The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

  I tried to imagine where it might have been but this was harder than finding excuses for its removal. I had seen no recently planted lawns or wilderness spaces where the roots of old hedges protruded through the turf, no stretches of bare weed-grown earth. Of course it occurred to me that I could ask the Cosways, some or all of whom I would meet at breakfast in an hour or so. A sudden inhibition forbade that. It would show them that I had discussed them with their old friend, and more than that. They would think me over-curious and a spy and perhaps they would be right. As it was, Ida, who was in the kitchen when I came back, eyed me with suspicion while yet having her mind set at rest. Finding the back door unbolted, she had been worrying for the past half-hour that she had left it like that the night before, an unimaginably feckless thing to do.

  ‘I'm so relieved it was only you, Kerstin.’

  She was wearing the same skirt and blouse with the same crossover overall, the only departure in her costume from the day before being checked carpet slippers worn over stockings rolled down around her ankles. Anxiety and stress creased her face and she looked as if at any minute she would sink down with her head in her hands. The kitchen table, a huge piece of furniture, pitted and hollowed from use and scored along its edges with knife cuts, was laden with loaves, dishes of butter, packets of cornflakes and other cereals, eggs in a bowl, pots of jam and stacks of plates, cups and saucers.

  Temporarily forgetting my resolution not to be an au pair, I asked her if I could help her.

  ‘Oh no, thank you. I'm used to it.’

  After a shower and in clean trousers and shirt, I came down to the dining room an hour later. Just as I had been searching for the maze, my next objective was the phone. I had heard it ring the evening before, soon after Winifred and Ella came in, but not seen the instrument itself. The table in that bleak dining room was set for breakfast, the door left wide open, and the first thing I saw after saying good morning to John and his mother was the phone standing on the sideboard. Mrs Cosway quickly noticed that my eyes were on it and began on a detailed list of phone rules I was to observe.

  ‘When you make a call,’ she said, ‘you should ask the operator to time it and tell you the cost. The simplest way to keep a tally will be for you to write each sum down. You might perhaps buy a notebook for this purpose. If you are careful you won't find the cost to you prohibitive. No outgoing calls are allowed in this house after ten at night, they should be restricted to ten minutes, and none may be received after half past eight. You may have heard the telephone ring just before ten last night. That was for one of my daughters and I shall speak to them about it. I sincerely hope you will also explain to your friends not to telephone during the afternoon when I shall be resting or between seven and nine when we breakfast and one and two p.m. when we are at lunch.’

  I thought this, to use my husband's phrase, a bit rich. How I was going to make Mark (my Lund student friend) understand, not to mention obey, these injunctions I had no idea. But I only nodded and applied myself to a boiled egg and bread and butter. Ida, having transferred, I've no doubt single-handedly, all the food from the kitchen table to this one, had finally arrived to sit down and eat some herself.

  ‘I hope you slept well,’ she said to me as if this was our first encounter of the day.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘My sisters Ella and Winifred will be down in a minute.’

  At this point Mrs Cosway laid down her knife and said in a dry and rather unpleasant way, pronouncing my name not as I had told her was correct but as she thought best, ‘Kerstin wants to know everything about this family, Ida. She told me so. She likes to get things clear. Succinct sentences like the one you've just uttered won't do for her.’

  Bewildered, as well she might be, Ida said, ‘I don't know what you want me to say, Mother.’

  ‘Oh, nothing, nothing. I'll do it.’

  Mrs Cosway turned to me. Her son, who had finished eating, had left his crusts like a child and arranged them on the plate to form a shape like a Maltese cross. His glazed eyes were fixed not on his mother's face but at a point somewhere to the left of her left shoulder. I thought what a handsome man he would be but for the blighting of his looks and his expression by whatever it was that afflicted him.

  ‘My daughter Ella,’ Mrs Cosway said, ‘is a teacher at a school in Sudbury, my daughter Winifred is a cook.’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ said Ida reproachfully.

  ‘Oh, Mother, what? Winifred is a cook. She may be a very good cook, I have no idea, she has never cooked anything for me, but to my mind a cook is a servant and I find it strange that one of my children should have a menial occupation. Someone gave her a tip the other day. She told me so herself.’

  John continued to sit silently, staring. He might have been in a trance, and perhaps he was. At first it looked as if he had left his boiled egg untouched but then I saw yolk on his spoon and understood he had eaten the egg and turned the shell over with its broken end inside the cup. I knew I must learn not to stare at him and luckily at that moment I heard a footstep on the stairs. Ida said quickly, ‘Winifred is a caterer for private dinner parties – well, all sorts of parties. She did the food for the one they both went to last night.

  Before I could make any comment the two sisters came in. Their mother, possibly still brooding on the horrors of someone in her position having a hireling for a child, nodded to them but said nothing, joining her son in blank silence. It was left to Ida to introduce me.

  ‘My sister Winifred, my sister Ella, this is Kerstin Kvist.’

  I was beginning to think I should have to resign myself to being the guttural and sharp-cornered Curstin for the duration of my stay instead of the Shashtin of soft sibilants. But I got up and shook hands with them.

  Mrs Cosway waited till they were seated, then said, ‘I suppose that telephone call last night was for one of you two.’ She spoke exactly as if they were sixteen and fourteen years old instead of the more probable late thirties. ‘I would like you to tell your correspondent that telephone calls in the middle of the night are not to be received in this house.’

  ‘Five to ten is hardly the middle of the night,’ said Winifred.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ella, ‘the call was for me. It was the head. He had something important to say about the Upper Fifth.’

  For a moment I was puzzled until I realized she must have meant the head teacher of her school. While she and her mother argued about this phone call – I was to learn that the daughters with each other or with their mother could sustain an argument on some trivial matter for fifteen minutes and sometimes much longer – I observed these two newcomers. As I had seen the night before, both were good-looking, Winifred particularly. But good looks are not just a matter of fine regular features, copious hair, large eyes and a supple figure, all of which they had, but of how a woman holds herself, turns her head, smiles, her consciousness of her appearance and the air of beauty she carries with her. Neither Winifred nor Ella seemed aware of their own attractions, neither had style. Their hair was dull and in need of a wash and Winifred's had clips in it to hold it back. Limp summer dresses and cardigans, one blue, one pink, did nothing to flatter them. Winifred was again heavily painted, especially about the eyes, her eyebrows plucked to thin lines, her mouth a scarlet gash, while Ella looked as if she had slept in last night's make-up. Their long slender hands could have been elegant but Ella's nails were bitten and Winifred's were dirty. Rather unfortunate for a cook, I thought.

  It was she who said to me as Ella and her mother continued to bicker, ‘I don't know what you must think of us, Kerstin, going on like this in front of you. It doesn't mean anything, you know.’

  I have my own opinion as to family quarrels meaning nothing but I only smiled and asked her if the party she had arranged for the evening before had been a success. It had, she said with great enthusiasm. The guests – it had been a reception to raise funds for the restoration of some part of the church – had enjoyed themselves, had eaten up all her mi
ni-quiches, cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks and baby vol-au-vents.

  ‘If there was a fly in the ointment,’ she said, ‘it was that the people there were mostly women. Mr Dawson was there of course, he always comes. But as for the rest – it usually is like that. Men just won't come to things like this, which is a great shame as they have the money, don't they?’

  My feminist soul rising in revolt (even in those days) against this sentiment, I asked her if there was much social life in Windrose.

  ‘Oh, yes, we're a very friendly bunch. I shall be cooking for the Midsummer Supper in a fortnight's time. And then there will be the Harvest Festival. You must come.’

  Still defending her right to receive phone calls at an hour ‘when no one, absolutely no one, would think of going to bed’, Ella left the table and went off to work. The pale green Volvo, some fifteen years old, started up with a clanking and gurgling. Later in the day I saw that its bonnet was stove in. A considerable time before, by the look of it, someone had driven it into the vehicle ahead.

  I wondered who Mr Dawson was. A slightly embarrassed look had come into Winifred's face when she spoke his name. She appeared to have no work to go to and in the absence of work, nothing to do. She left the clearing of the breakfast table to Ida, who did it uncomplainingly. Like her brother's, though in quite a different way, her expression never changed. While his face was blank, unaffected by mood, by frustration or anger or joy, if he felt these things, hers wore a look of patient stoicism, as if long ago she had settled into her fate and would apply herself to it till the end; not well or graciously or even mutinously – she did a poor job, leaving the table covered in crumbs and the napkins sprawled among them – but with resignation.

  I spent much of the next day and the next, which was a Saturday, observing Mrs Cosway's routine with John, and on Saturday afternoon I suggested she have her rest while I went out for a walk with him. Id succeeded in phoning Mark and at the second attempt had spoken to him, making both calls during the permitted times. He was disbelieving when I explained Mrs Cosway's rules to him and indignant about falling in with them. A meeting was arranged in London for the Tuesday, my first day off. I said nothing about the following weekend, reserving my expectations about that until I knew if he still attracted me the way he had done in our last months at Lund.

  The village of Windrose was still unvisited, though only about half a mile away. I suggested to John that we walk there and met with the first opposition I, or anyone else as far as I had seen, had had from him. He shook his head.

  ‘Not there,’ he said in his dull monotone.

  When I asked him why not he frowned and his expression became surly. It seemed wiser to leave the question for now. I was getting tired of walking round the same three fields, over the river bridge and alongside the wood, but he was determined. If he were set on following that route every afternoon I would rebel; for the present I gave in.

  Accompanying him on these outings was an awkward business, consisting really in his setting off and I walking some paces behind him. In recent years I have seen Muslim women following along behind their husbands like that. It was clear John didn't want me but his mother expected me to be there and he never said anything. The day he said he wouldn't go to Windrose was mild and dull, the sky a uniformly cloud-grey, the kind of day I have come to think of as essentially English, windless and still, the atmosphere calm and unchanging. We walked in single file three or four metres apart along the kind of wide path I believe is called a ride, between low hedges, broken here and there by gates into the meadows. Blossom was out on the brambles and the elder, it was pretty and tranquil, like a painting by Constable, who had lived not far from there. Across the little valley between shallow hills, I could see Windrose, a cluster of houses, a big house a short distance away, and the red church tower rising high above paler roofs and dark thatch.

  John seemed not to look around him. Perhaps it was all too familiar, and though there may have been comfort in this, there must also have been boredom. Or was he incapable of feeling bored? Who knew? I suited my pace to his and he walked fairly slowly, his head down and his eyes on the ground. My attempts to talk to him, which I persisted in, fetched monosyllables from him at best and more often nothing. That day was the first occasion on which I said nothing. I had given up.

  We were out for about an hour. When we got back he made his way to the kitchen, shuffling along, as he always did when inside the house, though he had walked normally along the ride. Ida, who seemed to live in that kitchen, constantly occupied at some task or other, smiled at him and said hallo. His face, usually so dull and blank, lightened a little. She made tea for him and me but made no effort to say anything more. And I saw that he was content with this, that he appeared to listen to the conversation I had with her without taking any part in it.

  Ella was out somewhere but Winifred was at home, spoiling my theory that Ida was solely responsible for the work of the household by doing the ironing. There was a great deal of it, bed linen and table linen, underclothes, John's shirts and the limp cotton dresses favoured by all the Cosway women except their mother, who dressed invariably in black trousers and blouse or sweater. Winifred had piled it untidily on the dining table, set up the ironing board, switched on the other television (black and white and very small) and worked away slowly and in no apparent order, her eyes on the screen. It took her several hours and by the time it was done Mrs Cosway was awake, Ida had set out the tea things and Ella was back from wherever she had been. Seated next to me at the tea table, Winifred remarked with an air of conscious virtue that she and Ella would go to church in the morning. Would I like to come?

  We Swedes are a secular lot and I hadn't been to church since I was at school, but this might be my only opportunity for some time to visit the village and I was curious too to see some of the other Windrose residents. On the other hand…

  ‘May I think about it? I'll let you know later.’

  Winifred looked rather shocked, perhaps expecting me to jump at the chance. Mrs Cosway seemed pleased rather than otherwise at my response and, bowing her head the way John did, favoured the bread and butter on her plate with one of her nasty little smiles.

  ‘Don't be too long about it, will you?’ Winifred said this as if she were arranging a bus outing for thirty or forty people to some popular London event rather than a half-mile walk to morning service. ‘I'm sure you'll want to meet Mr Dawson.’

  The identity of this person I resolved to find out later, perhaps when and if I told Winifred I would go with her. Meanwhile there was John's bedtime ritual to come and the inevitable sleeping pill. Once it had taken effect and he was bludgeoned into heavy sleep, Mrs Cosway asked for an account of our walk. Had we followed the same route? What, if anything, had John had to say for himself? Had we met anyone? I thought this an odd question.

  ‘We didn't meet anyone to speak to. I saw a man on a tractor quite a long way away and when we came close to the road, some cars went by. Why do you ask?’

  ‘You always want every detail, don't you? Why this, why that. I shall say to you what I used to say to the children, “Because I say so.”’

  I shrugged. ‘I'm sorry. But there is one thing I would like to know, if you don't mind. I suggested to John that we go to the village but he was very set against that idea. He didn't say why not and I wondered.’

  ‘As I said, you want every detail. It's very wearing, I must say. If you must know, he doesn't like going there because the people stare at him. Most of them are very ignorant. There were some children – they laughed. It was dreadful for him.’

  ‘I'm sorry,’ I said. ‘It is better I know, isn't it? So that I won't try to take him there again.’

  ‘I suppose so. But you couldn't if he didn't want to go.’

  After supper, twice asked by Winifred if I had yet made up my mind, to forestall a third time, I told her I would go to church.

  ‘I'm so glad, that's wonderful,’ she said, as if I had said I had
come into a fortune or bought the house of my dreams. ‘If it isn't raining we'll walk, shall we? It's not far. Meet down here at ten-thirty?’ She turned to her mother. You can spare Kerstin for a couple of hours, can't you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  I was learning that this was a favourite rejoinder of Mrs Cosway's. Ella, changed out of her summer frock into navy blue trousers and a pink sweater with moth holes across the back, had sat in an armchair for the past hour, marking work in her pupils' exercise books. To do this she had put on a pair of large, unflattering glasses with rainbow rims and she chain-smoked while she worked. Occasionally, Winifred (saying, ‘I really must give up’) took a cigarette from the packet herself, but she smoked no more than one to every five got through by her sister.

  Mrs Cosway I expected to have a word or two to say on the subject of the fug Ella had caused and her unattractive hawking, but apart from removing herself to a far corner of the room, she gave no sign of disapproval. She was sewing, doing something I think may be called gros-point on a great rug-sized tapestry, whose design was hidden from me, and she took no part in the desultory conversation except to say apropos of nothing, ‘Zorah will be home on Wednesday.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ said Ella, ‘you've already told us twice.’

  I had set them both and their sister Ida down as inveterate spinsters, as single women were still often called in those days. This was long before there was something almost meritorious in not being married. They lived at home with their mother, were discontented, set in their ways, seemed part of the virginal sisterhood, churchy, doing good works in the parish. So it surprised me when Ida, getting up to make bedtime hot drinks for everyone, asked me if I could spare her a minute ‘to have a word’.