by Barbara Vine
‘You take my turn, Julia,’ Jane said when we had fixed on a Friday I would take as my day off. ‘It can't be comfortable for you having to sit about on a hard chair.’
‘It's not.’ Mrs Cosway didn't thank her. ‘But my whole life is uncomfortable. I am used to it.’
A girl who had come in and sat down next to Jane giggled, perhaps from embarrassment. The practice nurse came back to tell Mrs Cosway Dr Barker was ready for her and the two of us took her to his surgery door. There I finally decided not to go in with her. She would expect me to support her, even say that John was impossible without the Largactil, and that I couldn't do.
‘I'll be in the waiting room when you're ready,’ I said.
‘You've wasted no time making friends, have you? I suppose you can't wait to get back to gossiping with the Trintowel woman.’
It was the nurse's turn to be embarrassed. She cast up her eyes. I went back to Jane.
‘She looks awful.’
‘I know, but she's very strong. She's not ill.’
‘And John?’
‘Better. He still shuffles a bit and his hands shake but I think he's a lot better without the drug Dr Lombard gave him.’
And he was destined to continue without it, for Dr Barker refused a prescription to Mrs Cosway just as he had to Ida, saying as adamantly that John should be seen by a psychiatrist for his needs to be evaluated. He would gladly find a suitable one at a Colchester hospital, say, write this man a letter and make an appointment for a consultation.
‘I told him it was all unnecessary,’ Mrs Cosway said in the car on the way home. ‘One ought to know one's own son. He's schizophrenic and he needs tranquillizing or he'll be impossible to manage. It was your duty to come in there with me and support me but no, you preferred chatting with your friend.’
‘It would have made no difference,’ I said, and again thinking that I could always leave, I didn't have to stay there, I screwed up my courage. ‘Why not let John see the Colchester man? It probably wouldn't cost anything.’ While keeping my eyes on the road, I could sense her staring at me. I made myself go on. ‘I don't suppose you're interested in what I think, but in my opinion John's all right as he is. He's better than he was. Why can't he be allowed to go on living the way he is now?’
‘You're right in one respect. I don't care what you think. I suppose you've been discussing me and my private affairs with Jane Trintowel.’
‘I can tell you exactly what we said if you like.’
‘Thank you but I don't wish to know.’
Dr Barker's second refusal to supply the longed-for prescription seemed to affect Ida and Winifred as badly as their mother, Ella to a lesser extent. She was too preoccupied by a gnawing anxiety over Felix to show concern for John, saying only that she wondered how they were going to cope with his hiding in cupboards and screaming on the floor. It was a week since Felix had been in touch with her for she said she couldn't count the occasion of his coming to dinner. There was no phone at The Studio, not particularly unusual in country places at that period, and at the start of their affair he had always phoned her (ignoring the proscribed times) from the call box outside the post office. He had told her that if she needed him she should phone the pub and leave a message as from ‘Tamara’.
‘I don't know why, Kerstin. You know what he's like. I sometimes think he tells any woman he's going about with to say she's Tamara.’ I struggled not to smile. She gave the Cosway laugh. ‘It's funny, isn't it? Mike the landlord must think he's such a faithful lover, getting all these calls from this one woman.’
‘You don't know that he's not.’
‘A faithful lover? I'm not a fool. Oh, what shall I do? I expect Winifred is with him now, sitting for him. And when that's done she'll be lying down for him. You'll see. I phoned the pub yesterday and said to tell him Tamara phoned. Come to that, I phoned the day before yesterday. I lie awake at night listening for the phone. I know he's capable of phoning any time up till midnight. When he came up here for dinner he shook hands with me. He'd think that funny. He has broken my heart.’
At this point the phone rang. She ran off to the dining room to answer it, came back to say it was June Prothero for Winifred. ‘She said she'd try the Rectory. I had to laugh.’
But Ella settled down to her regular evening task, the making of the bridesmaids' dresses. The real dislike and jealousy she now felt for Winifred did nothing to hinder her willingness to do this and I suppose the pleasure she got came from knowing she would get a free dress out of it. The material had been expensive, a watered silk in a bright shade of orchid pink, a bad colour and too thin for a January wedding. Velvet in a neutral shade would have been better but Ella anticipated getting a garment out of the pink silk she could afterwards wear to summer garden parties. She even put aside the pieces left after the cutting out so that she could make a doll's dress out of them.
‘I shall redo the blonde one from Poland,’ she said. ‘I've never liked that suit I've put her into. She can have a new pink frock. I don't know what I'd do without my hobbies, Kerstin, they're what keep me sane.’
She had set up her sewing machine in the drawing room. Mrs Cosway was displeased and Ida irritable at what she called ‘the mess’. She was always picking up pins and bits of thread from the floor. The machine was old and noisy, making it hard for her mother to hear the television. John ignored it. He went to bed when he liked these days and had again spent a whole night in the library. The walks too were no longer regular events. From insisting on them, he changed his mind and decided to go only occasionally. When Mrs Cosway told him he needed exercise and fresh air and told me to get ready and put my coat on, he went into the lavatory and locked himself in.
Ella was at school and it was Winifred who tried to get hold of the key by poking it through the lock from the outside with a knitting needle. We heard it fall to the floor. She had a kitchen implement which I believe is called a fish slice at the ready to insert under the door and draw the key out but John got there first, picking it up just as Winifred's scoop went in. He sat in there for five hours, occasionally running one of the taps above the basin. Mrs Cosway was sure he meant to flood the place but nothing happened as he always turned off the tap after a few seconds.
Walking as an activity essential for his health was forgotten after that episode but John seemed to bear a grudge against Winifred, I assume because she was the one who did most to get that door unlocked. If he was incapable of affection, he appeared to be able to dislike. But I don't know. Maybe what he felt was simple fear. He shrank away if she came near him. Everyone knew that it was unwise and perhaps cruel to touch John but Winifred had only to pass within a metre of his chair for him to pull himself away and hunch his shoulders.
This new behaviour, which Mrs Cosway called ‘defiance’, she constantly complained about as the result of the refusal of Dr Barker to prescribe Largactil or, as she put it, ‘John not being allowed to have his drug’. A further addition to her troubles came when Zorah turned up with news of the appointment she had made for John to be seen by an eminent consultant in Harley Street. She would take him. Before that she would drive him into Sudbury for an eye test.
I saw her glance at the harp and nod slightly but if she noticed the removal of the geode from her rooms she said nothing about it and did nothing. The trust had replied to her letter that any consultancy fees would be paid. John's appointment was for a date soon after Christmas and a week before Winifred's wedding.
Christmas is a feast of great importance to Swedes, but I hadn't yet decided whether to go home for it. Very indecisively, I kept saying to myself that I could always go home permanently, I could leave, go home for Christmas and not come back. Why was I staying when no one appeared to need me? Mrs Cosway was due to have the plaster cast removed from her leg in the coming week and would soon be back to normal. Her hand was completely healed and she had once more taken up her tapestry work. I provided a certain companionship to Ella which I thought she could do very
well without and as for helping Ida, she often seemed to prefer doing the tasks I did herself. I had spent a pleasant Friday evening with the Trintowels, met Charles, and been invited for Christmas. Perhaps it was the immediate attraction of Charles which made me accept or just the conviction that I should certainly leave by February or March and go home then.
If John had become more lively and alert (defiant), Winifred went about in a dream, quiet, preoccupied and sometimes gazing at objects with that compulsive stare which is unseeing because the mind is occupied elsewhere. She showed no interest in wedding acceptances and refusals –it was I who noticed Isabel's writing on one acceptance card –and was indifferent to the bridesmaids' dresses Ella was making, while the hymns to be sung at the ceremony, once so important to her, had lost their significance. What apparently absorbed her were the sittings for her portrait, though she never spoke of them beyond saying as she left the house that she would be going to The Studio.
In the early evening, now John needed no attention from me and wanted none from his mother, I helped Ida and was in and out of the dining room, switching on the electric heater well in advance of dinner, drawing the curtains on the damp starless night and laying the table. Believing no one was in there, I walked in one evening with a handful of silver to see Winifred on the phone and hear the end of her sentence.
‘…Tamara phoned.’
Remembering what Ella had told me, it was easy to reconstruct the earlier part. ‘Would you take a message and tell Felix Tamara phoned?’
She put down the receiver with a sharp bang. I took no notice of her, said nothing, but I knew then. The phone call told me Ella had been right. There was no possibility of Winifred's using that code name for any reason except that she was having an affair with Felix. She hadn't been phoning him to say that she could or could not sit for him next morning but to make, or most reluctantly unmake, an assignation. Where did that leave Eric? Or their wedding? Was this a last – and first too – fling? It went deeper than that, I thought. With her it would be either nothing or a whole-hearted passion.
While we were finishing dinner the phone rang. Ella was nearest to it and she twisted round quickly to grab the receiver, to the loud complaints of her mother.
‘Oh, really, it's too bad. No one is to telephone here at this hour.’
Ella was waving a silencing hand at her, saying into the phone, ‘Of course I'll come. In half an hour. Of course.’
Winifred had turned him down for some reason, so he sent for Ella. It was simple. She had flushed and pushed away her plate.
‘Please don't ever flap at me again, Ella,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘It's dreadfully rude. It's disrespectful, though that counts for nothing with you.’
‘I couldn't hear what was being said.’ Ella had discovered the virtues of the passive voice, an invaluable aid to subterfuge in the English language. ‘Please, Mother,’ she said in the tone of a ten-year-old, ‘may I leave the table?’
Mrs Cosway made a sound of disgust, flapping her uninjured hand in the way she had found so irritating when Ella did it. A silence fell, broken by the arrival of Eric, who had come for coffee after his meeting of the parochial church council. The reason for Winifred's disguising herself as ‘Tamara’ to call the White Rose was revealed.
‘I passed Ella driving down the hill,’ he said. ‘I'm afraid she was breaking the speed limit.’ He took his glasses off and put them on again for no apparent reason, as was always the case with him.
20
Without central heating, Lydstep Old Hall was an uncomfortable place to be that cold winter. John, who had borne it presumably without complaint during the drugged years, now began to show his discomfort in his own peculiar way. He never said more than, ‘It's cold’ or ‘I'm cold’ but he would wrap himself up like someone with limited resources preparing to spend a month in the open air of the Arctic. First of all his winter-weight dressing gown went on over his clothes – the pockets full of his ritual objects – then he would bring the eiderdown off his own bed downstairs, and if he decided this was inadequate, a couple of blankets would be fetched from the airing cupboard and, often, a sweater or two put on under the dressing gown. Those were the days before duvets and tracksuits and padded coats, so he had to manage as best he could. One day, particularly cold with flurries of snow, he went upstairs, diverging from his rule about only doing so for baths, got inside the airing cupboard and sat there on the lowest shelf, having pushed Winifred's laboriously ironed sheets and pillowcases on to the floor.
For half an hour or so no one knew where he had got to. Mrs Cosway, by this time free of plaster, her ankle still swollen, was loud in her lamentations on the results of the absent drug. I found John myself and, seeing him there, was reminded of Dr Lombard's story of Descartes in Queen Christina's airing cupboard.
His desperate quest for warmth prompted him to make another move towards seeking the help of the trust. Using his ancient reading glasses and the extra-powerful magnifying glass he had got Ella to buy him in Sudbury, he spent a lot of time scanning central heating advertisements in the newspapers. Finding a system he liked the look of, he announced in his very abbreviated way that the trust must produce the money to have it put in at Lydstep Old Hall.
‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘I won't ask them. It would be a shocking extravagance. We live in a temperate climate, especially in this corner of England.’
As she was speaking an easterly gale Ella said felt like Force 10 was tearing past the windows, carrying with it the last of the autumn leaves. From under his mounds of down quilt, blankets and a shawl he had found somewhere, John said, ‘Zorah will.’
At this, Mrs Cosway screamed aloud and as the sound died away the doorbell rang. It was Dr Barker, come to ‘take a look at’ John, though no one had invited him. John, who had never previously met him, refused to comply, and when Dr Barker made inept attempts to persuade him, huddled himself first into a corner, then departed into the lavatory, where we heard him lock the door.
‘I told you to take the key away,’ Mrs Cosway said to Ida.
Outside the door, Dr Barker began cajoling him to come out or let him come in. John maintained silence until the nagging became too much for him and he let out a yell so bloodcurdling that we all jumped and Dr Barker said, ‘I am afraid I am going to have to wash my hands of this, Mrs Cosway, for the present at least.’
‘Wash whatever you like,’ she said. ‘I didn't ask you to come here upsetting everyone.’ And after that, whenever she mentioned him, she called him Pontius Pilate.
It was another five hours before John came out. By that time most of us felt we could no longer stand these interruptions and I was again on the point of deciding to pack my bags. However, it did result in Winifred writing to the trust and asking for central heating to be installed. It never was, of course. There was no time and, after what happened, no need or wish. But for obvious reasons Winifred was feeling so elated these days that she would have done almost anything John or anyone else asked. A point had been reached at which she was Felix Dunsford's favoured lover, almost the maîtresse en titre, while Ella was relegated to the girl from the village, called upon when the favourite was not available.
It must have been tiring for Winifred. Since then I have seen others play it, this game of a woman juggling two men, one the husband or accredited fiancé, the other the illicit and secret lover. Most of them do it very well, but it surprised me that Winifred should be so expert, she who seemed scarcely to have had a boyfriend before Eric came on the scene. With absolute ease she fell in with the Tamara ploy, concealed as best she could her excitement, and succeeded in keeping Eric in a state of calm ignorance. Nor do I know what she thought would happen when Christmas was past and her wedding date approached. She was seizing the day, and the day – nearly every day, it seemed – brought Felix, sitting for the portrait and, no doubt, making love with the portrait painter afterwards.
Never talkative, Ida became almost silent as Christmas approached. I som
etimes saw her look wonderingly at Winifred as if she suspected what was going on but couldn't quite believe it. Perhaps she had noticed that her sister, recently such a fanatical church-goer, no longer attended Holy Communion or any services apart from Sunday Matins. In December, I was told, Ida would normally have been even busier than usual making preparations for Christmas but this year Winifred was to do everything. This was her wish. It would be the last time, she said, as the following year she would be having Christmas at the Rectory.
Ida looked bewildered when she said that, seemed about to speak but did not Perhaps her thoughts were the same as Ella's and mine, that in spite of everything, Winifred still intended to get married in three weeks' time. And continue with the affair afterwards? It certainly suited her. The flush on her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes and the gloss on her hair were almost indecent if you knew what had caused them. Ella invited me up to her bedroom to tell me she was thinking of telling Eric.
‘What good would that do?’
‘It would bring it out into the open. He'd break off the engagement and maybe think he'd had a lucky escape.’
‘Surely it would make him very unhappy,’ I said. ‘She's his fiancée, but don't forget Felix is his friend, or Eric thinks he is. Wouldn't it be better for them to marry and then for Winifred to forget Felix?’
‘Like I have?’
‘I suppose that means you haven't.’
‘I still phone him. If he wants me I go to him. You think that's humiliating?’
I shook my head and from pity did something unusual with me. I put my arms round her and hugged her. She began to cry, sobbing against my shoulder. As for Felix, he treated Winifred much as he had Ella, apparently expecting her to keep their affair secret, phoning her at Lydstep but if anyone else answered either putting down the receiver or asking for her without giving his name. On those occasions I think he disguised his voice, for several times when I answered, it was a man who asked for Winifred in an unfamiliar voice, but it was not till long afterwards that I realized the light tenor tone and slight Scots accent must have been Felix. He was a good actor. No doubt he had had plenty of rehearsals. He and she were never seen about together and his excuse this time would have been to save Eric from discovering their association. They were often seen in public together, Felix dropping in for tea at the Rectory or having drinks bought for him by Eric in the White Rose.