Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

It was as if he knew what was coming, though this was impossible. ‘I'll see myself out, Miss Kvist. We shall take good care of your diary.’

I felt strangely bereft without it. Since then I have been told this is a common reaction of diarists to being deprived, through losing it, having it stolen or simply coming to the end of the volume, of the physical thing itself, the book, in which the words have been written. A substitute will be adequate but only just. That which is remembered flows less smoothly when it is applied to different paper between alien covers. Much worse would be to stop writing altogether, so I found a notebook I had bought for some forgotten purpose and wrote down, faithfully but with less than my usual enthusiasm, the events of the evening before and that morning.

I felt a strong reluctance to go downstairs. The sun was as high in the sky as it ever gets at that time of the year and the icicles had shrunk to half their length. I saw how they might themselves be regarded as a sort of clock, the rate at which they dissolved depending on their length, their thickness and the heat of the sun. These, for instance, had diminished by about fifteen centimetres in an hour and a half. Somehow I was sure that all this would have interested John very much, that I could have told him about it, talking to him in a way, alas, I never had while he was here. I wrote all these reflections down and then I went downstairs.

Mrs Cosway and Ella were in the drawing room and I could hear them arguing about whether Ella should return to school or wait another week. In keeping with her usual attitude of getting her children out of the way as much as possible and then growing resentful at their absence, Mrs Cosway was telling Ella it was her duty to go back while Ella was responding that she was too sad and too wretched even to consider it. Was I her only hearer who knew the real cause of her misery? I went into the kitchen, from where I could see Ida pegging washing out on the line. It reminded me of my first day at Lydstep Old Hall when she had been doing the same thing on a fine summer's evening with John to help her.

I looked in the fridge to see what was for lunch and set about peeling potatoes and cleaning a cauliflower. Her hands in cotton gloves, Ida came back with her empty washing basket and my whole body tensed as I waited for a curt nod from her or a shrug. But she was as affable as she ever was, not very, that is, but it was a great improvement on her breakfast greeting.

‘You've started on the vegetables, I see.’

I agreed, the point being beyond doubt.

‘That's just as well. I shouldn't get my poor hands wet. They're cut to pieces. It made things very awkward doing the washing. With Winifred gone, I suppose I shall have to do all the ironing.’

Once, this remark would have shocked me but by now I was used to it and comments like it and what we would now perhaps call ‘Cosway-speak’.

‘Do you want any shopping done?’ I asked. ‘I could go down to the village this afternoon, if you like.’

‘No, thanks. I can do it.’

‘It's no trouble, Ida.’ I was placating her and, by association, her mother; I knew it and despised myself for it, but that was the demoralizing effect they had on me. I had reached a stage when any scrap of kindness, when a word which wasn't actually rude, made me absurdly grateful. ‘I can go after lunch.’

She didn't bother to answer. ‘Mother is furious about your diary,’ she said. ‘She thinks you had no business to keep a diary while you were working for us.’

I picked up a handful of silver, the cloth and the napkins and went into the dining room to lay the table. Ella was there, apparently talking to some member of the staff at the White Rose. I heard her say, ‘You are giving him my messages, aren't you?’ The reply must have been short and sharp for she had flushed when she put down the receiver.

I had to say something. ‘No luck?’

‘That girl is very impertinent. I think I shall go out of my mind, Kerstin. You needn't lay a place for me. I couldn't eat a thing. Have you noticed what a lot of weight I've lost?’

I hadn't, but I said I had and added humbly that did she think it would be all right for me to make a phone call to London?

‘Well, as far as I'm concerned, Kerstin, it's fine. Better do it before Mother comes in here. Oh, and don't be too long, will you, in case Felix is trying to get through to me? I know he will. He'll want to say sorry for the way he behaved yesterday.’

There was no reply from Mark and no way of letting him know what was going on, in those days before answering machines and faxes and text messaging and emails. A sudden darkening in the dining room drew me to the window and I saw that the brightness of the day was past. Great ponderous snow clouds, black and streaked with livid light, were gathering overhead.

Lunch was a horrible English dish which at the present day, thank God, seems to have disappeared entirely from cooks' repertoires: toad-in-the-hole, pork sausages in a Yorkshire pudding-like batter. In spite of what she had said, Ella sat down at the table with us. She had brought a bottle of rosé – I was beginning to wonder if she had a running order with a Sudbury wine merchant – and offered it to everyone, this being the only way, I suppose, of being able to drink it herself. The bottle might have contained arsenic from the look Mrs Cosway gave it.

‘No one used to drink wine at luncheon,’ she said. ‘It is a nasty habit we've picked up from the French.’

‘Ida?’ said Ella. ‘Kerstin?’

My nervous state was such that I wasn't able to resist. Under her mother's horrified eyes, Ella poured me a large glassful. It was a poisoned chalice and I knew it. No good could come of it. But I was both so relieved that I had been allowed to sit down to eat with the family and so afraid of what might be said at any moment about my presence there, the diary, my phone calls and my talking to Strickland in private, that my hands shook and my mouth was dry. Six months before I had thought myself a confident, intrepid girl but all that was gone, driven out of me by this frowning old woman with her pinched, grim face.

As it happened, nothing was said, at least on the subjects of phone calls, the diary and my interview with the police, for the duration of the meal. A good deal of comment was made on the weather, for the storm clouds had begun to shed their load of snow. Big fluffy flakes of it were flying at the window panes and quickly covering paving and grass and tree branches. Ella drank her glass of rosé, then a second. Mine was welcome, yet nauseating. I began to realize that Mrs Cosway, though addressing both her daughters, hadn't said a word to me. She was making it plain that she excluded me by calling them by their Christian names each time she spoke.

Normally, she would have made her statement to the assembled company but at that lunchtime, she singled out both sisters. ‘Zorah should be here by three, Ida and Ella. I do hope this snow doesn't hold her up.’

It was childish, it was grotesque, it was the kind of thing adolescent girls do, and I was a fool to be affected by it. Yet I don't think that anything which had been said in my presence before then or much afterwards made me feel so alone and so utterly rejected as Mrs Cosway's remark about Zorah. Ida smiled slightly – she hardly ever did smile more than slightly – but Ella, wrapped up as she was in her own woes, reached for my hand under the tablecloth and squeezed it. It made me like her. Perhaps it was this which, all those years later, made me bother to ask her to meet me for a drink that evening in Riga.

I drank my wine, though I'd have been wiser not to. The meal was over. I was getting up from the table to help Ida clear away when Mrs Cosway expelled me or gave me the order of release, depending how you look at it. She said to me, without using my name, ‘When you've taken those things out you can go. Now, I mean, this afternoon. Pack your bags and what you can't carry we shall have sent on.’