The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Why did he do that?’ she kept saying. ‘Why did he hit me?’

  He was simply exasperated, I wanted to say but did not.

  ‘Of course we all know really that he's quite mad. Stark, staring mad. I don't care what my father said, it's my belief he was mad from birth. Well, from being a little kid. You can get that way from a shock.’

  ‘How long has John been given Largactil?’ I asked, though I knew the answer.

  ‘Oh, years. Four years? Five? He has to have it. Well, look what happens when he doesn't. I shall never dare tell Mother. And now two of those pills have got lost. Today's one's gone missing as well. I don't know what's become of it.’

  It was supposed to be my day off, a fact of which I reminded Winifred after John and I came back from our walk and she, exhausted from preparing and serving lunch to a party of bridge-playing ladies, was lying down on the sofa.

  ‘You aren't going out, are you?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said firmly. ‘I'm taking the bus into Sudbury.’

  There, in the public library, I looked up Largactil in a medical dictionary. This, somewhat condensed, is what it said:

  A proprietary preparation of the powerful phenothiazine drug chlorpromazine hydrochloride, used as a major tranquillizer to treat patients with behavioural disturbances, such as schizophrenia. Available only on prescription, Largactil is produced in the form of tablets, syrup, and a suspension, in three strengths.

  It should not be administered to patients with certain forms of glaucoma, whose blood-cell formation by the bone marrow is reduced, and only with caution to those with lung disease, cardiovascular disease, epilepsy, Parkinsonism, abnormalities of the adrenal glands, impaired liver or kidney function, hyperthyroidism, enlargement of the prostate or any form of acute infection, who are pregnant or lactating or who are elderly. Prolonged use may result in motor difficulties, a shuffling gait and tremor in the hands, all of which may become permanent.

  Withdrawal of treatment should be gradual.

  All this was even worse than I supposed. I sat for a long time in that Victorian library, once a corn exchange, thinking of the consequences which might result from continuous use of Largactil. Were checks ever made on John's movement disorders? I had no idea but I guessed not. It seemed to me that a drug he didn't need but which was brutally administered to him was crippling his limbs and giving him something like Parkinson's disease. Leaving the library to catch my bus, I also thought of how he was refusing to take his drug, which meant it was cut off completely instead of gradually withdrawn as the book recommended.

  When I got back to Lydstep Old Hall I found John trying to read the newspaper. He had his glasses on but they were inadequate for his needs and he was using a magnifying glass procured from somewhere to help him. I guessed he hadn't had his eyes tested for years and now, at nearly forty, his sight was beginning its nearly always inevitable deterioration. As far as I could tell, the magnifying glass didn't help him much, for when he saw me he laid it down, took off his glasses and smiled. It wasn't the first time he had smiled at me but I don't think it had happened more than once or twice before. I asked him how he was feeling, using precisely the tone I would to any other man of his age.

  ‘I'm fine,’ he said.

  The first time I saw him, back in June when he was having tea in the kitchen with his mother and Ida, I had thought him a handsome man, his looks marred by the blankness of his face. Now that this dull mask had begun to lift, I saw once more how good-looking he was, his face the legacy of two people with fine classical features, his hair dark and thick and his eyes the clear dark blue of Winifred's. Recovered from the exhaustion of her day, she was looking at him too, but with distaste.

  16

  Little if anything was said about osteoporosis in those days, so I don't know whether Mrs Cosway's bones were brittle. At her age, they probably were. But the fracture of her ankle was a straightforward break, no one seemed much worried about it and Eric was beginning to say that he had been premature in postponing his wedding. Why had no one thought of taking his future mother-in-law to the church in a wheelchair? But the ceremony was now fixed for mid-January.

  I told no one what I had discovered about the nature of Largactil, for I was sure the Cosway sisters would be uninterested and Dr Lombard take no notice or, more likely, be angry at my interference. I knew myself that I was being presumptuous, unlearned as I was in medical matters. Still, I watched John very closely, noting as one could hardly help doing that he was far more alert than usual, more human, occasionally speaking, trying hard to read, and at mealtimes arranging his own potatoes and carrots in patterns and slicing the tops off his eggs himself. I asked Ida about his sight – the other sisters never wanted to talk about John – but she looked unconcerned.

  ‘He can't see very well and his glasses aren't strong enough for him. Even if he puts them on you can tell he can't read the paper unless he uses a magnifying glass as well.’

  This confirmed what I had seen myself. I lay awake a long time that night telling myself I must speak to Dr Lombard, whatever the consequences. The worst that could happen was that he would abuse me as a lay person presuming to teach a medical man his business, but surely I could bear that. I am afraid I eventually told myself that at least John was not taking the drug at present, perhaps would not even after Mrs Cosway came home if she were still incapacitated. She might even assume Ida or I was taking on this duty. So I said nothing and wondered many times afterwards if I should have, if my speaking out might have altered events. But I doubt it. I doubted it then and I do now. Only if John had made a miraculous recovery from his disease or disability or whatever it was, if he had suddenly got better and taken himself away would he not have been involved.

  I went to see Mrs Cosway once while she was in the cottage hospital, accompanying Ella one evening. She seemed less than pleased to see us, which I attributed to Dr Lombard's being at her bedside. Without letting go of her hand, which he had been holding when we came in, he began telling us, though no one had asked, the origin of his name.

  ‘Lombard comes from the Italian “Longibardi”, the long-bearded, but I'm afraid you young ladies are in for a disappointment if you expect me to wear a long beard.’

  Behind their backs, Ella cast up her eyes but I think she liked being included with me as a young lady. I have no more idea if his explanation for his name was true than I have for the accuracy of any of his strange irrelevancies. Leaving, he told us never to eat the liver of a polar bear, an eventuality possible only if one lived in the Arctic. The amount of vitamin A it contained was enough to poison us. Mrs Cosway said, ‘You know so much, Selwyn!’ and put up her face to be kissed.

  On the way back to Lydstep Old Hall, Ella opened her heart to me. ‘I told Felix I'd come and see him this evening. After all, it's only eight. He said I could come if I liked and give the place a clean. He'd be in the pub. To be fair, I had offered to do some cleaning, it's in an awful state.’

  ‘Why can't he take you to the pub?’

  ‘He says I'll cramp his style. But this doesn't upset me as much as you might think, Kerstin, because I know he's beginning to depend on me. And he talks about the future, about me being there. I mean, he says things like he may go away for Christmas and it'll be good to know I'll be there to keep an eye on the place. The same if he goes to Spain next summer, as he sometimes does. He sees me as a permanency, you see.’

  ‘I do see,’ I said, marvelling at the man's effrontery and her acquiescence.

  ‘I would love to stay the night sometimes. Women always want that when they're in love, don't they? Just to lie side-by-side with him all night would be so wonderful. He says no, he can't share a bed with anyone.’

  I had been invited to the Trintowels for the following day. It was my weekend off but in the circumstances everyone conveniently forgot this and I couldn't be bothered to remind them. I would take the next one instead when Mark would be back from his family wedding. I had much to tell him.
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  Going to White Lodge and spending the evening there showed me as perhaps nothing else could have what an ordinary English middle-class family was like by contrast with the Cosways. Not quite ordinary of course, for the Trintowels' was a big house, though not half the size of Lydstep Old Hall; they were obviously well off and both parents professional people. But they had about them what the Cosways, for all their efforts, so conspicuously lacked, a country Englishness, so that they had flowers in their garden, heating in their house, comfortable furniture, a kitchen modernized since the 1920s, a sense of humour, friends, and good manners.

  Mrs Trintowel asked me to call her Jane. I did so and continued to do so up until her death thirteen years ago. She was warm and kindly without being effusive, a great talker and benevolent gossip, ‘a woman of a few words, a few hundred thousand words’, as her elder son, my husband, used to say of her. She was also bossy, a trait which didn't show itself to me until later. Her warmth put me at my ease immediately. I am not shy but at White Lodge I was not even diffident after the first few minutes. James's father made me laugh by saying as soon as we had shaken hands, ‘My wife is dying to hear all about the Cosways and so, I admit, am I,’ though it was the Trintowels who told me about them.

  I had never realized – there was no reason why I should – the degree of curiosity with which the village regarded the occupants of Lydstep Old Hall or how bizarre the Windrosians found them. The Trintowels enlightened me. Everyone knew of the long love affair between Julia Cosway and Selwyn Lombard and vague threats were made (‘he said she said he was going to report him’) of alerting the General Medical Council to what was going on. Eventually Mrs Cosway left Dr Lombard's list and went to a doctor in Great Cornard but the rest of the family remained in his care. The resemblance to him of the youngest child had not passed unnoticed, the unfortunate nose being the giveaway.

  ‘Everyone knew, though no one talked about it much,’ Jane said, ‘for the child's sake.’

  Ida had been engaged. She broke things off when it was discovered the man had a criminal record.

  ‘Robbery with violence and indecent assault, my dear.’

  I said it seemed a curious combination, which made Gerald Trintowel laugh.

  ‘Julia Cosway found out. She put private detectives on to him, the man showed no outward sign of being anything but law-abiding. We met him, didn't we, Gerry? Can you believe it?’

  I tried to be careful not to be indiscreet, always difficult with someone like Jane Trintowel. Reminding myself that these people were my employers and I lived among them, I thought I owed them some loyalty, at least not to disclose things I had seen and heard which could only be known by an insider and confidante. Perhaps I shouldn't even have listened. To avoid doing so in the company of these kind and hospitable people, about to give me dinner, was beyond me.

  ‘Ella is rather sweet, I've always liked her. She has tried so desperately hard to get married, coming on strong with one man after another…’

  ‘Come on, Ma,’ said James, ‘you can't possibly know that.’

  She ignored him. ‘And then it's Winifred who finally gets engaged. Eric Dawson is fearfully dull but a parson ought to be dull, don't you think? He's nice as well. I hope they'll be happy.’

  ‘Kerstin is probably deeply embarrassed by you expecting her to betray her employers' secrets, you know.’ This was Gerald, shaking his head in halfhearted disapproval of his wife. ‘I've noticed if you haven't that she listens but she doesn't say much.’

  ‘She's just not a talkative person, are you, Kerstin? I mean, who talks as much as I do?’

  I had to speak then, or be set down as impossibly standoffish. ‘John,’ I said, ‘how about John?’

  Both Trintowels had lived in Windrose only since the 1950s, but White Lodge had belonged to Gerald's parents and he had lived there as a child. He was older than John and remembered him as a small boy.

  ‘He was the kind of child that everyone says they can't do anything with. Julia used to bring him and Ella down to the village and if there was something he didn't want to do he'd lie on the ground and scream. He ran away too. Twice, I think. The first time he was found fast asleep in a barn. The second was more serious. He was gone for a couple of days, I think. He must have been about ten by then.’

  ‘Tell her what Julia said to your mother.’

  ‘She doesn't want to hear that, Jane. Repeating things like that is the worst kind of tittle-tattle.’

  ‘Well, if you won't tell her I will. Julia met Gerry's mother in Dr Lombard's waiting room, of all places. She'd got Ella with her, come in for some injection or other. She was about six months pregnant with Zorah wanted to let the doctor listen to his daughter's heartbeat, I dare say…’

  ‘Oh, Ma.’

  Jane took no notice of him. ‘Anyway, Gerry's mother asked her if there was any news of John and she said, “I wouldn't care if he never came back, not with another one on the way. Good riddance.”’

  ‘She didn't mean it, Jane. She was overwrought. The funny thing is that John seemed all right when he was a little kid. I remember Julia bringing him to the house for tea. Winifred too, she was a bit older. He was quiet and well-behaved, used to sit there with a picture book, but he'd eat a very hearty tea. Then he got ill with something. Whooping cough? Mumps? One of those and it was after that there was no doing anything with him.’

  As for Zorah, no one had much to say. Jane, of course, contributed what there was. She had been sent away to school when she was seven, was at boarding school for eleven years, then at university. Even in the holidays she seldom showed herself in the village or other people's houses.

  ‘I'm sure Julia dreaded her being seen with Lombard and the resemblance being picked up on, though everyone knew. John – her husband, I mean – he knew. He found out. Zorah had tonsillitis or something when she was six and Lombard came up to the Hall. John Cosway saw them together and that was enough. That was the reason Zorah was packed off to school.’

  ‘You can't possibly know that, Jane.’

  ‘Yes, I can. Your mother told me.’

  We had dinner – a very good dinner – and more Cosway talk was punctuated by James saying plaintively that he was planning to carry me off to his room to hear Kraus. This was my original reason for coming.

  ‘Never mind that,’ his mother said, plying me with an autumn version of summer pudding and whipped cream. ‘She can take the records away and play them up at the House of Usher.’

  ‘I'm afraid I can't,’ I said, laughing. ‘They haven't a record player.’

  The extreme oddity of this was commented on at some length. I felt that on the whole I had managed to learn a lot without giving over-much into the temptation to talk about all the things I had seen, heard and intuited and which they had no idea of. Then, dinner over and coffee refused on the grounds that it would keep me awake, I followed James upstairs to hear the first act of Proserpin.

  It was later, as I was about to leave, given a lift home by Gerald Trintowel, that my eye was caught by the photograph among many on a hall table of a man in his twenties with bright eyes and a wry smile.

  ‘Is that your brother?’ I asked James.

  ‘Yes, that's Charles. He'll be here for the weekend in a couple of weeks' time.’

  Hospital patients never come home on the day they think they will or the hospital says they will. It is always a day earlier or a day or two later. I would have supposed no hospital would like the bother of sending someone home on a Sunday, especially in those days when Sunday still meant something, when everything was closed and skeleton staffs were kept. It is just one of those mysteries, peculiarly associated with a clinical situation, another being why the food which surely should be more nutritious and ‘healthy’ than in any other circumstances is so appalling, and why it is necessary – or was then – to make sick people wake up at six in the morning.

  Expected on Monday, Mrs Cosway was brought home on Sunday morning by Ella, who missed church to fetch her. Sh
e looked thin and seemed weak, her ankle in plaster and her wrist strapped up. One of the nurses had signed her name on the cast and drawn a smiling face next to the signature.

  ‘I tried to stop her,’ Mrs Cosway said, ‘but in my weakness I gave in. Stupid nonsense. I don't know what gets into people.’

  Ida was in a dilemma. Should she tell her mother John had refused the Largactil or remove the number he would have taken and say nothing? As it was, there were only twelve left in the bottle.

  ‘I think I'll just not mention it,’ she said, putting five tablets into the wastebin. ‘She can just start again in the morning. She won't see much change in him, do you think?’

  I could see a change. Ida simply found it easier not to do so. After his attack on her, and he had been much provoked, there had been no more violence. But on the rare occasions John spoke his speech was clearer and the things he said more coherent. His rituals remained unchanged, the favoured objects still set out on his bedside table by night and kept in his dressing-gown pocket by day, his food still arranged in patterns. Still, his walks obviously brought him some enjoyment, they were no longer the dogged tramping with head down and eyes fixed on the ground that they had been. Above all, I had noticed, if Ida had not, how much more alert he seemed, as if he was at last deriving energy from somewhere and leaving the zombie state behind.

  Start again in the morning, as Ida had hoped, Mrs Cosway could not. Her early rising, she said, was a thing of the past. I must supervise John's getting up and let her sleep. ‘One of the girls' would have to help her out of bed when the time came, get her on to her crutch and help dress her. All this took a long time and John's breakfast was over and he settled in his armchair by the time she came down. Not that she had forgotten the tablet she regarded it as essential he took.