Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘I'm fine.’

‘A man came looking for you.’ It was then that she told me about Mark's visit and how he had called on the Cosways. ‘It just made me think how lucky you were to have your man want to find you. Felix hasn't given the slightest sign he wants to find me. I've phoned the pub over and over but I've given up now, it got humiliating. I've been to The Studio too but he doesn't answer the door. You'll tell me I ought to go into the pub because I'll find him there, won't you?'

Knowing it would do no good, I assured her this was the last thing I would tell her. But I lacked the heart to say he couldn't have made it plainer that all was over between them.

‘I've cried so much I don't think I've any water left in my eyes.’ This was a line from a recent film I had seen with Mark and I knew Ella had seen with Bridget Mills. ‘I shall never get over him,’ she said. ‘I shall never marry now. I shall never have children. What goes on in the head of someone like him who goes about ruining women's lives? Do you know, Kerstin?’

I said truthfully that I did not.

‘Now, I have to ask you something. You may say no but I do hope you won't. Mother wants to see you. She's very sorry for the way she behaved and she knows it's too late to make all that right but it would be a great favour on your part if you'd just come and see her for half an hour. Ill actually fetch you if you like.’

The proffered lift I wouldn't need. I said I would come. At any rate, I thought, I could make my own time and said I would be with Mrs Cosway on Sunday morning.

‘You're mad,’ said Jane when she had shown Ella out. ‘Letting that woman walk all over you.’

‘I don't think she'll do that,’ I said, while having no idea what she would do or why she wanted to see me. I was accepting the invitation for the sake of finding out about John.

I had several telephone conversations with Mark. I felt grateful to him for coming to look for me and even more grateful to him for not finding me. Perhaps I knew that if he had and I had gone back to London with him, our relationship would have moved on to a permanent footing. He thought that too. He was cold with me, or rather he was cool. But that word has taken on such an over-used new meaning that it can hardly any longer be applied in its old sense. It was only when I said that I was determined to stay friends with him, and communicating attentive friends, that he warmed to me and told me about Anna. I agreed to meet him in London, and meet her too, before he left for America.

I hadn't gone down to the village once since I went to stay at White Lodge. Fear of meeting a Cosway kept me away but once I had agreed to the invitation to Lydstep Old Hall, I felt that encountering one of them would no longer be an ordeal but only a preliminary step towards Sunday morning. In the event I met none of them.

It was a bright blue-skied day, the low-hanging sun making the kind of long shadows that seem uncanny at eleven in the morning. The greengrocer's was crowded, but nothing to Walthams' shop, which brimmed with people, and at first it looked as if everyone I knew except the Cosways were in there: Eric, Bridget Mills, June Prothero, Bill Cusp and his son George and the architect's wife Felix had walked home from church that day. He wasn't there and nor was Serena Lombard, who had moved into her father's house. I had no shopping to do, for, except when she ran out of essentials, Jane did all hers for the household in the Sudbury shops, and I was turning away when Eric came out with two carrier bags of food.

‘I mustn't be a minute,’ he said. ‘I have a bride to marry in half an hour.’

I wasn't aware at that time of that particular usage, that a vicar or rector ‘marries' a couple just as they ‘marry’ each other, and I must have looked at him aghast, thinking he must be deranged or that he had really already found a substitute for Winifred.

‘A wedding,’ he said, realizing I hadn't understood. ‘Diane Waltham and her fiancé from Duke's Colne.’ His bags on the ground on either side of him, he took off his glasses, rubbed them on his sleeve and put them on again. ‘Life must go on.’

This I recognized as a reference to his loss.

‘I have been spending a lot of time at the Hall since I came back from my sister's,’ he said. ‘We find each other's company mutually comforting. I gather you have left them. May I hope to see you in church on Sunday?’

I told him Mrs Cosway had invited me to come and see her on Sunday morning.

‘Some other time, then.’ He made church attendance sound like a purely social duty. ‘I must get off. This wedding, you know.’ I thought then that in all the time I knew him I had never heard Eric make a single reference to God or the Christian faith or heaven or hell except when he was conducting a service.

Guests started arriving at the church about two minutes after he had closed the Rectory door behind him. Felix's signboard can't have been very securely fixed to the gate for it was already hanging off at an angle. The bridegroom and his best man (I supposed), both in grey morning suits and carrying grey top hats, arrived in a battered old car, its rear numberplate tied on with string. Standing about, I was beginning to feel cold and I continued with my walk, taking the long road round back to White Lodge.

A section of that road passed through woodland, where branches of trees on either side come close to meeting in the middle. I heard a car behind me and stepped on to the grass verge, close to the trunks of those trees, as Zorah's Lotus went past me, not fast enough to prevent my seeing Felix sitting next to her, his arm resting lightly along the back of the driver's seat.

28

Charles offered to wait for me, parked on the forecourt, but I told him I had no idea how long I would be and I would walk back. Yet when I saw his car disappear down the drive, I felt a great sense of isolation, very different from my feelings when I had first come there seven months before. The house had been hidden under its quivering mantle of green leaves while now it was veiled in a dark web. I wondered why nothing was ever planted in those two red earthenware pots and why, kept empty, they were there at all, and then I rang the doorbell.

As that first time, Ida came. For once she was without her apron and she had shoes on instead of slippers. It looked as if they were going out or, more likely, some guest, deemed special, was expected for lunch. The drawing room was diminished by the absence of the Roman vase, its gloom not much alleviated by an alabaster lamp and a set of watercolours, restored by Zorah. Ella, in bright pink wool, got up and kissed me, an action I saw as showing defiance to her mother. But Mrs Cosway was as affable as she ever could be, asking me to sit down close to the fireplace.

‘We were just about to have coffee,’ said Ida. ‘Can I offer you some?’

I had had my fill of Ida's coffee every morning for seven months but I accepted for the sake of being polite. This time, when she came back with the tray, she had resumed her apron but the pins in her hair were gone. The cotton gloves were no longer on her hands. They had been replaced by sticking plasters, which were soon streaked with black when she had made up the fire with pieces of coal to supplement the logs. Mrs Cosway too had patched hands. She was as usual in her unrelieved black, a tall, crow-like figure, folded up on the sofa, her legs too long for the distance between seat cushions and floor. On the console table behind her, the geode had replaced the Roman vase. But the worst thing about that room was that the bloodstains, splashes and drops, were still there; paler, yellower, but resistant as blood is to soap and water and cleansers. Only redecorating and a replacement carpet would serve, as the police had advised. If I knew the Cosways, and I believe I did, those dull yellow-brown spots and streaks would be there as long as they were.