Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Both of them were dark-haired and tall, though Ella was shorter than her sister. Winifred looked to me like one of those women who had been told when she was young that she was growing too tall and who, accordingly, had begun to round her shoulders and stoop. It was with a stance like this that she moved towards the front door, wrapping her arms round her chest as if she was cold. I couldn't hear what they were saying to each another, though I could tell they had been quarrelling. Perhaps ‘quarrel’ is too strong a word. They must have had one of their frequent little spats, probably over some happening at the wine and cheese party.

As Winifred disappeared from my view under the porch and its canopy of leaves, Ella let out a peal of laughter. Not the cough characteristic of her mother and her sister Ida, but a silvery, ringing sound, which I'm sure was derisive, though that evening it sounded to me affectionate and sweet. Below me I heard the front door creak open and close with a soft slam.

A leaf was caught between the window lattice and its frame. I slid it out and laid it on the dressing table. Then, without thought it seems now, certainly without taking any decision, I took a soft pencil out of the drawer and began to draw the house on one of the endpapers in the diary.

3

I was awakened by birds singing. It was half-past four in the morning and the first time my sleep had ever been disturbed by birdsong. I lay there listening to these sounds which both are and are not music and seem to have tone and rhythm and a kind of outflowing of joy but with no known scale. Light came swiftly and my room filled with the song of the birds so that at six I couldn't stay there any longer but had to get up and go out.

The day before had been dull and grey until the evening but this morning was sunny with that hazy sunshine, that mist and stillness, which herald a fine summer's day. I went outside by way of the kitchen and the several little rooms that had to be passed before I reached the garden, rooms with coats hanging up and boots standing about, with bags and sacks and drums and cans and crates – playing a game with myself to name in English all these useful objects – and finally one with unplastered brick walls that was full of flowerpots and watering cans.

Dew was on the big lawn and in the middle of it two green birds with long beaks and red flashes on their heads were prospecting for food in the grass, vegetable or animal I didn't know any more than I knew then that these were woodpeckers. They looked up but otherwise took no notice of me as I passed along the sandy path. The clothesline and the two posts were gone. Walking softly so as not to disturb the birds, I made my way towards the shrubberies I had only glanced at the day before. There was a little garden down there of what I called fir trees, knowing no better, though I could see their foliage was golden, red, almost white and slate-blue as well as every shade of green. It seemed an old garden and I supposed these trees had been planted, if not by the geode-discovering explorer, perhaps by his son. The same I thought might be true of many other fine large trees down here, some with long pointed leaves, others whose foliage was broad and flat, and some which I guessed must be exotics, possibly brought here by the explorer himself.

I found a kitchen garden too, vegetables neatly planted in rows, and a rather gloomy pond, covered in lily pads and surrounded by reeds, over which overgrown trees trailed long hair-thin branches. A boat with two oars laid in their rowlocks parallel to its sides lay in the middle of this still water and its dense plant life, but it looked as if no one had sat in it or touched those oars for years and now it would be hard to shift it out of all the constricting lilies with their stems like slippery ropes.

Apart from the features of this place, the grounds of Lydstep Old Hall were dull and too tidy. The maxim of the gardener who tended them must have been, when in doubt cut down, for everywhere else trees and shrubs had been viciously chopped and paths swept with depressing neatness. Another principle of his, or perhaps a directive from Mrs Cosway, seemed to be that flowers were in bad taste or too much trouble, for in spite of the watering cans, none were to be seen.

At first I had intended to go out into the field and take the path in the opposite direction from the way I had gone the previous afternoon, and I had reached the gate in the hedge. But now only one aim was paramount, to find the maze. I walked on over more stretches of lawn and through more shrubberies until I came to the wall which skirted the land at this point and extended parallel with the drive to the road. My only course now was to return the way I had come, but instead of going through the conifer wood and on to the woodpecker lawn, I took the path which went straight ahead beside the boundary hedge.

Nothing much was down there but for scrubby turf, currant bushes and after a while a neglected orchard. The trees, which were probably apple, pear and plum, looked past redemption, their trunks a bright yellow-green with lichen or grey with moss, more of their branches dead than living, and what fruit was forming on them already deformed and worm-eaten. The orchard distracted me from my search but this hardly mattered as coming upon a maze would have immediately caught my eye and lured me away from anything else. But there was no maze. Nowhere in those grounds was there anything labyrinthine, though I couldn't go so far as to say there was nowhere a maze might once have been. It was years since Isabel had visited Lydstep and since then she had only occasionally been in touch with the family. Wasn't it possible that in that time the maintenance of what was no more than a folly had come to seem a nuisance, involving unnecessary expense?

I tried to imagine where it might have been but this was harder than finding excuses for its removal. I had seen no recently planted lawns or wilderness spaces where the roots of old hedges protruded through the turf, no stretches of bare weed-grown earth. Of course it occurred to me that I could ask the Cosways, some or all of whom I would meet at breakfast in an hour or so. A sudden inhibition forbade that. It would show them that I had discussed them with their old friend, and more than that. They would think me over-curious and a spy and perhaps they would be right. As it was, Ida, who was in the kitchen when I came back, eyed me with suspicion while yet having her mind set at rest. Finding the back door unbolted, she had been worrying for the past half-hour that she had left it like that the night before, an unimaginably feckless thing to do.

‘I'm so relieved it was only you, Kerstin.’

She was wearing the same skirt and blouse with the same crossover overall, the only departure in her costume from the day before being checked carpet slippers worn over stockings rolled down around her ankles. Anxiety and stress creased her face and she looked as if at any minute she would sink down with her head in her hands. The kitchen table, a huge piece of furniture, pitted and hollowed from use and scored along its edges with knife cuts, was laden with loaves, dishes of butter, packets of cornflakes and other cereals, eggs in a bowl, pots of jam and stacks of plates, cups and saucers.

Temporarily forgetting my resolution not to be an au pair, I asked her if I could help her.

‘Oh no, thank you. I'm used to it.’

After a shower and in clean trousers and shirt, I came down to the dining room an hour later. Just as I had been searching for the maze, my next objective was the phone. I had heard it ring the evening before, soon after Winifred and Ella came in, but not seen the instrument itself. The table in that bleak dining room was set for breakfast, the door left wide open, and the first thing I saw after saying good morning to John and his mother was the phone standing on the sideboard. Mrs Cosway quickly noticed that my eyes were on it and began on a detailed list of phone rules I was to observe.