Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

I had stopped her just in time. The habit of putting milk into an infusion of leaves has always struck me as bizarre. I watched with relief as she passed me a large saucerless mug of neat brown tea, clear as the water of the Colne was in those days.

‘Are your mother and your brother at home?’ I asked her.

‘Mother is out with John.’ I nodded, though the day was grey and the wind rising all the time. ‘He insists on going out and she doesn't care for him to go alone.’ She managed to smile at me, a smile which aged her by sending wrinkles up her cheeks and round her eyes. ‘I expect that will be one of your jobs. They'll soon be back.’

‘Perhaps you'll tell me something of what I'll be expected to do for him. Your mother's letters said very little.’

‘What excellent English you speak,’ she said. ‘Really, I didn't expect it.’

‘All Swedes speak English.’ This was an exaggeration, though most do. ‘They wouldn't get very far if they didn't. You were telling me about your brother.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘John, yes.’

I sensed she disliked the idea and was trying to avoid it, but lacked the cunning or conversational skills to do so. In the ensuing silence, I drank my tea and studied her. She was a tall woman, as tall as I am, and I, to use the system then used in England, am five feet nine. The drawing I did of her four or five weeks later shows a fine-boned face as rough and neglected as her hands, and grey-threaded hair as dull as her dark brown tweed skirt. Perhaps my cartoonist's habit of exaggerating a subject's outstanding feature came into play here, for I doubt if Ida can have been as round-shouldered as she is in my sketch. Whether I rendered the tension which seemed to grip her, I can't tell. It intensified as I pressed her to tell me more about her brother, though I tried to speak gently.

She spoke more rapidly, as if anxious to say what had to be said as fast as possible, so that pleasanter things could be discussed. ‘He was quite normal as a little boy. Later on he began to get – strange. My mother has her own theories as to what started it off and so does our doctor, Dr Lombard. He treats John. He needs constant care – well, watching.’

‘I'm very sorry. Your mother takes care of him?’

‘She and I,’ Ida said, ‘and now you. Now she's getting old – well, of course, she is old – it is becoming too much for her to do single-handed. My sisters and I help but they both have jobs. It was John himself who wanted you – well, wanted someone, and of course what John wants John gets.’ Her dry laugh had an unpleasant sound, halfway between a cough and a gasp. I was later to learn that Mrs Cosway and her other daughters also laughed like that, as if laughter itself was a discreet substitute for a bitter comment. ‘Though not as much as he used to,’ she said.

I had no idea what she meant.

‘You said you would stay a year, I think. There won't be a great deal for you to do. And you needn't look like that –’ I wasn't aware I was looking anything but interested ‘– there's nothing distasteful. Anyway, you've been a nurse. He can feed himself and the – the other thing, you know.’ She meant his excretory processes and what nurses call the waterworks but the effort at clumsy euphemism made her blush. ‘You won't find it arduous. Really, it's more like babysitting only the baby is a grown man.’

She seemed to be considering whether to say more, then impulsively said, ‘There's madness in the family.’ The expression was old-fashioned then if not yet politically incorrect, but she repeated it. ‘Yes, madness in the family.’ When people say this, phrasing it in various ways, they always sound pleased about this particular genetic inheritance. Cancer or arthritis ‘in the family’ is spoken of quite differently. ‘My great-grandfather was strange,’ she said. ‘He went completely insane, and his son was eccentric, to say the least.’

She compressed her lips and I could tell she was feeling she had said too much. ‘Perhaps I could see my room now,’ I said.

‘Of course.’

We went upstairs. The passage was wide, more like a gallery, and with framed engravings on the walls. Ida showed me into a room facing the front. ‘This room,’ she said, putting the suitcase she was carrying for me on the bed, ‘was intended for my brother. It has its own bathroom, you see. My father was alive then and he had it put in. John didn't like it. He twice let the bath overflow and water came down through the ceiling. He doesn't like showers either – well, he doesn't much like upstairs, so now he sleeps in a room off the hall. I told you he always gets what he wants. But it's dreadful to be mad, isn't it?’

‘It's very sad,’ I said sincerely. ‘I feel for you all.’

‘Do you?’ she said wistfully as if little sympathy for their lot had come from anyone else. ‘That's nice of you.’

Because I like to have things straight, with everyone knowing what everyone else is doing, I asked if it would be all right for me to take a look round downstairs before I went out. At first she seemed taken aback but she rallied. ‘Of course. Turn right out of your room and you'll find the back stairs. They are nearer.’

For a moment I was unsure if this was her rather clumsy way of telling me that now I was in the position of a servant, I must use the back stairs just as I must use the back door. But when I knew her better I understood that it was quite otherwise. She was just awkward. She had been cut off from ordinary social usage by a sheltered and reclusive life.

I unpacked one of the cases and hung my clothes in the cupboard on the dry cleaner's wire hangers provided. I mention this because these hangers epitomized perhaps more than anything the way the Cosways lived, with a mean and cheeseparing indifference to comfort. The first drawer I opened was full of pencils – well, there were probably twenty of them rattling around in it. I wondered who had left them there – the schizophrenic brother? Sometimes I think it was those pencils, HBs, Bs and BBs, hardish, soft and very soft, which prompted me to draw and that without them, I might now be just retiring from my teaching job in Stockholm.

The other suitcase I left till later. Looking out of my window between the thin, unlined curtains of a fabric I believe was called cretonne, I saw an old lady, tall and very thin, walking slowly along in the meadow beyond the garden, with a young man. Of course John Cosway wasn't very young, he was thirty-nine, but everyone treated him as a child, including myself for a while.

The back stairs I found without trouble. They too were ‘linoed’ in a dull gravy-brown colour. They brought me into a passage where one open door showed me the way into the back garden, flowerless but well tended, and another into a passage with many doors, all of which, I think, were locked. I say ‘I think’ because at that time I tried only two of them. The passage was unlit, though there were bulbs in parchment lampshades hanging from the ceiling. I walked in the other direction and found a gloomy dining room. Pictures on the walls were all steel engravings of ruins in eighteenth-century Italy. Since then I have often seen engravings like these on hotel walls and marvelled at why people would want to look, or be expected to want to look, at monochrome pictures of crumbling walls, broken turrets, fractured staircases and piles of weed-grown rubble. One of those in the Cosways' dining room was of a dispirited-looking shepherd and a fat maiden reclining side by side on the topmost tier of a ruined amphitheatre.

John's room, I thought, must be behind one of the doors opening off the hall. I decided it would be wrong of me to try any of those doors and went into the drawing room instead. It was large and of those slightly wrong proportions that characterize large late-Victorian chambers, for the hallway at the Hall was all that remained of an ancient building. Like the other rooms I had seen, though adequately if drearily furnished, this one was without cushions or table lamps or books. Ornaments there were but they were the kind that made me think none of the occupants of this house had chosen them; they were of the sort which friends and relatives, desperate for what to give at Christmas or birthday, bestow for the sake of giving something, no matter what. There was a paperweight in the shape of a cat and made of chromium, a green and khaki plant holder with no plant to hold, two or three small glass animals, probably Venetian, and a fretwork letter rack, designed to be on a wall but which no one had bothered to hang up.