Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘I am thinking of Ptolemy's great library at Alexandria. That was burnt too.’

I found candles in the kitchen and an oil lamp – a real oil lamp, not one of those paraffin heaters – and we had a little light. John had decided to spend the night in the dining room. His ritual objects were gone, his dressing gown and all his quilts were gone. If this distressed him he gave no sign of it. I found pillows and quilts for him in the undamaged bedrooms and made a bed out of them for him on the dining-room floor. Zorah's rooms had been so badly damaged as to be unusable and Ella's suffered more from the water and chemical sprays the fire brigade had used than from the fire itself, but my bedroom was untouched. Ida or Mrs Lilly had stripped the bed once I was gone and I didn't bother to make it up but lay down on a blanket on the mattress with a quilt and a bedspread over me. I slept very little. Worrying about what would happen to John kept me awake, that and the cold. I dared not leave the candles burning. Although so much of the house still stood, the electricity supply was gone and the water in the taps was cold. The phone no longer worked.

I got up at five, lit more candles and the three oil stoves. By the time John was up, silent and expressionless, the kitchen was quite warm. I fried eggs and bacon on top of one of the stoves and boiled a kettle on the other, a slow process. It was all right for one night and one morning but I knew we couldn't stay here after today. The police wouldn't have let us do what we had done even for the ten hours or so that we had been in the house. I thought of the mental hospital where John had been when he was suspected of killing Winifred and a chill ran through me at the idea of his going back there because there was nowhere else for him to be.

Surely the trust would provide somewhere for him? Would Ella look after him? Somehow I doubted it. There was Ida, of course, but I had no faith in Ida. I couldn't imagine her returning to the world of the sane and balanced. I don't know now why there was one person, one obvious person I never thought of.

I washed the dishes as best I could in cold water mixed with the kettle dregs. John had gone. I wasn't worried, I knew where he would be. The passage of locked doors was open now to a flat grey sky, crosshatched by burnt blackened beams. John stood where he and I had stood the night before. We hadn't been able to see much then. Now it was like looking at some kind of geological phenomenon, a beach or plain of wet black rocks, only these stones were spongy and when you touched them, they made a soggy squelch. Once they had been books. Not one of them was recognizable, not Homer or Euclid or Mrs Halliburton's Troubles or the Bible. All were made one an undifferentiated amorphous black pulp.

John stood with his sleeping bag round his shoulders, simply staring at it. Impossible to tell if he was upset or angry or afraid. He turned his head when he heard me and he spoke.

‘Shashtin.’

I loved him then. Again I would have liked to take him in my arms and hold him, protect him for ever, save him from the world. Of course I could do nothing. He would have screamed and hidden himself if I had touched him. Suddenly I thought, for the first time really, that his mother was dead. Did he mind? Did he know? Whether she had loved him or he had loved her, I didn't know. She alone had been allowed to give him his drug and that must have meant something.

I will try to get him to the Rectory, I thought. His sister is there. Eric is there. Surely they won't desert him, abandon him. I walked back to the dining room. Winifred's wedding presents were still there, still covered in sheets, miraculously dry, untouched by fire or water. I heard a key in the front-door lock and I turned round, expecting to see Ella. Zorah was in the hall. In trenchcoat and boots, she looked like a forties star in a war film.

‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘Do you know what's become of m brother?’

I told her.

‘How did it happen?’

‘Apparently, a log fell out of the fireplace on to the rug. That's what they think. Your mother was asleep and Ida was…’

‘In the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Ella phoned me at six. I'd have come last night if I'd known.’ We went to look for John. ‘The man I took him to says he's never to have drugs again. His walking will get better without them and his hands will stop shaking. There's nothing much to be done for what he's got.’

John was still standing where I had left him.

‘Hallo, you,’ said Zorah.

I didn't know what she meant to do. If she intended to take him away, take him to London or some hotel, I thought it likely, probable, he would simply refuse to go. He smiled a little when he saw her. I am ashamed to admit it but I was jealous. That smile should have been for me. For all that, I was happy to see him follow her out of the front door to where her car was.

‘His things?’ I said. ‘He'll need clothes, I don't know if there are any.’

‘We'll buy new,’ she said. ‘We'll buy books. Would you like to go to Italy, John? When we were kids we said we'd go to Venice. We'd go to Florence. Remember? We can go now.’

He said nothing but the smile was still there.

‘Goodbye, John,’ I said.

Quite gravely he said, ‘Goodbye, Shashtin,’ and with that I had to be content.

Zorah wound down the driver's window. ‘Lift to White Lodge?’

‘No, thanks,’ I said, ‘I'd like the walk.’

‘Whatever happened to that bloody geode?’ she said but she didn't wait for an answer.

I spent my last night in Windrose with the Trintowels, staying one night longer than I had meant to. Nothing was talked about but the fire and its consequences and Mrs Cosway's death. I said very little about John, only that Zorah had taken him away. Jane was mystified by my decision to stay overnight with John in a cold, wet, half-burnt-out house after those supposed to know had told me it was unsafe. She kept asking me why but I didn't know the answer. In the afternoon I went down to the Rectory. Eric's daily woman let me in and I found Eric in the living room with Ella – and Felix.

They were all behaving in a subdued and controlled fashion, talking of course about the fire. I was able to tell Ella what had survived and that I thought the things in her room would be very little damaged.

‘Your clothes are all right,’ I said, ‘and the dolls are only a bit damp.’

‘Dolls?’ Felix obviously knew nothing of Ella's hobby. ‘What do you do? Play with them?’

‘I'll make a cup of tea,’ Ella said coldly.

I followed her to the kitchen, that grim high-ceilinged chamber. The only efficient modern thing in it was Winifred's wedding present.

‘Thank God,’ said Ella, ‘they sent Zorah's fridge here and not to the Hall. Ida would have got her hooks into it.’

I drank my tea. I told them I would be leaving next morning and returning to Sweden in five days' time. Ella said nothing this time about coming to London with me, nothing about her mother's death. She was sitting next to Felix on the sofa, her right hand lying beside his knee, not quite touching it. I kissed her when I left. Thirty-five years were to pass before I saw her again. The two men I never saw, though I occasionally heard of Felix, who became quite famous and at the age of sixty-nine was nominated for some quite important prize.

I walked back to White Lodge, thinking of seeing Charles next day, thinking of him in a romantic, ardent way, very different from how I had thought of Mark. The feeling I had had for John was of course separate and unique.

Zorah had asked me what started the fire and I gave her the accepted theory: a log had fallen out of the fireplace on to the rug while Mrs Cosway slept. This was impossible, as anyone acquainted with that room knew well. But the room was destroyed and the fireplace with it, Mrs Cosway was dead, John seldom spoke and certainly never about things like that, and Ella had no interest in the fate of the house or the cause of its destruction. That her clothes and dolls were safe was all that concerned her. Ida would certainly never deny the official version.