Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Or to protect himself, I thought. Not for the sake of his reputation but to leave his freedom unthreatened.

‘Then he said something funny. He said, “I don't want you to go out with me, I want you to stay in with me.” Wasn't that funny? I could sneak out after dark on Sunday night and no one would see, he said.’

‘You could, I suppose.’

It wasn't for me to ask her if she really wanted to be the female actor in this back-to-the-village-you scenario or what she thought was the point in the late 1960s of a single man keeping a by then quite permissible relationship with a single woman a dark secret. It looked as if this would develop into the kind of affair a man like Felix Dunsford has with women who have no money. Once he has begun the process of enslavement, he can stop even taking them to the pub. If they want a drink they can bring it with them. He won't mind providing a cup of tea. A man of this sort will go on for months or even years like that. With rich women it is quite different. They have luxurious homes for him to go to with ample drink laid on, they can pay for expensive hotels, weekends away, he won't even have to give them tea or waste heat and electricity on them. But Ella was one of the poor women – in more senses than one.

‘Zorah is cruising round the Aegean on someone's yacht,’ she told me, leaving the subject of Felix. ‘A man with a title, I can't remember his name. Mother is afraid she'll marry one of them and then she'll – well, stop the benefits.’

She might also stop squirrelling away Mrs Cosway's property, I thought but didn't say. Lighting yet another cigarette, Ella asked me what I thought of Dr Lombard. I said I didn't know, I hadn't thought much about him.

‘He's coming over this evening. You can study him. I'd love to know what you really think. It's all very well Mother worrying about Zorah remarrying. Winifred and I thought for years she'd marry Selwyn Lombard.’

‘Your mother, do you mean?’

‘Of course. Did you think I meant Zorah? The trouble is, or the good thing is, it turns out he's got a wife alive somewhere or did have a couple of years ago.’

We went in when Dr Lombard arrived and I was sent for. I don't know why I was, as he went into John's bedroom and once I had opened the door for him and closed it behind him, I was banished and told to help Ida with the dinner.

‘He's a good doctor,’ Ida said. Her attitude to him was very different from Ella's. ‘Prescribing that Largactil for John has made a great difference to all our lives. Before that you could say John ruled this household, we were all slaves to his whims and moods.’

This aroused in me an enormous distaste and disapproval, though I should have found it hard to say why. Perhaps it was better for John to be drugged into a kind of somnolent apathy, his eyes glazed, his feet stumbling and his hands shaking, than to be subject to fits and locking himself up in bathrooms. I said nothing, only listened while she continued to sing Lombard's praises and her mother's reliance on him until she had gone a long way towards convincing me that he and Mrs Cosway were lovers of long standing.

He came into the drawing room after a while, told me Mrs Cosway was ‘seeing to’ John and, calling me ‘young lady’, said she would not require my services that evening.

‘Give Dr Lombard a drink, would you, Kerstin?’ said Ida.

He chose that kind of sweet pale sherry which to me is the worst drink in the world, and sat sipping it, nursing the glass in his hands. I was at a loss with him, finding nothing to say and waiting in vain for him to speak. After a few minutes, he put the glass down and picked up the newspaper. Something he read made him laugh quite raucously. To my relief, Winifred came in and, almost immediately after her, Mrs Cosway. He struggled to his feet, took Winifred's left hand in his, smiling at her engagement ring, but her mother got a warm kiss on her cheek close to her mouth.

‘You left your doctor's bag in John's room, Selwyn. Don't forget and go home without it.’

Someone was using the phone in the dining room. I passed the door, which was slightly ajar, and heard Ella's voice say, ‘Will you take a message to him? Say it's Tamara.’

I had never heard the name before. It sounded Russian to me or from Central Asia. I was to hear it several times in the future. As I went on towards the kitchen, I looked back and saw Ella come out of the dining room.

‘I suppose you heard that.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘He hasn't got a phone and anyway I wouldn't want him to phone me here. I mean, anyone might answer the phone. So we have an arrangement. I phone the pub and ask them to give him a message. He says to say it's Tamara, then he'll know.’

Come to that, he would have known if she had said it was Ella.

‘I'll have dinner and then I'll go down there. That will give him a chance to have a few drinks and see his friends. I won't go into the pub. He'll go home a few minutes before I'm due. I'll think of something to tell Mother.’

I said, because I could stand no more, but I said it gently, ‘You're not committing adultery, Ella.’

She laughed uneasily and ran upstairs, coming down for dinner dressed up in pink flowered cotton and high-heeled shoes. Picking at her food, clockwatching, she was in a fever of impatience. I tried to put myself in Felix Dunsford's shoes, asking myself how I would feel as a man confronted by this combination of frenetic eagerness with a passionate desire to please. Ella would be a heavy burden. The moment Ida took away our dessert plates, she was on her feet, eyes on her watch.

‘Where are you going to, my pretty maid?’ said Dr Lombard.

‘Oh, just down to the village to see my friend Bridget.’

‘Having a party, is she?’

This was Winifred, speaking in a very dry voice. Ella gave her a venomous look but said nothing. Two minutes later we heard the car start up and move off down the drive.

‘What it is to be young,’ said Dr Lombard and told the quite famous story about Augustine's astonishment when he came upon St Ambrose reading to himself silently instead of aloud, something apparently very rare at the time. He got up, said he was an old man and needed his ‘beauty sleep’.

‘Now don't forget your bag,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘I told you it was in John's room.’ Having eaten and drunk very well, he was obviously unwilling to move far. ‘Kerstin will fetch it for you.’

I went, not too pleased at being sent on errands, but attempting a pleasant smile. After all, I was their employee. John was fast asleep, deeply and heavily asleep, spread-eagled on his back. I pulled the eiderdown over him, though he was quite adequately covered. What made me glance at the photograph? I took it to the window, where just enough light remained for me to see it. I had seen it before. I saw it, when I bothered to look, every time I assisted at John's going to bed. This time I looked at it with new eyes. There in the group was Zorah some years before she had had her nose reshaped. When she was a teenager it was a large hooked nose, a replica of the one which had been facing me across the dinner table.

There could be no doubt. I picked up the doctor's bag which belonged to her father and took it downstairs to give to him.

13

It is supposed to be a great honour to be asked but I was rather taken aback when Winifred invited me to be her bridesmaid. I imagined Mark's laughter if I told him I had accepted, I imagined the weary business of fittings for dresses and, worse, the tripping up the aisle, and I said no, trying to be as nice and grateful-sounding about it as I knew how. Her asking me seemed to point to a lack of friends. Had June Prothero been asked and had she refused? Though I tried not to show disapproval or even criticism, I found it strange that a woman of forty would want bridesmaids and I wondered if this wedding was to be a frothy and girlish affair of long white gown, bridal veil, bouquets and beribboned cars.