Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Though she said very little, John must have heard her voice for he came out at last, dragging his bedclothes with him.

‘Felix was asleep in his chair and that made John angry, said Ella. ‘He stood over him, staring. It was awful. I thought he was going to hit him but Felix woke up. John said, “You're in my chair. Get up,” and Felix did, very quickly. Winifred told John never to behave like that again, which was absurd, you know, because it's always useless saying anything like that to him. Zorah started laughing when John said what he said and then she told him not to forget she'd be driving him to London in the middle of next week to see the specialist. Then Mother said, “Let's see if he puts you back on your Largactil.”

‘Felix left soon after that. He hadn't taken offence, I don't mean that. He said he'd enjoy the walk home, it would clear his head. But I know him and I think he was going straight to the pub. They'd just opened. But I think Winifred is giving him up,’ said Ella, ‘or he's giving her up. After the wedding Felix will just be Eric's best friend until some new person comes to Windrose.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you think he'll come back to me?’

‘Surely you wouldn't want him?’ I should have known better.

‘Oh, yes, I would, Kerstin. I'm not proud. I know he's a drunk and faithless and he'll never be successful but I love him.’

Zorah had taken John to Sudbury for an eye test a week before Christmas and he was promised new glasses. The day before he was due to go to London with her I too went there and spent the afternoon and evening with Mark, returning on the last train.

He looked very serious when I told him of the latest Cosway troubles. ‘I think you ought to leave,’ he said. ‘It sounds as if something nasty is going to happen.’

‘What sort of something nasty?’

‘I don't know and I may be quite wrong. I don't understand why you want to stay on.’

‘Don't you?’ I said.

‘If you mean because of what I asked you, you can still come and share this room. If you don't want me to I'll never mention marriage again. I'm in love with you but I won't mention that either.’

On the way back in the train I thought about taking up his offer. I could wait until Zorah had taken John to London, Ella was at her sewing, Winifred at the Rectory – or The Studio? – and Ida being a housewife, and then break the news to Mrs Cosway. Only one doesn't break good news and I was sure she would be pleased. It would be a relief. It meant nothing to her that I took half the work off Ida's shoulders. Ida could manage on her own. She always had before I came.

Things would be better, I thought (and wrote down when I got back to Lydstep) after Winifred had gone. The constant sparring between her and Ella would be over and Felix would no longer come there; I was sure Ella was wrong and he wouldn't return to her, not that when he was ‘hers' he had ever made that plain in public. No, he would become, for a while, a frequent visitor at the Rectory, neither he nor Winifred betraying by a glance or a catching of eyes or exchanged half-smiles that they had ever been more to each other than friendly acquaintances. So I was thinking as the train came to a stop at Marks Tey, and because rain was falling, washing away the snow, I was obliged to take an expensive taxi back to Lydstep.

There was one week to go before the wedding. Winifred asked me if I would like to hear her banns called for ‘the third time of asking’. I had no idea what banns were or what asking meant in this context; she explained and told me too that Eric wouldn't be calling his own banns (perhaps this wasn't allowed, I don't know) but the vicar of the next parish would do it as he had done on the two previous occasions. In the event, I, Mrs Cosway, Ella and Winifred all went to church, while Ida stayed at home to be with John, happier with his new glasses and able to dispense with the magnifying glass.

I read in the paper the other day, thirty-five years later, that the publishing of banns of marriage is likely to disappear along with other Church ‘reforms’. I don't know why and maybe there is no good reason. It was pleasing to hear the ancient formula spoken by Mr Moxon from St John's, Lydstel le Grand, as he asked us, all thirty or so of us, if we knew ‘cause, or any just impediment, why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony’. It made me think of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester's wedding and the first wife's brother speaking up to tell of the impediment, but Eric had no first wife and the bride having a lover is no cause for not refusing to join two persons together in matrimony. Felix was there, sitting where he had sat that Sunday in summer when Winifred had reproved him for his clothes, and when the organist, who wasn't a patch on James Trintowel, struck up ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’, sang as lustily as he had done before.

I thought of John and his proposal. He was a single man, a ‘bachelor of this parish’, and I was a single woman. We were free and there was no impediment to stop us marrying. If it was what John wanted he could have spoken the responses, said the words. Recalling the terms of Mr Cosway's will, I could see why Mrs Cosway was worried and why she sat close by John to protect him from his predatory carer.

The Church of England fascinated me then. Now it only disappoints me. In those days I used to marvel at an institution dedicated to a religion where no one seemed to believe in God and everyone believed passionately in ritual and rubric. It was my first visit for some weeks and I watched, rapt, as some knelt, some remained sitting, all closed their eyes in prayer, some crossed themselves while others witnessed the crossing disapprovingly, some sang ‘Hallelujah!’, others ‘Alleluia!’ and all gave a kind of court bow, dipping their heads, when the Creed was said and the words ‘Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord’ were reached. I don't know why. I didn't then and I don't know now. Were their minds devoutly full of Christ's passion, his suffering, his descent into hell, and his mystical resurrection? Or did they think of the roasting joint and whether their neighbours would be coming back after church for sherry?

Eric was to come to the Hall for lunch. This had been the usual arrangement for weeks by then but this time Felix wouldn't be with him. There was something formal, I thought, almost ceremonial in the way he said goodbye to Winifred, taking both her hands in his and, to everyone's surprise, not least her own, kissing her cheek. In the days of Ella's ascendancy there had been nothing like this and as I watched them the puzzle of why Felix seemed to prefer the older sister was solved. For all her prissy ways, her apparent devoutness and her Sunday school-teacherish way of talking, Winifred gave off a charge of sexual energy entirely absent from Ella. I felt it then, a powerful sexiness in the way she breathed and the gaze of her eyes and the parting of her painted lips. If I could feel it, how much more must Felix? He had awakened this in her, he must have done, for I am sure it wasn't there before.

She wanted him to come back to the Hall with her. Without him her day was spoilt. She had only Eric, an encumbrance and a nuisance as well, a stumbling block to any plans she might make, but an inescapable and in some ways desired fate. She had to have a husband. Without a husband, she was no better than Ida or Ella, an old maid, a spinster. But did she have to give up Felix?

Because I wouldn't be at the wedding, I was to be shown Winifred's dress, a special treat. It was a classic bridal gown, of white silk and having about it those special wedding-dress features you never seem to see in connection with any other kind of costume, points on the long sleeves that extend over the hand, a standup collar like a calla lily, a train which would be carried up the aisle by Ella or June Prothero and which would make the dress unwearable on any subsequent occasion. The headdress which went with it was rather like those worn in portraits by Elizabethan ladies and which always seemed to be shaped like a gable on the front of a house. A veil would be attached to float down Winifred's back.