Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘It would have made no difference,’ I said, and again thinking that I could always leave, I didn't have to stay there, I screwed up my courage. ‘Why not let John see the Colchester man? It probably wouldn't cost anything.’ While keeping my eyes on the road, I could sense her staring at me. I made myself go on. ‘I don't suppose you're interested in what I think, but in my opinion John's all right as he is. He's better than he was. Why can't he be allowed to go on living the way he is now?’

‘You're right in one respect. I don't care what you think. I suppose you've been discussing me and my private affairs with Jane Trintowel.’

‘I can tell you exactly what we said if you like.’

‘Thank you but I don't wish to know.’

Dr Barker's second refusal to supply the longed-for prescription seemed to affect Ida and Winifred as badly as their mother, Ella to a lesser extent. She was too preoccupied by a gnawing anxiety over Felix to show concern for John, saying only that she wondered how they were going to cope with his hiding in cupboards and screaming on the floor. It was a week since Felix had been in touch with her for she said she couldn't count the occasion of his coming to dinner. There was no phone at The Studio, not particularly unusual in country places at that period, and at the start of their affair he had always phoned her (ignoring the proscribed times) from the call box outside the post office. He had told her that if she needed him she should phone the pub and leave a message as from ‘Tamara’.

‘I don't know why, Kerstin. You know what he's like. I sometimes think he tells any woman he's going about with to say she's Tamara.’ I struggled not to smile. She gave the Cosway laugh. ‘It's funny, isn't it? Mike the landlord must think he's such a faithful lover, getting all these calls from this one woman.’

‘You don't know that he's not.’

‘A faithful lover? I'm not a fool. Oh, what shall I do? I expect Winifred is with him now, sitting for him. And when that's done she'll be lying down for him. You'll see. I phoned the pub yesterday and said to tell him Tamara phoned. Come to that, I phoned the day before yesterday. I lie awake at night listening for the phone. I know he's capable of phoning any time up till midnight. When he came up here for dinner he shook hands with me. He'd think that funny. He has broken my heart.’

At this point the phone rang. She ran off to the dining room to answer it, came back to say it was June Prothero for Winifred. ‘She said she'd try the Rectory. I had to laugh.’

But Ella settled down to her regular evening task, the making of the bridesmaids' dresses. The real dislike and jealousy she now felt for Winifred did nothing to hinder her willingness to do this and I suppose the pleasure she got came from knowing she would get a free dress out of it. The material had been expensive, a watered silk in a bright shade of orchid pink, a bad colour and too thin for a January wedding. Velvet in a neutral shade would have been better but Ella anticipated getting a garment out of the pink silk she could afterwards wear to summer garden parties. She even put aside the pieces left after the cutting out so that she could make a doll's dress out of them.

‘I shall redo the blonde one from Poland,’ she said. ‘I've never liked that suit I've put her into. She can have a new pink frock. I don't know what I'd do without my hobbies, Kerstin, they're what keep me sane.’

She had set up her sewing machine in the drawing room. Mrs Cosway was displeased and Ida irritable at what she called ‘the mess’. She was always picking up pins and bits of thread from the floor. The machine was old and noisy, making it hard for her mother to hear the television. John ignored it. He went to bed when he liked these days and had again spent a whole night in the library. The walks too were no longer regular events. From insisting on them, he changed his mind and decided to go only occasionally. When Mrs Cosway told him he needed exercise and fresh air and told me to get ready and put my coat on, he went into the lavatory and locked himself in.

Ella was at school and it was Winifred who tried to get hold of the key by poking it through the lock from the outside with a knitting needle. We heard it fall to the floor. She had a kitchen implement which I believe is called a fish slice at the ready to insert under the door and draw the key out but John got there first, picking it up just as Winifred's scoop went in. He sat in there for five hours, occasionally running one of the taps above the basin. Mrs Cosway was sure he meant to flood the place but nothing happened as he always turned off the tap after a few seconds.

Walking as an activity essential for his health was forgotten after that episode but John seemed to bear a grudge against Winifred, I assume because she was the one who did most to get that door unlocked. If he was incapable of affection, he appeared to be able to dislike. But I don't know. Maybe what he felt was simple fear. He shrank away if she came near him. Everyone knew that it was unwise and perhaps cruel to touch John but Winifred had only to pass within a metre of his chair for him to pull himself away and hunch his shoulders.

This new behaviour, which Mrs Cosway called ‘defiance’, she constantly complained about as the result of the refusal of Dr Barker to prescribe Largactil or, as she put it, ‘John not being allowed to have his drug’. A further addition to her troubles came when Zorah turned up with news of the appointment she had made for John to be seen by an eminent consultant in Harley Street. She would take him. Before that she would drive him into Sudbury for an eye test.

I saw her glance at the harp and nod slightly but if she noticed the removal of the geode from her rooms she said nothing about it and did nothing. The trust had replied to her letter that any consultancy fees would be paid. John's appointment was for a date soon after Christmas and a week before Winifred's wedding.

Christmas is a feast of great importance to Swedes, but I hadn't yet decided whether to go home for it. Very indecisively, I kept saying to myself that I could always go home permanently, I could leave, go home for Christmas and not come back. Why was I staying when no one appeared to need me? Mrs Cosway was due to have the plaster cast removed from her leg in the coming week and would soon be back to normal. Her hand was completely healed and she had once more taken up her tapestry work. I provided a certain companionship to Ella which I thought she could do very well without and as for helping Ida, she often seemed to prefer doing the tasks I did herself. I had spent a pleasant Friday evening with the Trintowels, met Charles, and been invited for Christmas. Perhaps it was the immediate attraction of Charles which made me accept or just the conviction that I should certainly leave by February or March and go home then.

If John had become more lively and alert (defiant), Winifred went about in a dream, quiet, preoccupied and sometimes gazing at objects with that compulsive stare which is unseeing because the mind is occupied elsewhere. She showed no interest in wedding acceptances and refusals –it was I who noticed Isabel's writing on one acceptance card –and was indifferent to the bridesmaids' dresses Ella was making, while the hymns to be sung at the ceremony, once so important to her, had lost their significance. What apparently absorbed her were the sittings for her portrait, though she never spoke of them beyond saying as she left the house that she would be going to The Studio.

In the early evening, now John needed no attention from me and wanted none from his mother, I helped Ida and was in and out of the dining room, switching on the electric heater well in advance of dinner, drawing the curtains on the damp starless night and laying the table. Believing no one was in there, I walked in one evening with a handful of silver to see Winifred on the phone and hear the end of her sentence.