Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘I'll come back in ten minutes,’ I said, determined not to be there while this grown man undressed himself.

Mrs Cosway gave me a look implying she hadn't expected any assertiveness from me. I said nothing and occupied myself with unpacking the rest of my clothes and setting out on a dressing table which would serve me as a desk the large leather-bound diary I had brought with me.

I gave them the time I had said I would, which seemed reasonable. John was in striped pyjamas and a dressing gown. ‘Shashtin,’ he said, a flat utterance of my name with no apparent pride in his correct pronunciation.

‘John,’ I said, and after that, when we greeted each other, it was always with the simple Christian name.

Mrs Cosway was looking at me narrowly. ‘I'm not sorry I was wrong but I expected someone of eighteen or nineteen. You must be several years older than that.’

‘I'm twenty-four,’ I said, feeling like Elizabeth Bennet when interrogated by Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

The little staccato laugh preceded her words. ‘When I was young red hair like yours was considered quite ugly.’

‘Luckily for me,’ I said, ‘times have changed.’

‘Yes.’ If she detected a sharp note in my response she gave no sign of it. ‘I expect you're thought good-looking. You have a modern face. Now get into bed, John, and I'll give you your pill.’

He gave no sign of having heard her. Later I understood that apparent acquiescence from him to her instruction was really her telling him to do something he had already made up his mind to do. He wanted to go to bed, he was tired; he wanted the pill because he had been told it was vitamins. Nothing would have made him do what he disliked. It was a little while before I realized this and realized too that when he did what his mother wanted it was sometimes because he had been kept in ignorance of the true facts. But that was in the future. On my first evening there I saw John remove from the pockets of his dressing gown a ballpoint pen, a pencil, a dice, a tiny green bottle with ribbed sides, a safety pin, a boiled-sugar sweet wrapped in cellophane, a tiny book perhaps measuring five centimetres by three and a reel of sticking plaster. These objects he arranged in a pattern on the bedside table, several times straightening up, contemplating his achievement and moving one piece or another an infinitesimal distance away from where it had been. Mrs Cosway waited, not very patiently, tapping one toe on the lino. At last he was satisfied. He took off his dressing gown, hung it on the door hook and got into bed. I expected some good-night ritual, a story read or told perhaps, a hot drink brought, but Mrs Cosway merely gave him water in a mug with a handle he could hold. She put a white tablet into a small glass dish and held it out to him. He took it, drank and swallowed it. He was treated like a child and I half-expected his mother to kiss him. But she stepped back, careful not to touch him.

‘Good night,’ she said, adding neither name nor endearment.

I too said good night to him and began to tidy the room, careful not to disturb the objects on his bedside table. Mrs Cosway did nothing but she watched me. John was asleep by the time we left the room. Only a barbiturate would work so fast, I thought, and thought too that I disapproved. Mrs Cosway left the door ajar.

‘Noise from out here won't disturb him,’ she said.

Nothing would have, not with phenobarbitone inside him.

‘You could do that if I went out, couldn't you? One must be careful not to touch him. He screams if he's touched.’ She looked at the watch which hung loosely on her emaciated arm. ‘I see it is five and twenty past seven. Supper will be in exactly one hour.’

‘I shan't want supper,’ I said. ‘I rather thought we had had our last meal of the day.’

‘Goodness, no. Ida will be cooking something and there will be cheese and a pudding.’ Mrs Cosway looked me up and down critically. ‘You are far too thin.’

I questioned whether I was as thin as she or Ida but not aloud. Ever since I had seen John given that barbiturate capsule in the guise of a vitamin pill, I had wanted to be away from her. I needed to be alone. As I had told her, I wasn't hungry and I felt that for tonight, with conversation expected from me as we sat round a table, I had nothing left to say.

‘Of course you must do as you wish.’ She said it in the tone which means you really should do as she wishes and dislikes the turn events have taken.

‘If there's nothing you'd like me to do.’

‘Oh dear, no. Not at this hour. Here is Ella's room.’

Its frivolity was a shock. I only just stopped myself gasping at its colours. Beyond a doubt, Ella Cosway's favourite colour was pink, all shades of it, peach, blush, sugar-pink, rose, fuchsia, coral, and every one of them was represented here. Roses blossomed on the pale pink curtains, the covers were pink and white candy stripes, the carpet raspberry ice-cream and the cushions the colour of a blonde's rouge. Even the sewing-machine cover was pink. On the striped window seat stood or sat a dozen ‘grown-up’ dolls, each dressed in contemporary fashion, with shoes on their feet and handbags hooked over their arms. The books were in a small white bookcase by the bedhead and, judging by the dolls and the general pinkness, I feared the worst. I was wrong. My need was for a book that was quintessentially English and which gave a picture of English life in country and town, though not necessarily of the present day. After rejecting Villette as too sad and not in any case primarily set in this country, Barchester Towers because I had recently read it and The Egoist because the print was tiny, I chose Great Expectations and carried it off with me to my bedroom.

It was not a bad room, only dull and rather bare. But the cupboard was adequate, there was a fine long mirror of the kind which I believe is called a pier glass, and a good armchair covered in the same cretonne as the curtains. I took the diary from the dressing table and settled down in the armchair to write my first entry, resolving to write something every day. Needless to say, I failed in this lofty aim but I did write something most days. If I hadn't – well, what might have happened if I hadn't was still a long way off.

Of course there was no radiator in the room. This was England before the seventies when central heating became the rule. In the winter it would be very cold in this house, a fire lit only in the drawing room and perhaps in the hallway fireplace where, I'd already discovered, if you stood on the hearth and looked upwards you could see the sky through the wide-open chimney. Standing there in the winter, as I did only once, I felt the powerful draught, the icy wind strong enough to lift my hair and blow it out in a horizontal stream.

That evening my thoughts kept returning to the man I always wanted to call a boy, a ‘poor boy’, though he was fifteen years my senior, lying in a drug-induced sleep he had been deceived into. As yet I could do nothing about it so I resolutely drove it from my mind, sat down and began to write what had happened that day. It was about three-quarters of an hour later that I heard a car come down the track. Later on I learnt that inside that house you would always be aware of the arrival of a car by the noise it made grinding across the gravel.

I looked out of the leaf-bordered window, a move which involved no drawing back of the curtains as their thin fabric was very nearly transparent. At nine-thirty on that fine cool midsummer night it wasn't yet dark and I was able to see quite clearly the two people who had arrived home.

They were both women, two more daughters of the house. It was impossible for me to tell which was the elder but I identified Ella by her cotton dress, patterned all over with large pink roses, and her high-heeled pink shoes. She had been driving, so it was her sister, the passenger, who was the first to get out of the car, a badly battered old Volvo. I may have put this in the diary but whether I did or not, I remember that my first thought at sight of Winifred was how easy it was for a basically good-looking woman to make herself ugly with heavy make-up, a dipping hemline and a hand-knitted droopy cardigan.