Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Outside the rain continued to fall and although I could see nothing from inside the library, I could hear its drumming and sometimes hear sheets of water dashed across the glass by the rising wind. It was rather strange in there, claustrophobic, enclosed, twilit, yet with the constant sound of falling water in the background. Nothing else could be heard. It might have been any time of the day or night. I thought this was perhaps why John liked it. It must have been peculiarly suited to someone who wanted to be alone, eschewed human contact, appeared only to love inanimate objects, needed books, puzzles, conundrums, more than any companionship. Perhaps he liked the stone faces which so intimidated me. They were not real, as he would know they were not, and unable to assume the expressions of rage or exasperation or despair he daily saw in the living faces around him.

At that moment I saw locking the library up to keep him out as particularly cruel and I was starting to think what I could do to put an end to this embargo, when a kind of howl, half scream, half groan, broke the near silence. I had thought nothing but the swish of falling water would be audible in the library, which seemed hermetically sealed, but I heard that sound.

Growing familiar by this time with ways in and out, I twisted round corners and down short passages, flung open the door and came out into the passage. A hubbub of voices reached me from the hall. Winifred and Ida were there, Mrs Cosway lying on the floor at the foot of the stairs, not unconscious, already struggling to sit up. I saw her wince with pain as she tried to move her left leg. All round her on the floor were the bits and pieces she had been carrying downstairs and which must have contributed to her fall, a glass of water – broken and the contents splashed everywhere – John's pyjamas, sheets of newspaper and her knitted cardigan.

‘Don't try to move,’ Ida said. ‘I'll phone Dr Lombard.’

‘He won't be able to get me up off this floor.’ She sounded angry rather than hurt but when she lifted her hands I saw that the left wrist was crooked. ‘I think my leg's broken too. How did it happen? Did someone give me a push?’

‘Mother,’ said Winifred, ‘what are you saying?’

Mrs Cosway waved her good wrist at the stairs. On the first landing John stood, holding the banisters, looking down.

‘If Eric were here,’ Winifred said brightly, ‘I'm sure he could lift you.’

‘Well, he's not, so what's the use of that?’

Ida came back to say Dr Lombard would be there in five minutes. ‘Now, I wonder if John might possibly…’

‘I don't want him near me,’ her mother snapped back.

John began to come downstairs. He paused at the foot and stood looking at his mother. Then he went into the downstairs lavatory and locked himself in. I heard the key turn. Trying to treat him like the rational adult I was becoming sure he was, I asked him if he was all right. His mother had fallen down the stairs but she was well if injured. He was on the other side of the door but he made no answer when I told him this. He made no sound at all.

‘He'll be in there for hours,’ Ida said.

‘I know you think I'm making it up,’ said Mrs Cosway from the floor, ‘though why I should invent such a thing about my own son, I can't imagine, but I have a very strong feeling I was pushed.’

No one said anything. I knew John was incapable of touching, still less pushing anyone. Winifred shrugged and cast up her eyes. I heard Dr Lombard's car and within seconds he was in the hallway. To me, before this, he had simply been an old man, pompous, given to strange irrelevant anecdotes, any character he might have blanked out by my new knowledge that he was Zorah's father. That morning, I suddenly recognized that he was a very strong old man, thin and muscular, his fitness revealed by sweater and flannel trousers. He knelt down with ease – I had been wrong about the reason for his failure to kneel in church – and spoke to Mrs Cosway. Hearing him call her ‘darling’ almost shocked me.

‘Are you in pain, darling?’

‘My leg hurts,’ she said. She lifted up her right hand, now beginning to swell. ‘I don't know what I've done to my wrist.’

‘I'm going to take you to hospital.’

Mrs Cosway had doubted that he would be able to get her off the floor but he did so with ease, slipping his arms under her and lifting her up, rising from his kneeling position with only the faintest sign of strain and no sign that he had hurt her. She looked into his face and he smiled at her, an exchange of tenderness between them which made Winifred purse her lips and frown.

‘I said you wouldn't be able to get me off the floor, Selwyn, but I was so wrong.’

‘Then I'm glad I can still surprise you after so long.’

‘Where are you going to take her?’ Winifred's voice was abrupt and sharp.

‘The cottage hospital.’

Dr Lombard bent his head, touched Mrs Cosway's cheek with his lips and carried her out of the house. Over his shoulder he said, ‘I'll call on my way back and tell you what's happening.’

Once the front door closed Winifred made the noise the Victorians rendered as ‘Pshaw!’

‘He means well,’ said Ida.

‘The road to hell must be so well paved it never needs maintenance.’

This was the only mildly witty thing I ever heard Winifred say. Years later I tried to use it for a cartoon but the circumstances were never right and I abandoned the idea. Winifred went into the dining room to phone Eric. Moral support was what she wanted him for, I suppose, but I wondered if there had ever been or ever would be the kind of shared tenderness, sympathy and enduring love between those two as I had just seen in the faces of that old couple.

*

Mrs Cosway's accident and departure for the hospital rather eclipsed the interest there might have been in Zorah's arrival from London in the Lotus. ‘Where's John?’

Ida didn't answer. ‘Mother's fallen downstairs and Dr Lombard's taken her to the cottage hospital.’

‘I asked where John was.’

A while afterwards, when I began to know Ida's true nature, I wouldn't have been surprised by her failure to tell Zorah that Dr Lombard was expected at any minute. She knew very well Zorah's hatred of Selwyn Lombard, the hatred any child might feel for the parent who has both fathered her and also wrecked the family life of the home she was to grow up in. If she had known he was coming she would surely have gone up to her own rooms and Ida was aware of this. Yet she said nothing and it was left to Winifred to tell Zorah that John had shut himself in the lavatory.

‘Why did he?’

‘Why does he do anything, Zorah?’

‘Do you know, I think much of what he does is very reasonable and logical.’

‘Mother,’ said Ida, ‘has got it into her head that John – well, I don't say pushed her downstairs but gave her a push. Perhaps it was a joke.’

‘That is a foul slander and John doesn't joke, as you well know.’

The doorbell rang, Winifred answered it and Dr Lombard walked in. ‘Hallo, everyone. Sorry to have kept you in suspense so long. Poor Julia has a Potts fracture of the right ankle but her wrist is only sprained. She may be a week in hospital or only a few days.’

Zorah picked up the newspaper just before he came in and began to read it as if he had never arrived, as if she, Winifred, Ida and I were alone. Apart from the nose, which in her case of course had been altered and was small and tip-tilted, she and Dr Lombard I could now see were very much alike, so similar that anyone seeing them together – Mrs Cosway's husband? – could have had no doubt as to her parentage. He had turned his eyes on her and I thought I could see in his look regret that she ignored him and a wish for a reconciliation, now the man legally her father was dead.