The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

  ‘You're wrong there,’ Ella said with extreme bitterness. ‘He'd see that as a challenge. That would be something for him to break down and overcome. It would excite him – it has to be that. What else has she got, for God's sake?’

  Impossible to answer her. The more she said the more I began to see she might be right. ‘I've started biting my nails again,’ she said. ‘I'm going back to my room and I'm going to open another bottle and drink it all. It will stupefy me and I'll feel like hell tomorrow but I don't care!’

  It was very dark by then, lights on everywhere in the house but still not making it light enough. The air held an icy chill. A powerful scent of roasting meat came from Ida's kitchen. In the drawing room Mrs Cosway was waking up, concentrating, as she had to, on moving her cramped fingers and swinging her injured leg and foot down on to the carpet. I gave her the crutch and my arm and we made our slow way into the dining room, where Ida had switched on a tiny electric heater. It was windy and leaves fluttered down outside the window, one of them, soaked by intermittent rain, pasting itself flat against the glass like a forbidding hand.

  ‘Where are my other daughters?’

  ‘Winifred said to tell you she's gone out, Ella is upstairs.’ I made what is called an intelligent guess. ‘She doesn't want any dinner. Zorah…’

  ‘I know where Zorah is, thank you.’ Mrs Cosway picked up her soup spoon. ‘This is the time of day when I most miss Selwyn, though oddly enough, I seldom saw him in the evening of late. I am bereft without him.’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ said Ida.

  ‘Oh, Mother, nothing. What do you know?’

  The rest of the meal was eaten in silence, broken occasionally by Ida's small-talk. It had been very cold that day, was there a chance of a white Christmas, there were still a number of potential guests who had not yet replied to Winifred's wedding invitations. Mrs Cosway said nothing. Without waiting for dessert (which she called ‘pudding’ even if it was fruit salad), she held her arm up to me to be helped from the room. In the drawing room she sat in front of the television, unseeing and unhearing I am sure, for she can't have been interested in a pop concert.

  A log fell off the fire and rolled a little way across the glazed tiles. Ida said, ‘We need a fender,’ and came back into the room with a kind of metal wall, about fifteen centimetres high and shaped like an E without the central bar. This she put round the tiles. It was the wrong size and its colour clashed with the brown glaze but the Cosways never worried much about things like that.

  Ella never reappeared that evening and Winifred had not returned by ten-thirty, the time I thought of going upstairs to the diary. It was then, noticing the light on at the end of the passage where the library was, that I realized we had forgotten all about John. That is, I had, for Mrs Cosway and Ida no doubt thought I had put him to bed hours before. I found him in the library fast asleep over a book of square roots, the magnifying glass fallen out of his fingers on to the floor. I would have to wake him, get him into his bedroom and face Mrs Cosway's anger. That was something I hadn't cared about when first I came but now the thought of it cowed me a little. I spoke to John, trying in vain to wake him, and telling myself that I could always leave, I was not obliged to stay in this uncongenial house, I left him to sleep among his books.

  *

  The wind had become a gale by morning, ripping the dark red burnt-looking leaves off the creeper and whirling them in a wild dance before letting them drop to the ground. By this time they were sparse on the house and lying in heaps across the flowerbeds, each leaf much bigger than I had supposed when I first saw them, some of them as large as plates but shaped like those on a grape vine. Stripped off, they left behind a network of tendrils, thousand upon thousand of them, like the web of a giant spider, which veiled without hiding the brickwork. And this was not red or brown as I had supposed, but composed of those bricks called ‘white’, which are really a light yellowish-grey and come from over the border in Suffolk. Small decorative tiles in red and black above the windows and round the porch also emerged with the falling of the leaves, and the house which I had thought must be ugly without its covering appeared rather handsome.

  Ella felt too ill to eat breakfast. She had done as she threatened and had that second bottle. She drank black coffee standing up in the kitchen, moaning softly, before leaving in the car for school. Winifred was looking beautiful. Felix Dunsford seemed to have that effect on women, at least when he began with them. Later on he made them ill. But I was still disbelieving. She might look like that, smile like that and have such happy laughing eyes because she had had a good night's sleep or received a bold compliment from Eric.

  Ida I thought the quietest of the sisters and the least characterful. She was a housewife without being a wife, one of those country housewives of the time who were still living in a domestic setting of twenty years before, house-cleaning a religion, literally so, for she never went to church. She cooked, she swept and dusted, washed and shopped, with a martyred look sometimes but without verbal complaint. I never saw her read a book or even look at the newspaper. Television she would watch but in a dull, preoccupied way and since she could never sit still for even half an hour, she would be up and off to the kitchen every few minutes to make tea or stoke the boiler or turn on the oven. While sitting down she was usually sewing something or knitting. She was the first to get up in the morning and, as far as I knew, the last to go to bed at night. It wouldn't have surprised me to have found out that she got up several times in the night and came downstairs to check she hadn't left the gas on or a tap dripping.

  Angry I would have said she could never be, any more than ecstatic or grief-stricken, but she was angry when she came home from Dr Barker without the prescription she had been to ask for. Indignant perhaps describes her reaction better, for she neither became excited nor ranted. With a glance at John, who had come out of the library some time in the small hours, she helped Mrs Cosway out of earshot into the dining room, whispering to me to come too.

  ‘He wouldn't let me have it. I told him Dr Lombard had been prescribing Largactil as a matter of course and do you know what he said? “Well, he was wrong there,” he said.’

  ‘I have never heard a medical man criticize another medical man,’ said Mrs Cosway, who had overheard in spite of Ida's efforts. ‘How dared he find fault with Selwyn?’

  ‘I was – well, taken aback. I felt really cross but what could I do? Dr Barker wanted to know if John was violent or – well, noisy, and I had to say he wasn't.’ She didn't say if she had told him about the blow John struck her. Perhaps she remembered how she had provoked him.

  ‘He will be without his medicine.’

  Ida must have known differently, but saying so would have revealed that three weeks had passed without the Largactil being given. ‘He said he would write a letter to some psychiatrist – I don't remember the name – and I was to make an appointment for John to see this man and take the letter.’ So Dr Barker was prescribing just what John and Zorah wanted, I thought. ‘The psychiatrist was the right person to decide what treatment John should have,’ she said. ‘Dr Barker said he wouldn't be responsible for prescribing a powerful drug like chlorpro – oh, I can't pronounce it – to someone he hadn't even seen. I was very angry but what could I do?’

  ‘I suppose I shall have to go and see him,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘We can't be expected to live here with a mad person who's not restrained in any way.’

  This was her own son she was speaking of and I suppose my shock showed in my face.

  ‘You needn't look like that, Kerstin. You have no idea what life would be like with him, absolute hell. Oh, why did Selwyn have to die? I need him so.’

  ‘Don't, Mother,’ said Ida.

  ‘I shall go down to see him myself. Kerstin can drive me.’ She looked sourly at me. ‘I suppose you can drive?’

  ‘I can drive,’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes I think my whole world is falling apart. The only man I ever loved is dead. My mad son is
going to spend thousands of his father's money on unnecessary treatment while he's denied the drug which is really necessary by a jumped-up, officious little general practitioner. I wonder if things could be worse.’

  Unusually talkative, Ida said to me in the kitchen that she wouldn't mind things being worse so long as they were different. I looked at her in consternation. Complaining about her lot was rare with her, even rarer any sign on her part that she found her dreary routine at Lydstep burdensome.

  ‘Sometimes I think I'd do anything for a change,’ she said.

  19

  One of the first cartoons I ever did shows the Prime Minister of the day, a very unpopular politician, standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace while an anti-Government demonstration goes past, and saying to the Queen, ‘Why do they hate me so, ma‘am? I never did them any good.’

  This of course is an old joke – of Jewish origin, I think. It isn't really funny. It appeals because it ought to be a flagrant untruth but when people think about it and its implications, they know it's sound. John had never done his mother or his sisters any good, had done nothing to them, good or bad, but I think they all disliked him deeply. Felix did nothing but harm to Ella and Winifred and they both loved him.

  In a rare moment of openness, Ida told me her mother had purposely infected John with mumps when he was five years old. Two children in the Prothero family, June and her brother, had the disease and Mrs Cosway invited herself, Winifred and John to tea. She knew, having read somewhere or been told so by Dr Lombard, that a boy should have mumps early in his life because if he gets it when he is in his teens the effects of it may be to make him sterile. She meant well.

  He was very ill. I don't know why Ida told me about it unless it was to show that good intentions can be misplaced.

  ‘She had his welfare at heart,’ she said. ‘She meant to do the best for him. And she had to pay the price, of course, nursing him for week after week. He was a dreadful patient. I was fourteen and I remember it well. There weren't any long-term effects, though.’

  Weren't there? I don't know. As I mentioned before, medical opinion now is that autism results from some physical cause. Mrs Cosway had no idea of this. More to the point, Lombard had none either or refused to accept it. Whatever Ella said, I believe Mrs Cosway knew that John had been in her bedroom and knew what he had seen. The irony was that she secretly blamed this for his disability while exonerating herself for manufacturing the true cause. She was guilty where she had no need to be and guiltless where she had been dreadfully at fault. But I don't know and I never shall.

  Geodes were seldom seen at that time except as exhibits in geology museums, but only a few years later they had become almost requisite furnishings of shops selling alternative remedies and beauticians' salons offering distillations of flowers picked at certain phases of the moon. The Cosways' geode fascinated me when I first came to Lydstep Old Hall, partly by its size but much more by the lavishness, the brilliance and the colour of the amethysts encrusted inside its wide-open mouth. I suppose they were only amethyst quartz but they were of such a rich violet that they looked to me like the precious stone itself.

  Once I had seen the Roman vase the geode became for me what it had really always been, a lump of rock with a curious kind of purple lining. The mountain regions of Africa and Asia were rich in such things. But the Roman vase, or jug as I suppose it should be called as it had a lip and a handle, was not only a man-made thing of great beauty but almost infinitely precious, a priceless object almost 2,000 years old.

  The glass of which it was made was a cloudy green, the colour of pale jade, but stained with a darker shade, so that its surface was like a map of islands, large and small, on some unknown sea. Its base was the same deep green, as were its mouth and its handle, this being twisted like a rope. Precious as it was and made of a vulnerable material, it hadn't a fragile look but seemed solid – confident, if an inanimate object can be so. I valued it so much more, I thought, than its owners did (with the exception of John) because I marvelled at the miracle of its survival over those long centuries.

  I still have a fragment of it which I keep in a little jeweller's box in my bedroom. Its edges are razor-sharp. There is no doubt I shouldn't have it, for when I found it under a corner of the drawing-room carpet I should have sent it at once to join the hundred or so other pieces of green glass, though there was no question of the vase being repaired. It was far beyond that.

  The two sisters were barely on speaking terms that weekend. Ella had confronted Winifred with accusations that she was trying to take Felix away from her, to which Winifred responded by telling her she was making a fool of herself. After that they passed in the house without a word and studiously avoided speaking to each other at table, Winifred wearing a smug expression and Ella made ugly with resentment. On the Sunday evening Eric came up to Lydstep Old Hall, bringing Felix with him.

  John was there when they arrived. It was seven-thirty but he was there. No longer stupefied with drugs, he was beginning to do as he liked and do it after the fashion of high-functioning autistics, that is without regard for the feelings or wishes of others. I inwardly applauded him. When Eric came into the drawing room with Felix, John was sitting in his usual armchair, and being John, he neither got up nor extended his hand but looked at them and said to Felix, ‘Who are you?’

  It was the first time I had seen Felix taken aback. To be fair to him, he had never seen John before, very likely had no knowledge of him – both sisters were good at pretending he didn't exist – and was surprised to see him there. ‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘I'm Felix. Felix Dunsford.’

  ‘Dunsford,’ said John and repeated it. ‘Sounds like a place in the Midlands.’

  Mrs Cosway was still a long way from learning what had happened and what the future might hold. ‘Time for bed, John,’ she said.

  He ignored her. It was plain to the rest of us that he meant to stay up for dinner. Ida brought drinks but in this John had no interest. He moved ahead of everyone into the dining room and when the rest of us eventually went in there he was sitting at the table examining cutlery as if he had never seen any of it before.

  I could almost admire Felix's skill at being in Ella's company without giving the slightest sign that they were more to each other than acquaintances. And I don't mean he did this, as secret lovers famously do, by a studied indifference and off-handedness. He behaved exactly as he would have done if she was the future sister-in-law of his friend and they had met two or three times. He was pleasant to her, easy, he even gave a hint of perfectly proper flirtatiousness. I couldn't fault him but I could tell his expertise came from long practice. Or he might be rehearsing for the way he intended to behave in front of her husband after he had seduced the architect's wife. As for Ella, she kept up her resentfulness until Eric delivered his news, and after that she was watchful but relieved.

  ‘Felix has kindly agreed to paint Winifred's portrait.’ What was kind about it I don't know since he was presumably being paid. ‘I've told him there's to be none of his abstracts.’ Eric was in his twinkling mood, a mischievous smile on his lips. ‘He's agreed this will be a conventional portrait. We envisage something in the manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds, don't we, dear?’

  I felt almost sorry for Felix, who whatever its merit took his art seriously, being obliged to fit his style into this prescribed mould. Lounging at the table with his elbows on it in the way Mrs Cosway loathed, he nodded idly. I could guess what was going on in Ella's mind. Was this the reason for Winifred's evening visit of the week before? Was there no more to it than that? Or had this been dreamt up to deceive Eric and perhaps everyone else? She looked the picture of nervous wretchedness. No one had told her of Felix's imminent arrival – did anyone but Winifred know? – and she had taken no pains with her appearance. A woman who dressed up and made up for men and occasionally for other valued company, she had seen no reason to change out of her scruffy trousers and tired sweater for her sisters and Eric. Now she plainly
felt at a disadvantage and had sneaked out of the drawing room to pass a lipstick over her mouth and rush a comb through her hair without much obvious improvement.

  John said not a word throughout dinner and, when it was over, pushed back his chair and left the room. Any manners he might once seem to have had depended on the stupefying effect of the drug which made him too sleepy and dull ever to exert himself. His stillness (albeit with trembling hands) had passed for politeness and his inertia for acquiescence and obedience. These were conditions Mrs Cosway wanted back again, and wanted them to the extent of leaving the house next morning for the first time since she came home from hospital. I drove her down to the small purpose-built medical centre where Dr Barker had his surgery.

  The practice nurse had to be fetched to help me get Mrs Cosway out of the car. She winced and groaned and complained but finally made it into the waiting room. Three people were before us, a young woman with a sleeping baby, an old man with a cough and Jane Trintowel. This brought back to me Jane's story of her own mother-in-law meeting the much younger Julia in just this place thirty-five years ago. Of course she knew from me about the fractured ankle, so she showed less shock than she might have done over Mrs Cosway's changed appearance, her wasted face and by then skeletal body. The strong, resonant voice that came from those pinched lips may have surprised her.

  To her greeting of, ‘How are you, Julia? I hear you've had an accident,’ Mrs Cosway replied that Jane could presumably see she had had an accident, she didn't hobble about with a crutch for fun.

  ‘I can see you're still the same old Julia.’

  Jane turned to me, asking me when I would be free to come to White Lodge again. James was back in Bristol until the middle of December but her elder son came down every other weekend. While we were discussing dates and possibilities, the young mother went in to see Dr Barker, was in there only a few minutes, and the old man went in.