by Barbara Vine
‘This is very unsatisfactory but what else can I do? It gets warmer all the time, it must be up in the seventies. It makes my job very difficult.’
‘Will you have a bigger refrigerator at the Rectory?’
She gave the Cosway laugh. ‘Eric's is about the size of our bread bin. I don't know how I'm going to manage. But then I don't suppose I shall have time. I shall be too busy in the parish.’
It sounded a grim prospect to me. ‘Will your youngest sister be going to the Midsummer Supper tonight?
‘Zorah? I shouldn't think so. She never does take part in village life. Besides, when she gets home she's too cosy in her little bower to go out anywhere for a few days. No doubt she'll have a male visitor.’
By no stretch of optimism could my room or her mother's (nor, I supposed, the other bedrooms) be called a little bower. Not caring to ask directly, still less comment on the possible visitor, I said, feeling my way, ‘She has made it very comfortable then?’
‘You can say that again.’ Winifred spoke bitterly again and in a very heartfelt way. I saw that I had been wrong in assessing these two sisters as close. With one of her mother's shrugs, she shook off resentment or whatever it was and said, ‘I do hope you'll come.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I will.’
That had not been my plan but now I told myself it would be a chance to learn more about Windrose and its inhabitants. I promised Winifred I would help her load the food into the Volvo and we set off, with Ella driving, at six-thirty, well in advance of the other guests. It was my first sight of an English church hall. It may differ from a village hall but if so I have no idea how. This one was not much more than a large but with a roof of corrugated iron. Inside it had a bare wood floor with a dais at one end which could be used as a stage and several long trestle tables. The windows were small and uncurtained but still it was rather dark until Ella turned on the strip lighting. In the cold uncompromising light it looked a grim place.
Winifred spread cloths on the tables and we set out the food. As the plates of ham were uncovered I wondered which one had been explored by the fly and resolved to give all a miss. Perhaps because of its repeated transition from fridge to table and table to fridge, the food looked the worse for wear, the slices of meat curling at the edges and the lettuce wilting. It was hot and stuffy inside the hall, a fact immediately commented on by Eric Dawson, who was the first to arrive. He went about opening windows. After that the village trooped in, mostly elderly couples and ageing single ladies. Perhaps they were younger than I remember but then, of course, anyone over forty seemed old to me.
Clinging to Eric's arm and flashing her ring, Winifred walked about greeting people, anticipating her future as chatelaine of the Rectory and parson's wife. Ella was transformed. She had dressed herself in a pink jumper and pleated skirt and washed her hair. She met a bosom friend, a woman of about her own age called Bridget Mills, and the two of them went off into a corner where the few chairs were set out and, their heads close together, began an eager conversation.
Everyone smoked and, in spite of the open windows and door, a thick blue fug built up, hanging like cumulus above people's heads. Knowing no one and with no one willing to introduce me, I went among the crowd explaining who I was and that I had been helping Winifred. They were very nice, these people, warm and friendly and welcoming. But there can be no more uncomfortable meal than a buffet supper in a place where there are twenty chairs to fifty people and few uncluttered surfaces. We juggled with a plate in one hand, a glass in the other, and in most cases a cigarette gripped between fore- and middle-finger of the glass-holding hand. Somewhere had to be found then to put the glass down while a fork was used on the food and it surprised me that only one plate crashed to the ground, this being dropped by an old lady introduced to me as Miss Adams. Ella rushed over, obviously very displeased at having to leave her friend even for the five minutes it took to clear up the mess.
I learnt something about village gossip that night and without, I hope, being unkind, the trivialities which Windrose concentrated on when any newcomer to the village was expected. For everyone talked to his or her neighbour for at least a while about the imminent arrival of a new tenant for The Studio. It was like Jane Austen but a hundred and fifty years later, long enough I would have thought for radical change. But these Windrosians were still excited by the prospect of this man's coming and a village gathering in the church hall was the perfect venue for an exchange of information. Those who knew when he would arrive depended on others to tell them his name and those who knew his name were avid to hear his age, the precise nature of his occupation and if he was unmarried. Perhaps, again in a Jane Austen climate, it is unnecessary to say that a bachelor of forty, as he seemed to be, was far more interesting to them than a woman of that status and age would have been. No doubt they were thinking that a single man would be in want of a wife.
A lot of the speculation seemed to be founded on wild rumours. After all, he could hardly be a painter of abstracts and a potter and a weaver of tapestries but various people put forward with absolute conviction these and other versions of what he did. Mrs Cusp, the churchwarden's wife, was sure she had heard of him as a Symbolist but perhaps that was someone of the same name. A retired army officer from the house next to The Studio said he hoped he wasn't ‘anything like Picasso’.
‘I hope he'll fit in,’ said Ella's friend.
‘Maybe he'll fall in love with you, Bridget.’ This from an elderly female lay reader who took the service when Eric was hard pressed. Apparently she was known for her tactless frankness. ‘He's never been married, has he? I always think that peculiar in a man who, however you look at it, is on the verge of middle age.’
This was hard on Eric, who tightened his lips, took off his glasses and put them on again. ‘I look forward to meeting him, anyway,’ he said in a repressive way unusual with him.
Even after most of the food had been eaten I waited for young people to turn up but none came. I was the youngest there by fifteen years. It was as if a Pied Piper had come into the village some time ago and lured all the children away. I asked Eric about this.
‘The young all leave,’ he said, fidgeting with his glasses. ‘There's no work for them and nothing much to do. The first thing they do when they leave school is get a car or if they're under seventeen, a motorbike, and then they're off. They go to the towns. We're getting to be a population of retired people.’
The effect was depressing. I would have been glad to leave but Winifred had to stay till the end and remove all the dishes and wasted food. It seemed to me that hers was an arduous job. I hoped it was lucrative but doubted it. Her principal reward would have been the praise of approving guests. I heard someone tell Eric he was a lucky man and what an excellent wife she would make. People still said things like that in the sixties. A man's life companion was a good proposition if she could cook and clean.
One good thing about an elderly population was that they tended to leave functions early. At ten sharp couples began going home. It was a fine clear night, the sun not long set and the sky still lit and coloured by it, blue and indigo feathers spread across its deep red. Because I have never been back I have no idea what that countryside is like now but then it was all little patchwork fields, rich flowering hedges and screens of tall trees. The elms have all gone long ago but when I was there Dutch elm disease had not yet come to England. Few new houses had been built except for the short rows of council houses outside each village and the cottages were almost all beautiful – if not beautiful to live in – with roofs of thatch or slate, tiny small-paned windows and ramblers climbing their walls. Roses round the door are a calendar and Christmas card cliché but those cottages really were like that and still are, for all I know. I had seen Ida desultorily embroidering a picture of one for a firescreen.
Zorah was not at breakfast and failed to appear for lunch. This was party leftovers thriftily served up by Ida. I ate none of it, sticking to bread and cheese as d
id Mrs Cosway, but I tried to keep a straight face while she wrinkled up her nose and turned her mouth down. On my way out with John I saw that the Lotus had gone. As usual he kept his head bent and eyes downcast as we walked along. I had debated with myself whether it was better to keep a matching silence to his own or to persist in talking even if I got no replies from him, and I finally decided on the latter. But there is something unnerving about an entirely one-sided conversation. Wearing and frustrating, and the speaker feels foolish. After ten minutes of what became fatuous rubbish about the weather and the scenery, I wanted to shout out, ‘For God's sake say something!’ but of course I had to resist.
I supposed I would get used to it and come to expect a response from him no longer. This was the beginning of my speculating as to what was really wrong with him. My knowledge of mental illness was very inadequate but I knew more than the Cosways. If he was schizophrenic, was he on any medication other than the sleeping pill Mrs Cosway gave him every night? He acted and moved like someone heavily dosed with a tranquillizing drug, his hands trembling, his gait often unsteady. His doctor must know, I told myself, this Dr Lombard who had come to visit Mrs Cosway while Winifred, Ella and I were out. Had he also seen Mrs Cosway's son or was John already in bed asleep?
No one had mentioned the maze. Perhaps if you had one in your grounds and had always had it, had been born to it, so to speak, and grown up with it, you had lost interest and forgotten it was there. Or was it not there? I could have asked. If I didn't it was because I felt that the Cosways' silence on the subject of something so interesting indicated it was banned as a topic of conversation. Or that, if they wanted me to know about it, they would have mentioned it by now.
This didn't stop me looking for it. I kept my eyes open while on those dreary walks with John and whenever I went out into the grounds alone I looked, not only for a maze but for the traces of where a maze might once have been, the cut-off trunks of bushes showing through the grass, a copse of trees all of the same kind and closely planted, even a barren square of turf with no apparent purpose or use. There was nothing.
Later that week I came back from one of these explorations to find Mrs Cosway and Zorah in the drawing room in the throes of an argument I knew instinctively that Zorah would win. She was dressed in a white suit and had pushed her sunglasses up into her black hair so that she looked like a taller version of Jacqueline Kennedy. Mrs Cosway was holding the amethyst geode, needing both hands to do this because it was too heavy for one. Neither Ida nor Winifred was anywhere to be seen.
‘Haven't you taken enough upstairs to those rooms of yours?’ Mrs Cosway was saying. ‘Oh, no. Now you want this. You could go and buy all these things. You could afford it. It seems to me you can afford anything.’
‘Just as well for you, Mother,’ said Zorah. ‘A fine mess you'd all be in if I couldn't.’ She turned when she heard the door. ‘Hallo, Kerstin.’
I said hallo to her and, apologizing for coming in on what seemed to be a private matter, said I would go.
‘No, you don't,’ Mrs Cosway astonished me by saying. ‘Now you're here you can arbitrate.’ This brought one of her small Gioconda smiles to Zorah's face. ‘Tell me your opinion. My daughter has already removed all the prettiest ornaments from this room and not only this room. Now she wants the geode. Why? She won't say.’
‘Yes, I will. I rather like it.’
This I thought the response of a tyrant, worthy of a dictator who can command anything or negate anything.
‘What do you think, Kerstin?’
I was astonished to be asked. My opinion was certainly never again sought on any subject. ‘I don't know, Mrs Cosway,’ I said. ‘It's not my business.’
Zorah raised her wonderfully shaped black eyebrows. ‘Any judge might say that, Kerstin. Nothing that goes on in a court would be his business if he hadn't been appointed to make a decision.’
‘He only recommends,’ I said. ‘He has a jury.’
That made Zorah laugh and as her mother allowed a small smile to widen her mouth a centimetre, she reached for the geode and quickly took it out of her hands. This action produced a scream of rage as Mrs Cosway lunged at her daughter, ineffectually grabbing at the geode. It fell to the ground with a heavy thump and rolled across the floor. I heard a sound from John. He was on his feet, his hands up to his ears, his eyes bulging.
‘No, no, no, no,’ he whimpered. ‘No, no…’
‘See what you've done to your brother!’ Mrs Cosway, though crawling across the carpet, was once more frustrated by an agile Zorah grabbing the geode and holding it up high like a child with a stolen ball. ‘Look what a state you've got him in. You're a disgrace, you ought to be ashamed.’
Zorah was smiling no longer. ‘Be careful what you say, Mother. You know what I mean.’
That was more than I did. John had crawled into a far corner of the room, where he sat with his forefingers pushed into his ears, his head bent. Horrified as much at Mrs Cosway's careless anger and Zorah's indifference, I watched him curl himself up on the carpet in the foetal position.
‘Can I do anything?’ I said, and then, ‘There must be something we can do.’
‘Just leave him.’ Mrs Cosway sounded more impatient than I had ever heard her. ‘Leave him alone. Ignore him. He'll get up and come back eventually.’
Zorah gave me an amused look. She walked over to John and said, ‘Never mind, old chap. You soldier on.’
John stayed in his corner for about half an hour but just as I was beginning to think this was more than I could bear, this grown man curled up on the floor, his mother reading the newspaper as if this was normal behaviour, he got up and shambled back to his armchair.
Next morning Zorah invited me up to her rooms.
6
I had decided to go to London that evening instead of waiting till the Saturday. Although I had settled into helping Ida in the mornings, this after breaking my firm resolve to do no housework, walking with John in the afternoon and attending the ritual of his bedtime, I had nothing to do after that except eat and watch television with the family. I was in the dining room phoning the station for train times, when Zorah walked in.
‘How are you going to get there?’
‘I thought I'd go to Marks Tey because it's nearest. I'll walk. It's only a mile.’
‘A very long mile! I'll drive you if you like.’
I accepted as I had a bag to carry which was light enough but would become very heavy by the time Marks Tey station was reached. As I was giving Zorah the time of my train, Ida came in with a tablecloth and the knives and forks for lunch. She had been shopping in the village.
‘Mr Dunhill is moving in on Monday,’ she said with the pride of someone imparting a thrilling and long-awaited news item. ‘Mrs Waltham told me in the post office.’
In that light and slightly mocking tone I was beginning to associate with her, Zorah said, ‘And who may Mr Dunhill be?’
‘The artist who's moving into The Studio.’
‘I've never heard of him. Should I have?’
‘I don't know, Zorah. I don't even know what sort of an artist he is. No one seems to know.’
‘Would you like me to find out?’
‘Could you?’ Ida spoke with the kind of admiring wistfulness I could already tell Zorah liked when it was directed at her. It implied that she was clever and that she knew the right people, a puller of strings, in the know, a spy in the corridors of power. ‘Could you really?’
‘I expect so,’ said Zorah carelessly. ‘Leave it to me.’ While Ida laid the table, she turned to me. ‘Shall I show you where I live when I'm here?’
We went upstairs. I already knew where her room must be, along the passage past Mrs Cosway's and Ella's where I had never had reason to venture. I followed her, waiting to see another shabby chamber stacked with treasures stolen from her mother. It was not like that. She opened the door and stood back with the sort of pride I would never have expected from someone with her combination of sophi
stication and coolness.
‘There,’ she said, and I heard the little girl she had once been in her voice, the spoilt child (as I thought then) which the youngest, the afterthought, often is.
Big structural changes had been made. This had probably been two rooms which she must have had combined, for there were windows at each end of it, and an arch dividing living room from bedroom. The walls were panelled and painted in ivory and pale blue in the eighteenth-century manner and a fine cornice of swatches of ribbons and flowers separated them from the ceiling. The carpet was ivory, a vulnerable carpet which looked untrodden, and on it stood pieces of French furniture in blue and Chinese yellow as well as several deep armchairs and two sofas. I wondered if the spinet and the harp also came from downstairs rooms and, come to that, the landscapes in their slender gilt frames.
The geode stood alone in the middle of a small painted table, its pale lilac crystals glittering in the sunshine and flashing rainbows on to the white wall. Among the other ornaments, a cut-glass bowl and an alabaster lamp suggested themselves to me as also once having belonged to Mrs Cosway. I was less sure about the jug of clouded glass which stood by itself on a tall table and I approached it curiously, gingerly laying a finger on its side.
‘It's Roman,’ Zorah said carelessly. So might someone describe an object as coming from John Lewis's.