Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

The Minotaur

BARBARA VINE

Now

One of the women buying amber was so much like Mrs Cosway that it gave me a shock to see her. She seemed shorter but people shrink with age. Otherwise the likeness, from her curly white hair to her spindly legs and fine ankles, was almost uncanny. She was holding up a string of pale yellow beads, looking at them and smiling with that excitement you only see on the faces of women who love shopping and pretty things.

Charles has a theory that if you are in X, a distant place you have never been to before, and while there you meet or pass in the street your nearest and dearest, a spouse or lover or even your child, you won't recognize them. Not only do you not expect to see them there; you know they can't be there because you have certain knowledge that at this moment they are hundreds of miles away. Of course, they can be there, they are there, they have deceived you or your knowledge of their whereabouts is in fact very uncertain, but the chances are you will pass on, telling yourself this was no more than an extraordinary resemblance.

Mrs Cosway fitted into none of the categories I have named. I hadn't even liked her but I had certain knowledge of where she was now. She was dead. This woman looked like her but was someone else. I turned away and began to walk on. She called after me.

‘Kerstin!’

If she had pronounced my name as it should be pronounced, that is as, more or less, ‘Shashtin’, I might have turned round and gone up to her but it wouldn't have been a shock, it wouldn't have sent a shiver through me. But she had called me ‘Curstin’, the way the Cosways, all of them except John, invariably had done. I walked across the cobbled square and went up to her.

‘You don't know me, do you ? Of course I'm awfully changed, I know that. It's inevitable at my age.’

The voice told me. ‘Ella,’ I said.

She nodded, pleased. ‘I knew you . You've changed too but I knew you. This is my daughter Zoë and my granddaughter Daisy. Always girls in our family, isn't it?’

Zoë was a tall dark woman in her early thirties, handsome, brown-eyed, holding a child of about six by the hand. We shook hands.

‘Does she remind you of anyone?’

‘Winifred,’ I said.

Zoë made a face. ‘Oh, Mother.’

How often had I heard those words from Ida when Mrs Cosway said something particularly outrageous.

‘What brings you to Riga?’

‘Zoë wanted to see the art nouveau in Alberta Street. She's doing an art history course, so we thought we'd do a tour of the Baltic States.’ If Ella assumed I was doing the same thing, if for a different reason, she was right but I doubt if that was why she didn't ask. The Cosways were never much interested in other people's activities. ‘Shall I buy this amber? You'll say it's a wicked price, I know.’

‘On the contrary,’ I said. ‘You'll never get it cheaper anywhere else.’

Perhaps she resented this for she said rather severely, ‘Mother never forgave you for the diary, you know.’

This wasn't the moment for argument. ‘It's a long time ago. What happened – is – mean, what became of John?’

‘He's still alive, if that's what you mean. Zorah took him to Tuscany with her but he lives alone now – well, with a couple to look after him. You'll say that anyone as crazy as he is couldn't manage, but he does.’

I smiled at her usage, the attributing of unlikely views to me, which once annoyed me so much.

‘Buy that amber for me, Zoë, will you? Our bus will be here any minute. Oh, John, yes. He has a lovely house near Florence. Or so I'm told. Not that we ever get invited, do we, Zoë? Of course he's a rich man. The land the Hall was on was sold and they built four houses where it was. Planning! I ask you. I don't know what he does with it all. They say he never goes out and he's seventy-five now.’

Their tour bus came slowly round the corner and pulled up in the square. It was nearly full. I wanted to ask her whom she had married. Who was Zoë's father? They were already on the steps.

‘Will you be back here tonight?’ I said.

‘We're due back at five, aren't we, Zoë?’

‘Meet me for a drink,’ I said, naming my hotel. ‘Six-thirty OK?’

She called something back that I didn't catch. I waved as the bus moved off, and when it was out of sight, turned away. What I had heard of John Cosway made me so happy that I walked back to the hotel, to Charles and Mark and Anna, with a spring in my step.

Then

1

I am a cartoonist.

We are thin on the ground, we women cartoonists, it's still thought of as a man's job, and there are even fewer of my sort who aren't English and never went to art school. Over the close-on thirty years that I have been contributing a couple of cartoons to each issue of a weekly news magazine, I have drawn Harold Wilson and Willi Brandt, Mao Zedong and Margaret Thatcher (hundreds of times), John Major, Neil Kinnock, David Beckham and Tony Blair (nearly sixty times). People say I can catch a likeness with a few strokes and squiggles; they know who it's supposed to be before they read the caption or the balloon coming out of a character's mouth. But I was no child artist prodigy, I don't remember learning anything about art at school and for years all I ever drew was a Dog Growing for my small niece and nephew.

I'll tell you about the Dog Growing because you may want to make one for your own children. You take a sheet of paper; a piece of A 4, cut vertically in half, will do very well. Then you fold it in half again and fold the folded-over piece back on itself to make an inch-wide pleat. Flatten it out again and draw a dog across the folds. It's best to make it a dachshund or a basset hound because it should have a long stretch of body between forelegs and hindlegs. Then refold your paper into its pleat. The dog now has a short body but when the child opens the pleat the dog grows into a dachshund. Of course, when you get practised at it, you can make a Giraffe's Neck Growing or a Turkey Growing into an Ostrich. Children love it and that was all I ever drew all through my teens and when I was at university.

I was going to be a nurse and then I was going to teach English. I never considered drawing as a career because you can't make a living out of a Dog Growing. It was in the late sixties when I came to England, fresh from the University of Lund and my English degree and with a fairly humble nursing qualification. I had a job lined up and a place to live, but my real motive in coming was to renew my love affair with Mark Doulas.

We had met at Lund but when he graduated he had to go home and all his letters urged me to follow him. Get a job in London, get a room. Everyone in London, he wrote, lives in a bedsitter. I did the next best thing and got a job in Essex, near the main line from Liverpool Street to Norwich. The family who were employing me were called Cosway and the house they lived in, Lydstep Old Hall. I had never in my life seen anything like that house.

It was very large yet it hardly looked like a house at all, more a great bush or huge piece of topiary work. When I first saw it in June it was entirely covered, from end to end and from foundations to the line of the roof, in intensely green Virginia creeper. I could see it was oblong and that its roof was almost flat but if there were architectural features such as balconies, railings, recessed columns, stonework, none showed through the mass of glossy green. Windows alone peeped out of this leafy wrapping. It was a rather windy day and, because the breeze set all the hundreds of thousands of leaves shivering, there was an illusion that the house itself moved, shrank, expanded and subsided again.