For three of the nights I was there I took baby Will in with me so that Beetle and Susan could get some badly needed rest. Once little Will had worn himself out with crying he slept beside me in the bed in the Blue Room, as his uncle had done over thirty years before.
People may get used to terrible things but I don’t believe they get over them. They may go on, but that is because they have to, which is not at all the same. I believe that because of that first loss there was some small aspect of life for Will that was never quite right for him. Like his father, but when no more than a scrap, he bore on his tiny downy shoulders the burden of being a survivor. His relentless frantic wail was like no other that I at least have ever heard. It was strangely unchildlike, more penetrating than a baby’s usual cries, so that his crying seemed to touch some nervous system, deeper almost than the heart.
‘He is lamenting his lost twin, poor little lamb,’ I said to myself. I couldn’t say this to his parents.
2
To my mind that was what Cecilia was for Will: his lost twin. I do wonder if this love affair they seemed to have had would really have lasted. Who can say? Perhaps it would have done. Perhaps my tendency to anti-romanticism is some defence against the romantic chances that I myself have spurned. But what I do believe – and have no doubt about – is that they were kindred spirits and yes, if you like, twin souls.
They stayed with us many times as children, so I had leisure to observe them, and they had the kind of intuitive sense of the other that you most commonly find in twins.
Those were halcyon years for me and Fred. Fate which had pitched so many horrors at us seemed content to let us graze for the time in pleasanter pastures. We never forgot Nat. But things you have to bear – because what else is there to be done? – will, in time, become perforce bearable. Fred, once he had settled in at St Levan, was happy with his books and his reading and his translation. I was grateful for this as it absorbed his considerable energy. And I, always more lackadaisical and untroubled by idleness, was content with reading and walking by the sea and gardening – and my grandchildren.
Before he left for the RAF, I went with Jock Turnbull to the Fitzwilliam. In one of the galleries there was a Renaissance painting of a Madonna, don’t ask me by whom because I forget. What I do recall is making a callow comment about her expression. I’m sorry to say that I insisted she looked constipated because, while I was never a card-carrying atheist like Fred, in those days to be even faintly religious was to be considered reactionary. It’s not so different now, I suppose.
Jock, who came from a mining family, and was therefore free of left-wing pretentions, was hampered by no such prejudice. He said, and I never forgot this because it was a kind way of taking me down a peg, ‘I reckon she’s contemplating all those years ahead of never being able to put things right for her kid.’
I might have told him, had he lived, that grandchildren make up for a good deal because they are a second chance.
This must be why there is so often such a special bond between grandchild and grandparent. And I have come to see that the better you treat someone, the more you love them – which is why you must never let someone treat you badly, for the worse they do to you, the more they will hate you. I had failed Nat, and my other children were the sufferers and for that reason, I knew, I had loved them less well. Fred, I should say, would have dismissed this suggestion as rubbish.
But it meant that free of the anxious tentacles of parenthood I was able to watch with enjoyment as Will and Cecilia, and later Hetta, grew. And I’ll say this, in spite of all that had happened with Nat we never coddled our other children or our grandchildren. When they stayed with us in Cornwall we let them go off bathing and climbing the cliffs and exploring because it seemed to us that common sense is best cultivated by being let loose to navigate the world, not by being sheltered from it.
For years, I put the pair of them to sleep together in the four-poster that was Ma’s and too fragile for Fred’s big frame (the only time we slept in it one side gave way so suddenly that I ended up on the floor). I would often steal in when the two children were sound asleep beneath the old silk canopy, simply to enjoy the vision of them entwined together or with their limbs flung about in that childish unconscious carelessness. Few sights are as sheerly heart-melting as a sleeping child.
Will and Cecilia more or less learned to read together on the tattered copies of Beatrix Potter that I had first read to their parents. I can’t say that this is what gave them their love of animals – I suspect all children love animals until they are taught not to. But the very anthropomorphizing, so witheringly despised by Fred, who had no time for Beatrix Potter (‘bourgeois’), gave them that sense of animals being their equals and worthy of respect. Certainly this point of view came naturally to them.
One of the things I love most about children is the way they mind. It is what I loved in Fred, that he minded. ‘Never mind,’ I often say to myself, but children ought to mind. It creates the oxygen in which their souls can breathe. But even by the standards of children, Will’s minding was exceptional. He regularly got into trouble for fights and because he was small he had a compulsion to take on bigger boys. He got into a barney once while staying with us with a local lad who was maltreating a donkey. I never discovered how this unfortunate animal had landed up in this bully’s care. But when, to prove his point, Will took me to the bit of scrub where the donkey was tethered, I could see that the poor beast had abscesses. Will, aged ten, sought out the donkey’s owner, who was an overweight bulky boy of fourteen, verbally attacked him and, when that produced jeers, physically assaulted him. According to Cecilia, the lout rushed off wailing to his mother. The mother came round to complain but Fred, who had a down on her because she’d got up a petition against some council houses that were being mooted in the village, packed her off with a flea in her ear and a threat to report them to the RSPCA. Fred was always Will’s ally.
Although he tended to tangle with older boys, Will was remarkably tender to younger children. I’ve often thought that small children are like canaries down a mine – they only sing when the air is wholesome. If I was sometimes worried by Will’s easily aroused aggression, I was reassured by the gathering of the local little ones who appeared like magic when he was down with us. As Fred said, he was a pied piper born.
That got him into trouble too. Little Tim Trannack, with his nose running and his bruised knees, whenever Will was staying would arrive first thing at our door to ask if he could come out and play. Although Will could be impatient he was always patient with Timmy, who was a backward little boy with a speech difficulty so it was often tricky to make out what he was saying. Will, however, seemed to follow Timmy’s odd locutions with no trouble. He let Timmy tag along with him and Cecilia when they were messing about near home. But he knew better than to let him accompany them on longer expeditions.
Timmy once followed the cousins surreptitiously on to a bus which was going up the coast and then missed the stop where they were getting off. Instead of waiting for the next stop he jumped off the bus after them, and was badly knocked on the head and shoulders where he fell on the kerb. He was hurried off to A and E and Will was desperately upset and blamed himself for Timmy’s fall, though he hadn’t encouraged him, quite the reverse. He seemed to me always to retreat too readily into some inner place of hurt.
And it was the case that when Will was hurt, and he was easily hurt, he could lay waste all around him. I never knew the cousins quarrel when they were small but as Will grew older not even Cecilia was safe and she was the one most vulnerable to his attacks. Will was always Cecilia’s sun. She took her centre of gravity from him.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things began to go wrong but if I had to choose a defining moment, when the unravelling of Will began, it would be with Cecilia being sent away to school. I should have tried to dissuade Bell. I knew it was a bad idea. Bad for Cecilia, bad for Bell, bad for all of them. And it led to that
monster seducing Cecilia. She must have been so lonely away from them all at Dowlands, poor lamb.
I tried to speak to Fred of this once and all he would say was ‘But you were under age, weren’t you, when I had my way with you in the sand dunes?’
I could have said, ‘It wasn’t in the dunes.’ I could have said, ‘That was quite different because sixty years on we are still together.’ I could have said, ‘Times were different then and you, after all, for all your faults are not a thorough shit.’ But what would have been the use? He wouldn’t have understood and anyway I was too annoyed.
3
When Fred died, Cecilia came to see me in Ely. Hetta had been staying with us and had left only days before and I was missing her, as I always missed the grandchildren when they went. But I was missing everyone more sorely than usual, for obvious reasons.
I had left Fred’s copy of the Georgics on the little table by the chair where he was reading it and Cecilia picked up the book with its scuffed red jacket. ‘Do you remember how he used to get us to help with his Aeneid?’
‘How could I forget. Was it an awful burden?’
She laughed and that was good to hear because she didn’t laugh much. ‘I wasn’t much help but Will was, wasn’t he?’
‘Oh, Fred loved that Will shared his love of Virgil. But I was saying to Hetta, I feel if it weren’t for that Will would never have gone to King’s and …’
‘Granny, please don’t.’
‘I’m sorry. One should never say “if only” …’
‘We loved being with Grandpa. Especially Will. I don’t mean …’
‘It’s OK, pet. I know Fred was special for him.’
‘He still says “LR”, like you and Grandpa. It’s probably his only joke now.’
She looked so wistful that I said, ‘It’s not one that many people would get these days.’
‘He said to say “LR” to you about Grandpa.’
There was something too painful in this so as she began to flick through the book I didn’t say, as I might have done, ‘Please don’t lose his place.’ I had wanted to leave the book marked at the point Fred had reached. It was somewhere in the section on bees, I know, because before I left the room to make tea, I mentioned to Fred how all those years ago Bev had got me to read Maeterlinck. Funny how I suddenly recalled that. He must have died while I was warming the pot because the tea still wasn’t made when I put my head back round the door to ask if he wanted a biscuit and saw that he had gone.
It was the last thing I ever said to him and maybe it was not such a bad image to go out on, a bee.
I was rewarded for holding my tongue about the book because, with it open in her hands like a prayer book, my granddaughter said, ‘Granny, Will wants to die.’
I had gathered as much. More than once he had painfully blinked out to me ‘I do not want to go on like this.’ And what could I answer that would not sound to Will like sentimental tripe? ‘You must live in hope’? ‘Things will get better’? ‘The Lord will provide’?
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Granny.’
‘Yes, darling.’
I can see her white face still, with the luminous skin and the Russian bones and those eloquent green eyes.
‘He wishes he had never regained consciousness.’
‘I see.’
‘And I helped him back.’
‘My understanding is that you helped him communicate. He was conscious anyway, wasn’t he?’
‘I don’t know. I may have made him come back.’
I doubted that. I still believe there are limits to human powers. But I listened. I have learned to listen, or maybe to listen better. I listened not simply to her words but to the reverberations behind them, the tone. You can hear the truth of a person’s words in the tone.
Pretty much from the time Will learned how to communicate after his accident, he had, as far as he was physically able, been badgering Cecilia, entreating her to help him end his life. Everything that had mattered to him had been taken from him, he insisted. He couldn’t walk, or climb, or run, talk normally, argue, eat, he couldn’t hold her in his arms, never mind make love. Even with her, he lamented, he could barely hold a proper conversation.
‘I haven’t tried to dissuade him. It would have only increased his anguish for me to seem not to know how he feels. I can’t, I can’t tell him it will all be all right because it won’t be, will it, Granny?’
‘Probably not.’ Not enough for Will, anyway.
‘He wanted me to tell you and I wasn’t sure that was right.’
‘But it seems so now?’
‘It did just then. I don’t know why.’
I felt I knew why. It had something to do with Fred dying. And while I didn’t think this then, maybe some part of her saw that his dying had left me more free. ‘Darling, I am so, so sorry.’
‘I’m sorry too,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if this is upsetting for you.’
‘I’m upset for Will. And for you.’
‘Don’t be upset for me.’
‘I worry, darling. I worry that …’
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t say it, Granny.’
She has changed, I thought. My sweet timid girl has changed. I realized then how the things that open out in us as we go on through life become the very things that prevent us from ever going back.
‘It’s all right, lamb. I understand.’
I did understand. I understood why Will wanted to go and why she wanted to help him. She would always want to help him and somewhere, for her, he would always come first. What I was less sure of is what I wanted to do about this and before I could consider anything so serious I felt I must bury Fred.
I gave Fred a prayer-book service because – well, basically, because I wanted to. And as Fred himself would have been the first to say, he wasn’t there so he wasn’t likely to mind.
We sang Bunyan’s ‘To be a Pilgrim’, because Fred had always excepted Bunyan from his atheist’s Index and Fred, in his way, had been a pilgrim of sorts. I wanted Bell to play the fiddle but she said she was too out of practice, though my private thought was that she feared she would be too overcome. But it was at her suggestion that we gave Fred ‘Joe Hill’ as a final rousing send-off. The vicar, a portly young chap with a belly that suggested he would do well to watch his own heart, was quite witty about this and observed, ‘“I never died, said he” is, after all, a well-regarded religious position, so I think we can approve it for Wilfred.’ I had to explain that Fred was never ‘Wilfred.’
Cecilia came, bringing a message from Will. She didn’t stay for the wake that Beetle and Susan had organized at Dowlands. Hetta was there of course. And Sydella sent beautiful flowers, white lilac, which, sweetly, she had remembered that I love. Eddie had driven Bell up from London the afternoon before in a very smart car, which I was glad of, as I felt Bell might need someone to talk to – she was always closer to Fred than to me – and Bev and Ted came from Harrogate, where they’d retired. And I was touched by other locals who had known us coming to condole, including a nephew of the farmer with whom Bev had her wartime fling. The nephew strongly resembled his uncle, who was a big rugged man, and I caught Bev giving him an old-fashioned look. She caught me catching this and winked.
When I got her to myself I told her about my mentioning Maeterlinck to Fred moments before he died. She laughed and said, ‘I can’t say I remember reading it myself,’ but she seemed pleased. I get the feeling she doesn’t read so much now.
Susan had laid on a fine old spread. The dead, notoriously, are good being gone so maybe she was assuaging her guilt with sliced ham and home-made pickle and beetroot (which reminded me of the ghastly paying guest they used to have there, God knows why). Beetle provided beer, and two cases of very superior wine arrived from Graham with a thoughtful note, which was especially generous as he must have been aware that Fred, in his high-minded way, had vaguely despised him.
I was g
lad to be among my family and friends but after a bit I wanted to be alone. So I took myself off, not too much the worse for wear, to the modest hotel I’d booked myself into because while I’d sometimes visited Dowlands on my own, especially latterly, I frankly couldn’t stand the thought of sleeping there that night without Fred. And it’s an odd thing but that night my sleep was strangely sound.
The next morning I woke early and drove to the foot of the hill where long ago, as a young woman, I had found Cuthbert’s chapel. There had been rain in the night and the sky was washed white and blue and the wet hill grass was gleaming silver. It was a tough walk up the escarpment through the black-faced sheep. I am fit for my age but the years take their toll. When, panting but triumphant, the bottoms of the legs of my trousers drenched from the wet grass, I made it up there, I sat on my jacket on the boulder by the hawthorn, where I had sat long ago, and pondered in my heart many things.
4
I sometimes teased Fred that he might have made a splendid general because when he set his mind to it he had a capacity both to anticipate and to plan. What in his make-up appeared vague, and many mistook for benign, could switch to a decisive ruthlessness when he chose. Will had the same decisiveness. From the moment I agreed to help he meticulously organized the campaign for his own death.
It was Will’s idea that I should be there at the flat when Cecilia fed him the drugs and this was the really clever part of his plan. He dismissed the idea of involving Bell, unsure whether she could withstand the questions that might follow. But he had concluded that if everyone present pleaded ignorance – Bell because she genuinely would be ignorant and Cecilia and I because he had demanded that we did so – then there would be a serious evidential problem with any inquiry.
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