Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

The fog lifted as a little wind got up. Into the clearing sky, dark blue between the shreds of whitish cloud, the moon sailed. As they left, the police were talking to each other about the fog lifting and driving back being easier than coming here. We had all had to change our clothes and let them take away the ones we had been wearing. Mrs Cosway laid herself face downwards on the sofa, Ida disappeared into the kitchen and Ella to her bedroom. John was gone. All this I have remembered as best I could because I wrote nothing in the diary that night.

25

I don't know if a psychiatrist saw John, I don't know what was said or done to him or where he was kept. Mrs Cosway must have known the answers to these questions and probably Ida too, for different police came next day and talked to them for a long time. Ella too was closeted with the police, though she said to me afterwards that they had told her nothing. On that day Mrs Cosway's attitude towards me changed.

It was much worse than it had been up till then, verging on violence. It began in the kitchen at breakfast, a meal which, it seemed, was to be taken in silence, no one eating much but everyone drinking more tea and coffee than usual. Mrs Cosway was the first to speak and then not until Ida was collecting plates and cups and putting them on a tray.

‘John doing what he did,’ she said, ‘just goes to show how criminally negligent Pontius Pilate was in refusing me his drug. He was never aggressive while he had it, he never did any of those things he'd been doing like striking Ida and destroying books. It culminated in murder and all because that wicked man kept his drug from him.’ She turned to me. ‘Why are you looking like that? What does that look mean?’

Shock must have shown in my face. I said I was sorry but I wasn't aware of looking any different from usual.

‘You did look different, very different. You need to remember that all this is no business of yours. You're an employee, not a family friend.’

Yes, she is,’ said Ella. ‘She's my friend.’

I gave her a grateful smile. That had been kind. I said nothing to Mrs Cosway but she had not yet said as much as she wanted to.

‘The police will be back today and they'll want to talk some more to Ida and me. I don't want you there, Kerstin. Do you understand? You have no business to judge us. I don't want you sitting there disapproving in your holier-than-thou way. Is that clear?’

Ida, who might have intervened on my behalf, continued to take our breakfast things off the table. I said it was perfectly clear and got up. The police themselves would decide who should be present when they continued with their questioning and Mrs Cosway must have known this. She simply wanted an excuse to exclude me. I don't think I had ever been holier-than-thou but I had disapproved of her, in her attitude to John particularly, and I was young enough to have shown it.

This provided a good reason for me to hand in my notice and go but I remembered what the inspector had said to us the day before about staying where we were. I especially had been singled out as not to leave the country. Almost automatically piling plates and cups on the draining board, I looked at Ida where she stood with her back to me, staring out into the garden, which was once again lying under a blanket of snow. Backs can be as eloquent as faces and hers, round-shouldered, slack under the floral cotton overall and moth-holed grey jumper, the muscles giving one nervous twitch, told me she had nothing to say to me and would welcome my departure. Her stance and her attitude showed me more than anything else had how close she and her mother were, almost of one mind. I don't know how long it was before she turned round and began on her unending tasks, for I left her and went into the library.

The drawing room was out of bounds, its door taped shut. Our bedrooms were our refuge or, in my case, the library. I rediscovered it that morning, learning to guide my footsteps by the kind of books which were the various walls of the maze, English literature in one, science in another, ancient German and Danish dictionaries in Gothic script on the shelves Longinus faced and encyclopaedias in one wall of the passage John had run down to escape. I went down it and after rounding two corners (ghosts and the occult, fine arts and travel) I saw signs of a struggle where the people who came for him must have hunted him down. I expect my distaste showed in my face then, but there was no one to see it.

Books had fallen or been pulled out of the shelves, most of them classical literature; Ovid's Metamorphoses and Tacitus's Annals lay face downwards, their pages creased. I didn't want to imagine John's capture here or the carelessness of those who came for him and who had no more interest in the volumes their struggles had displaced than they had in his fear. I knelt down and picked up the books, smoothing out the thin fine paper and blowing dust off spines.

Back in the open space where John had been sitting, I too sat on the floor and looked at his notebook, at Pythagoras, drawn with exquisite precision, on other pages at algebraic equations I was unable to understand, and strange propositions presented, all of them, it seemed to me, beginning on the lines of letting something squared equal a and something else to the power of five equal b. I picked up the English–Swedish Esselte Studium dictionary and diverted myself by looking up long English words whose meanings I didn't know, but diversion was not what I found. I was too wretched for that and too angry. For a moment, no more, I asked myself if John could possibly have killed his sister, if he would have wanted to, for no more reason than that she had touched him or said something he found unacceptable. For a moment – then I was back at my firm conviction that it was impossible, an invention of Mrs Cosway's or of Ida's.

True, he had struck Ida, but that had been from exasperation. To my mind, I might say to my knowledge, the violent emotions which would be a preliminary to such a deed were not in his make-up. Put more simply, he wouldn't have wanted to do it. I could almost have said he wouldn't be interested. Winifred deceiving Eric with another man wouldn't have concerned him, would have meant nothing. If she had made him angry or upset he would have run away to hide himself. All that meant nothing to them. They wanted him charged with murder and found not to be responsible for his actions. That way they could be rid of an encumbrance.

I heard the police arrive and someone inadvertently slam the front door. I heard Ella say, ‘If you want me I'll be upstairs in my room.’

Probably I should have been upstairs in mine. Before leaving the library I walked round it once more, learning its intricacies. The time passed very slowly. I had been in there only half an hour. Ella tapped on the door after I had been in my room no more than five minutes. I had been writing in the diary and she spotted it at once, unmistakably what it was in its dark red leather binding, lying face downwards on my bed.

‘Oh, a diary! May I look?’

Thinking of the drawings, I said I'd rather she didn't but I was too late. She looked at the one of Lydstep Old Hall under its summer leaves, but failed to comment on it and turned to the first page. The entries were in Swedish.

‘Silly me, I should have known. Now tell me, Kerstin, am I intruding?’

Relieved that she had stopped before coming to the drawing of herself and her dolls, I said truthfully that she was not. I was glad to see her but had nothing in my room to offer her.

‘That doesn't matter. I couldn't eat a thing. I just picked at my breakfast. Isn't everything absolutely awful? I feel I ought to apologize to you on Mother's behalf, she was so rude and unkind, but of course she's under a great strain. We all are. Mind you, I think that in a way it's a blessing in disguise.’