Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘Be like living inside a tree,’ said the taxi man as I was paying him. ‘You'd think all that stuff would damage the brickwork. I wouldn't fancy it. Friends of yours are the?’

‘Not yet,’ I said.

Lydstep Old Hall was the first thing I ever drew. Apart from Dogs Growing, that is. I drew it that night, from memory as I was inside the house, and that is how I have drawn everything ever since.

Mark's sister-in-law Isabel Croft got me the job. She had been at school with the youngest Cosway girl.

‘Zorah won't be living at home any longer,’ she said when I asked her to tell me about the family. ‘I don't really know who will. Ida, certainly. She house-keeps for them. Her other two sisters I never knew well. They may have married or gone to live elsewhere. The house actually belongs to John.’

‘The one I'm to have charge of? He's schizophrenic, is that right?’

‘I don't know,’ she said. ‘“Charge” is rather a strange word to use.’

‘Mrs Cosway's,’ I said, ‘not mine.’

‘I never heard a name for what's wrong with John,’ Isabel said. ‘It rather puzzles me – but there, I expect Mrs Cosway knows what she's talking about. There's a trust to administer the estate. It's a strange business, something to do with the way Mr Cosway left things in his will. I don't suppose you want to know the details. His marriage had gone wrong, I think, and he and Mrs Cosway hardly spoke to each other in his last years. Mrs Cosway was always nice to me but she is rather a difficult woman. Well, you'll see. The house is very big but they keep some of the rooms shut up.’

I asked her what she was going to say about being puzzled. She hadn't finished her sentence.

‘I was going to say I wouldn't have thought John needed looking after. You've been a nurse and he didn't need a nurse when I knew him. Of course he sometimes behaved strangely but he never did any harm. But I don't really know.’

There were so many things she didn't say. Most of them she simply knew nothing about. The Cosways were good at keeping things hidden – from other people and one another.

In the novels of the nineteenth century which I had read while studying English, girls taking posts in country families are always met at the nearest station by some old retainer with a pony and trap. No such offer had been made to me. The Cosways had neither retainer nor pony and the one car they possessed was used by Ella Cosway to go to work. I took a taxi. There were always taxis outside Colchester station and still are for all I know.

The route it followed has been much built up since then and the old road has become a three-lane highway. We drove along winding lanes, some of them narrow, for part of the way following the valley of the River Colne, passing the gates of several great houses. I had read a little about the architecture of Essex and knew that the county lacked building stone. Wood, brick, chalk and flint were the materials used and another material called pudding stone, oblong and rounded pebbles of flint, much used in the construction of churches and of some walls. But the most important material of all was timber and I gazed out of the taxi window, happy to see the information I had read of confirmed in mansions and farmhouses built of tiny Tudor bricks with weatherboarding and half-timbering. Of course it aroused my expectations of what the house I was going to would be like, for Isabel had never described it. It might have a moat, as some did, part of its roof might be thatched, its windows mullioned and its woodwork bare and unstained. And then there was the maze.

‘In the grounds, do you mean?’ I'd said to her. ‘Made of hedges?’

But she only laughed and said, ‘You'll see.’

My excited anticipation made me ask the driver how much further it was and when he said two miles, I had to restrain myself from telling him to hurry up. We bypassed the village but no matter where you were within five miles of Windrose you could hardly fail to see the church, All Saints, its tall rose-red tower a landmark which drew and held your eyes. The Great Red Tower of Windrose, people called it, and some said the name of the village came from its colour. Lydstep Old Hall was about half a mile further on, at the top of a long hill. We approached it along a cart track which the taxi man called a ‘drive’ and which had been gravelled over where it opened out and the house was reached. There was no sign of a maze in this part of the grounds, only grass and ancient oak trees and holly.

The front door, of weathered oak, was of course set back, a rectangular hole deep in the green canopy. Now they were close to my eyes, I saw how large each shiny leaf was and when one brushed my face, felt how cool it was to the touch. You can sometimes only tell an artificial houseplant from a real one by touching its leaves, and then there's no doubt. The imitation one feels stiff and dead while the real seems to breathe and yield under your fingers. The leaf that touched my cheek was like that.

I rang the bell and a woman came to the door. You may have seen her picture in the papers and on the television, though there weren't many of these and it was so long ago. None of the photographs of family members were good likenesses. The drawing I made of her was nearer, though perhaps it's vain of me to say so. At first I thought she must be an employee. She looked about fifty and wore one of those crossover overalls, the staple of sitcom dailies.

She held out her hand and said, ‘I am Ida Cosway. How do you do?’

The hand she gave me was hard and calloused, red and work-damaged.

‘Kerstin Kvist,’ I said and followed her into the hallway, humping my two suitcases.

No description of the inside of that house appeared in the papers and I shan't describe it now. Later on I will give some idea of how it was. I shall just say now that this hallway was the oldest part, an ancient vestige of a house which may have dated back to before Tudor times and which Ella Cosway told me had stood on this spot when the Battle of Agincourt was fought. The fine timbering I hoped to see showed on the plastered walls and low ceiling and there was some carving, vague shapes of roses and shields, half-obliterated by time and wear. Facing the front door was a great inglenook fireplace of red and black bricks.

Ida asked me if I had eaten and when I said I had, offered me a cup of tea. Swedes drink far more coffee than tea but I accepted because I disliked the thought of being shown to my room before I had made my situation and the terms under which I was prepared to work here clear to her (in case her mother had kept them to herself) and found out a little more about this family. She took my cases from me and placed them side by side at the foot of the staircase, rather a mean staircase for such a large house with such a noble hallway, its treads covered in linoleum and its wooden banister rail attached to the bare wall by metal struts. We went down a passage into the kitchen, very large and reasonably well appointed, but the height of its ceiling, all the pots and pans and a lantern hanging from a big black iron contraption the shape of a drying rack, made me think of a film I had seen set in the eighteenth century where food was prepared in just such a place. There were a table and a number of assorted chairs, armchairs as well as the upright kind, and a sofa covered in a blue check blanket.

‘Do sit down,’ Ida said in her lifeless voice. ‘You must be tired from your journey.’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I should like to go out for a walk later.’

‘Goodness,’ she said. The monotonous tone she invariably spoke in made it unclear whether this was uttered in admiration for my hardihood or dismay at my folly. ‘Sugar?’

‘No, thank you,’ and I added hastily, ‘and no milk either.’