The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

He came into the drawing room after a while, told me Mrs Cosway was ‘seeing to’ John and, calling me ‘young lady’, said she would not require my services that evening.

  ‘Give Dr Lombard a drink, would you, Kerstin?’ said Ida.

  He chose that kind of sweet pale sherry which to me is the worst drink in the world, and sat sipping it, nursing the glass in his hands. I was at a loss with him, finding nothing to say and waiting in vain for him to speak. After a few minutes, he put the glass down and picked up the newspaper. Something he read made him laugh quite raucously. To my relief, Winifred came in and, almost immediately after her, Mrs Cosway. He struggled to his feet, took Winifred's left hand in his, smiling at her engagement ring, but her mother got a warm kiss on her cheek close to her mouth.

  ‘You left your doctor's bag in John's room, Selwyn. Don't forget and go home without it.’

  Someone was using the phone in the dining room. I passed the door, which was slightly ajar, and heard Ella's voice say, ‘Will you take a message to him? Say it's Tamara.’

  I had never heard the name before. It sounded Russian to me or from Central Asia. I was to hear it several times in the future. As I went on towards the kitchen, I looked back and saw Ella come out of the dining room.

  ‘I suppose you heard that.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘He hasn't got a phone and anyway I wouldn't want him to phone me here. I mean, anyone might answer the phone. So we have an arrangement. I phone the pub and ask them to give him a message. He says to say it's Tamara, then he'll know.’

  Come to that, he would have known if she had said it was Ella.

  ‘I'll have dinner and then I'll go down there. That will give him a chance to have a few drinks and see his friends. I won't go into the pub. He'll go home a few minutes before I'm due. I'll think of something to tell Mother.’

  I said, because I could stand no more, but I said it gently, ‘You're not committing adultery, Ella.’

  She laughed uneasily and ran upstairs, coming down for dinner dressed up in pink flowered cotton and high-heeled shoes. Picking at her food, clockwatching, she was in a fever of impatience. I tried to put myself in Felix Dunsford's shoes, asking myself how I would feel as a man confronted by this combination of frenetic eagerness with a passionate desire to please. Ella would be a heavy burden. The moment Ida took away our dessert plates, she was on her feet, eyes on her watch.

  ‘Where are you going to, my pretty maid?’ said Dr Lombard.

  ‘Oh, just down to the village to see my friend Bridget.’

  ‘Having a party, is she?’

  This was Winifred, speaking in a very dry voice. Ella gave her a venomous look but said nothing. Two minutes later we heard the car start up and move off down the drive.

  ‘What it is to be young,’ said Dr Lombard and told the quite famous story about Augustine's astonishment when he came upon St Ambrose reading to himself silently instead of aloud, something apparently very rare at the time. He got up, said he was an old man and needed his ‘beauty sleep’.

  ‘Now don't forget your bag,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘I told you it was in John's room.’ Having eaten and drunk very well, he was obviously unwilling to move far. ‘Kerstin will fetch it for you.’

  I went, not too pleased at being sent on errands, but attempting a pleasant smile. After all, I was their employee. John was fast asleep, deeply and heavily asleep, spread-eagled on his back. I pulled the eiderdown over him, though he was quite adequately covered. What made me glance at the photograph? I took it to the window, where just enough light remained for me to see it. I had seen it before. I saw it, when I bothered to look, every time I assisted at John's going to bed. This time I looked at it with new eyes. There in the group was Zorah some years before she had had her nose reshaped. When she was a teenager it was a large hooked nose, a replica of the one which had been facing me across the dinner table.

  There could be no doubt. I picked up the doctor's bag which belonged to her father and took it downstairs to give to him.

  13

  It is supposed to be a great honour to be asked but I was rather taken aback when Winifred invited me to be her bridesmaid. I imagined Mark's laughter if I told him I had accepted, I imagined the weary business of fittings for dresses and, worse, the tripping up the aisle, and I said no, trying to be as nice and grateful-sounding about it as I knew how. Her asking me seemed to point to a lack of friends. Had June Prothero been asked and had she refused? Though I tried not to show disapproval or even criticism, I found it strange that a woman of forty would want bridesmaids and I wondered if this wedding was to be a frothy and girlish affair of long white gown, bridal veil, bouquets and beribboned cars.

  It appeared that it was. The dress was to be made by a woman in the village who did such things and the cake ordered from a shop in Sudbury which specialized in weddings. I wondered if it was to be a cake like the one in Dr Lombard's anecdote, tier upon tier supported by white pillars. Winifred, though busily involved, showed as far as I could see no enthusiasm for these preparations. To look at her and listen to her, one would have thought she was preparing for the marriage of someone else and someone to whom she owed a duty but didn't much like. That may have been how she felt about herself. There were changes in her too, in her appearance for one thing. Thinner and paler, she looked better for the slight hollowing of her cheeks and the fining down of waist and hips. I wondered if it was my imagination that her hair looked cleaner – her nails certainly were – as if washing it took place every other day instead of once a week. The make-up too had been modified. She both looked more like Ella and much prettier. Often, catching sight of her when she was unaware of it, I saw how near she had come to being a beautiful woman.

  Eric too had noticed it. From being surely the dullest wooer in all Essex, he was becoming gallant, he was paying compliments, and the lifeless kiss planted on Winifred's cheek had livened and moved to her mouth. No doubt it was pleasanter when the lipstick was pale and less sticky. Another change was in her attitude to what she had called her ‘profession’. She appeared to have retired, perhaps at Eric's request or perhaps it was by her own decision. By the middle of September we heard no more of her needing to earn her living.

  About this time the invitations arrived from the Colchester printing firm and Ida was delegated to fill them in, she having in everyone's opinion the most legible handwriting. Winifred had drawn up the list without, as far as I know, consulting anyone else.

  ‘I'd awfully appreciate it if you'd ask Felix,’ Ella said in a far humbler tone than she usually used to Winifred. ‘Thanks to the painter's guarded behaviour and wish for secrecy, their affair, or ‘relationship’ as she called it, was still largely unknown. ‘I'd really love him to be there.’

  To my surprise Winifred said, ‘I've already asked him.’

  ‘You have?’

  Winifred responded by showing her the list. One of those fine Cosway blushes spread across Ella's face – from pleasure or resentment? While she was reading the list Zorah came in, took it from her and scrutinized it as if it were a legal document, a contract perhaps or a deed. She had been back from the Aegean cruise for about a week and during that time the promised car, a yellow Hillman, had been bought and the geode restored to her own rooms. This happened on the evening of her return. She must have guessed who had entered her domain for she said to Ella within an hour of her arrival, ‘I congratulate you on your skill as a burglar.’

  Thinking of the car, no doubt, which had already been spoken of though had not yet materialized, Ella said she was sorry but it was unfair on Mother taking her things.

  ‘Unfair!’ Her word made Zorah laugh. ‘Oh, really, what an absurd word to use of anything I could do to this family after what has been done to me.’

  She said no more but next day a man arrived from some company which fitted locks opened by keys with registered numbers that could never be copied except on the owner's application. He was upstairs a long time, operati
ng on Zorah's front door, and it was dark by the time he left.

  The guest list in her hand, Zorah said, ‘One of you has been a fast worker in getting to know Dunsford. I see his name up among all the relatives and someone I take to be Eric's sister.’

  “‘Fast worker” is a very vulgar expression, Zorah,’ said Winifred. ‘Mr Dunsford has become quite a friend of Eric's.’

  ‘Oh, Eric's. I see. That explains it.’

  ‘Felix is a very good friend of mine too.’ Ella said it bravely, giving Zorah a defiant look. By this time she would have very much liked the affair to be known and the two of them regarded as a couple.

  It is perhaps strange that I should talk about bravery in connection with a woman of thirty-seven talking to her sister of thirty-five. But courage was needed by those sisters in standing up to Zorah and I could see why. Money and power and what I understood was her burning desire for revenge had created her personality and made her frightening. Besides, though the car had come, other benefits derived from Zorah that everyone (except John) would be afraid to lose: money itself, food and drink and generous gifts, as I was soon to realize.

  You may as well tell me,’ she said, ‘what you want for a wedding present.’

  At that time gift lists were already being deposited with department stores but unfashionable people living in the country hadn't noticed this new development. Winifred hesitated, and said at last, ‘I was saying to Kerstin the other day that Eric's fridge is about the size of a biscuit tin.’

  ‘So you want a fridge, do you? I've always thought it peculiar that the British call a refrigerator a fridge and the Americans, who love abbreviations and acronyms and all that, call it a refrigerator.’

  ‘That's the sort of thing I'd expect Selwyn Lombard to say.’

  Ella laughed. I could tell she hadn't thought about what she was saying. The words had just rattled out of her.

  The change in Zorah was frightening. She became very still and pale, as if she had suddenly been struck by a chill, and yet there was something snake-like about her. She had grown fangs and would strike. I understood then that she knew Dr Lombard was her father and hated the knowledge, that she had possibly changed the shape of her nose not only for enhancement of her looks but to make the resemblance less marked. She said to Ella in a voice as clear and hard as glass, ‘I hope you'll take care of that car and not batter it about like you did the last one. It's simply a matter of learning to drive properly, you know.’ Her manner was that of an unkind aunt to a small niece. Without comment, she watched Ella get up and leave the room. ‘So I am to buy you a fridge, am I, Winifred?’

  ‘That would be very generous,’ Winifred said.

  ‘It would. Still, I don't have a sister married every day. In fact, I hardly ever have one married at all. You had better go and choose a fridge tomorrow but not more than three hundred pounds, mind.’

  As it happened, I went with Winifred into Colchester to choose it. I was amused by her choice, not so much because it was the largest and best-equipped refrigerator in the store but on account of her rejection of the one she preferred. The big one was more expensive, costing at £299 19s. 11d. just a penny less than the top price specified by Zorah.

  ‘Actually, that's the one I really like best,’ she said, pointing to the refrigerator she had decided not to have. ‘I think it might fit into the Rectory kitchen better and I prefer the door fittings. But Zorah said up to three hundred so I may as well have the big one.’

  That made me wonder if Zorah had also set a ceiling on the car price and Ella had been careful to come only just within it. The youngest of Mrs Cosway's daughters might have her power and take her pleasure in the family's obsequiousness but they had learnt how to take the maximum advantage of her.

  On the way back we stopped outside the Rectory gates and Winifred asked me if I would like to see inside it. What interested me was finding out if she had a key to the house, but whether she did I never discovered for Eric saw us from the window and opened the front door. We walked into a large, square and shabby hallway and on into a larger, oblong and shabbier living room. Rectories and vicarages all over England were like that then, though I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know that incumbents of parishes were expected to live in vast ‘gentlemen's' houses, once occupied by clergymen with private incomes or with horribly disproportionate stipends, some of them as little as fifty pounds a year, some of a thousand. And this in the days when you paid your servants a few shillings a year to keep these mansions clean. I thought all that had died away with the passing of the nineteenth century.

  Now, of course, a vicar looks after three or four parishes and lives in a little purpose-built vicarage (of the same design all over the country, though executed in the local building materials). When Eric occupied Windrose Rectory, a house of ten bedrooms and four ‘reception’ rooms, he had a cleaning woman from the village come in each morning, do some desultory sweeping up and prepare a sketchy evening meal for him.

  Men in the sixties were unable to do much about the house and never considered learning how to clean and cook. I doubt if Eric could have wielded a vacuum cleaner or boiled an egg. Perhaps he was capable of boiling a kettle but that was something else I never found out for Winifred said to sit down and she would make tea. Lydstep Old Hall, dreary as its carpets and furnishings were, had an interior out of House and Garden compared with what was to be Winifred's home. The living room, where Eric and I sat on a long sofa of scuffed brown leather in front of a grim steel-grey metal and marble fireplace, was a large, echoing chamber, its walls painted many years before a dirty cream. A chandelier of wooden branches and parchment lampshades had a branch broken and a lampshade missing. The velvet curtains were dust-coloured and the carpet olive green with a just discernible pattern of dark brown. Outside the window I could see a wilderness of weeds, tall and tired at that time of the year, all of them overgrown by rampant brambles. I was sorry to find that my face had shown how I felt.

  ‘It needs a woman's touch,’ Eric said sadly.

  ‘It will get one.’ If he thought anyone from Lydstep, but particularly Winifred, capable of transforming this place he must have been very unobservant.

  ‘Yes.’ He added naively but engagingly, ‘I'm looking forward to being married.’

  His prospective bride called me to come and look at the kitchen. It too was big and gloomy, though apparently refitted not long before, perhaps when Eric's incumbency began. The refrigerator was larger than a biscuit tin but not very much.

  ‘I must tell Eric about the new one,’ she said.

  This she proceeded to do over tea, frankly telling him that she had chosen the most expensive refrigerator because Zorah had ‘plenty of money and could have spent twice as much without noticing’.

  Eric said something feeble about its being very kind of Zorah. ‘But that's your province, my dear.’ His eyes began twinkling, a feat he achieved by looking up and down under lowered lids. ‘I shall not have occasion to pay many visits to the refrigerator, I'm sure.’

  I expected Winifred to rise to this, as she normally would have. But she said nothing for a moment or two while Eric talked to me about the kind of people who would have lived in this house a hundred years before, a household consisting of parents, four or five children, a nanny, perhaps a governess, two housemaids, a parlourmaid and a cook.

  ‘The living was a good one and in proportion the parson was getting five times what I get.’

  Winifred looked up and asked him abruptly if he ever heard confessions. It was news to me that any clergyman in what I thought of as a Protestant Church – Eric always corrected me, saying Anglicans were Catholics but not Roman Catholics – was allowed to hear confessions or, come to that, would wish to.

  He looked surprised but said, ‘I have to if I'm asked.’

  ‘But have you ever?’

  ‘Once or twice,’ he said, ‘when I was in my last parish. It's usually very devout ladies who want it. I asked them to come round to the v
icarage and I heard their confessions in my study.’

  ‘I don't suppose they were very sensational.’

  ‘Now, my dear, I couldn't possibly discuss the content.’

  ‘I didn't ask you to.’

  He saw that he had offended her, not a difficult thing to do, and became placatory, smiling and putting out his hand to cover hers. ‘There haven't been any since I came here.’ I saw that he thought she was jealous, resentful of the very devout ladies who contrived to be alone with him. ‘I don't suppose there will be. I believe Tom Trewith at Bishop's Colne hears them on quite a regular basis.’

  ‘Really?’

  Whether Winifred ever went to open her heart to the Reverend Mr Trewith I never heard. Presumably, she told no one if she did. But I wondered, as I wrote in the diary that evening, what she had to confess. A kiss from some predecessor of Eric's? Some teenage fumbling? Since she was a ‘very devout lady’ herself, possibly she would consider this worth confessing to someone who could absolve her.

  When I had finished writing I drew a little picture of Eric on the facing page. It isn't a bad likeness and I was quite pleased with it. Eric is sitting in his study and a woman who looks a lot like Lily, the barmaid at the White Rose, kneels at his feet with a balloon coming out of her mouth that says, ‘Bless me, Mr Dawson, for I have sinned.’

  It was the first cartoon I ever did.

  14

  There must have been many people then, though very few now, who went to church as I did; not because I was in the slightest degree devout, not because I could even have called myself an agnostic, but solely because I enjoyed it. I liked the words, the prose of the Book of Common Prayer, the music, the hymns (even though, or perhaps because, some of the verses were ridiculous), the lessons and the beautiful place in which we sat. I even rather missed it on those Sundays I spent in London, something I never dared tell Mark.

  So it was no hardship to me to walk down to All Saints with Winifred and Ella, always asking Mrs Cosway's permission and always being told that she supposed so. A newcomer to the village was in church one Sunday morning in late September. Since she was young, female and very good-looking, she was unlikely to be one of those taken up by Eric and made his friend. Felix homed in on her in a way which terrified Ella. She clutched my hand.