Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘Not Zorah and not me,’ I said. ‘I wasn't there and Ella wasn't.’

As I said it I knew I wished I had been. I wished I had seen what had happened so that I could have helped John, but then Gerald came into the room with my two cases and gave us drinks, a strong vodka and orange for me which he said I must need after being turned out into the snow.

After I'd been up to my bedroom, the same one as they had given me when I stayed on Christmas Night, I asked Jane if I could make a phone call to London. It would be nothing these days, a call one made as casually and easily as phoning the people next door or in the flat upstairs. Things were different then. This was ‘long distance’, almost a serious undertaking. Of course she said I could but again I failed to get an answer and I felt I couldn't ask again without saying I would pay, an offer which I knew she would refuse. Of an inveterately inquiring turn of mind – nosy, according to Gerald – she wanted to know if it was ‘some very close friend you wanted to ring’.

I had to tell her, though as I did so I remembered what she had said about Charles never forgiving her. ‘He's my boyfriend but I don't think he is any more. Still, I ought to let him know what's happened.’

‘Try again in the morning,’ she said.

I had slept as soundly as usual since Winifred's death but that night I couldn't get to sleep, although there was no doubt White Lodge was a far warmer and more comfortable house than Lydstep Old Hall. Perhaps my wakefulness had something to do with the fact that, taking off my skirt, I felt in one of the pockets and found the triangular piece of green glass I had picked up off the drawing-room floor. Though I handled it with care, I still cut my finger on its razor-sharp edge.

Next day Mark came to Lydstep to look for me. He came on the train and walked to Windrose from Marks Tey. While I was trying to phone him he was half a mile away down the hill, inquiring for me in the White Rose and in the shop. If Mrs Waltham had been serving there when Jane and I met the day before, a piece of gossip as juicy as the foreign girl being turned out of Lydstep Old Hall would have been all over the village before nightfall. But her husband was rather a taciturn man and the shop assistant from Sudbury had no interest in me, the Cosways or the Trintowels. All that concerned her was knocking off and going home as soon as possible. So she had no information on my whereabouts to offer him. The landlord of the White Rose had no idea who I was. I had never been in there and he had never heard my name.

By then Mark had already been to Lydstep Old Hall. Apparently – according to Ella later – he had been very worried about me. Being Mark, interested in people the way I believe few men are, he must have remembered all the things I had told him about the Cosways' eccentricities and decided I was in some sort of danger. He hadn't seen Mrs Cosway, only Ida, who told him I had left the day before, saying I would like my luggage sent on. I had gone to London, she supposed. Mark had phoned his brother, Isabel's husband, but they knew nothing of my whereabouts.

Circumstances seemed to conspire against him finding me. Eric, from whom he might have inquired and who would have made an intelligent guess that I was with the Trintowels, was away, staying with his sister. Mark went to various houses in the village, ringing doorbells at random, but by chance not to June Prothero's or Bridget Mills's parents. At last he came to White Lodge but it was a fine day and Gerald was playing golf while Jane and I had driven in to Sudbury to visit the market.

He told me all this weeks later, not by then, for another reason, regretting any of it. My failure to get in touch with him when I was in what was, after all, a dire situation showed him that our relationship was over. If I had loved him as he loved me, I would have gone straight to him and all the invitations from country neighbours would have meant nothing to me. So, very dispirited and low, he went back to London.

The train had come from Ipswich and there was already someone in the carriage he got into, a girl of about my own age. She was hunting through her bags, looking more and more distraught. He asked her what was wrong and she told him she had lost her wallet or it had been stolen. Few people had credit cards then but twenty pounds had been in that wallet and her ticket. Of course, it was the oldest con trick in the world but Mark didn't think it was a con trick and he was right. He explained to the ticket collector and was obliged to buy her a new ticket. He lent her five pounds it went quite a long way in those days bought her a cup of tea at Liverpool Street Station and escorted her on the Tube to the flat she shared with four others in Islington. She told him her name was Anna and he, sore from what he thought of as my rejection of him, asked when he could see her again.

She has been his wife for as long as I have been married to Charles. So failing to find me was good for him and for Anna too.

Charles came down for the weekend and we met again.

But before that, two visitors came to see me at White Lodge. Strickland was the first of them. My diary, he said, had been ‘infinitely helpful’, though he didn't say in what way. It must have had something to do with the characters of the people involved and, notably, John's.

I asked about him. When he came out of hospital, they would release him, wouldn't they?

He didn't answer. Disappointment and a kind of fear descended on me but I managed quite a comprehensive answer when Strickland asked me about the Roman vase.

‘You said in your diary that John Cosway loved it,’ he said. ‘What did you mean by that?’

‘It wasn't his in the way the objects were that he carried in his dressing-gown pockets,’ I said. ‘I suppose it didn't really belong to any of them. It should have been public property, in a museum somewhere. But I think it was the only thing he truly loved, the way he isn't really able to love people. He used to touch it – well, caress it.’ I was proud of that word, which I had just learnt, though I feared misusing it. I didn't think of this before,’ said. ‘It suddenly came into my head. But I think he was lying on the ground after it happened, not because he'd done what was done to Winifred but because the vase that was so precious to him was broken.’

Strickland looked strangely at me but he thanked me for what I'd said. I held up my hand with the sticking plaster round my left forefinger. ‘I cut myself on a piece of it,’ I said. ‘That happened much later. It was a piece I picked up from the carpet. Apart from Ella, John was the only one who didn't have cut hands after…it happened. He couldn't have picked up that vase and struck Winifred with it without cutting his hands. I know he couldn't.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘You put that in your diary.’

After he had gone I reflected on it, quite astonished at the discovery I had made and voiced without any prior consideration or even realizing I had made it. But I was convinced of its truth. The whole essence of John, of what he was, seemed contained in his grief over a broken object, the whole truth in the evidence of the cut and the intact hands.

If Strickland had looked at my drawings he said nothing about them. They, at least, needed no translation.

‘Now, I know you won't want to see her,’ said Jane, who was taking me over with a kind of motherly bossiness unknown in my own family. She made me her daughter long before I became her daughter-in-law. ‘What shall I tell her? I don't in the least mind being rude.’

I laughed. ‘Of course I'll see her. I rather like her.’

Jane wasn't too pleased. ‘On your own head be it.’

Ella threw herself on me. Not exactly into my arms because they weren't outstretched. To say she put me into her arms would be more accurate. ‘Oh, I do love this house, don't you, Kerstin? I haven't been here for years and there have been lots of changes. I think that's lovely, don't you? That's the trouble with the Hall’. The Cosways always referred to their home as ‘the Hall’. ‘It never changes. I don't think Mrs Trintowel was very pleased to see me but I can't help that. I came to see you. How are you?’