Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Going back to Marks Tey in the train, I imagined the effect this would have on Mrs Cosway, for I was sure the phone calls would be made at forbidden times. Perhaps I would finally be driven to leave by Mark's calls and Mrs Cosway's wrath, and I would be forced to take refuge with him for at least a while. In that way phoning me might have something approaching the effect he wanted.

I was on the last train and the last taxi bore away the passenger who had been just ahead of me in the queue. The night was mild for December and I decided to walk. It was less than two miles but a very long way in the dark for someone carrying a backpack. Today, I think, I should have been afraid. Perhaps we grow more apprehensive as we get older or else there is genuinely more reason for fear than there was. Certainly I felt far less nervous as I walked through the lanes and along a footpath that skirted the hedges than I often did in the drawing room at Lydstep Old Hall with Mrs Cosway, yet my path was lit only by a damp-looking moon. My head was full of Mark and his disappointment and my own hurt that I had hurt him.

At first, when I came into the house at a little after midnight, I thought all the lights were out and everyone had gone to bed. Then, glancing down the passage on my way to the stairs, I saw the line of light under the library doors I had seen on the night I drew the vase. I knew it must be John in there yet I opened the right-hand door and went in. The lamps in the library were all of low wattage and a kind of dismal twilight pervaded the place, some of those tortuous passages and the walls, heavy with books, being in the darkness of long, deep shadows. The stone faces, Greek and Roman and medieval and eighteenth-century, with clustering curls or laurel wreaths or Voltairean caps or periwigs, stared at me with blank, sightless eyes. No sculptor has yet found a way of making eyes look lifelike. I had no string to pay out behind me, but I knew my way without difficulty to the centre by this time and there I found John, sitting on the floor at Longinus's feet, reading, or trying to read, with the aid of his magnifying glass and a torch propped up on a stack of textbooks, a thick leather-bound volume.

He didn't look up. He knew who it was, for he recognized my tread, and this failure to give any sign that he knew I was there, which in another man would seem like gross rudeness, I took as a compliment. With me he felt no need to be guarded, to withdraw into himself, or take the extreme step of hiding. You could say he trusted me, though this may be a concept alien to those with his affliction. At least he felt no need to be afraid of me. After a few moments he looked up but without acknowledging me, and stared expressionlessly into my face. I saw that the book he had been puzzling over was The Shorter Oxford Dictionary .

The silence in the library was so deep that I hesitated to break it. I had nothing to say, for whatever his mother and sisters might have done, I had no intention of trying to dislodge John from the library, warn him not to strain his eyes or chivvy him into going to bed. But we often talk when we have nothing to say, simply to fill a silent void, perhaps because the absence of sound frightens us. I moved a little away from him, to his relief I think, because he returned to his dictionary, adjusting the torch which had slipped when he turned round to me. As usual when he was in here, he had removed the Bible from Longinus's grasp and replaced it with a great tome of Locke's political philosophy. Someone must go in there after John's occupancy and put that Bible back. Winifred, I guessed it would be.

There was a chiming clock somewhere in the labyrinth. One of the family, John himself most likely, had set it going again, and now it tolled out a single sonorous note. It was one hour past midnight. The clock having broken the silence, I felt less apprehensive about doing so and I said good night to John in an even tone.

To my surprise he said, ‘Good night, Shashtin.’ He didn't look up.

I went to bed, leaving any entry I might make in the diary until the next day.

Along with the rest of us, John was invited by Eric to The Studio to view the finished portrait of Winifred. Mrs Cosway refused for him, saying that someone must stay at home with him – why? – and it had better be her since no one else was willing.

‘I don't want to go anyway,’ she said. ‘The last thing one wants is to see the inside of that man's house.’

My previous visit to Felix's home had been back in the summer. Since then large quantities of rubbish had accumulated, mostly in the shape of old newspapers and magazines and empty bottles. Whatever Ella and Winifred did on their visits there, it wasn't cleaning. The place was seriously filthy, a state of affairs which Eric and Winifred seemed to regard as not only normal in a painter or ‘artist’, as they called him, but quite admirable. I doubt if they would have found a like untidiness attractive in me, but I was careful, especially in the vicinity of Felix, to give no hint of my own sketches.

When not a single glass or mug could be found, Eric said that looking for a reasonable standard of hygiene from someone with Felix's gifts would be like expecting housewifely skills from Gauguin. It was in the style of Gauguin rather than Reynolds, which Eric had said he would have preferred, that Winifred's likeness had been painted. She was in raptures, blushing crimson when the dirty piece of cloth – an old curtain? – was drawn aside by Felix and the work revealed.

Perhaps to avoid having to join in the delighted praise, Ella had removed herself to the sink, where she was rinsing out all the cups and mugs she could find under the cold tap, there being no hot water, and showing an intimate knowledge of the household arrangements as she did so. After she had dried them on the only available teacloth, apparently the fellow to the curtain which had been used to cover the portrait, Eric filled the various vessels from the wine bottles he had brought. I would have been very surprised if Felix himself had provided anything for his guests to drink. We drank a toast to the painter, then to the engaged couple, Eric being in his element while all this was going on, finally raising his ‘glass’, a paint-stained mug with a picture of the infant Prince Charles and Princess Anne on its side, to ‘my beautiful bride’.

The portrait, still unframed, was carried back to the Rectory by Eric and Ida, where a cheque in an envelope was handed over. I went too, curious to see it hung. The sign Felix had painted had at last been put up by the gate. His lettering was impeccable. That evening I wrote in the diary that providing this painted signboard was the only good thing Felix Dunsford had done since coming to Windrose and in any case he had been paid for it.

The picture was to be hung over the fireplace in the room Eric called the ‘lounge’, a word which conjured up to me places of cream tweed sofas and cut-glass ashtrays, nothing at all like the Rectory's shabby living room. The portrait, in ivory and reds and purples, brought the only colour. I thought it a poor likeness. It's not to my credit that I never recognized what a good painter Felix was.

‘Shall you like having your own face staring down at everyone when you have guests?’ Ella spoke in dry, almost sarcastic tones. ‘It would embarrass me .’

‘Possibly,’ said Winifred, ‘but it's not your portrait and you're not going to live here.’

I remembered what Ella had said about telling Eric and for a moment I thought she meant to say something which would make the situation clear. But she only continued to stare at her sister. Eric announced that since ‘the sun was over the yard-arm’ we should all have a drink, though what little sun there was had been nowhere near the yard-arm when we had the wine in The Studio. Winifred seemed far less familiar with the arrangements at the Rectory than with those at Felix's and it was Ida who fetched a tray laden with bottles and took glasses out of a gloomy heavily carved sideboard. Meanwhile, Winifred stood in front of the portrait, which was balanced on the brown marble mantelpiece, staring at her own face with doting narcissism.