The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

  It was Cox the gardener who phoned for help. The first time he ever went into Lydstep Old Hall was to pick up the telephone and do the only thing he could to lessen its destruction. Next day he went into the pub and told everyone prepared to listen, and that I am sure was most people, that he had found ‘Miss Ida’ sitting at the kitchen table with a knife in her hand and a bowl of water in front of her, peeling potatoes. He got no answer from her when he asked her where her mother and her brother were. The phone, of course, was in the dining room, and although he hadn't a phone of his own, he knew how to dial nine-nine-nine. The drawing room was impenetrable because of the flames and smoke. Later on he heard that Mrs Cosway had been in there, asleep on the sofa, and as for her son, ‘the one that's off his rocker’, there was no sign of him either.

  What had happened to John? He did talk to me a little but most of this I pieced together from what I knew of the place and his habits. He had been out for his walk, came back and saw the flames, and did the kind of thing he would always do, walked away from something alien and different and which frightened him. It was lucky for me, and I hope for him, that we met where we did. At that moment, when we met in the village street, I wanted more than anything in the world to take him in my arms and hold him. It was the one thing I could never, must never, do.

  Ida was taken to hospital, though I don't think anything was wrong with her – not physically wrong, that is. Mrs Cosway was dead. She had been overcome by smoke and fumes and at her age didn't stand a chance. Dr Barker told Ella she would have known nothing of what happened to her. Ella wouldn't go back to what remained of the house. Eric gave her one of the bedrooms at the Rectory and offered another to John. Kind though it was, I knew he wouldn't do it but stood shaking his head and refusing to step over the Rectory threshold.

  He and I went back together to the near-ruin of Lydstep Old Hall because he wouldn't go anywhere else. It was late evening by then. The fire brigade and the police had left after telling us the house was unsafe even to set foot in. We were forbidden to go there. But we did go, making our way up the hill close by the hedge. People who have no experience of living in the English countryside thirty-five years ago have no idea how dark it was by night. Those were the days before what is now called light pollution, when the sky wasn't dark red from the lights of the nearest towns but impenetrable, sometimes starry, black. There were no stars visible that night. Without the torch I borrowed from Eric, getting to Lydstep Old Hall would have been impossible.

  John's bedroom had gone when the drawing room went and the library too was a blackened ruin. Everything was covered up with tarpaulins and battens had been nailed up to shut off the drawing room but there was nothing to stop us standing at the end of what had been the passage and looking at where the library and the labyrinth had been. Is there any sadder sight than a burnt-out library? The moon rose slowly and eerily, shedding a pale cold light over the ruins. We stood outside and looked. The temperature was normal for a January night but for once John seemed not to feel the cold. His face showed no emotion, it never did, and perhaps he felt none to show. I don't know, but he addressed to me the longest sentence I ever heard him utter.

  ‘I am thinking of Ptolemy's great library at Alexandria. That was burnt too.’

  I found candles in the kitchen and an oil lamp – a real oil lamp, not one of those paraffin heaters – and we had a little light. John had decided to spend the night in the dining room. His ritual objects were gone, his dressing gown and all his quilts were gone. If this distressed him he gave no sign of it. I found pillows and quilts for him in the undamaged bedrooms and made a bed out of them for him on the dining-room floor. Zorah's rooms had been so badly damaged as to be unusable and Ella's suffered more from the water and chemical sprays the fire brigade had used than from the fire itself, but my bedroom was untouched. Ida or Mrs Lilly had stripped the bed once I was gone and I didn't bother to make it up but lay down on a blanket on the mattress with a quilt and a bedspread over me. I slept very little. Worrying about what would happen to John kept me awake, that and the cold. I dared not leave the candles burning. Although so much of the house still stood, the electricity supply was gone and the water in the taps was cold. The phone no longer worked.

  I got up at five, lit more candles and the three oil stoves. By the time John was up, silent and expressionless, the kitchen was quite warm. I fried eggs and bacon on top of one of the stoves and boiled a kettle on the other, a slow process. It was all right for one night and one morning but I knew we couldn't stay here after today. The police wouldn't have let us do what we had done even for the ten hours or so that we had been in the house. I thought of the mental hospital where John had been when he was suspected of killing Winifred and a chill ran through me at the idea of his going back there because there was nowhere else for him to be.

  Surely the trust would provide somewhere for him? Would Ella look after him? Somehow I doubted it. There was Ida, of course, but I had no faith in Ida. I couldn't imagine her returning to the world of the sane and balanced. I don't know now why there was one person, one obvious person I never thought of.

  I washed the dishes as best I could in cold water mixed with the kettle dregs. John had gone. I wasn't worried, I knew where he would be. The passage of locked doors was open now to a flat grey sky, crosshatched by burnt blackened beams. John stood where he and I had stood the night before. We hadn't been able to see much then. Now it was like looking at some kind of geological phenomenon, a beach or plain of wet black rocks, only these stones were spongy and when you touched them, they made a soggy squelch. Once they had been books. Not one of them was recognizable, not Homer or Euclid or Mrs Halliburton's Troubles or the Bible. All were made one an undifferentiated amorphous black pulp.

  John stood with his sleeping bag round his shoulders, simply staring at it. Impossible to tell if he was upset or angry or afraid. He turned his head when he heard me and he spoke.

  ‘Shashtin.’

  I loved him then. Again I would have liked to take him in my arms and hold him, protect him for ever, save him from the world. Of course I could do nothing. He would have screamed and hidden himself if I had touched him. Suddenly I thought, for the first time really, that his mother was dead. Did he mind? Did he know? Whether she had loved him or he had loved her, I didn't know. She alone had been allowed to give him his drug and that must have meant something.

  I will try to get him to the Rectory, I thought. His sister is there. Eric is there. Surely they won't desert him, abandon him. I walked back to the dining room. Winifred's wedding presents were still there, still covered in sheets, miraculously dry, untouched by fire or water. I heard a key in the front-door lock and I turned round, expecting to see Ella. Zorah was in the hall. In trenchcoat and boots, she looked like a forties star in a war film.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘Do you know what's become of m brother?’

  I told her.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Apparently, a log fell out of the fireplace on to the rug. That's what they think. Your mother was asleep and Ida was…’

  ‘In the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Ella phoned me at six. I'd have come last night if I'd known.’ We went to look for John. ‘The man I took him to says he's never to have drugs again. His walking will get better without them and his hands will stop shaking. There's nothing much to be done for what he's got.’

  John was still standing where I had left him.

  ‘Hallo, you,’ said Zorah.

  I didn't know what she meant to do. If she intended to take him away, take him to London or some hotel, I thought it likely, probable, he would simply refuse to go. He smiled a little when he saw her. I am ashamed to admit it but I was jealous. That smile should have been for me. For all that, I was happy to see him follow her out of the front door to where her car was.

  ‘His things?’ I said. ‘He'll need clothes, I don't know if there are any.’

  ‘We'll buy new,’ she said. ‘We'll buy books. Would y
ou like to go to Italy, John? When we were kids we said we'd go to Venice. We'd go to Florence. Remember? We can go now.’

  He said nothing but the smile was still there.

  ‘Goodbye, John,’ I said.

  Quite gravely he said, ‘Goodbye, Shashtin,’ and with that I had to be content.

  Zorah wound down the driver's window. ‘Lift to White Lodge?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said, ‘I'd like the walk.’

  ‘Whatever happened to that bloody geode?’ she said but she didn't wait for an answer.

  I spent my last night in Windrose with the Trintowels, staying one night longer than I had meant to. Nothing was talked about but the fire and its consequences and Mrs Cosway's death. I said very little about John, only that Zorah had taken him away. Jane was mystified by my decision to stay overnight with John in a cold, wet, half-burnt-out house after those supposed to know had told me it was unsafe. She kept asking me why but I didn't know the answer. In the afternoon I went down to the Rectory. Eric's daily woman let me in and I found Eric in the living room with Ella – and Felix.

  They were all behaving in a subdued and controlled fashion, talking of course about the fire. I was able to tell Ella what had survived and that I thought the things in her room would be very little damaged.

  ‘Your clothes are all right,’ I said, ‘and the dolls are only a bit damp.’

  ‘Dolls?’ Felix obviously knew nothing of Ella's hobby. ‘What do you do? Play with them?’

  ‘I'll make a cup of tea,’ Ella said coldly.

  I followed her to the kitchen, that grim high-ceilinged chamber. The only efficient modern thing in it was Winifred's wedding present.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Ella, ‘they sent Zorah's fridge here and not to the Hall. Ida would have got her hooks into it.’

  I drank my tea. I told them I would be leaving next morning and returning to Sweden in five days' time. Ella said nothing this time about coming to London with me, nothing about her mother's death. She was sitting next to Felix on the sofa, her right hand lying beside his knee, not quite touching it. I kissed her when I left. Thirty-five years were to pass before I saw her again. The two men I never saw, though I occasionally heard of Felix, who became quite famous and at the age of sixty-nine was nominated for some quite important prize.

  I walked back to White Lodge, thinking of seeing Charles next day, thinking of him in a romantic, ardent way, very different from how I had thought of Mark. The feeling I had had for John was of course separate and unique.

  Zorah had asked me what started the fire and I gave her the accepted theory: a log had fallen out of the fireplace on to the rug while Mrs Cosway slept. This was impossible, as anyone acquainted with that room knew well. But the room was destroyed and the fireplace with it, Mrs Cosway was dead, John seldom spoke and certainly never about things like that, and Ella had no interest in the fate of the house or the cause of its destruction. That her clothes and dolls were safe was all that concerned her. Ida would certainly never deny the official version.

  A log falling from the fire would have toppled on to the brown glazed tiles of the hearth and been stopped from rolling on to the rug by the fender. To prevent such a thing was its function. Ever since the first fire of the winter had been lit, the fender had been in place. I remembered, very distinctly, Ida bringing it from the boot room, placing it round the hearth and telling me – astonished that I didn't know – what it was and what it was called.

  No log falling from the fire could have rolled past it. Logs don't have wings, nor are they fired from catapults. So what had really happened?

  I believe I know that answer. It has to be. Ida went into the drawing room, clearing up, emptying an ashtray, plumping a seat cushion, performing one of the myriad tasks she set herself every day. The fire had reached that red glowing stage of maximum heat when it can either be left to burn out in ten minutes or fed with more logs, in which case it will lose heat for a moment or two. I think Ida seized her chance, moved away the fender with the toe of her shoe, and again with the toe of her shoe dislodged the topmost log from the fire. Perhaps she watched it and the sparks it scattered catch the tufts of the rug and a little flame flicker, take hold and strengthen. Or perhaps she went straight back to the kitchen, filled a bowl with water, sat at the table and began to peel potatoes. It will never be known, I thought, because she will never say.

  Why? Because her mother had killed Winifred and burning alive was fit punishment for her? Or because Ida herself had killed Winifred and to lose her home and perhaps her life was fit punishment for her? I don't think so. I don't think either of these dramatic solutions is true. I remembered what she said to me that day when Dr Barker had refused her the prescription.

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

  Now

  She came. The words she had called back to me were ‘Love to.’ She had brought Daisy with her, having left Zoë behind with some people of her own age she had met. Charles and Mark and Anna were in the far corner of the bar but I had decided to make no introductions yet. We sat at a little table, the child quiet and staring, her hands folded in her lap.

  Ella looked less like her mother. She had put on a red jacket and shoes with high heels. Her face was discreetly made up and her hair had been done in one of Riga's many hairdressers. That day, it appeared, we had both been to see the art nouveau in Alberta Street, that place of bad dreams for some and fantasies for others, which she had hated and I had loved, anything between the two being impossible. Though nothing like it, though belonging to a different period, it had reminded me of the library at Lydstep Old Hall.

  ‘I was so glad to hear about John,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said rather doubtfully, as if hearing her brother was in a mental hospital or had come to some other bad end would have been better options.

  The same old Ella, I thought. I asked Daisy if she would like orange juice or a coke. ‘I don't mind,’ she said meekly, and then, ‘What can I do, Grandma?’

  Inspiration came to me. ‘I'll make you a Dog Growing,’ I said, taking the drinks menu off the table and beginning to fold it. ‘Would you like a glass of rosé, Ella?’

  ‘Rosé?’

  ‘It used to be your favourite.’

  ‘Did it? Goodness, I haven't touched the stuff since I married. Still, why not?’

  I thought then that she would say who she had married and I waited expectantly. Not Felix, surely. I tried to remember a profile I had read of him in some paper. No wife had been mentioned. Daisy, a serious child, watched me beginning to draw the dog's outline.

  ‘I'm a widow now,’ Ella said. ‘Have been for ten years.’ She sipped the wine and then went on, ‘You live in Sweden, do you?’

  ‘I live in London. I've lived in London since before I married. You remember my husband, Charles Trintowel? That's him over there. I'll introduce you in a minute.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She sounded bored.

  Daisy moved to sit beside me and started giggling as I drew the dog's nose and floppy ears. ‘Is Ida still alive?’

  Ella peered into her glass as if into a crystal ball. ‘She's in an old people's home. After the fire she stayed with us for a while but we never really got on. Mr Trewith's wife died – do you remember Mr Trewith? – and he offered her a job as his housekeeper.’ I remembered Mr Trewith. He heard confessions, had perhaps heard Winifred's. ‘That's what really always suited Ida, housework, waiting on others, that sort of thing. Would never have done for me but of course I was a professional woman.’

  I had to know. ‘Felix Dunsford did well for himself. I saw the other day that one of his paintings fetched fifty thousand pounds.’

  Not a flicker of memory or reminiscence, still less of pain, showed in her face. ‘Oh, yes. We sold his portrait of Winifred for quite a tidy sum. Not fifty thousand, I may add, but not far off. It's been a godsend to me. Talking of Felix, when we saw you'd become a cartoonist we couldn't understand you never said anything to him about it.
You having that in common, I mean.’ She peered at the now recognizable dog without enthusiasm. ‘He might have given you some tips.’

  She laughed, so I laughed and Daisy burst into a peal of laughter. ‘Who are “we“, Ella?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Who did you marry?’

  ‘Oh, didn't I say? Eric, of course.’

  Eric.

  ‘I wore Winifred's wedding dress, so it wasn't wasted. But you know, Kerstin, the Church of England are so mean-spirited. When Eric died they made me get out of the Rectory in three months. Three months to find another place and move out. I ask you.’

  I pulled open the folds and the spaniel became a dachshund. Once more serious, Daisy put out her hand for the drawing. She folded it, pulled it out and smiled. ‘Can I keep it?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Come and say hallo to Charles.’

  And they did, Daisy with the Dog Growing in her hand.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  The Minotaur

  Now

  Then

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13