Kissing Cousins
There's trouble brewing in Lower Itchen.
We are a “Medical Family”. Everyone in Itchen knows that. But nothing else about us. Not really.
My Sis has just got engaged. Not my “sister” in truth, a cousin, but that’s another long short story.
Mother is particular. About what happens to her Deoxyribonucleic Acid- DNA. She didn’t marry “Well” herself, so it’s down to her Susan to make up for her “mistake”, thirty-one years later.
“The Target”- Jake is a GP. Or will be next June, just in time for “The Wedding of The Year”. In Lower Itchen. Grandmother Philadelphia was holding out for a Consultant. But nothing gynaecological. Something nice.
She imagined I’m sure, a ward full of eternally grateful cherubs with conveniently curable childhood diseases. A specialism in “Paedophilia”, Grandma P. said. (She meant Paediatrics). But that’s Grandma all over. I see where I get my social faux-pax from, inherited gaffs that you can’t simply open the French windows to disperse in company. My natural if disarming tactlessness, if that is indeed a word.
As long as he was a “Gentleman”, Grandma announced, peering imperiously over the top of her half-rims.
I thought, it didn’t matter much if he turned out to be a complete “S-Aitch-I-T”. As long as he was “Harley Street”. Or in the mews behind at a pinch. A shrink, like poor bow-tied Mr. Asher, the Psychiatrist who took his own life whilst trying so hard to save others.
As long as they called her granddaughter’s future, “Mister”. As you are supposed to do with Surgeons and Consultants. Who, in Grandma P.’s day still wore long morning suits and salt-and-pepper trousers to see their titled patients…
Then played Club bridge long into in the afternoon. Drank from five. Played Debussy at his baby grand, gradually getting worse and worse as the light faded and the level in the gin bottle dropped “below the label”. That was how they described dipsomaniacs- whether they were “Above” or “Below” the label.
Grandma knew someone who knew someone at St. Thomas’. A surgeon with a K- a Knighthood- who gave his wife a black eye once. She missed all the “socials” for two weeks, pretended to have a heavy cold, then Peritonitis.
“Could of been worse, of course”, Mother confided. He might have been just an ordinary, country General Partitioner. In fact, the wife did catch Peritonitis or something intestinal- faked it too good- and died “tempting Providence”, once too often.
“Jakes” as Sis called him, was summoned for “Interview” a week later. Sis was sent out of town. Mother listening for the tell-tale squeak of the garden gate opening, like a submarine commander from behind the net curtain; talking excitedly behind her hand. “He’s arrived”…
Sis had warned him not to mind her Grandmother’s American “straight-talking”.
He promised not to. And looked forward to her shooting from the “hip replacement”. Docs always make silly quips like that. “It shows they’re nervous too”, I offered. That seemed to explain everything to Sis. And she left contended for Staines on the 9.10.
Jake. Of course he was called “Jake”. What else? You can’t imagine a “Keith” as a future partner in uncle’s practice- “Offices & Associates in Boston…”, as it said on the Medical Register entry Jake told everyone he had studied like the Bible. Who was targeting whom, I wonder now? Now it’s, always, too late.
My sister had stalked her prey via his friends of friends. Like a ghost hovering around the ivy-smothered entrance to his “Quad” at “College”. The deliberate use of “College” enabled him to avoid the word “Oxford”, in case it put off “the oiks” in his platoon. Or impressed social-ivy climbing Jewish mothers. Attracting the right, or the wrong “sort”.
Sis an eminence grise, armed with a pasta-boiler he didn’t know “how the hell” to use. A shadow of her former self at the Hurlingham Ball, when “Rugger Bugger” Jake had taken “That Hussey”, Sam Thatcher-Gore... Who was actually rather nice and “rode to hounds”. Whom I might have tried a stab at myself. Manufactured the chance to accidentally bump into her on purpose. Nice. If you like that sort of thing.
Then Jakey did his “Suck-it-and-See” Limited Commission year in the army- Blues & Royals, naturally. And before you ask, or deduce, yes I was a pale Verdigris shade of jealous green. Sis might have still believed I was the “Bestest Big Brother ever”, as she wrote on cards. Until Jakey Boy stole the title.
She, observing his every “Top Likes” and “Dislikes” in the St. John’s Yearbook. Her friend’s brother had access to his private entry. As if summoning the apparition of the future life she wanted. Craved, I see only now, a decade since her death, and two past the divorce that led to his.
A gift-wrapped life, as neat their wedding list at Harvey Nicks department store would be. Bowed-and-tied. But the silk ribbon proved more of a garotte. Strangling expectations. The phantom son and still-born daughter, one-of-each, who they discovered could not be so easily delivered.
She lived “Jakes” life for him in the end. Took over. Like a well-meaning, generous but a well-meaning, cancer-like generosity all the same. What was it Wilde said, we always destroy the things we love?
She was Jake. Without the work and sleepless, coffee-fuelled nights. Without getting the Medical Post-grad to add to her one A level, a D- in Human Biology.
“The most expensive A-level of all time”- father coined the phrase. Five years a St. Mary’s Ascot. A week of pottery, Art History and dress-making at The Featherstonehaugh School of Art in Chelsea. She left abruptly, whilst throwing a clay pot, having decided inside herself, it was easier to “bag” her Jake. Thus are many lives Fates sealed- on an unglazed clay pot.
The sleepless nights, the tears making pillows damp, and the tantrums. Sis always had one after her second sloe G&T. At least they were her own tears. Not Mother’s. She just wanted to be a A Good Wife. Better than Sam Thatcher-Gore. All she needed was real love, to add to her Grade D, and a fallopian tube free of endometriosis. She “only had to litter. Just once”. Jake’s father, The Brigadier, someone said, had said that. She was right. He never liked her.
She was paired with Jake “In Heaven”. She revealed to me exactly a week before died. I worried then and worry still, when I overhear language like that. It leads to murder. Or worse. Emasculation. That was what Jake died of. The medical sounding, Emasculation.
In her mind, sewing in the high-ceilinged studio in Chelsea, she as as good as three months pregnant with Oscar their first child. One of four. In the perfection she spun, and smoothed like wet clay between her fingers. Something made her think. She was sucking the mango juice from his finger on their honeymoon in Mauritius. Which she did. But marriage would turn reality into premonition.
Jake “disappeared” for the first time while they were there. He was always doing that. The same as her father. Never realized they were so alike. She would complain to her friends how she had lost her car keys- and her husband.
But this first time of so many first times, rounding the corner, she found her Jake. In the staff carpark of all places, shaded by the banyan trees. In the jeep they had hired to go looking at waterfalls and buy weed, if they could find out how.
She placed the Gucci box containing the sports diving watch gently on the roof. The watch Jake had casually said he liked in the hotel shop. It was just something to say, to break the icy silence after their first row. But Sis as ever, remembered more how he said it. That if she bought it, all would be right, again.
Jake she saw, was inside. Windows steamed. Bending forward, shoe-less. Placing a kiss on the forehead, then the lips of that man, the handsome one with the prematurely white-grey beard. The finger, a Papilla mammaria, the nipple exposed. That younger man, always smiling, smiling; one of the reception staff who had wished them “Every Happiness”, and given Jake the key to the rooftop Honeymoon Suite.
James Chanel- “Writing that no one will read”- AMAZON/KDP