Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘John asked for money to spend on impossible things. A sports car, for instance, and then he wanted a boat. The trustees let him have the car and he crashed it into a wall in Great Cornard. I said there were conditions. Daddy thought John would die young, so the will says that if he dies before Mother or if he has to be committed to an institution the house goes to her for her lifetime and the money between those of us who remained unmarried. But only if it's some outside authority that commits him, not if it's Mother. Everything goes to John if she dies first – unless he's in an institution, that is – and passes to us on his death or our children if we're dead. I shouldn't think there'd be any children, would you?’

‘Money must be provided for John's upkeep,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes, for all our upkeep really. Mother has to send our food bills to the trustees and bills for Ida's clothes – Ida has literally nothing and Winifred only what she gets paid for cooking that stuff for people – and plumbers' and electricians' bills. There aren't any extras, though. We never have holidays – how could we with John? I suppose Eric and Winifred will go to the seaside for a fortnight every year now. Of course Zorah's got her house in Italy and she goes all over the world as well.

‘John doesn't like being touched and he freaks out, goes crazy, if anyone tries to kiss him. That's a disaster. And he's had fits, real fits. About five years ago Mother started drugging him to keep him quiet. He used to shut himself in the downstairs lavatory for hours on end. It was worse when he shut himself in the library. He loves the library but he'd throw the books about. Mother got it into her head he'd set the house on fire, though he'd never showed the least inclination to that sort of thing. But that was when she and Dr Lombard started the drugs. She gets them from Dr Lombard, it's all above board, they're prescribed for schizophrenics.’

‘Those drugs have been continuous for five years?’

‘There have been times when she's – well, withdrawn them. I may as well tell you why. Zorah's very fond of John, she said it was wrong what Mother was doing. If John needed that kind of dosage he ought to be in a proper mental hospital under supervision.’

‘And Mrs Cosway did what Zorah told her? Just like that?’

‘My mother wouldn't cross Zorah. Zorah – gives her things. Well, money mostly. All the drink in the house comes from her and all the decent food. She pays for Mrs Lilly. The trust wouldn't, not with four women in the house already, they said. She's promised to buy me a new car – well, us a new car – and she will but in her own good time. I suppose she likes keeping us in suspense. Anyway, you can see why Mother wouldn't go against her. Not while she's here, that is.’

‘Does she pay me?’ I said, thinking that if she did I would be obliged to go. I could hardly stay and be party to this bribe and threat game.

But Ella shook her head. She produced a mother-of-pearl inlaid box full of coloured ‘cocktail’ cigarettes. I fancied a black one, she, of course, pink.

‘John pays you. That is, the trust does. Zorah told Mother to lay off the drugs again and see what happened, try an experiment. It actually worked for a few days, he was quite lucid and ordinary, doing his maths again and reading the papers. He told my mother she ought to have help and that's when he got Ida to apply to the trust for – well, for you. I don't think Mother was keen but there wasn't much she could do. John got bad again soon after that, having tantrums and locking himself in the downstairs loo. You'll say Mother and Dr Lombard could have him committed and that would solve a lot of problems.’

I interrupted her to say with perfect truth and indignation that I wouldn't say it.

‘Oh, well, most people would. Daddy was too cunning for that. As I said, my mother only gets the house and the money if John's committed to a mental hospital by an outside authority. That means two doctors and one of them has to be a psychiatrist.’

The prospect of human villainy shocked me in those days. I'm sorry to say that it seldom does now. By the time you get to my age you have seen too much of it to feel anything but sad. But at that time I was very shockable and showed it with a stare and an exclamation.

‘My God, Ella!’

She had a greater capacity for getting the wrong end of the stick than anyone I have ever known. ‘Yes, it's tough on Mother, isn't it? I try to remember that when she's being nasty. She's got a lot to put up with.’

Long after this, my husband, who is a lawyer, though not a solicitor, told me that he doubted if this will would ever stand up in court in the event of anyone contesting it. More than that, he said he wondered what kind of a solicitor this Mr Salt was that he could draw up such a will. It seemed to me at the time only that the Cosways were subject to some very shady advisers, first Dr Lombard and then this Mr Salt, who had also managed to get himself made a trustee.

Still, it wasn't for me to say any of this to Ella. It would have done no good and caused great offence. I asked instead about the library. And since she had offered to take me in there, I could confess that I had already been in with Zorah. When I did she made a face, poured us more wine.

‘John used to spend hours in there, moving the books and rearranging them. It got too much for Mother. He started taking books out and piling them on the floor so you had to step over them to move around and sometimes you couldn't because he'd built a wall of them. And he didn't like the Bible being there – you know, the one Longinus is holding – and he'd take it down and replace it with something he did like. Once it was Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica . He said he was a militant atheist.’

‘ John ?’ I said, thinking of the poor zombie downstairs.

‘Yes, John. Honestly. Look, Mother's asleep, Ida's in the kitchen and Winifred won't care. Why don't we go down to the library now?’

Now the shock of it was past, I could look at the books the library contained. It was full of treasures, enough desirable books to last me the whole year. Victorian novels by such obscure (to me) authors as Sabine Baring Gould and Mrs Henry Wood filled a whole wall in that passage I had taken to enter the central square. There was The Origin of Species in what may have been a first edition, Paley's Evidences , Gosse's Omphale and Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua . There were thousands I had never heard of before and have never come across since.

Another wall, this one in a passage I was nearly sure I had not passed along before, was devoted to the works of philosophers, and one at a right angle to it, to mathematics. Though fairly quick at mental arithmetic, I am hopeless at maths but I know enough to be sure these were not the intellectual recourse of Mrs Cosway or her daughters. Trying not to look at the nightmare face of a stone Milton, I took down Euclid's Elements , brushed, then blew the thick dust off its cover, and brought it under one of the dim lights. John Cosway, his book, 1938 was written in a strong but strange hand on the flyleaf. As I turned the (to me) incomprehensible pages a folded sheet of yellowing paper fell out. In the same handwriting it was headed Euclidean Algorithm and underneath John had written, it was undoubtedly John, the technique used to find the largest natural number that divides (with zero remainder) two given natural numbers. Repeated use of the division algorithm finds this number, called the greatest common divisor .

Now I don't know if there is anything particularly intellectually challenging about this, only that it was so to me, but evidently not to John, who had written underneath a series of numbers and finally one which he called this greatest common divisor. If this paper was written at the same date as his name was put in the book he was nine years old at the time.