Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Eric said kindly, ‘It was a play on words, of course, the Latin for a cat being felis .’

‘Yes, thank you, Eric. I am not entirely uneducated. Latin was compulsory at my school.’

‘Really, Mother!’ said Winifred, very put out. ‘Eric was merely being helpful.’

‘Is that what it was? Thank you for telling me. No doubt, he will soon tell us that Dunhill is a manufacturer of cigarettes.’

Due to Eric's unfailing good humour, no more was said, and we began to talk of the forthcoming Midsummer Supper. But the significant thing about the conversation was that this was the first time they and I had heard the name of the future tenant of The Studio, all of us of course unaware that this man would have so profound an effect on the Cosways, their lives and their very existence. Yet did he? As I write these words I have to pause and take a long look at them. I think he would have liked to have that effect but I have to ask myself whether things would have been any different if he had never come to Windrose, if he was any more than a shadow passing through their lives.

5

On her way to school, Ella dropped me at Sudbury station and I caught a train to London. There resumed – or rather, at the following weekend, resumed – my love affair with Mark Douglas, a happy and delightful relationship based on a powerful mutual attraction with occasional moments of passion. He had a room in a tall house behind Ladbroke Grove, fondly called ‘the Grove’ by the crowds of young people who were drawn to it by its almost magical magnetic powers. The sexual revolution was in full swing and we were like the girl in the song. ‘Those were the days, my friend/ We thought they'd never end.’ Mark and I made love in his hot little room where dusty trees outside the window made a permanent dusk, and afterwards walked the streets hand-in-hand to sit outside the cafés or drink in the pubs, in that carefree state which is without fear or ambition or the deadening knowledge that things must change.

We are still friends, his wife and I, my husband and he, after all these years and six children between us. I have said how we sometimes go on holiday together. Apart from the attraction, what Mark and I shared was an enthusiasm for the study of character, fairly common in women and fairly rare in men. We still do and so does his wife, while the whole business mystifies my husband, who has no interest in what makes his friends and colleagues tick or motivates his neighbours.

At that first meeting, on a Tuesday just before Midsummer, I told him about the Cosways. Unaware then that he also was a student of the mind and its emotions, I expected to see boredom lay its dulling hand across his lively face and meant to pass quickly on, but he began asking questions and analysing character and I knew that here was another aficionado.

It was his opinion that Mrs Cosway ruled the household because what real money there was she possessed.

‘Three things make for power,’ Mark said. ‘Money, beauty and perseverance.’ Perhaps unconsciously, he paraphrased a New Testament text I had heard from Eric Dawson two days before. ‘And the greatest of these is money.’ He looked gloomy. ‘Horrible, isn't it? Against everything we all believe in and aim for but it's a fact.’

‘What about love?’ I said. ‘It's supposed to make the world go round.’

‘Maybe it does. All I'm saying is that it doesn't confer power. More rubbish is talked about love than anything. Love is stronger than death, for instance. I don't know how many otherwise quite intelligent people say that.’

‘Of course love isn't stronger than death. I've never heard anyone say it.’

‘Perhaps they don't in Sweden,’ said Mark.

Next day we awaited the arrival home of Zorah Todd. Except for me. I had forgotten she was coming, having Mark on my mind as well as a determination to get clear with Mrs Cosway what my duties really were. I had nothing to do except take John for his walk each afternoon, an outing which, as far as I could see, he could have managed perfectly well on his own. He never spoke, he kept his eyes on the ground, walking jerkily and doggedly like someone who does a repetitive and hated job on the assembly line he sees no way of escaping. Yet these walks were his own choice. Was I there to guard him from some unknown harm committed by him or against him? I asked Mrs Cosway, though not quite in those words.

‘Of course you're not a guard,’ she said. ‘What an idea.’

She had been in a bad temper since breakfast, snapping at everyone. Oddly, though, she was better dressed and groomed than I had seen her since I arrived, the sweater changed for a diaphanous blouse, a string of pearls round her neck and rouge on her withered cheeks. I thought she must be going out but she was still at home at lunchtime and already talking of taking her afternoon rest.

‘Of course, if you don't want to go with John on a not very long and certainly healthy walk…’

‘It's not that I don't want to,’ I said with patience, ‘but that I don't think he wants me.’

‘Really, it doesn't matter whether he wants you or not, Kerstin. I can't have him going out alone and that's all there is to it. Who knows what goes on in his head?’

This sounded unpleasantly sinister to me and I decided not to pursue it. Instead, I asked her what else there was for me to do as I felt I was not earning my keep or the wage she paid me.

She shrugged, a common gesture with her. ‘If you feel like that, you can always give Ida a hand. I dare say she'd be grateful.’

Not a very congenial idea, I thought, but still I went off to the kitchen to help with lunch preparation. None was going on or it had been done hours earlier, for Winifred had taken over the kitchen, and it was a very large kitchen, to prepare the food for the Midsummer Supper to be held in the church hall that evening. Luckily, it was a cool day for the time of year, for the fridge was far too small, as English fridges always are, to hold even a quarter of the cold meats and fish starters, salads and elaborate puddings in process of preparation. Every surface was covered with dishes of food over which Winifred had spread clean tablecloths while she boiled ham and baked yet another meat pie.

At the moment I walked in, she was angrily lifting up each cloth by one corner to try to find the fly which had crawled underneath and which she could hear buzzing. She lifted her head to see who had intruded into the domain she had taken over. Her face was scarlet and running with sweat, her cheeks and eyes a smudgy mess of brown and red and black like a busy artist's palette.

‘What is it?’ Her tone was just polite.

‘I came to see if any help was needed.’

‘You can find the fly that's got in there if you like.’

I found it crawling over slices of ham and when I lifted the cloth a wasp flew out as well. Winifred retreated into a corner of the room, flapping a tea towel and shouting, ‘I hate wasps, I can't bear them, it will go for me and sting me, I know it will.’

Made angry by the wet towel, the wasp zoomed in on her, making her scream. I managed to steer it, not towards the open window as I had hoped, but out into the passage, and closed the door.

‘Thank you for that, I loathe those things. If I get a sting it lasts for days – weeks, really.’

Forbearing to say, as people do in these circumstances, that if you leave wasps alone they are unlikely to touch you, I asked her where the lunch things were so that I could lay the table.

‘Don't you know?’ she said, but she opened the various drawers and cupboards to show me and indicated the covered dishes lying apart from her Midsummer confections.

At lunch she was calmer at first and had washed the mess off her face. Mrs Cosway remarked that she wouldn't be going to the Midsummer Supper after all but Winifred and Ella could take me with them if they liked.