by Barbara Vine
I followed her into the kitchen where she said in a low, serious tone, ‘I have something to tell you.’
It sounded alarming but I'm not the sort of person who, at these words, invariably thinks she must be in trouble – at least, I wasn't then, in those early days. ‘Yes?’ I said, my voice light. ‘What is it?’
‘Mr Dawson and Winifred are engaged to be married.’
In most circumstances, this sort of news merits congratulations and a show of joy. ‘That's good, isn't it? Who's Mr Dawson?’
‘My goodness, I'm so relieved you aren't cross,’ said Ida. ‘Knowing how you want everything to be open and no secrets et cetera, I thought you might be offended because no one told you the moment you came.’
‘Not a bit,’ I said, mystified.
‘That's such a relief.’ She looked neither relieved nor at all happy. ‘Mr Dawson is the Rector of this parish. You'll meet him tomorrow. He will, of course, take the service. I no longer go to church myself.’
‘Is he a young man?’ I asked, feeling like a character in Charlotte Bronte, but curious to know.
‘Two years older than Winifred. He's forty-two. You'll be wondering why she doesn't wear an engagement ring.’
I was not; the absence of a ring had failed to register with me. I smiled encouragingly.
‘He only proposed last Wednesday.’
‘I see. So Winifred will be moving out to live at the Vicarage.’
‘The Rectory, yes.’ Ida seemed to find my innocent small-talk suspect. What she thought I meant to imply I don't know. Perhaps, knowing this family as I was beginning to, she saw me as having designs on a different, larger, bedroom, though there were at least eight at Lydstep Old Hall, or else, as a single woman myself, though so much younger, envious of Winifred's coming status.
‘They can't get married for a long time yet,’ Ida said obscurely. ‘Would you mind carrying this tray with the mugs on it?’
I picked up the tray and went back into the drawing room, looking at Winifred with new eyes in the light of the future awaiting her. Trying to avoid being unkind, even in my own mind and to myself, I still had to wonder what on earth Mr Dawson saw in her to make him propose marriage. The heavy make-up she wore had been on, unrefreshed, since early morning, and was now greasy and stale. Lipstick had edged on to her teeth and leaked into the fine lines on her upper lip. Her hair hung limp and straight and her fingernails were still dirty. She must once, perhaps years before, have chosen to buy the green and yellow patterned dress of some synthetic fabric but unless it had been very cheap or the last garment in the shop, it was hard to say why. If he could have put up with the smell of smoke which hung about her, Mr Dawson would have done better to have picked Ella of the two sisters. But what kind of a man must he be? Did he live alone at the Rectory or did he too have a presiding mother? I'd know some of the answers next day.
Composing myself for sleep some hour or so later, I realized I'd forgotten to ask Mr Dawson's first name. I needed it for the diary but would surely find out next day. Before I fell asleep I began thinking about the Cosways' great-grandfather and the library he had ‘made’, whatever that meant. Collected? Amassed? Bought? For reasons not at all clear, it was kept locked. Perhaps it lay behind one of those doors in the long unlit passage.
4
The three, and for all I knew then the four, Cosway ‘girls' went in for that peculiar Victorian usage of referring to Mrs Cosway as ‘my mother’ and to John as ‘my brother’ as if they were not mother and brother to all of them. I saw this then and still do as indicative of the isolation in which each existed, even Winifred and Ella, who were so much together, living under the same roof from necessity rather than choice.
So, at Sunday breakfast, Winifred said, ‘My mother can spare you to come to church, Kerstin.’
Permission was uttered in the manner of one mentioning a subject for the first time. I think Winifred said it to emphasize Mrs Cosway's generosity in letting me go out, though there was nothing for me to do at home. John needed very little looking after, seemed not to notice whether other people were present or not, and would probably have been as content to have lived in a small flat somewhere on his own. It was at this time, so early in my stay, that I began to wonder what I was doing there. Why had John wanted someone with a nursing qualification? As I understood the matter, it was he who had asked for help for his mother. All I had seen of him so far precluded his asking for anything, certainly reasoning so far as to think additional help was needed in caring for him.
We set off for church at ten-thirty, Ella and Winifred having smartened themselves up considerably. Winifred even wore a hat, though one of the wide-brimmed, ribbon-trimmed kind generally reserved for weddings. It was the finest day since I had come to Lydstep Old Hall. The sky had cleared, the sun had come out and it promised to be hot. A heatwave might even have been on its way, Ella said rather gloomily. She felt the heat, she told me. Her ankles would swell and she tended to come out in a rash. But at ten-thirty it was only pleasantly warm. We walked down the not very steep hill into the village, a pretty place of cottages, some of them thatched, round a triangular green with a memorial to two world wars in the centre of it. There were some bigger houses too and a row of cottages, one of which, with a large plate-glass window in its roof, Ella called The Studio. This, she said, was to let.
‘Again. The last tenant was only there six months.’
‘Artists,’ Winifred said in a rather contemptuous way, ‘are an itinerant lot. Feckless too. Don't you remember Mr Johnston? The place was overrun with rats while he was there. Mice are all very well, but rats!’
The church stood on the sort of shallow hill that is called an eminence. It was then that Winifred, an authority on local names and north Essex lore, told me what the tower was called and that the ‘rose’ in Windrose referred to its colour. I asked her where her fiancé lived.
To my astonishment she blushed deeply, a blotchy reddening under all the pancake and rouge. ‘The Rectory is over there.’ I was reminded of my reading in Victorian fiction where it was considered unwise to say too much about a young woman's engagement in case it failed to ‘come off’ and her reputation was damaged. The facts that Winifred was forty and we were coming to the end of the 1960s seemed not to enter into it. ‘It's quite a fine Georgian house, isn't it?’
Not having any acquaintance with Georgian houses, I couldn't judge, but I agreed, smiled and, persisting in my embarrassing questions, asked if she intended to make any changes when she moved there.
‘That's a long way off,’ she said in Ida's manner, her expression showing no enthusiasm for becoming Mrs Dawson, and I couldn't help wondering if she had accepted the Rector's proposal for the sake of escape from Lydstep Old Hall or even from becoming what people still called an old maid.
She was very attentive to me and took upon herself the office of a tour guide, telling me that the gate into the churchyard with the little roof over it was called a lychgate from lic, an old English word for corpse, because it served as a shelter for coffins and pallbearers on their way to a funeral. She seemed to know a great deal about ecclesiastical things, very suitable for the wife of a clergyman. I was instructed that graves should face east so that the faithful rising at the Last Day will be looking in the right direction when the Messiah returns to Jerusalem.
The church was beautiful outside and in, seven hundred years old, its stained glass smashed by Henry VIII (or was it Cromwell?) and replaced in the nineteenth century by rich red and blue depictions of saints: John the Baptist, apparently draped in a whole camel skin, a golden-haired Mary Magdalene holding a jar of what looked like Elizabeth Arden skinfood but which Winifred said was precious ointment, and St Paul with a beard and joined-up eyebrows. I thought these windows fine but was instructed, this time by Ella as we took our seats, that they were an unfortunate and vulgar substitute for the glories which had been there before. Both sisters, once they had laid down the prayer books they had brought with them, though
at least fifty were provided on the shelf in front of us for a congregation of twenty, fell to their knees, put their heads into their hands – not easy for Winifred in her picture hat – and, I suppose, concentrated on silent prayer.
On their way in all the members of the congregation had been chatting to one another in a lively fashion, calling out to ask friends how they were and to remark on the weather, and as soon as the service began I noticed what pride many took in not referring to their prayer books at all but reciting canticles, psalms and responses (I may not have these names correctly) from memory. Mr Dawson wore a white smock-like garment over a long black gown. He was a tallish man and thin, and he reminded me in looks of a professor we had at Lund, not handsome but with a pleasant, beaky face which would one day become what my mother-in-law calls ‘nutcrackery’, nose stretching forward to meet jutting chin. The glasses he needed for reading he kept putting on and taking off, a fidgety habit I hoped Winifred would cure him of when they were married. He had a fine baritone voice in which he chanted various requests to God.
‘Give us peace in our time, O Lord,’ rang out with a particular vigour.
Luckily, there was no one sitting immediately behind us or if there had been they had moved away, for Winifred's hat would have obstructed their view of the choir of four women sitting in the chancel, the aged men who read the lessons and Mr Dawson when he climbed up to the pulpit to give his sermon. I had no experience of sermons but to judge by the innumerable lectures I had heard in recent years and the many talks, I thought it good and said so to Winifred when the service was over and we were leaving the church. It had been on the subject of tolerance and not judging one's fellows when one was in possession of only limited facts about their misdeeds. Later on, at the time of the terrible events that were to come, I wondered if he had been able to put these principles into practice.
‘Yes, Eric preaches well,’ she said, but in a lifeless tone. At last I knew the man's name and in a moment heard her address him by it.
He was standing at the church door as we filed out, shaking hands with his parishioners as we passed, telling some how nice it was to see them, asking others after the health of some relative. When it was our turn Ella went first, was asked how she was and had her hand shaken. Rather to my surprise, having said, ‘Good morning, Eric,’ Winifred got a kiss on the cheek or the air an inch from her cheek. She introduced me and I congratulated him on his sermon. Both sisters looked rather shocked – by my presumption, I suppose, in daring to comment on the oratorical powers of a clergyman nearly twenty years my senior. But Eric Dawson smiled and thanked me.
‘How kind of you to say so.’
In quite a formal and ceremonious way Winifred asked him if he would come up to Lydstep Old Hall that day for supper.
‘Once Evensong is over I would love to,’ he said. ‘What a charming hat, Winifred.’
Again that unbecoming blush. And I felt I was back in that Victorian novel where engaged couples encountered each other only in their parents' homes, chaperoned by siblings. Did Winifred and Eric Dawson never go for solitary walks together, as I was sure other local courting couples must do? Would she never go to the Rectory to be alone with him once his housekeeper, who came in daily, had gone home? Stay overnight? Or was this improper in the kind of world they lived in? It was all so remote from anything I had ever known that I was defeated by it and simply bewildered.
He said goodbye, that he would see us all later and that it had been nice to meet me. On the way back to Lydstep Old Hall, walking up the hill, a violent quarrel broke out between Ella and Winifred, astonishing and rather dismaying. It began with Ella asking if Eric had ever been married before.
‘You know he hasn't, Winifred said, already looking put out. ‘Why do you ask that now?’
‘It does seem strange, doesn't it? I mean, to get to the age of forty-five and never to have been married.’
‘Eric is forty-two.’ Winifred spoke with indignation as if the difference between Eric's real age and that put forward by Ella was thirty years instead of three. ‘He has been wise enough not to get married until he found the woman he really wanted to spend his life with.’
‘You, you mean? Oh, please. Do you know what they're saying?’
‘I don't wish to know, thank you, Ella.’
‘You'll have to, just the same. You ought to know before you do anything you'll regret.’
Winifred said magnificently, ‘I never do things I shall regret.’
Ella burst out laughing, as well she might. I think they had both forgotten I was there or cared not at all. ‘On second thoughts, it may be best for me not to tell you. It will only upset you.’
‘Now you have gone as far as this you had better come out with it.’
‘Don't say you didn't ask me,’ said Ella in an insufferably smug way. ‘Well, they are saying that Eric is –’ she paused for a moment to think, I suppose, what Eric was and came out with the words all in a rush ‘– is an invert. There you are. Don't say you didn't ask.’
Winifred screamed out. ‘How dare you? How dare you? You must be mad, whoever says so is mad, sick in their minds.’
‘Please don't make an exhibition of yourself in the public street.’
Far from a street, it was a country lane with not a soul about. In any case, Ella's words had no effect and Winifred continued to shout and scream, standing still now and stamping her foot. She took off her hat and waved it about while Ella watched, a little smile coming and going. The word she had used meant nothing to me. I had never heard it before but of course I gathered from the context what it meant. Homosexuality was not a subject that was much discussed at that time, though more then than previously. The law which legalized sex between homosexual men in private had come into force the year before.
Ella then, in a slow, steady voice, made calmer by her sister's near-hysterics, proceeded to tell her that one rumour had it that Eric Dawson's Bishop, when the gossip reached him, had advised him to marry. ‘I know the very words he used. Find some older woman, Eric, he said, someone who won't be too demanding, if you understand me, and marry her to set my mind and your own at rest.’
‘You're making it up!’ Winifred shouted.
‘No, I'm not. I swear I'm not.’
The quarrel went on all the way back to Lydstep Old Hall, all along the track and up to the front door. There both of them, by unspoken consent, became silent, each clamping her lips tightly shut as if words which must be suppressed were struggling behind them to break out. On the doorstep, Winifred said to me in bitter tones, ‘There now, you can't complain you're not privy to our secrets, can you?’
I began to wish I had never said that about liking to know the history and the facts of a family. It looked as if they had all had an indignant conference on the subject. Three or four hours later I was walking round those uninteresting fields, a dozen paces behind John, and because he again made no response to my attempts at conversation and didn't even lift his eyes from contemplation of the ground, I let my thoughts drift off to Eric Dawson and the rumour about him.
Very likely he was gay, not a word in vogue at the time, as far as I remember, and if he wanted to keep his job, avoid scandal and newspaper publicity, he might aim to present himself as a respectably married man. Far more experienced women than Winifred were unable to detect for a long time, sometimes years, that they had married a homosexual. But perhaps it scarcely mattered whether she knew or found out as she was certainly not marrying Eric Dawson in the expectation of passion, an assumption which was borne out by her behaviour that evening when he arrived in time for supper.
I always ate very little at this meal. I had finished tea only two hours before. But when I told Mrs Cosway that she might prefer me to go to my room while they had a guest, she looked very put out.
‘I don't see that at all,’ she said. ‘You won't be in the way. I don't see you as a servant, Kerstin, but more of a companion or au pair.’
The very title and function I
had tried to avoid…Spending the evening in my room – which, whatever its shortcomings, was big and airy – with Great Expectations and my diary, would have been a pleasant relief, but I agreed to stay downstairs at any rate for supper. John went to bed without a word. ‘Zombie’ was not a word much used then, but I had come across it and been told that it came from the Caribbean (or, as we then said, West Indian) term for the living dead. It came into my mind as I stood by, watching John arrange on his bedside table the small objects he kept in his dressing-gown pockets during the day, strictly following the requisite pattern. When I held it out to him he refused the sleeping pill with a shake of the head but took it from the little glass dish when his mother offered it. His expression never changed. Waking and asleep, it was as blank as a mummy's or a passport photograph.
I wondered if he had thoughts or if his mind, like his face, was a tabula rasa, without memory or hope or knowledge as an animal's is said to be, knowing only fear and the need for flight. I was to find out, but not then, not yet. Then, watching him as Mrs Cosway gathered up his discarded clothes, hung up his jacket and trousers and put them away, I felt as Ida must have done when she told me about him that first day, and the tears came into my eyes. Mrs Cosway looked at me with incomprehension, giving a little shrug. Walking downstairs behind her, I thought how, the first time she left me in charge of him at bedtime, I would take a chance and give him an aspirin instead of the barbiturate. If he would take it from me. If he would take anything from me.
Evensong ending at seven-thirty, Eric Dawson arrived half an hour later in his Ford Anglia. He had changed into ordinary clothes, including a shirt with an open neck instead of the dog collar. Again a kiss was exchanged between him and Winifred, he putting his lips to her cheek and she briefly laying the side of her face against his. He had brought the ring, explaining that he had been unsure if she would be at Matins since she had attended seven o'clock Communion four hours before. If the rumour were true and Winifred was the wrong sex for him, she was certainly devout enough. Blushing, she held out her left hand, and watched by her mother, her two sisters and me, he put it on to her third finger. The three little diamonds, caught by a bright beam from the setting sun, made a winking rainbow pattern running up and down the wall as Winifred held out her hand for all to admire. Whether her nails had been cleaned or not was hard to say as she had painted them the same bright pink as her mouth.