There is a moment in Salley Vickers’s 2012 novel, The Cleaner of Chartres, when the central character, Agnès, observes the famous labyrinth on the floor of the cathedral: “It was clever,” she reflected, “the cross, being composed not of the stones that made the path, but of those that marked its absence.”
Hetta Tye, one of the narrators of Vickers’s new novel, Cousins, reiterates this idea: “I’m fascinated by the gaps made by people and the gaps in people, and how those gaps get filled, sometimes to our detriment.” Cousins is a story whose shape is defined by absences. Narrated in turn by three women from three generations of the Tye family, it is principally the story of two young men, Nat and Will, both of whom suffer the same unusual dramatic accident and whose fates come to seem inevitably connected as their lives are reconstructed through the accounts of the women who loved them.
The novel opens with Hetta, who has “some slight reputation as a writer”, looking back to the night in 1994 when her brother Will, like his uncle Nat, free-climbs the spire of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, and falls. It is Hetta’s idea to compose a family history around this pivotal point and its aftermath, corralling her flighty Aunt Bell and quietly wise grandmother Betsy to share their memories. The Tyes are English gentry; an 18th-century family seat, Dowlands, in Northumberland, forms the geographical centre of the novel and the locus of each generation’s childhood memories, though Betsy’s husband, Fred, a lifelong committed socialist, did his best to shake off the class trappings. To say they’re a close-knit family would be an understatement: Fred and Betsy are first cousins whose attachment reaches back to childhood, while Will – whose twin sister died at birth – finds a substitute in his cousin Cele, Bell’s illegitimate daughter who grows up with Will and Hetta.
Of the three narrators, it is Betsy who emerges as the most substantial character. Hetta, like the best observers, does not impose herself too greatly on her narrative and leaves an indistinct impression, while Bell begins as something of a “type”, a superficial woman who has always relied on her beauty and her ability to manipulate men to make her life as easy as possible; only after Will’s accident does she reveal stronger qualities. But Betsy’s story holds the key to all the others; she follows it back to her childhood, and her student days during the war years, where the great family secret behind the birth of Nat lies buried. Betsy’s long perspective allows her to analyse the nature of cause, effect and blame in the way this family drama has played out, and to conclude that her own part in it leaves her with a responsibility to atone, regardless of the cost.
“And all the while the ancient well-worn words ran through my head, the sins of the fathers… Those Biblical authors, when they weren’t fanatical zealots, or list-makers and lawgivers, were shrewd psychologists.”
Admirers of Vickers’s work will know that she had a career as a psychoanalyst before turning to fiction, and that she brings a scalpel-sharp but compassionate scrutiny to her characters’ minds and motivations. Here, as in her previous novels, there are hints of mysticism and coincidence that may or may not be rationally explained away. Cousins is a measured, thoughtful study of the ways in which expectations, deceptions and regrets play out through the generations, but it is also a celebration of loyalty, sacrifice and a tentative sort of redemption, effected principally through the steadfastness and solidarity of women.
• Cousins by Salley Vickers is published by Viking (£16.99). To order a copy for £13.93 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min of £1.99
