I had not, after all, gone away. All the plans I had made that night of the lunar eclipse had to be set aside while my family dealt with this new disaster. But I had got myself a job selling programmes at the National Theatre and found a friendly floor to sleep on while I looked for a flat share. I felt for my parents but I couldn’t stay a day longer at Dowlands. To be brutal, I felt that that might finish me off too.
I was anxious going to see Cuthbert Baines, unsure what he would want from me. And I was unsure, in my own mind, what to think about Will’s death. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine killing anyone and found it hard to believe that my gentle cousin Cele could kill. But I had talked, painfully, to Will and I had felt his misery and despair. And I knew that she would have felt it tenfold.
Cuthbert Baines looked to me quite elderly, though he can have been only in his sixties, tall and spare, with jutting eyebrows over little grey eyes. He had hair coming out of his ears, which I found embarrassing because I felt he was aware of my trying not to look at it. When he spoke, which he did slowly and precisely, he had a trick of rubbing his right thumb into the palm of his left hand. The hands, with rather yellowish uncut nails, were long and bony like the rest of him.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Tye,’ Cuthbert Baines said. ‘Would you care for some tea?’ The little grey eyes searched mine coldly as if he were suspending judgement on me pending my answer.
I didn’t in the least want tea. I didn’t want anything as a matter of fact, other than to get away as fast as I feasibly could. But I accepted the tea because I felt that maybe I should; or that maybe I would not be considered trustworthy if I rejected it.
Cele’s solicitor smiled at me with a red lipsticky smile in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring. I was not reassured. I was frankly so nervous that I slopped the tea a young man had brought in for me into the saucer and then on to my skirt and over the rug. It was a rug not unlike the one I had helped Bell to lug to the Oxfam shop – composed of very faded muted colours which made me aware that it was probably antique and grand.
Cuthbert Baines flicked an imperious hand at the rug. ‘Don’t worry about that, tea is good for carpets.’ He passed me a box of tissues to mop my skirt. There was a tin on his desk, with a picture of a pair of kittens playing with a ball of wool, and I remember thinking that it was not the kind of tin I would expect a big-shot lawyer to have. It turned out to have digestive biscuits in it and he offered me one, and that was more reassuring because it brought Grandpa to mind.
‘I have a grumbling ulcer which I have to keep quiet by feeding it biscuits,’ Cuthbert Baines explained and afforded me a chilly smile.
Cele’s solicitor was engaged in reading something in a fat ring binder balanced on her knee.
‘Thank you for coming here, Henrietta. We’ve read your statement but we were wondering if you could give us some insight into how your cousin was when she brought your brother up to see you at Dowlands, it is, isn’t it?’
‘A little holiday,’ Cele had said to Mum on the phone. ‘Will wants to come up to Dowlands to see you all.’
My memory of it now is sketchy, but Cele wrote about it in her diary. Their last time away together, it must have been.
Jesse Arnedale had taken over Kittiwake, his dad’s boat, and he offered to ship the cousins over to Holy Island and Farne. I could have gone too but Will’s features were all screwed up and he was so crooked-looking that I felt squeamish in his company. Cele never revealed this at the time but it was as well I didn’t go along with them as when Jesse saw Will in his chair he said, ‘Hey, grand to see you, man’ but he apparently had tears in his eyes. Will was always the leader, the guy Jesse followed. Awful, it must have been for him, seeing those tears.
Jesse took them out to the islands, where they saw Cele’s friends the seals and puffins and other seabirds.
And quite suddenly, sitting uncomfortably in Cuthbert Baines’s rooms, I remembered Cele saying excitedly over supper in our kitchen that they’d seen a fulmar.
‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that fulmars have a clever system for processing salt from the seawater they drink which they eject through their nasal cavities? Jesse explained it. All these years coming here and I didn’t know that.’
She had seemed very bright that evening.
‘How was your cousin when they were staying with you?’ Cuthbert Baines asked me that afternoon. ‘What sort of mood was she in then, can you remember?’
‘I think she seemed happy,’ I said.
‘Was that unusual?’
I tried to consider this. ‘Well, she was, we all were, worried about Will mostly.’
‘In what way “worried”?’
‘I don’t know, just worried. He was so different. I mean he’d been very active and he was, well …’
‘Very maimed?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry if this is upsetting, Henrietta,’ the solicitor said. She didn’t look too upset herself.
‘What would be helpful, Henrietta,’ Cuthbert Baines went on, in his grave, clear voice, ‘is if you could give us some further idea of how your cousin behaved on that visit. She helped your brother considerably, I gather.’
‘Yes, a lot.’
‘What did that involve? Could you say?’
‘With his toilet, his bladder and, you know, things like that.’
‘I see. Difficult tasks to undertake, in other words.’
‘Yes.’
‘And how would you say she was, your cousin, about performing these very delicate tasks?’
‘She was great. I never felt, I mean, she never made … she never made a fuss about them. She just did them.’
‘So she took very good personal care of your brother. Your mother or father didn’t help, then?’
This was trickier because I wasn’t really sure why it was always Cele who did the things that needed doing for Will.
‘I don’t seem to think they did those things for Will. But that wouldn’t have been because they didn’t want to, Mum and Dad. I expect he wanted Cele to see to him.’
I had loathed the thought of it. I don’t like to remember this but, truthfully, I think I had wanted them both to go.
‘So Will relied on Cecilia, trusted her, in other words?’
‘Oh yes. He trusted her more than anyone.’
‘Thank you, Henrietta. That is most helpful. One last question. Did your cousin ever make any suggestion that she might be contemplating helping your brother to die?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so. Can you say if she ever did?’
‘No.’
‘She never suggested to you that it might be a help to Will if she assisted him to die?’
‘No.’
‘Not ever?’
‘No.’
‘And did he ever make such a suggestion to you?’
‘I wasn’t that good at talking to him. I mean it took a lot of time, you know, he had to blink everything and it took getting used to. I didn’t talk to him much at all.’
‘I understand. So he never made such a request to you for help in dying?’
‘No.’
‘And he never suggested that he might have asked for Cecilia’s help?’
‘No. No, he didn’t.’
‘And would you say you were close, you and Cecilia, exchanged confidences, that sort of thing?’
I considered this. Were we?
‘Yes, I think so. Not as close as she was to Will.’
‘But you would say you were, if not as close as she and Will were, anyway fairly close?’
‘Yes.’
‘She talked to you about things? Included you in her plans?’
‘She was always very kind to me.’
‘So you would say Cecilia is a kind person?’
And that I was very sure of. ‘Oh yes, immensely kind.’
As I made my way out of Cuthbert Baines’
outer office I could hear her solicitor’s voice, which was shrill and carried: ‘Don’t think we can use her, can we? Too unsure of her ground.’
And then I heard Cuthbert Baines say, ‘She might go down well with a jury. Clean-faced young woman, seems honest, sounds authentic. Let’s withhold judgement, shall we, pro tem?’
Part Five
* * *
BETSY
1
I have told only part of the story, my story, my part in the story of our family, but only a part of my part. The essence of what you have read already I wrote in Ely, in those dark days after Will’s accident when his life hung in the balance and we were unsure if he would live or die. While Fred buried his feelings by working away at his translation and Cecilia worked away at Will’s recovery, I found that I too needed an occupation, a means to stay my mind. But there is more to be told …
About that mark on Cain. I have been thinking that if there was a mark it was not so much that he killed his brother as that he survived him. Survivors’ guilt I believe they call it. I think a good deal about survival now.
The day after Will’s accident I went to sit in the cathedral. From the time of our move to Ely I had often retired to its ancient calm and never went without lighting a candle for Nat. That afternoon I lit one for his nephew too and stood and watched the pair of fragile flames burn side by side in the dim quiet before sitting down on one of the pews to – what? To consider what had happened and how it had happened. To try to comprehend.
After Nat was killed, for years it was as if I had been in a bad accident and to the other children I must have seemed – no, have been – a broken creature. In their different ways they both suffered. I knew it then but I see it more clearly now.
How Bell came about I’ll never know, unless she was a changeling. She drove me round the bend because while she was as bright as a button she was also as lazy as all-get-out. I once chided her for not getting on with her exam revision and she shrugged her pretty shoulders, opened the window and threw all her books and notes out into the front garden. I recovered some of them lodged in the thorns of my ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ rose. She passed all her O levels fine nonetheless.
Even as a small girl Bell had men eating out of her hand. She had a way of moving her body which was always provocative. It wasn’t pert or overtly sexy and I don’t believe she was putting it on. I saw a version of this in my mother. Nothing is odder to me than how a movement or gesture will recur in a new generation when it cannot have been learned. But Ma was a fluffy kitten to Bell’s tigress.
I was always trying to discover where my daughter’s beauty came from as no living relative, handsome enough as some of us were, possessed such features. Dad used to say Bell was a throwback to my mother’s Anglo-Irish genes and it was true that she did have a look of Maud Gonne. It must have been this which so often brought to my mind those lines in Prayer for My Daughter:
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
… for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end …
But Yeats survived his passion for Maud Gonne. It was she, whose beauty had driven him wild, who in the end was the loser.
If there is blame to be levelled over the history of my daughter, and thus my daughter’s daughter, then, sitting in the quiet cathedral, I had to acknowledge that it lay with me. For one consequence of the loss of Nat was that I never really challenged Bell. For all my outward scolding, her tantrums cheered me, caused me a secret amusement. I suppose I was impressed that she had the nerve not to yield.
There is some perverse element in human nature which seems to manifest in a peculiar lack of sympathy for those who reflect our own weak traits. Poor Beetle never won from me such admiration. Yet in many ways we were alike. Like me, he was terrified of heights. He was in terror of many things, poor Beetle. Where Nat went off to nursery with barely a backward glance, Beetle clung to my skirt and it was weeks before I felt able to leave him on his own. He was scared of thunder too, whereas Nat was never bothered and Bell could go wild in storms. I can see her, running naked on to the lawn in the midst of a spectacular summer storm, shrieking with Bacchic excitement.
Once at a birthday party Beetle threw back his head to laugh and cracked it on an iron radiator so hard that blood flowed. It was Bell’s fourth birthday, so he would have been seven. The little girls squealed in horror but dear Beetle when he saw how the blood was upsetting them just laughed the more.
As I sat in the unjudging quiet of Ely Cathedral thinking about my children, the old reels flickered across the screen of memory: Nat dancing on the top of Salisbury’s tower, showing me a grass snake he’d found coiled in a mound of grass clippings, refusing to shout with the other children, that ‘Yes,’ he believed in fairies, when Ma took him to Peter Pan; Bell stamping on her birthday cake because I’d forgotten pink icing, winning the talent contest at the Daily Worker fête, dressing up as the Queen in Ma’s satin petticoat – and little Beetle, laughing as blood dripped down his neck on to his clean shirt.
If Beetle survived Nat’s loss, I reflected that May afternoon, he did so partly by marrying Susan.
Susan was unexcitable, loyal, capable and her only mild eccentricity, if that is what you’d call it, was her obsession with her sheep. Fred used to call her Bo Peep, which he took for granted she found amusing. I could tell that she found it irritating and I tried to explain this to Fred. But he was never able to see that what was unimportant to him might matter quite a bit to others unlike him.
In truth, Susan found us both irritating, though she hid it fairly well. But I was aware of it and I was alive to her reasons. I should explain how they came to have Dowlands.
I had always reckoned Grandmother Tye as indelibly steeped in the ethos of male primogeniture. It would never have crossed Fred’s mind to speculate on wills or calculate a likely inheritance. But if I ever considered the future I would have bet Ma’s brown diamond ring on Grandmother leaving her estate to a male heir.
She died with characteristic aplomb, at close on a hundred and three, all but eighty years after she and Grandad Tye – she in old lace, he in full fig – had married in Bamburgh Church. Her last will was brief. She left Margaret a life tenancy in the house and the dogs to care for. I suspect it was thanks to the dogs that Margaret had the tenancy – Grandmother would never have had her dogs lose their home. But I was wrong about her principles, for ultimately Dowlands was left to me. I suppose she trusted me not to give it away.
After her death, it emerged that over the years, with Grandad having passed on much of the family money to Oswald and their capital draining away, they had taken out loans from the bank, which by now held a substantial charge on the house. The place required attentive upkeep. By the time Margaret died, it was run-down and badly in need of repair. Any sale value was unlikely to be very high.
Sydella had not long arrived and Beetle was training as an anaesthetist in a hospital up in Manchester. One day he rang to say he was in London and could he call round. I remember it made me apprehensive: there had never been any question of the children asking if they could call round.
When he turned up he was visibly nervous and suggested we have a drink, which put me in mind of Magda when she came to ask me to take care of Nat. I try to follow my father’s rule, which was ‘to hold off till sundown’, but I had a drink too because I caught his nerves.
He sat there smoking until I couldn’t stand the uncertainty and said, ‘Well go on then. Spit it out.’ As I believe I’ve said, I was always slightly preparing for bad news.
‘It’s about Dowlands. Susan and I would very much like to buy it, if you’ll let us.’
And I was so relieved that I said, ‘Is that all? There’s no question of your buying it. Of course you must have it.’
I was touched that the old house mattered to Beetle. But there was this too
. I felt I owed him some kind of recompense. I never regretted it till lately, when I began to wonder if maybe some unquiet spirit of Nat’s haunted Dowlands.
In those first years after they moved up to Northumberland, we saw precious little of Beetle and Susan, which meant I saw next to nothing of Sydella, which I regret as I never got to know her as I did the other grandchildren. Susan was wary of me. She was always outwardly welcoming and her words were on the face of it warm but you could read ‘Keep off’ as clearly as if she’d daubed it in paint on Dowlands’ big oak front door.
It was partly because of me giving them Dowlands.
Dowlands was where Nat and I had spent those enchanted early years and the very fabric of the walls was imbued with that first love. It seemed fitting that I should pass on what I could of it now to his brother. But for Susan the gift made for difficulties. She had her reasons for resenting me. She didn’t hold with the way we had brought up our children. Her own family were in no position to offer financial provision and she was having no truck with any hint of a Lady Bountiful to whom she might be expected to be beholden. I like to believe that I had no such expectation. Nor do I think she would ever have voiced such thoughts. But thought, especially unconscious thought, is real and I felt it.
It must have been doubly hard for Susan that the twin who bore her mother’s name was the twin she lost and that the baby named after Fred survived. The idea of naming the babies after their grandparents was hers; it was a dear thought, one that Fred and I appreciated, to give one of the twins his name. Though it’s a name that seems not to stick; neither Fred nor Will ever owned to Wilfred.
Because Susan was exhausted by a protracted birth, and then holed by the grief of her lost baby daughter and by Will’s ceaseless crying, at Beetle’s request I went up to Northumberland that freezing December of 1971 to help out. I was very grateful to be asked. Grateful that they allowed me to be of use. To be allowed to be of use is a privilege that you only truly grasp when you become a grandparent.
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