Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Ella felt too ill to eat breakfast. She had done as she threatened and had that second bottle. She drank black coffee standing up in the kitchen, moaning softly, before leaving in the car for school. Winifred was looking beautiful. Felix Dunsford seemed to have that effect on women, at least when he began with them. Later on he made them ill. But I was still disbelieving. She might look like that, smile like that and have such happy laughing eyes because she had had a good night's sleep or received a bold compliment from Eric.

Ida I thought the quietest of the sisters and the least characterful. She was a housewife without being a wife, one of those country housewives of the time who were still living in a domestic setting of twenty years before, house-cleaning a religion, literally so, for she never went to church. She cooked, she swept and dusted, washed and shopped, with a martyred look sometimes but without verbal complaint. I never saw her read a book or even look at the newspaper. Television she would watch but in a dull, preoccupied way and since she could never sit still for even half an hour, she would be up and off to the kitchen every few minutes to make tea or stoke the boiler or turn on the oven. While sitting down she was usually sewing something or knitting. She was the first to get up in the morning and, as far as I knew, the last to go to bed at night. It wouldn't have surprised me to have found out that she got up several times in the night and came downstairs to check she hadn't left the gas on or a tap dripping.

Angry I would have said she could never be, any more than ecstatic or grief-stricken, but she was angry when she came home from Dr Barker without the prescription she had been to ask for. Indignant perhaps describes her reaction better, for she neither became excited nor ranted. With a glance at John, who had come out of the library some time in the small hours, she helped Mrs Cosway out of earshot into the dining room, whispering to me to come too.

‘He wouldn't let me have it. I told him Dr Lombard had been prescribing Largactil as a matter of course and do you know what he said? “Well, he was wrong there,” he said.’

‘I have never heard a medical man criticize another medical man,’ said Mrs Cosway, who had overheard in spite of Ida's efforts. ‘How dared he find fault with Selwyn?’

‘I was – well, taken aback. I felt really cross but what could I do? Dr Barker wanted to know if John was violent or – well, noisy, and I had to say he wasn't.’ She didn't say if she had told him about the blow John struck her. Perhaps she remembered how she had provoked him.

‘He will be without his medicine.’

Ida must have known differently, but saying so would have revealed that three weeks had passed without the Largactil being given. ‘He said he would write a letter to some psychiatrist – I don't remember the name – and I was to make an appointment for John to see this man and take the letter.’ So Dr Barker was prescribing just what John and Zorah wanted, I thought. ‘The psychiatrist was the right person to decide what treatment John should have,’ she said. ‘Dr Barker said he wouldn't be responsible for prescribing a powerful drug like chlorpro – oh, I can't pronounce it – to someone he hadn't even seen. I was very angry but what could I do?’

‘I suppose I shall have to go and see him,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘We can't be expected to live here with a mad person who's not restrained in any way.’

This was her own son she was speaking of and I suppose my shock showed in my face.

‘You needn't look like that, Kerstin. You have no idea what life would be like with him, absolute hell. Oh, why did Selwyn have to die? I need him so.’

‘Don't, Mother,’ said Ida.

‘I shall go down to see him myself. Kerstin can drive me.’ She looked sourly at me. ‘I suppose you can drive?’

‘I can drive,’ I said.

‘Sometimes I think my whole world is falling apart. The only man I ever loved is dead. My mad son is going to spend thousands of his father's money on unnecessary treatment while he's denied the drug which is really necessary by a jumped-up, officious little general practitioner. I wonder if things could be worse.’

Unusually talkative, Ida said to me in the kitchen that she wouldn't mind things being worse so long as they were different. I looked at her in consternation. Complaining about her lot was rare with her, even rarer any sign on her part that she found her dreary routine at Lydstep burdensome.

‘Sometimes I think I'd do anything for a change,’ she said.

19

One of the first cartoons I ever did shows the Prime Minister of the day, a very unpopular politician, standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace while an anti-Government demonstration goes past, and saying to the Queen, ‘Why do they hate me so, ma‘am? I never did them any good.’

This of course is an old joke – of Jewish origin, I think. It isn't really funny. It appeals because it ought to be a flagrant untruth but when people think about it and its implications, they know it's sound. John had never done his mother or his sisters any good, had done nothing to them, good or bad, but I think they all disliked him deeply. Felix did nothing but harm to Ella and Winifred and they both loved him.

In a rare moment of openness, Ida told me her mother had purposely infected John with mumps when he was five years old. Two children in the Prothero family, June and her brother, had the disease and Mrs Cosway invited herself, Winifred and John to tea. She knew, having read somewhere or been told so by Dr Lombard, that a boy should have mumps early in his life because if he gets it when he is in his teens the effects of it may be to make him sterile. She meant well.

He was very ill. I don't know why Ida told me about it unless it was to show that good intentions can be misplaced.

‘She had his welfare at heart,’ she said. ‘She meant to do the best for him. And she had to pay the price, of course, nursing him for week after week. He was a dreadful patient. I was fourteen and I remember it well. There weren't any long-term effects, though.’

Weren't there? I don't know. As I mentioned before, medical opinion now is that autism results from some physical cause. Mrs Cosway had no idea of this. More to the point, Lombard had none either or refused to accept it. Whatever Ella said, I believe Mrs Cosway knew that John had been in her bedroom and knew what he had seen. The irony was that she secretly blamed this for his disability while exonerating herself for manufacturing the true cause. She was guilty where she had no need to be and guiltless where she had been dreadfully at fault. But I don't know and I never shall.

Geodes were seldom seen at that time except as exhibits in geology museums, but only a few years later they had become almost requisite furnishings of shops selling alternative remedies and beauticians' salons offering distillations of flowers picked at certain phases of the moon. The Cosways' geode fascinated me when I first came to Lydstep Old Hall, partly by its size but much more by the lavishness, the brilliance and the colour of the amethysts encrusted inside its wide-open mouth. I suppose they were only amethyst quartz but they were of such a rich violet that they looked to me like the precious stone itself.

Once I had seen the Roman vase the geode became for me what it had really always been, a lump of rock with a curious kind of purple lining. The mountain regions of Africa and Asia were rich in such things. But the Roman vase, or jug as I suppose it should be called as it had a lip and a handle, was not only a man-made thing of great beauty but almost infinitely precious, a priceless object almost 2,000 years old.

The glass of which it was made was a cloudy green, the colour of pale jade, but stained with a darker shade, so that its surface was like a map of islands, large and small, on some unknown sea. Its base was the same deep green, as were its mouth and its handle, this being twisted like a rope. Precious as it was and made of a vulnerable material, it hadn't a fragile look but seemed solid – confident, if an inanimate object can be so. I valued it so much more, I thought, than its owners did (with the exception of John) because I marvelled at the miracle of its survival over those long centuries.