Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Ella, ‘you've already told us twice.’

I had set them both and their sister Ida down as inveterate spinsters, as single women were still often called in those days. This was long before there was something almost meritorious in not being married. They lived at home with their mother, were discontented, set in their ways, seemed part of the virginal sisterhood, churchy, doing good works in the parish. So it surprised me when Ida, getting up to make bedtime hot drinks for everyone, asked me if I could spare her a minute ‘to have a word’.

I followed her into the kitchen where she said in a low, serious tone, ‘I have something to tell you.’

It sounded alarming but I'm not the sort of person who, at these words, invariably thinks she must be in trouble – at least, I wasn't then, in those early days. ‘Yes?’ I said, my voice light. ‘What is it?’

‘Mr Dawson and Winifred are engaged to be married.’

In most circumstances, this sort of news merits congratulations and a show of joy. ‘That's good, isn't it? Who's Mr Dawson?’

‘My goodness, I'm so relieved you aren't cross,’ said Ida. ‘Knowing how you want everything to be open and no secrets et cetera, I thought you might be offended because no one told you the moment you came.’

‘Not a bit,’ I said, mystified.

‘That's such a relief.’ She looked neither relieved nor at all happy. ‘Mr Dawson is the Rector of this parish. You'll meet him tomorrow. He will, of course, take the service. I no longer go to church myself.’

‘Is he a young man?’ I asked, feeling like a character in Charlotte Bronte, but curious to know.

‘Two years older than Winifred. He's forty-two. You'll be wondering why she doesn't wear an engagement ring.’

I was not; the absence of a ring had failed to register with me. I smiled encouragingly.

‘He only proposed last Wednesday.’

‘I see. So Winifred will be moving out to live at the Vicarage.’

‘The Rectory, yes.’ Ida seemed to find my innocent small-talk suspect. What she thought I meant to imply I don't know. Perhaps, knowing this family as I was beginning to, she saw me as having designs on a different, larger, bedroom, though there were at least eight at Lydstep Old Hall, or else, as a single woman myself, though so much younger, envious of Winifred's coming status.

‘They can't get married for a long time yet,’ Ida said obscurely. ‘Would you mind carrying this tray with the mugs on it?’

I picked up the tray and went back into the drawing room, looking at Winifred with new eyes in the light of the future awaiting her. Trying to avoid being unkind, even in my own mind and to myself, I still had to wonder what on earth Mr Dawson saw in her to make him propose marriage. The heavy make-up she wore had been on, unrefreshed, since early morning, and was now greasy and stale. Lipstick had edged on to her teeth and leaked into the fine lines on her upper lip. Her hair hung limp and straight and her fingernails were still dirty. She must once, perhaps years before, have chosen to buy the green and yellow patterned dress of some synthetic fabric but unless it had been very cheap or the last garment in the shop, it was hard to say why. If he could have put up with the smell of smoke which hung about her, Mr Dawson would have done better to have picked Ella of the two sisters. But what kind of a man must he be? Did he live alone at the Rectory or did he too have a presiding mother? I'd know some of the answers next day.

Composing myself for sleep some hour or so later, I realized I'd forgotten to ask Mr Dawson's first name. I needed it for the diary but would surely find out next day. Before I fell asleep I began thinking about the Cosways' great-grandfather and the library he had ‘made’, whatever that meant. Collected? Amassed? Bought? For reasons not at all clear, it was kept locked. Perhaps it lay behind one of those doors in the long unlit passage.

4

The three, and for all I knew then the four, Cosway ‘girls' went in for that peculiar Victorian usage of referring to Mrs Cosway as ‘my mother’ and to John as ‘my brother’ as if they were not mother and brother to all of them. I saw this then and still do as indicative of the isolation in which each existed, even Winifred and Ella, who were so much together, living under the same roof from necessity rather than choice.

So, at Sunday breakfast, Winifred said, ‘My mother can spare you to come to church, Kerstin.’

Permission was uttered in the manner of one mentioning a subject for the first time. I think Winifred said it to emphasize Mrs Cosway's generosity in letting me go out, though there was nothing for me to do at home. John needed very little looking after, seemed not to notice whether other people were present or not, and would probably have been as content to have lived in a small flat somewhere on his own. It was at this time, so early in my stay, that I began to wonder what I was doing there. Why had John wanted someone with a nursing qualification? As I understood the matter, it was he who had asked for help for his mother. All I had seen of him so far precluded his asking for anything, certainly reasoning so far as to think additional help was needed in caring for him.

We set off for church at ten-thirty, Ella and Winifred having smartened themselves up considerably. Winifred even wore a hat, though one of the wide-brimmed, ribbon-trimmed kind generally reserved for weddings. It was the finest day since I had come to Lydstep Old Hall. The sky had cleared, the sun had come out and it promised to be hot. A heatwave might even have been on its way, Ella said rather gloomily. She felt the heat, she told me. Her ankles would swell and she tended to come out in a rash. But at ten-thirty it was only pleasantly warm. We walked down the not very steep hill into the village, a pretty place of cottages, some of them thatched, round a triangular green with a memorial to two world wars in the centre of it. There were some bigger houses too and a row of cottages, one of which, with a large plate-glass window in its roof, Ella called The Studio. This, she said, was to let.

‘Again. The last tenant was only there six months.’

‘Artists,’ Winifred said in a rather contemptuous way, ‘are an itinerant lot. Feckless too. Don't you remember Mr Johnston? The place was overrun with rats while he was there. Mice are all very well, but rats!’

The church stood on the sort of shallow hill that is called an eminence. It was then that Winifred, an authority on local names and north Essex lore, told me what the tower was called and that the ‘rose’ in Windrose referred to its colour. I asked her where her fiancé lived.

To my astonishment she blushed deeply, a blotchy reddening under all the pancake and rouge. ‘The Rectory is over there.’ I was reminded of my reading in Victorian fiction where it was considered unwise to say too much about a young woman's engagement in case it failed to ‘come off’ and her reputation was damaged. The facts that Winifred was forty and we were coming to the end of the 1960s seemed not to enter into it. ‘It's quite a fine Georgian house, isn't it?’

Not having any acquaintance with Georgian houses, I couldn't judge, but I agreed, smiled and, persisting in my embarrassing questions, asked if she intended to make any changes when she moved there.

‘That's a long way off,’ she said in Ida's manner, her expression showing no enthusiasm for becoming Mrs Dawson, and I couldn't help wondering if she had accepted the Rector's proposal for the sake of escape from Lydstep Old Hall or even from becoming what people still called an old maid.

She was very attentive to me and took upon herself the office of a tour guide, telling me that the gate into the churchyard with the little roof over it was called a lychgate from lic , an old English word for corpse, because it served as a shelter for coffins and pallbearers on their way to a funeral. She seemed to know a great deal about ecclesiastical things, very suitable for the wife of a clergyman. I was instructed that graves should face east so that the faithful rising at the Last Day will be looking in the right direction when the Messiah returns to Jerusalem.