The Family Secret

by Rex Antioch

1.
	It was the day after my Great-great-grandmother’s one-hundredth birthday and most of the twenty-five of her descendants who had gathered for the occasion had left again for their homes all around the country.   Great-great-grandmother, though, had asked Dad if he, mum and I could stay for another day because she wanted to talk to me.
So after breakfast Dad delivered me at Great-great-gran’s Rest Home and then he and Mum went shopping in the city.
“Sit down, girl,” Great-great-grandmother said once the nurse had delivered me to her room.  I took one of the chairs parked by the wall and set it beside her bed.  She had one of those hospital beds with a motorised headboard and its motor whirred as she raised it to me able to see at me better.
“So you’re thirteen, eh?” she asked.  
“Yes, Great-great-grandmother,” I said.  Dad, Mum, my brother Michael and I lived in a town not so far away, so we had been visiting Great-great-grandmother in her Rest Home about once a month for years.  As long as I could remember, in fact.  So I’d assumed she knew all about me.
“Do you know how babies are made?” she asked.
“Er, yes, Great-great-grandmother,” I told her, more than a little startled by the question.
“‘Gran’ will do,” she said firmly.  “Ever tried it?”
“Er...”  I stared at her.  Gran gazed steadily back.
“Claire,” she said softly, startling me even more for I couldn’t recall her ever using my name to my face before.  To her I was usually ‘girl’ although she would use my name when grilling Dad about my progress at school or something, ignoring the fact that I was there in the room as well.  
“I’ve brought you here to impart a secret to you,” she went on.  “Otherwise it will die with me, and I don’t want that.  Now, I don’t care if you’re a virgin or if you’ve slept with the entire Manchester United football team and I am not going to tell your parents either way.  But I’d like to know.  So?”
“Er.  I haven’t,” I announced in a small voice.  Truthfully.  Gran nodded as though I was right.
“Can you get those photos down and bring them to me?” she asked, looking past me at them.  There were two of them, one above the other in a big frame hanging on the wall opposite Gran’s bed.  I dragged the chair over to it, stood on it and sized up the frame.
“It will be heavy,” Gran said warningly.
That much was obvious.  The frame was of wide, dark solid wood and the glass over the contents looked thick.  The two photos inside were each perhaps a bit bigger than a foolscap sheet of paper on its side and there was a lot of space around them taken up with a plain, creamy-looking card like wallpaper.  The whole thing was about as wide as my shoulders and would have covered me from my chin to the belt on my jeans.  I grasped the frame at each side and gingerly tested its weight.
I discovered that I could lift it as long as I did not have to lift it very far.  Peering behind it I saw it was hanging by a cord suspended from hook in the wall.  With a heave I lifted it clear of the hook and dropped heavily down onto the floor from the chair with it.
“Set it on the bed, girl, then bring up another chair for it,” Gran ordered.  So I was ‘girl’ again.
I followed her instructions and when I sat down again next to Gran’s bed the picture was sitting on a chair next to me.
“The top photograph,” Gran said, looking at it past me.  “Do you know what it is?”
“Er, it’s you,” I offered.
I knew that only because I had been told.  The Gran in the faded, soft greys of the photograph was a pretty girl of about my age in a plain long-sleeved dress with a round neck, a sash belt and full skirt to mid-calf.  She was wearing thick stockings probably of wool and little black shoes.  Her hair, white in the photo but presumably blond like mine, was all brushed back to fall over her shoulders to about her shoulder-blades, to judge from the ends peeping from behind her arms.  
She was standing in front of a tall, slim woman with her hair drawn behind her head into a tightly bound bun under a broad-rimmed, ribboned hat.  She was wearing a billowing white blouse with a little lace at the throat and down the front and an ankle-length black, severe dress pinched close around an incredibly narrow waist.  I had been told she was Gran’s mother.  My great-great-great-grandmother.  She was looking uncomfortable.
The centre and focus of the photograph was a young man in an army officer’s uniform standing slightly forward next to Gran and her mother, while on the other side but slightly behind him stood an elderly, balding man in the black vestments of a clergyman complete with dog-collar, who was my great-great-great-grandfather.  The group was standing on a lawn of short grass in front of an ivy-covered house with square, undecorated windows and a big shiny front door in the centre.  I knew this was Biston Magna rectory where Gran’s father had been the parish priest for many years because Dad had once taken me there to see it and it was still just like it was in the photograph.
“Yes, that’s me,” Gran said softly.  “With my mother, father and brother David.”
So the young man in the uniform was her brother.  If I had ever been told that I had forgotten it.
“Can you read the date on the photograph, girl?”  Gran asked.
I had to peer at it closely.  In the bottom right hand corner of the image on the pale grey of the lawn, a very neat hand with a very fine nibbed pen had inscribed in tiny letters ‘Biston Magna Rectory.  10th June 1916.’  I read it out loud.
“10th June1916", Gran echoed softly.  “I was one hundred yesterday.  How old was I when that photograph was taken?”
I was startled once again.  It seemed an incredibly involved way of setting me a reasonably simple math test.
“Er,” I narrowed it down to the year and then worked out the months.  “Fourteen years four months,” I said.  Gran nodded approvingly. 
“And what was going on when that photograph was taken?”
I caste my mind about.  I assumed she wasn’t expecting me to know what was happening in Biston Magna rectory on 10th June 1916, apart from the fact that family photos were being taken.  There was only one thing happening on that date that I knew about.
“Well, there was a war,” I hazarded.  Gran nodded sadly.
“Indeed there was.  The war to end wars.”  She was silent for a moment and I saw tears gather in her eyes.  With a grimace she twisted them away.
“And does the date 1st July 1916 mean anything to you?”
I thought about it and then shook my head regretfully.
“The 1st July 1916,” Gran said softly, “Was the first day of the First Battle of the Somme.  On that one day eighty thousand British soldiers died. One of them was my brother David.”
“Oh, Gran!”  I hadn’t known that, or if I had I’d forgotten it.
“That photograph was taken on the last day of two week’s leave my brother’s regiment had been given before they moved up to the front for the attack.  The Generals said that the preliminary bombardment would be so accurate and heavy that nothing would be left of the German trenches.  So they ordered the soldiers to attack across no-man’s land at the walk, in lines.  And forbade them to stop, or take cover.  They had no idea.  Eighty thousand men died.”  A single glistening tear crept down by her nose and she scrubbed it away.  For her age she was still quite strong and could even walk a few paces with her frame.
“David knew he was going to die.  The average life expectancy of a lieutenant in the Trenches was nineteen weeks.  They were expected to lead from the front, to set an example to the men.  He had been out there since January.  His nineteen weeks were up.  He knew what he was going back to.”
Propped up in her bed Gran looked no bigger than me, and no heavier.  The previous day I had seen her grilling and cross-examining her great-nephews and nieces and her great-grandson my father, sharp-tongued and sharp-witted.  A roomful of people who, like me, all owed their existence to her, and who regarded her with awe and respect.  Now before me, the youngest of them, she looked helpless and wept silently.
“Look again at the photograph,” she whispered at last.  “Look at me.  Pregnant with my brother’s child.”
It took me several seconds to catch on to what she had said.  To fully grasp its meaning.  My great-great-grandmother standing in the photograph as just a fourteen-year-old girl, pregnant with her brother’s child.  Which meant that she had....  With her brother...  And she had just admitted it to me.
Not knowing what to say, what to think, I stared at the pretty girl in the ancient photograph, a girl only a few months older than me.  She even looked a bit like me.  She didn’t look pregnant but she had just told me, eighty-six years later, that she was standing there with her brother’s baby inside her.  
“I didn’t know it then, of course,” Gran said quietly.  “For the baby was only a day old.  Nothing more than a fertilized egg, really.  Three weeks later it was all I had left of my brother.  He never knew.”  
I was gob-smacked.  I didn’t know what to say.  I knew she had told me something extraordinary, something so huge that I couldn’t begin to think it through.  I didn’t even know where to start.  I knew, though, that I couldn’t keep on staring at the ghostly image of the little girl in the photograph whose attempt to smile at the camera was all too clearly failing in the face of a deep worry and unhappiness even though she didn’t then know that she had her brother’s baby in her womb.  So I faced  up to Gran aware that I looked like a stunned mullet, as Dad likes to say.
“I loved my brother,” she told me softly.  “Of course he was six years older, but before he went away to University he was at home and I was just a little girl, and he would read me stories and take me for walks across the fields and through the woods and tell me about the trees and the flowers, and always look after me.  And I always felt safe with him.
“Then he went away to University and I was devastated, and then the war came and, being the man he was, he joined the army as soon as he could.  He trained as an officer and we were all so proud of him, and he went away to France that January so determined and a little bit worried, and a little bit excited....”
Gran fell quiet for a moment, remembering.
“And then he came home on leave, that June.  And I knew he was different.  He tried so hard not to be, but his eyes had changed.  They saw a different world.  A world full of death and destruction.  He saw Biston Magna not as the Garden of Eden it had always been for him, for us, but like the destroyed villages he’d seen in France and Belgium, just shattered stumps of trees, the farms reduced to a lifeless desert, homes reduced to knee-high walls and everywhere just death and the dead.”
Gran’s eyes, too, had changed and though they were looking at me, they were not seeing me.  Then suddenly they were.
“The day before that photograph was taken,” she told me, “David’s last full day of leave, he disappeared and I was sent to look for him at dinner-time.  I found him in our favourite place, a little dell in the woods.  He was crying.  I asked him why and he told me all about it.  The war.  What he had to do.  And I hugged him like he used to hug me to make me feel better.  And he told me he was scared.  Not scared of dying or being injured, but scared of showing that he was scared.  Because you see, Claire,” Gran told me slowly, “Where he was going it didn’t matter whether you were brave and strong or cowardly and weak.  The gas and the artillery shells and the machine guns killed everyone regardless.   The only way not to get killed was not to go, or to desert, or to shoot your own foot off, or go mad, and David couldn’t do any of these things.  He knew he was going to be killed.  He just wasn’t sure he could show he wasn’t scared of it when he was.  So, so scared.”
Gran was weeping again but didn’t seem to be aware of it, the tears forming in her eyes and trickling down her cheeks.
“And he told me that the one big regret he had was that he was going to die a virgin, without ever having known what it was like to make love to a girl.  To really make love to a girl.
“So I told him to make love to me and pulled him down onto the soft thick grass of the dell and we made love under the blue sky, brother and sister.”
Gran was still for a moment, staring into the past, then jerked her head up and sniffed.  “Give me some tissues, girl,” she ordered.  I pulled a handful from a box amid the bottles of medicine and jars of creams on the table beside the bed and handed them to her.  She wiped the wet streaks from her cheeks and blew her nose, then gave me the wad back to dispose of in a bin beneath the table.
“When you get to my age, you know,” her voice was soft again.  “You can remember what happened fifty years ago better than you can remember what happened yesterday.  I can close my eyes,” she closed them, “And it is all so clear to me.  The smell of the grass under my back, the little white clouds drifting across the blue sky above us - Oh, such a blue sky, - the skylarks trilling out of sight, the leaves whispering.” Her voice trembled.  “And my big brother’s weight on me,  making love to me.  My big brother safe and warm inside me.  Oh, it was wonderful.”
She fell silent, her lips parted slightly, tears that I knew were tears of happiness trickling down her cheeks.  I sat frozen, unable to breath.
“Claire,” her eyes flicked open, pinning me to my chair.  “The young so often ignore the things the old can tell them.  But the old have been there, done that, and they know.  There is nothing so wonderful as love between a brother and sister, unless it is love between a mother and son.  Believe me, I know.”
This was strong stuff.  Mum had talked to me about sex, but not like this.  I felt almost as uncomfortable as if Gran was showing me a porno movie.  I couldn’t think of a thing to say and, seeing it, she smiled softly.
“And you are so young, and I am so old,” she pointed out.  I smiled weakly.  Gran sniffed and glared at me.
“Has Michael tried anything on with you?” she asked briskly.
Michael was my 18-year-old brother, training to be an aircraft mechanic because of his clever fingers.  He was bluff and strong, laughed a lot and called me ‘kid’ as he ruffled my hair affectionately.  I opened my mouth and shut it again.
“Do you not think, after what I’ve told you, that you can tell me?” Gran asked gently.
“Er.  He....  Well, he likes to hug me sometimes.  And, er...  He sometimes squeezes....” I couldn’t say 'tits' in front of Gran, nor breasts neither as they weren’t really breasts yet, so I waved my hand in their general vicinity.  “And makes a joke about them not growing quickly.”
Gran smiled.  “And do you want him to do more?”
After a long moment I nodded.
“Don’t worry about it,’ Gran said softly.  “He’s not sick for thinking thoughts like that and neither are you.”  She took a deep breath.
“Afterwards David and I went home.  Mother had prepared his last dinner with us, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, David’s favourite.  There were new potatoes from Mr.  Seymour’s garden, the first of the year, and asparagus which was considered very decadent, running with butter.  Then strawberries and cream.  And ale and port. Everyone was laughing and joking and no-one was happy.  David got a little drunk but no-body minded.”
She paused for a moment, looking at me and thinking. 
“And then,” she said slowly, as though uncertain whether or not to go on.  “We all went to our beds.  Later, a long time later, I slipped out of mine, donned my gown and crept through the silent house to David’s room.”
Her eyes on mine were sad, reflective.  “Yes, I was going to him again.  I wanted to comfort him.  I wanted to give him just once more the pleasure I knew he had known when we were lying together on the grass.  And I wanted it, too.  I yearned to feel him inside me again, making my body burn with that sweet fire.  I reached his room, opened the door silently and slipped inside.”
Gran closed her eyes as though to remember the better, releasing me from the iron of her gaze.
“But someone else got there first,” she whispered.  “I saw them on the bed.  David naked on top of her, his body slicked with sweat rising and falling between her knees, his head on her shoulder, face buried in the pillow beside her cheek as he laboured in her.  And she turning her face to the door as I closed it behind me and seeing me there.  Looking at my face, into my eyes.  My mother’s eyes looking into mine but perhaps seeing what I was seeing, her naked body beneath her son, his body between her legs, his flesh sliding in and out of her.”
My heart had stopped and I could see only Gran’s blank, blind face as she relived that sight.  Relived it for me.
“She saw me,” Gran breathed, “And saw what I saw.  She knew why I was there, and knew also that she could not let her son, my brother, know that I had seen them.  So she put one arm around his back, pulling him onto her breasts, and the other over his head, holding his face in her hair on the pillow.  She murmured her love to him and her hips rose to meet his and hold him snared there as she turned her face away from me again to look past David’s shoulder and through the ceiling and the roof-tiles into the infinity of heaven and the joy that waits there while I crept silently from the room and back to my bed where I cried and cried and cried.”
She was crying again while I could only stare at her, stunned.  In her long silence I slowly became aware of the sounds outside the room, a trolley squeaking up the passage with footsteps behind it.  The trill of a distant phone.  The slam of a car door outside the window and the grinding whirr of the engine as it started.  Slowly I returned from that June night in 1916 to the present.
“Tissues, “ Gran snapped at me and I clumsily grabbed some more from the box and handed them to her.  She wiped her eyes and face again and blew her nose noisily.
“I think,” she declared clearly, glaring at me, “That if someone made a study of the numbers of babies born to sisters, mothers and daughters nine months after their brothers, sons or fathers came home on leave from a war, they would be in for a very great surprise.” 
I had nothing to say to that and Gran’s face softened.
“I don’t blame David.  I don’t think he lied to me.  He would not have taken me against my will in that dell.  But his body knew it had only a few days left to live and was crying out to do what it had been created for.  To pass on his seed.  Not to his sister or mother, perhaps, but his body was blind to that.  It did not care about the name attached to the womb it was seeking.  Was it wrong to spill it into his sister and his mother?  Was it right that it should walk into that storm of bullets and shrapnel and high explosive at 20-years-old?  To die before it had lived?  No, I don’t blame my brother.  Nor do I blame myself.  I gave myself that first time in the dell for love, not sex.  And found that sex transmutes love and love transmutes sex into something else.  Love is love and sex is sex, but together they become divine, an act of Worship.  Ah, girl, I cannot describe it.  It can only be experienced.  If you are very, very lucky you will meet a man you can love and who will love you and with whom sex will be divine.  Most people are not that lucky and at the best experience affection and good sex.  Yet for a woman with her father, her brother and her son as with a man with his mother, his sister or daughter that love should already be there to share and it is so, so stupid to deny them the sex that elevates it to the divine.”
She gazed at me, lips pursed thoughtfully.  I hoped she was not expecting me to comment.  Then she shrugged.
“Once I knew I was pregnant I told Mother.  I did not need to tell her who the father was.  She had not spoken to me about what I saw in my brother’s bed.  Had made no excuses.  Nor had she asked me about my brother and I.  We each understood the other and were women together, united in grief.  We planned how to deal with it and I seduced a poor lad from the village.  Had sex with him twice.  The third time Mother ‘caught’ us and he was sent away in disgrace.  He lied about his age and joined the County regiment, and was killed at Cambrai.”  A spasm of pain crossed her face.  “So he became the father of my brother’s baby.
“Mother, of course, had to pretend to be angry and father was very stiff, but so soon after David’s death we could not bear to cause each other any more pain and so it was not too bad.
  “You know, girl,” she went on conversationally, as though we were discussing a cookery recipe  “God has a warped sense of humour.  My menses had only just begun.” She shot me a glance and I nodded to show I knew what she was talking about.  “And they were still irregular,” she went on.  “Had I actually wanted to get pregnant I probably wouldn’t have.  The odds against it must have been enormous.  But it happened.
“Of course in those days abortion was illegal.  You could have it done illegally but it was terribly dangerous.  Thousands of women died each year from infections or internal injuries caused by amateur backstreet abortionists.   So soon after losing her son Mother could not bear to risk losing her daughter as well, and Father could never rule her.  When I neared my term I was sent to a home which specialised in girls in my condition and had the baby.  Of course we feared the worst, Mother and I.  A baby born of incest. Deformed, perhaps, or handicapped.  Cursed somehow with God’s disapproval.  But I had beautiful, healthy, happy baby boy, born of the pure love of two virgins and conceived in the Garden of Eden.  That’s him in the other photograph, with me.”
The second photograph in the frame was a standard studio portrait of a young man in an RAF uniform sitting in front of his two proud parents, each with a hand on his shoulder.  Like the other image in the frame a date had been added by hand.  4th December 1942.
So in it Gran was 40.  She looked so much like her mother in the other photo - about the same age, tall, slim-waisted and pretty though with shoulder-length hair tightly curled at the ends in the style of the day.  She was wearing a sober, rather cheap-looking knee-length dress and stockings - nylons, I assumed, - with low-heeled shoes.  She looked just like the women I had seen in films of the time about the war, like ‘Yanks’.
The young man in the blue uniform - the photo was in colour - looked to be in his mid-twenties.  I realised I could work it out and did.  He would have been born in February or March 1917 so in December 1942 he would have been 25.  He was smiling cheerfully at the camera and had one hand on his mother’s on his shoulder.  Now that I was alert to it I could see that he was very much like the young man in uniform in the other photograph. His uncle who was also his father.
Years before, seeing me looking at the photo, Dad had just said, “That’s Gran, in the Second War.  That’s her son and her husband.  Her son was killed in the war.”  All very true, yet far from the whole story.
Gran’s husband was another clergyman and looked far older that she did - in his sixties.  Although he had his hand on the young man’s shoulder he was looking straight ahead, almost as it he was trying to disclaim the boy.  Gran sniffed.
“Had the baby really been the by-blow of a village lad Mother would have had it adopted, but I don’t think she could give away something her son had created.  So we kept the baby. But I was a young girl with an illegitimate child,” she said softly as though following my thoughts.  “And so many young men died in the First War that there was a huge surplus of young women in the years that followed.  Any man looking to marry could more or less take his pick, so why should he be interested in a girl with another man’s son in tow?  My father married me off to Percy in 1925, and I suppose I was lucky to get a husband at all.  He was a good man.”
My great-grandfather had died long before I was born and I knew practically nothing about him.  From the way Gran said the five words of his epitaph I gained the feeling that ‘good’ was a generous assessment of his life - that in fact they had meant little to each other.
“My son was christened Adam David,” Gran said.  “And Percy and I formally adopted him after our wedding. He died in a raid over Berlin in August 1943.”
“Oh, Gran,” I said again, feeling her sadness.
“Yes,” she sighed.  “I not only lost a son, I lost another part of my brother as well.”
After a moment’s reflection she sharpened up.  “Take a look in the top drawer of that chest.” She pointed across the room and I obeyed.  Inside the drawer was a box made of a pale, fine-grained wood with two brass clasps holding the lid closed.  It was about the size of the video recorder that sits under our TV at home.
“Open it,” Gran ordered.
I undid the clasps and lifted the lid back.  Inside in a bed of blue velvet was the family Bible.
It fitted snugly in the box and was, I knew, over two-hundred years old because I had seen it before.  The cover was a soft red leather over a stiff leaf, intricately carved and inlaid with gold.  Like the one in our church it had half-a-dozen coloured ribbons to mark various passages and the edges of the pages were gold so that, closed up, it looked like a gold brick inside the covers.  Inside the front cover were two pages, originally blank but now containing my family tree going right back to my grandfather with seven ‘great-‘s in front of him, who had been alive when George II had been King of England.
“Know what that is?” Gran asked.
“Yes, Gran.”
“I’d like to give it to you.  Will you take it?”
“Oh.”  It was utterly unexpected, and I was confused at being asked.
“Claire,” Gran said.  “It is a responsibility.  It will be up to you to keep it up to date until, perhaps when you are a hundred, you can pass it on to a young member of the family who you think is the right person for it.”
I was aware that she had indirectly complemented me.  I think.
“All right, Gran,” I said a little faintly.
“Good.” She sounded pleased.  “Your father can take it with you when you go.”  I couldn’t help thinking that my first responsibility would probably be to add the date of Gran’s death to the lists.  Which is why, I realised, she was giving it to me now.
“And I’ve a favour to ask of you, girl,” Gran said softly.  I returned to my chair and sat down.
“Will you take that?” she asked, nodding at the two photographs in their frame.  “You are the keeper of the family secret, now, as well as the family Bible.  I’d like you to hang that somewhere where you’ll see it occasionally, so it will prompt you to remember my brother David and his forgotten son.  It doesn’t have to be in public.  Inside a cupboard would be a good place, because the photographs really should be kept out of the light.”
“I’d like to, Gran,” I said.  “It will remind me of you, too.”  
“Thank you, girl.  That’s very sweet of you,” Gran said a little huskily and I knew she was pleased.  “Now, what are we going to talk about until your father gets back.”

2.
	Six days after I became the keeper of the family Bible, and the family secret, I was lying on my bed at home reflecting that Gran had been right.  Sex with your brother is wonderful.  
Michael had been, and come, and gone.  In fact he’d come twice.  Whether sex with your brother was more wonderful than sex with anyone else I had yet to find out.  I was also keen to find out if sex with my brother would be as wonderful the second time as it was the first, but that would have to wait.  For the moment I was content to lay naked on my bed and luxuriate in the things my body was telling me.
It hadn’t been all that difficult to get my brother to have sex with me.  I’d waited until, alone in the house with him, he had crept up behind me, slipped his arms around me and pulled me against him.  His hands had covered my little tits and given them a squeeze, and then as before he’d let me go, slipping past me with a laugh and a “Reckon they’re a little bigger, kid.”
“Would you like to see them?”  I’d asked, a little nervously.  
That stopped him.  Before he could say anything I’d dragged my top off over my head and taken off the little cotton bra I didn’t really need.
My brother was right about my tits getting bigger and I was glad of that as his eyes drank them in.  At least they were past that awful stage of being just silly little pointed bumps like someone had stuffed an olive under each of my nipples, making them stick up.  It was more like someone had stuffed half an orange there instead but at least they looked a bit more like real breasts and they even jiggled a little bit if I jumped up and down.
“Oh, wow,” my brother said kindly.  “You’re getting there, kid.”
“Can I see, you know, your prick,” I’d asked, still a little nervous as I didn’t know then how easy it was going to be.  I thought I might be too little for Michael and I was, of course, his sister.  And Michael wasn’t a virgin, I was sure, or going off to be killed in a war.
He pretended to think about it for a moment and then shrugged.  “Yeah.  OK.  Why not,” he said.  “What else are brothers for?”  He undid his belt, opened up his flies and extracted his prick for me to look at.
I hadn’t seen one before.  Not in the flesh, anyway.  Michael’s looked like the ones I’d seen when a friend of mine had found some porn on the Net although seeing a real one, alive and kicking, was a lot more exciting.  I’d stepped up to him and took it in my hands.
He’d jumped, and then kind of melted.  I let my breath out with a gust and hadn’t realised I’d been holding it.  The thing I was holding wasn’t what I’d expected.  It was so strong, so alive.  It pulsed and twitched in my hands.  Its funny bulging head was so incredibly soft but it felt like bone underneath, though I knew it wasn’t, having learned at school how men have erections.  “Oh, sis,” Michael had groaned.
“Take me to bed,” I’d ordered.
“Hey, Kiddo,” he had breathed, as though he wasn’t sure.  I’d stroked his prick.
“Take me to bed,” I’d said again.
“Are you sure?” he’d asked.
“I’m sure,” I’d said, and added, “And one day I’ll tell you why.”
I stretched my body lazily on my bed, feeling good.
I felt sure Gran would never have seen a boy’s prick before that day with her brother in the woods.  Not that at 20 her brother was a boy any more.  He was a man in a war.  He’d probably killed people.  She wouldn’t have seen a prick in a photograph, there was no TV and I wasn’t even sure if they had cinemas.  Even if they did, though, I’d bet they didn’t show nude people in it.  From what I knew of the period people had been very particular about that kind of thing.
What must it have been like for her, then, so completely unprepared for the sight of her brother’s prick?  I couldn’t imagine.
Had she taken her clothes off?  If she hadn’t how did she avoid getting grass-stains and dirt on her back, with her brother’s weight on her as well?  Yet as I’d listened to her story I had pictured Gran and her brother hugging each other, her brother crying and telling Gran why and Gran pulling her brother off the log onto the ground with her and them going straight into sex.  Probably she would just have pulled her dress up, her brother would have pushed his trousers down over his bottom and she wouldn’t even have seen his prick before it pushed against her and then into her.  She wouldn’t have had a clue what to expect, and then even when it was inside her she wouldn’t have known what it looked like.  Weird.
Had it hurt Gran?  Had her brother’s prick been bigger than my brother’s, with him being two years older?  Did that make any difference?  It hadn’t hurt me too much.  Just a kind of stretching and a pop with a ping of pain I hardly noticed as Michael’s prick had surged into me making me tingle from my head to my toes.
How had Gran described it?  Sweet fire.  Oh yes, that was good.  I’d felt that, too.  Sweet fire and a fizzy sparkling, starting where Michael’s prick was stroking me inside and spreading like there were wires leading from my cunt to my fingertips and the soles of my feet and up my spine to my nipples and the top of my head.
Had Gran’s brother come twice in her as mine had, or just once?  Or three times, perhaps.  The first time Michael had been hard and urgent, sliding up and down in me rapidly, his hairs banging against mine and jolting me with the end of his prick bumping against something soft deep inside me which poured petrol on the sweet fire until it flared up suddenly and burned right through me and I had squealed and dug my fingers into Michael’s ribs.  And he had kept banging away, grunting, holding his weight off my little breasts while the sweet fire gobbled me up and then died away leaving me warm and tingling all over like I’d been singed inside but not badly.
Then my brother had come in me.  I’d never wondered about it, but I guess people grow hair between their legs to act as a cushion when they’re having sex.  Michael has a thick tangle like a beard but I haven’t been growing mine very long and it’s just a little bush around my slit almost like a little vertical moustache.  Suddenly my brother jammed that beard really hard against my little bush as though trying to get every last millimetre of his prick into me and I could feel it pulsing and pumping as it squirted his spunk into me, and I could feel it like it was a tiny finger poking out of the end of his prick and prodding me softly in the insides, a funny tickling.  I expect Gran felt it to, and it was that tickling which gave her a baby.
Michael was very worried about me having a baby as he didn’t have any condoms to use on me, not that I wanted him to.  I told him that I hadn’t begun my periods yet, which is true, and that I couldn’t get pregnant until after I’d had one, which I hope is true.  Michael believed me, because he wanted to I suppose, but I know I ought to start being more careful.  Gran wasn’t all that much older than me and she’d started her periods.  Or menses as she called them.  And she got pregnant first time.  And my Mum wouldn’t be so understanding.  I wondered if Gran had thought about getting pregnant but had done it anyway because she loved her brother, or just hadn’t thought about it.  I think you can get the pill from the Family Planning people these days once you’ve started having sex, even at thirteen, and they won’t tell your parents.  I’ll have to find out.
After he’d come the first time Michael collapsed on me, puffing like he’d just finished a cross-country run, then he slipped his arms around me and squeezed me and stroked my hair and nibbled my ears, which made my cunt go all tingly for some reason, and told me what a wonderful sister I was and how much he loved me, and that made me feel almost as good as the sweet fire had.
His prick was still in me and still hard like a rod, and he began sliding it up and down in me again but more gently and slowly, and he talked to me as he was doing it - about us and things we had done when I was little, things I’d forgotten about but which had made him laugh, or proud of me.
I didn’t want to talk.  I just wanted to lie there and bathe in the sweet fire, but I was glowing, too, just listening to my brother talk.
I guess this is what makes brother and sister sex so special.  My brother gently shafting me and reminding me about wonderful things we had shared when I was a little girl, or a bigger one, and telling me happy or funny things I had forgotten.  No other boy could do that, and I don’t think Michael would have thought about me like that, not warm and close like that, unless we were warm and close because we were having sex.  And it was only then, that second time, that I understood what Gran had said about sex and love.  I was having sex and sex is wonderful, but the boy I was having sex with loved me because I was his sister and I loved him because he was my brother and we had a whole lifetime of knowing and caring for each other and that made the wonderful sex a whole lot more wonderful because it was something else wonderful to share.
He came in me gently but my sweet fire had almost burned out and was just a kind of glow with little sparkles like the embers of a camp-fire when a draft pokes it.  Then Michael lay on me for a while just loving me, not having sex though his prick was still inside me, but just loving me.  Then he had to go because he’d arranged to meet his mates for some snooker, so he slipped his prick, which had shrunk and gone all floppy, out of me, kissed me on the lips and on each tit and then, with a “love you, kid,” which he’d said as if he’d meant it, he gathered up his clothes and went for a shower.
And I just lay there letting the embers of the sweet fire fade away.
Gran and her brother hadn’t been able to do that.  Or perhaps they had.  Perhaps afterwards they’d lain there on the grass under the blue sky watching the little white clouds float by overhead and listening to the skylarks talking like brother and sister about the happy times they’d had, but far closer than most brothers and sisters because they’d shared the closeness of sex as well.  I hope they had.
How, I wondered, had Gran dealt with the mess?
Having my brother inside me had made me much wetter than I’d ever been able to make myself with my finger or pushing things inside myself, and there was my brother’s spunk as well.  “A teaspoonful of sperm’, the teacher had told a giggling class of us during sex education at school but it felt a lot more than a teaspoonful.  More like a pint, some of it still tricking down inside me with a little tickle.  As soon as Michael had left I had grabbed a handful of tissues from the box beside my bed and stuffed it between my legs, and now I extracted it and gingerly looked at it.  It was soaked and sticky with my slime, and also some globs of white stuff that had to be my brother’s spunk.  There was just a single small smear of blood, so I had bled a little bit the first time.  Not much, though, thank God!  I put the used tissues on my bedside table and grabbed a fresh wad.
Had Gran bled, I wondered?  I’d been putting things as big as I could bear inside me for a couple of years which is perhaps why it had not hurt very much, the first time.  I’d got Dad to hang the frame with the two photographs on my bedroom wall over a poster of Robbie Williams, who I’d gone off, and now I could turn my head and look at it only a few feet away.
It was hard to imagine the prim-looking fourteen-year-old-girl in the top photograph playing with herself or pushing candles up her own cunt to see how deep it was, and because it felt nice.  It was also hard to believe that the same prim-looking girl was standing there with her brother’s baby inside her, but she was.  If Gran from the 1916 photograph was to stand next to me and if neither of us had any clothes on you wouldn’t be able to tell which of us was from 1916 and which from 2002.  Gran had enjoyed sex with her brother as much as I had.  We weren’t different at all, really.  So of course she had explored herself.  When her brother had talked about making love to a girl she had known what he had meant.  She hadn’t been taught about sex at school like I had, seen photographs of people doing it or seen people in bed on TV all the time, but she hadn’t been stupid.  
So perhaps they’d had handkerchiefs, or perhaps she’d just wiped herself off with grass or dock-leaves.  Spunk though, I was discovering, is thick, sticky stuff and takes a long time to trickle out of your cunt.  And in Gran’s case, of course, not all if it did.  At least some of it went the other way, into her womb, and made a baby.  Perhaps they lay together on the grass afterwards for a long time and a lot of it had trickled the other way.
But eventually they’d gone home, Gran with the back of her dress grubby and grass-stained and the top of her legs sticky and cold when the air brushed it as it was brushing mine.  Perhaps she had been able to creep into the house and get changed without anyone seeing her.  Perhaps she’d been seen but claimed that she’d slipped and fallen over.  Perhaps her mother had seen her and had known what Gran had done, but hadn’t said anything because she couldn’t, because she was going to do it herself.
I hadn’t thought much about that part of what Gran had told me.  It was just too huge.  OK, I had been shocked when she had told me that she had had sex with her brother, but I knew it happened.  There were stories and rumours about it at school.  I knew what incest meant - sex between brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters and mothers and sons.  I even knew a few girls who had admitted having limited sex with their brothers - not all the way like I just had but looking and touching, so they said.  I knew, too, that some fathers had sex with their daughters.  They went to jail for it.  But not mothers and sons.  I’d never heard of a mother going to jail, or even being in court for it.  I’d never heard any gossip or rumours about it at school.  I simply, simply could not image Mum having sex with Michael.
It was possible, of course.  Just unbelievable that Michael would want it, or Mum would allow it even if he did.  Yet Gran had told me that she had seen her mother having sex with her son.
Why?
Why had she told me?
She had been reluctant to, had nearly not told me at all, I knew.  She had spoken of her incest with her brother warmly, lovingly, unashamed.    Describing her brother’s incest with their mother she had been remote, untouchable.  Why had she gone back to her bed after discovering them that night in 1916 and cried and cried and cried?  Because she had been unable to comfort her brother that last time?  Because she had been denied the chance to experience sex with her bother than last time?  Because her brother had betrayed her?  Because her mother had?
Probably all of them, I decided, which made it even more surprising that she should reinflict the pain on herself by recalling it, let alone telling me about it.  Too, her incest with her brother was her secret.  Hers alone, to do what she wanted with, including tell me if she chose.  Yet the incest between her brother and her mother had been their secret, not hers.  What right did she have to pass it on to me?
Something in my memory stirred.  Something Gran had said to me which my mind had noted down for further attention later, but which I had not yet given it.  Gran saying something about the old having so much to teach the young, but the young not listening.  ‘There is nothing so wonderful as love between a brother and sister, unless it is love between a mother and son.  Believe me, I know,’ she had said.  The love between a mother and son.
Yes, she had seen it on her brother’s bed but she wouldn’t have known how wonderful that was for all she had seen was a reflection of it in her mother’s face.  ‘Believe me, I know,’ she had said in a way intended to call my attention to it.  She knew how wonderful sex between a mother and son is, because she had done it.
I looked at the face of the young man in the second photograph.  Gran’s eldest son, named Adam because he had been conceived by two virgins in the Garden of Eden, and David after his dead father.  Gran’s son, who she had made love with.  Had sex with.
Now that I knew, it was plain to be seen in the photograph.  Gran was standing so close to her son that her stomach, her womb, was pressing slightly against the point of his shoulder as he sat, turned slightly towards her, and she seemed to be almost trying to shelter him beneath her breasts as though they could keep him safe from the German fighters and the anti-aircraft fire.  Her hand was on his shoulder, almost at the base of his neck, and his hand was laid over hers parallel with it, just as his body had lain on hers in his bed or her marriage one.  His smile was the happy one of a man at peace with himself.  I had seen it on my brother’s face as he had looked fondly down at me lying naked on my bed after we had made love.  Gran’s face was tight with worry under the smile for the cameraman, her eyes caste down on her son like a lover’s.
And the man her husband?  There was a small but telling distance between him and the young man on the chair, his step-son.  The man’s hand on his shoulder was barely touching him, reluctant to acknowledge him and the boy’s own pose turned his back slightly to the man.  The man, my great-grandfather, was looking past the camera not at it, ignoring the boy, disowning the event.
He knew his wife was having sex with her son.  He knew and disapproved.  But could do nothing for to do anything would mean scandal and divorce, the loss of his unpaid housekeeper and bed-warmer, possibly the end of his career even as the innocent party.  So he remained grimly silent, no doubt laving his conscience with lashings of Christian charity and the masochistic burden of martyrdom.
Her son, not his.  Yet their son, the son of Gran and this man, was my grandfather, I remembered with a shock.  This man cuckolded by his wife’s son had had the same surname I had.  I had inherited it from him.
‘I think,” I suddenly heard Gran saying to me, ‘That if someone made a study of the numbers of babies born to sisters, mothers and daughters nine months after their brothers, sons or fathers came home on leave from a war, they would be in for a very great surprise’. The voice in my mind was so clear that I almost expected to find Gran in the room with me, glaring down at me lying naked in post-coital bliss on my bed, my brother’s spunk still oozing out of my cunt.
And I knew it was the last clue, given to me deliberately by my Gran.  When had my grandfather been born?
Reluctant to move and disturb the ashes of the sweet fire, I rolled off the bed and groped under it.  Wrapped in an old blanket was the wooden box containing the family Bible, which I only had room for under the bed.  I unwrapped it, opened the box and hefted the big book onto my bed, kneeling before it as though at prayer with a wad of tissues between my thighs still soaking up my brother’s sperm as it leaked out of me.
Inside the front cover was the family tree.  Gran, born Emily Jane Anderson on 15th February 1902 and with an ominous space left for the date of her death.  Connected to her directly underneath by a short line was her son, Adam David Anderson, born out of wedlock, while connected with a short horizontal line of marriage to her was her husband, Percy Edward Couper, with my surname, 10th January 1882 to 27th September 1961.  Dropping from the short horizontal marriage line was the link to children of the marriage.  There was just one.  My grandfather Edward David Couper, b.  1st September 1943 and still alive, not quite sixty.  Born nine months after the photo of Gran and her son had been taken, when her son had presumably been home on leave.
Gob-smacked I flopped back onto my heels.
This was the family secret Gran had entrusted to me.  Not that she had had sex with her brother, nor even that she had seen their mother having sex with him too.  These secrets she had been able to tell me about because they did not affect me.  She had not been able to bring herself to tell me the real family secret because it did.  If I was right, and I knew I was, my surname shouldn’t be Couper, it should be Anderson, after my true grandfather, Adam David Anderson.
Which made me a child of incest, too.   A child of double incest, in fact.
  Jesus.
Now I understood why Gran had always cross-examined Dad so closely about Michael and me, and all the family who were not able to visit her often.  She had needed to know if what she had done was affecting us.
It wasn’t affecting me.  I was enjoying school and doing well.  Very well.  I realised that most of the people who had gathered around her bed and sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to her, and been there when the telegram from the Queen had arrived, were descended from Gran and her Grandson by her son who was her brother’s child.  Grandfather Couper had been a successful lawyer with seven children of his own and my uncles were lawyers like him or accountants, ran their own businesses or held important posts in big Companies.  My many cousins, all older than me, were at University or training to be teachers or, like my brother, engineers or something.  I couldn’t think of one who might be thought a bit odd or had a handicap or defect of some kind.  So Gran needn’t have worried.
And now she was leaving the secret to me, to do what I thought to be right with it.  She must have been confident I would eventually work it out  - thinking about what she had said and why, looking at the clues in the Bible and, the biggest clue of all, the two photographs in the frame - but perhaps not until after she was dead so she wouldn’t have to know that I knew. 
But I did, and I was going to let her know I did, and that I’d found out for myself how wonderful brother/sister sex is -  so she would to tell me more about what happened.
And I’d let her know that the family secret was safe with me.