Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

The first drawing I did, the one of the house, was on one of the diary's endpapers because I had no other paper. Zorah, looking like a fashion plate, was in there too and for the same reason. On my day off I took the bus into Sudbury and bought paper but using it didn't feel the same. For one thing, it wasn't the thick cream vellum of the diary but thin white stuff, and it was loose, just slippery sheets, and there was nothing in the room to rest on but the diary itself. I didn't know it then, because I had no plans for the future or ideas of what it would be, but this decision of mine to keep up my drawing, and on the pages of the diary itself, formed a habit for me which some have called eccentric. When I began my cartoons I found they would only work if I did them in a notebook. Since then I have always done this, I can't make any sort of drawing (except the Dog Growing) on a loose sheet, and over the years I've torn out the page with the cartoon on it and sent it by post, then by fax, and lately have scanned them and sent them by email attachment.

The next sketch I made in the diary was of Felix Dunsford.

I had no difficulty in recognizing him from Zorah's description. No one else in Windrose had shoulder-length black hair or hands quite so ostentatiously paint-stained. I had walked into the village one morning to do some shopping Ida had no inclination for and probably no time either. Windrose wasn't well endowed with shops. There was a good butcher, quite famous in north Essex, a general store that was also the post office and newsagent, and a greengrocer. The days when English villages would have either no shops at all or else a designer boutique and a hairdresser were still a long way in the future. I encountered Felix Dunsford in the general store, where he was buying cigarettes and a packet of tea.

I have said that for the most part the village people were middle-aged or elderly, so it was probably my youth which made him look me up and down in an appraising way. But it was a rude way just the same.

In a phrase I had picked up from Mark, I said, ‘You'll know me again.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, and, ‘it was only an admiring glance.’

Such a remark tells you more about a man's nature than any amount of listening and observation. I went up to the counter and asked for the things Ida wanted. The eyes of the other people in the shop were on me, and disapprovingly. One woman positively scowled. I wanted to laugh but controlled myself. Holding Ida's shopping basket in one hand and a paper carrier full of vegetables in the other, I walked back to find Winifred at the kitchen table, writing a menu and a list for a dinner party booked for the following Saturday week. When I remembered the chaos and panic of the Midsummer Supper I was glad that was my weekend off and I'd be in London.

‘I've seen the painter,’ I said, knowing by now that retailing bits of gossip was almost a bounden duty in that household.

‘What's he like?’

Zorah had already told her and so had Mrs Lilly. ‘Good-looking. Long hair.’ Better not mention the appraising stare, I thought. ‘He was in the shop buying cigarettes.’

‘Eric is bound to pal up with him,’ Winifred said. ‘He always takes up with new people whether they go to church or not. He says it's his function but I think he likes it.’

She insisted on reading her menu to me. It seemed very elaborate for a country dinner, for this was long past the days of big house parties and before England became cuisine-aware: prawn and lobster cocktail, leek and potato soup, roast lamb, mint sauce, redcurrant jelly, duchesse potatoes, new peas, a Pavlova and a hazelnut tart, Stilton and biscuits.

‘What's a Pavlova?’ I said.

‘A sort of meringue with raspberries and cream. Do you think it will do?’

‘They'll love it. But will they get through all that?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Ida. ‘No problem out here. I suppose you'll want to take over the kitchen on Saturday. I only ask because it puts Mother in a bad temper if she doesn't get a good lunch at the weekend.’

Winifred threw down her pencil. ‘It's my living!’ she shouted. ‘You don't earn anything and nor does Mother and as for John – God knows he doesn't need it. What am I supposed to do if I can't have the kitchen for an hour to earn my living? It's my job .’

‘Of course you must have the kitchen.’ Ida said in the tone of someone much put-upon. ‘Of course. I'll manage.’

The previous weekend I had been in London and by the time this Sunday came round I had almost forgotten the only one I had so far spent at Lydstep.

‘You'll come to church?’

Winifred's inquiry was more in the nature of a command. She had attended Holy Communion one morning in the week, so was at breakfast with us this Sunday.

‘Eric will be taking Communion after Matins today.’

‘I'll come,’ I said, not revealing my vague knowledge about this appendage to the service.

John sat at the table, his toast eaten and his tea half-drunk, contemplating his folded hands which lay on the tablecloth, trembling faintly. They seemed to have an hypnotic effect on him as if they might send him into a trance or had already done so. In the light of my recovered knowledge, I questioned why a man so apparently lifeless and calm would need Largactil but perhaps he was only lifeless because of the Largactil.

Isabel Croft might answer this question for me, I thought, as we set off for church. She had phoned the day before at a blameless hour to invite me, not to meet for lunch but to come and have it with her at her house. As a child Isabel had stayed at Lydstep Old Hall in her holidays and been quite close to Zorah, whom she still occasionally met. She could also tell me about the maze I had been unable to find.

Though covering the head hadn't been a rule in the Church of England for more than twenty years, Winifred insisted on wearing a hat. As a special mark of piety, I suppose, designed to impress Eric Dawson and not so very different from the habit of those Muslim girls one sees today who wear a miniskirt and low-cut top but the hijab tied round their heads and covering their necks.

We filed into what Ella grandly called ‘the Cosway pew’ and the two of them fell on their knees to make their silent devotions. The organist was playing a cantata which seemed familiar and after a moment or two I recognized the work of the Swedish composer Josef Martin Kraus. This was the music he wrote for the birthday of Gustav III and it made me want to meet this organist and ask about his rare choice of a voluntary by a composer who hadn't even found his way into the Oxford Companion to Music .

The pews began to fill up, in so far as they ever did, with Cusps and Walthams, Mrs Lilly and her husband and several of the people who had been in the general store when I went shopping there. Ida and Zorah never went to church and Mrs Cosway only rarely. There seemed some mystery about Ida's staying away for she had apparently once been a devout attender. Much to my surprise, when I thought the entire congregation were in their seats, Felix Dunsford came in. Instead of choosing a pew at the back, he came right up to the front and sat down on the other side of the aisle from ourselves.

His appearance caused a stir. This was partly due, I suppose, to the length of his hair. Long hair on men was common in cities then but not in the conservative countryside, where the short-back-and-sides was not only de rigueur but almost a moral duty. It was soon after this that I heard Mrs Waltham say of a teenage boy that he must be a bad lot because he had hair which covered his collar. Felix Dunsford's was much longer than that. He wore a jacket of sorts, linen and crumpled, very unlike the suits complete with waistcoats the other men had on and which filled the church with the reek of mothballs and sweat. His trousers were jeans and paint-stained at that. I judged him the sort of painter who takes pains to leave no one in ignorance for a moment of the art he practises.