Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

I had to speak then, or be set down as impossibly standoffish. ‘John,’ I said, ‘how about John?’

Both Trintowels had lived in Windrose only since the 1950s, but White Lodge had belonged to Gerald's parents and he had lived there as a child. He was older than John and remembered him as a small boy.

‘He was the kind of child that everyone says they can't do anything with. Julia used to bring him and Ella down to the village and if there was something he didn't want to do he'd lie on the ground and scream. He ran away too. Twice, I think. The first time he was found fast asleep in a barn. The second was more serious. He was gone for a couple of days, I think. He must have been about ten by then.’

‘Tell her what Julia said to your mother.’

‘She doesn't want to hear that, Jane. Repeating things like that is the worst kind of tittle-tattle.’

‘Well, if you won't tell her I will. Julia met Gerry's mother in Dr Lombard's waiting room, of all places. She'd got Ella with her, come in for some injection or other. She was about six months pregnant with Zorah wanted to let the doctor listen to his daughter's heartbeat, I dare say…’

‘Oh, Ma .’

Jane took no notice of him. ‘Anyway, Gerry's mother asked her if there was any news of John and she said, “I wouldn't care if he never came back, not with another one on the way. Good riddance.”’

‘She didn't mean it, Jane. She was overwrought. The funny thing is that John seemed all right when he was a little kid. I remember Julia bringing him to the house for tea. Winifred too, she was a bit older. He was quiet and well-behaved, used to sit there with a picture book, but he'd eat a very hearty tea. Then he got ill with something. Whooping cough? Mumps? One of those and it was after that there was no doing anything with him.’

As for Zorah, no one had much to say. Jane, of course, contributed what there was. She had been sent away to school when she was seven, was at boarding school for eleven years, then at university. Even in the holidays she seldom showed herself in the village or other people's houses.

‘I'm sure Julia dreaded her being seen with Lombard and the resemblance being picked up on, though everyone knew. John – her husband, I mean – he knew. He found out. Zorah had tonsillitis or something when she was six and Lombard came up to the Hall. John Cosway saw them together and that was enough. That was the reason Zorah was packed off to school.’

‘You can't possibly know that, Jane.’

‘Yes, I can. Your mother told me.’

We had dinner – a very good dinner – and more Cosway talk was punctuated by James saying plaintively that he was planning to carry me off to his room to hear Kraus. This was my original reason for coming.

‘Never mind that,’ his mother said, plying me with an autumn version of summer pudding and whipped cream. ‘She can take the records away and play them up at the House of Usher.’

‘I'm afraid I can't,’ I said, laughing. ‘They haven't a record player.’

The extreme oddity of this was commented on at some length. I felt that on the whole I had managed to learn a lot without giving over-much into the temptation to talk about all the things I had seen, heard and intuited and which they had no idea of. Then, dinner over and coffee refused on the grounds that it would keep me awake, I followed James upstairs to hear the first act of Proserpin .

It was later, as I was about to leave, given a lift home by Gerald Trintowel, that my eye was caught by the photograph among many on a hall table of a man in his twenties with bright eyes and a wry smile.

‘Is that your brother?’ I asked James.

‘Yes, that's Charles. He'll be here for the weekend in a couple of weeks' time.’

Hospital patients never come home on the day they think they will or the hospital says they will. It is always a day earlier or a day or two later. I would have supposed no hospital would like the bother of sending someone home on a Sunday, especially in those days when Sunday still meant something, when everything was closed and skeleton staffs were kept. It is just one of those mysteries, peculiarly associated with a clinical situation, another being why the food which surely should be more nutritious and ‘healthy’ than in any other circumstances is so appalling, and why it is necessary – or was then – to make sick people wake up at six in the morning.

Expected on Monday, Mrs Cosway was brought home on Sunday morning by Ella, who missed church to fetch her. She looked thin and seemed weak, her ankle in plaster and her wrist strapped up. One of the nurses had signed her name on the cast and drawn a smiling face next to the signature.

‘I tried to stop her,’ Mrs Cosway said, ‘but in my weakness I gave in. Stupid nonsense. I don't know what gets into people.’

Ida was in a dilemma. Should she tell her mother John had refused the Largactil or remove the number he would have taken and say nothing? As it was, there were only twelve left in the bottle.

‘I think I'll just not mention it,’ she said, putting five tablets into the wastebin. ‘She can just start again in the morning. She won't see much change in him, do you think?’

I could see a change. Ida simply found it easier not to do so. After his attack on her, and he had been much provoked, there had been no more violence. But on the rare occasions John spoke his speech was clearer and the things he said more coherent. His rituals remained unchanged, the favoured objects still set out on his bedside table by night and kept in his dressing-gown pocket by day, his food still arranged in patterns. Still, his walks obviously brought him some enjoyment, they were no longer the dogged tramping with head down and eyes fixed on the ground that they had been. Above all, I had noticed, if Ida had not, how much more alert he seemed, as if he was at last deriving energy from somewhere and leaving the zombie state behind.

Start again in the morning, as Ida had hoped, Mrs Cosway could not. Her early rising, she said, was a thing of the past. I must supervise John's getting up and let her sleep. ‘One of the girls' would have to help her out of bed when the time came, get her on to her crutch and help dress her. All this took a long time and John's breakfast was over and he settled in his armchair by the time she came down. Not that she had forgotten the tablet she regarded it as essential he took.

‘You will have to carry on giving it to him,’ she said to me, ‘or Ida will. I see we've only a week's supply in the bottle. Remind me to ask Selwyn for a prescription when he comes.’

He was expected at ten when his morning surgery was at an end and he was punctual. I happened to open the door to him and he greeted me typically.

‘How are you this morning, young lady?’

In expansive and jovial mood, he must have been looking forward to seeing his old love again and she managed one of her rare smiles when he came into the drawing room. She lifted her face to him and he kissed her on the lips. If I had been the only other person present, I would have gone and left them alone together, but naturally John stayed and neither Ida nor Winifred showed any signs of going.

‘I shall never walk properly again,’ Mrs Cosway said. ‘It's only to be expected at my age. My left leg will be shorter than my right, I heard them muttering about that in the hospital, they thought I couldn't hear. I shall be left with a limp and heaven knows whether I shall ever be able to use my right hand again, I doubt it. There was a nerve twisted inside there, I'm sure of it.’

Like Eric, Dr Lombard was one of those men who twinkle when in a good mood. He would purse up his mouth, open his eyes wide and turn them this way and that to rather ferocious effect above his eagle's nose. ‘Let your words be sweet and tasty, Julia,’ he said, ‘for tomorrow you may have to eat them.’