by Barbara Vine
Zorah stood watching me as I made my way along this passage, my feet leaving shiny marks in the dust on the floorboards, turning to the left at the end of it, the only possible route. She followed me. Having made this right angle, I was confronted with a choice, either to turn left again into a parallel passage or to proceed straight ahead, where the space between the wall and the free-standing case was a little wider. The easily recognizable faces of Balzac and Frederick the Great eyed me with distaste. The books which surrounded me gave off that curious, rather sour smell old paper has, especially dusty old paper that is shut up for long periods in an airless space.
It seemed natural here to go on tiptoe. I took the left turn, found the wall of books on my right was broken halfway along, offering me another choice, to go on or turn right. At first I had rather resented Zorah's accompanying me but then I felt glad of her presence. This place was so bizarre, the old, somehow Victorian, stench of paper and ink and leather so overpowering, that I felt intimidated. If I had been claustrophobic I should have had to turn back. As it was, with her behind me and the delicate, very modern scent of her perfume so at odds with the stronger smell, I went on, taking turn after turn and short passage after short passage without any thought of a plan or making any attempt to memorize the course I had taken. I may have noticed the titles of volumes as I passed them but I could remember none of them later that night. Only the faces stayed in my memory and I was afraid they might visit me in dreams.
Why is it that sculpted or carved faces, when seen by night in a half-lit place, have a frightening effect, while effigies of animals or artefacts do not? No one expects the lion on a tomb to raise its head or stretch out its paws but everyone of an imaginative turn of mind fears that the human head in stone may turn, the lips part or twist into a snarl. Those heads never did come back to me in nightmares but nor did they ever cease to make me uneasy, though I went into the library several times after that, and always the faces seemed to follow me with their sightless, pupil-less eyes.
‘Next time you come, darling,’ said Zorah with a soft laugh, ‘you must be like Theseus in the Minotaur's lair and play out a thread behind you. A ball of Ida's wool will do.’
As she spoke I stepped into a wider space, a square formed of bookcases. In the middle of it stood a lectern of bronze, made in the shape of a young man holding a book spread out on his outstretched hands. At his sandalled feet, also in bronze, lay two discarded volumes, one with Homer engraved on it, the other with Plato. The book in his hands, however, was real, paper and ink and leather, and when I approached I saw it was the Bible, open at the Book of Wisdom in the Apocrypha.
‘Great-grandfather Cosway made the maze and put that monstrosity there,’ said Zorah. ‘God knows why but the young chap is supposed to be Longinus, the one who wrote about the sublime, not the one who put his spear into Christ's side. He's rejecting Homer and Plato in favour of Holy Writ. He was no relation of mine, I'm glad to say.’
I thought she must mean she was no relation of Longinus's. Looking at the page at which the book was open, I read, ‘The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and there shall no torment touch them.’
The bronze hand felt cold to my touch. Longinus wore the tunic and breastplate of a Roman soldier and his hair fell in long curls to his shoulders. With his delicate profile, rather like that of Michelangelo's David, his short skirt and long bare legs, he looked in the dimness more like a girl than a man-at-arms. The lights in this place were low and his shadow long, falling across the entrance to two more passages.
‘Shall I get you out?’ said Zorah. ‘You could wander round for hours. Some have.’
I wanted to ask her if the only reason the labyrinth library was kept locked was to keep John out and if so why? What would he do? I didn't ask. Ella would be more approachable if less intelligent. Turning round corners, taking passages I was sure I had not been along before, I saw the picture Isabel had mentioned hanging on a bookcase end, a mezzotint of a house I took on trust was Lydstep Old Hall, for I would never have guessed it. Zorah found the geode on a shelf full of Victorian geography books. She lifted it down, holding the heavy thing in both hands.
‘I'd like to come in here again,’ I said.
She hesitated, then said, ‘No reason why not. Most of the keys live in a drawer in the dining room but not this one. I'll show you where you can find it.’
I went with her and watched her open the door to a cavity in the wall. The door was the picture of the couple in the amphitheatre. ‘There was once a safe behind here,’ she said. ‘No use any longer. They've nothing to keep in it.’ She laughed, said, ‘Better not,’ and stopped.
Better not what? She put the key back. The table was still littered with the debris of dinner and I began clearing it on to a large tray Ida had left behind. Zorah watched me with an expression largely blank, slightly amused.
‘Good night,’ she said and went away, carrying the geode.
10
Sitting on the flat roof outside his room on that warm Saturday night, over a bottle of Riesling –Chardonnay as the default tipple was a long way in the future – Mark and I discussed the Cosways, he being by this time almost as interested in their doings as I was. I had asked him why he thought Zorah behaved as she did. Why did she, who could live anywhere, choose to spend so much time at Lydstep, a shabby house in a pretty enough but remote part of north Essex? What was the battle for the geode about?
‘It's for power,’ he said. ‘It's power she wants and she's got it. Don't ask me why because I don't know. I don't want power and I don't know why anyone else does. But they do.’
I told him what Isabel had said to me about Zorah's wealth and how it was far greater than I had thought at first.
‘From what you say about her comments on the whisky, she doesn't just give them an income over and above what they've got, she likes to remind them of it. She sounds a real bitch.’
‘I don't know. I wonder if she has some motive for doing this, dating back to her childhood. She's taken every pretty ornament out of her mother's house upstairs to those rooms of hers. And that's what I don't understand. She could buy anything she wanted, she could have far more valuable things.’
‘That's not the point, is it? Those are their things, things that have memories attached to them for Julia. Old people are like that. They look at some old vase or whatever and it reminds them of visiting Auntie in Broadstairs in 1915. Or else they had it as a wedding present. Taking those things upstairs must really hurt Julia whereas stuff Zorah bought, even very valuable stuff, wouldn't mean anything at all to her. And, incidentally, do you know what her name means?’
‘Whose name? Zorah?’
‘I looked it up when you first told me. I'd never heard it before.’ No Internet in those days, no easy reference. Mark had traced it through the Proper Names section of a Bible with a subject index and concordance he had found in Kensington Public Library. ‘It's not a woman's name at all. It means “a place of hornets”,’ he said. ‘Book of Joshua, chapter nineteen.’
‘Why would you call your little girl after a place of hornets?’
‘People just like the sound,’ said Mark. ‘Look at all those parents who call a boy Gideon. They don't know it means “a lame man” and if they did I don't suppose they'd care. Shall we have another bottle of wine?’
For power. The thought of it brought a shiver down my spine. Perhaps power always does and in that lies its appeal. And there are no two ways about power, no grey area but all black or white. If you want it you want it all, as much as you can get and where you can get it, but if you don't want it you are indifferent to the whole thing and simply fail to see the point.
It was an ugly picture, this girl with an offensive name which, once you knew what it meant, could only be seen as a reflection on her character, moving back once she was rich into the family home where she had perhaps been neglected, and exerting a kind of tyranny over those who remained there. But why had the Cosways so little
money? Fairly obviously it was because Lydstep Old Hall cost a lot to run. They could surely have moved away, sold the house for a hotel or residential home, but they stayed. So what happened to the rents from the farmers who leased the land? What became of the money Mr Cosway left? Isabel had said there was a trust and perhaps it obliged them to stay.
Wills have to be published, no matter whose they are. Only the Royal Family are exempt. But I knew nothing of that until Mark told me and it was a while before I asked him. Back at Lydstep, I found Zorah had gone. It seemed that she and I had been in London at the same time, though in very different parts of it. Winifred was in the kitchen, making coffee for Eric, who had brought her back after Evensong. She immediately began telling me how Felix was going to paint a sign for the Rectory gate and she was to call on him and see his work. I thought it kinder not to remind her that I had been there when the arrangement was made.
Eric had to wait a long time for his drink. As soon as Winifred had started on the subject of Felix Dunsford she was unable to let it go. He was so charming, such an interesting man. She had been quite wrong about him. Of course he was eccentric, he was bohemian, but that was only to be expected from an artist.
‘I was wrong when I said he came to mock, you know. He was at Matins this morning again. But he was much more discreet about where he sat. I think he realized it was pushing it to sit in the front pew.’
It was rare for her to attend Evensong and I wondered if she had been only in the hope of his turning up again.
‘I'm quite excited at the prospect of seeing his work,’ she said. ‘I have a sort of intuitive feeling that he's good. We have so little real culture in this place, you know, Kerstin. It's a refreshing change to have someone like Mr Dunsford living amongst us. Would you like some coffee?’
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘It keeps me awake.’
But I went into the drawing room to say hallo to Eric. I expect it was my imagination which made me think he looked forlorn, reading the Sunday paper there in that barren place which might have been the lounge of a middle-grade Swedish country hotel. There was a brownness and a fawnness about it, a general shabbiness, not a book, not a cushion, only the seldom-emptied ashtrays, which made it hard to believe this was the living room of a county family. Poor Eric was not unsuited to it. Handsome as Winifred was pretty in a worn, unrealized sort of way, he too had a rather shabby air. I hoped she would iron his shirts and press his trousers; no one appeared to be doing it now. She brought his coffee and his glum face brightened. I wouldn't have believed that now she was with him she could go on talking about Felix Dunsford but she did.
‘Yes, he's a pleasant chap,’ was all Eric said but it was enough to stimulate her to further eulogies. Now it was to enthuse over the ease with which he had ‘got on’ with everyone at Lydstep, his graceful manners and, once more, his charm. Having had enough, I said good night and went off upstairs to the diary.
A few days later I expected more excesses from Winifred, for I had seen her come back from the village from John's bedroom while he was getting into bed. But she was strangely quiet, not only on the subject of Felix Dunsford and his works, but on any other. She sat by the French windows in the drawing room, apparently reading a cookery book, but spending most of the time, as far as I could tell, gazing into the garden and at the low hills and woods of north Essex beyond. Ella came home far later than usual from school. It was as if, unable to join Winifred at The Studio, she had decided to stay away as long as reasonably possible, perhaps to avoid hearing how her sister had enjoyed herself. But Winifred was unwilling to be drawn and answered her questions in monosyllables.
‘What do you mean by “Yes” when I ask you if his pictures are any good? How are they good? Are they abstracts? Representational? You don't know, do you? You know nothing about art.’
‘I never claimed to,’ said Winifred.
‘But you know what you like? Is that it? The trouble is that no one in this house is educated. Oh well, you are, I suppose, Kerstin, and Zorah is, for what that's worth, but you know what I mean.’
No one knew. I doubt if Ella did herself. She was angry and jealous and lashing out at whoever happened to be there, as was her way. ‘I shall go and see for myself, that's all. He said to drop in, so I will.’ She seemed to lose her nerve and said, as if I were a suitable chaperone, ‘You can come with me, Kerstin.’
‘I can't spare Kerstin for that kind of thing,’ said Mrs Cosway.
I kept silent, while inwardly amused. That rather pleasant inner laughter died when Ella said, ‘I tell you what I'm going to do now, Mother, and don't try to stop me. I'm going to go up to Zorah's place, and go in and take back your geode. And while I'm there I'm going to get the lamp and the watercolours and – and the harp and everything else she's pinched.’
‘Her door will be locked,’ said Mrs Cosway coldly.
‘I have a key.’ Ella did not specify how she had come by it or elucidate at all.
‘There'll be trouble,’ warned Ida.
‘There's always trouble,’ said Ella. ‘It seems to come naturally to this family.’
Mrs Cosway cast up her eyes. ‘I suppose it comes to all families. We are no different.’
Ella's answer to this was a burst of laughter, harsh and unamused.
In the event I did go with Ella to The Studio. I am sorry to have to say it but I went, according to the diary, not because I sympathized with her feelings or liked Felix Dunsford or to see his paintings (though I was curious about them) but because I wanted to watch her behaviour with him and his with her. It was a Saturday. She wanted to get there by two but I reminded her that the pub stayed open until half-past. Three seemed a wiser time.
Though dressed in her usual weekend clothes at lunchtime, baggy trousers, sandals and a blouse, the way I judged Felix would probably like to see a woman, she changed afterwards. Mrs Cosway had agreed, at Ella's behest, not mine, to take John for his walk, and as soon as she was out of the house and Winifred occupied in the kitchen baking cakes for the Mothers' Union coffee morning after Matins next day, Ella rushed upstairs. Coming down a quarter of an hour later in a dress never before seen by me, she asked if her appearance would do.
‘Is this frock too smart? Now tell me honestly.’
I rather liked the striped pink and white cotton, the tightly belted waist and low neckline. Ella had a very good figure, and with discreet make-up, not plastered on like Winifred's, she looked pretty and young. Still, all she needed was a big hat to go to a royal garden party. In the high-heeled sandals she had put on, walking at even a reasonable speed was impossible. At the rate we were going we would be lucky to get there by three-fifteen.
‘What did you think of Selwyn Lombard?’
I said, more or less truthfully, that I had not thought much about him. In my ignorance I added nothing about his reminding me of someone I knew because it seemed impossible that she would help me. ‘That was the first time I've seen him.’
‘It won't be the last,’ she said with a little laugh. ‘He and my mother are very good friends.’
Though this, uttered in a loaded voice, could only mean one thing, I put it down to jealousy or resentment on Ella's part. These people were so old, to me then so impossibly ancient, that to think of any sexual tie between them was grotesque. Now, although I am twenty years younger than they were then, love and sexual relations between the elderly no longer seem ridiculous. I have heard of too many cases of passion among septuagenarians to feel that. At twenty-four I dismissed Ella's confidence as hysterical rubbish.
She said no more. Her feet were hurting. She lit a cigarette and drew hard on it. At Felix Dunsford's gate she turned to me and whispered, ‘I feel quite nervous. Silly, isn't it?’
Against my own wishes, I said, ‘Would you rather I wasn't with you? I can always go and sit on a seat on the green.’
‘Oh, God, no, Kerstin. I'd never go in at all without you.’
It looked at first as if going in would be impossible. Ther
e was no doorbell. We used the knocker to no effect. I offered to go round the back and look for him in the garden.
‘We'll both go,’ said Ella.
The back garden was a narrow, weed-grown strip planted with plum and apple trees that looked as if they had never borne fruit and never would. In a deckchair under one of them sat Felix, smoking a cigar. An old table which had apparently been used in a workshop, it was so scored with saw cuts, held a full ashtray and a half-empty bottle of red wine.
He looked up, and in true Rhett Butler–Maxim de Winter style, gave no greeting and no sign of surprise at seeing us. ‘Some guy in the Rose gave me this,’ he said, waving the cigar. ‘Very kind, I thought. I don't know what you're going to sit on.’
‘Oh, we can sit on the ground,’ said Ella gaily, ‘can't we, Kerstin?’
‘I suppose I'd better give one of you my chair.’
He spoke in a wondering tone as if this example of good manners on a man's part had been learnt aeons ago at school or his mother's knee but was now almost lost in the mists of time. Slowly he got up. Ella sat in his chair, blushing, though not so unbecomingly as Winifred.
‘We thought you would show us your paintings,’ she said.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘later. Do you want any wine?’
We shook our heads. What made this woman and her sister call him charming? Sexy, yes, maybe. (Did anyone use the word then? Certainly not in the sense of being exciting in a non-sexual sense.) He was sexually attractive if that was all you wanted and all those Gothic hero or anti-hero qualities were present. But wasn't he also trivial and shallow? I was a prig, I suppose, I was young and I thought Ella should have known better. I thought she should have got up, told him not to bother, she was sorry to have disturbed him and we would go. Of course she said none of that.