Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘She'll need clothes, I suppose,’ said practical Ida, already making lists and plans in her mind. ‘I'll go in tomorrow.’

‘So will I, of course, I shall be so anxious.’ Whether Winifred would have said this if Eric hadn't arrived in Dr Lombard's wake, for she was always keen to make an impression of virtue on him, I hardly know. ‘She'll want things to read too. And I expect the food is awful, isn't it?’

‘She said she'd like some biscuits and orange juice,’ Dr Lombard said.

Why these innocuous words should have been the trigger for Zorah to get to her feet and depart for her rooms upstairs, who can tell? Perhaps her exit had nothing to do with the words but only with the voice which uttered them and its possessor. Dr Lombard watched her leave with the same rueful expression.

‘How long will she be – er, incapacitated?’

It took Eric to ask this question. Perhaps the others had not quite liked to. Dr Lombard said it was hard to tell. Mrs Cosway was no longer, as he put it, in her first youth.

‘Nor her second,’ said Eric as if delivering a profound philosophical principle.

‘It may be a couple of months before she can walk without crutches.’

‘We're getting married in just under five weeks.’

‘It's quite obvious,’ Winifred said, ‘that the wedding will have to be postponed. I can't get married without Mother being there.’

She might have disguised her delight a little. She sounded triumphant and Eric seemed to notice how exultant she was, for he frowned and gave her a puzzled look. Even intelligent clergymen, I have noticed since then, need breezy platitudes and comforting sweet nothings amongst their stock-in-trade, and Eric now brought one of these out for the cheering-up of the company.

‘What a blessing you have Kerstin here! There must be so many little tasks performed by Mrs Cosway she can take over now she knows the ropes.’

Did I know the ropes? Perhaps, but that was not to say I liked them. I could see I was faced with several dilemmas, one of them major. Some rejoinder was probably expected from me but I said nothing. Ida looked at her watch and, keeping to her inevitable eternal role, said she would get tea for everyone. I offered to help her and followed her out to the kitchen.

Rain was still streaming down the windows and although the clocks wouldn't go back for a month, it was dark enough in the middle of the afternoon to have lights on. Ida started on a low murmured catalogue of all the things Mrs Cosway used to do and would be unable to do now, of the folly, however understandable, of carrying too many articles in one's hands when walking downstairs at the age of seventy-nine, and when and if her injuries would ever at her age fully mend.

I paid very little attention to this. My mind was occupied with John, still locked away and still silent, responding not at all to Dr Lombard's efforts outside the door to cajole him out and Eric's exhortations to him to be ‘a good chap’. Knowing he would come out eventually, I would have left him alone. I was far more troubled by Mrs Cosway's accusation. No, not troubled, angered. John, I knew, would never push her or anyone, and this would not be due to morality or love for her or fear of consequences but simply because to push you have to touch. And you have to care enough to hate. Why had she accused him? I knew she couldn't have believed it herself. The motive she might have had, the desire to be rid of him, was too dreadful to be thought of.

Eric went away at last and Dr Lombard went. I don't know when John came out but early in the evening I came upon him in the drawing room, gently stroking the Roman vase as if it were a pet animal.

15

The rain fell all evening and the wind, rising to a gale, tore off the first of the red leaves to fall that autumn. A lake of water, quite deep in places and whipped by the wind into little waves, had spread across the drive in front of the house by the time John went to bed. This was at eight rather than at seven, the first departure from his routine.

He seemed to take a longer time than usual arranging the ballpoint, the plaster, the dice and the rest at his bedside. The pattern, always precisely the same, slowly took shape. It was like someone setting out counters on a board for a table game. Satisfied, he shed his dressing gown and got into bed. I wondered why I – or anyone – had to be there. To prevent him doing something dangerous or harmful? Perhaps, though he showed no sign of diverging from his rigid routine.

I knew he would refuse the phenobarbitone. He had refused to take it from me the evening his mother went to fetch his prescription and he would again. I didn't attempt to give it to him. But after he was asleep and throughout that evening I kept asking myself what right I had to find prescribed drugs unnecessary. Unattractive as the prospect was, I would have to ask Dr Lombard. I would have to go to his surgery and consult him.

As it happened, he came to Lydstep Old Hall to speak to me.

This meeting seemed even more urgent in the morning. Uncertain what to do about getting John up, I went into his bedroom at about seven but he was gone. On his own, he had gone upstairs to run his bath. I noticed too that the objects from the bedside table were gone; back, I supposed, in his dressing-gown pockets.

Ida was of course up, a draggled sight, her hair fastened back with an elastic band, her tweed skirt fastened at the waist with a safety pin and the kind of carpet slippers my grandfather used to wear on her bare feet. When she saw me she said, as if it were eleven in the morning, ‘I thought you were never coming. Have you forgotten we have to give John his tablet?’

The Largactil. She must have taken it from Mrs Cosway's medicine chest the previous evening. Now she handed the bottle to me and said, ‘You have to put it on his plate and let him pick it up himself. He won't want it if you've touched it.’

John was watching me. He followed with his eyes the progress of tablet from bottle to spoon to plate, where it rolled a little before coming to rest. Then he looked hard at me and said, ‘No.’

Ida said, ‘Why not, John? You know Kerstin. You like her, don't you?’ There was no response to this, no sign in his expression that he had even heard. ‘Suppose I do it, then. I know, why don't I pick up your pill like this? In a different spoon and put it on a different plate? How's that?’

A slow horror was breaking over me as I heard her speaking in this tone to a middle-aged man who had been a child prodigy and was obviously very clever still. But there was nothing I could do and nothing John would do. He was determined not to touch that pill.

‘Try a glass dish like the one he has in his room,’ I said.

Showing more weariness than she ever did in her mother's presence, Ida sighed, opened the sideboard and found a small glass dish. The white tablet was dropped into it and the cajoling began again in much the same words. Exasperated beyond patience, John picked up the glass dish with the pill in it and, while his sister waited in breathless anticipation of his finally swallowing it, hurled both across the room, where the dish hit the wall and broke in pieces and the pill disappeared behind the sideboard.

I thought Ida was going to tell him he was a naughty boy. ‘There's nothing we can do,’ I said quickly. ‘We have to leave it.’

She set up a sort of wail. With a look of angry bitterness at John, she got on to her knees and began scrabbling about under the sideboard, cutting her fingers on broken glass, a prefiguring of things to come, almost an omen. There she discovered two other pills, one white but a different shape, and one red, a number of needles and hair clips and a lens from a pair of glasses, but not the Largactil. I said nothing and she took my silence for disapproval, which is what I suppose it was.