by Barbara Vine
I thought this a strange way of putting it. ‘It's very sad,’ I said for the second time that day, and she looked narrowly at me as if I had corrected her.
‘Is there anything else?’
‘I'd like you to confirm that I'm to have every other weekend off and one whole day in every week.’
‘Oh, yes, that was agreed.’
She turned her eyes to the sunspots on the carpet. Outside, where the evening seemed to be warming and brightening all the time, Ida was putting up a washing line, taking advantage of the unexpected drying weather. John had come out with her because, it seemed, the clothes prop refused to stand erect. He took it from her, careful not to touch her hands, drove it into the ground, and stood back, nodding slightly.
Mrs Cosway's eyes followed mine and she twisted round in her chair the better to see her son. ‘Strange, isn't it?’ she said. ‘He was quite a normal child. Of course he never got on well with other boys and he used to have these tantrums. One couldn't do anything with him. But apart from that – well, what is there to say? It makes one wonder. Our doctor, a brilliant man, says his trouble is the result of a severe emotional shock.’
It made me wonder too. Ida had told me her mother had her own theories about the onset of John's schizophrenia. If she had she was clearly determined not to mention them to me – or not yet? John and Ida were pegging out the clothes now, John arranging all his pegs precisely the same distance apart regardless of the width of the pillowcase or shirt he was hanging up. Something about this surprised me for I had never heard of obsessive compulsive behaviour being part of the schizophrenia pattern.
‘You may as well start tonight,’ Mrs Cosway said ‘He sleeps downstairs but he doesn't have his bath till the morning. I give him a sleeping pill.’ She added in the sort of tone that expects argument, ‘Always.’
‘Is he a poor sleeper, then?’
She didn't answer. ‘He insists on the pill. He thinks it's a vitamin – well, multi-vitamins. It's better that way.’
I was shocked. Of course I was. ‘Your doctor prescribes it?’
‘Of course. “I should tell John it's vitamins,” he said. “Otherwise you'll find he won't take it.”’
It seemed wise to ask no more along these lines for the present. ‘I'd like to ask you something else. It has nothing to do with John. Are there any books in the house?’
‘Books?’ She said it as if I had asked whether there were any elephants.
‘Yes. If you don't mind I'd like to have a look and borrow something to read. Just until I can find a library.’
She seemed to be considering, weighing something or someone up. Perhaps me. Then she said, ‘We have a library here. We keep it locked.’
I could find nothing to say.
‘Yes, I dare say you find that strange. One has one's reasons. I told you my husband's grandfather made the library in this house. Let me just say that the way he made it was odd and not particularly – suitable.’
This immediately made me think it must contain one of those secret Victorian collections of erotica I had read about. But all I said was, ‘I shall manage until I can get into Colchester and join the library.’
‘I didn't say we had no books. Ella has plenty. You can have a look in her room, she won't mind,’ Mrs Cosway said, with the air of someone making a derogatory remark, ‘she's easygoing,’ and she laughed.
She was very old and I expected her to have some difficulty in getting up off that sofa, into which she had sunk deeply. Its seat cushions sagged and it looked as if its springs had gone. I sensed that any help I offered would be brusquely refused. But I need not have worried, for she stood up as easily as a twenty-year-old and without that tell-tale movement of pushing herself upright by pressing on the seat with both hands. Once on her feet, she stood as erect as I did, her back straighter than her daughter's.
‘John will want to go to bed now,’ she said.
It was very early, not yet seven, and an unexpectedly fine day. Ida and John were no longer on the lawn, where bed linen and shirts hung unmoving in the still air. Mrs Cosway went off to look for him and he came back with her. Perhaps I should say that he came in and she came in, there being no sense of one having fetched the other. I saw that he moved slowly and in a dazed fashion but there was no coercion on Mrs Cosway's part.
Apart from mine, there appeared to be only one bathroom in the house, though that virtually useless sanitary device, the washbasin, was to be found in every bedroom except John's. It took me a few days to appreciate my luck in having, rare in England at that time, a private shower room two metres from my bed. Where John had chosen to sleep wasn't like a bedroom at all but another drearily furnished high-ceilinged chamber with armchairs and ‘fireside’ chairs, small tables and an upright piano, the curtains of chenille in a colour called ‘old gold’. It was dark too, due to the Virginia creeper leaves thrusting over the edges of the window. John's bed was a convertible settee and his washing arrangements a marble-topped stand with an earthenware bowl on it and a jar for his toothbrush.
‘I'll come back in ten minutes,’ I said, determined not to be there while this grown man undressed himself.
Mrs Cosway gave me a look implying she hadn't expected any assertiveness from me. I said nothing and occupied myself with unpacking the rest of my clothes and setting out on a dressing table which would serve me as a desk the large leather-bound diary I had brought with me.
I gave them the time I had said I would, which seemed reasonable. John was in striped pyjamas and a dressing gown. ‘Shashtin,’ he said, a flat utterance of my name with no apparent pride in his correct pronunciation.
‘John,’ I said, and after that, when we greeted each other, it was always with the simple Christian name.
Mrs Cosway was looking at me narrowly. ‘I'm not sorry I was wrong but I expected someone of eighteen or nineteen. You must be several years older than that.’
‘I'm twenty-four,’ I said, feeling like Elizabeth Bennet when interrogated by Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
The little staccato laugh preceded her words. ‘When I was young red hair like yours was considered quite ugly.’
‘Luckily for me,’ I said, ‘times have changed.’
‘Yes.’ If she detected a sharp note in my response she gave no sign of it. ‘I expect you're thought good-looking. You have a modern face. Now get into bed, John, and I'll give you your pill.’
He gave no sign of having heard her. Later I understood that apparent acquiescence from him to her instruction was really her telling him to do something he had already made up his mind to do. He wanted to go to bed, he was tired; he wanted the pill because he had been told it was vitamins. Nothing would have made him do what he disliked. It was a little while before I realized this and realized too that when he did what his mother wanted it was sometimes because he had been kept in ignorance of the true facts. But that was in the future. On my first evening there I saw John remove from the pockets of his dressing gown a ballpoint pen, a pencil, a dice, a tiny green bottle with ribbed sides, a safety pin, a boiled-sugar sweet wrapped in cellophane, a tiny book perhaps measuring five centimetres by three and a reel of sticking plaster. These objects he arranged in a pattern on the bedside table, several times straightening up, contemplating his achievement and moving one piece or another an infinitesimal distance away from where it had been. Mrs Cosway waited, not very patiently, tapping one toe on the lino. At last he was satisfied. He took off his dressing gown, hung it on the door hook and got into bed. I expected some good-night ritual, a story read or told perhaps, a hot drink brought, but Mrs Cosway merely gave him water in a mug with a handle he could hold. She put a white tablet into a small glass dish and held it out to him. He took it, drank and swallowed it. He was treated like a child and I half-expected his mother to kiss him. But she stepped back, careful not to touch him.
‘Good night,’ she said, adding neither name nor endearment.
I too said good night to him and began to tidy the room,
careful not to disturb the objects on his bedside table. Mrs Cosway did nothing but she watched me. John was asleep by the time we left the room. Only a barbiturate would work so fast, I thought, and thought too that I disapproved. Mrs Cosway left the door ajar.
‘Noise from out here won't disturb him,’ she said.
Nothing would have, not with phenobarbitone inside him.
‘You could do that if I went out, couldn't you? One must be careful not to touch him. He screams if he's touched.’ She looked at the watch which hung loosely on her emaciated arm. ‘I see it is five and twenty past seven. Supper will be in exactly one hour.’
‘I shan't want supper,’ I said. ‘I rather thought we had had our last meal of the day.’
‘Goodness, no. Ida will be cooking something and there will be cheese and a pudding.’ Mrs Cosway looked me up and down critically. ‘You are far too thin.’
I questioned whether I was as thin as she or Ida but not aloud. Ever since I had seen John given that barbiturate capsule in the guise of a vitamin pill, I had wanted to be away from her. I needed to be alone. As I had told her, I wasn't hungry and I felt that for tonight, with conversation expected from me as we sat round a table, I had nothing left to say.
‘Of course you must do as you wish.’ She said it in the tone which means you really should do as she wishes and dislikes the turn events have taken.
‘If there's nothing you'd like me to do.’
‘Oh dear, no. Not at this hour. Here is Ella's room.’
Its frivolity was a shock. I only just stopped myself gasping at its colours. Beyond a doubt, Ella Cosway's favourite colour was pink, all shades of it, peach, blush, sugar-pink, rose, fuchsia, coral, and every one of them was represented here. Roses blossomed on the pale pink curtains, the covers were pink and white candy stripes, the carpet raspberry ice-cream and the cushions the colour of a blonde's rouge. Even the sewing-machine cover was pink. On the striped window seat stood or sat a dozen ‘grown-up’ dolls, each dressed in contemporary fashion, with shoes on their feet and handbags hooked over their arms. The books were in a small white bookcase by the bedhead and, judging by the dolls and the general pinkness, I feared the worst. I was wrong. My need was for a book that was quintessentially English and which gave a picture of English life in country and town, though not necessarily of the present day. After rejecting Villette as too sad and not in any case primarily set in this country, Barchester Towers because I had recently read it and The Egoist because the print was tiny, I chose Great Expectations and carried it off with me to my bedroom.
It was not a bad room, only dull and rather bare. But the cupboard was adequate, there was a fine long mirror of the kind which I believe is called a pier glass, and a good armchair covered in the same cretonne as the curtains. I took the diary from the dressing table and settled down in the armchair to write my first entry, resolving to write something every day. Needless to say, I failed in this lofty aim but I did write something most days. If I hadn't – well, what might have happened if I hadn't was still a long way off.
Of course there was no radiator in the room. This was England before the seventies when central heating became the rule. In the winter it would be very cold in this house, a fire lit only in the drawing room and perhaps in the hallway fireplace where, I'd already discovered, if you stood on the hearth and looked upwards you could see the sky through the wide-open chimney. Standing there in the winter, as I did only once, I felt the powerful draught, the icy wind strong enough to lift my hair and blow it out in a horizontal stream.
That evening my thoughts kept returning to the man I always wanted to call a boy, a ‘poor boy’, though he was fifteen years my senior, lying in a drug-induced sleep he had been deceived into. As yet I could do nothing about it so I resolutely drove it from my mind, sat down and began to write what had happened that day. It was about three-quarters of an hour later that I heard a car come down the track. Later on I learnt that inside that house you would always be aware of the arrival of a car by the noise it made grinding across the gravel.
I looked out of the leaf-bordered window, a move which involved no drawing back of the curtains as their thin fabric was very nearly transparent. At nine-thirty on that fine cool midsummer night it wasn't yet dark and I was able to see quite clearly the two people who had arrived home.
They were both women, two more daughters of the house. It was impossible for me to tell which was the elder but I identified Ella by her cotton dress, patterned all over with large pink roses, and her high-heeled pink shoes. She had been driving, so it was her sister, the passenger, who was the first to get out of the car, a badly battered old Volvo. I may have put this in the diary but whether I did or not, I remember that my first thought at sight of Winifred was how easy it was for a basically good-looking woman to make herself ugly with heavy make-up, a dipping hemline and a hand-knitted droopy cardigan.
Both of them were dark-haired and tall, though Ella was shorter than her sister. Winifred looked to me like one of those women who had been told when she was young that she was growing too tall and who, accordingly, had begun to round her shoulders and stoop. It was with a stance like this that she moved towards the front door, wrapping her arms round her chest as if she was cold. I couldn't hear what they were saying to each another, though I could tell they had been quarrelling. Perhaps ‘quarrel’ is too strong a word. They must have had one of their frequent little spats, probably over some happening at the wine and cheese party.
As Winifred disappeared from my view under the porch and its canopy of leaves, Ella let out a peal of laughter. Not the cough characteristic of her mother and her sister Ida, but a silvery, ringing sound, which I'm sure was derisive, though that evening it sounded to me affectionate and sweet. Below me I heard the front door creak open and close with a soft slam.
A leaf was caught between the window lattice and its frame. I slid it out and laid it on the dressing table. Then, without thought it seems now, certainly without taking any decision, I took a soft pencil out of the drawer and began to draw the house on one of the endpapers in the diary.
3
I was awakened by birds singing. It was half-past four in the morning and the first time my sleep had ever been disturbed by birdsong. I lay there listening to these sounds which both are and are not music and seem to have tone and rhythm and a kind of outflowing of joy but with no known scale. Light came swiftly and my room filled with the song of the birds so that at six I couldn't stay there any longer but had to get up and go out.
The day before had been dull and grey until the evening but this morning was sunny with that hazy sunshine, that mist and stillness, which herald a fine summer's day. I went outside by way of the kitchen and the several little rooms that had to be passed before I reached the garden, rooms with coats hanging up and boots standing about, with bags and sacks and drums and cans and crates – playing a game with myself to name in English all these useful objects – and finally one with unplastered brick walls that was full of flowerpots and watering cans.
Dew was on the big lawn and in the middle of it two green birds with long beaks and red flashes on their heads were prospecting for food in the grass, vegetable or animal I didn't know any more than I knew then that these were woodpeckers. They looked up but otherwise took no notice of me as I passed along the sandy path. The clothesline and the two posts were gone. Walking softly so as not to disturb the birds, I made my way towards the shrubberies I had only glanced at the day before. There was a little garden down there of what I called fir trees, knowing no better, though I could see their foliage was golden, red, almost white and slate-blue as well as every shade of green. It seemed an old garden and I supposed these trees had been planted, if not by the geode-discovering explorer, perhaps by his son. The same I thought might be true of many other fine large trees down here, some with long pointed leaves, others whose foliage was broad and flat, and some which I guessed must be exotics, possibly brought here by the explorer himself.
I found a kitchen garden too, vegetables neatly planted in rows, and a rather gloomy pond, covered in lily pads and surrounded by reeds, over which overgrown trees trailed long hair-thin branches. A boat with two oars laid in their rowlocks parallel to its sides lay in the middle of this still water and its dense plant life, but it looked as if no one had sat in it or touched those oars for years and now it would be hard to shift it out of all the constricting lilies with their stems like slippery ropes.
Apart from the features of this place, the grounds of Lydstep Old Hall were dull and too tidy. The maxim of the gardener who tended them must have been, when in doubt cut down, for everywhere else trees and shrubs had been viciously chopped and paths swept with depressing neatness. Another principle of his, or perhaps a directive from Mrs Cosway, seemed to be that flowers were in bad taste or too much trouble, for in spite of the watering cans, none were to be seen.
At first I had intended to go out into the field and take the path in the opposite direction from the way I had gone the previous afternoon, and I had reached the gate in the hedge. But now only one aim was paramount, to find the maze. I walked on over more stretches of lawn and through more shrubberies until I came to the wall which skirted the land at this point and extended parallel with the drive to the road. My only course now was to return the way I had come, but instead of going through the conifer wood and on to the woodpecker lawn, I took the path which went straight ahead beside the boundary hedge.
Nothing much was down there but for scrubby turf, currant bushes and after a while a neglected orchard. The trees, which were probably apple, pear and plum, looked past redemption, their trunks a bright yellow-green with lichen or grey with moss, more of their branches dead than living, and what fruit was forming on them already deformed and worm-eaten. The orchard distracted me from my search but this hardly mattered as coming upon a maze would have immediately caught my eye and lured me away from anything else. But there was no maze. Nowhere in those grounds was there anything labyrinthine, though I couldn't go so far as to say there was nowhere a maze might once have been. It was years since Isabel had visited Lydstep and since then she had only occasionally been in touch with the family. Wasn't it possible that in that time the maintenance of what was no more than a folly had come to seem a nuisance, involving unnecessary expense?