The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Who's that?’

  ‘I've no idea, Ella.’

  ‘Ask Mrs Cusp.’

  The wife of the People's Warden was sitting just behind me. I turned to her with my question, to be told the newcomer was married to the architect who had just moved into a newish house by the Memorial Green.

  ‘Married, then?’

  Ella's panic was subsiding. She lived in a world which hadn't moved with the times, which hadn't noticed the sexual revolution and the rising ascendancy of youth. A married woman was still inviolable, still sacrosanct. Felix had taken no notice of Ella. Our pew might have been empty for all the significance it had for him. As carelessly dressed as usual – Winifred's admonition had brought about no change in his clothes – he was pointing out to the architect's wife the hymns we should be having as they appeared on Eric's numbers board and finding them for her in Hymns Ancient and Modern.

  But I had other things to think about at Matins, for the organist whose playing had pleased me some weeks back was once more at the organ and once more playing Kraus. Knowing that British universities go back in early October after the long summer vacation, I saw that this was probably my last chance for weeks to speak to him. He wouldn't be here to play the wedding march for Winifred in November. As it happened, this was another morning of coffee and cakes being provided by her after the service and as I stood there with my cup of coffee and my custard cream biscuit, Ella introduced me to the man who had just walked down the aisle from the vestry.

  ‘Kerstin, this is James Trintowel.’

  We talked about the music and about King Gustav III, architect of the Swedish Enlightenment, who was assassinated while attending a masquerade at the opera. James said he had Kraus's Proserpin on records (two LPs in those days) and I should come up to their house on Saturday for a meal with them and he would play some of it. His mother and father would be delighted. It happened that I should be in Lydstep that Saturday, Mark being home at a family wedding in Shropshire, so I accepted.

  Winifred, Ella and I had walked down and intended to get a lift back from Eric but Ella left us at The Studio gate. She was going to wait for Felix to come back from church. I had seen him walking the architect's wife home while I was eating my biscuit but I saw no point in telling her that. Winifred said nastily that chasing men was always a mistake and Ella, unable to think of a retort, turned away in silence. We walked part of the way up the hill, waiting for Eric to pick us up. Winifred was silent for a while, then began brightly talking about fittings for her wedding dress, how Ella was making her own dress and June Prothero's and whether their bouquets should be mauve or pink chrysanthemums. Abruptly, after a pause, she asked me what I thought of Felix.

  ‘Does it matter what I think, Winifred?’

  ‘It does to me.’ She spoke in a sad, serious voice.

  ‘I don't think he's a very interesting man,’ I said.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Well, since you ask, he has no conversation. He may know a lot about art but he knows nothing about anything else. All he does is lounge about looking lazy. His manners are awful and he has no charm, though he thinks he has lots. He's vain. He's treating your sister badly.’

  This pleased her. ‘What do you mean?’

  I saw no reason to protect Felix Dunsford's dubious interest. ‘You must know she's in love with him. He never takes her out except to the pub and I don't think he does that any more. He's her lover –’ she winced ‘– but he barely acknowledges her in company. He pretends their affair has to be a secret but there's no reason why it should be. She's not married and as far as I know he's not.’

  ‘Of course he's not married, Kerstin. I had no idea things had gone so far between them.’ I could tell she was lying. ‘But how can you say he's not interesting? I think he's fascinating.’

  ‘It's not the same thing,’ I said and then Eric's car drew up alongside us.

  The Virginia creeper was taking on its autumn colour. There was something much more remarkable about a house clothed in red leaves than in green. From a distance it looked like a great hedge of bright flowers but its strangeness really only struck home when we were upon it, almost underneath it, and the rippling wind set those scarlet leaves quivering and trembling. We went into the house and a fallen leaf was blown in with us.

  *

  Rain began soon after we had finished lunch. It started as a thin drizzle. Confident that John and I would be able to go for our walk as usual, Mrs Cosway went upstairs for her rest. Within minutes it was pouring. I decided to act on my own initiative and abandon all thoughts of going out.

  ‘We'll stay in this afternoon, John,’ I said, noticing to my continuing disquiet that I was still talking to him as if he were nine years old, the mental age Ida once told me she and his mother had set for him. Every time I caught myself doing this I resolved to stop but so far I had failed.

  ‘I shall go out,’ he said.

  ‘It's raining, John. It will be nasty –’ I changed this child's word ‘– unpleasant.’

  Giving no sign he had heard me, he said nothing but stared at the table where the Roman vase stood. He could gaze at a point in the middle distance for very long periods of time, hours sometimes. Observing him – with interest and I hope with great pity – I often wondered if this staring was symptomatic of his condition or the result of the Largactil Mrs Cosway gave him daily. And what was that condition? This occupied my mind a lot. I wished I had studied more psychiatry, I wished I had real experience in nursing psychiatric patients. None of those few I remembered had been particularly intelligent. I mean by that, of course, that they had been sick in their minds and often their bodies but those minds hadn't been capable of intellectual feats. Was John's?

  ‘I shall go out now,’ he said.

  It had begun to pour.

  Crossing him could result in his behaving like he had done that day in the summer when he hid behind the sofa. Mrs Cosway would blame me if that happened and though I would like to say I wouldn't have cared if she did, this wasn't quite true. She made plain her dislike of me being there at all by a cold yet curiously indifferent harping on characteristics of mine (largely invented by herself) and by comments on my alleged inquisitiveness, accompanied by that chilling cough of a laugh. I was in danger of being driven by her into a nervous condition of doing almost anything to avoid more of it.

  ‘I'm sorry, John,’ I said, ‘but you can't go out in this. Look for yourself.’

  Ida caught my eye and made a little movement of her head, designed I suppose to indicate that he was incapable of this. But John did rouse himself up, his hands shaking more than I had ever seen them shake, and go sluggishly to the window, where he stood staring into the garden, or as much of it as he could see, a green and brown blur through the lashing rain which streamed down the panes. To my surprise, and certainly to Ida's, he turned round and came back to his seat. There he picked part of the Sunday paper off the table where the geode had been and seemed to make an attempt to read it, falling asleep after a moment or two from weariness or frustration or the drug.

  *

  John always took his bath in the mornings, usually when he first got up but sometimes later, if there were difficulties with the hot water supply, which happened quite often. To bath was his only reason for ever going upstairs, a part of the house I had been told he disliked, though not of course told by him. He never objected to going up there for his bath, as far as I could see. That Monday there was no hot water at six in the morning but after much stoking of the kitchen boiler by Ida and feeding it with a new supply of ‘anthracite nuts’, Mrs Cosway decided that John could take his bath at ten. She went upstairs with him.

  Free for half an hour, having helped Ida with the table-clearing and dish-washing, I took the key from behind the amphitheatre picture and went back into the library to search for more books which might have been John's. My luck was in. I had to climb the library steps to reach the top shelves. Each one held two rows of books, o
ne in front of the other. Impossible not to feel, as I did when I had taken down the Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells novels from the front row, that those behind had been deliberately hidden. They were philosophical works by Kant, by Kierkegaard and Hume among others, and a daunting book on quantum physics. Back in my room I found inside this one a sheet of paper covered with incomprehensible (to me) hieroglyphics which, as far as I could make out, were equations indicating how to measure radiation variants. The date on the flyleaf was 1950 and I thought the paper might have been John's.

  This of course was quite a long time before he fell into the hands of Mrs Cosway and Selwyn Lombard. His father was still alive and I supposed he had been much under his father's care and protection. There would surely have been no mind-numbing medication in Mr Cosway's time. I decided that I would like to know more about John Cosway the elder, where he thought this myth of John's mental age came from and what was wrong with his son.

  Once again, I asked myself the same question. Not schizophrenia, I was sure, not a manic-depressive condition. In no sense of the word was he ‘mad’. What made him the way he was seemed to me to have happened when he was a child, as Isabel had hinted at, or was still in the womb, or through a gene passed on down the Cosway family. There might be instances of ancestors who had behaved strangely, hiding, hating raised voices, maintaining long periods of silence, violent when asked to do something feared, phobic when touched, but highly intelligent, particularly in the areas of mathematics and physics. Somehow I felt that in Victorian times and earlier, such people might have been better treated, looked on as no more than eccentrics. Were there any such among John's forebears?

  Outside the rain continued to fall and although I could see nothing from inside the library, I could hear its drumming and sometimes hear sheets of water dashed across the glass by the rising wind. It was rather strange in there, claustrophobic, enclosed, twilit, yet with the constant sound of falling water in the background. Nothing else could be heard. It might have been any time of the day or night. I thought this was perhaps why John liked it. It must have been peculiarly suited to someone who wanted to be alone, eschewed human contact, appeared only to love inanimate objects, needed books, puzzles, conundrums, more than any companionship. Perhaps he liked the stone faces which so intimidated me. They were not real, as he would know they were not, and unable to assume the expressions of rage or exasperation or despair he daily saw in the living faces around him.

  At that moment I saw locking the library up to keep him out as particularly cruel and I was starting to think what I could do to put an end to this embargo, when a kind of howl, half scream, half groan, broke the near silence. I had thought nothing but the swish of falling water would be audible in the library, which seemed hermetically sealed, but I heard that sound.

  Growing familiar by this time with ways in and out, I twisted round corners and down short passages, flung open the door and came out into the passage. A hubbub of voices reached me from the hall. Winifred and Ida were there, Mrs Cosway lying on the floor at the foot of the stairs, not unconscious, already struggling to sit up. I saw her wince with pain as she tried to move her left leg. All round her on the floor were the bits and pieces she had been carrying downstairs and which must have contributed to her fall, a glass of water – broken and the contents splashed everywhere – John's pyjamas, sheets of newspaper and her knitted cardigan.

  ‘Don't try to move,’ Ida said. ‘I'll phone Dr Lombard.’

  ‘He won't be able to get me up off this floor.’ She sounded angry rather than hurt but when she lifted her hands I saw that the left wrist was crooked. ‘I think my leg's broken too. How did it happen? Did someone give me a push?’

  ‘Mother,’ said Winifred, ‘what are you saying?’

  Mrs Cosway waved her good wrist at the stairs. On the first landing John stood, holding the banisters, looking down.

  ‘If Eric were here,’ Winifred said brightly, ‘I'm sure he could lift you.’

  ‘Well, he's not, so what's the use of that?’

  Ida came back to say Dr Lombard would be there in five minutes. ‘Now, I wonder if John might possibly…’

  ‘I don't want him near me,’ her mother snapped back.

  John began to come downstairs. He paused at the foot and stood looking at his mother. Then he went into the downstairs lavatory and locked himself in. I heard the key turn. Trying to treat him like the rational adult I was becoming sure he was, I asked him if he was all right. His mother had fallen down the stairs but she was well if injured. He was on the other side of the door but he made no answer when I told him this. He made no sound at all.

  ‘He'll be in there for hours,’ Ida said.

  ‘I know you think I'm making it up,’ said Mrs Cosway from the floor, ‘though why I should invent such a thing about my own son, I can't imagine, but I have a very strong feeling I was pushed.’

  No one said anything. I knew John was incapable of touching, still less pushing anyone. Winifred shrugged and cast up her eyes. I heard Dr Lombard's car and within seconds he was in the hallway. To me, before this, he had simply been an old man, pompous, given to strange irrelevant anecdotes, any character he might have blanked out by my new knowledge that he was Zorah's father. That morning, I suddenly recognized that he was a very strong old man, thin and muscular, his fitness revealed by sweater and flannel trousers. He knelt down with ease – I had been wrong about the reason for his failure to kneel in church – and spoke to Mrs Cosway. Hearing him call her ‘darling’ almost shocked me.

  ‘Are you in pain, darling?’

  ‘My leg hurts,’ she said. She lifted up her right hand, now beginning to swell. ‘I don't know what I've done to my wrist.’

  ‘I'm going to take you to hospital.’

  Mrs Cosway had doubted that he would be able to get her off the floor but he did so with ease, slipping his arms under her and lifting her up, rising from his kneeling position with only the faintest sign of strain and no sign that he had hurt her. She looked into his face and he smiled at her, an exchange of tenderness between them which made Winifred purse her lips and frown.

  ‘I said you wouldn't be able to get me off the floor, Selwyn, but I was so wrong.’

  ‘Then I'm glad I can still surprise you after so long.’

  ‘Where are you going to take her?’ Winifred's voice was abrupt and sharp.

  ‘The cottage hospital.’

  Dr Lombard bent his head, touched Mrs Cosway's cheek with his lips and carried her out of the house. Over his shoulder he said, ‘I'll call on my way back and tell you what's happening.’

  Once the front door closed Winifred made the noise the Victorians rendered as ‘Pshaw!’

  ‘He means well,’ said Ida.

  ‘The road to hell must be so well paved it never needs maintenance.’

  This was the only mildly witty thing I ever heard Winifred say. Years later I tried to use it for a cartoon but the circumstances were never right and I abandoned the idea. Winifred went into the dining room to phone Eric. Moral support was what she wanted him for, I suppose, but I wondered if there had ever been or ever would be the kind of shared tenderness, sympathy and enduring love between those two as I had just seen in the faces of that old couple.

  *

  Mrs Cosway's accident and departure for the hospital rather eclipsed the interest there might have been in Zorah's arrival from London in the Lotus. ‘Where's John?’

  Ida didn't answer. ‘Mother's fallen downstairs and Dr Lombard's taken her to the cottage hospital.’

  ‘I asked where John was.’

  A while afterwards, when I began to know Ida's true nature, I wouldn't have been surprised by her failure to tell Zorah that Dr Lombard was expected at any minute. She knew very well Zorah's hatred of Selwyn Lombard, the hatred any child might feel for the parent who has both fathered her and also wrecked the family life of the home she was to grow up in. If she had known he was coming she would surely have gone up to her own rooms and Ida was
aware of this. Yet she said nothing and it was left to Winifred to tell Zorah that John had shut himself in the lavatory.

  ‘Why did he?’

  ‘Why does he do anything, Zorah?’

  ‘Do you know, I think much of what he does is very reasonable and logical.’

  ‘Mother,’ said Ida, ‘has got it into her head that John – well, I don't say pushed her downstairs but gave her a push. Perhaps it was a joke.’

  ‘That is a foul slander and John doesn't joke, as you well know.’

  The doorbell rang, Winifred answered it and Dr Lombard walked in. ‘Hallo, everyone. Sorry to have kept you in suspense so long. Poor Julia has a Potts fracture of the right ankle but her wrist is only sprained. She may be a week in hospital or only a few days.’

  Zorah picked up the newspaper just before he came in and began to read it as if he had never arrived, as if she, Winifred, Ida and I were alone. Apart from the nose, which in her case of course had been altered and was small and tip-tilted, she and Dr Lombard I could now see were very much alike, so similar that anyone seeing them together – Mrs Cosway's husband? – could have had no doubt as to her parentage. He had turned his eyes on her and I thought I could see in his look regret that she ignored him and a wish for a reconciliation, now the man legally her father was dead.

  ‘She'll need clothes, I suppose,’ said practical Ida, already making lists and plans in her mind. ‘I'll go in tomorrow.’

  ‘So will I, of course, I shall be so anxious.’ Whether Winifred would have said this if Eric hadn't arrived in Dr Lombard's wake, for she was always keen to make an impression of virtue on him, I hardly know. ‘She'll want things to read too. And I expect the food is awful, isn't it?’