Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘…Tamara phoned.’

Remembering what Ella had told me, it was easy to reconstruct the earlier part. ‘Would you take a message and tell Felix Tamara phoned?’

She put down the receiver with a sharp bang. I took no notice of her, said nothing, but I knew then. The phone call told me Ella had been right. There was no possibility of Winifred's using that code name for any reason except that she was having an affair with Felix. She hadn't been phoning him to say that she could or could not sit for him next morning but to make, or most reluctantly unmake, an assignation. Where did that leave Eric? Or their wedding? Was this a last – and first too – fling? It went deeper than that, I thought. With her it would be either nothing or a whole-hearted passion.

While we were finishing dinner the phone rang. Ella was nearest to it and she twisted round quickly to grab the receiver, to the loud complaints of her mother.

‘Oh, really, it's too bad. No one is to telephone here at this hour.’

Ella was waving a silencing hand at her, saying into the phone, ‘Of course I'll come. In half an hour. Of course .’

Winifred had turned him down for some reason, so he sent for Ella. It was simple. She had flushed and pushed away her plate.

‘Please don't ever flap at me again, Ella,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘It's dreadfully rude. It's disrespectful, though that counts for nothing with you.’

‘I couldn't hear what was being said.’ Ella had discovered the virtues of the passive voice, an invaluable aid to subterfuge in the English language. ‘Please, Mother,’ she said in the tone of a ten-year-old, ‘may I leave the table?’

Mrs Cosway made a sound of disgust, flapping her uninjured hand in the way she had found so irritating when Ella did it. A silence fell, broken by the arrival of Eric, who had come for coffee after his meeting of the parochial church council. The reason for Winifred's disguising herself as ‘Tamara’ to call the White Rose was revealed.

‘I passed Ella driving down the hill,’ he said. ‘I'm afraid she was breaking the speed limit.’ He took his glasses off and put them on again for no apparent reason, as was always the case with him.

20

Without central heating, Lydstep Old Hall was an uncomfortable place to be that cold winter. John, who had borne it presumably without complaint during the drugged years, now began to show his discomfort in his own peculiar way. He never said more than, ‘It's cold’ or ‘I'm cold’ but he would wrap himself up like someone with limited resources preparing to spend a month in the open air of the Arctic. First of all his winter-weight dressing gown went on over his clothes – the pockets full of his ritual objects – then he would bring the eiderdown off his own bed downstairs, and if he decided this was inadequate, a couple of blankets would be fetched from the airing cupboard and, often, a sweater or two put on under the dressing gown. Those were the days before duvets and tracksuits and padded coats, so he had to manage as best he could. One day, particularly cold with flurries of snow, he went upstairs, diverging from his rule about only doing so for baths, got inside the airing cupboard and sat there on the lowest shelf, having pushed Winifred's laboriously ironed sheets and pillowcases on to the floor.

For half an hour or so no one knew where he had got to. Mrs Cosway, by this time free of plaster, her ankle still swollen, was loud in her lamentations on the results of the absent drug. I found John myself and, seeing him there, was reminded of Dr Lombard's story of Descartes in Queen Christina's airing cupboard.

His desperate quest for warmth prompted him to make another move towards seeking the help of the trust. Using his ancient reading glasses and the extra-powerful magnifying glass he had got Ella to buy him in Sudbury, he spent a lot of time scanning central heating advertisements in the newspapers. Finding a system he liked the look of, he announced in his very abbreviated way that the trust must produce the money to have it put in at Lydstep Old Hall.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘I won't ask them. It would be a shocking extravagance. We live in a temperate climate, especially in this corner of England.’

As she was speaking an easterly gale Ella said felt like Force 10 was tearing past the windows, carrying with it the last of the autumn leaves. From under his mounds of down quilt, blankets and a shawl he had found somewhere, John said, ‘Zorah will.’

At this, Mrs Cosway screamed aloud and as the sound died away the doorbell rang. It was Dr Barker, come to ‘take a look at’ John, though no one had invited him. John, who had never previously met him, refused to comply, and when Dr Barker made inept attempts to persuade him, huddled himself first into a corner, then departed into the lavatory, where we heard him lock the door.

‘I told you to take the key away,’ Mrs Cosway said to Ida.

Outside the door, Dr Barker began cajoling him to come out or let him come in. John maintained silence until the nagging became too much for him and he let out a yell so bloodcurdling that we all jumped and Dr Barker said, ‘I am afraid I am going to have to wash my hands of this, Mrs Cosway, for the present at least.’

‘Wash whatever you like,’ she said. ‘I didn't ask you to come here upsetting everyone.’ And after that, whenever she mentioned him, she called him Pontius Pilate.

It was another five hours before John came out. By that time most of us felt we could no longer stand these interruptions and I was again on the point of deciding to pack my bags. However, it did result in Winifred writing to the trust and asking for central heating to be installed. It never was, of course. There was no time and, after what happened, no need or wish. But for obvious reasons Winifred was feeling so elated these days that she would have done almost anything John or anyone else asked. A point had been reached at which she was Felix Dunsford's favoured lover, almost the maîtresse en titre , while Ella was relegated to the girl from the village, called upon when the favourite was not available.

It must have been tiring for Winifred. Since then I have seen others play it, this game of a woman juggling two men, one the husband or accredited fiancé, the other the illicit and secret lover. Most of them do it very well, but it surprised me that Winifred should be so expert, she who seemed scarcely to have had a boyfriend before Eric came on the scene. With absolute ease she fell in with the Tamara ploy, concealed as best she could her excitement, and succeeded in keeping Eric in a state of calm ignorance. Nor do I know what she thought would happen when Christmas was past and her wedding date approached. She was seizing the day, and the day – nearly every day, it seemed – brought Felix, sitting for the portrait and, no doubt, making love with the portrait painter afterwards.

Never talkative, Ida became almost silent as Christmas approached. I sometimes saw her look wonderingly at Winifred as if she suspected what was going on but couldn't quite believe it. Perhaps she had noticed that her sister, recently such a fanatical church-goer, no longer attended Holy Communion or any services apart from Sunday Matins. In December, I was told, Ida would normally have been even busier than usual making preparations for Christmas but this year Winifred was to do everything. This was her wish. It would be the last time, she said, as the following year she would be having Christmas at the Rectory.

Ida looked bewildered when she said that, seemed about to speak but did not Perhaps her thoughts were the same as Ella's and mine, that in spite of everything, Winifred still intended to get married in three weeks' time. And continue with the affair afterwards? It certainly suited her. The flush on her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes and the gloss on her hair were almost indecent if you knew what had caused them. Ella invited me up to her bedroom to tell me she was thinking of telling Eric.