Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

In Cosway fashion, Ella screamed, ‘You can't do this, Mother. You're crazy.’

‘And you are not to give her a lift anywhere, Ella. Not if you want to come back into this house.’

Ella began to say something, incomprehensible to me, about having things she could say if she chose to the ‘authorities' but the rest of it I didn't hear. Nausea overcame me and with my napkin over my mouth I ran to the downstairs lavatory, getting there just in time. I was very sick, throwing up again and again. Afterwards, drinking water with my mouth held under the cold tap, I felt so weak I had to sit down in there and rest, gasping. John and his sojourns in that very place came back to me and how he had locked himself in.

About ten minutes went by before I came out and went upstairs. There was no sign of any of them. The smell of sausages in batter and overcooked cauliflower pervaded the place. In my bedroom I threw things into my cases, keeping back a second sweater to wear on top of the one I had on in case I had to be outdoors a long time. It was the way characters in films pack, folding nothing, tossing clothes and shoes in haphazardly on top of each other. I was putting my toothbrush and toothpaste into my sponge bag when Ella came in to promise to send on the bags I couldn't carry.

‘You do see I can't drive you anywhere, don't you, Kerstin? Mother and Ida really wouldn't let me back in. All the outer doors can be bolted, you know.’

I said I did see.

‘Please don't lose touch. You must write to me as soon as you're settled somewhere or I shall be so dreadfully worried. Besides, you'll want to know what's happening with me and Felix. I've got a sort of feeling he'll ring before the day is out and I'm determined not to stray far from the phone. That's actually another reason why I can't take you to the station.’

Promising to write to her, I put the diary-notebook in on top of the clothes in my overnight bag, closed it and picked it up along with the smaller of the other two. But I had to set them down again as Ella threw her arms round me. She covered my face with kisses in an almost amorous way, explaining herself when she released me.

‘That's what I'd do if you were Felix, you see. You don't mind, do you?’

27

I walked out of Lydstep Old Hall at three-thirty in the afternoon. It would have been dark by then in Gothenburg and it was growing dark here, the snow still falling but lightly, as a fine powder. Wearing my padded boots and my thick coat with its hood, I felt better and more myself, my old self, than I had for weeks, so fast was the effect of the Cosways shed once I was out of the house. This return to an old, once habitual feeling restored what I thought I had once had in abundance, a sense of well-being. Exercising it, I looked at what the Cosways had done and began to laugh at the whole concept, so dear to the hearts of those Victorian novelists, of the young woman, whatever she might be, some dependant or governess, turned out into the snow. The cold, cold snow.

I was laughing like this when Zorah's Lotus passed me. Whether she recognized me or not, she very likely didn't want to stop for a madwoman who was prancing down the road laughing. It was hysterical, of course, and the happiness I felt was illusory. Still, I had left. I had shaken the dust of Lydstep Old Hall off my feet for ever. At once I asked myself why I hadn't done so weeks before, when I first thought of it. But for a few minutes I was happy and then, when I thought of John, I became sombre again. At least I knew that he was in a hospital as a voluntary patient. I need no longer have those visions I had been experiencing, especially in the night-time, of him in a prison cell, insufficiently heated and with nowhere to hide. I wondered then if I would ever see him again and as I remembered him, the things he liked doing and the things they stopped him doing, I realized that I loved him. Not as I had once or twice loved a lover or would love my husband, but nearer to the feeling I had for my brother. Coupled with that was a tenderness which had begun, I believe, from his asking me to marry him. Many would have said that his proposal was all nonsense, that he had no idea of what marriage was, but I knew that he would only have made his offer because he liked me enough to want me to be with him, because he knew that I, of all the people in that household, to some extent understood the strange workings of his mind. I make an exception there for Zorah. She was fond of him and ‘on his side’ but I think she had been made too egotistical by the way life and her family had treated her to care very much for anyone else at all. So I thought then, walking down the hill into Windrose.

I had decided to seek refuge with Eric. For a night or two. The Rectory was huge and it seemed to me that he would hardly notice I was there. If he wanted me to do things for him, I could cook and clean and wash. While I was there I would decide where to go and what to do next. First of all I had to find out from the police if I was expected to stay in the immediate neighbourhood. I would keep trying Mark until I got hold of him. I would phone my parents from Eric's and pay for the call. I had plenty of money, having had nothing much but train fares on which to spend my wages while at Lydstep.

Lights were on in The Studio as I passed it. In fact, I didn't immediately pass it, but stood by the gate for a moment, looking into the half-lit, disordered sitting room, but then I thought that if Felix saw me and came out he would certainly invite me to stay with him, a situation to be avoided. The White Rose was shut, as it was bound to be at this hour, but the general store was open. I went in to buy myself a bar of chocolate. Jane Trintowel was standing at the counter, being served with a tin of coffee and twenty cigarettes.

I remember these things because I stood staring at them for perhaps a whole minute before she must have become aware of my gaze and turned round. She said hallo, then saw my big suitcase which I had rested on the floor.

‘You've left!’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, just like that? What else?’

‘They threw me out.’ The whole shop could hear but I cared very little about that. Jane didn't ask me why but paid for her groceries and moved across into a corner. I went with her. ‘I'm going to Eric,’ I said. ‘Just for a couple of nights.’

‘No, you aren't. He's staying with his sister. Mr Moxon is taking the services. You're coming to us.’

Of course, I did. I made deprecating noises at first, I couldn't possibly, it would be an imposition, that sort of thing.

‘If you don't,’ Jane said, ‘Charles will never forgive me.’

Mr Waltham, the grocer, said he would look after my cases until Gerald Trintowel brought the car and fetched them up to White Lodge. Jane was very hospitable and fond of company and, not to underrate her kindness, I think she was quite excited at doing something which, as she put it, was ‘one in the eye for the Cosways’.

A tremendous gossip, she wanted to know everything. Had John done it? If he had, why? Was it something to do with ‘both those women carrying on with Felix Dunsford’? Ignorant of village life, I was amazed that she knew but I soon understood that the whole of Windrose did.

‘Even Eric?’ I said.

‘Oh, well, probably not, but they always say the husband, or in this case the fiancé, is the last to know, don't they?’

She wanted to know if it was true the Cosways possessed a solid-gold Roman figurine and that this was the murder weapon. I disappointed her by telling her it was a glass vase and it was broken, though it had been Roman.

‘And he hit her with it in front of everyone, those three girls – well, they're not girls any more, are they? and their mother and you?