Cousins by Salley Vickers

Author:Salley Vickers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241972304
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

9

But I had known. Blanche and Grandmother, with their genteel, antiquated anti-Semitism, had been concerned to cover it all up. Grandad, in his dotage, had never really taken it in and Ma was always one for live and let live. But my father, I am sure, believed that we were wrong to keep Nat in the dark. Though he would have been forgiving of my reasons, I was conscious that he disapproved. Dad was a moral touchstone, one I had failed to regard.

I’ve jumped ahead because all this – all that I learned from Eddie – only came out afterwards.

At Fred’s suggestion I was putting on a production of The Trojan Women, which is a good choice of play for a girls’ school because the principal parts are female. The night that Nat died was the play’s first night. The Greek gods were said to laugh at mortal affairs, so they must have been vastly entertained that night, because about the time little Alexandra Pelham, as the young Astyanax, was being dramatically thrown from the battlements of Troy by various of my pupils dressed as Greeks in cardboard greaves, Nat was preparing to scale the north-east pinnacle of King’s Chapel.

The son of Rex Napley – the student who had taunted Fred about being a CO – had gone up to Cambridge the year after Nat. Evidently Rex had married the dreadful Philippa and they had produced an equally dreadful child. This ghastly son had revived an old Cambridge tradition of climbing the more perilous Cambridge buildings by night. It was the kind of gung-ho undergraduate cult that Fred and I would have utterly despised when we were students. The Night Climbers of Cambridge, they called themselves. This Napley brat evidently dared Nat to join them. His father had apparently recognized the name Tye and had regaled his son with a tale of Fred’s ‘cowardice’. Or maybe the son simply took the information that Nat’s father was a ‘conchy’ and ran with it. I don’t know for sure.

The loathsome Napley boy wrote us a lickspittle letter after Nat’s fatal fall, in which he expressed his ‘most sincere regrets’. I didn’t believe for one second that he was regretful at all, except out of the desire to save his own skin. We learned more from another student, a frantically distressed young man called Bob Craft, who was too stricken for me to hate him and who had also been involved in the climb. He, poor lad, had reached the roof of the chapel and had witnessed the fall. Nat, already angry with us, must have been goaded into a demonstration of his difference from his father.

His father had chosen to turn his back on the fight against the system whose clear and stated ambition was to rid the face of the earth of Jews – a system which had killed his mother, the mother whom he had, in a sense, only just found. The discovery of this shamefully long-concealed truth must have caused an incomparable inner havoc.

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