Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

It was the day after that when the snow began. I was used to snow. We in Sweden seldom passed a winter without it and sometimes it fell for months on end. In England, it seemed to me, everyone hoped to get through the winter without snow, but if it must come, let it be at Christmas. A white Christmas was what they wanted. After that it could go away until next year. Things seldom worked out like that but this year they did, at least as far as the snow at Christmas went.

There is a belief, almost universal, that the temperature rises when it snows. This is a myth, as one of my children doing a meteorology course told me. I believe it got colder with the snow that year. At Lydstep Old Hall fires were lit in fireplaces which had held no coal or wood for decades. Ella drove into Sudbury and, with grudging consent from Mrs Cosway, bought electric heaters. Wrapped in blankets and eiderdowns, wearing woollen gloves, John did his Descartes act and sat in the airing cupboard day after day. Lydstep Old Hall had become a grey house with a white roof, desolate and sad to look at, its windows glassy black eyes. It was hard to tell if Zorah was there or not. To protect the shining bodywork of the Lotus, she put it away in one of the barns no one had used for half a century.

‘She's ended it,’ Ella said to me. ‘Winifred, I mean. When the portrait was finished, that was the end. I expect she said so. I expect she told him that with the last brush stroke that was the last time. I shall never forgive her, never. But she looks miserable, doesn't she?’

I found it hard to agree. To me she looked much the same as usual. Nor did I believe Ella. I saw no reason to think Winifred had ended anything.

‘She knows she's got to marry Eric. It's her fate. Besides, if she doesn't she thinks Ida would.’

‘Surely Eric himself would have some say in it.’

She shrugged. ‘What do you think of the doll?’

It was in the pink silk of the bridesmaids' dresses and holding a bouquet of tiny artificial rosebuds. I said it was very nice but I must have sounded vague. I was thinking of Ida and Eric. Eric and Ida – how much more suitable that would have been than the present arrangement.

My second proposal came in the following week. It was from John Cosway.

*

If the cold had continued he might never have made it for he was always in the airing cupboard or otherwise directing his energies to keeping himself warm. But mildness returned with heavy rain and Winifred went about saying it was more like August than December, a wet August. When John emerged he began to spend long hours in the library, perhaps making the best of the warmer weather before the cold that was sure to come drove him back upstairs again. But in the late afternoon he usually returned to his chair in the drawing room where Mrs Cosway always was and where Ida, still aproned and harassed, would drop on to the sofa for occasional ten-minute breaks before rushing off back to housework.

Whatever Winifred had said, the temperature was far from anything this country saw in August and Ida had always lit a fire in this room. One of the advantages of central heating is that one can spend time in any room one chooses, while in its absence there is no alternative to sitting as close as possible to the only fire in the house. I had been helping Ida sort out two large cardboard boxes full of sadly shabby Christmas decorations, deciding which could be used again and which disposed of, but this more or less done, both of us were in the drawing room, Mrs Cosway was lying on the sofa and John was standing at the end of it, in front of the console table, with his gloved hands on the rounded body of the Roman vase. His mother watched him in a fretful way as if she feared he would break it. Winifred had just come in. She was brimming with excitement, the result no doubt of an afternoon with Felix, and I had a sudden fear that she wouldn't be able to contain herself but would break out into some wild exhilarated confession.

Nothing like that happened. Ida got up to make the tea, I said I would help, and as I got to my feet, John said, ‘Will you marry me, Shashtin?’

As a high-functioning autistic, he had simply expressed a desire, as he always did, and because he knew nothing of tact or discretion or that this request is always made in private, was without normal inhibitions, had no shyness or care for the usages of the world, he had expressed it in the presence of three other people. At that time, I had never had a shock like it. I don't know that I have since. I was simply dumbstruck. The awful silence was broken by Winifred, whose pent-up excitement burst out of her in a shriek of laughter and the worst question she could have asked.

‘Marry you? Are you mad?’

They thought he was. Mrs Cosway said, ‘Ignore it. The best thing to do is ignore it,’ and she turned on me eyes full of anger.

I thought then and wrote in the diary that evening that if I did what she asked I would have to live with this cowardice for the rest of my life, I would never forget it, I would never get over it. In a voice that I am sure sounded strangled, I said, ‘Thank you very much, John, but I'm afraid the answer is no.’

He said nothing. Whether there was some peculiarity in me which brought tears into my eyes when I am proposed to, I don't know, but again I felt like crying. I could do that in Mark's room but not here and I made an enormous effort to control myself, clenching my fists and driving my nails into the palms of my hands.

I could see no change in John's expression, no danger there of his feeling a similar distress to my own. Mrs Cosway now turned and addressed her daughters.

‘That's why he wanted her. I always suspected it. What other reason could there be for his asking for a young woman to help me? Ostensibly to help me. Anyone would have done, of course.’ She turned to me. ‘I don't know how you've been making up to him. I don't want to know. You may care to hear it would have made no difference. He was obviously set on this from the start.’

Was he? Had he really only asked the trust for help for his mother in order to have a girl in the house to marry? Perhaps. I would never know. His motive in wishing to marry anyone was hard to imagine, unless he saw marriage as a way of escape from this place. He wasn't mad, even then I was quite certain of that, but there was no doubt he was very different from other men of his age. Could he love? Did he love anything or anyone but that vase and perhaps Zorah? And if so, was it remotely possible he loved me?

All this passed through my mind, though not till later. After the things Mrs Cosway had said, gross insults and intended as such, I walked out of the room and went into the kitchen. There I busied myself with putting the kettle on, setting cups and saucers out on a tray, and finding a cake and some biscuits. It was still too cold to use the dining room until the electric heater had warmed it for an hour or two. After a blankness in my head which lasted a full minute, I began to ask myself what John thought marriage was. What did anyone who screamed when he was touched think marriage was? Was I only to be his silent companion and servant or did he believe our coming together would unlock in him reserves of self-expression and social interaction? But I realized I was attributing to him thoughts and feelings he could never have had. Possibly he believed he wanted to be married because there was so much talk of marriage with Winifred's wedding only a month away. Then there came back into my mind the dreadful question she had asked him.

‘Are you mad?’

I sat down at the table and when Ida came scurrying in, the hated tears had begun. She looked at me and shrugged.

‘Goodness knows what all that was about.’

‘I don't want any tea,’ I said and I went upstairs to my room, wondering how I was going to face John later and, come to that, the rest of them.