Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Both are possible. They would have spoken in the street or ‘passed the time of day’ as the English curiously put it, bumped into him at a drinks party after Winifred was safely married. Engaging herself to Eric Dawson had made not knowing him better impossible. Eric always took up new people. I think it was partly the clergyman's proselytizing need to add to his flock, partly an aversion to solitariness and quite a lot of just wanting to be kind. It seemed to extend to anyone and everyone, for in the year I was at Lydstep he made friends not only with Felix Dunsford but also with other newcomers, an architect and his wife and an old man who had moved into a Memorial Green cottage when he was widowed.

Eric always began, apparently, by inviting the new friend to the Rectory for a meal. Winifred had prepared these dinners or suppers herself in the past in her capacity as itinerant cook. It was through her asparagus soup, roast lamb and tarte tatin served up to Peter Johnston, previous tenant of The Studio, that she and Eric had first discovered that, in his words, they were ‘made for each other’.

‘Before that everyone thought he was keen on Ida,’ said Ella, who had followed me upstairs.

I hastily hid the diary. ‘Ida?’

‘She used to do the flowers in the church when Mr Clare was the Rector and when Eric came she kept on with it. This will be four or five years ago.’ Ella had produced a bottle of rosé and two glasses. ‘I've told you how Eric takes up every new person who comes to Windrose. I meant men, of course. My sister was the only old person, so to speak, he got pally with, and the only woman.’

‘You mean he and Ida went about together?’

‘Not exactly. It was more that she'd go to the Rectory on some pretext – or no pretext, I expect – and she'd make tea for herself and him and they'd chat, that sort of thing. I don't know what happened but nothing came of it.’

I said it didn't sound like a grand passion.

‘No, it wouldn't suit me but I expect you'll say that's what he's got with Winifred.’ Ella was fond of telling me what I would say in almost any given situation and she was always off the mark. She gave me a conspiratorial smile. ‘Not everyone feels things with the same intensity as you and I do, Kerstin.’

Cautiously I steered us to the subject of the library without mentioning it, only saying that when The Woman in White was finished I would have nothing to read.

‘Yes, I promised to take you into the library, didn't I? But I don't know if you'll find anything you fancy.’ She looked over her shoulder, then leant nearer to me. ‘My mother doesn't like people going in there, you know. She's afraid the door will be left unlocked and John will get in, though the state he's in these days I don't suppose he even knows where it is any more.’

I waited, unwilling to say anything that would betray my increasing desire to see behind that door.

‘I doubt if anyone's been in there for five years,’ she said. ‘The key's in a secret place but I expect I can find it.’

Not that evening, though. She settled herself in my armchair for a cosy chat.

9

He was every hero of Gothic romance, every lady novelist and dramatist's creation of the kind of man attractive to naive women. He was the forties film star who looks best in knee breeches. I am not saying this was apparent to me at once but I had an inkling of it as Felix Dunsford slung himself into an armchair and lounged as if exhausted from enterprises such as duelling, making love, climbing mountains in a storm and swimming the Bosphorus. He was dark, almost swarthy, and in those days when for a man to be unshaven was as bad as wearing earrings, showing a day or two's growth of beard. His long black hair was greasy but his open-necked white shirt was clean. Shaking hands rather reluctantly, Mrs Cosway looked at him as if she had never before seen a man without a tie.

I think it's worth saying here – though of course I didn't realize it immediately – that he must have studied the Byronic hero. The way he behaved can't have been natural. It was too stereotyped, too fictional . This was how he wanted to be, no doubt because he found it paid dividends. I never saw him act out of character and this was one reason why he always appeared dull to me. I could predict what he would answer or say next, and if at first this amused me, after a while it became tedious. Even then, that first evening, I knew he would habitually drink too much, have little or no means of support, live dangerously, chase women and misuse them, and when things became too hot to hold him disappear.

Felix wasn't the only dinner guest. I had been hoping it wouldn't be too long before I saw Dr Lombard, the doctor Mrs Cosway had visited that evening when I had been left in charge of John. She addressed him as ‘Selwyn’ and he her as ‘Julia’. This would hardly be noticed now, when everyone calls everyone else by their given names, but then it meant something. Selwyn Lombard and Julia Cosway were friends of long standing. The portrait I made of him, taking up a whole page of the diary, was of an old man, though a few years younger than his friend, tall, his hair still dark. His face would have been handsome but for the big hooked nose. A greater contrast in dress to Felix, whose picture faces him on the opposite page, could hardly be found, for the doctor is wearing a black pinstriped suit with waistcoat and a grey tie like shiny pewter.

Knowing that he prescribed for John, I expected him to ask after him but nothing was said. Like the Cosway women and Eric, the doctor took it for granted John wouldn't be there and, either by a conspiracy with Mrs Cosway or because he gave the matter no thought, kept silent on an awkward subject. Eric Dawson turned out to be one of those people who can't be in the presence of a doctor of medicine without consulting him. He had met Dr Lombard before and this time was scarcely in his company for five minutes before he was pointing out some problem with, of all things, his fingernails. Sitting next to the doctor while our drinks were dispensed by Ida, he spread both hands out on the little table between them and asked why his nails were splitting and scaling. Had he a fungus? It was embarrassing when he was baptizing babies.

‘I think you'd better come over to my surgery when you have a moment, Rector,’ said Dr Lombard, barely suppressing a smile. ‘Here and now won't really do, will it?’

Eric seemed rather taken aback and was putting on and taking off his glasses when Felix Dunsford said in his languid Byronic voice, ‘That reminds me of the woman in the restaurant who saw her dentist at a table on the other side of the room. She rushes over, opening her mouth and sticking her fingers inside, and tells him about her toothache. “Madam,” says he, “I'm thankful I'm not your gynaecologist.”’

This made Dr Lombard roar with laughter and Ella managed a sort of giggle. But the effect on the others was to stun them with shock. It seemed that nothing of this enormity had ever before been uttered in the drawing room at Lydstep Old Hall. Mrs Cosway closed her eyes and shook her head slowly from side to side. Glancing at Eric, Ida as rapidly looked away. The look on his face was (as the English say) enough to curdle milk. Felix produced a squashed Capstan Extra Strong packet from his trouser pocket and offered it to Ella.

‘Fag?’

‘Oh, no, you must smoke ours,’ Ida intervened in a hostessy way, handing round cigarettes from a box. ‘They are rather milder than yours but perhaps you won't mind.’

‘I won't mind,’ said Felix. ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth, that's me.’

His anecdote I used years later as the subject for a cartoon. Several readers of the magazine wrote in to say it was disgusting and they were surprised at me. The shock and outrage in these letters brought back the Cosways and Eric, all but Ella deeply embarrassed. Soon afterwards she went to the kitchen to see to her dinner. Her appearance was much improved that evening, rather obviously as I thought, since everyone knew she ‘had her eye’ on Felix Dunsford, as Winifred had put it. The red suit that was her best flattered her more than anything I had ever seen her wear. When she had make-up on, as she did that evening, she applied it with a surer and less lavish hand than Winifred. Felix's eyes followed her as she left the room but, naturally, because he was a laid-back ladykiller modelled on movie pirates and highwaymen, he gave no sign beyond a lazy smile that she attracted him.