Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

We notice such absurd and trivial details in people. The first thing I saw wasn't his wretched tear-stained face or his haunted eyes but the fact that he hadn't shaved. The stubble was white and it aged him by ten years. He stood there and I stood there, wishing I hadn't come.

‘It's going to snow,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ I was cold, shivering with cold. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course. I'm so sorry.’

In his living room, over the mantelpiece, Winifred looked down at me, joy and triumph in her face. I wondered why I had once thought the portrait a poor likeness. It was her to the life. It was enormously better than my own drawing. She looked as if at any minute she might spring from the canvas and run to meet the painter with outstretched arms. Poor Eric. How could he bear to have it there?

He seemed scarcely aware of it. ‘Can I get you anything?’

‘No, thanks. Of course not.’

‘Some guests arrived for the wedding. They didn't know. We forgot to let people know. Bill Cusp told me. He sent them away.’ Briefly he closed his eyes. ‘How are they all up there?’

‘As you'd expect,’ I said. Or as I would have.

‘We were going to Mallorca,’ he said.

I looked inquiring.

‘On our honeymoon.’ He was silent. Then he said, ‘I won't be able to take her funeral service, you know. I'm afraid I might break down. Will you tell them?’

I said of course I would and then that I must go. He shook hands with me very formally, as he had in the church porch on the day we first met.

‘I suppose they'll put him in an asylum,’ he said.

The word, old-fashioned even then, was new to me. In the thirty-five years gone by it has utterly changed its meaning, a mental hospital in those days, a place of safety for refugees now. I looked it up in Esselte when I was back at Lydstep, having some difficulty because I didn't know how to spell it. After that I went into the library and looked for it in the massive Shorter Oxford Dictionary which I had once found John reading. 1. a sanctuary, it said, for criminals and debtors, from which they cannot be forcibly taken without sacrilege. 2. a secure place of refuge or shelter . And, finally, after other definitions, a lunatic asylum .

So John was a criminal or a lunatic or both. This place was his sanctuary, I thought, books surrounding me in the dimness, and he was forcibly taken from it. That was the sacrilege.

26

Several times during that evening the phone rang. With nothing to do but read and nothing to read but third-class Victorian novels, I wrote an account of the day in the diary. Who had made those calls? Eric, perhaps. Felix, if Ella had phoned him first. The police? They had left at about six but they might easily have called back. Jane Trintowel for me? If Mrs Cosway or Ida had answered I thought it unlikely they would have told me.

Ella tapped on my door just after nine and came in carrying a bottle of rosé.

She glanced at the remains of my meal, crumbs and chocolate bar wrappers. ‘You should have come down for dinner.’

‘I'd have been banished to the kitchen,’ I said.

‘Mother will get over all that, you know. It's just that she's in a state.’

‘Is she, Ella? Is anyone in a state except John? I'm sure he is. I don't like to think of the kind of state he's in.’

‘Oh, nor do I, nor do I. It's dreadful. Come on, let me give you a drink. I've brought wine glasses. It's not the same drinking it out of a cup, is it?’ Ella drank her first glassful as if it were water. ‘That's better. I phoned the White Rose like I said. That girl who works the bar answered. I didn't much like that but I thought, in for a penny, in for a pound. I said, “It's Tamara” and she didn't wait for me to say I wanted Felix, she just said, “He hasn't been in today” and put the phone down.’

Another of his women, I thought. This seemed not to have occurred to Ella. ‘I suppose he stayed away out of respect,’ she said. ‘Unlike him, but you never know how this sort of thing is going to affect people.’

‘No, you don't.’

‘I'll try again tomorrow and if he still doesn't phone I think I'll go down to The Studio. I miss him so terribly, Kerstin. You asked if anyone was in a state. I am, I really am. Sometimes I think I'm going mad. Of course there's madness in our family. Look at John.’ She picked up the diary but put it down again, saying, ‘Fancy you writing it in Swedish. It's like a code, isn't it? I suppose you do it so that no one but you can read it.’

‘Other Swedes could.’

‘Well, of course. But there aren't any here, are there? Zorah phoned. Imagine, no one had bothered to tell her. She had to read it in the paper. She's coming down. Oh, and a man called Mark phoned, asking for you. I heard Mother tell him she couldn't take phone calls at this time of night. I'm afraid I didn't take much notice because it wasn't Felix, you see.’

The snow which had loaded the skies began to fall that night and much more heavily than last time. Lydstep Old Hall was filled with the peculiar white glow which radiates from snow, lighting hall and rooms and even passages more than the sun ever did. Sick of being in my bedroom, I came down early and found the table laid and no one in the dining room but Ida. In overall and carpet slippers, a lock of hair at her forehead twisted into a curl with a clip, she looked up from her bread and butter to say a cold ‘Good morning’, as icy as the weather. Her hands were bandaged from forearm to fingertips like a mummy's.

I poured my coffee, almost elated to find that it had been made, for no one but me ever drank it. I thanked her and she said, ‘I always do make it,’ in the sort of voice that implied my ingratitude, her own stoicism and the enormous effort making coffee took. Just as I had cracked the shell on my egg and was lifting my first piece of toast to my lips, Mrs Cosway appeared. She had taken once more to the stick she had discarded a month before and was leaning on it, her body bent and her face grim. I wondered why the stick. She didn't need it and had always cursed it when using it was essential. The hand which grasped its hooked top was bandaged like Ida's but the other one had no more than a plaster round the thumb. Neither Ida nor I had a word from her. Breakfast was eaten in silence until Ella came in, wanting to know if anyone intended to go to church.

‘One of us should. Winifred would have wished it.’

‘Don't be ridiculous,’ said Mrs Cosway, her voice creaky from lack of use.

That morning I had the curious feeling that everything would continue at Lydstep Old Hall just as it was at that moment. Ella would go back to school, of course, I would leave as soon as the police would let me, but Ida and Mrs Cosway would continue to live here in this cold calm, Mrs Lilly coming in twice a week, the gardener gardening, the phone ringing only at prescribed times. The promise Zorah had made would be carried out and she would never be seen again. Nor would John. He would be incarcerated for the rest of his life in a high-security mental hospital or, as Eric called it, an asylum. And this state of affairs was what Mrs Cosway wanted, had wanted for years.

Ella and I went to church. She asked me to go with her. It suddenly seemed dreadful to me that she should have to go alone when she had previously always been accompanied by Winifred, even though the terms they had been on were seldom friendly and often hostile.

‘You'll say I'm only going because Felix might be there,’ she said as we drove down the hill.

Even if I had thought such a thing I wouldn't have said it but I was accustomed to this usage of hers and this was no time for arguing. Tiny flakes of snow, pinhead size, pattered lightly against the windscreen. The sky was leaden, the colour it is before a summer storm. There was an umbrella in the car and I held it over both of us as we ran into the church porch.