Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

The geode stood alone in the middle of a small painted table, its pale lilac crystals glittering in the sunshine and flashing rainbows on to the white wall. Among the other ornaments, a cut-glass bowl and an alabaster lamp suggested themselves to me as also once having belonged to Mrs Cosway. I was less sure about the jug of clouded glass which stood by itself on a tall table and I approached it curiously, gingerly laying a finger on its side.

‘It's Roman,’ Zorah said carelessly. So might someone describe an object as coming from John Lewis's.

‘Valuable, I suppose?’

‘Oh, priceless, I should think. They weren't taking proper care of it downstairs so I brought it up here.’ Later I learnt that she often referred to her mother and her sisters as ‘downstairs’. ‘Lots of Roman glass and porcelain has been found in Essex, you know, but not much of it is as well preserved as that. John loves it – or he used to. He doesn't seem to care about anything any more. If I thought he did I'd take it back.’

I didn't reply. John liking any object but those he carried in his dressing-gown pockets was beyond my imagination. I expected her to say more and was disappointed when all she said was, ‘My bedroom is through the arch and the bathroom is next to it.’

I looked at the four-poster with its white and turquoise bed curtains, the lilac and yellow and blue-green rugs and thought that, elegant as it all was and as far a cry from downstairs as you could get, it was rather like a five-star hotel. It reminded me of the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, a palatial place where a rich aunt of my mother's stayed when she came into town and where I had once been to have tea with her. But looking at the record player, the books, the television, white and neat like the radio, I could understand how Zorah might be happy spending her time up here rather than downstairs. That hardly explained why she wanted to be here at all when it appeared that she could have afforded to buy herself a house in any East Anglian village. Pretty cottages were available at that date for three or four thousand pounds and a fine house for ten.

‘It's very pretty,’ I said.

I am not sure if my comment quite satisfied her. ‘I thought you'd like it.’

She dismissed me by opening the door and standing back to let me pass through. Perhaps I should have reminded her she was going to drive me to the station but I come from a family, and since that date have married into a family, where people do what they say they will and the kind of offer she made is written in stone. I attended John's bedtime ritual, still trying to think of ways I could put an end to dosing him with barbiturates. It would take me twenty-five minutes to walk to the station but less than five in a car and at that time I thought I would get a lift. I put a spare pair of jeans and a sweater into my bag and went downstairs to wait for Zorah. Something made me look out of the window and it was a good thing I did, for the Lotus was gone and Zorah with it. She had forgotten me.

I waited for ten minutes in case she meant to return and then I left, sore and angry. Although with none of that longing which is a sign of love, I was looking forward to this meeting with Mark and now I had no idea when the next train would come or when it would get to London. As it happened, it was only just over half an hour before one came but it shuddered to a halt at every station on the line before reaching Liverpool Street an hour and ten minutes later.

Mrs Cosway and John were always seated at the breakfast table when I came down. I tried to be up by seven, though this was hard for me, as it usually is for people of the age I was then, but it would not have been so difficult if I could have seen the need for it. There was nothing for me to do unless I manufactured chores for myself, and nothing as far as I could see to occupy Mrs Cosway and her son. They could have stayed in bed another two hours for all they did with the time gained, but they were always up earlier than I was and always waiting for me, Mrs Cosway pointedly looking at her watch as I came in. Needless to say, Ida had been up since God knows when to serve them their breakfast.

On the Tuesday after my weekend in London I was down earlier than usual, obviously earlier than Mrs Cosway expected me, for as I came in I saw her give John a pill on a saucer. I might have taken no notice of this but for the start she gave.

‘I didn't hear you come downstairs,’ she said.

My shoes had rubber soles but they were a pair I often wore. She was beginning to lose her hearing, as I had noticed and Ella had told her, but she refused to accept it.

‘I am rather early,’ I said.

‘No need to apologize for that.’

There was a ring of sarcasm in her voice implying that I might consider saying I was sorry for the many occasions I had been late but never for being in advance of my time. Ella arrived in time to hear her.

‘Kerstin wasn't apologizing, Mother,’ she said, pouring cornflakes into a bowl. ‘She was explaining. There is a difference, you know.’

One of their spats developed after that with Ella telling her mother that her passion for punctuality was ridiculous and it was just as bad to be too early for an appointment as too late. Mrs Cosway denied it. If you were early you kept no one waiting, the way Ella kept everyone waiting, saving her own time but wasting theirs. How a child of hers, brought up like the others, came to have such a major character flaw she had no idea. Tempers began running high and into the midst of it walked Winifred, brilliantly made-up as usual, her fingernails blood-red, to put her spoke in, as her mother said, by telling Mrs Cosway that it hardly mattered whether she were early or late as she seldom set foot outside and never met anyone.

Ida came in with a pot of fresh tea. ‘Oh, please, please. I could hear you in the kitchen. Think of John. You know how he hates it.’

It was true that he usually did but now he sat still and silent, his face calm as a death mask, his hands laid on the tablecloth as if about to play on an invisible instrument; I remembered the pill I had seen Mrs Cosway give him and which, surely, had been the root cause of this quarrel. Was she drugging him by day as well as by night and if so, why?

There was no sign of Zorah. She never appeared at breakfast and I supposed she either went without or made tea and toast for herself upstairs. The evening before she had turned up for supper, a much more interesting meal than usual with a pair of cold pheasants and a game pie, all of which I guessed she had brought with her or ordered from Harrods. She said nothing about forgetting to drive me to the station and I also said nothing, recriminations being pointless. Whether it was as a result of Zorah's influence or some other unknown cause, Ella had made some improvements to her appearance during the weekend. Her face was lightly made-up, her hair washed, and instead of one of her droopy prints, she wore a straight shift in red crepe. Some man must be in the offing, I decided, for I had summed her up as a woman who would dress up when intent on attracting, and in spite of the books in her room, one who had never learnt from Jane Austen that ‘man only can be aware of man's insensibility to a new gown’.

The Cosways possessed an enormous amount of silver and, either from an oversight or because she disliked it, Zorah seemed to have purloined none of it. Coming upon Ida opening drawers and cupboards and gazing at the tarnished contents in despair, I had said I would clean it for her or at least make a start on cleaning it. I had begun, and was tackling with the silver polish and a pile of torn-up pyjamas a silver tray bearing on it a cream jug, water jug and sugar basin, when Mrs Lilly arrived.

In the short time I had been at Lydstep Old Hall I had learnt never to take on a task the cleaner might be expected to perform without offering her an explanation. This applied (and still does) to a job she would never do even if asked to, but at which, if she finds anyone else usurping it, she will take umbrage. Accordingly, when Mrs Lilly came into the dining room, pushing a vacuum cleaner she never emptied and with a handful of dirty dusters she never washed, I said brightly, ‘You're always so busy when you're here, Mrs Lilly, that I don't know when you'd make time to do this, so I thought I'd help you out.’