by Barbara Vine
We filed out past Eric, who gave Winifred a kiss on the cheek and asked if he was right in thinking he had been invited to lunch.
‘Of course, darling.’ She sounded like Zorah.
‘I liked your organist's playing,’ I said to him. ‘It was Swedish music.’
‘Was it now?’ I could tell he had no interest in music of any sort. ‘Dear old Jim is sometimes too advanced for our quiet backwater.’
Once he was out of earshot Ella reverted to Felix Dunsford. ‘Personally, I like a man to have a casual look.’
‘Not in church,’ said Winifred.
‘I don't suppose he'll come again after what you said.’
‘You know, Ella, I think you've got your eye on him. You don't stand a chance, not once he's seen Zorah. Talk about casual. You want to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror.’
A fierce quarrel developed which only came to an enforced end when Eric's car pulled up beside us and he drove us all back to Lydstep Old Hall. John and his mother were in the living room. Eric was careful not to offer him his hand but instead dipped his head in what I believe is called a court bow. I am afraid I had put Eric down as a fool but now my estimation of him was going up rapidly.
‘How are you, old man?’ he asked John.
‘Fine, fine, I'm fine.’ The voice was the same, a robot's monotone, but the face was brighter, no longer expressionless.
The room was different. It seemed less barren and less shabby. And then I noticed the Roman vase, standing on the console table against the wall beside Mrs Cosway's sofa. Before she left for London, Zorah had restored it to John. He sat looking at it, gazing as if meditating, his hands no longer shaking but resting quietly in his lap. At seven, apparently his bedtime of choice, he got up, shambled over to the console table and laid his hands on the body of the vase. He held them there and then began to stroke the sleek green dimpled glass while his mother waited quite patiently for him to go into his bedroom with her.
8
We went into Isabel's living room and she poured white wine into two glasses. Of course she wanted to know how I was getting on with the Cosways and I soon saw that she looked on them with very different eyes from mine. I was her brother-in-law's girlfriend but they were her friends, if distant ones by this time, and I knew I must be careful not to criticize.
‘Mrs Cosway was quite nice to me when I used to go there and stay. The village is pretty too, don't you think? Of course the house is strange, especially in the summer. There used to be a picture in the library of the old house as it was before their great-grandfather put a new facade on it and planted all that creeper. As you know, I haven't been there for ages, it must be ten years, but I don't suppose it's changed much.’
‘Maybe not,’ I said.
‘My own father was very strict and I remember when I was a child I used to wish Mr Cosway was my father. He was so nice. He always had time for the children, answered all their questions, really spent time with them, and he was patient. John becoming – well, mentally ill was something he could never quite accept.’
‘Do you mean he wasn't always?’
‘It seems he was quite normal when he was a little boy but something went wrong with his brain after he had some kind of a shock. Or that's what Zorah said. I don't know what it was and of course I couldn't ask. He began to have terrible tantrums and there was no doing anything with him. That was when he started hiding in cupboards and spending all day in the library. Mr Cosway was one of those men who valued his son over any daughter and I'm afraid he thought the only career for a woman, the only happy way of life really, was marriage. But none of his girls looked like marrying. Ida got engaged to someone and that was a relief to him, but it was broken off soon after he died.’
‘He would have been in for disappointment,’ I said. ‘Ida and Ella both without husbands and Zorah a widow.’
‘Why didn't you include Winifred?’
‘Oh, didn't you know? Winifred's engaged. To a man called Eric Dawson. He's the Rector of Windrose.’
Isabel laughed but in kindly fashion. ‘How like Winifred. Still, I'm glad. She'll make an excellent vicar's wife – rector's, I should say. Shall we go and have lunch?’
At this meal, a light and delicate change from the heavy food served up at Lydstep, we talked about Isabel's husband, a civil servant in the Foreign Office, and their children, both at school that day. Unless they had both changed a lot, I found it hard to imagine Isabel and Zorah as friends, they were so different. We called people like Zorah ‘jet-setters' in those days, sophisticated, smart, dashing and superficial, while Isabel was gentle and warm. You could hardly have found women who were contemporaries and of the same ethnic group who looked less alike, Zorah thin and model-ish, her black hair so geometrically cut that it looked painted on, Isabel plump and fair, the type then called an English rose.
Keeping off the subject of the Cosways was impossible for me for long. When Isabel brought us coffee I asked her when she had last seen Zorah. Surely since the ten years she had mentioned.
‘Well, we both live in London but there's a bit of a difference, isn't there? I mean, here am I in Crouch End and her house is in Green Street.’
‘You mean, the Green Street in the West End? In Mayfair?’
She laughed at the expression on my face. ‘I do mean that, yes. Zorah is very very rich, you know. I see you didn't know. But we do meet sometimes. Having the children makes it difficult for me. I suppose the last time was two years ago when we had lunch. She phones and Mrs Cosway writes – as you know.’
I said bluntly, ‘How rich?’
‘Oh, millionaire class. I'd better tell you the story. It's quite romantic in its way.’
‘Yes, please.’
‘She was very plain when she was in her teens. Huge nose and quite swarthy but awfully bright. I mean, streets ahead of anyone else in the family, not a bit like them really. I told you Mr Cosway had these antediluvian ideas. He thought you only bothered to educate plain girls because they'd need to earn their own livings. They wouldn't get married, you see. Zorah got a scholarship to Oxford. Everyone thought he wouldn't let her go but he did because he thought it was her only hope. Besides, he wanted to get her out of his sight, he'd never loved her like he did the others.’
‘He was nice?’ I said, and breaking my rule, ‘He doesn't sound it.’
‘He was of his time. Very much a Victorian. After all, he was born in the 1880s. Anyway, Zorah got a first and started on a DPhil. I got the impression the others were bewildered by her brains. This would have been some time in the late fifties. She was doing research in some obscure library which was expecting a visit from a millionaire they hoped would endow something or other. I mean, really big money was involved and Zorah was asked to show him round and look after him for the day. The next thing was he wanted to see her again and within a couple of months they were married.’
‘So much for Mr Cosway's estimate of her.’
‘Yes,’ Isabel said. ‘You could put it like that. Raymond Todd had been married three times before and been three times divorced. The Cosways found that very hard to take but Zorah was determined to marry him and she was of age, she was twenty-four by then.’
I asked her how old Raymond Todd was.
‘Getting on for sixty. He had a house in Italy and an apartment in New York and this house in Green Street. She'd been married maybe six months when Mr Cosway died. He left a funny sort of will. I don't remember the ins and outs of it, if I ever knew, but I do know that John got everything. Mrs Cosway has a small annuity but none of the rest of them have any money except what Ella earns and Winifred makes cooking for people and, of course, what Zorah gives them. She's been amazing – I mean, very, very generous.’
‘Is that why she spends so much time there? She's got those houses and so on, yet she apparently spends weeks at Lydstep. I've wondered why but perhaps it's so that she can be on hand to help them.’
‘Perhaps.’ Isabel looked dubious. �
�I suppose she likes it.’
That mystery remained unsolved, as far as I was concerned. It seemed to me that Zorah could have given her family financial support just as well from London, or Italy, come to that, as from a bedroom in her mother's house. I asked when her husband died.
‘Oh, not long after Mr Cosway. He left Zorah all he had. He had no children from any of his marriages, you see, so she got the lot.’ Isabel laughed. ‘Do you know the first thing she did? She had her nose done.’
‘Plastic surgery, d'you mean?’
‘Absolutely. She's got a neat little nose now. You have a look at it next time you see her.’
‘I wish you could remember,’ I said, ‘the details of Mr Cosway's will.’
‘I don't think it's a matter of remembering. I don't think I ever knew.’
‘Perhaps he didn't have much money,’ I said, ‘but he had the house.’
‘And the land. Don't forget that. Several hundred acres and it's all let out to farmers. Besides, I think there was quite a lot of money. He was a stockbroker, you know, and doing very well after the war, my mother said. She said John's trouble was a shocking blow to him. He adored John, he was enormously proud of him, because he was clever, you know, in a curious sort of way, but he sort of couldn't realize his intelligence, if you understand what I mean. It was there, he'd do algebra puzzles and that sort of thing, but he couldn't put it to practical use.’
‘What exactly was he like when you knew him?’ I asked her.
She considered. ‘There was always something peculiar about him. He never seemed to have any feelings for people and he was totally undemonstrative, hated to be touched, for instance. I saw some relative, an aunt I think it was, try to kiss him and he just screamed out loud. His own family knew better than to try that. There were all sorts of other things he did, like hiding and doing violent things, breaking things, throwing them around. I was last there for Zorah's wedding ten years ago. Eleven actually by now.’
‘Was John normally dull and lethargic?’
‘I don't think so. No, he wasn't. He did puzzles, played word and number games, you know the sort of thing. Of course he could never work and there was no question of university. For one thing he would never answer questions and never ask them. I think they'd say now that he'd lost his hold on reality if he ever had any and he never showed the least emotion. Is he like that now?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘No, he's not like that now. He's – well, nothing now.’
She showed me some photographs, two of her and Zorah as teenagers, Zorah's hooked nose and spots the way they were in the picture on the piano, then one of a thinner and livelier-looking John with Zorah and Ella, but they told me nothing I didn't already know.
The album was put away and I said, ‘Now tell me what happened to the maze.’
‘What do you mean, what happened to it?’
‘Where is it? What is it?’
‘I'm amazed they haven't told you. It's in that wing of the house that leads off to the right from the hall.’
I asked her if she meant it was inside the house.
She laughed. ‘It's the library. The door's at the end of that passage and it's the biggest room in the house.’
Double doors faced me. First looking over my shoulder in a guilty way, I tried the handles but both doors were locked. Through the empty keyhole, I could see nothing except a kind of uneven darkness. I turned away and went out into the sunshine, noticing for the first time that the windows at that end of the house were entirely overgrown by Virginia creeper. Someone, perhaps the gardener, had cleared the others but the ones I thought must be those of the labyrinth library were hidden under blinds of shiny green leaves. Even close observers would think they were looking at windowless walls.
But the doors were locked. It wouldn't have been beyond my ingenuity to find the key. After all, it surely wasn't a dark secret. The motive for locking it up must have been that in the 1960s the books were of no possible interest to anyone. If it were opened, it would have to be cleaned, as would the other locked rooms along the passage. Mrs Lilly already grumbled enough about the work expected of her. Therefore, I thought it unlikely I would be refused a key provided I guaranteed to lock the door again after I had seen the place. But something stopped me asking. These ‘somethings’ were coming to me quite a lot, warning voices really, telling me, ‘Better not’ and ‘Leave it for now’, though I had never before experienced premonitory cautioning with no apparent reason for it.
My hope of entry lay with Ella. Along with her overtures of friendship, she had said she would show me the library ‘some time’, yet had looked suspicious when I showed enthusiasm. I decided to try to let the suggestion come from her, perhaps in reply to a request for more books, as I would soon have exhausted her small collection.
Eric paid us a visit in the evening, driving Winifred home from wherever she had been. Sherry was brought out in his honour and, longing for the privacy of my room, the diary and The Woman in White, which I had just begun reading, I said I would leave them, but Mrs Cosway, for some reason, insisted I stay. Winifred, who had been presiding at something called the Women's Prayer Group, was in a highly nervous state about the dinner she was to prepare the following Friday. She wished she had never undertaken to do it and it was now impossible to get out of. Eric, true to the form she had claimed for him and having forgotten this engagement of hers, had invited Felix Dunsford to the Rectory for what he modestly called ‘a simple evening meal’ on Friday night. He had been relying on Winifred to do the cooking and hence her dilemma. Moreover she said she disliked Felix, his appearance, his manner and his attitude to herself. What on earth had possessed Eric to invite him?
‘I rather like him,’ said mild Eric. ‘Besides, he comes to church, which is more than you can say for most people.’
‘You mean he's been once,’ said Winifred. ‘He came to mock.’
‘I'm sure you're wrong there, my dear. He knew the liturgy, he sang the hymns. I do notice these things, you know.’
‘You couldn't help it, the way he planted himself in a front pew. And, you know, that isn't done in country churches.’
‘I don't in the least mind its being done in mine. It's most unfortunate you can't be there when he comes. You'll prepare something for us in advance, won't you?’
This gave rise to a small explosion. Surely she had enough worries with this dinner preying on her mind? Why could a man not learn to cook? It was very hard on her, having so much to do. He should remember the catering she did was earning her living.
‘I shall console myself,’ said Eric, ‘with the thought that once we are married you won't have to earn your living.’
A much larger explosion this time. I doubt if the term ‘sexist’ had been invented then but that was the word Winifred would have used if it had. ‘What makes you think I'm going to give up my profession when I'm married? I never said so. You've never mentioned it before.’
‘I took it for granted. Any man would.’
‘I know dozens of men who wouldn't, hundreds. A lot of men would be delighted their wives work. I can't get things ready for you on Friday and that's flat. You'll have to take him into Sudbury or somewhere to a restaurant.’
At this point Mrs Cosway, who looked as if she was enjoying all of it, poured Eric more sherry without asking him if he wanted it. I suppose she thought he needed refuelling. Ella had so far listened in silence, with a little smile on her face.
‘Why not bring Mr Dunsford here?’ she said.
‘That means Ida has to do it.’ I had never known Winifred show any consideration for her elder sister before.
‘Not at all. I will. I can cook, though no one seems to know it.’
‘Be thankful they don't.’ Ida spoke with unusual bitterness. ‘You might have to take on my job.’
‘I? I'm a breadwinner in case you haven't noticed. I have a real and very valuable career. I'm not messing about cooking fancy dishes for stockbrokers.’
One of their acrimonious rows developed, Winifred insisting almost tearfully that she could only do what she was trained for and Ella saying it was such a drawback to have no ‘real’ qualifications. But when she had vanquished Winifred she repeated her offer and Eric accepted.
‘I quite like the look of Felix Dunsford,’ she said with that irritating little smile.
‘If that means you're after him,’ said Winifred, ‘you want to be careful. I see him as a dangerous man.’
This led to Eric, presumably trying to calm things down, quoting tediously from Shakespeare a passage about someone thinking too much and therefore being very dangerous. Winifred shook her head slowly, Ella smiled, while Mrs Cosway had closed her eyes and appeared to be asleep. Going up to my room and the diary, I wondered why Eric wanted to marry Winifred, why he would want to marry at all; and since she very obviously was not in love, why she wanted to marry him. Since then I have learnt that people marry for status, for security, for escape, because they have got into it and would find it very awkward and embarrassing to get out of, and of course for money. Besides, there was always the Bishop's cautionary advice to Eric, as relayed by Ella, that he should find himself a wife.
What happened later would possibly have happened whether Felix Dunsford had been asked to Lydstep or not. Yet I am not sure. They could have met him in church. The kind of functions and meetings Winifred and Ella attended were shunned by him, the pub and a shady club outside Sudbury being the kinds of places he preferred. So would they have met him again? Or would Winifred's encounter with him when she told him off about his clothes have been the only one?
Both are possible. They would have spoken in the street or ‘passed the time of day’ as the English curiously put it, bumped into him at a drinks party after Winifred was safely married. Engaging herself to Eric Dawson had made not knowing him better impossible. Eric always took up new people. I think it was partly the clergyman's proselytizing need to add to his flock, partly an aversion to solitariness and quite a lot of just wanting to be kind. It seemed to extend to anyone and everyone, for in the year I was at Lydstep he made friends not only with Felix Dunsford but also with other newcomers, an architect and his wife and an old man who had moved into a Memorial Green cottage when he was widowed.
