The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Money must be provided for John's upkeep,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, for all our upkeep really. Mother has to send our food bills to the trustees and bills for Ida's clothes – Ida has literally nothing and Winifred only what she gets paid for cooking that stuff for people – and plumbers' and electricians' bills. There aren't any extras, though. We never have holidays – how could we with John? I suppose Eric and Winifred will go to the seaside for a fortnight every year now. Of course Zorah's got her house in Italy and she goes all over the world as well.

  ‘John doesn't like being touched and he freaks out, goes crazy, if anyone tries to kiss him. That's a disaster. And he's had fits, real fits. About five years ago Mother started drugging him to keep him quiet. He used to shut himself in the downstairs lavatory for hours on end. It was worse when he shut himself in the library. He loves the library but he'd throw the books about. Mother got it into her head he'd set the house on fire, though he'd never showed the least inclination to that sort of thing. But that was when she and Dr Lombard started the drugs. She gets them from Dr Lombard, it's all above board, they're prescribed for schizophrenics.’

  ‘Those drugs have been continuous for five years?’

  ‘There have been times when she's – well, withdrawn them. I may as well tell you why. Zorah's very fond of John, she said it was wrong what Mother was doing. If John needed that kind of dosage he ought to be in a proper mental hospital under supervision.’

  ‘And Mrs Cosway did what Zorah told her? Just like that?’

  ‘My mother wouldn't cross Zorah. Zorah – gives her things. Well, money mostly. All the drink in the house comes from her and all the decent food. She pays for Mrs Lilly. The trust wouldn't, not with four women in the house already, they said. She's promised to buy me a new car – well, us a new car – and she will but in her own good time. I suppose she likes keeping us in suspense. Anyway, you can see why Mother wouldn't go against her. Not while she's here, that is.’

  ‘Does she pay me?’ I said, thinking that if she did I would be obliged to go. I could hardly stay and be party to this bribe and threat game.

  But Ella shook her head. She produced a mother-of-pearl inlaid box full of coloured ‘cocktail’ cigarettes. I fancied a black one, she, of course, pink.

  ‘John pays you. That is, the trust does. Zorah told Mother to lay off the drugs again and see what happened, try an experiment. It actually worked for a few days, he was quite lucid and ordinary, doing his maths again and reading the papers. He told my mother she ought to have help and that's when he got Ida to apply to the trust for – well, for you. I don't think Mother was keen but there wasn't much she could do. John got bad again soon after that, having tantrums and locking himself in the downstairs loo. You'll say Mother and Dr Lombard could have him committed and that would solve a lot of problems.’

  I interrupted her to say with perfect truth and indignation that I wouldn't say it.

  ‘Oh, well, most people would. Daddy was too cunning for that. As I said, my mother only gets the house and the money if John's committed to a mental hospital by an outside authority. That means two doctors and one of them has to be a psychiatrist.’

  The prospect of human villainy shocked me in those days. I'm sorry to say that it seldom does now. By the time you get to my age you have seen too much of it to feel anything but sad. But at that time I was very shockable and showed it with a stare and an exclamation.

  ‘My God, Ella!’

  She had a greater capacity for getting the wrong end of the stick than anyone I have ever known. ‘Yes, it's tough on Mother, isn't it? I try to remember that when she's being nasty. She's got a lot to put up with.’

  Long after this, my husband, who is a lawyer, though not a solicitor, told me that he doubted if this will would ever stand up in court in the event of anyone contesting it. More than that, he said he wondered what kind of a solicitor this Mr Salt was that he could draw up such a will. It seemed to me at the time only that the Cosways were subject to some very shady advisers, first Dr Lombard and then this Mr Salt, who had also managed to get himself made a trustee.

  Still, it wasn't for me to say any of this to Ella. It would have done no good and caused great offence. I asked instead about the library. And since she had offered to take me in there, I could confess that I had already been in with Zorah. When I did she made a face, poured us more wine.

  ‘John used to spend hours in there, moving the books and rearranging them. It got too much for Mother. He started taking books out and piling them on the floor so you had to step over them to move around and sometimes you couldn't because he'd built a wall of them. And he didn't like the Bible being there – you know, the one Longinus is holding – and he'd take it down and replace it with something he did like. Once it was Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica. He said he was a militant atheist.’

  ‘John?’ I said, thinking of the poor zombie downstairs.

  ‘Yes, John. Honestly. Look, Mother's asleep, Ida's in the kitchen and Winifred won't care. Why don't we go down to the library now?’

  Now the shock of it was past, I could look at the books the library contained. It was full of treasures, enough desirable books to last me the whole year. Victorian novels by such obscure (to me) authors as Sabine Baring Gould and Mrs Henry Wood filled a whole wall in that passage I had taken to enter the central square. There was The Origin of Species in what may have been a first edition, Paley's Evidences, Gosse's Omphale and Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. There were thousands I had never heard of before and have never come across since.

  Another wall, this one in a passage I was nearly sure I had not passed along before, was devoted to the works of philosophers, and one at a right angle to it, to mathematics. Though fairly quick at mental arithmetic, I am hopeless at maths but I know enough to be sure these were not the intellectual recourse of Mrs Cosway or her daughters. Trying not to look at the nightmare face of a stone Milton, I took down Euclid's Elements, brushed, then blew the thick dust off its cover, and brought it under one of the dim lights. John Cosway, his book, 1938 was written in a strong but strange hand on the flyleaf. As I turned the (to me) incomprehensible pages a folded sheet of yellowing paper fell out. In the same handwriting it was headed Euclidean Algorithm and underneath John had written, it was undoubtedly John, the technique used to find the largest natural number that divides (with zero remainder) two given natural numbers. Repeated use of the division algorithm finds this number, called the greatest common divisor.

  Now I don't know if there is anything particularly intellectually challenging about this, only that it was so to me, but evidently not to John, who had written underneath a series of numbers and finally one which he called this greatest common divisor. If this paper was written at the same date as his name was put in the book he was nine years old at the time.

  I could only think that there must be a mistake somewhere but speculation when one is in possession of so few facts is useless. My companion this time wore the look of a woman gleeful at bringing a delightful surprise to someone else, quite different from Zorah's supercilious expression.

  ‘It's amazing,’ I said, pleasing her.

  Dante, I seemed to remember, was conducted by Virgil round the infernal regions and I wondered if his guide enjoyed himself as much as Ella seemed to enjoy taking me round the labyrinth library.

  ‘If you come on your own,’ she said, ‘you'll have to bring a ball of wool and unravel it behind you like what's-his-name in that place in Crete.’

  Did they all say that when they brought in a visitor? Still, it must happen seldom. She had told me so much, yet so little. So few mysteries had been solved. There seemed to me then to be a life going on in this family and this house underneath the existence they presented to the world and me, a secret force like that which Eric had described that morning as the workings by which God subdues all things to himself.

  We made our way back to the double doors, along the narrow and tortuous passages where
books themselves were the bricks and mortar forming the walls. That dust itself has a smell was a discovery I made that afternoon. I learnt too how claustrophobia may suddenly come into being in someone who has never known it before. Without being exactly difficult, breathing became something of an effort and panic fluttered under the mind's surface. Coming out of there and into the hot sunshine of the garden was more than relief, it was like stepping into another world.

  Ella had gone to put the key back behind the amphitheatre engraving. I was alone, breathing deeply, relishing the light and the warmth, the grass and the green branches swaying in the breeze.

  12

  Ella was out a long time. She had left to meet Felix Dunsford at six. I refused to take part in the discussion which started at ten as to why she was still out. One after the other, at five-minute intervals, the Cosways remarked that four hours was a very long time to spend in the White Rose, Mrs Cosway adding that she couldn't understand why anyone would go in there at all. I alone, it seemed, supposed that a good part of it had been spent elsewhere, most likely at The Studio.

  We were watching television when Ella came in. Or the television was on and Mrs Cosway was watching it. Without looking round, she said sourly, ‘You have missed the only good programme we've had this year.’

  ‘No doubt you had something better to amuse you,’ said Winifred.

  ‘I had something different.’

  Ella looked pensive. She was unusually silent, though she kept glancing at me and I expected to be asked to come to her room with her. Since her campaign of making me her friend had begun, she also increasingly made me her confidante. The revelations about the will had been followed a day or two later by a detailed account of her affair with the married man and there had been a drive around the villages, undertaken, I think, to point out to me the ‘close’ of modern houses where he lived. But that evening the invitation I expected never came and it was the end of the week and August before she asked me in a mysterious voice, loaded with suspense, to come and sit in the garden with her. Apparently she had run out of rosé for she brought out a tray with coffee in a pot and two cups and set it on the table under the mulberry tree. The gardener was mowing one of the distant grassy areas, an endless task in summer when the lawns are extensive and one has only a small hand-mower.

  ‘I know it's your favourite,’ Ella said. ‘I got it specially,’ and it was true I had expressed a preference for coffee over tea. ‘We won't be disturbed down here.’

  The garden was tended twice a week by a morose and silent man called Cox, a relative of Mrs Waltham the postmistress, and so it had a far less neglected look than the house. His services of course were paid for out of the trust, as were mine. With dreadfully inadequate tools, he kept the grass mown and the hedges trimmed and if there were no flowers to be seen, perhaps the colour they would have brought was not to be associated with Lydstep Old Hall. It was a close, humid day without much sun, the sky overcast but not really threatening rain or any change in the dull weather. Coffee in the garden was a good idea but not the place Ella had chosen. In August mulberry trees drop their moist dark purple fruits, which, when they flop on to a hard surface, look like coagulating blood. Even on grass the stains are unpleasant and there were plenty of these round the table. My own jeans and shirt were black and liable to come to no harm but Ella wore her stripy frock and I dreaded the effect on her of a mulberry splitting open on her skirt.

  Balkan Sobranie cigarettes were produced and our cups filled. ‘We ought to keep silkworms,’ said Ella with one of her giggles. ‘All these mulberry leaves just go to waste. I wonder if there's any profit in it. We could do with an increase to our income.’ I had no opinion to offer on silk production, so only smiled. ‘I've got something to tell you,’ she went on unsurprisingly. ‘I wonder what you'll think of me. Of course, being Scandinavian, you won't be shocked.’

  I don't much like being lumped together with Danes, Norwegians and Finns as if we were all a single tribe, looking and feeling the same, holding to the same principles or lack of them, spending our time reading Hans Andersen and going to plays by Ibsen, all gloomy and suicidal alcoholics and all of us leading sexual lives like characters in I Am Curious – Yellow, a daring film of the time. But I said nothing.

  ‘Well, here goes then.’ She looked up at me, then away. ‘I've slept with him. We didn't waste much time, did we? Oh, not that first time, not that evening I came home and Mother said I'd missed some TV programme, not then. Two days later, actually. That first evening – well, we didn't go all the way. You'll say I shouldn't be telling you this.’ I interrupted to assure her I wouldn't. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘It's funny but it's easier telling you things like this because English isn't your mother tongue, is it? So I don't feel words have the – well, the resonance they'd have with Zorah, say – God forbid! – or Winifred. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, hoping very much that her assessment of my grasp of the English language would not lead her into clinical detail or a run-down on what he said to her and she said to him.

  ‘Because we are friends, aren't we, Kerstin? We can tell each other things we wouldn't tell other people?’

  I was strangely moved by this. She was thirty-seven but she talked like a fifteen-year-old and an insecure one at that. ‘You can be sure I won't tell anyone, Ella,’ I said. And I meant it and stuck to it – while this was possible. Neither of us could have foreseen what was to come when the diary became an important piece of evidence and I would have to speak and tell everything I knew. But not for the life of me could I think of anything more to say to her or ask her. I could smile, I could look attentive and drink my coffee – and a great deal better than Ida's it was.

  ‘He's a very good lover,’ she said, lighting a cigarette.

  That comment has always embarrassed me, as do all such words as ‘performance’ and ‘technique’ in this connection. They seem to reduce lovemaking to a stage production or display and to herald that clinical detail I feared. Perhaps something in my expression warned her of my distaste, for she quickly changed tack, saying, ‘He wants me to spend the whole weekend with him. I'd have to lie to Mother and Ida if not to Winifred, I couldn't tell them what I was really doing. And Felix feels the same. He wants us to be discreet. For the sake of my reputation, I suppose. To protect me.’

  Or to protect himself, I thought. Not for the sake of his reputation but to leave his freedom unthreatened.

  ‘Then he said something funny. He said, “I don't want you to go out with me, I want you to stay in with me.” Wasn't that funny? I could sneak out after dark on Sunday night and no one would see, he said.’

  ‘You could, I suppose.’

  It wasn't for me to ask her if she really wanted to be the female actor in this back-to-the-village-you scenario or what she thought was the point in the late 1960s of a single man keeping a by then quite permissible relationship with a single woman a dark secret. It looked as if this would develop into the kind of affair a man like Felix Dunsford has with women who have no money. Once he has begun the process of enslavement, he can stop even taking them to the pub. If they want a drink they can bring it with them. He won't mind providing a cup of tea. A man of this sort will go on for months or even years like that. With rich women it is quite different. They have luxurious homes for him to go to with ample drink laid on, they can pay for expensive hotels, weekends away, he won't even have to give them tea or waste heat and electricity on them. But Ella was one of the poor women – in more senses than one.

  ‘Zorah is cruising round the Aegean on someone's yacht,’ she told me, leaving the subject of Felix. ‘A man with a title, I can't remember his name. Mother is afraid she'll marry one of them and then she'll – well, stop the benefits.’

  She might also stop squirrelling away Mrs Cosway's property, I thought but didn't say. Lighting yet another cigarette, Ella asked me what I thought of Dr Lombard. I said I didn't know, I hadn't thought much about him.

  ‘H
e's coming over this evening. You can study him. I'd love to know what you really think. It's all very well Mother worrying about Zorah remarrying. Winifred and I thought for years she'd marry Selwyn Lombard.’

  ‘Your mother, do you mean?’

  ‘Of course. Did you think I meant Zorah? The trouble is, or the good thing is, it turns out he's got a wife alive somewhere or did have a couple of years ago.’

  We went in when Dr Lombard arrived and I was sent for. I don't know why I was, as he went into John's bedroom and once I had opened the door for him and closed it behind him, I was banished and told to help Ida with the dinner.

  ‘He's a good doctor,’ Ida said. Her attitude to him was very different from Ella's. ‘Prescribing that Largactil for John has made a great difference to all our lives. Before that you could say John ruled this household, we were all slaves to his whims and moods.’

  This aroused in me an enormous distaste and disapproval, though I should have found it hard to say why. Perhaps it was better for John to be drugged into a kind of somnolent apathy, his eyes glazed, his feet stumbling and his hands shaking, than to be subject to fits and locking himself up in bathrooms. I said nothing, only listened while she continued to sing Lombard's praises and her mother's reliance on him until she had gone a long way towards convincing me that he and Mrs Cosway were lovers of long standing.