by Barbara Vine
‘Valuable, I suppose?’
‘Oh, priceless, I should think. They weren't taking proper care of it downstairs so I brought it up here.’ Later I learnt that she often referred to her mother and her sisters as ‘downstairs’. ‘Lots of Roman glass and porcelain has been found in Essex, you know, but not much of it is as well preserved as that. John loves it – or he used to. He doesn't seem to care about anything any more. If I thought he did I'd take it back.’
I didn't reply. John liking any object but those he carried in his dressing-gown pockets was beyond my imagination. I expected her to say more and was disappointed when all she said was, ‘My bedroom is through the arch and the bathroom is next to it.’
I looked at the four-poster with its white and turquoise bed curtains, the lilac and yellow and blue-green rugs and thought that, elegant as it all was and as far a cry from downstairs as you could get, it was rather like a five-star hotel. It reminded me of the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, a palatial place where a rich aunt of my mother's stayed when she came into town and where I had once been to have tea with her. But looking at the record player, the books, the television, white and neat like the radio, I could understand how Zorah might be happy spending her time up here rather than downstairs. That hardly explained why she wanted to be here at all when it appeared that she could have afforded to buy herself a house in any East Anglian village. Pretty cottages were available at that date for three or four thousand pounds and a fine house for ten.
‘It's very pretty,’ I said.
I am not sure if my comment quite satisfied her. ‘I thought you'd like it.’
She dismissed me by opening the door and standing back to let me pass through. Perhaps I should have reminded her she was going to drive me to the station but I come from a family, and since that date have married into a family, where people do what they say they will and the kind of offer she made is written in stone. I attended John's bedtime ritual, still trying to think of ways I could put an end to dosing him with barbiturates. It would take me twenty-five minutes to walk to the station but less than five in a car and at that time I thought I would get a lift. I put a spare pair of jeans and a sweater into my bag and went downstairs to wait for Zorah. Something made me look out of the window and it was a good thing I did, for the Lotus was gone and Zorah with it. She had forgotten me.
I waited for ten minutes in case she meant to return and then I left, sore and angry. Although with none of that longing which is a sign of love, I was looking forward to this meeting with Mark and now I had no idea when the next train would come or when it would get to London. As it happened, it was only just over half an hour before one came but it shuddered to a halt at every station on the line before reaching Liverpool Street an hour and ten minutes later.
Mrs Cosway and John were always seated at the breakfast table when I came down. I tried to be up by seven, though this was hard for me, as it usually is for people of the age I was then, but it would not have been so difficult if I could have seen the need for it. There was nothing for me to do unless I manufactured chores for myself, and nothing as far as I could see to occupy Mrs Cosway and her son. They could have stayed in bed another two hours for all they did with the time gained, but they were always up earlier than I was and always waiting for me, Mrs Cosway pointedly looking at her watch as I came in. Needless to say, Ida had been up since God knows when to serve them their breakfast.
On the Tuesday after my weekend in London I was down earlier than usual, obviously earlier than Mrs Cosway expected me, for as I came in I saw her give John a pill on a saucer. I might have taken no notice of this but for the start she gave.
‘I didn't hear you come downstairs,’ she said.
My shoes had rubber soles but they were a pair I often wore. She was beginning to lose her hearing, as I had noticed and Ella had told her, but she refused to accept it.
‘I am rather early,’ I said.
‘No need to apologize for that.’
There was a ring of sarcasm in her voice implying that I might consider saying I was sorry for the many occasions I had been late but never for being in advance of my time. Ella arrived in time to hear her.
‘Kerstin wasn't apologizing, Mother,’ she said, pouring cornflakes into a bowl. ‘She was explaining. There is a difference, you know.’
One of their spats developed after that with Ella telling her mother that her passion for punctuality was ridiculous and it was just as bad to be too early for an appointment as too late. Mrs Cosway denied it. If you were early you kept no one waiting, the way Ella kept everyone waiting, saving her own time but wasting theirs. How a child of hers, brought up like the others, came to have such a major character flaw she had no idea. Tempers began running high and into the midst of it walked Winifred, brilliantly made-up as usual, her fingernails blood-red, to put her spoke in, as her mother said, by telling Mrs Cosway that it hardly mattered whether she were early or late as she seldom set foot outside and never met anyone.
Ida came in with a pot of fresh tea. ‘Oh, please, please. I could hear you in the kitchen. Think of John. You know how he hates it.’
It was true that he usually did but now he sat still and silent, his face calm as a death mask, his hands laid on the tablecloth as if about to play on an invisible instrument; I remembered the pill I had seen Mrs Cosway give him and which, surely, had been the root cause of this quarrel. Was she drugging him by day as well as by night and if so, why?
There was no sign of Zorah. She never appeared at breakfast and I supposed she either went without or made tea and toast for herself upstairs. The evening before she had turned up for supper, a much more interesting meal than usual with a pair of cold pheasants and a game pie, all of which I guessed she had brought with her or ordered from Harrods. She said nothing about forgetting to drive me to the station and I also said nothing, recriminations being pointless. Whether it was as a result of Zorah's influence or some other unknown cause, Ella had made some improvements to her appearance during the weekend. Her face was lightly made-up, her hair washed, and instead of one of her droopy prints, she wore a straight shift in red crepe. Some man must be in the offing, I decided, for I had summed her up as a woman who would dress up when intent on attracting, and in spite of the books in her room, one who had never learnt from Jane Austen that ‘man only can be aware of man's insensibility to a new gown’.
The Cosways possessed an enormous amount of silver and, either from an oversight or because she disliked it, Zorah seemed to have purloined none of it. Coming upon Ida opening drawers and cupboards and gazing at the tarnished contents in despair, I had said I would clean it for her or at least make a start on cleaning it. I had begun, and was tackling with the silver polish and a pile of torn-up pyjamas a silver tray bearing on it a cream jug, water jug and sugar basin, when Mrs Lilly arrived.
In the short time I had been at Lydstep Old Hall I had learnt never to take on a task the cleaner might be expected to perform without offering her an explanation. This applied (and still does) to a job she would never do even if asked to, but at which, if she finds anyone else usurping it, she will take umbrage. Accordingly, when Mrs Lilly came into the dining room, pushing a vacuum cleaner she never emptied and with a handful of dirty dusters she never washed, I said brightly, ‘You're always so busy when you're here, Mrs Lilly, that I don't know when you'd make time to do this, so I thought I'd help you out.’
A kind of grudging suspiciousness narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her upper lip but she accepted my explanation, though taking the rag out of my hand and showing me how to apply what she called ‘elbow grease.’ Not much time was spent on this as she had news to impart and Ida had to be called in to hear it while Mrs Lilly trailed very slowly round the room, talking as she wiped surfaces. Her news was the arrival at The Studio of Mr Dunhill, her own cottage being just on the other side of the little green from his.
‘He didn't have the removal people. All his stuff came in a van and I reckon it was driv –’ Essex people say ‘dri
v’ for ‘driven’ ‘– by a pal of his on account of they both went in the Rose when they'd done the unloading. He didn't have much. A lot of books and some great big frames with cloth stretched on them and things to paint pictures on. Him and the pal had a couple of G and Ts in the Rose and that's where Mr Lilly saw them when he went in for his pint.’
All this was of very little interest to me but Ida and Winifred, who had also come in, were enthralled by it. Living in the country narrows the mind and I wondered if I would get like them after a year of it.
‘What does he look like, Mrs Lilly?’ This was Winifred, always interested in personal appearance.
‘Oh, I don't know. Tall, dark and handsome – is that what you want me to say? I'm no good at what folks look like. He's all right, about forty, got a lot of long hair. When I was a girl we used to say we'd like a handsome husband and a thousand a year. Wouldn't go far these days, would it?’
‘I wonder if he goes to church, said the Rector's prospective bride.
‘Not by the looks of him.’ Mrs Lilly gave a raunchy laugh. ‘I'd be surprised.’
Silently but not stealthily, Zorah came in. She must have been listening outside. She wore a blue and white check dress, summertime country wear. ‘I can tell you exactly what he looks like, Winifred,’ she said. ‘I saw him myself yesterday.’
‘Why didn't you say?’
‘I'm saying now, darling. I didn't imagine you'd have such a voracious appetite for the details of a bachelor's appearance.’ One of her crimson blushes flooded Winifred's face. ‘By the way, I've discovered he's a painter of abstracts,’ said Zorah. ‘He has exhibited. I don't know if he's ever sold anything. Not likely, I'd say. Whoever told you his name was Dunhill was wrong. It's Dunsford. He's about six feet tall, thin, shoulder-length black hair. Personally I don't care for long hair on a man. Some would call him good-looking.’ Whether or not she would, she failed to say. ‘Satisfied?’
‘You needn't make such a song and dance of it, Zorah.’
‘I thought it was you doing that, darling.’
‘I'm going to start hoovering,’ said Mrs Lilly, ‘so you'd best all clear off if you want to hear yourselves speak.’
Ida helped me carry trayfuls of silver out to the kitchen. At a loose end now her catering was over for the time being, Winifred followed us to drift round the big room, pausing first to gaze out of the window, then opening the fridge door and pushing jars and dishes about inside.
‘Zorah can be a real bitch,’ she remarked to the remains of cold pheasant. “‘Voracious appetite for the details of a bachelor's appearance,” indeed. She's got a nerve. When we all know she'll get hold of him. She always does.’
‘Oh, Winifred.’ Ida gave a meaning glance at me.
‘Kerstin won't say anything,’ said Winifred. ‘She wouldn't be interested.’
Which only went to show how little they knew me. I sat with John and Mrs Cosway and shared with her the two newspapers they took. She read, he did nothing. Now I was beginning to see his condition as a possibly drug-induced dazed state, light was starting to dawn on other aspects of his life and habits. I asked myself – I had already asked Mrs Cosway in vain – why she had taken me on. What was I for? Solely to accompany this poor, sluggish, zombie-like man for an hour's walk in the afternoons? And to watch him go to bed in a neglected living room with a piano in it?
My day off this week would be the Wednesday, too soon to arrange to see Isabel. I would phone her, though, and ask if I could call and see her at her home in London the following Monday. It was she who had recommended me to the Cosways and them to me and I had a lot of things to ask her. Meanwhile, as if reading my thoughts on my uselessness at Lydstep Old Hall, Mrs Cosway looked up from her paper and asked me if I would ‘supervise’ John's bedtime that evening as she, in spite of what Winifred had said at breakfast, would be going out. In the afternoon I went out with him for his walk as usual and this time I tried a different route. Seeing that he put up no resistance when, instead of opening the gate into the field, I said, ‘I think we'll go by the road today, John,’ I led him a little way down the hill and on to the public footpath which skirted the side of the meadow, went a little way into the wood and crossed a river, which must have been the Colne, by a footbridge. I hoped it would take a turn to bring us back without retracing our steps and this was what happened. We came to a lane and a signpost which pointed to Windrose in one direction and Lydstep Green in the other and turned left.
John walked obediently along, plodding like a weary horse pulling too heavy a load. It upset me just to look at him, wondering if he had been given some mind-numbing drug early that morning and possibly – though this was guesswork on my part – another later in the day. Cowardly though it was, I tried to solve this by turning my eyes away from him to gaze at the Great Red Tower of Windrose, a blunt finger pointing skywards out of the horizon, at a flock of birds which rose in formation from one of the fields and then at a cat stalking some tiny creature under the hedge. But my thoughts stayed with him and my eyes went back to his lumbering figure, round shoulders and forward-thrusting head. Mrs Cosway had said that it was he who had asked for me, asked for someone to help her, that is, but it seemed to me then that this was the hardest thing of all to imagine, that he might have any wishes or be capable of making any real decisions. Suppose I asked him? Would he answer? I was thinking how impossible that question would be to ask, how unlikely that there would be any reply, when without warning, John stumbled and fell over, sprawling on the ground.
Appalled, I instantly blamed myself, though nothing out of the way had happened except that we were following a different route. Though thin, I was very strong and fit and I bent down to John before remembering I mustn't touch him. He gave no more sign that he had fallen than if he had been a waxwork. Indeed, lying there, he looked like some sort of lay figure, as rigid as the stone on the road he had tripped over. Touching him would be worse than leaving him there, I thought, and I sat down on the grass verge to wait. Time goes very slowly in these circumstances and I began to wonder what to do if he stayed there for hours. He might even fall asleep, he so often seemed on the verge of it, as if sleep was always waiting beside him to pull him into its folds. But just as I was thinking I would have to leave him and go back to the house for help, he got to his feet and started to walk on without a word.
He was quite unhurt. When I told Mrs Cosway what had happened I got an unexpected reaction. I thought she would be angry and I was prepared for that, being pretty sure that if we had followed our normal itinerary none of this would have happened. If she had said in response that, as a result, she would stay in that evening instead of leaving me in charge, I wouldn't have been surprised. But she only gave one of her shrugs, a movement that conveyed indifference more perfectly than any I have ever seen.
‘He's not hurt, is he?’
‘I don't think so.’
‘He does that sometimes,’ she said.
And at six, home from school an hour before, Ella drove her away in the car. Her mixture of devotion and an uncaring lack of interest was beyond me. I suppose I had sentimental ideas about motherhood in those days or just my own mother as an example. An hour had passed and John shuffled off to his bedroom. I followed him after allowing him time to get undressed. When I came into the room he was in the act of arranging dice, ballpoint, plaster, green bottle and the rest on his bedside table and took no notice of me. He hadn't uttered a word, in my hearing at least, since we came back from our walk.
Mrs Cosway had left me the barbiturate tablet ready in the glass dish. I held it out to him exactly as she did but he shook his head, turned over on his side and pulled the quilt over him.
I said, ‘Your pill, John,’ but he didn't answer and I saw he was already asleep.
It was still broad daylight and the room was as light as it ever was. Although I knew Mrs Cosway disliked drawn curtains, I went to the window to pull them across but before I got there I noticed on top of the piano a framed
photograph of four girls, taken perhaps twenty years before. One of them, plain-faced and spotty but just recognizable as Zorah, was in an unflattering school uniform. Ida looked much as she did today, careworn and harassed from self-imposed duties, Winifred and Ella both very pretty, brightly smiling. A middle-aged man in the picture I supposed must be the late Mr Cosway, father of this family, handsome and with an unexpectedly sensitive face. John was not there. Could he have taken this photograph?
I drew the curtains, picked up Johns discarded clothes from the floor and went out into the hall. Zorah was standing there as if waiting for me. She looked at the shirt and socks and underwear I was holding.
‘Why do you have to do that?’
‘Someone has to.’
‘My mother will be hours. Where she's gone she won't hurry back.’ She was dressed to go out, her car keys in her hand, but she lingered. ‘John never used to be like that,’ she said, ‘like he's in a dream all the time, never saying a word, clumsy and stumbling about. What do you think is really wrong with him?’
I said I didn't know but no doubt his doctor did. She laughed. She opened the front door and slammed it behind her. The house shook. I wondered what her laughter meant and then where she was going and whom she was meeting. In spite of what her daughter had said, Mrs Cosway came back in the Volvo half an hour later. Perceptive enough to notice that I had expected her to be out longer, Ella said, though unasked, ‘She only went to the doctor's.’
Mrs Cosway followed her in, opened her bag and dropped a piece of paper on the hall table before passing on into the drawing room. Considering where she had been, for me to have kept from glancing at it would have been impossible. I had no pangs of conscience to struggle with.
It was a prescription for high-dose phenobarbitone and another drug called Largactil. I had completely forgotten what Largactil was for. If I wanted to identify it I would have to find a dictionary of medicines in the public library at Colchester or Sudbury and look it up. I had decided to say nothing to Mrs Cosway about John's refusal to take the barbiturate from me. He was asleep, would very probably stay asleep, and if he didn't and she asked me, I would admit my failure. I could see no reason for his going to bed at seven any more than I could for the afternoon walks. It was Ella who, that very evening, came to sit next to me and explain, though I hadn't asked her. This was the beginning of her overtures of friendship to me.