Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

It was absurd, of course, all of it was, not least because this kind of regalia was once designed for a young virgin being delivered from her father's hands into her husband's. Winifred would be forty-one a week after the wedding and a man who was not her future husband had recently been her lover. And it was true that a few months before, in the heavy make-up and the dirty-fingernails days, these clothes would have seemed grotesquely unsuitable for her. She would have been taking a risk in wearing them lest she set off giggling in the church. Not so by the time I saw them. Her natural good looks had come into their own, she had shed years off her age and there was a spring in her step. She had become young, six or seven years older than I was; through love or sex or something of that sort, she had regained her youth. She would no longer disgrace that gown and it would no longer show her up for a fool without taste or judgement.

Winifred had been abroad very little so she was excited, or seemed to be, about the prospect of her unknown honeymoon destination. For once Eric was doing the romantic thing and taking her away to a holiday place he refused to reveal.

‘You can tell me,’ said Mrs Cosway ‘I won't give the secret away.’

‘It will be much easier for you not to if you don't know,’ said Eric.

‘If I guess right I shall be able to tell from your face.’

‘I doubt that, Mater,’ said Eric.

This was the sobriquet he had finally decided on, having rejected ‘mother-in-law’, ‘Julia’, ‘Mamma’ and Felix's facetious suggestion, the awful ‘Winsmum’. I don't think Mrs Cosway liked ‘Mater’, though she probably thought it the best of the bunch.

She began naming cities and holiday resorts in European countries in the hope of detecting their destination from his expression – ‘Paris, Rome, the South of France, one of those costas, Crete, Lake Garda’ – until he came the nearest to losing his temper I had ever seen him.

‘Oh, Southend,’ he said. ‘Where else?’

For a long time, ever since the wedding was postponed from November till January, I had been sure they would never get married, but once Christmas was past and the days went by quietly, I began to think it would happen. Things had reached a stage when cancellation or even further postponement would cause so much trouble and be so expensive as to be untenable. The clothes were ready, the honeymoon was booked, the rehearsal was about to happen and the cake was delivered. Wedding presents had begun arriving.

We all went down to the church, where Mr Cusp deputized for the Archdeacon. It had at last been decided that Mrs Cosway should give Winifred away but in her absence Ida performed this function. Stony-faced, she walked Winifred up the aisle and, when Mr Cusp asked who was to give her away, handed her to him, stepped back and sat down at the end of the front pew. She kept her eyes off Eric, gazing straight ahead of her into the chancel.

Ella's expression was supercilious, as if she thought the whole thing as absurd as the wedding itself would be, while June Prothero smiled with earnest cheerfulness, occasionally making arch remarks about how pretty Winifred was looking and what a wonderful man Eric was. I half-expected Felix to be there but there was no sign of him. His presence wasn't necessary, I am sure he hadn't been invited, but this would hardly have stopped him coming if he had wanted to. As we left the church and came out into the cold dark of a country night, drifts of dirty frozen snow lying on the verges, I thought how, with the coming of the New Year, he seemed to have been abandoned. Winifred had left him behind as she went forward into her new life. Eric, no doubt, had other things to think about and would pick him up again when he returned from his mysterious destination. So I thought.

We drove past the White Rose, brightly lit, Christmas decorations still in the lighted windows, holly wreaths still hanging on the doors. I saw Ella turn to look as we went by, hoping for a sight of Felix perhaps or still so besotted that a place he frequented continued to hold a compelling magic for her. Winifred, on the other hand, at the wheel, kept her eyes on the road, and Ida, sitting beside her in the passenger seat, kept the silence she had maintained since before she escorted the future bride up the aisle.

That winter she had aged. I remembered when I had first seen her, when she admitted me to the house in early June, how I had thought her good-looking, though her appearance was neglected, and had guessed her age at about fifty when she was in fact forty-eight. Since then she had had a birthday but it looked as if it had brought her to the verge of sixty instead of forty-nine. A few minutes after we were back in the house I went into the kitchen to give her a hand.

‘Will you be going in May?’ she said as I began peeling vegetables. ‘I mean, at the end of May when your year is up?’

‘As you say, my year will be up,’ I said.

‘So you'll leave? You won't stay on for another six months?’

‘I haven't been asked to do that.’ I might as well give a warning hint, I thought. ‘I'd better tell you, Ida, I've thought of leaving before May.’

‘Only thought?’

‘Let's put it this way. I was employed here in a nursing capacity to help care for someone I thought was mentally ill.’

‘He is . He is mentally ill.’

‘He doesn't need a nurse, does he? I'm left with nothing to do except help you and before I came I made up my mind that what I wouldn't be was an au pair.’

I dried my hands, took the tablecloth from one drawer and the cutlery from another. She said nothing. The water in the large saucepan she had set on the electric burner began to boil and she slowly tipped in the cauliflower florets. I went to the dining room and found the door I had left open closed against me. As I opened it Winifred's voice said, ‘Tell him Tamara is on her way, will you?’

An intake of breath behind me made me turn my head. I looked round at Ida but couldn't tell from her face if she had heard.

23

Reading the diary after all these years, I have been thinking how different things would be today. Impossible, for instance, for The Studio not to be on the phone. Winifred wouldn't be dependent on a land line without extensions in a house the size of Lydstep Old Hall but would have her own mobile which she could use in the privacy of her bedroom. I doubt there would be all this elaborate cooking and table-laying. Mrs Cosway was old and had been ill. Today she would still have her meals prepared but they would be brought to her on a tray while the rest of the family, even John, would be left to forage for themselves. But what am I saying? Isn't it even more unthinkable that all these middle-aged people would still be living at home with a parent? I don't know what level of sexual morality is expected from a Church of England clergyman thirty-five years later but it seems unlikely to me that a man and a woman of Eric and Winifred's ages – or any ages, come to that – would contemplate marriage without living together first for a while.

As for John, now his Asperger's would be recognized for what it was. No one would call him schizophrenic and no doctor would prescribe for him a powerful tranquillizer like chlorpromazine hydrochloride. Afflicted only by Asperger's, he would never be classified as mentally ill but only as ‘different’ and, as a child, as having ‘special needs’. But all this happened thirty-five years ago.

Winifred had no dinner with the rest of us that evening. What she told her mother and sisters I don't know but the prevailing opinion seemed to be that she had gone to the Rectory. It was a grim meal. John, of course, never did anything to please. It was not in his nature, it was impossible, something his mother and sisters never began to understand. And when he got up from the table after eating his first course and disappeared, Mrs Cosway began on a whining monologue about his selfishness and how it had only begun to show itself when the drug was withdrawn. In this she had the support of Ella, who rattled on about how leaving him without tranquillizers was bad for him and everyone else, and suggested that ‘this specialist of Zorah's' might well put him back on them.