by Barbara Vine
More police had arrived by this time and concentrated their efforts on the drawing room. What they did in there I don't know but it took a long time. They must have measured things and taken photographs but it would have been less thorough than it would be today. One of them came out and said he would like all the clothes we had been wearing that day for forensic examination. The inspector came back at about seven, told us Eric ‘had been informed’ and he would appreciate it if none us went anywhere that evening. With a sharp look at me, he said we must not on any account go far, definitely not leave the country, and were to notify the police if we intended to leave Windrose.
‘I don't know about anyone else,’ said Mrs Cosway, a remark which might have served as an epitaph for her, ‘but I should like dinner.’
‘Oh, Mother,’ said Ida but she got up as usual.
I expected Eric to make some sign, to come or phone. By that time he must have been told. Perhaps he had gone to Felix or asked Felix to come to him. I had no idea if he had loved Winifred or just wanted a suitable wife and, though he was wrong, he had thought her suitable. Neither he nor Felix appeared. No one in that house, as far as I could tell, showed the least grief over Winifred. Shock, yes, a certain amount of fear, but I saw no sorrow.
The fog lifted as a little wind got up. Into the clearing sky, dark blue between the shreds of whitish cloud, the moon sailed. As they left, the police were talking to each other about the fog lifting and driving back being easier than coming here. We had all had to change our clothes and let them take away the ones we had been wearing. Mrs Cosway laid herself face downwards on the sofa, Ida disappeared into the kitchen and Ella to her bedroom. John was gone. All this I have remembered as best I could because I wrote nothing in the diary that night.
25
I don't know if a psychiatrist saw John, I don't know what was said or done to him or where he was kept. Mrs Cosway must have known the answers to these questions and probably Ida too, for different police came next day and talked to them for a long time. Ella too was closeted with the police, though she said to me afterwards that they had told her nothing. On that day Mrs Cosway's attitude towards me changed.
It was much worse than it had been up till then, verging on violence. It began in the kitchen at breakfast, a meal which, it seemed, was to be taken in silence, no one eating much but everyone drinking more tea and coffee than usual. Mrs Cosway was the first to speak and then not until Ida was collecting plates and cups and putting them on a tray.
‘John doing what he did,’ she said, ‘just goes to show how criminally negligent Pontius Pilate was in refusing me his drug. He was never aggressive while he had it, he never did any of those things he'd been doing like striking Ida and destroying books. It culminated in murder and all because that wicked man kept his drug from him.’ She turned to me. ‘Why are you looking like that? What does that look mean?’
Shock must have shown in my face. I said I was sorry but I wasn't aware of looking any different from usual.
‘You did look different, very different. You need to remember that all this is no business of yours. You're an employee, not a family friend.’
Yes, she is,’ said Ella. ‘She's my friend.’
I gave her a grateful smile. That had been kind. I said nothing to Mrs Cosway but she had not yet said as much as she wanted to.
‘The police will be back today and they'll want to talk some more to Ida and me. I don't want you there, Kerstin. Do you understand? You have no business to judge us. I don't want you sitting there disapproving in your holier-than-thou way. Is that clear?’
Ida, who might have intervened on my behalf, continued to take our breakfast things off the table. I said it was perfectly clear and got up. The police themselves would decide who should be present when they continued with their questioning and Mrs Cosway must have known this. She simply wanted an excuse to exclude me. I don't think I had ever been holier-than-thou but I had disapproved of her, in her attitude to John particularly, and I was young enough to have shown it.
This provided a good reason for me to hand in my notice and go but I remembered what the inspector had said to us the day before about staying where we were. I especially had been singled out as not to leave the country. Almost automatically piling plates and cups on the draining board, I looked at Ida where she stood with her back to me, staring out into the garden, which was once again lying under a blanket of snow. Backs can be as eloquent as faces and hers, round-shouldered, slack under the floral cotton overall and moth-holed grey jumper, the muscles giving one nervous twitch, told me she had nothing to say to me and would welcome my departure. Her stance and her attitude showed me more than anything else had how close she and her mother were, almost of one mind. I don't know how long it was before she turned round and began on her unending tasks, for I left her and went into the library.
The drawing room was out of bounds, its door taped shut. Our bedrooms were our refuge or, in my case, the library. I rediscovered it that morning, learning to guide my footsteps by the kind of books which were the various walls of the maze, English literature in one, science in another, ancient German and Danish dictionaries in Gothic script on the shelves Longinus faced and encyclopaedias in one wall of the passage John had run down to escape. I went down it and after rounding two corners (ghosts and the occult, fine arts and travel) I saw signs of a struggle where the people who came for him must have hunted him down. I expect my distaste showed in my face then, but there was no one to see it.
Books had fallen or been pulled out of the shelves, most of them classical literature; Ovid's Metamorphoses and Tacitus's Annals lay face downwards, their pages creased. I didn't want to imagine John's capture here or the carelessness of those who came for him and who had no more interest in the volumes their struggles had displaced than they had in his fear. I knelt down and picked up the books, smoothing out the thin fine paper and blowing dust off spines.
Back in the open space where John had been sitting, I too sat on the floor and looked at his notebook, at Pythagoras, drawn with exquisite precision, on other pages at algebraic equations I was unable to understand, and strange propositions presented, all of them, it seemed to me, beginning on the lines of letting something squared equal a and something else to the power of five equal b. I picked up the English–Swedish Esselte Studium dictionary and diverted myself by looking up long English words whose meanings I didn't know, but diversion was not what I found. I was too wretched for that and too angry. For a moment, no more, I asked myself if John could possibly have killed his sister, if he would have wanted to, for no more reason than that she had touched him or said something he found unacceptable. For a moment – then I was back at my firm conviction that it was impossible, an invention of Mrs Cosway's or of Ida's.
True, he had struck Ida, but that had been from exasperation. To my mind, I might say to my knowledge, the violent emotions which would be a preliminary to such a deed were not in his make-up. Put more simply, he wouldn't have wanted to do it. I could almost have said he wouldn't be interested. Winifred deceiving Eric with another man wouldn't have concerned him, would have meant nothing. If she had made him angry or upset he would have run away to hide himself. All that meant nothing to them. They wanted him charged with murder and found not to be responsible for his actions. That way they could be rid of an encumbrance.
I heard the police arrive and someone inadvertently slam the front door. I heard Ella say, ‘If you want me I'll be upstairs in my room.’
Probably I should have been upstairs in mine. Before leaving the library I walked round it once more, learning its intricacies. The time passed very slowly. I had been in there only half an hour. Ella tapped on the door after I had been in my room no more than five minutes. I had been writing in the diary and she spotted it at once, unmistakably what it was in its dark red leather binding, lying face downwards on my bed.
‘Oh, a diary! May I look?’
Thinking of the drawings, I said I'd rather she did
n't but I was too late. She looked at the one of Lydstep Old Hall under its summer leaves, but failed to comment on it and turned to the first page. The entries were in Swedish.
‘Silly me, I should have known. Now tell me, Kerstin, am I intruding?’
Relieved that she had stopped before coming to the drawing of herself and her dolls, I said truthfully that she was not. I was glad to see her but had nothing in my room to offer her.
‘That doesn't matter. I couldn't eat a thing. I just picked at my breakfast. Isn't everything absolutely awful? I feel I ought to apologize to you on Mother's behalf, she was so rude and unkind, but of course she's under a great strain. We all are. Mind you, I think that in a way it's a blessing in disguise.’
I thought perhaps I had misheard. English colloquialisms sometimes eluded me at that time and I wasn't even sure what ‘blessing’ meant, though it was a word I had heard often enough on Eric's lips. She couldn't have meant the killing of Winifred had some sort of good aspect – could she?
‘Well, look at it this way, Kerstin. You and I are friends, aren't we, so I think I can speak frankly. Winifred was behaving terribly badly. She'd have made poor Eric a hopeless wife and in my opinion she was using Felix unforgivably. Honestly, is she that much of a loss?’
I said nothing. Starting to wonder if others among the Cosways were not madder than John, I picked up the diary, closed it and put it out of Ella's reach. She had a groomed appearance that morning as if the whole of her, hair, hands, clothes and her skin itself, had been brushed and smoothed. I soon saw why.
‘Now I want your advice, Kerstin. Tell me honestly what you feel. Do you think it's too early for me to – well, resume my relationship with Felix? I mean, should I ring up the pub and leave him a message?’
She took my silence and blank look for encouragement.
‘Of course, you'll say that at first he may just want to talk. He'll have no one to talk all this over with. I mean, he can hardly discuss it with Eric, can he? Wouldn't he welcome the chance to meet me and be alone with me and have a real heart-to-heart? And after that things should go back to their old footing.’
The last thing she really wanted was my honest opinion. I would, anyway, have been afraid to give it, it was too violent and condemnatory. Holier-than-thou it might well have been and Mrs Cosway justified. At that moment it seemed to me that almost anyone would have been holier than Ella but at the same time I felt I was dealing with someone far younger than myself, more a child than a woman. I said, carefully restraining myself, ‘It would be wiser to wait a week or two. I would let him make the first move.’
‘Oh, no, Kerstin, I know him. In that case, he wouldn't make a move at all.’ Like most people seeking advice, she had determined before she asked on the course she meant to take. ‘I think I'll ring the pub around midday and say it's Tamara. He'll know it's me because he'll know it can't be Winifred.’
I said there was no doubt about that.
‘Thanks, anyway. For your advice, I mean. You've helped me clear my mind. I'll phone at lunchtime. He may even be in the pub and come to the phone.’
She returned in a little while to say the police wanted to speak to me but there was some difficulty as to where this interview should take place. I said that perhaps the dining room would do.
‘Oh, Kerstin, I'm so sorry but Mother's in there covering all the presents up with sheets and Ida's busy in the kitchen.’
This was probably the first time I knew Mrs Cosway to do anything that could be remotely construed as housework. ‘Then they'd better come up here.’
They came up, the same young sergeant and a different older man, a detective superintendent whose name I do remember. It was Strickland. He had been in my room no more than a minute before he, like Ella, picked up the diary but, unlike her, asked what it was. I told him.
‘Look if you like,’ I said.
He looked, smiled, closed it and made no comment. I had to say it, though I was hoarse with fear and a kind of shyness.
‘John didn't kill her.’
Strickland said, very gently, ‘You weren't there, were you, Miss Kvist?’
I had to say I wasn't. I was asked a lot of questions about where in fact I had been when the attack happened, what had been said and how much I had seen. I answered as best I could but all the time I was wondering what was in store for me when I finally went downstairs. At some point I had to eat. It seemed that I was not welcome in the dining room or the kitchen. Strickland and the other man left and I sat in the window, watching them get into their car and drive away. I wanted very much to phone Mark. By this time he would know what had happened at Lydstep Old Hall, he would have heard it on the radio or read about it in the paper.
If all this was happening today, I would have access to the Internet and the means to send emails. Eating would not be a problem. The White Rose probably has a restaurant now as well as serving bar meals and there would be at least one other place to eat in Windrose. Every inhabitant of Lydstep would be offered counselling, for good or ill. The police would have sent a family liaison officer to be with us all. None of this was the case thirty-five years ago.
Eventually, because I could hardly stay in my room indefinitely, I went slowly downstairs. The sound of a furious argument reached me as I came down into the hall. The gist of it seemed to be that Ella was insisting on her right to use the phone while Mrs Cosway was equally adamantly shouting at her that it was the wrong time of day and lunch was ready. I approached the dining room, anxious to appear neither timid nor assertive and finding it hard to strike the middle way. Ida was serving meat loaf, mashed potatoes and very bright green peas. She looked at her mother, Mrs Cosway met her eyes and then looked at me.
‘Your lunch is on the kitchen table.’ With the prong of a fork Ida picked up a pea she had dropped on the table.
‘I don't believe this,’ Ella said. ‘You can't do this.’
‘My mistake was in not doing it from the start,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘We should never have allowed her to eat with us.’
It is said that your feelings can't be hurt by someone you dislike and don't admire. I disliked Mrs Cosway and certainly had never admired her but I was hurt. Tears pricked my eyelids and I went quickly out so that no one should see. Two slices of meat loaf, a scoop of mashed potatoes and a spoonful of peas awaited me on a plate on the kitchen table. Four tinned peach halves were in a bowl, covered by an inverted saucer. My appetite had entirely gone. As I was fetching my coat, hat and snowboots from upstairs, I thought for the first time that this was to have been Winifred's wedding day.
It was very cold but Swedes are used to cold and conditioned not to make a fuss about it. A sky like the one that day, a thick yellowish-grey as if made of some solid substance like pea soup, is often described as being full of snow. I expected it to start as I walked down the hill but none fell. Windrose seemed emptier than usual on a Saturday, as if everyone had been driven indoors by the shock and manner of Winifred's death. But the cause may only have been the bitter cold.
Two women I didn't know were in the shop. Wordless and unsmiling, they turned to look at me. I expected the girl behind the counter to make some remark about the events at Lydstep Old Hall but she said nothing beyond an offhand ‘thanks' when I paid her for the brown loaf, piece of cheese and chocolate bars I bought. In the phone box outside the post office I phoned Mark but I hadn't enough change to talk to him for long and – foolishly, perhaps – I said nothing about being sent to Coventry (a phrase I learnt from Ella that day) or banished to eat in the kitchen. We were still constrained with each other and a little awkward, our frankness gone. Once I would have said to him that when the police would let me, I would come to him in London and stay, but those words were no longer possible.
In spite of the cold, I was reluctant to go back to Lydstep before I had to. The White Rose was about to close and I was afraid that unless I quickly got away I might encounter Felix Dunsford leaving the saloon bar. There, though, I later found out I did
him an injustice, for he had stayed away from the pub that day. I walked across the Memorial Green. The architect and his wife had thrown out their Christmas tree but no one had collected it and it lay, brown and forlorn, on their garage drive. On the Rectory gate was the painted sign Felix had made for Winifred, frost still clinging to it. Eric's car stood on the curved drive outside the front door. I was sure there must be some etiquette laying down the correct procedure for behaving towards someone whose bride-to-be has been murdered, but I had no idea what this might be. I rang the bell, expecting a friend or relative to answer it, but Eric came himself.
We notice such absurd and trivial details in people. The first thing I saw wasn't his wretched tear-stained face or his haunted eyes but the fact that he hadn't shaved. The stubble was white and it aged him by ten years. He stood there and I stood there, wishing I hadn't come.
‘It's going to snow,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ I was cold, shivering with cold. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course. I'm so sorry.’
In his living room, over the mantelpiece, Winifred looked down at me, joy and triumph in her face. I wondered why I had once thought the portrait a poor likeness. It was her to the life. It was enormously better than my own drawing. She looked as if at any minute she might spring from the canvas and run to meet the painter with outstretched arms. Poor Eric. How could he bear to have it there?
He seemed scarcely aware of it. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘No, thanks. Of course not.’
‘Some guests arrived for the wedding. They didn't know. We forgot to let people know. Bill Cusp told me. He sent them away.’ Briefly he closed his eyes. ‘How are they all up there?’
‘As you'd expect,’ I said. Or as I would have.
‘We were going to Mallorca,’ he said.
I looked inquiring.
‘On our honeymoon.’ He was silent. Then he said, ‘I won't be able to take her funeral service, you know. I'm afraid I might break down. Will you tell them?’