by Barbara Vine
I had stopped her just in time. The habit of putting milk into an infusion of leaves has always struck me as bizarre. I watched with relief as she passed me a large saucerless mug of neat brown tea, clear as the water of the Colne was in those days.
‘Are your mother and your brother at home?’ I asked her.
‘Mother is out with John.’ I nodded, though the day was grey and the wind rising all the time. ‘He insists on going out and she doesn't care for him to go alone.’ She managed to smile at me, a smile which aged her by sending wrinkles up her cheeks and round her eyes. ‘I expect that will be one of your jobs. They'll soon be back.’
‘Perhaps you'll tell me something of what I'll be expected to do for him. Your mother's letters said very little.’
‘What excellent English you speak,’ she said. ‘Really, I didn't expect it.’
‘All Swedes speak English.’ This was an exaggeration, though most do. ‘They wouldn't get very far if they didn't. You were telling me about your brother.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘John, yes.’
I sensed she disliked the idea and was trying to avoid it, but lacked the cunning or conversational skills to do so. In the ensuing silence, I drank my tea and studied her. She was a tall woman, as tall as I am, and I, to use the system then used in England, am five feet nine. The drawing I did of her four or five weeks later shows a fine-boned face as rough and neglected as her hands, and grey-threaded hair as dull as her dark brown tweed skirt. Perhaps my cartoonist's habit of exaggerating a subject's outstanding feature came into play here, for I doubt if Ida can have been as round-shouldered as she is in my sketch. Whether I rendered the tension which seemed to grip her, I can't tell. It intensified as I pressed her to tell me more about her brother, though I tried to speak gently.
She spoke more rapidly, as if anxious to say what had to be said as fast as possible, so that pleasanter things could be discussed. ‘He was quite normal as a little boy. Later on he began to get – strange. My mother has her own theories as to what started it off and so does our doctor, Dr Lombard. He treats John. He needs constant care – well, watching.’
‘I'm very sorry. Your mother takes care of him?’
‘She and I,’ Ida said, ‘and now you. Now she's getting old – well, of course, she is old – it is becoming too much for her to do single-handed. My sisters and I help but they both have jobs. It was John himself who wanted you – well, wanted someone, and of course what John wants John gets.’ Her dry laugh had an unpleasant sound, halfway between a cough and a gasp. I was later to learn that Mrs Cosway and her other daughters also laughed like that, as if laughter itself was a discreet substitute for a bitter comment. ‘Though not as much as he used to,’ she said.
I had no idea what she meant.
‘You said you would stay a year, I think. There won't be a great deal for you to do. And you needn't look like that –’ I wasn't aware I was looking anything but interested ‘– there's nothing distasteful. Anyway, you've been a nurse. He can feed himself and the – the other thing, you know.’ She meant his excretory processes and what nurses call the waterworks but the effort at clumsy euphemism made her blush. ‘You won't find it arduous. Really, it's more like babysitting only the baby is a grown man.’
She seemed to be considering whether to say more, then impulsively said, ‘There's madness in the family.’ The expression was old-fashioned then if not yet politically incorrect, but she repeated it. ‘Yes, madness in the family.’ When people say this, phrasing it in various ways, they always sound pleased about this particular genetic inheritance. Cancer or arthritis ‘in the family’ is spoken of quite differently. ‘My great-grandfather was strange,’ she said. ‘He went completely insane, and his son was eccentric, to say the least.’
She compressed her lips and I could tell she was feeling she had said too much. ‘Perhaps I could see my room now,’ I said.
‘Of course.’
We went upstairs. The passage was wide, more like a gallery, and with framed engravings on the walls. Ida showed me into a room facing the front. ‘This room,’ she said, putting the suitcase she was carrying for me on the bed, ‘was intended for my brother. It has its own bathroom, you see. My father was alive then and he had it put in. John didn't like it. He twice let the bath overflow and water came down through the ceiling. He doesn't like showers either – well, he doesn't much like upstairs, so now he sleeps in a room off the hall. I told you he always gets what he wants. But it's dreadful to be mad, isn't it?’
‘It's very sad,’ I said sincerely. ‘I feel for you all.’
‘Do you?’ she said wistfully as if little sympathy for their lot had come from anyone else. ‘That's nice of you.’
Because I like to have things straight, with everyone knowing what everyone else is doing, I asked if it would be all right for me to take a look round downstairs before I went out. At first she seemed taken aback but she rallied. ‘Of course. Turn right out of your room and you'll find the back stairs. They are nearer.’
For a moment I was unsure if this was her rather clumsy way of telling me that now I was in the position of a servant, I must use the back stairs just as I must use the back door. But when I knew her better I understood that it was quite otherwise. She was just awkward. She had been cut off from ordinary social usage by a sheltered and reclusive life.
I unpacked one of the cases and hung my clothes in the cupboard on the dry cleaner's wire hangers provided. I mention this because these hangers epitomized perhaps more than anything the way the Cosways lived, with a mean and cheeseparing indifference to comfort. The first drawer I opened was full of pencils – well, there were probably twenty of them rattling around in it. I wondered who had left them there – the schizophrenic brother? Sometimes I think it was those pencils, HBs, Bs and BBs, hardish, soft and very soft, which prompted me to draw and that without them, I might now be just retiring from my teaching job in Stockholm.
The other suitcase I left till later. Looking out of my window between the thin, unlined curtains of a fabric I believe was called cretonne, I saw an old lady, tall and very thin, walking slowly along in the meadow beyond the garden, with a young man. Of course John Cosway wasn't very young, he was thirty-nine, but everyone treated him as a child, including myself for a while.
The back stairs I found without trouble. They too were ‘linoed’ in a dull gravy-brown colour. They brought me into a passage where one open door showed me the way into the back garden, flowerless but well tended, and another into a passage with many doors, all of which, I think, were locked. I say ‘I think’ because at that time I tried only two of them. The passage was unlit, though there were bulbs in parchment lampshades hanging from the ceiling. I walked in the other direction and found a gloomy dining room. Pictures on the walls were all steel engravings of ruins in eighteenth-century Italy. Since then I have often seen engravings like these on hotel walls and marvelled at why people would want to look, or be expected to want to look, at monochrome pictures of crumbling walls, broken turrets, fractured staircases and piles of weed-grown rubble. One of those in the Cosways' dining room was of a dispirited-looking shepherd and a fat maiden reclining side by side on the topmost tier of a ruined amphitheatre.
John's room, I thought, must be behind one of the doors opening off the hall. I decided it would be wrong of me to try any of those doors and went into the drawing room instead. It was large and of those slightly wrong proportions that characterize large late-Victorian chambers, for the hallway at the Hall was all that remained of an ancient building. Like the other rooms I had seen, though adequately if drearily furnished, this one was without cushions or table lamps or books. Ornaments there were but they were the kind that made me think none of the occupants of this house had chosen them; they were of the sort which friends and relatives, desperate for what to give at Christmas or birthday, bestow for the sake of giving something, no matter what. There was a paperweight in the shape of a cat and made of chromium, a green and khaki plant holder with no plant t
o hold, two or three small glass animals, probably Venetian, and a fretwork letter rack, designed to be on a wall but which no one had bothered to hang up.
To all this kitsch there was one exception, a geode. It was the beautiful thing in that room and much larger than these things usually are. When I first saw it I wondered where it had come from and what it was doing there, this oval stone dull as granite but showing, where it had split open, its glittering lode of amethyst quartz. I would have liked to touch it but did not quite care to. It seemed over-familiar on my first day there. There would be other occasions, I thought, and I walked back along the passage to find my way out into the garden. The interior of the house had disappointed me but I had faith in the maze. I was sure I was about to find it.
2
How much of the lawns, shrubberies, copses and parkland I walked over were part of the Lydstep land, I had no idea at the time. These grounds were pleasant and pretty enough but I had been looking for a labyrinth and I hadn't found it. I was struck by the strangeness of that in itself, that a maze, which by its very nature is a puzzle, should also be a puzzle to find.
As I came back, the kitchen window opened and Ida put her head out, calling to me to come in as tea was ready. I believed I had had my tea and supposed the next meal would be supper or dinner but when I walked into the kitchen I saw bowls of tinned fruit and plates of tongue and ham, a cake and biscuits and a great many already buttered slices of bread. Frugal in many ways Mrs Cosway might have been but her meanness didn't extend to food. The Cosways always ate well.
‘This is my mother,’ Ida said, and with great formality, ‘and this is my brother John. Mother, may I introduce Miss Kvist?’
‘Kerstin Kvist,’ I said, giving my name its Swedish pronunciation.
Mrs Cosway didn't get up but put out her hand. ‘How do you do?’ She had that English upper-class voice which foreigners find forbidding and sometimes absurd. She appeared to be turning the syllables of my name over in her mind. ‘According to your letter your name is Kerstin,’ she said like an overbearing teacher, ‘not Shashtin. Have you changed it since you wrote?’
‘K, e, r, s, t, i, n is pronounced Shashtin, Mrs Cosway.’
‘What a strange idea,’ she said, implying by words and look that, among civilized people, only English pronunciation was admissible and that I might not know how to articulate my own name. ‘It must make things very awkward. Say hallo to Miss Kvist, John.’
My drawing of Julia Cosway shows a craggy face, the skin rough and deeply wrinkled with the same neglected look as her daughter's and her mouth set in a downward curve. I think I have caught on that ruined face the grimness and distaste it wore when she looked at her son. I had an impression of control being exercised and words she would have liked to utter, suppressed. I was too young then to know that there are women who actively dislike their own children.
Like the rest of them (as I later came to find out) John Cosway was good-looking, with regular features and dark eyes. I had no idea then if his other sisters were tall or if he were an instance of one member of a family failing to inherit height, but when I saw him in the meadow he had seemed shorter than Mrs Cosway. So much for the old wives' tale that a man is always taller than his mother. Of the whole family and the other Windrose people I came to know, John is the only one I never drew. It seemed wrong to try to catch the likeness of a mentally disturbed and defenceless man, as if I would be doing something unfair.
‘Hallo, Miss Kvist,’ he said in the tone of an upper-class robot.
My impression was that he spoke entirely of his own volition and not because he had been prompted. But the hand I held out to him was not so much ignored as repudiated. It wasn't quite a shrinking, more a controlled retreat.
To cover my dismay, I said, ‘You must call me Kerstin,’ and to Ida and her mother, ‘I'd like everyone to do that.’
Mrs Cosway had the same sort of coughing laugh as Ida, dry, cackling and dismissive. She laughed like that then and said she would try. ‘But I don't know how I shall get my tongue round it.’
‘Shashtin,’ said John, with perfect enunciation. ‘Shashtin, Shashtin.’
‘Eat your tea, John.’ His mother spoke to this handsome, intelligent-looking man as if he were a child of five.
Unused to digesting anything at that hour, I did my best with a slice of ham, half a round of bread and four halves of apricot. John cut his bread and butter up into small triangles, each slice divided into four. These he severally spread with jam, fish paste, Marmite and cream cheese, each triangle different in colour and flavour, and placing the plate directly in front of him, the horizontal cut through the centre of the bread parallel with the table edge, began to eat, taking care not to disarrange the other pieces when he picked up the top left-hand triangle. He seemed totally concentrated on this task, absorbed by it to the exclusion of all else.
I have already said that I prefer to get things straight and to clear up mysteries when I meet new people, for I particularly dislike being among those who expect you to know everything about them and their family, its ramifications and offshoots, without ever having been told. Such women – they are usually women – are quickly irritated and even become angry if you fail to place the child they are talking about in its proper context or are ignorant of whose wife so-and-so is or that uncle such-and-such died three years before, even though there is no possible way you could have known.
I had therefore made up my mind to ask for details of family members from Mrs Cosway when she suddenly said, ‘You will need to know who everyone in the household is and where in our family they fit, Miss – er, Shashtin.’ She pronounced my name correctly for the first and last time.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I will.’
‘My eldest daughter and my son you have already met. My daughter Zorah, that is Mrs Todd, is not here at present. She is in London, she has a home there.’ Whereas now the American word for ‘house’ is a commonplace, it was seldom used in England then. Mrs Cosway spoke it with a kind of bitter pride. ‘The other two Misses Cosway, my daughters Winifred and Ella,’ she said, ‘are at present out. They seem to need constant entertainment and will later be attending a wine and cheese party, whatever that may be, in the village hall. That is the extent of our family. Is there anything you would like to ask?’
Her crisp tone and manner of one chairing a committee amused me but I took care not to let my amusement show. ‘Not about what you've just told me,’ I said, ‘but I would like to know what my duties are to be.’
‘Tea is over,’ she said. ‘We'll go into the drawing room.’
John remained behind with Ida, to whom was left the task of clearing up and washing the dishes. I began to wonder if she did all the work of this house without any help from her sisters, whom their mother had made sound as if they led hectic and frivolous lives.
Now that it was close on evening the day had brightened and shafts of pale sunshine gleamed through the French windows on to the carpet, showing up the threadbare patches on its faded pink and green. Later on, a single hanging lamp, a branched wooden chandelier with two of its bulbs missing, would light this room. Mrs Cosway had seated herself on the pink and beige sofa and, with a downward patting motion of her hand, indicated to me that I was to sit in what Ida told me some time afterwards was called a fireside chair, wooden-armed and with a loose seat cushion. Again I noticed that there was nothing to do in this room except watch television, no books, no record player or radio, no pictures to look at (except for a huge and very dark landscape in oils) or photographs to comment on. You could, I supposed, occupy yourself with examining the geode.
‘I see you are looking at Grandfather Cosway's find.’
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering if this was the mad forebear, ‘it's very beautiful.’
Again that dismissive laugh. It would be hard to say how I knew it was a laugh at all for no light showed in her eyes, her mouth remained downturned and the sound which came out of it was no more than a series of coughs.
‘My late husband's grandfather was one of those amateur geologists. It was quite a popular thing to be in the last century. Of course they were all amateurs then, there was no such thing as a degree in these subjects and they were none the worse for that.’ She waited for my agreement and, when none came, went on, ‘He was an explorer too and he found that amethyst geode while travelling to Mogador through the Atlas Mountains. On a camel, I suppose.’ A pause while she gave this some thought. ‘Do you think it would have been on a camel?’
Not realizing then – how could I have realized? – that this was the only time she would ever address a friendly casual inquiry to me, I said, ‘A camel or a donkey perhaps.’
‘A donkey isn't a dignified animal. Grandfather was very dignified, according to my husband, and corpulent, though he may not have been in his youth. He was a peculiar man but gifted. He made our library here. Did you ask me something?’
‘What my duties are to be.’
‘Ah, yes. Really they'll consist in looking after John when I am unable to. When I'm tired, for instance.’ She had a disconcerting stare or, rather, one which she intended to be disconcerting. I returned it and our eyes met. ‘You could ask him. He wanted you. But you'll get a dusty answer.’ She followed this up with her cough-laugh and said unexpectedly, ‘I am nearly eighty years old, you know.’
I don't belong to that school of thought which decrees that when someone tells you her age you should automatically reply that she doesn't look it. Mrs Cosway looked every hour of her seventy-nine years.
‘I think it will be best,’ she said, ‘for you to observe my routine with John tomorrow and perhaps the next day. Then you'll know how to take over when necessary. Once we've done that, I'd like to take a rest on my bed every afternoon after lunch for two hours and sometimes I should like to go out in the evenings.’ That look was again levelled at me. ‘One has friends in this village whom one doesn't see enough of. I would like to see them.’ She proceeded to tell me some of the things about John Ida had already mentioned and some she had not. ‘He has medicine – well, drugs. Strictly prescribed by our doctor, of course. Without them there's a possibility he might be violent. It's a bad business, isn't it?’