Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘When you make a call,’ she said, ‘you should ask the operator to time it and tell you the cost. The simplest way to keep a tally will be for you to write each sum down. You might perhaps buy a notebook for this purpose. If you are careful you won't find the cost to you prohibitive. No outgoing calls are allowed in this house after ten at night, they should be restricted to ten minutes, and none may be received after half past eight. You may have heard the telephone ring just before ten last night. That was for one of my daughters and I shall speak to them about it. I sincerely hope you will also explain to your friends not to telephone during the afternoon when I shall be resting or between seven and nine when we breakfast and one and two p.m. when we are at lunch.’

I thought this, to use my husband's phrase, a bit rich. How I was going to make Mark (my Lund student friend) understand, not to mention obey, these injunctions I had no idea. But I only nodded and applied myself to a boiled egg and bread and butter. Ida, having transferred, I've no doubt single-handedly, all the food from the kitchen table to this one, had finally arrived to sit down and eat some herself.

‘I hope you slept well,’ she said to me as if this was our first encounter of the day.

‘Very well.’

‘My sisters Ella and Winifred will be down in a minute.’

At this point Mrs Cosway laid down her knife and said in a dry and rather unpleasant way, pronouncing my name not as I had told her was correct but as she thought best, ‘Kerstin wants to know everything about this family, Ida. She told me so. She likes to get things clear. Succinct sentences like the one you've just uttered won't do for her.’

Bewildered, as well she might be, Ida said, ‘I don't know what you want me to say, Mother.’

‘Oh, nothing, nothing. I'll do it.’

Mrs Cosway turned to me. Her son, who had finished eating, had left his crusts like a child and arranged them on the plate to form a shape like a Maltese cross. His glazed eyes were fixed not on his mother's face but at a point somewhere to the left of her left shoulder. I thought what a handsome man he would be but for the blighting of his looks and his expression by whatever it was that afflicted him.

‘My daughter Ella,’ Mrs Cosway said, ‘is a teacher at a school in Sudbury, my daughter Winifred is a cook.’

‘Oh, Mother,’ said Ida reproachfully.

‘Oh, Mother, what? Winifred is a cook. She may be a very good cook, I have no idea, she has never cooked anything for me, but to my mind a cook is a servant and I find it strange that one of my children should have a menial occupation. Someone gave her a tip the other day. She told me so herself.’

John continued to sit silently, staring. He might have been in a trance, and perhaps he was. At first it looked as if he had left his boiled egg untouched but then I saw yolk on his spoon and understood he had eaten the egg and turned the shell over with its broken end inside the cup. I knew I must learn not to stare at him and luckily at that moment I heard a footstep on the stairs. Ida said quickly, ‘Winifred is a caterer for private dinner parties – well, all sorts of parties. She did the food for the one they both went to last night.

Before I could make any comment the two sisters came in. Their mother, possibly still brooding on the horrors of someone in her position having a hireling for a child, nodded to them but said nothing, joining her son in blank silence. It was left to Ida to introduce me.

‘My sister Winifred, my sister Ella, this is Kerstin Kvist.’

I was beginning to think I should have to resign myself to being the guttural and sharp-cornered Curstin for the duration of my stay instead of the Shashtin of soft sibilants. But I got up and shook hands with them.

Mrs Cosway waited till they were seated, then said, ‘I suppose that telephone call last night was for one of you two.’ She spoke exactly as if they were sixteen and fourteen years old instead of the more probable late thirties. ‘I would like you to tell your correspondent that telephone calls in the middle of the night are not to be received in this house.’

‘Five to ten is hardly the middle of the night,’ said Winifred.

‘Anyway,’ said Ella, ‘the call was for me. It was the head. He had something important to say about the Upper Fifth.’

For a moment I was puzzled until I realized she must have meant the head teacher of her school. While she and her mother argued about this phone call – I was to learn that the daughters with each other or with their mother could sustain an argument on some trivial matter for fifteen minutes and sometimes much longer – I observed these two newcomers. As I had seen the night before, both were good-looking, Winifred particularly. But good looks are not just a matter of fine regular features, copious hair, large eyes and a supple figure, all of which they had, but of how a woman holds herself, turns her head, smiles, her consciousness of her appearance and the air of beauty she carries with her. Neither Winifred nor Ella seemed aware of their own attractions, neither had style. Their hair was dull and in need of a wash and Winifred's had clips in it to hold it back. Limp summer dresses and cardigans, one blue, one pink, did nothing to flatter them. Winifred was again heavily painted, especially about the eyes, her eyebrows plucked to thin lines, her mouth a scarlet gash, while Ella looked as if she had slept in last night's make-up. Their long slender hands could have been elegant but Ella's nails were bitten and Winifred's were dirty. Rather unfortunate for a cook, I thought.

It was she who said to me as Ella and her mother continued to bicker, ‘I don't know what you must think of us, Kerstin, going on like this in front of you. It doesn't mean anything, you know.’

I have my own opinion as to family quarrels meaning nothing but I only smiled and asked her if the party she had arranged for the evening before had been a success. It had, she said with great enthusiasm. The guests – it had been a reception to raise funds for the restoration of some part of the church – had enjoyed themselves, had eaten up all her mini-quiches, cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks and baby vol-au-vents.

‘If there was a fly in the ointment,’ she said, ‘it was that the people there were mostly women. Mr Dawson was there of course, he always comes. But as for the rest – it usually is like that. Men just won't come to things like this, which is a great shame as they have the money, don't they?’

My feminist soul rising in revolt (even in those days) against this sentiment, I asked her if there was much social life in Windrose.

‘Oh, yes, we're a very friendly bunch. I shall be cooking for the Midsummer Supper in a fortnight's time. And then there will be the Harvest Festival. You must come.’

Still defending her right to receive phone calls at an hour ‘when no one, absolutely no one, would think of going to bed’, Ella left the table and went off to work. The pale green Volvo, some fifteen years old, started up with a clanking and gurgling. Later in the day I saw that its bonnet was stove in. A considerable time before, by the look of it, someone had driven it into the vehicle ahead.

I wondered who Mr Dawson was. A slightly embarrassed look had come into Winifred's face when she spoke his name. She appeared to have no work to go to and in the absence of work, nothing to do. She left the clearing of the breakfast table to Ida, who did it uncomplainingly. Like her brother's, though in quite a different way, her expression never changed. While his face was blank, unaffected by mood, by frustration or anger or joy, if he felt these things, hers wore a look of patient stoicism, as if long ago she had settled into her fate and would apply herself to it till the end; not well or graciously or even mutinously – she did a poor job, leaving the table covered in crumbs and the napkins sprawled among them – but with resignation.