by Barbara Vine
Men like Felix Dunsford are very difficult to talk to. I have met more of them since then. They trade on their mesmeric power, that which makes women enthralled by them, and which renders conversation beyond the merest innuendo unnecessary. Perhaps they talk to men. Women they despise and won't waste conversation on them, and this, horribly, is at the root of their attractiveness. It may be that Felix could have talked by the hour about Rouault and Kokoschka or the latest art movements or the Italian Renaissance but I was too ignorant of these things to broach them. (Not having been to art school and thinking of myself even now as an amateur, I still am.) I'm sure Ella was too. Nervous and awkward, she tried asking him about sign-painting. She knew enough – I suppose that as a teacher, she would – to inquire if he had taken a lettering course at art school. He grinned and nodded, said something about the Slade, where he had apparently been, and asked if either of us had any cigarettes as he had run out. By this time the cigar was a stub on top of a mountain of fag ends in the ashtray.
Ella fell over herself to offer him a cigarette from a new packet she had in her handbag. He took two, put both in his mouth, and performed the old seducer's trick of lighting them and handing one of them to her. Somehow he had assumed I was a non-smoker and it was true I got through fewer cigarettes than the Cosways, forced to ration myself on cost grounds.
‘Better go in and show you my daubs,’ he said.
Possibly stimulated by a rush of nicotine to the brain, Ella said in bright tones, ‘I warn you, I shall be strictly honest. If I don't think they're any good I shall say so.’
‘Do you know anything about painting?’ He sounded, at last, deadly serious. ‘Because if not I'd rather you didn't comment. If you mean you'll tell me if you like them, that's another thing.’
Flustered by this as anyone would be, Ella flushed again. I wondered if these sisters' tendency to blush, like madness, could be genetic. ‘I don't mean to offend,’ she said in a small voice.
That made him laugh. He patted her shoulder, a bare shoulder in that sleeveless dress, and she shivered. We went into the house, one bedsitter and a kitchen that doubled as a bathroom downstairs, furnished by a landlord not generous with domestic comforts and occupied by a man who never washed dishes or put anything away. A ladder went up through a square hole in the floor above to the studio proper.
‘I can't bring them down,’ he said. ‘Can you climb up in those shoes?’
‘I can take them off.’
Ella managed to sound as if she would take anything off, strip herself naked if necessary, for the sake of seeing his pictures. She took off her shoes and suddenly ceased to be a tall woman, barely reaching to his shoulder. He seemed to like that, for, smiling down at her, he said, ‘Here, let me carry those.’
Why she needed shoes upstairs was not clear. Perhaps he wanted to demonstrate his prowess at shinning up a steep ladder with widely spaced steps, a pair of white strappy sandals hanging from two of his fingers. He glanced at them, smiling, as some women look at babies. By this time it seemed to me that seeing the paintings themselves, ostensibly the purpose of our visit, had become irrelevant. But none of us was going to say this. We stepped off the ladder into a big room with a ceiling window, a broad sheet of glass that I suppose gave a north light. I was obviously not in need of help to step off the ladder but Felix put his hand out to Ella, who took it tentatively yet with a kind of gravity, so that it seemed symbolic of a much more significant contract than an accepted offer to prevent her falling.
Canvases were everywhere, some turned away towards the wall, some in a transition stage, and there were stacks of hardboard sheets for painting on with acrylic. His finished work he brought out as one canvas after another and placed them on the two easels. Studying his face, I hoped to see there some sign of emotion at thus displaying to comparative strangers what must surely be the most important achievements of his life. But it had become as blank as John Cosway's and I wondered if this assumption of a deadpan glaze was his way of defending himself against Ella's ‘strict honesty’ and what he saw as my indifference. Within seconds expression had returned and he was turning on Ella his habitual highwayman's grin.
‘I think they're lovely!’ Whether she was as enraptured as she sounded or putting on a very good show of it, I don't know. ‘I love this one.’ She had chosen an abstract – but they were all abstracts – in blues, greys and the pink of her dress. ‘Wouldn't it look marvellous in a room with a blue carpet, Kerstin? What is it called?’
‘Ocular Orgasm,’ he said.
No one talked much about orgasms in those days. ‘Climax’ was the word more often used if it was used at all. Ella surprised me, and him too perhaps, by saying coolly, ‘Oh, yes, we had to read Reich while I was in college.’
We went down and Ella put on her shoes, Felix holding one after the other up to her on the palm of his hand like Prince Charming with the glass slipper. Leaving, I went down the path ahead of her, she lingering to be whispered to by him, and when she caught me up, flushed and giggling, she told me he had asked her out.
‘I'm to have a drink with him in the Rose on Monday evening, Kerstin.’
That was nice, I said, while wondering if he ever took women anywhere but to the nearest pub. Not many village locals served anything more than a pie or a sandwich then and I thought Ella might have to wait a long time before she got taken out to dinner.
‘I was afraid he'd ask you,’ she said confidingly. ‘You're quite good-looking really and much younger than I am.’
‘There was no chance of that,’ I said.
‘What do you think Winifred will say? She's got so pompous since she landed Eric.’ My impatience with her changed abruptly to pity as she said, ‘I'll have to stop biting my nails. I'll have to grow them.’ She looked into my face. ‘I'd like to get married, Kerstin. Do you think it's awful of me to confess that? Women aren't supposed to.’
I said that of course I didn't think it was awful. Most women wanted to be married some time or other.
‘Do they? Winifred always used to say she didn't care – till Eric asked her, that is.’
There is something frightening about being aware that a friend is heading in the completely wrong direction and knowing too that warning them will be useless and only offend. I knew, as surely as I knew any fact, that Felix Dunsford would never marry Ella, that he would probably not marry for years and when he did his choice would be to marry money. It was impossible for me to say this to her, a woman thirteen years older than myself. Even if I could she would have ignored it and been angry, as people always are when warned off someone else.
I drew her that evening. She too had a whole page to herself in her pink striped dress and the shoes Felix had carried upstairs for her. My sketch pleased me and I thought I was getting better at it. I resisted a sudden impulse to draw a balloon coming out of her mouth. I couldn't think of anything for her to say.
11
Hoping to see more of the Dunsford drama unfold, I decided to go to church in the morning. Several surprises awaited me. The geode was back on the table where I had first seen it, though Ella had apparently lost heart when it came to restoring the watercolours. In the hallway I found Mrs Cosway with Winifred, her shapeless trousers and jumper changed for a pinstriped suit and a small felt hat.
‘You're coming to church, are you, Kerstin? It's just as well Ida says she will take care of John then, isn't it?’
Mrs Cosway had a way of making blameless, even virtuous, behaviour sound self-indulgent. ‘I'll stay here if you like,’ I said. I had too little to do in this house as it was and had left her to accompany John on the previous day. But it was she who had told me to go with Ella and she who in the usual course of things never went to church. ‘I really don't have to go.’
‘No, no. You must go if you want to. Ida has volunteered.’
She said it with a sigh, as if my destination was a nightclub. Because she was with us we had to go in the car and as a result got to church very early. Ella had maintained her
elegance, though the torturous sandals had been abandoned. We walked around the churchyard, looking at tombs. It was a warm sunny day and the flowers people had placed on relatives' graves were wilting in the heat. The others stopped in front of one on which a pink marble slab was engraved with the name John Henry Cosway and the dates 1830–1907. I was told that he was the discoverer of the geode but no one said anything about his being the founder of the labyrinth library.
Eric arrived in a rush, his cassock billowing and his face shiny with sweat. He paused to kiss Winifred on the cheek and I noticed that she wiped her face afterwards on her handkerchief, smearing it with brown and pink make-up. Her hair newly washed and glossy, her nails painted a silvery pink – to prevent further biting? – Ella watched her sister with a small superior smile.
As it happened, Felix failed to turn up. Events too intensely anticipated often fail to come off. Probably he felt he had exhausted the possibilities of church. Of the only pretty women he had encountered there, one was engaged and he had already begun his onslaught on the other. Dr Lombard arrived instead. He came in soon after we did. I was sitting in the aisle seat, Winifred next to me, Ella next to her and Mrs Cosway at the end. Perhaps they had arranged things that way for Dr Lombard to slip in next to his friend. A whispered conversation began between them, neither of them being among those who dropped to their knees for silent prayer, and when the service began they remained seated, their heads bowed and their eyes closed. On our way out, presumably because we were inside a place of worship, Dr Lombard told me that wedding cakes were shaped in pillared tiers like St Bride's, Fleet Street, because, long ago, a baker had made one which was a small replica of the church for a marriage reception and created a precedent.
Eric came back to Lydstep with us, bringing Winifred in his car. I wrote in the diary that night that looking at the house as we approached, I thought of how it would be transformed when the leaves fell from the Virginia creeper. Then, instead of cloaked in trembling green, its brickwork would be covered in some sort of web, formed by myriad tendrils. Grey, green or brown? All such thoughts were banished by the sight of a white-faced Ida running down the front steps when she heard the cars.
‘What's the matter?’ Mrs Cosway struggled out of the car, needing Ella's hand to help her get on to her feet. ‘What's wrong?’
‘It's John. He's had a fit.’
We hurried in, I at least having no idea what form this sort of fit might have taken. John was nowhere to be seen. Ida looked at her mother, then at the great heavy sofa, its arms and the frame of its back of carved wood, its upholstery a gingery-brown corduroy. This, it seemed, was familiar territory to Mrs Cosway.
‘Give me a hand, would you, Kerstin?’
For a woman of her age she was very strong. I had helped her move the sofa a little way away from the wall before I fully realized what she was doing. When I saw John I stepped back and I think she saw from my face that I would refuse to expose him further to Eric's aghast gaze and that of his sisters. He was sitting on the floor in the triangle made by the slope of the sofa back and the wall, and he must have squeezed with difficulty but perhaps in extreme stress into this narrow gap. His arms were wrapped round his knees, his head laid on them but turned towards us, and his face was white and wet with tears. I have never seen a face, not even a child's, so drenched with tears, so dripping with water from his red and swollen eyes.
‘What did you do to him?’ Mrs Cosway spoke in a thin, tired voice.
Ida shrugged. ‘I touched him. I didn't mean to. I must have been mad. He suddenly said out of the blue that he'd like to do a crossword puzzle, the one in the paper. I was so pleased. I thought how he hadn't said anything like that for ages and I – oh, I took hold of his hands and squeezed them and he screamed and got in there and – oh, I must have been mad.’
‘As you say, you must have been. It's too late now. I don't know why you said “a fit”. He hasn't had a fit.’
‘The only thing to do, Eric,’ said Winifred, as if he had asked, ‘is just to leave him there until he comes out in his own good time.’
‘But he's weeping.’ I thought it strange that Eric said ‘weeping’ instead of ‘crying’. A biblical usage perhaps?
‘Yes, well, he does.’
‘Hadn't we better put the sofa back?’ I said.
Eric helped me and we shoved it back to where it had been before. John made no sound at all. Suddenly recalling her omission, Mrs Cosway said, ruefully but not with much distress, ‘I suppose I forgot to give him his tablet. It's happened once or twice before. But I'm glad you've seen it, Kerstin. Perhaps this will cure you of thinking you know better than I where John's medicine is concerned.’
I was taken aback. It was only once that I had ventured to dispute the need for giving him a pill, and that had been a barbiturate, not the Largactil. Had there been something in my face to show her, when she handed him the sleep drug in the evenings, that I disapproved? Had she read my ‘thinking’ in my expression?
John would have no walk that day. We ate our lunch without him. He remained where he was for hours, Mrs Cosway remarking as she went off to her afternoon sleep that he had no sense of time. While I helped Ida with the dishes, an operation conducted in almost total silence, Winifred and Eric went outside and sat in deckchairs under the mulberry tree, he with a corner-knotted handkerchief spread over his face, she reading, like an elderly couple on the beach.
Ella said to me, ‘Come into my room, I've something to tell you.’
I hoped for great things, though scarcely of so sensational a nature, and I went very willingly up into Ella's pink bedroom with its frills and its doll inhabitants. The first time I had seen them I had been alone with Mrs Cosway. Now seemed the time to comment on them.
‘You dressed all these yourself?’
‘Well, yes. Do you like them?’
‘They're beautifully done,’ I said diplomatically.
‘You might not think me keen on fashion, the way I slop around at weekends, but I actually love it when there's someone to notice. Now I'll open the window, it's really hot today, isn't it, and we'll make ourselves comfy and have a nice drink and a cigarette.’
She produced a bottle of rosé, a very fashionable drink and her favourite. I expected it to be warm but she had kept it in a cold dark cupboard and it was pleasantly cool. We lit cigarettes.
‘You must be wondering what I'm going to say.’
I smiled encouragingly.
‘Oh, don't worry,’ she said. ‘It won't affect you in any way. It's our cross. I mean, the cross we have to bear. Not Winifred much longer, of course, and maybe not me either. Who knows?’
She must have meant rescue by Felix. An English proverb exists about counting one's chickens before they are hatched. I think there should be one about sterile eggs and no chickens ever coming out of them.
But, ‘It's about my father's will,’ she said.
I had intended to ask Mark next time I was in London how I could discover that will's contents. Now I might hardly need to.
‘You'll be wondering how it can concern you and why I should want to tell you family secrets. Well, a will isn't private, it has to be published – thank you, Ella, I thought ‘– so a secret it's not. We do have those – she laughed a little hysterically ‘– but this isn't one of them. It's just that I imagine you must find a lot of things here rather – well, odd. I thought they ought to be cleared up.’
I assumed an interested expression, though not one as avid and fascinated as I felt. It is unwise in these circumstances to look greedy.
‘My father and mother weren't on very good terms. That's making it sound better than it was. They were on very bad terms and had been for some time. I don't know why unless it was something to do with Dr Lombard.’ She changed tack abruptly. ‘John was quite a normal little boy or so they say. He's two years older than I am. He had mumps when he was five and I think that's what changed him. Dr Lombard says no but he doesn't know everything, though he thinks
he does. Whatever happened, it didn't make him stupid. He could do amazing algebra problems and that kind of thing.
‘Well, Daddy had made a will, leaving everything including the house to Mother, but something happened to make him change it. He made a completely new will in which he left Mother an annuity and everything else including the house to John. Mother has a life interest in the house but it belongs to John, so neither of them can sell it.’
‘What about the rest of you?’ I said.
‘He thought we'd all get married. That was what he expected women to do and the only real career for them. Zorah was married. He couldn't understand it, that the plainest and youngest of us got married first. Of course what Raymond Todd – that was her husband – liked about her was her brain and her style. All his wives had been clever. The second one was quite a distinguished physicist.
‘As I say, he thought we'd get married and our husbands would keep us.’ Ella gave the Cosway coughing laugh. ‘Ida's engagement was broken off within weeks of his death. I had a chap but there was no chance of him marrying and the one after him was married already. I expect you thought I was a virgin.’
I said not quite truthfully that I hadn't thought about it.
‘Well, I'm not. I suppose Winifred is but I dare say Eric is too. My God, but that'll be some wedding night. I'm digressing, aren't I? I was telling you about the will. Daddy left everything to John on well, certain conditions. That would mean we'd have to ask him for what we wanted – I think he meant we'd have to treat him properly – and in point of fact that means asking the trustees. Daddy set up a trust for John, you see. If he wants something he has to ask the trustees, they're Daddy's nephew Adam, who's a heart specialist, and Daddy's solicitor, Mr Salt, and the son of an old friend of his called Jerome Prance. And Mother. Mr Salt insisted he included Mother but the others always outvote her so her being there isn't much use.
‘John asked for money to spend on impossible things. A sports car, for instance, and then he wanted a boat. The trustees let him have the car and he crashed it into a wall in Great Cornard. I said there were conditions. Daddy thought John would die young, so the will says that if he dies before Mother or if he has to be committed to an institution the house goes to her for her lifetime and the money between those of us who remained unmarried. But only if it's some outside authority that commits him, not if it's Mother. Everything goes to John if she dies first – unless he's in an institution, that is – and passes to us on his death or our children if we're dead. I shouldn't think there'd be any children, would you?’
