Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Eric came back to Lydstep with us, bringing Winifred in his car. I wrote in the diary that night that looking at the house as we approached, I thought of how it would be transformed when the leaves fell from the Virginia creeper. Then, instead of cloaked in trembling green, its brickwork would be covered in some sort of web, formed by myriad tendrils. Grey, green or brown? All such thoughts were banished by the sight of a white-faced Ida running down the front steps when she heard the cars.

‘What's the matter?’ Mrs Cosway struggled out of the car, needing Ella's hand to help her get on to her feet. ‘What's wrong?’

‘It's John. He's had a fit.’

We hurried in, I at least having no idea what form this sort of fit might have taken. John was nowhere to be seen. Ida looked at her mother, then at the great heavy sofa, its arms and the frame of its back of carved wood, its upholstery a gingery-brown corduroy. This, it seemed, was familiar territory to Mrs Cosway.

‘Give me a hand, would you, Kerstin?’

For a woman of her age she was very strong. I had helped her move the sofa a little way away from the wall before I fully realized what she was doing. When I saw John I stepped back and I think she saw from my face that I would refuse to expose him further to Eric's aghast gaze and that of his sisters. He was sitting on the floor in the triangle made by the slope of the sofa back and the wall, and he must have squeezed with difficulty but perhaps in extreme stress into this narrow gap. His arms were wrapped round his knees, his head laid on them but turned towards us, and his face was white and wet with tears. I have never seen a face, not even a child's, so drenched with tears, so dripping with water from his red and swollen eyes.

‘What did you do to him?’ Mrs Cosway spoke in a thin, tired voice.

Ida shrugged. ‘I touched him. I didn't mean to. I must have been mad. He suddenly said out of the blue that he'd like to do a crossword puzzle, the one in the paper. I was so pleased . I thought how he hadn't said anything like that for ages and I – oh, I took hold of his hands and squeezed them and he screamed and got in there and – oh, I must have been mad.’

‘As you say, you must have been. It's too late now. I don't know why you said “a fit”. He hasn't had a fit.’

‘The only thing to do, Eric,’ said Winifred, as if he had asked, ‘is just to leave him there until he comes out in his own good time.’

‘But he's weeping.’ I thought it strange that Eric said ‘weeping’ instead of ‘crying’. A biblical usage perhaps?

‘Yes, well, he does.’

‘Hadn't we better put the sofa back?’ I said.

Eric helped me and we shoved it back to where it had been before. John made no sound at all. Suddenly recalling her omission, Mrs Cosway said, ruefully but not with much distress, ‘I suppose I forgot to give him his tablet. It's happened once or twice before. But I'm glad you've seen it, Kerstin. Perhaps this will cure you of thinking you know better than I where John's medicine is concerned.’

I was taken aback. It was only once that I had ventured to dispute the need for giving him a pill, and that had been a barbiturate, not the Largactil. Had there been something in my face to show her, when she handed him the sleep drug in the evenings, that I disapproved? Had she read my ‘thinking’ in my expression?

John would have no walk that day. We ate our lunch without him. He remained where he was for hours, Mrs Cosway remarking as she went off to her afternoon sleep that he had no sense of time. While I helped Ida with the dishes, an operation conducted in almost total silence, Winifred and Eric went outside and sat in deckchairs under the mulberry tree, he with a corner-knotted handkerchief spread over his face, she reading, like an elderly couple on the beach.

Ella said to me, ‘Come into my room, I've something to tell you.’

I hoped for great things, though scarcely of so sensational a nature, and I went very willingly up into Ella's pink bedroom with its frills and its doll inhabitants. The first time I had seen them I had been alone with Mrs Cosway. Now seemed the time to comment on them.

‘You dressed all these yourself?’

‘Well, yes. Do you like them?’

‘They're beautifully done,’ I said diplomatically.

‘You might not think me keen on fashion, the way I slop around at weekends, but I actually love it when there's someone to notice. Now I'll open the window, it's really hot today, isn't it, and we'll make ourselves comfy and have a nice drink and a cigarette.’

She produced a bottle of rosé, a very fashionable drink and her favourite. I expected it to be warm but she had kept it in a cold dark cupboard and it was pleasantly cool. We lit cigarettes.

‘You must be wondering what I'm going to say.’

I smiled encouragingly.

‘Oh, don't worry,’ she said. ‘It won't affect you in any way. It's our cross . I mean, the cross we have to bear. Not Winifred much longer, of course, and maybe not me either. Who knows?’

She must have meant rescue by Felix. An English proverb exists about counting one's chickens before they are hatched. I think there should be one about sterile eggs and no chickens ever coming out of them.

But, ‘It's about my father's will,’ she said.

I had intended to ask Mark next time I was in London how I could discover that will's contents. Now I might hardly need to.

‘You'll be wondering how it can concern you and why I should want to tell you family secrets. Well, a will isn't private, it has to be published – thank you, Ella, I thought ‘– so a secret it's not. We do have those – she laughed a little hysterically ‘– but this isn't one of them. It's just that I imagine you must find a lot of things here rather – well, odd. I thought they ought to be cleared up.’

I assumed an interested expression, though not one as avid and fascinated as I felt. It is unwise in these circumstances to look greedy.

‘My father and mother weren't on very good terms. That's making it sound better than it was. They were on very bad terms and had been for some time. I don't know why unless it was something to do with Dr Lombard.’ She changed tack abruptly. ‘John was quite a normal little boy or so they say. He's two years older than I am. He had mumps when he was five and I think that's what changed him. Dr Lombard says no but he doesn't know everything, though he thinks he does. Whatever happened, it didn't make him stupid. He could do amazing algebra problems and that kind of thing.

‘Well, Daddy had made a will, leaving everything including the house to Mother, but something happened to make him change it. He made a completely new will in which he left Mother an annuity and everything else including the house to John. Mother has a life interest in the house but it belongs to John, so neither of them can sell it.’

‘What about the rest of you?’ I said.

‘He thought we'd all get married. That was what he expected women to do and the only real career for them. Zorah was married. He couldn't understand it, that the plainest and youngest of us got married first. Of course what Raymond Todd – that was her husband – liked about her was her brain and her style. All his wives had been clever. The second one was quite a distinguished physicist.

‘As I say, he thought we'd get married and our husbands would keep us.’ Ella gave the Cosway coughing laugh. ‘Ida's engagement was broken off within weeks of his death. I had a chap but there was no chance of him marrying and the one after him was married already. I expect you thought I was a virgin.’

I said not quite truthfully that I hadn't thought about it.

‘Well, I'm not. I suppose Winifred is but I dare say Eric is too. My God, but that'll be some wedding night. I'm digressing, aren't I? I was telling you about the will. Daddy left everything to John on well, certain conditions. That would mean we'd have to ask him for what we wanted – I think he meant we'd have to treat him properly – and in point of fact that means asking the trustees. Daddy set up a trust for John, you see. If he wants something he has to ask the trustees, they're Daddy's nephew Adam, who's a heart specialist, and Daddy's solicitor, Mr Salt, and the son of an old friend of his called Jerome Prance. And Mother. Mr Salt insisted he included Mother but the others always outvote her so her being there isn't much use.