by Barbara Vine
This would never happen, and when the men came into the drawing room, each holding a newly refilled sherry glass, John, who had been working out some mathematical puzzle with paper, pencil and magnifying glass, looked up and said to Felix, ‘You're drunk.’
Winifred, inheritor of her mother's short fuse, screamed at him to shut up – how dared he speak like that? I half-expected Felix to laugh but his vanity had been hurt and perhaps he was aware that the accusation was not far off the truth. He scowled and said, ‘Thank you very much. You don't pull your punches.’
While Eric was muttering, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, how very unfortunate,’ Winifred began playing the difficult game of apologizing to Felix and scolding John at the same time, managing a sweet smile in one direction and a ferocious frown in the other, rather like the masks of comedy and tragedy you see in theatres.
‘There's no use making a fuss about it,’ Mrs Cosway said. ‘It's been said and now you might as well forget it.’ She addressed Eric. ‘If only Pontius Pilate had given one the tablets Selwyn Lombard prescribed none of this would have happened.’
‘It isn't too late, you know,’ Winifred said to her brother. ‘There are other doctors. You could be back on it next week and it won't be up to you. It will be Mother's decision.’ She turned to Felix and said in a scathing tone, ‘Asking Kerstin to marry him! That's the kind of thing that happens when he's deprived of his medicine.’
I didn't like this but there was nothing I could do. Throughout it all John had been half-buried as he always was these days in sleeping bag, quilts and blankets. Trailing them behind him, hitching them up as he went and still clutching the magnifying glass, he shuffled across to the high-backed sofa and crawled into the three-sided cave between it and the wall. A pink satin eiderdown effectively blocked the opening behind him. Everyone but Felix knew he would be there for hours, possibly all night.
Mark had gone to his parents in Shropshire. We hadn't met since that weekend when he proposed to me but this was as much due to the snow as to any awkwardness between us. Next morning I was due at White Lodge to spend a day and a night and a day with the Trintowels. Determined not to dwell morbidly on Winifred's remark, I fiercely pushed her words out of my mind. But what took its place wasn't much improvement. I went to bed early, thinking how absurd it was that I, who was quite without any religious faith, should be feeling melancholy and lonely because for once I was deprived of a Christmas Eve celebration with my parents and my brother and sister. I found it hard to sleep and I was still awake when Eric brought Winifred back from the midnight service of lessons and carols.
I had bought small gifts for Jane and Gerald Trintowel but nothing for the Cosways and I was surprised when Ella knocked on my door at eight in the morning with a present for me.
‘No one can sleep properly the night before Christmas, can they?’ she said. ‘So I didn't think you'd mind me bringing this bright and early.’
Not to be outdone and thinking fast, I gave her the gift of soap and perfume which was an extra I had wrapped up for Jane in addition to their wine and chocolates. Years later I told Jane. She smiled and said it was just as well as she had always disliked that particular scent.
‘I want to laugh,’ she said, ‘but I can't when it's anything to do with that family. It seems wrong to think of them in any way but tragic.’
Ella gave me a doll. It was smaller than those in her bedroom, a twenty-centimetre-tall blonde of the Barbie type in a short yellow dress and knee boots.
‘It's a Courrèges copy. I must say I'm rather proud of her boots. I made them out of the fingers of Mother's gloves. I'm keeping my fingers crossed she won't decide she needs them.’
I still have that doll. It is ugly and absurd and I would never have dreamt of putting it on show in any home of mine but somehow I can't throw it away. My daughter found it when she was a little girl and wanted to play with it. I refused – not because I ever treasured it but because of where it came from and the dreadful events associated with it. Thirty-five years later it is as clean and its clothes as exquisitely made as when Ella gave it to me in my bedroom at Lydstep Old Hall, as the sun coming up over Windrose coloured the fields of snow with her favourite pink.
With his bedclothes and his magnifying glass, John had buried himself behind the sofa for eighteen hours. Twice he had come out to go to the lavatory and on each occasion, she told me, Ida had been worried that he would lock himself in and carry on his vigil or strike or whatever it was from there.
‘There is nothing to be done, I suppose,’ she said. ‘If I take the key away it's going to be so embarrassing for guests not being able to lock themselves in. Did you have a good time?’
I said it had been very nice, thank you.
‘They've got two sons, haven't they? The younger one used to play the organ in church in the days when I went. I met the older one once. D'you know, Kerstin, I'd have thought he'd be just your type.’
She was right but of course I didn't say so, if I even knew it then. ‘I've got a boyfriend,’ I said.
The question of the hour – of several days to come in fact – was who was to give Winifred away. Apparently, in the absence of her father, some male relative of the bride or family friend had to do this and Winifred might have fixed on an uncle or the nephew who was one of the John Cosway Trust trustees. But the Lydstep Old Hall people, with the exception of Zorah, had fallen out with them and relations were now confined entirely to business.
‘Of course John ought to do it,’ Winifred had remarked during Christmas lunch while her brother was still behind the sofa. ‘He could have done if he'd still had his medicine. He'd have bumbled through it all right.’
Her mother told her not to be silly and Eric was very shocked. Ella, who told me about it, said, ‘So Mother said she assumed she was going to do it. It was surely possible for a woman to give her daughter away and Eric said, yes, it was, and it would be quite suitable. And then what do you think happened? You'd never guess in a million years. Winifred said, “Why shouldn't Felix give me away? He's a family friend and he's Eric's friend. I thought it would be nice for him to be Eric's best man but George Cusp is up for that, so why shouldn't he give me away?” Well, Mother was absolutely furious, she said she'd never heard of anything so preposterous and if that happened she wouldn't even go to the wedding.’
I asked Ella what the person who gave away the bride would have to do and say.
‘He isn't supposed to say anything. He goes with the bride to the church and takes her arm up the aisle – you see how John couldn't possibly have done it. The parson – it'll be the Archdeacon – says, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” and he doesn't say anything, just stands there, but most get it wrong and say, “I do,” and then he walks away and sits down and the bridegroom says that bit about taking thee to my wedded wife. Well, Winifred got quite excited at her idea and when we'd finished the Christmas pudding and Ida was handing round chocolates, she got the Prayer Book and she and Felix started going through it together, their heads touching if you can believe it, and laughing and reading bits out. I don't know what Eric thought but he didn't say anything. Felix read out the bit about the minister “receiving the woman at her father's or friend's hand” and said that was clear enough. It meant he was more suitable than Mother because there was nothing about the minister receiving Winifred at her mother's hands.’
‘So what happened in the end?’
‘Well, nothing really. Eric said it wasn't necessary to have anyone to give a bride away and it was time to change the subject. He seemed a bit uneasy by that time.’
I asked her why Winifred wanted Felix.
‘I see it as a symbol,’ said Ella. ‘It means she's giving him up to get married. He's giving her up to another man. You'll say it's in very bad taste and I'd agree but it's what a father does in a sort of way.’
‘In a sort of way,’ I said.
Zorah hadn't been with them at lunch but appeared in the afternoon, beautifully dres
sed, her hair done in a new way and wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes ‘I'd have given years off my life for’, said Ella. Having put away a ‘vast amount’ of the sherry, burgundy and brandy, all of it provided by Zorah, Felix had fallen asleep, sprawled out in the armchair where John usually sat. Mrs Cosway was also asleep, Eric dozing and Winifred lying back with closed eyes, fairly typical it seemed for any English family on Christmas afternoon. Zorah looked carefully at Felix, walking round him and putting her head on one side, like someone studying an unusual specimen of wildlife.
Though she said very little, John must have heard her voice for he came out at last, dragging his bedclothes with him.
‘Felix was asleep in his chair and that made John angry, said Ella. ‘He stood over him, staring. It was awful. I thought he was going to hit him but Felix woke up. John said, “You're in my chair. Get up,” and Felix did, very quickly. Winifred told John never to behave like that again, which was absurd, you know, because it's always useless saying anything like that to him. Zorah started laughing when John said what he said and then she told him not to forget she'd be driving him to London in the middle of next week to see the specialist. Then Mother said, “Let's see if he puts you back on your Largactil.”
‘Felix left soon after that. He hadn't taken offence, I don't mean that. He said he'd enjoy the walk home, it would clear his head. But I know him and I think he was going straight to the pub. They'd just opened. But I think Winifred is giving him up,’ said Ella, ‘or he's giving her up. After the wedding Felix will just be Eric's best friend until some new person comes to Windrose.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you think he'll come back to me?’
‘Surely you wouldn't want him?’ I should have known better.
‘Oh, yes, I would, Kerstin. I'm not proud. I know he's a drunk and faithless and he'll never be successful but I love him.’
Zorah had taken John to Sudbury for an eye test a week before Christmas and he was promised new glasses. The day before he was due to go to London with her I too went there and spent the afternoon and evening with Mark, returning on the last train.
He looked very serious when I told him of the latest Cosway troubles. ‘I think you ought to leave,’ he said. ‘It sounds as if something nasty is going to happen.’
‘What sort of something nasty?’
‘I don't know and I may be quite wrong. I don't understand why you want to stay on.’
‘Don't you?’ I said.
‘If you mean because of what I asked you, you can still come and share this room. If you don't want me to I'll never mention marriage again. I'm in love with you but I won't mention that either.’
On the way back in the train I thought about taking up his offer. I could wait until Zorah had taken John to London, Ella was at her sewing, Winifred at the Rectory – or The Studio? – and Ida being a housewife, and then break the news to Mrs Cosway. Only one doesn't break good news and I was sure she would be pleased. It would be a relief. It meant nothing to her that I took half the work off Ida's shoulders. Ida could manage on her own. She always had before I came.
Things would be better, I thought (and wrote down when I got back to Lydstep) after Winifred had gone. The constant sparring between her and Ella would be over and Felix would no longer come there; I was sure Ella was wrong and he wouldn't return to her, not that when he was ‘hers' he had ever made that plain in public. No, he would become, for a while, a frequent visitor at the Rectory, neither he nor Winifred betraying by a glance or a catching of eyes or exchanged half-smiles that they had ever been more to each other than friendly acquaintances. So I was thinking as the train came to a stop at Marks Tey, and because rain was falling, washing away the snow, I was obliged to take an expensive taxi back to Lydstep.
There was one week to go before the wedding. Winifred asked me if I would like to hear her banns called for ‘the third time of asking’. I had no idea what banns were or what asking meant in this context; she explained and told me too that Eric wouldn't be calling his own banns (perhaps this wasn't allowed, I don't know) but the vicar of the next parish would do it as he had done on the two previous occasions. In the event, I, Mrs Cosway, Ella and Winifred all went to church, while Ida stayed at home to be with John, happier with his new glasses and able to dispense with the magnifying glass.
I read in the paper the other day, thirty-five years later, that the publishing of banns of marriage is likely to disappear along with other Church ‘reforms’. I don't know why and maybe there is no good reason. It was pleasing to hear the ancient formula spoken by Mr Moxon from St John's, Lydstel le Grand, as he asked us, all thirty or so of us, if we knew ‘cause, or any just impediment, why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony’. It made me think of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester's wedding and the first wife's brother speaking up to tell of the impediment, but Eric had no first wife and the bride having a lover is no cause for not refusing to join two persons together in matrimony. Felix was there, sitting where he had sat that Sunday in summer when Winifred had reproved him for his clothes, and when the organist, who wasn't a patch on James Trintowel, struck up ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’, sang as lustily as he had done before.
I thought of John and his proposal. He was a single man, a ‘bachelor of this parish’, and I was a single woman. We were free and there was no impediment to stop us marrying. If it was what John wanted he could have spoken the responses, said the words. Recalling the terms of Mr Cosway's will, I could see why Mrs Cosway was worried and why she sat close by John to protect him from his predatory carer.
The Church of England fascinated me then. Now it only disappoints me. In those days I used to marvel at an institution dedicated to a religion where no one seemed to believe in God and everyone believed passionately in ritual and rubric. It was my first visit for some weeks and I watched, rapt, as some knelt, some remained sitting, all closed their eyes in prayer, some crossed themselves while others witnessed the crossing disapprovingly, some sang ‘Hallelujah!’, others ‘Alleluia!’ and all gave a kind of court bow, dipping their heads, when the Creed was said and the words ‘Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord’ were reached. I don't know why. I didn't then and I don't know now. Were their minds devoutly full of Christ's passion, his suffering, his descent into hell, and his mystical resurrection? Or did they think of the roasting joint and whether their neighbours would be coming back after church for sherry?
Eric was to come to the Hall for lunch. This had been the usual arrangement for weeks by then but this time Felix wouldn't be with him. There was something formal, I thought, almost ceremonial in the way he said goodbye to Winifred, taking both her hands in his and, to everyone's surprise, not least her own, kissing her cheek. In the days of Ella's ascendancy there had been nothing like this and as I watched them the puzzle of why Felix seemed to prefer the older sister was solved. For all her prissy ways, her apparent devoutness and her Sunday school-teacherish way of talking, Winifred gave off a charge of sexual energy entirely absent from Ella. I felt it then, a powerful sexiness in the way she breathed and the gaze of her eyes and the parting of her painted lips. If I could feel it, how much more must Felix? He had awakened this in her, he must have done, for I am sure it wasn't there before.
She wanted him to come back to the Hall with her. Without him her day was spoilt. She had only Eric, an encumbrance and a nuisance as well, a stumbling block to any plans she might make, but an inescapable and in some ways desired fate. She had to have a husband. Without a husband, she was no better than Ida or Ella, an old maid, a spinster. But did she have to give up Felix?
Because I wouldn't be at the wedding, I was to be shown Winifred's dress, a special treat. It was a classic bridal gown, of white silk and having about it those special wedding-dress features you never seem to see in connection with any other kind of costume, points on the long sleeves that extend over the hand, a standup collar like a calla lily, a train which would be carried up the aisle by Ella or June Prothero and which would
make the dress unwearable on any subsequent occasion. The headdress which went with it was rather like those worn in portraits by Elizabethan ladies and which always seemed to be shaped like a gable on the front of a house. A veil would be attached to float down Winifred's back.
It was absurd, of course, all of it was, not least because this kind of regalia was once designed for a young virgin being delivered from her father's hands into her husband's. Winifred would be forty-one a week after the wedding and a man who was not her future husband had recently been her lover. And it was true that a few months before, in the heavy make-up and the dirty-fingernails days, these clothes would have seemed grotesquely unsuitable for her. She would have been taking a risk in wearing them lest she set off giggling in the church. Not so by the time I saw them. Her natural good looks had come into their own, she had shed years off her age and there was a spring in her step. She had become young, six or seven years older than I was; through love or sex or something of that sort, she had regained her youth. She would no longer disgrace that gown and it would no longer show her up for a fool without taste or judgement.
Winifred had been abroad very little so she was excited, or seemed to be, about the prospect of her unknown honeymoon destination. For once Eric was doing the romantic thing and taking her away to a holiday place he refused to reveal.
‘You can tell me,’ said Mrs Cosway ‘I won't give the secret away.’
‘It will be much easier for you not to if you don't know,’ said Eric.