The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

  Eric always began, apparently, by inviting the new friend to the Rectory for a meal. Winifred had prepared these dinners or suppers herself in the past in her capacity as itinerant cook. It was through her asparagus soup, roast lamb and tarte tatin served up to Peter Johnston, previous tenant of The Studio, that she and Eric had first discovered that, in his words, they were ‘made for each other’.

  ‘Before that everyone thought he was keen on Ida,’ said Ella, who had followed me upstairs.

  I hastily hid the diary. ‘Ida?’

  ‘She used to do the flowers in the church when Mr Clare was the Rector and when Eric came she kept on with it. This will be four or five years ago.’ Ella had produced a bottle of rosé and two glasses. ‘I've told you how Eric takes up every new person who comes to Windrose. I meant men, of course. My sister was the only old person, so to speak, he got pally with, and the only woman.’

  ‘You mean he and Ida went about together?’

  ‘Not exactly. It was more that she'd go to the Rectory on some pretext – or no pretext, I expect – and she'd make tea for herself and him and they'd chat, that sort of thing. I don't know what happened but nothing came of it.’

  I said it didn't sound like a grand passion.

  ‘No, it wouldn't suit me but I expect you'll say that's what he's got with Winifred.’ Ella was fond of telling me what I would say in almost any given situation and she was always off the mark. She gave me a conspiratorial smile. ‘Not everyone feels things with the same intensity as you and I do, Kerstin.’

  Cautiously I steered us to the subject of the library without mentioning it, only saying that when The Woman in White was finished I would have nothing to read.

  ‘Yes, I promised to take you into the library, didn't I? But I don't know if you'll find anything you fancy.’ She looked over her shoulder, then leant nearer to me. ‘My mother doesn't like people going in there, you know. She's afraid the door will be left unlocked and John will get in, though the state he's in these days I don't suppose he even knows where it is any more.’

  I waited, unwilling to say anything that would betray my increasing desire to see behind that door.

  ‘I doubt if anyone's been in there for five years,’ she said. ‘The key's in a secret place but I expect I can find it.’

  Not that evening, though. She settled herself in my armchair for a cosy chat.

  9

  He was every hero of Gothic romance, every lady novelist and dramatist's creation of the kind of man attractive to naive women. He was the forties film star who looks best in knee breeches. I am not saying this was apparent to me at once but I had an inkling of it as Felix Dunsford slung himself into an armchair and lounged as if exhausted from enterprises such as duelling, making love, climbing mountains in a storm and swimming the Bosphorus. He was dark, almost swarthy, and in those days when for a man to be unshaven was as bad as wearing earrings, showing a day or two's growth of beard. His long black hair was greasy but his open-necked white shirt was clean. Shaking hands rather reluctantly, Mrs Cosway looked at him as if she had never before seen a man without a tie.

  I think it's worth saying here – though of course I didn't realize it immediately – that he must have studied the Byronic hero. The way he behaved can't have been natural. It was too stereotyped, too fictional. This was how he wanted to be, no doubt because he found it paid dividends. I never saw him act out of character and this was one reason why he always appeared dull to me. I could predict what he would answer or say next, and if at first this amused me, after a while it became tedious. Even then, that first evening, I knew he would habitually drink too much, have little or no means of support, live dangerously, chase women and misuse them, and when things became too hot to hold him disappear.

  Felix wasn't the only dinner guest. I had been hoping it wouldn't be too long before I saw Dr Lombard, the doctor Mrs Cosway had visited that evening when I had been left in charge of John. She addressed him as ‘Selwyn’ and he her as ‘Julia’. This would hardly be noticed now, when everyone calls everyone else by their given names, but then it meant something. Selwyn Lombard and Julia Cosway were friends of long standing. The portrait I made of him, taking up a whole page of the diary, was of an old man, though a few years younger than his friend, tall, his hair still dark. His face would have been handsome but for the big hooked nose. A greater contrast in dress to Felix, whose picture faces him on the opposite page, could hardly be found, for the doctor is wearing a black pinstriped suit with waistcoat and a grey tie like shiny pewter.

  Knowing that he prescribed for John, I expected him to ask after him but nothing was said. Like the Cosway women and Eric, the doctor took it for granted John wouldn't be there and, either by a conspiracy with Mrs Cosway or because he gave the matter no thought, kept silent on an awkward subject. Eric Dawson turned out to be one of those people who can't be in the presence of a doctor of medicine without consulting him. He had met Dr Lombard before and this time was scarcely in his company for five minutes before he was pointing out some problem with, of all things, his fingernails. Sitting next to the doctor while our drinks were dispensed by Ida, he spread both hands out on the little table between them and asked why his nails were splitting and scaling. Had he a fungus? It was embarrassing when he was baptizing babies.

  ‘I think you'd better come over to my surgery when you have a moment, Rector,’ said Dr Lombard, barely suppressing a smile. ‘Here and now won't really do, will it?’

  Eric seemed rather taken aback and was putting on and taking off his glasses when Felix Dunsford said in his languid Byronic voice, ‘That reminds me of the woman in the restaurant who saw her dentist at a table on the other side of the room. She rushes over, opening her mouth and sticking her fingers inside, and tells him about her toothache. “Madam,” says he, “I'm thankful I'm not your gynaecologist.”’

  This made Dr Lombard roar with laughter and Ella managed a sort of giggle. But the effect on the others was to stun them with shock. It seemed that nothing of this enormity had ever before been uttered in the drawing room at Lydstep Old Hall. Mrs Cosway closed her eyes and shook her head slowly from side to side. Glancing at Eric, Ida as rapidly looked away. The look on his face was (as the English say) enough to curdle milk. Felix produced a squashed Capstan Extra Strong packet from his trouser pocket and offered it to Ella.

  ‘Fag?’

  ‘Oh, no, you must smoke ours,’ Ida intervened in a hostessy way, handing round cigarettes from a box. ‘They are rather milder than yours but perhaps you won't mind.’

  ‘I won't mind,’ said Felix. ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth, that's me.’

  His anecdote I used years later as the subject for a cartoon. Several readers of the magazine wrote in to say it was disgusting and they were surprised at me. The shock and outrage in these letters brought back the Cosways and Eric, all but Ella deeply embarrassed. Soon afterwards she went to the kitchen to see to her dinner. Her appearance was much improved that evening, rather obviously as I thought, since everyone knew she ‘had her eye’ on Felix Dunsford, as Winifred had put it. The red suit that was her best flattered her more than anything I had ever seen her wear. When she had make-up on, as she did that evening, she applied it with a surer and less lavish hand than Winifred. Felix's eyes followed her as she left the room but, naturally, because he was a laid-back ladykiller modelled on movie pirates and highwaymen, he gave no sign beyond a lazy smile that she attracted him.

  Mrs Cosway, determined from the start to dislike him, inquired what kind of things he painted and asked rather rudely if he could make a living at it. He was the kind of man it is impossible to offend and he gave the impression of being impervious to hurt, but this too may have been assumed. Eric might have told us, quoting as he liked to do, that he was one of those who when ‘moving others are themselves as stone’ and that they ‘rightly do inherit heaven's graces’, if he had ever seen Felix in any light but as a pleasant newcomer to the village. There were a lot of heaven's graces
about Felix, I could see that, though I never felt the attraction he had for the Cosway women, and I think this was because, apart from his dullness, he was old. Not old as Dr Lombard was but, if considered as a possible lover, well over the hill for me. Would he have been impervious to that if he had known it?

  Mrs Cosway began to come round at the point when he answered her question, telling her that painters hardly ever did make enough to live on.

  ‘There are other jobs around,’ he said, favouring her with his lazy smile, ‘if you're not proud. I'm not proud, am I, Eric?’ He appealed to the Rector of Windrose as if they were bosom friends, as if he had known him since their schooldays, instead of only having met him a week before. ‘I can work a bar.’ I don't think Mrs Cosway knew what he meant. ‘I can clean flats. I'm thinking of doing a spot of sign-painting. You know the sort of thing: “Beware of the dog, no hawkers or circulars.” Americans say “no solicitors” but they don't mean what we do.’

  Ella, who had come back to announce dinner, giggled hysterically. ‘Please do come and eat,’ she said.

  She was a better cook than Ida, possibly better than Winifred, who of course was away somewhere, preparing dinner for other people. I don't remember much of what we ate and for some reason I didn't put it in the diary. Perhaps, unlike the sundial, I counted not the sunny hours but only the dark or boring ones. An excellent bread-and-butter pudding with sherry and cream in it I do remember. If the way to Felix Dunsford's heart was through his stomach, Ella was more than halfway there.

  After we had finished and Ida was clearing away – Ella's culinary efforts didn't include washing up afterwards – Winifred came in. She seemed breathless, as if she had been running instead of driving the old Volvo, and she began apologizing to Felix for being out. Considering he was only there because she had to be out, he looked puzzled.

  Dr Lombard suddenly said, apropos of nothing that had gone before, ‘The galleries in the Hermitage in St Petersburg’ – it was the sixties, so he said Leningrad – ‘if laid to end to end, would be six miles long, the same length as the Nevsky Prospekt.’

  I was later to learn that he often came up with non sequiturs of this kind, though I had no idea of it then. But this one rather interested me and I would have liked to know more. Apart from Mrs Cosway, who said, ‘That's fascinating, Selwyn,’ the others ignored it with the indifference of those who have heard it all before. Dr Lombard got up and said it was time he went home, he was too old for late nights. No one seemed surprised and I supposed – rightly as it happened – that the Hermitage remark was a cue, as were others of a similar kind, for his departure.

  Standing in the doorway, making some future engagement with Mrs Cosway, he reminded me in profile of someone I knew, though I couldn't think who it was. Was there anyone I knew with a nose like his? Or was it some other aspect of his face that suggested another face to me, the line of his jaw, jowly now with age, or the set of his dark eyes?

  Soon after he went Ida settled down to knitting and Zorah appeared. We heard the roar of the Lotus, a door slamming, and then she walked in.

  ‘What have you all been up to?’ We might have been children caught raiding the fridge.

  ‘Eric brought Mr Dunsford to dinner, Zorah,’ said her mother. ‘I don't think you've met him.’

  Felix was sitting next to Ella. This was because she had positioned herself beside him, not he beside her. He got up when Zorah approached him but his movements seemed to suggest that anything which interrupted his desultory conversation with Ella and Ida he found irksome. Such indifference, I thought, must be unusual for Zorah in her white dress and high white sandals, bringing scents of patchouli and sandalwood with her into the room.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ The tone in Mrs Cosway's voice when speaking to her youngest daughter, placatory, anxious, almost wheedling, I had never heard her use to anyone else. ‘Eric is going to have a whisky.’

  It seemed to be with an effort that Zorah managed not to shudder. She shook her head. But when the whisky was produced by Ida, she beckoned her over. Beckoning was a favourite gesture of hers, though this was the first time I had seen it. She looked closely at the bottle.

  ‘A single malt, I see,’ she said. ‘Very expensive.’

  This breathtakingly rude remark didn't deter Eric, as I suppose was intended. He let Ida pour him the usual measure and said to Felix, ‘Won't you change your mind?’

  It took very little to change Felix's mind when it came to accepting a drink he had just refused. ‘Why not?’ He gave Zorah a snide sideways glance which seemed to say, ‘So much for you.’

  She lit a cigarette which she put into a long red holder, turned to her mother and said, ‘Where is my amethyst thing, darling?’

  Only Eric and Felix were unaware of what she meant. The Cosway women were not only aware but somehow galvanized by what she had asked. It seemed to me that they were sitting on the edge of their chairs, holding their breath, with the exception, that is, of Ida who, still on her feet, was turned to stone, the whisky bottle raised up in her hand.

  Mrs Cosway was the first to speak. ‘I put it in the library.’

  That alerted me. With the drink and the warmth I had been feeling sleepy but suddenly I was wide awake.

  ‘But, darling,’ Zorah said, ‘no one goes in there from one year's end to the next. What's the point of putting it there?’

  ‘It isn't your amethyst thing. It's a geode and it belongs to Mother.’ Winifred's voice was shrill with nerves. ‘She can put it where she likes.’

  Zorah nodded. ‘I'll take it back when I go upstairs.’

  I expected protest. None came. Ida gave a deep and heavy sigh. ‘Would anyone like more coffee? Mr Dunsford? Eric?’

  No one wanted more. I wondered how bitter Ida felt and whether Eric had given her reason to think he cared for her or if he was quite innocent and had merely been friendly towards a woman he liked. Their faces gave nothing away. Felix Dunsford reclined in his chair, his right leg crossed at the knee over his left, the whisky glass so loosely held in his long thin hand that it looked as if it must at any minute fall to the ground. He might have been settled there for the night, might drop asleep before much more time had passed. I began thinking of what Zorah had said about taking the geode with her when she went upstairs, the geode which was in the library. She would know where the key was.

  Utterly defeated in the matter of this chunk of Atlas mountain rock, Winifred lapsed into sulks. No doubt to change the subject utterly, Eric asked Felix if what he had said about sign-painting to earn his living was seriously meant. Felix looked up languidly.

  ‘Sure. Why? Do you want a sign painted?’

  He made it sound like a faintly absurd thing to wish for. It was Winifred who answered him, still sullen.

  ‘I expect Eric meant that there's nothing to tell people that the Rectory is the Rectory.’

  Whatever he had meant, Eric said, ‘Everyone knows it is. They don't need to be told.’

  ‘Visitors do. Don't you think it would be nice to have a beautiful sign lettered The Rectory? Or even All Saints Rectory?’

  Felix laughed. ‘You don't know it would be beautiful. You've never seen anything I've done.’

  ‘If I come and call,’ Winifred said, ‘will you show me?’

  All this was unexpected. If it had been Ella who had asked for a sign for Lydstep Old Hall I wouldn't have been surprised. She was the one marked out for his attention that evening. She was the unattached one – Ida hardly counted, she never did, evidently never had with Eric – the single ‘girl’ available to be courted. Zorah was a curious law unto herself. Winifred was spoken for.

  But now Ella intervened. There was a winsome note in her voice which she perhaps thought attractive to men. ‘May I come too? I'd love to see your real paintings.’

  ‘I'm not used to all this popularity.’ But Felix sounded as if he was very used to it, as if it was his way of life.

  ‘Shall we make a date then?’ Winifred's smile and
sparkling eyes suggested she thought this was contemporary slang, as perhaps it was. ‘One afternoon next week? Say Tuesday at half-past two?’

  Ella's wail was a little too piteous. ‘Then I can't come! I'll be at school. Some of us have to work, you know.’

  ‘Oh, just drop in, why don't you?’ Felix was getting bored with this and Eric was looking at his watch. ‘I'm always there and if I'm not you'll find me in the pub.’

  Zorah said, ‘Good night, darlings,’ and floated away.

  Now or never, I thought, and careless of whether my abrupt departure was rude, I followed her. Truthfulness seemed the only course to take and when Zorah came out of the dining room, where the key must be kept, I told her I would like to see the library when she went in to fetch the geode.

  ‘For the books,’ she said, ‘or the maze?’

  ‘For both.’

  My answer seemed to please her for she nodded. ‘I hope my sisters aren't going to make fools of themselves over that man.’

  I would have preferred to say nothing but she was looking as if she expected a reply. ‘Winifred is engaged,’ I said.

  That made her laugh. She switched on the rather dim light that lit the passage, we walked to the end of it and she unlocked the door.

  The walls were lined with bookshelves, unglazed, and at first sight the books in them, jacketless and all bound in sombre colours, looked mostly dark red, but there were green as well and blue and brown. Those that I could see, that is, the ones that filled the shelves on the right-hand side, for ahead of me, facing them, was a free-standing bookcase of the same height, forming a passage so narrow that a fat person couldn't have squeezed along it. At the corners, on the end of each bookcase, stood a bust in marble of some luminary of the past, statesman, philosopher or scientist. The lighting, like everywhere else in Lydstep Old Hall, was dim, inadequate to read much by, and the stone faces seemed to hover in the half-dark, frowning or deep in thought.