Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

To all this kitsch there was one exception, a geode. It was the beautiful thing in that room and much larger than these things usually are. When I first saw it I wondered where it had come from and what it was doing there, this oval stone dull as granite but showing, where it had split open, its glittering lode of amethyst quartz. I would have liked to touch it but did not quite care to. It seemed over-familiar on my first day there. There would be other occasions, I thought, and I walked back along the passage to find my way out into the garden. The interior of the house had disappointed me but I had faith in the maze. I was sure I was about to find it.

2

How much of the lawns, shrubberies, copses and parkland I walked over were part of the Lydstep land, I had no idea at the time. These grounds were pleasant and pretty enough but I had been looking for a labyrinth and I hadn't found it. I was struck by the strangeness of that in itself, that a maze, which by its very nature is a puzzle, should also be a puzzle to find.

As I came back, the kitchen window opened and Ida put her head out, calling to me to come in as tea was ready. I believed I had had my tea and supposed the next meal would be supper or dinner but when I walked into the kitchen I saw bowls of tinned fruit and plates of tongue and ham, a cake and biscuits and a great many already buttered slices of bread. Frugal in many ways Mrs Cosway might have been but her meanness didn't extend to food. The Cosways always ate well.

‘This is my mother,’ Ida said, and with great formality, ‘and this is my brother John. Mother, may I introduce Miss Kvist?’

‘Kerstin Kvist,’ I said, giving my name its Swedish pronunciation.

Mrs Cosway didn't get up but put out her hand. ‘How do you do?’ She had that English upper-class voice which foreigners find forbidding and sometimes absurd. She appeared to be turning the syllables of my name over in her mind. ‘According to your letter your name is Kerstin,’ she said like an overbearing teacher, ‘not Shashtin. Have you changed it since you wrote?’

‘K, e, r, s, t, i, n is pronounced Shashtin, Mrs Cosway.’

‘What a strange idea,’ she said, implying by words and look that, among civilized people, only English pronunciation was admissible and that I might not know how to articulate my own name. ‘It must make things very awkward. Say hallo to Miss Kvist, John.’

My drawing of Julia Cosway shows a craggy face, the skin rough and deeply wrinkled with the same neglected look as her daughter's and her mouth set in a downward curve. I think I have caught on that ruined face the grimness and distaste it wore when she looked at her son. I had an impression of control being exercised and words she would have liked to utter, suppressed. I was too young then to know that there are women who actively dislike their own children.

Like the rest of them (as I later came to find out) John Cosway was good-looking, with regular features and dark eyes. I had no idea then if his other sisters were tall or if he were an instance of one member of a family failing to inherit height, but when I saw him in the meadow he had seemed shorter than Mrs Cosway. So much for the old wives' tale that a man is always taller than his mother. Of the whole family and the other Windrose people I came to know, John is the only one I never drew. It seemed wrong to try to catch the likeness of a mentally disturbed and defenceless man, as if I would be doing something unfair.

‘Hallo, Miss Kvist,’ he said in the tone of an upper-class robot.

My impression was that he spoke entirely of his own volition and not because he had been prompted. But the hand I held out to him was not so much ignored as repudiated. It wasn't quite a shrinking, more a controlled retreat.

To cover my dismay, I said, ‘You must call me Kerstin,’ and to Ida and her mother, ‘I'd like everyone to do that.’

Mrs Cosway had the same sort of coughing laugh as Ida, dry, cackling and dismissive. She laughed like that then and said she would try. ‘But I don't know how I shall get my tongue round it.’

‘Shashtin,’ said John, with perfect enunciation. ‘Shashtin, Shashtin.’

‘Eat your tea, John.’ His mother spoke to this handsome, intelligent-looking man as if he were a child of five.

Unused to digesting anything at that hour, I did my best with a slice of ham, half a round of bread and four halves of apricot. John cut his bread and butter up into small triangles, each slice divided into four. These he severally spread with jam, fish paste, Marmite and cream cheese, each triangle different in colour and flavour, and placing the plate directly in front of him, the horizontal cut through the centre of the bread parallel with the table edge, began to eat, taking care not to disarrange the other pieces when he picked up the top left-hand triangle. He seemed totally concentrated on this task, absorbed by it to the exclusion of all else.

I have already said that I prefer to get things straight and to clear up mysteries when I meet new people, for I particularly dislike being among those who expect you to know everything about them and their family, its ramifications and offshoots, without ever having been told. Such women – they are usually women – are quickly irritated and even become angry if you fail to place the child they are talking about in its proper context or are ignorant of whose wife so-and-so is or that uncle such-and-such died three years before, even though there is no possible way you could have known.

I had therefore made up my mind to ask for details of family members from Mrs Cosway when she suddenly said, ‘You will need to know who everyone in the household is and where in our family they fit, Miss – er, Shashtin.’ She pronounced my name correctly for the first and last time.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I will.’

‘My eldest daughter and my son you have already met. My daughter Zorah, that is Mrs Todd, is not here at present. She is in London, she has a home there.’ Whereas now the American word for ‘house’ is a commonplace, it was seldom used in England then. Mrs Cosway spoke it with a kind of bitter pride. ‘The other two Misses Cosway, my daughters Winifred and Ella,’ she said, ‘are at present out. They seem to need constant entertainment and will later be attending a wine and cheese party, whatever that may be, in the village hall. That is the extent of our family. Is there anything you would like to ask?’

Her crisp tone and manner of one chairing a committee amused me but I took care not to let my amusement show. ‘Not about what you've just told me,’ I said, ‘but I would like to know what my duties are to be.’

‘Tea is over,’ she said. ‘We'll go into the drawing room.’

John remained behind with Ida, to whom was left the task of clearing up and washing the dishes. I began to wonder if she did all the work of this house without any help from her sisters, whom their mother had made sound as if they led hectic and frivolous lives.

Now that it was close on evening the day had brightened and shafts of pale sunshine gleamed through the French windows on to the carpet, showing up the threadbare patches on its faded pink and green. Later on, a single hanging lamp, a branched wooden chandelier with two of its bulbs missing, would light this room. Mrs Cosway had seated herself on the pink and beige sofa and, with a downward patting motion of her hand, indicated to me that I was to sit in what Ida told me some time afterwards was called a fireside chair, wooden-armed and with a loose seat cushion. Again I noticed that there was nothing to do in this room except watch television, no books, no record player or radio, no pictures to look at (except for a huge and very dark landscape in oils) or photographs to comment on. You could, I supposed, occupy yourself with examining the geode.