by Barbara Vine
Winifred was not welcome in the pub and was never taken out for a meal. Again the explanation would have been that Eric must never know. Did she mind? I don't think so. While Ella had wanted the whole world to know she and Felix were lovers, it was in Winifred's interest even more than his to keep things secret. She was plainly enjoying herself, discovering the joys of sex rather late in the day. I believe her mother and June Prothero and the church people attributed her improved looks to her impending wedding and perhaps to her love for Eric, soon to have its consummation. For there was no doubt that at that time she meant to get married and on the appointed day. She had had a final fitting for her wedding dress, the flowers were ordered and a ‘going away’ suit and coat had been bought from Colchester's top dress shop.
Mrs Cosway thought, and loudly said, that for people in her and Eric's ‘position’ to have a wedding rehearsal was ridiculous. Like royalty or film stars, she said. In accordance with her current mood, Ida had no comment to make. She broke her near-silence only to say to me while we were preparing dinner one evening, ‘I should like to see Eric Dawson happy,’ her use of both his Christian name and surname adding solemnity to her remark. ‘He's a good man.’
For a moment I thought she was indicating that she knew about Winifred and Felix but I soon realized I was wrong. ‘I used to go to church,’ she said, ‘but I stopped. I never really believed.’
What did this mean? She said no more, relapsing into her sad silence.
Winifred was a very different woman from Ella. Not for her confiding in someone years younger than herself or indeed in anyone, for I don't suppose she whispered secrets to June or Mrs Cusp. She had an elevated idea of her own importance and also of her virtuous and upright character. This must of course have been severely put to the test by the Felix affair, carried on while she was engaged to another man, but I have no doubt she made solid excuses to herself for her behaviour. Eric was a husband, not a lover. She would be unflinchingly faithful to him once they were married. He would never know. She would make it up to him in appropriate ways. This was her Indian summer, soon to end.
Once or twice more, as Christmas approached, Felix came up to Lydstep Old Hall for drinks or coffee or dinner. As far as I know, he never made an offer of reciprocation. He always came with Eric, never on his own. With his reputation for making friends with any newcomer to the village – the men, that is, for he was too proper ever to have been seen about with any woman but Winifred – Eric organized ‘chaps' days out’ when he and two or three others would go off for lunch in a hotel somewhere and spend the afternoon in Brightlingsea or Frinton. Felix may already have been on such a group outing. The fairly heavy drinking which went on would have suited him, though not the absence of female company.
As with Ella, he behaved as if there was nothing between him and Winifred, glancing at her neither too much nor too little. He even talked about the coming wedding, which he meant to attend, although, as he said in a rueful tone with a lazy grin at Mrs Cosway, ‘The bride's mother hasn't invited me but my pal here says I can come.’
His ‘pal here’ said in rather a flustered way that he was sure this was an oversight as Felix would be very welcome. Compressing her lips, Mrs Cosway still managed to stretch them into a tight smile. The first invitations which went out had included him but it seemed that she had changed her mind when Ida was sending out the second lot. She loathed Felix, as she never missed a chance to say as soon as he had left.
‘Of course if your husband-to-be brings him here, what is there to say? It isn't my house. It belongs to John.’
What John thought of him no one knew. The probability is that he never thought of him at all. John was unaffected by people who took no steps to cross him or ignored him as he ignored them. Encountered by me in the passage on his way back from the lavatory, Felix asked me what was wrong ‘with the silent guy’.
‘I don't know.’ What I half-guessed hadn't yet been confirmed. ‘Ask Winifred,’ I said.
He was an excellent actor. His face betrayed nothing. ‘D‘you know, I never knew he existed until the last time I was here. Is that peculiar or just the way they behave in this creepy house?’
‘How's the portrait coming on?’
He grinned. ‘Ask Winifred,’ he said. That was the only hint of their affair he ever gave.
I found myself hoping Eric would never know, that Felix would maintain his discretion, whatever its purpose, whatever the main chance he kept his eye on, until they were married and across the years to come. I liked Eric. He wasn't my kind of man but he was kind and unselfish, cheerful and pleasant. I felt sure he would rarely tell a lie and then only a white one, and never break a promise. Full of good intentions, Mrs Cosway had said of him, adding that we knew what those led to. Eric himself once preached a sermon about the intention amounting to the same thing as the deed, quoting something about a man who lusts after a woman having already committed adultery with her in his heart. If that is so, meaning well ought to be the same as doing well. But I don't know. I only know that he deserved better than the treatment his fiancée and his friend had meted out to him.
Within minutes of their driving away, Zorah arrived. They must have passed on the Windrose road. It was after ten-thirty and usually when she came at that time she went straight upstairs, but that evening she walked into the drawing room, where Mrs Cosway was still sitting with John and two of her daughters while Ida and I cleared away glasses and emptied ashtrays. She seldom sat down when she entered a family gathering but wandered the room, ‘as a roaring lion, seeking what she may devour, like it says in the Bible', Winifred once said.
John was the first one Zorah spoke to. It was always so. ‘Hallo, you.’ He didn't shift his gaze from the Roman vase. Ella's eyes had turned guiltily towards the geode, a glance Zorah didn't miss. ‘You can keep that thing if you want,’ she said. ‘It's no use to me.’
‘That's a new departure,’ said Ella.
‘As you say. But I intend to depart, you see. Leave, go, shake the dust of this place off my feet. It's no good looking like that, Mother. I know what you're thinking. The answer to your next question is, no, I shall be leaving the vase behind too. Mind you look after it. You can have the spinet and the harp too – I see you've already helped yourself to it. Incidentally, those geodes are in all the crystal shops in London now, they're two a penny.’
‘Do you mean you're moving out?’
‘That's what I mean, Ida, yes. Some time after Christmas. After John's appointment with the specialist. Are you still getting married in January, Winifred?’
‘Of course I am!’
‘No of course about it. You were going to get married in November but you didn't.’
I asked myself if Zorah could possibly know about Felix. Surely not. How could she?
‘You will do very well out of my going, Mother,’ she said. ‘You'll get my rooms and another bathroom all beautifully decorated. What more do you want?’
They were all thinking, all of them but John, that with Zorah's departure the gifts would go too, the wine, the food, the cash presents. I could read Ella's thought that thank God she had already got the car out of her.
‘I may have Christmas here with you all. I haven't decided yet. In any case you can take it I'll provide the turkey and the booze.’
In the drawing room next morning, I went over to the console table and laid my hands on the Roman vase. It was the first time I had ever touched it. I ran my fingers over its surface, feeling its smoothness which at the same time was faintly dimpled. It was cool but not cold to the touch, jade-coloured but not opaque as jade is, reflecting light but not images from its rounded surface. A strange and unlikely urge to possess it made me lift it up with extreme care, but I put it down almost at once, unwilling to be found handling it by a Cosway.
I had no idea then and have none now as to its value. Did it in fact even belong to the Cosways? Some ancestor of theirs had found it buried in the grounds, miraculously intact. Waste dumps
have always been rich sources of treasure because householders tend to throw away their rubbish on the same site as that used by the generation immediately before them, while that previous generation favours the site used by his forebears and so on back for centuries. So it is quite possible that excavating a Victorian rubbish heap may lead you on down and down to Tudor and even medieval detritus. I have never heard of Roman remains being found under later waste repositories but I suppose it is possible. This, at any rate, was what Ida told me was the burial place of the Roman vase, long since become the neglected orchard.
It was not quite intact, there being a tiny chip out of its base. Perhaps this was the reason for its being thrown away, though ‘thrown’ was hardly the word as, again according to Ida, it had been found encased in a great earthenware jar. What became of the jar I have no idea.
Apart from the house itself, the Roman vase was the only inanimate thing I drew in the diary. I tried to draw it from memory but found, sitting in my bedroom, that I had forgotten the precise configuration of its mouth and the twist pattern of its handle. Everyone had gone to bed except John, who was in the library and likely to stay there for hours. I went downstairs to imprint on my mind those details of the vase.
The harp glowed dimly in the darkened hall. A faint light showed under the double doors to the library. I imagined John in there, sitting on the floor, I supposed, with his back resting against Longinus's plinth, surrounded by tumbled books, amidst dim light and deep shadows, and I felt happy for him. The house was as silent as only houses which stand alone in countryside can be by night. I studied the vase, its shape, its texture, the sugarstick twist of its curved handle. No one came in, though I was afraid all the time that they would, and ask what I was doing there.
Switching off the lights, I went upstairs again, treading softly. Before I went to bed I drew the vase in the diary and was quite pleased with the result. The fears I had experienced downstairs, creeping on tiptoe, afraid to turn on lights, made me marvel at myself. I who had used to be determined, robust and cheerful was gradually becoming – as I saw it – mouse-like and diffident. It was Mrs Cosway who was grinding me down, changing me into the submissive creature she would probably have liked me to be when I first arrived.
Why did I draw the vase when it never crossed my mind to draw the geode or the hall fireplace or the harp or the library itself? Why draw the vase and not the mulberry tree or the boat floating on the pond or Ella's room with the frills and the dolls? Why not the orchard with its withered trees or the piano in John's gloomy bedroom? I flatter myself if I say it was because of my foresight and because I knew its long ancient life was not to last much longer. I had no such reason. I drew it only because it was the most beautiful thing in Lydstep Old Hall.
21
In the first half of December I had two proposals. They were the only proposals I ever had, for I have no memory of my husband ever asking me to marry him. We just knew that one day we should be married because it seemed the logical next step in our shared life.
Mark was the first to ask me. I was in London for the weekend and we had been talking about my vacillations over whether to leave Lydstep or to stay. I knew I shouldn't burden poor Mark with all this but I suppose I had no one else on whom to unload my troubles and usually, as soon as I arrived, although I tried not to, I would begin on a catalogue of Cosway horrors and my own general feelings of uselessness. Mostly, he had no solution to offer. He would only tell me to put up with it a little longer, to stay until after Winifred's wedding, or else, probably exasperated, would say there were only two choices before me. If I disliked it so much I might as well leave now.
‘I meant to stay a year,’ I said. ‘At least, I meant to stay till you go to America.’
Mark was committed to a postgraduate course at a university in New Hampshire and intended to go there in August for two years. We had known that from the beginning and accepted it. Once he had gone we might never see each other again. No doubt we would correspond but we would regard ourselves as free and not in any way committed. It seemed that he was beginning to see things differently.
‘You could leave and still stay in this country,’ he said.
I said I couldn't afford it. I might find other work but I had nowhere to live.
‘Move in with me.’
I said nothing. I looked at him and he took my hand.
‘Move in with me and come with me when I go to America.’
These arrangements, recognized relationships, as they might be called, were far from being accepted then. The United States, I felt and said, would have been still less likely to tolerate a graduate student living on campus with his girlfriend, even if this were possible.
‘You could marry me,’ he said, and seeing my shocked face, ‘that was brutal of me, I shouldn't have put it like that. I should say, will you marry me, Kerstin? I should like it very much.’
I didn't want to be married but nothing would have made me put it in those words. For some reason, saying no upset me terribly. I don't think I actually did say it. I shook my head, muttered something like, ‘I can't, I can't,’ and began to cry. He held me and I cried against his chest, making his sweater all wet. That was the first and only time he ever saw me in tears and I had to tell him truthfully that I didn't know why I was crying. Perhaps it had something to do with thinking it a great honour to be proposed to by this nice, kind, good-looking and clever man whom I liked so much but didn't love at all, and knowing that marrying him would make us both unhappy for maybe the rest of our lives.
The weekend was spoiled, as I sensed it might be when my tears started. And the rest of our weekends were spoiled too, for Mark, who had never previously been in love with me, now fell in as into a fast-flowing river which carried him helplessly along. Once the idea of marriage had come to him, he couldn't let it go and his unhappiness and frustration began the following day. He who had been so light-hearted and funny and interested in everything grew silent and miserable. I left him sadly, feeling wretched in his company in a way I never had before. Instead of keeping to our old arrangement of my phoning him once or twice in the next couple of weeks to say when I would next be in London, he promised as if I had asked for this, that he would ring me every day.
Going back to Marks Tey in the train, I imagined the effect this would have on Mrs Cosway, for I was sure the phone calls would be made at forbidden times. Perhaps I would finally be driven to leave by Mark's calls and Mrs Cosway's wrath, and I would be forced to take refuge with him for at least a while. In that way phoning me might have something approaching the effect he wanted.
I was on the last train and the last taxi bore away the passenger who had been just ahead of me in the queue. The night was mild for December and I decided to walk. It was less than two miles but a very long way in the dark for someone carrying a backpack. Today, I think, I should have been afraid. Perhaps we grow more apprehensive as we get older or else there is genuinely more reason for fear than there was. Certainly I felt far less nervous as I walked through the lanes and along a footpath that skirted the hedges than I often did in the drawing room at Lydstep Old Hall with Mrs Cosway, yet my path was lit only by a damp-looking moon. My head was full of Mark and his disappointment and my own hurt that I had hurt him.
At first, when I came into the house at a little after midnight, I thought all the lights were out and everyone had gone to bed. Then, glancing down the passage on my way to the stairs, I saw the line of light under the library doors I had seen on the night I drew the vase. I knew it must be John in there yet I opened the right-hand door and went in. The lamps in the library were all of low wattage and a kind of dismal twilight pervaded the place, some of those tortuous passages and the walls, heavy with books, being in the darkness of long, deep shadows. The stone faces, Greek and Roman and medieval and eighteenth-century, with clustering curls or laurel wreaths or Voltairean caps or periwigs, stared at me with blank, sightless eyes. No sculptor has yet found a way of making eyes look li
felike. I had no string to pay out behind me, but I knew my way without difficulty to the centre by this time and there I found John, sitting on the floor at Longinus's feet, reading, or trying to read, with the aid of his magnifying glass and a torch propped up on a stack of textbooks, a thick leather-bound volume.
He didn't look up. He knew who it was, for he recognized my tread, and this failure to give any sign that he knew I was there, which in another man would seem like gross rudeness, I took as a compliment. With me he felt no need to be guarded, to withdraw into himself, or take the extreme step of hiding. You could say he trusted me, though this may be a concept alien to those with his affliction. At least he felt no need to be afraid of me. After a few moments he looked up but without acknowledging me, and stared expressionlessly into my face. I saw that the book he had been puzzling over was The Shorter Oxford Dictionary.
The silence in the library was so deep that I hesitated to break it. I had nothing to say, for whatever his mother and sisters might have done, I had no intention of trying to dislodge John from the library, warn him not to strain his eyes or chivvy him into going to bed. But we often talk when we have nothing to say, simply to fill a silent void, perhaps because the absence of sound frightens us. I moved a little away from him, to his relief I think, because he returned to his dictionary, adjusting the torch which had slipped when he turned round to me. As usual when he was in here, he had removed the Bible from Longinus's grasp and replaced it with a great tome of Locke's political philosophy. Someone must go in there after John's occupancy and put that Bible back. Winifred, I guessed it would be.
