Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

A kind of grudging suspiciousness narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her upper lip but she accepted my explanation, though taking the rag out of my hand and showing me how to apply what she called ‘elbow grease.’ Not much time was spent on this as she had news to impart and Ida had to be called in to hear it while Mrs Lilly trailed very slowly round the room, talking as she wiped surfaces. Her news was the arrival at The Studio of Mr Dunhill, her own cottage being just on the other side of the little green from his.

‘He didn't have the removal people. All his stuff came in a van and I reckon it was driv –’ Essex people say ‘driv’ for ‘driven’ ‘– by a pal of his on account of they both went in the Rose when they'd done the unloading. He didn't have much. A lot of books and some great big frames with cloth stretched on them and things to paint pictures on. Him and the pal had a couple of G and Ts in the Rose and that's where Mr Lilly saw them when he went in for his pint.’

All this was of very little interest to me but Ida and Winifred, who had also come in, were enthralled by it. Living in the country narrows the mind and I wondered if I would get like them after a year of it.

‘What does he look like, Mrs Lilly?’ This was Winifred, always interested in personal appearance.

‘Oh, I don't know. Tall, dark and handsome – is that what you want me to say? I'm no good at what folks look like. He's all right, about forty, got a lot of long hair. When I was a girl we used to say we'd like a handsome husband and a thousand a year. Wouldn't go far these days, would it?’

‘I wonder if he goes to church, said the Rector's prospective bride.

‘Not by the looks of him.’ Mrs Lilly gave a raunchy laugh. ‘I'd be surprised.’

Silently but not stealthily, Zorah came in. She must have been listening outside. She wore a blue and white check dress, summertime country wear. ‘I can tell you exactly what he looks like, Winifred,’ she said. ‘I saw him myself yesterday.’

‘Why didn't you say?’

‘I'm saying now, darling. I didn't imagine you'd have such a voracious appetite for the details of a bachelor's appearance.’ One of her crimson blushes flooded Winifred's face. ‘By the way, I've discovered he's a painter of abstracts,’ said Zorah. ‘He has exhibited. I don't know if he's ever sold anything. Not likely, I'd say. Whoever told you his name was Dunhill was wrong. It's Dunsford. He's about six feet tall, thin, shoulder-length black hair. Personally I don't care for long hair on a man. Some would call him good-looking.’ Whether or not she would, she failed to say. ‘Satisfied?’

‘You needn't make such a song and dance of it, Zorah.’

‘I thought it was you doing that, darling.’

‘I'm going to start hoovering,’ said Mrs Lilly, ‘so you'd best all clear off if you want to hear yourselves speak.’

Ida helped me carry trayfuls of silver out to the kitchen. At a loose end now her catering was over for the time being, Winifred followed us to drift round the big room, pausing first to gaze out of the window, then opening the fridge door and pushing jars and dishes about inside.

‘Zorah can be a real bitch,’ she remarked to the remains of cold pheasant. “‘Voracious appetite for the details of a bachelor's appearance,” indeed. She's got a nerve. When we all know she'll get hold of him. She always does.’

‘Oh, Winifred.’ Ida gave a meaning glance at me.

‘Kerstin won't say anything,’ said Winifred. ‘She wouldn't be interested.’

Which only went to show how little they knew me. I sat with John and Mrs Cosway and shared with her the two newspapers they took. She read, he did nothing. Now I was beginning to see his condition as a possibly drug-induced dazed state, light was starting to dawn on other aspects of his life and habits. I asked myself – I had already asked Mrs Cosway in vain – why she had taken me on. What was I for? Solely to accompany this poor, sluggish, zombie-like man for an hour's walk in the afternoons? And to watch him go to bed in a neglected living room with a piano in it?

My day off this week would be the Wednesday, too soon to arrange to see Isabel. I would phone her, though, and ask if I could call and see her at her home in London the following Monday. It was she who had recommended me to the Cosways and them to me and I had a lot of things to ask her. Meanwhile, as if reading my thoughts on my uselessness at Lydstep Old Hall, Mrs Cosway looked up from her paper and asked me if I would ‘supervise’ John's bedtime that evening as she, in spite of what Winifred had said at breakfast, would be going out. In the afternoon I went out with him for his walk as usual and this time I tried a different route. Seeing that he put up no resistance when, instead of opening the gate into the field, I said, ‘I think we'll go by the road today, John,’ I led him a little way down the hill and on to the public footpath which skirted the side of the meadow, went a little way into the wood and crossed a river, which must have been the Colne, by a footbridge. I hoped it would take a turn to bring us back without retracing our steps and this was what happened. We came to a lane and a signpost which pointed to Windrose in one direction and Lydstep Green in the other and turned left.

John walked obediently along, plodding like a weary horse pulling too heavy a load. It upset me just to look at him, wondering if he had been given some mind-numbing drug early that morning and possibly – though this was guesswork on my part – another later in the day. Cowardly though it was, I tried to solve this by turning my eyes away from him to gaze at the Great Red Tower of Windrose, a blunt finger pointing skywards out of the horizon, at a flock of birds which rose in formation from one of the fields and then at a cat stalking some tiny creature under the hedge. But my thoughts stayed with him and my eyes went back to his lumbering figure, round shoulders and forward-thrusting head. Mrs Cosway had said that it was he who had asked for me, asked for someone to help her, that is, but it seemed to me then that this was the hardest thing of all to imagine, that he might have any wishes or be capable of making any real decisions. Suppose I asked him? Would he answer? I was thinking how impossible that question would be to ask, how unlikely that there would be any reply, when without warning, John stumbled and fell over, sprawling on the ground.

Appalled, I instantly blamed myself, though nothing out of the way had happened except that we were following a different route. Though thin, I was very strong and fit and I bent down to John before remembering I mustn't touch him. He gave no more sign that he had fallen than if he had been a waxwork. Indeed, lying there, he looked like some sort of lay figure, as rigid as the stone on the road he had tripped over. Touching him would be worse than leaving him there, I thought, and I sat down on the grass verge to wait. Time goes very slowly in these circumstances and I began to wonder what to do if he stayed there for hours. He might even fall asleep, he so often seemed on the verge of it, as if sleep was always waiting beside him to pull him into its folds. But just as I was thinking I would have to leave him and go back to the house for help, he got to his feet and started to walk on without a word.

He was quite unhurt. When I told Mrs Cosway what had happened I got an unexpected reaction. I thought she would be angry and I was prepared for that, being pretty sure that if we had followed our normal itinerary none of this would have happened. If she had said in response that, as a result, she would stay in that evening instead of leaving me in charge, I wouldn't have been surprised. But she only gave one of her shrugs, a movement that conveyed indifference more perfectly than any I have ever seen.