly when reprimanded. So it was understandable they gave him the push. He didn’t let on to me but got himself taken on as a barman in one of the Festival Hall bars. And of course that was fatal.

  He started to drink really heavily. And I guess, if he hadn’t already, he moved on to drugs. They were everywhere then in London, and by the time he’d got his band together he was going to hell in a handcart with a vengeance. In my view, this was more of the revolt, a more determined reaction to the Dowlands ‘family values’, though by this time something had clearly already gone pretty askew. Daddy was an atheist but he would never in his life have defaced a building, not even a hideous one, and certainly never an ancient chapel like King’s. He was too respectful of history for that.

  I asked Will to stay with us in London for two reasons: I was sorry for him but also I thought it would please Cele. And, as I say, it had got to a point where the more the merrier, as far as I was concerned, anything to help dilute my time with Graham. But I got that wrong as far as Cele was concerned. She hated the drunkenness, the drugs even more, and it didn’t bring them closer. Quite the revers
e. The drugs seemed to bring out a violence in Will. There was always an element of that – he had a notoriously inflammable temper but there was a sweetness in him too, a delightful charm, and that seemed to have evaporated, or anyway gone underground.

  So the atmosphere between them was none too bright already when one day, out of the blue, the unspeakable Colin reappeared.

  I’m not easily fazed but I was completely taken aback when the stranger’s voice on the intercom early one evening proved to be his. I’d been expecting a delivery from our dry cleaners, which happened to be called Colin’s, so when I buzzed to let him up I thought nothing more than that it was my Max Mara suit being delivered. Although I’d never met him I knew at once who this was when I opened the door.

  He wasn’t bad-looking. In fact more attractive than I’d been imagining and I admit I was surprised. I hadn’t expected Cele to appeal to a man like that. What I mean is, I hadn’t expected her to be pursued by such an apparently sexually attractive man, which is not to my credit, I know.

  But my God, did I go off him fast. Mr Bloody-Full-of-Himself. It was obvious after three breaths that it had never crossed his mind that he might not be exactly welcome. He actually had the nerve to attempt to seduce me, with a load of crap about how beautiful he’d heard I was but I was even more beautiful than he’d been led to expect, blah, blah. I put a stop to that with my basilisk face, as Robert used to call it.

  He was not too obviously disconcerted but I’d conveyed, very firmly, that I expected him to leave and I do believe that he was about to go when Will arrived on the scene. He was either drunk or high, you could see the moment he walked through the door, and I could also tell that, like me, he knew at once who the interloper was.

  And the very next thing that happened was that Cele came home.

  Will was standing there, stock-still in the middle of my sitting room, just staring at Colin. Then he walked towards him and stared a bit more, very deliberately, slightly narrowing his eyes. As a matter of fact, I had taught all the children that trick long ago. It’s a trick I employ alongside my basilisk stare if I want to seriously freeze someone out. Will had mastered this art to perfection. I said that Robert said he should have been my child.

  With the double force of our basilisk stares and Will’s expertly narrowed eyes you’d have supposed Mr Full-of-Himself would have backed off. But he was just too full of himself. He simply stood there, bold as brass, in the middle of my sitting room on my Persian rug and smiled. A horrid condescending smile.

  Then, with deliberate slowness, he extended an open hand and laid it on Cele’s cheek. Cele shot him a glance, though I couldn’t read her expression, then, eyes down, tried to make for her room. And Colin, stretching out and catching her by the crook of her elbow, said, in a horribly creepy tone of voice, ‘Celandine?’

  The air became electric. If the awful intimacy of that name shocked me to my core it must have primed Will’s already simmering rage.

  ‘Cunt!’

  Colin just smiled down at him. He was so much taller than Will that it was impossible for him not to look down.

  ‘You can fuck right off! Fucking cunt!’

  And Colin, still with that awful smile, said, ‘Ah, the brave, bold cousin William.’

  I don’t know why I intervened with ‘It’s Wilfred, actually.’ I don’t mean I don’t know why I intervened.

  Colin, whose grip on Cele’s elbow had been broken by Will’s shoving, now patted him on the shoulder. ‘Calm down, laddy.’

  I can’t honestly swear to exactly what occurred next but it seems Will had a spanner in his pocket – something to do with the equipment for the gig the band were playing that night – and he hit out with it at Colin’s face. Then Colin was at my feet screaming blue murder and there was blood all over my Charles Jourdan shoes and over the rug. I bought it at Christie’s and it was probably the most expensive thing we had in the flat, but I gave it and the shoes away to a charity shop afterwards.

  Cele stood there transfixed and I heard myself saying to Will with surprising authority, ‘Go to your room, now!’

  We rang for an ambulance, which took its time coming, and meantime I wrapped a clean tea towel round Colin’s face, avoiding his right eye which was frankly a bloody mess. Colin kept up a low moaning whine throughout which left my withers unwrung. If that sounds spiteful then let it be known that I felt, and feel, spiteful, and cruel, and had then as now no desire to find it in me to sympathize.

  If Colin and I meet in hell, where we are both likely to land up, I shall be indifferent to any punishment that may be meted out to me in the unbounded satisfaction that I shall take in witnessing whatever is served on Colin. As Mum said when I put this to her, ‘Yes, well, we’re told that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman’.

  3

  When Will was taken to court by the vengeful Colin it was not really so surprising that the person who reacted best to this was Daddy. You might imagine, as the circs were so different – Daddy’s sentence being the consequence of a principled pacifism whereas Will’s was the outcome of unlawful aggression – that Daddy would’ve been in the forefront of the band of disapprovers. But what this mess of Will’s must have activated in Daddy was his longing for camaraderie. If Daddy was a commie my guess is it was because of a need for comradeship, and Will was already a kind of colleague for him. (It only struck me the other day but if you put together the names they went by they make up the single name they shared.) It was also the case that Daddy’s indifference to the personal meant that he cared less than most people about any individual’s misdeeds and far more about their ideology. Or his perception of their ideology. In his eyes, Will’s attack on Colin was a righteous attack on privilege – male sexual privilege in this case – but any privilege unworked for was to be fought against in Daddy’s eyes. Good for him for that.

  Beetle and Susan, however, were predictably aghast. All their former anxieties about Will now seemed justified. Any career he hoped to have would, in their view, have gone down the plughole. Daddy’s attitude, which apparently contradicted his lifelong pacifism to which we had all been tediously subjected, would have just made their outrage worse, particularly in Susan’s case. Hetta has hinted that Susan, quite unfairly, held Daddy’s atheism responsible for the vandalism that led to Will getting kicked out of King’s.

  But the person most deeply affected was obviously my daughter.

  The difficulty I have is that I cannot claim that I really know Cele. It’s a wise parent that knows her own child and in this respect I am less wise than most, though having said that I would bet I have as good an understanding of Cele as Beetle and Susan have of their children. I’d kept Cele at a distance, palming her off on Daddy and Mum, or Beetle and Susan, so it was only post my marriage to Graham that I had time to observe her.

  Poor child. She was obliged to appear as a witness, called by Will’s defence counsel, and she loyally plumped up Colin’s behaviour that day, suggesting that his physical attempt to detain her was rather more outwardly aggressive than it actually had been. I had no qualms at all about endorsing this and frankly I quite enjoyed being in the witness box. Violence is not only explicit and that ‘Celandine’ was deliberate provocation (though I know it’s not an argument that would wash in a court). So I dressed myself up to the nines and laid it on with a trowel.

  Cele refused to dress up at all, though the fact that she looked so excessively drab might of course have helped. What she wouldn’t do was claim that Colin had involved her in underage sex, ‘a potentially mitigating factor’, Will’s defence suggested. Presenting Will in the role of one endeavouring to protect his cousin from further depredations might have got him off with no more than a caution and would have finally done for the regrettable Colin (and good riddance, I say). But concerned as she was to help Will in every way, Cele bent the truth no more than by that very slight talking up of Colin’s behaviour towards her that day in my flat. Will’s defence attempted to m
ilk, by implication, the effect on Cele of her affair with Colin and her desire to end it, and Will’s concern for his cousin’s safety and peace of mind. And he might have got off altogether except that, under oath and pressed by the prosecution, she admitted in court that the sex with Colin was consensual. In her position I think I would have lied.

  Will’s defence persuaded him to plead guilty to unintentional GBH and the judge was lenient and on account of Will’s previous good character gave him only a suspended sentence. In spite of his scrape at King’s, one of the dons there wrote Will a testimonial, saying how bright he was, what a promising student etcetera, which shows you that for all his antisocial behaviour Will was popular there. I was a witness that he had been provoked by Colin and much was made by his counsel of his protective instincts towards his cousin, which was ironical as the episode caused a serious rift between them.

  It was a condition of Will’s probation that he live under the ‘supervision of a responsible adult’ who could answer for him and he had touched me by rather hesitantly asking if I would agree to act in that role. I was tickled to be considered a ‘responsible’ adult but I suppose I had Graham to thank for that. Cele’s reaction to the fight – and her refusal to sink Colin outright in court – must to Will have appeared a betrayal. I expect he made himself believe that he was protecting her and that she was ungrateful. Anyway, the upshot was that after a couple of tricky months, with the two of them at daggers drawn, Cele decided to take herself off. I wasn’t privy to what exactly led to her move, though I’d overheard them rowing. Will probably thought she’d asked Colin to come, or that they were still sexually involved. Maybe they were. I don’t really know.

  I ought just to add that, given that Daddy and Mum were first cousins, any long-term alliance between Will and Cele would have provoked serious opposition from Beetle and Susan. And I must admit that even I was a tiny bit concerned. As I jokingly said to Mum once (she wasn’t too receptive), there were dotty Great Aunt Char’s genes to consider.