The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

  She grew silent, hanging her head. Those words had perhaps brought back memories of Dr Lombard. On the other hand, I believe these were never far from her mind, she thought about him and remembered him all the time. It was more likely that she had just realized the possible difficulties that lay ahead.

  ‘How many tablets are there left?’

  Ida could answer this question truthfully because she had given John no more since he struck her and by then that was ten days before.

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘As many as that? Are you sure?’

  ‘I can show you, Mother.’

  ‘No, I'll take your word for it, but I would have thought there were fewer.’

  In a week's time someone would have to go to Dr Lombard's partner, a young man with, I had been -told, progressive ideas, and ask for a prescription for Largactil. We shall see, I thought, and went to catch the train for London.

  18

  I don't know if it was the Largactil which damaged John Cosway's sight or if it had just deteriorated as he approached his forties, as it sometimes can. He already had glasses for reading and if they were inadequate for the purpose this may only have been because they were the same pair as he had had five years before and he simply needed his eyes tested again. I don't know.

  I half-guessed what was wrong with him, though my conjecture was full of doubts, not least the one about my own inadequacy at making any sort of diagnosis. I had no qualifications except an English degree and my humble nursing diploma. How would I know from reading medical books without direction or supervision? Perhaps it was a case of telling myself, ‘I always knew that's what it was,’ rather than feeling a quiet satisfaction when the specialist gave the verdict which confirmed my guesswork.

  Everyone knows about autism now. Everyone has heard of it. Hardly a week goes by without some article about it in a newspaper. Not then, though it had been described and named twenty-five years before. A society for sufferers and their parents was in existence. But it was not accepted as a legitimate disturbance of the psyche with a probable physical cause. The word wasn't in the Oxford Dictionary and most people, if told it, would have had no idea what it meant. Doctors – Lombard had been one of them – called it ‘childhood schizophrenia’ and attributed it, as he had done, to emotional trauma.

  It is thought autism can result from childhood infectious diseases. And one theory might be that John, who was very ill with mumps when he was a child, developed his at that time. Maybe and maybe not. Boys are affected more than girls. A Swedish study of Asperger's, the type I believe John had, found a ratio of four boys to one girl, and it is harder to detect in women, perhaps because their social instincts are stronger than men's. Asperger himself, whose syndrome is less severe than Kanner's, suggested that his might be the extreme end of the continuum of the normal male personality, a startling claim. It implies that men with an excessive degree of maleness would be, or are, selfish, lacking emotion, taking what they want when they want it, knowing no altruism, tactless and blunt and liable to rages when they fail to get their own way. A conundrum for some PhD seeker? Or a wild exaggeration?

  Such people speak little or not at all. They lack social skills, appear to be without affection, are restless and often destructive, compulsive and routine-driven. Some will lie on the floor and scream when frustrated. Egocentric, they have no idea that other people have thoughts or feelings. If one of the definitions of the schizophrenic is to be unreasonable, the Asperger subject can be said to be too reasonable. He never lies but utters what he thinks and feels without tact or appropriateness, does what he chooses and runs away from what he dislikes.

  I read about Asperger's in a scientific journal I came upon amongst other medical literature in the library – yes, the library, the labyrinth at Lydstep Old Hall. They were not very old, these journals. Someone must have put them there. John himself before Lombard and Mrs Cosway went to work on him? It was more likely to be Zorah, attempting to discover for herself what was wrong with her brother but, when she saw his decline, giving up in despair.

  When John said he would ask Zorah I had assumed he meant to ask her for the money which consulting a psychiatrist or specialist in diseases of the central nervous system would cost. She was rich. A consultation would only be the beginning, there might be second opinions sought, surgery carried out and hospitalization. But Zorah was rich and could afford it almost without noticing the amount. However, that was not what he meant. A few days after I got back, while John was having his tea in the kitchen with Ida, Zorah walked into the drawing room and said that she intended to inform the trust that John wanted to see ‘a top man about his tremors and his unsteady movements’.

  ‘I know just the man,’ she said. Zorah always knew everyone. ‘He helped a friend of mine who had Parkinson's. It was almost miraculous. When the time comes I shall drive John to London myself.’

  ‘Then you can pay for it,’ said Mrs Cosway.

  ‘Now wait a minute. Your husband set up the trust for just that purpose, to take care of John.’ It was a shock to hear her refer to John's father like that, reminding us all that he was no relation of hers. ‘He could hardly have foreseen that you and that lover of yours would conspire to make a zombie out of John. He couldn't tell you'd fix things so that he was an imbecile with no use for money. Well, he has a use for money now and I'm going to see he gets it. From its proper source. From the money he has a right to.’

  Mrs Cosway addressed the ceiling, to which she cast up her eyes. ‘I would never have believed my own child could speak to me like that.’

  Whatever it did to Mrs Cosway, using such terms to her mother must have taken it out of Zorah. I had thought her tough and invulnerable, a woman of iron, but I had misassessed her, for she had gone paper-white and I noticed that her long and elegant hands, which hung down by her sides, were shaking the way John's still did sometimes. She turned without another word and went back upstairs. There she must have done what packing was needful, very little I imagine, and gone straight out, for I heard her say to Winifred in the hall that she was off to London and might be away for several weeks. But there she would remember what she had said, as her first act when she reached her house would be to write to the trust.

  The Lotus had hardly disappeared down the drive when Ella, who had slipped out of the drawing room when Zorah came in, reappeared, triumphantly holding up the geode in both hands. Coming down to make her announcement, Zorah must have been, as I had supposed, in quite a state, keyed up to an unusual defiance, and had forgotten to lock her door. How Ella guessed she would I had no idea unless she checked every time her sister appeared downstairs. This possibility brought me a feeling of powerful distaste. I had preferred Ella to anyone else in that household and sympathized with her over Felix, but the idea that she might study and plan in this way to outwit Zorah chilled me. I watched with a revulsion I tried to disguise as she pranced across the room, the geode held aloft like a trophy, and finally set it down on the table where it had once been a permanency. I had lost count of the number of times that lump of rock had been carried downstairs, taken up again and brought down once more. Ella let out a prolonged peal of Cosway laughter.

  ‘How about that?’ she said. ‘Never say I don't have your interests at heart, Mother.’

  Mrs Cosway said nothing. She made a sour face, signifying disapproval or mild congratulation. It was hard to say. Zorah's declaration had turned the latest capturing of the geode into an anticlimax.

  ‘I've got the harp too but I'll need someone to help me downstairs with it.’ Ella turned to me. ‘Kerstin? Come and help me and then we'll have a drink.’

  ‘Kerstin has to get John to bed,’ said Mrs Cosway.

  ‘Not yet, surely? I thought he was going to bed later these days? He isn't tired at seven, Mother. He's not a baby.’

  It was true that since Mrs Cosway's accident John's bedtime had subtly moved towards half-past seven, towards eight, then nine. It was all part of his slow improvement, his
gradual progress towards becoming a human being.

  ‘Everything I say is overruled these days,’ said Mrs Cosway. ‘It has happened since I fell downstairs. Who would have thought an accident happening through no fault of one's own would change a whole family's attitude towards one? Who would have thought my children would decide to turn me into a senile old woman with softening of the brain?’

  ‘Don't be absurd, Mother.’ This was Winifred, who had been fidgeting about for the past half-hour, looking at her watch and apparently listening for something she might miss if she failed to concentrate.

  ‘No one thinks that I have been bereaved. If one of you had died I should receive boundless sympathy.’ Mrs Cosway looked her daughters up and down as if such sympathy would have been misplaced. ‘But the fact that I've lost the only man I ever loved means nothing to any of you.’

  Winifred pulled her soon-to-be-Rector's-spouse face. ‘You shouldn't talk about it. You should keep it to yourself. It’ not – not seemly.’

  ‘What would you know? You and that fiancé of yours. Now there is an old woman.’

  It has always struck me as strange that the people who make this remark are usually old women themselves. What Winifred might have said in reply was never uttered. The phone began to ring in the dining room. It first made her jump, then run out of the room, calling, I'll get it, I'll get it,’ as she went.

  I went upstairs with Ella, who was carrying a bucket of ice she had fetched from the kitchen. Into this went a bottle of her favourite rosé, cooling while she broke a large bar of fruit-and-nut milk chocolate into squares, a curious choice to go with wine. We lugged the heavy gilded harp downstairs but left it in the hall, where it brightened things up a good deal. Back in her bedroom, the dolls in their fashionable clothes seemed to be staring at us, possibly warning us, to judge by their stick-thin figures, of the dangers of consuming chocolate. I had half forgotten how feminine the room was, how many yards of frills it contained, how many ribbons and artificial flowers. The nightdress case on the bed, a pale blue satin heart with pink and white appliqué roses, I was sure I had never seen before.

  Ella poured us each a glass of wine. ‘I'm thinking of getting sloshed this evening. Now don't look like that, it's not something I make a habit of. But Felix is meeting an old schoolfriend in Colchester so we can't see each other.’ She took a big gulp of her wine. ‘That's better. Isn't Mother impossible sometimes? And Zorah! I don't know what you must think of us.’ Correctly receiving my smile as meaning my thoughts could be of no consequence, she changed tack entirely. ‘I don't think I ever told you how I came to dress the dolls, did I?’

  ‘No, you never did.’

  ‘Well, I thought those peasant dresses they were in were too impossibly old-hat – sorry about the pun – for words, but it took a bit of a nerve stripping them off.’ She giggled. ‘Everyone knows everything that goes in in this house, you see – well, you must know – and I thought Mother would make a frightful fuss, but I was all prepared to say to her, no one wears those clothes any more, not in the countries they come from they don't. I started making the clothes for them. I copied them from pictures in magazines. I spent a fortune on Vogue, you wouldn't believe. And when they were all done I was really proud of them. Winifred came in here and so did Mother and, would you believe it, they never noticed a thing.’

  I laughed appropriately, then asked her, because it seemed a question she would like, how she was getting on with making her bridesmaid's dress.

  Her face clouded. ‘I haven't even got the material yet and the wedding's in about eight weeks. Of course I can do it in that time but Winifred hasn't made up her mind about the colour. And I'm doing June Prothero's too, you know.’

  Having no idea how long it would take to make a dress, a task beyond the skills of anyone I knew, I couldn't offer an opinion. She refilled her glass, admonished me for drinking so slowly and said, ‘I have to tell you something. I don't think Felix is the marrying kind. You'll say that doesn't matter so long as he loves me.’

  I was tired of denying these comments attributed to me. ‘I suppose it may matter to you,’ I said.

  ‘Do have some more wine. I'm on my third glass. As for mattering, I tell myself love's better without marriage, it lasts longer. Look at Mother and Dr Lombard. I mean, that was immoral and cruel to Dad and a scandal and everything, but it was love and it did last.’

  An interesting sidelight on sex education, I thought, when a mother teaches her daughter to prefer illicit love to marriage and teaches her by her own example.

  ‘I really do love him, Kerstin. He's “the very eyes of me” like that poem, I don't know who wrote it. I adore him.’

  And I could see she did, her pretty face held up to the light, flushed rose with the rosé, a look in her eyes of yearning and need. Then she said, leaving the subject completely, ‘I've been meaning to tell you something ever since this improvement to John. You know the way they're always talking about this mental trouble of his starting with an emotional shock? Well, they haven't told you what the emotional shock was, have they?’

  I agreed that they hadn't.

  ‘When he was a little boy he wandered into Mother's bedroom in the middle of the afternoon. She thought he was asleep. But he wasn't and what he saw was her and Dr Lombard in bed together. How about that for the primal scene?’

  Though I tried to look suitably impressed, I didn't believe that what John had seen would have had much effect on him. Autism, they were saying even then, always had a physical cause.

  ‘Ida told me. John went running to his big sister – that's how she put it – and told her what he'd seen. She said she didn't believe him but she did later on. I don't know if Mother knew – I mean, if she saw John – but I'm sure Lombard didn't or he wouldn't have gone on talking about emotional shocks. He'd have kept quiet on that one.’

  I left her to the rest of the wine. John and Mrs Cosway were alone in the drawing room. She seemed to be asleep, lying on the sofa with the leg plaster propped up on one of the arms. If I had not known such behaviour was impossible for John, I would have thought his determined attempts to read the telephone directory purposely staged to annoy his mother, and also perhaps to hasten a consultation with a specialist. But Asperger's people never behave like this, they have no involvement with others' emotions, and although I then had no name for his condition, I knew its manifestations. John tried to read because, after his long drug-induced stupor, he was waking up to a desire for knowledge and a need to use his failing sight. His mother came into it not at all. As far as he was concerned, she was there as we all were, because we were there. Like the furniture but inferior to the Roman vase.

  ‘Time for bed, John,’ I said.

  He looked up at me. ‘No,’ he said.

  I thought this would be sure to wake Mrs Cosway but she slept on. I doubted that I could encourage John to get up by any words and certainly not by any physical move. Touching him was always out of the question. He laid down the paper and said, ‘Library.’

  Why attempt to stop him? It seemed to me that the more alert he became, the more ‘normal’, the better things would be for everyone. I went with him to the dining room to find the key, daringly showing him where it was kept, then to the library, where I left him, searching out those mathematics and science books which had once been a source of pleasure to him. Somehow I knew the intricacies of the library plan would hold no mystery for him. He would be able to find his way to its centre and back blindfold. And if he threw books on the floor and replaced the Bible in Longinus's hands with some work from the classics? Wait till it actually happens, I thought.

  Returning to the drawing room, I met Winifred coming down the stairs into the hall. She stopped at the foot, stared at the harp's golden shimmer in its dark corner and smiled. My first thought was that I had never seen her look so nice. She had used a lighter hand than usual with the make-up, her hair was clean and shining and, instead of a floral dress and cardigan, she had put on trousers and a
new blue sweater. This was not the way she dressed for Eric and church business. She put her head round the drawing-room door but Mrs Cosway was evidently still asleep for she withdrew it quickly.

  ‘Tell Mother I've gone out, will you, Kerstin? I'm going to take the car – no, on second thoughts, better not. I'll walk.’

  For some reason this made her laugh rather hysterically. She took a coat out of the hall cupboard, huddled herself into it and started to walk. A powerful draught came into the house with the opening and closing of the front door. It was November and growing cold, the only heating provided at Lydstep Old Hall coming from an open fire in the drawing room. I had gone back there to put on more logs when Ella appeared. She stood in the doorway.

  ‘Your mother's asleep,’ I said.

  ‘Come out here.’

  She had drunk the best part of a bottle of wine and she was unsteady on her feet. ‘Where has Winifred gone?’

  ‘She didn't say,’ I said.

  ‘I saw her go. I thought she'd take the car but I know why she didn't. She didn't want it to be seen outside The Studio.’

  It took me a moment or two to understand her. ‘What do you mean, Ella?’

  ‘She's gone to Felix.’

  ‘I'm sure you're wrong. You said he was meeting a friend in Colchester.’

  ‘He said he was. He'll tell any lie. Oh, what shall I do?’ She threw herself into my arms and began to cry. ‘What shall I do? What will become of me? I love him so, I wish I'd never met him, I don't know what to do.’

  I still thought it more likely Winifred was with Eric or at some church meeting. Then I remembered the trousers. She would never go to anything connected with the church in trousers.

  ‘Ella, if you're right,’ I said, ‘it only means she's gone to get him to do some work for her. Paint a sign or something. Be reasonable, she's getting married to Eric in two months' time.’ I spoke my thought aloud. ‘What could he see in her? Aren't that churchy look and manner very off-putting?’