Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘I shall ask Zorah,’ he said. ‘Zorah will help me.’

Mrs Cosway seemed more shattered by his using so long and so reasonable a sentence than by its content. She turned on Ida, speaking as if he was somewhere else.

‘What's happened to him that he's talking like this? He wasn't like this when I went to hospital.’ A thought struck her, though not apparently the one Ida dreaded. ‘We must be running out of his tranquillizer. Have we run out?’

‘Almost,’ Ida said.

Could there be a greater irony than this woman lamenting the fact that her psychotic son's condition was improving? ‘You'll have to get another prescription from – yes, Selwyn's partner.’

She grew silent, hanging her head. Those words had perhaps brought back memories of Dr Lombard. On the other hand, I believe these were never far from her mind, she thought about him and remembered him all the time. It was more likely that she had just realized the possible difficulties that lay ahead.

‘How many tablets are there left?’

Ida could answer this question truthfully because she had given John no more since he struck her and by then that was ten days before.

‘Seven.’

‘As many as that? Are you sure?’

‘I can show you, Mother.’

‘No, I'll take your word for it, but I would have thought there were fewer.’

In a week's time someone would have to go to Dr Lombard's partner, a young man with, I had been -told, progressive ideas, and ask for a prescription for Largactil. We shall see, I thought, and went to catch the train for London.

18

I don't know if it was the Largactil which damaged John Cosway's sight or if it had just deteriorated as he approached his forties, as it sometimes can. He already had glasses for reading and if they were inadequate for the purpose this may only have been because they were the same pair as he had had five years before and he simply needed his eyes tested again. I don't know.

I half-guessed what was wrong with him, though my conjecture was full of doubts, not least the one about my own inadequacy at making any sort of diagnosis. I had no qualifications except an English degree and my humble nursing diploma. How would I know from reading medical books without direction or supervision? Perhaps it was a case of telling myself, ‘I always knew that's what it was,’ rather than feeling a quiet satisfaction when the specialist gave the verdict which confirmed my guesswork.

Everyone knows about autism now. Everyone has heard of it. Hardly a week goes by without some article about it in a newspaper. Not then, though it had been described and named twenty-five years before. A society for sufferers and their parents was in existence. But it was not accepted as a legitimate disturbance of the psyche with a probable physical cause. The word wasn't in the Oxford Dictionary and most people, if told it, would have had no idea what it meant. Doctors – Lombard had been one of them – called it ‘childhood schizophrenia’ and attributed it, as he had done, to emotional trauma.

It is thought autism can result from childhood infectious diseases. And one theory might be that John, who was very ill with mumps when he was a child, developed his at that time. Maybe and maybe not. Boys are affected more than girls. A Swedish study of Asperger's, the type I believe John had, found a ratio of four boys to one girl, and it is harder to detect in women, perhaps because their social instincts are stronger than men's. Asperger himself, whose syndrome is less severe than Kanner's, suggested that his might be the extreme end of the continuum of the normal male personality, a startling claim. It implies that men with an excessive degree of maleness would be, or are, selfish, lacking emotion, taking what they want when they want it, knowing no altruism, tactless and blunt and liable to rages when they fail to get their own way. A conundrum for some PhD seeker? Or a wild exaggeration?

Such people speak little or not at all. They lack social skills, appear to be without affection, are restless and often destructive, compulsive and routine-driven. Some will lie on the floor and scream when frustrated. Egocentric, they have no idea that other people have thoughts or feelings. If one of the definitions of the schizophrenic is to be unreasonable, the Asperger subject can be said to be too reasonable . He never lies but utters what he thinks and feels without tact or appropriateness, does what he chooses and runs away from what he dislikes.

I read about Asperger's in a scientific journal I came upon amongst other medical literature in the library – yes, the library, the labyrinth at Lydstep Old Hall. They were not very old, these journals. Someone must have put them there. John himself before Lombard and Mrs Cosway went to work on him? It was more likely to be Zorah, attempting to discover for herself what was wrong with her brother but, when she saw his decline, giving up in despair.

When John said he would ask Zorah I had assumed he meant to ask her for the money which consulting a psychiatrist or specialist in diseases of the central nervous system would cost. She was rich. A consultation would only be the beginning, there might be second opinions sought, surgery carried out and hospitalization. But Zorah was rich and could afford it almost without noticing the amount. However, that was not what he meant. A few days after I got back, while John was having his tea in the kitchen with Ida, Zorah walked into the drawing room and said that she intended to inform the trust that John wanted to see ‘a top man about his tremors and his unsteady movements’.

‘I know just the man,’ she said. Zorah always knew everyone. ‘He helped a friend of mine who had Parkinson's. It was almost miraculous. When the time comes I shall drive John to London myself.’

‘Then you can pay for it,’ said Mrs Cosway.

‘Now wait a minute. Your husband set up the trust for just that purpose, to take care of John.’ It was a shock to hear her refer to John's father like that, reminding us all that he was no relation of hers. ‘He could hardly have foreseen that you and that lover of yours would conspire to make a zombie out of John. He couldn't tell you'd fix things so that he was an imbecile with no use for money. Well, he has a use for money now and I'm going to see he gets it. From its proper source. From the money he has a right to.’

Mrs Cosway addressed the ceiling, to which she cast up her eyes. ‘I would never have believed my own child could speak to me like that.’

Whatever it did to Mrs Cosway, using such terms to her mother must have taken it out of Zorah. I had thought her tough and invulnerable, a woman of iron, but I had misassessed her, for she had gone paper-white and I noticed that her long and elegant hands, which hung down by her sides, were shaking the way John's still did sometimes. She turned without another word and went back upstairs. There she must have done what packing was needful, very little I imagine, and gone straight out, for I heard her say to Winifred in the hall that she was off to London and might be away for several weeks. But there she would remember what she had said, as her first act when she reached her house would be to write to the trust.

The Lotus had hardly disappeared down the drive when Ella, who had slipped out of the drawing room when Zorah came in, reappeared, triumphantly holding up the geode in both hands. Coming down to make her announcement, Zorah must have been, as I had supposed, in quite a state, keyed up to an unusual defiance, and had forgotten to lock her door. How Ella guessed she would I had no idea unless she checked every time her sister appeared downstairs. This possibility brought me a feeling of powerful distaste. I had preferred Ella to anyone else in that household and sympathized with her over Felix, but the idea that she might study and plan in this way to outwit Zorah chilled me. I watched with a revulsion I tried to disguise as she pranced across the room, the geode held aloft like a trophy, and finally set it down on the table where it had once been a permanency. I had lost count of the number of times that lump of rock had been carried downstairs, taken up again and brought down once more. Ella let out a prolonged peal of Cosway laughter.