Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

The thought that if I left I would have to separate myself from Mark and go back to Sweden stopped me. I went back into the drawing room. John had got up off the floor and gone, or so it appeared until I looked round, shifted the sofa and found him hunched up behind it like a fugitive or a frightened child.

*

A lover has no status. Mrs Cosway was regarded by Dr Lombard's middle-aged children and teenage grandchildren as no more than a friend and erstwhile patient. Still, I am sure she would have gone to the funeral if she had been able-bodied. Alone of the Cosway family, Winifred attended. But there was nothing unusual in this. Since becoming engaged to Eric, who of course conducted the services, she had taken it upon herself to attend every funeral, though there had only been four since the ring was on her finger. Mrs Cosway waited at home, anxious to hear all about it the moment Winifred returned – who was there? Did she speak to his son and daughter? What about the flowers, the address and the tributes? The funeral was timed for two in the afternoon and Winifred might reasonably be expected back by three-thirty, but when John and I returned from our walk she was still not home. Mrs Cosway may have rested but not slept.

There was nothing unusual in her wearing mourning. She had always dressed in black but now it seemed deeper and more like widow's weeds, due perhaps to the addition of a long black scarf or stole she had rooted out from somewhere. By contrast Zorah, who occasionally appeared downstairs to make some cheerful or optimistic remark, dressed herself up in fashion-model clothes, quite unsuitable for the country. She had had a party up in her ‘apartment’ to which about a dozen smart-looking people turned up in cars. One was a Rolls whose driver sat out there at the wheel, smoking and reading magazines until his employer came out at midnight. I was invited, but only Ella of family members. She went, though I didn't, and had a bad hangover next day, which luckily for her was a Saturday. She told me the party was to celebrate Dr Lombard's death. I doubt if most of the guests knew this or cared.

What Mrs Cosway thought about it I have no idea. She spoke to me very little at that time. We sat in silence together with John, waiting for Winifred to come back. Four o'clock went by and five. Ida got tea and Ella came home.

‘I couldn't eat a thing,’ Mrs Cosway said.

‘I suppose Eric will bring her back.’

Ella had been fidgety and nervous ever since she was told what her mother was waiting for. This remark of hers was obviously expecting the answer yes but that was not what she got from Ida, the only one of us who appeared to know.

‘No, he can't. She told me he was going straight to his appointment with the Archdeacon after the funeral.’

As we all moved into the dining room for tea, Mrs Cosway limping along with the aid of her crutch and Ida's arm, Ella pulled me aside into a doorway.

‘She's with Felix.’

I must have stared at her.

‘I tell you, she's with Felix. She'll have gone to him as soon as the funeral was over. Eric would be out of the way, you see. She says they're just friends but is it likely? I don't think Felix could be just friends with any woman under seventy.’

She spoke with such extreme bitterness that it had brought the colour fiercely into her face.

‘We'd better go and have tea,’ I said.

Winifred came in at twenty to six.

‘You've been so long,’ said Mrs Cosway, ‘it has nearly killed me. You've been hours and hours.’

‘Serena Lombard invited me back to the house, so of course I couldn't say no. I can't imagine why you were so worried.’

‘Mother wasn't worried about you,’ said Ella. ‘It's just so thoughtless partying with these people when Mother was waiting for you to tell her about the service.’

‘Partying, indeed! I had a cup of tea and a piece of fruit cake.’

She sat down next to Mrs Cosway and began telling her about flowers and hymns and tributes to Dr Lombard. Could it be true, this story about her and Felix Dunsford? I thought about the postponed wedding and the Rectory sign but still disbelieved what Ella had told me. Her affair with him was still going on and more passionately, if what she said was true. Yet he hadn't gone with her to Zorah's party, though invited at her special request. I could see that he was willing to do nothing which might show him to the world as Ella's accredited lover, a man she could with reason have called her boyfriend, but that was not to say he was making love to Winifred as well.

She was older than Ella and, though basically better-looking, had something churchy in her appearance, some suggestion that her proper sphere was behind a stall at a bring-and-buy sale. The dowdiness of her clothes contributed to this as did, oddly enough, the thick make-up she wore, all of which gave her the air of a Sunday school teacher sprucing herself up to visit a rich London relative. But was it possible Felix saw the fine features under the powder and lipstick and, come to that, the voluptuous shape under the floral dresses and jersey suits? Perhaps he found something titillating in the idea of breaking down her goody-two-shoes manner. And what of Eric? Winifred wanted to be married as much as Ella did and was far nearer to her goal. Would she give it up for an adventure with Felix? On the whole, I thought not.

It was my weekend in London and I was looking forward to it as I always did. I was looking forward to being with Mark again and meant to catch a train to London on the Friday evening. That morning I went into the village to shop for the weekend. This was usually one of Ida's many jobs but currently she had so much more to do than usual, her mother still needing to be helped everywhere she went after the wearisome business of getting her up, washed and dressed. Bags would be heavy to carry so she made me take Mrs Cosway's old shopping trolley, a kind of basket on wheels made of a tartan waterproof material.

It was this contraption which prompted Felix's remarks when he met me pushing it across the Memorial Green.

‘A beautiful girl like you shouldn't be seen with an old lady's pushcart.’

‘Don't look then,’ I said.

‘But seriously, Kerstin, what's the idea?’

‘Seriously, Mr Dunsford, I don't want to carry two heavy bags of groceries up the hill.’

‘Felix. Now, if you'll come into The Studio and have a glass of something with me I will carry your bags up the hill and we can chuck that monstrosity on the village dump.’

There was no village dump, as far as I knew. I said no, thank you, I hadn't time, and he said to make time, and we argued amicably enough along these lines, walking along together by then, inevitably in the direction of The Studio because it was also in the direction of the butcher and the greengrocer.

‘Are you scared of what might happen?’ he asked me.

‘Why? What might happen?’

Instead of answering he said, ‘So you don't mind wasting your youth doing household chores? Come on, we're at the door. You know you want to. You're too young to resist, aren't you, Miss Kvist?’

His effrontery, his vanity, made me rude. ‘You're too old to persuade me, Mr Dunsford,’ I said.

I was rewarded by a look of fury, which pleased me, but something miserable too which didn't. I knew I had just made an enemy but cared not at all for that and walked away from him into the greengrocer's. I might reasonably have given him that joke response, ‘You say that to all the girls,’ if I even knew it at that time, for it seemed clear to me that he tried to make love to any woman of a fair standard of attractiveness. Why not Winifred? But would she?

Back at Lydstep, an argument had begun again about John's physical condition, Mrs Cosway continuing to refuse his request to ask the trust for money for a specialist and Ida and Winifred backing her up.