Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

From her position, after Winifred's death, of longing to be back, she had since used her loss as an excuse for not returning. She hadn't, up till then, done an hour's teaching at her Sudbury school, the playground and outbuildings of which we could see from the teashop window. ‘Of course I'll have to go back,’ she said. ‘But not quite yet. D‘you know, I haven't been to London for ages, literally years.’

I couldn't encourage her. The sad fact was that I didn't want her. There are words for people like Ella today and perhaps there were then, only I hadn't heard of them: ‘clingy’ and ‘needy’ were among them. I could almost, but never quite, sympathize with Felix Dunsford. She plainly wanted to stay out, keep away from Windrose as long as she could, and after we had talked exhaustively about the Millses, her mother, how Eric was coping and when she and Felix would next meet, she suggested we have lunch in one of Sudbury's hotels.

I didn't care for the idea. Before I went next day I wanted to see John for the last time and there was a half-formed plan in my mind of catching him on his walk – if he went for a walk. He didn't always but he often did when the day was fine and when he did he took one of two routes. I would have to take my chance. I knew the chances of his speaking to me were slight but he might just say, ‘Hallo, Shashtin,’ giving my name its proper pronunciation, the way he invariably did. But I was feeling guilty over Ella, irrationally guilty no doubt, but most guilt is irrational. I felt I owed her something because I had refused her the chance of an innocent and harmless trip to London, so I said yes to her lunch invitation. Perhaps I could still be back in time to see John.

In the intervening years, the world has utterly changed. We could park the car anywhere we liked and where we liked was right outside the hotel. Lunch in English country hotels then was quite different from pub lunches today with the menus chalked on blackboards and help-yourself paper napkins. It was all rather grand, the white damask tablecloth, starched stiff, the heavy silver, the waiters; somewhat less pleasant was their attitude, slightly contemptuous, faintly amused, that two women should be eating in a restaurant alone together.

We ate and I clock-watched. Would I be in time for John? If not, could I manage to see him tomorrow before I went to London? Ella smoked between courses, wreathing the air above us with grey plumes, but no one minded in those days, no one even looked disapproving. Most people were doing the same. We weren't back in the car until nearly three and I knew we would be too late. Plainly, Ella didn't know what to do, where to go. Bridget was at work till five. Her parents slept most of the afternoon away and they hadn't given her a key. Did I think she could come to White Lodge with me?

‘You'll say Jane Trintowel won't like it.’

For once she was right but I couldn't bring myself to say so. ‘Ella, couldn't you go home? You're going to have to sometime. What else can you do?’

An explosive ‘No!’

Not if I came with her? I suggested this most reluctantly, though I did think that this way at least I could contrive to see John. An argument ensued, Ella insisting that she would never set foot in Lydstep Old Hall again and I telling her to be realistic and asking what options she had. All the time this was going on she drove erratically, sometimes mounting the grass verge, and I could see what Zorah had meant when she told her to improve her driving. In spite of all this, we came safely into Windrose just before half-past three, the question of where Ella was to go not resolved.

The sun was setting behind Lydstep Old Hall, a crimson and orange sunset showing under the hem of a black cloud curtain. I got out of the car outside the church and stared at it, seeing something wrong, off-key, the red glare just in the wrong place, not due west where it should have been, where sunsets always were. And then I saw a man walking towards me, down the village street, past the White Rose, past the general store and the butcher's, and he too was in the wrong place. John never came into Windrose. Years had passed since he had walked this way and the locals had laughed at him. He wore his winter coat with the Black Watch tartan blanket over it and he was holding his sleeping bag unzipped round his shoulders.

I began to move slowly to meet him, hoping in vain that he would smile.

29

Unlike Thornfield, unlike Manderley, those mansions of fiction, most of the house survived the fire. The local fire brigade, composed of volunteers, got to Lydstep Old Hall before it reached the south side of the house, but the drawing room and those rooms along the passage I had never been in and the library, all those were burnt out. The ten thousand books in the library resisted the volunteers' hoses for a long while and nothing that had been in there was left but the statue of Longinus, which was found next day, lying on the lawn.

It was Cox the gardener who phoned for help. The first time he ever went into Lydstep Old Hall was to pick up the telephone and do the only thing he could to lessen its destruction. Next day he went into the pub and told everyone prepared to listen, and that I am sure was most people, that he had found ‘Miss Ida’ sitting at the kitchen table with a knife in her hand and a bowl of water in front of her, peeling potatoes. He got no answer from her when he asked her where her mother and her brother were. The phone, of course, was in the dining room, and although he hadn't a phone of his own, he knew how to dial nine-nine-nine. The drawing room was impenetrable because of the flames and smoke. Later on he heard that Mrs Cosway had been in there, asleep on the sofa, and as for her son, ‘the one that's off his rocker’, there was no sign of him either.

What had happened to John? He did talk to me a little but most of this I pieced together from what I knew of the place and his habits. He had been out for his walk, came back and saw the flames, and did the kind of thing he would always do, walked away from something alien and different and which frightened him. It was lucky for me, and I hope for him, that we met where we did. At that moment, when we met in the village street, I wanted more than anything in the world to take him in my arms and hold him. It was the one thing I could never, must never, do.

Ida was taken to hospital, though I don't think anything was wrong with her – not physically wrong, that is. Mrs Cosway was dead. She had been overcome by smoke and fumes and at her age didn't stand a chance. Dr Barker told Ella she would have known nothing of what happened to her. Ella wouldn't go back to what remained of the house. Eric gave her one of the bedrooms at the Rectory and offered another to John. Kind though it was, I knew he wouldn't do it but stood shaking his head and refusing to step over the Rectory threshold.

He and I went back together to the near-ruin of Lydstep Old Hall because he wouldn't go anywhere else. It was late evening by then. The fire brigade and the police had left after telling us the house was unsafe even to set foot in. We were forbidden to go there. But we did go, making our way up the hill close by the hedge. People who have no experience of living in the English countryside thirty-five years ago have no idea how dark it was by night. Those were the days before what is now called light pollution, when the sky wasn't dark red from the lights of the nearest towns but impenetrable, sometimes starry, black. There were no stars visible that night. Without the torch I borrowed from Eric, getting to Lydstep Old Hall would have been impossible.

John's bedroom had gone when the drawing room went and the library too was a blackened ruin. Everything was covered up with tarpaulins and battens had been nailed up to shut off the drawing room but there was nothing to stop us standing at the end of what had been the passage and looking at where the library and the labyrinth had been. Is there any sadder sight than a burnt-out library? The moon rose slowly and eerily, shedding a pale cold light over the ruins. We stood outside and looked. The temperature was normal for a January night but for once John seemed not to feel the cold. His face showed no emotion, it never did, and perhaps he felt none to show. I don't know, but he addressed to me the longest sentence I ever heard him utter.