Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

22

But for Mark's proposal and my refusal, I would have left Lydstep Old Hall that very evening. But I couldn't go to the man I had said no to and tell him I had changed my mind and would he take me in? And there was another reason for staying. Along with my refusal of John, I had found myself feeling tender towards him in a way I had never been before. Though I could do nothing for him while I was there except respect him and his wishes, I felt there would be a kind of betrayal in deserting him just when what he had asked me seemed to indicate a need I had never before suspected.

So I forced myself to come down that evening and the next day and the next and try to behave as if nothing had happened. This was hard because Mrs Cosway seemed to blame me for John's behaviour, while several times I caught Winifred staring at me in wonder as if she was amazed by her brother's choice or was speculating as to what I had done to deserve it. Perhaps she, like her mother, thought my red hair a grave disadvantage in the attraction stakes. Ella had heard, probably from her, about John's very public proposal and was so enthralled by the whole idea that she wanted to talk about it all the time, trying to lure me with offers of rosé and chocolates to her room, where I was expected to analyse John's feelings and my own. I resisted most of it but the very act of resistance made me tired and exasperated.

The cold weather came back and we had a heavy snowfall. Driving was impossible until the snow-ploughs came out and cleared the roads. I was used to snow at home and had brought a pair of padded waterproof boots with me, new to English eyes and pronounced by Winifred to be ‘not very elegant’. These boots enabled me to get down into Windrose and do the shopping, which I brought up from the village on an old toboggan I found in one of the outbuildings and dragged up the hill behind me. Apart from the kitchen boiler, the open fire in the drawing room and the two new electric heaters, Lydstep Old Hall was now to be heated by paraffin stoves, fetched by Ida from the ‘boot room’. I had never before seen anything like these black cylinders that Mrs Cosway called ‘lamps' and which were fuelled by paraffin. This was among the items I was asked to bring back from the village, told by Ida to buy the kind which was coloured pink because blue paraffin smelt. The pink smelt quite strongly enough to me. Its powerful chemical reek, even less pleasant than the smell of petrol, spread through the whole house with no chance of escape as all the windows were kept firmly shut against the cold. Mrs Cosway switched off the ‘electric fires’, as she called them, whenever she was near one, on the principle that using them would overload the system and the house would catch fire.

No one else went out. In a way I thought opposed to all her usual habits, Mrs Cosway built up her strength by flexing the foot she had injured and describing circles with both feet. It was a kind of physiotherapy formulated by herself and it seemed to work. She had always been thin and upright. Now her strength was coming back. She told Winifred this was a regime for getting herself fit for the wedding. Winifred received all such remarks and good wishes with indifference, barely smiling. If anyone pressed the point she said, ‘Let's get Christmas over first.’

A lot of people I encountered on my shopping trips to Windrose talked like this, making the feast which I had always loved into a burden and speaking about it as if it were an ordeal to get through before the business of normal living could resume. Only Ella spoke of Christmas with a childlike thrill in her voice. As the cold intensified and, after a brief thaw, nightly frosts closed in on us, John sought refuge in the airing cupboard or, with two paraffin heaters in the drawing room and the fire built up high, huddled himself inside a sleeping bag Ella had found in one of those rooms off the kitchen I had passed through on my first morning there. He never again referred to his proposal. He took no more or less notice of me than he had ever done. This didn't stop Mrs Cosway taking up a station by his chair when her pacing was over for the day. She brought an upright chair for herself and sat there, stitching at the tapestry, as if protecting him from some onslaught I might make.

One evening when I went into the dining room to switch on the electric heater half an hour before dinner, Winifred was in there making a phone call. I left the room at once but not before I had seen from her guilty look and darting eyes that Ella was wrong and she had been telling Mike at the Rose that this was Tamara with a message for Felix. Zorah too stayed at home, though scarcely showing herself. A male friend of hers appeared, turning up in a jeep-like vehicle high above the snow. She must have given him a key to the house for, though I saw him arrive, the front-door bell never rang and no one came to let him in. Late that evening, when I went up to bed, I heard laughter from behind her door and the sound of music. There was a heavy fall of snow that night and the visitor's car, buried in a drift, became an igloo by morning. He stayed up there with Zorah for another twenty-four hours, finally dug his car out on Christmas Eve and drove away.

This had always been Christmas to me, as it is in much of the continent of Europe, and it came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to find that in England it was nothing more than the eve of the Great Feast. A time of last-minute preparations, cooking, present-wrapping, cake-decorating, table-laying, but not of festivity. Eric came, bringing Felix with him, and the two of them joined Winifred in the kitchen to drink sherry while she mixed stuffing, iced the cake and made crumbs from a white loaf for bread sauce. I went out there at one point to fetch a hot drink for Mrs Cosway and found Winifred flushed and laughing, obviously excited at being the focus of attention for not one but two men, she who until quite recently had been on the shelf and heading for old maidhood.

‘The silent guy’, as Felix always referred to John, had begun to treat him with antagonism. This would have mattered not at all but for Winifred's determination that her brother and her lover must like each other. I have noticed this phenomenon since in families, when a woman is so besotted with a boyfriend that she expects all her relations and everyone she knows to admire him as she does. But with a man like John, certainly not insane but suffering from a peculiar mental condition, she ought to have known better. She had no more chance of success with John than she had with her mother. At least Mrs Cosway was coldly polite to Felix. John could only express his true feelings, egocentric, indifferent to others' sensibilities, insensitive, isolationist, for this was Asperger's unchangeable nature. I believe Winifred still thought, as I once had, that now the medication was in the past, he would gradually become like everyone else.

This would never happen, and when the men came into the drawing room, each holding a newly refilled sherry glass, John, who had been working out some mathematical puzzle with paper, pencil and magnifying glass, looked up and said to Felix, ‘You're drunk.’

Winifred, inheritor of her mother's short fuse, screamed at him to shut up – how dared he speak like that? I half-expected Felix to laugh but his vanity had been hurt and perhaps he was aware that the accusation was not far off the truth. He scowled and said, ‘Thank you very much. You don't pull your punches.’

While Eric was muttering, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, how very unfortunate,’ Winifred began playing the difficult game of apologizing to Felix and scolding John at the same time, managing a sweet smile in one direction and a ferocious frown in the other, rather like the masks of comedy and tragedy you see in theatres.