Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Now, of course, a vicar looks after three or four parishes and lives in a little purpose-built vicarage (of the same design all over the country, though executed in the local building materials). When Eric occupied Windrose Rectory, a house of ten bedrooms and four ‘reception’ rooms, he had a cleaning woman from the village come in each morning, do some desultory sweeping up and prepare a sketchy evening meal for him.

Men in the sixties were unable to do much about the house and never considered learning how to clean and cook. I doubt if Eric could have wielded a vacuum cleaner or boiled an egg. Perhaps he was capable of boiling a kettle but that was something else I never found out for Winifred said to sit down and she would make tea. Lydstep Old Hall, dreary as its carpets and furnishings were, had an interior out of House and Garden compared with what was to be Winifred's home. The living room, where Eric and I sat on a long sofa of scuffed brown leather in front of a grim steel-grey metal and marble fireplace, was a large, echoing chamber, its walls painted many years before a dirty cream. A chandelier of wooden branches and parchment lampshades had a branch broken and a lampshade missing. The velvet curtains were dust-coloured and the carpet olive green with a just discernible pattern of dark brown. Outside the window I could see a wilderness of weeds, tall and tired at that time of the year, all of them overgrown by rampant brambles. I was sorry to find that my face had shown how I felt.

‘It needs a woman's touch,’ Eric said sadly.

‘It will get one.’ If he thought anyone from Lydstep, but particularly Winifred, capable of transforming this place he must have been very unobservant.

‘Yes.’ He added naively but engagingly, ‘I'm looking forward to being married.’

His prospective bride called me to come and look at the kitchen. It too was big and gloomy, though apparently refitted not long before, perhaps when Eric's incumbency began. The refrigerator was larger than a biscuit tin but not very much.

‘I must tell Eric about the new one,’ she said.

This she proceeded to do over tea, frankly telling him that she had chosen the most expensive refrigerator because Zorah had ‘plenty of money and could have spent twice as much without noticing’.

Eric said something feeble about its being very kind of Zorah. ‘But that's your province, my dear.’ His eyes began twinkling, a feat he achieved by looking up and down under lowered lids. ‘I shall not have occasion to pay many visits to the refrigerator, I'm sure.’

I expected Winifred to rise to this, as she normally would have. But she said nothing for a moment or two while Eric talked to me about the kind of people who would have lived in this house a hundred years before, a household consisting of parents, four or five children, a nanny, perhaps a governess, two housemaids, a parlourmaid and a cook.

‘The living was a good one and in proportion the parson was getting five times what I get.’

Winifred looked up and asked him abruptly if he ever heard confessions. It was news to me that any clergyman in what I thought of as a Protestant Church – Eric always corrected me, saying Anglicans were Catholics but not Roman Catholics – was allowed to hear confessions or, come to that, would wish to.

He looked surprised but said, ‘I have to if I'm asked.’

‘But have you ever?’

‘Once or twice,’ he said, ‘when I was in my last parish. It's usually very devout ladies who want it. I asked them to come round to the vicarage and I heard their confessions in my study.’

‘I don't suppose they were very sensational.’

‘Now, my dear, I couldn't possibly discuss the content.’

‘I didn't ask you to.’

He saw that he had offended her, not a difficult thing to do, and became placatory, smiling and putting out his hand to cover hers. ‘There haven't been any since I came here.’ I saw that he thought she was jealous, resentful of the very devout ladies who contrived to be alone with him. ‘I don't suppose there will be. I believe Tom Trewith at Bishop's Colne hears them on quite a regular basis.’

‘Really?’

Whether Winifred ever went to open her heart to the Reverend Mr Trewith I never heard. Presumably, she told no one if she did. But I wondered, as I wrote in the diary that evening, what she had to confess. A kiss from some predecessor of Eric's? Some teenage fumbling? Since she was a ‘very devout lady’ herself, possibly she would consider this worth confessing to someone who could absolve her.

When I had finished writing I drew a little picture of Eric on the facing page. It isn't a bad likeness and I was quite pleased with it. Eric is sitting in his study and a woman who looks a lot like Lily, the barmaid at the White Rose, kneels at his feet with a balloon coming out of her mouth that says, ‘Bless me, Mr Dawson, for I have sinned.’

It was the first cartoon I ever did.

14

There must have been many people then, though very few now, who went to church as I did; not because I was in the slightest degree devout, not because I could even have called myself an agnostic, but solely because I enjoyed it. I liked the words, the prose of the Book of Common Prayer, the music, the hymns (even though, or perhaps because, some of the verses were ridiculous), the lessons and the beautiful place in which we sat. I even rather missed it on those Sundays I spent in London, something I never dared tell Mark.

So it was no hardship to me to walk down to All Saints with Winifred and Ella, always asking Mrs Cosway's permission and always being told that she supposed so. A newcomer to the village was in church one Sunday morning in late September. Since she was young, female and very good-looking, she was unlikely to be one of those taken up by Eric and made his friend. Felix homed in on her in a way which terrified Ella. She clutched my hand.

‘Who's that?’

‘I've no idea, Ella.’

‘Ask Mrs Cusp.’

The wife of the People's Warden was sitting just behind me. I turned to her with my question, to be told the newcomer was married to the architect who had just moved into a newish house by the Memorial Green.

‘Married, then?’

Ella's panic was subsiding. She lived in a world which hadn't moved with the times, which hadn't noticed the sexual revolution and the rising ascendancy of youth. A married woman was still inviolable, still sacrosanct. Felix had taken no notice of Ella. Our pew might have been empty for all the significance it had for him. As carelessly dressed as usual – Winifred's admonition had brought about no change in his clothes – he was pointing out to the architect's wife the hymns we should be having as they appeared on Eric's numbers board and finding them for her in Hymns Ancient and Modern .

But I had other things to think about at Matins, for the organist whose playing had pleased me some weeks back was once more at the organ and once more playing Kraus. Knowing that British universities go back in early October after the long summer vacation, I saw that this was probably my last chance for weeks to speak to him. He wouldn't be here to play the wedding march for Winifred in November. As it happened, this was another morning of coffee and cakes being provided by her after the service and as I stood there with my cup of coffee and my custard cream biscuit, Ella introduced me to the man who had just walked down the aisle from the vestry.

‘Kerstin, this is James Trintowel.’

We talked about the music and about King Gustav III, architect of the Swedish Enlightenment, who was assassinated while attending a masquerade at the opera. James said he had Kraus's Proserpin on records (two LPs in those days) and I should come up to their house on Saturday for a meal with them and he would play some of it. His mother and father would be delighted. It happened that I should be in Lydstep that Saturday, Mark being home at a family wedding in Shropshire, so I accepted.