Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘I see you are looking at Grandfather Cosway's find.’

‘Yes,’ I said, wondering if this was the mad forebear, ‘it's very beautiful.’

Again that dismissive laugh. It would be hard to say how I knew it was a laugh at all for no light showed in her eyes, her mouth remained downturned and the sound which came out of it was no more than a series of coughs.

‘My late husband's grandfather was one of those amateur geologists. It was quite a popular thing to be in the last century. Of course they were all amateurs then, there was no such thing as a degree in these subjects and they were none the worse for that.’ She waited for my agreement and, when none came, went on, ‘He was an explorer too and he found that amethyst geode while travelling to Mogador through the Atlas Mountains. On a camel, I suppose.’ A pause while she gave this some thought. ‘Do you think it would have been on a camel?’

Not realizing then – how could I have realized? – that this was the only time she would ever address a friendly casual inquiry to me, I said, ‘A camel or a donkey perhaps.’

‘A donkey isn't a dignified animal. Grandfather was very dignified, according to my husband, and corpulent, though he may not have been in his youth. He was a peculiar man but gifted. He made our library here. Did you ask me something?’

‘What my duties are to be.’

‘Ah, yes. Really they'll consist in looking after John when I am unable to. When I'm tired, for instance.’ She had a disconcerting stare or, rather, one which she intended to be disconcerting. I returned it and our eyes met. ‘You could ask him. He wanted you. But you'll get a dusty answer.’ She followed this up with her cough-laugh and said unexpectedly, ‘I am nearly eighty years old, you know.’

I don't belong to that school of thought which decrees that when someone tells you her age you should automatically reply that she doesn't look it. Mrs Cosway looked every hour of her seventy-nine years.

‘I think it will be best,’ she said, ‘for you to observe my routine with John tomorrow and perhaps the next day. Then you'll know how to take over when necessary. Once we've done that, I'd like to take a rest on my bed every afternoon after lunch for two hours and sometimes I should like to go out in the evenings.’ That look was again levelled at me. ‘One has friends in this village whom one doesn't see enough of. I would like to see them.’ She proceeded to tell me some of the things about John Ida had already mentioned and some she had not. ‘He has medicine – well, drugs. Strictly prescribed by our doctor, of course. Without them there's a possibility he might be violent. It's a bad business, isn't it?’

I thought this a strange way of putting it. ‘It's very sad,’ I said for the second time that day, and she looked narrowly at me as if I had corrected her.

‘Is there anything else?’

‘I'd like you to confirm that I'm to have every other weekend off and one whole day in every week.’

‘Oh, yes, that was agreed.’

She turned her eyes to the sunspots on the carpet. Outside, where the evening seemed to be warming and brightening all the time, Ida was putting up a washing line, taking advantage of the unexpected drying weather. John had come out with her because, it seemed, the clothes prop refused to stand erect. He took it from her, careful not to touch her hands, drove it into the ground, and stood back, nodding slightly.

Mrs Cosway's eyes followed mine and she twisted round in her chair the better to see her son. ‘Strange, isn't it?’ she said. ‘He was quite a normal child. Of course he never got on well with other boys and he used to have these tantrums. One couldn't do anything with him. But apart from that – well, what is there to say? It makes one wonder. Our doctor, a brilliant man, says his trouble is the result of a severe emotional shock.’

It made me wonder too. Ida had told me her mother had her own theories about the onset of John's schizophrenia. If she had she was clearly determined not to mention them to me – or not yet? John and Ida were pegging out the clothes now, John arranging all his pegs precisely the same distance apart regardless of the width of the pillowcase or shirt he was hanging up. Something about this surprised me for I had never heard of obsessive compulsive behaviour being part of the schizophrenia pattern.

‘You may as well start tonight,’ Mrs Cosway said ‘He sleeps downstairs but he doesn't have his bath till the morning. I give him a sleeping pill.’ She added in the sort of tone that expects argument, ‘Always.’

‘Is he a poor sleeper, then?’

She didn't answer. ‘He insists on the pill. He thinks it's a vitamin – well, multi-vitamins. It's better that way.’

I was shocked. Of course I was. ‘Your doctor prescribes it?’

‘Of course. “I should tell John it's vitamins,” he said. “Otherwise you'll find he won't take it.”’

It seemed wise to ask no more along these lines for the present. ‘I'd like to ask you something else. It has nothing to do with John. Are there any books in the house?’

‘Books?’ She said it as if I had asked whether there were any elephants.

‘Yes. If you don't mind I'd like to have a look and borrow something to read. Just until I can find a library.’

She seemed to be considering, weighing something or someone up. Perhaps me. Then she said, ‘We have a library here. We keep it locked.’

I could find nothing to say.

‘Yes, I dare say you find that strange. One has one's reasons. I told you my husband's grandfather made the library in this house. Let me just say that the way he made it was odd and not particularly – suitable.’

This immediately made me think it must contain one of those secret Victorian collections of erotica I had read about. But all I said was, ‘I shall manage until I can get into Colchester and join the library.’

‘I didn't say we had no books. Ella has plenty. You can have a look in her room, she won't mind,’ Mrs Cosway said, with the air of someone making a derogatory remark, ‘she's easygoing,’ and she laughed.

She was very old and I expected her to have some difficulty in getting up off that sofa, into which she had sunk deeply. Its seat cushions sagged and it looked as if its springs had gone. I sensed that any help I offered would be brusquely refused. But I need not have worried, for she stood up as easily as a twenty-year-old and without that tell-tale movement of pushing herself upright by pressing on the seat with both hands. Once on her feet, she stood as erect as I did, her back straighter than her daughter's.

‘John will want to go to bed now,’ she said.

It was very early, not yet seven, and an unexpectedly fine day. Ida and John were no longer on the lawn, where bed linen and shirts hung unmoving in the still air. Mrs Cosway went off to look for him and he came back with her. Perhaps I should say that he came in and she came in, there being no sense of one having fetched the other. I saw that he moved slowly and in a dazed fashion but there was no coercion on Mrs Cosway's part.

Apart from mine, there appeared to be only one bathroom in the house, though that virtually useless sanitary device, the washbasin, was to be found in every bedroom except John's. It took me a few days to appreciate my luck in having, rare in England at that time, a private shower room two metres from my bed. Where John had chosen to sleep wasn't like a bedroom at all but another drearily furnished high-ceilinged chamber with armchairs and ‘fireside’ chairs, small tables and an upright piano, the curtains of chenille in a colour called ‘old gold’. It was dark too, due to the Virginia creeper leaves thrusting over the edges of the window. John's bed was a convertible settee and his washing arrangements a marble-topped stand with an earthenware bowl on it and a jar for his toothbrush.