by Barbara Vine
‘If I guess right I shall be able to tell from your face.’
‘I doubt that, Mater,’ said Eric.
This was the sobriquet he had finally decided on, having rejected ‘mother-in-law’, ‘Julia’, ‘Mamma’ and Felix's facetious suggestion, the awful ‘Winsmum’. I don't think Mrs Cosway liked ‘Mater’, though she probably thought it the best of the bunch.
She began naming cities and holiday resorts in European countries in the hope of detecting their destination from his expression – ‘Paris, Rome, the South of France, one of those costas, Crete, Lake Garda’ – until he came the nearest to losing his temper I had ever seen him.
‘Oh, Southend,’ he said. ‘Where else?’
For a long time, ever since the wedding was postponed from November till January, I had been sure they would never get married, but once Christmas was past and the days went by quietly, I began to think it would happen. Things had reached a stage when cancellation or even further postponement would cause so much trouble and be so expensive as to be untenable. The clothes were ready, the honeymoon was booked, the rehearsal was about to happen and the cake was delivered. Wedding presents had begun arriving.
We all went down to the church, where Mr Cusp deputized for the Archdeacon. It had at last been decided that Mrs Cosway should give Winifred away but in her absence Ida performed this function. Stony-faced, she walked Winifred up the aisle and, when Mr Cusp asked who was to give her away, handed her to him, stepped back and sat down at the end of the front pew. She kept her eyes off Eric, gazing straight ahead of her into the chancel.
Ella's expression was supercilious, as if she thought the whole thing as absurd as the wedding itself would be, while June Prothero smiled with earnest cheerfulness, occasionally making arch remarks about how pretty Winifred was looking and what a wonderful man Eric was. I half-expected Felix to be there but there was no sign of him. His presence wasn't necessary, I am sure he hadn't been invited, but this would hardly have stopped him coming if he had wanted to. As we left the church and came out into the cold dark of a country night, drifts of dirty frozen snow lying on the verges, I thought how, with the coming of the New Year, he seemed to have been abandoned. Winifred had left him behind as she went forward into her new life. Eric, no doubt, had other things to think about and would pick him up again when he returned from his mysterious destination. So I thought.
We drove past the White Rose, brightly lit, Christmas decorations still in the lighted windows, holly wreaths still hanging on the doors. I saw Ella turn to look as we went by, hoping for a sight of Felix perhaps or still so besotted that a place he frequented continued to hold a compelling magic for her. Winifred, on the other hand, at the wheel, kept her eyes on the road, and Ida, sitting beside her in the passenger seat, kept the silence she had maintained since before she escorted the future bride up the aisle.
That winter she had aged. I remembered when I had first seen her, when she admitted me to the house in early June, how I had thought her good-looking, though her appearance was neglected, and had guessed her age at about fifty when she was in fact forty-eight. Since then she had had a birthday but it looked as if it had brought her to the verge of sixty instead of forty-nine. A few minutes after we were back in the house I went into the kitchen to give her a hand.
‘Will you be going in May?’ she said as I began peeling vegetables. ‘I mean, at the end of May when your year is up?’
‘As you say, my year will be up,’ I said.
‘So you'll leave? You won't stay on for another six months?’
‘I haven't been asked to do that.’ I might as well give a warning hint, I thought. ‘I'd better tell you, Ida, I've thought of leaving before May.’
‘Only thought?’
‘Let's put it this way. I was employed here in a nursing capacity to help care for someone I thought was mentally ill.’
‘He is. He is mentally ill.’
‘He doesn't need a nurse, does he? I'm left with nothing to do except help you and before I came I made up my mind that what I wouldn't be was an au pair.’
I dried my hands, took the tablecloth from one drawer and the cutlery from another. She said nothing. The water in the large saucepan she had set on the electric burner began to boil and she slowly tipped in the cauliflower florets. I went to the dining room and found the door I had left open closed against me. As I opened it Winifred's voice said, ‘Tell him Tamara is on her way, will you?’
An intake of breath behind me made me turn my head. I looked round at Ida but couldn't tell from her face if she had heard.
23
Reading the diary after all these years, I have been thinking how different things would be today. Impossible, for instance, for The Studio not to be on the phone. Winifred wouldn't be dependent on a land line without extensions in a house the size of Lydstep Old Hall but would have her own mobile which she could use in the privacy of her bedroom. I doubt there would be all this elaborate cooking and table-laying. Mrs Cosway was old and had been ill. Today she would still have her meals prepared but they would be brought to her on a tray while the rest of the family, even John, would be left to forage for themselves. But what am I saying? Isn't it even more unthinkable that all these middle-aged people would still be living at home with a parent? I don't know what level of sexual morality is expected from a Church of England clergyman thirty-five years later but it seems unlikely to me that a man and a woman of Eric and Winifred's ages – or any ages, come to that – would contemplate marriage without living together first for a while.
As for John, now his Asperger's would be recognized for what it was. No one would call him schizophrenic and no doctor would prescribe for him a powerful tranquillizer like chlorpromazine hydrochloride. Afflicted only by Asperger's, he would never be classified as mentally ill but only as ‘different’ and, as a child, as having ‘special needs’. But all this happened thirty-five years ago.
Winifred had no dinner with the rest of us that evening. What she told her mother and sisters I don't know but the prevailing opinion seemed to be that she had gone to the Rectory. It was a grim meal. John, of course, never did anything to please. It was not in his nature, it was impossible, something his mother and sisters never began to understand. And when he got up from the table after eating his first course and disappeared, Mrs Cosway began on a whining monologue about his selfishness and how it had only begun to show itself when the drug was withdrawn. In this she had the support of Ella, who rattled on about how leaving him without tranquillizers was bad for him and everyone else, and suggested that ‘this specialist of Zorah's' might well put him back on them.
He had gone into the drawing room, where we found him holding the Roman vase. He hadn't lifted it off the cabinet but was standing in front of it with his hands round its bulbous lower part and, when I came in with Mrs Cosway, he took the left one away and lightly touched the spiral handle with his forefinger. It was impossible to tell from his blank expression if he admired it or was astonished by it or even found it repulsive.
Mrs Cosway, whose only remarks ever made to him were to admonish him, now asked in a snapping tone if he intended to break the vase. What did he think he was doing, touching it at all? Being John, he took no notice of her, he didn't even turn his head, but began running his hands down the sides of the vase, gently stroking it, feeling I suppose its smooth, though dimpled, surface.
He never broke things through carelessness but only because he meant to break them, as in the case of the glass dish when Ida tried to give him the Largactil. Mrs Cosway must have known this but she chose to ignore or forget it, went over to him and laid one finger not on him but on the vase. Quickly he took his hands away from that finger's proximity, returned to his chair, picked up his blanket and eiderdown and left the room. I knew he was on his way to the library and once again meant to spend the night there.
Ida had uttered no word since, after following me to the dining room for no reason I had discovered except perhaps to co
ntinue the argument about whether I was leaving or not, she had overheard Winifred sending her cryptic message to Felix. Apparently she had understood it as well as I had, though how I didn't know. She, certainly, had never been in thrall to Felix, but somehow the code-name was known to her and she had realized its significance. With only two more days to go until her wedding, Winifred was at The Studio with a man Ida loathed, deceiving a man Ida loved and would have liked to marry.
She came into the drawing room and sat down, grim-faced, with ‘the mending’, a basket full of woollen clothes moths had attacked, and various items of underwear and nightclothes which had broken straps or torn flounces. I believe the custom of darning socks and sewing hems which had come down was out of date even then. Probably the arrival of synthetics put an end to it. But Ida still darned and mended and hemmed, possibly in the interests of economy but more likely because she saw it as a housewife's duty. It would have pleased Eric, I was sure. What a wife he had lost when he rejected her and picked Winifred.
Her head bent over a hole in one of John's socks, Ida looked in a state of suppressed distress. She said nothing, perhaps because she was afraid of crying and betraying herself. Mrs Cosway, of course, had turned on the television and she and Ida sat side-by-side, watching it. The programme was one of those serials the BBC used to do so well. I was frightening myself with a collection of Victorian ghost stories I had found in the library and I wasn't sorry when Mrs Cosway fetched me from the book with a reproof, though I could have preferred her to do it in a pleasanter way.
‘I suppose the television isn't good enough for you, Kerstin. Oh, no, you have to show your superiority with something more intellectual. To my mind, one doesn't read a book when others are present. A newspaper or a magazine perhaps, but not a book.’
When I first came to Lydstep I had been so strong and bold, so able to hold out against her and assert myself. No longer. She had beaten me down and taught me to take the line of least resistance. My parents and my brother and sister wouldn't have recognized the girl who closed her book without protest and said she was sorry, she hadn't meant to be rude.
So I watched television with them, browbeaten into wishing Ella would reappear. She and I had very little in common but we could talk to each other amicably. To the others I felt I had nothing to say and if I were left alone with either of them and without television to resort to, we should be utterly silent. But Ella stayed up in her room with the dolls and the rosé and the chocolates, putting the finishing touches to the bridesmaids' dresses, as she told me next day.
It was impossible for Ida to stay still for more than a few minutes. She laid her mending aside, left the room for some reason to do with clearing up or making hot drinks or general useless bustling, came back, watched another two or three minutes of the serial before she was off again. Mrs Cosway took absolutely no notice of these comings and goings. Another sign of my almost broken spirit showed itself in my fear of being caught glancing at the clock or, worse, looking at my watch. It was the television which told me, when the episode came to an end, that it was ten-thirty. I was getting up, about to say I was going to bed, when Mrs Cosway remembered John.
‘He'll have to come out of there and go to bed,’ she said.
Since John had been going into the library most evenings the door was no longer ever locked. He might have lost the key. At any rate, it couldn't be found. Mrs Cosway had made a tremendous fuss about this, but a useless fuss just the same. What happened that evening I never knew for sure because she told me curtly that she would ‘see to it’ and my assistance wasn't necessary.
There was a huge crash, as of a hundred heavy objects falling on to the floor, a woman's thin scream and the cries John typically made when he was frustrated. I ran to the library with Ida behind me. We managed the short passages in the usual half-dark, I going too fast and bumping my head on one of the corner bookshelves, dislodging precariously balanced volumes, to find a welter of heavy books piled on the floor, Mrs Cosway sprawled on top of them and John crouched down, yelling and waving his arms. The Bible Longinus had been holding teetered on top of the pile while the saint held out his empty hands as if begging for mercy.
With Ida's help, Mrs Cosway struggled to her feet. She wasn't hurt.
‘I tried to make him come out and go to bed,’ she said. ‘One gets so sick of this behaviour. I used to think he'd do anything I asked but that's all changed.’
‘Did you touch him?’
‘Well, of course I did, Ida. I had to if I was going to get him out of here. He got into a state and threw all those books about. I don't care any more. I'm going to leave him and go to bed. Let him get on with it.’
It was a futile exercise, this. Many times that I remembered each of them had accused the other of touching John while knowing how he hated it, each had reprimanded the other while surely being aware of doing the same thing herself. He always cringed and screamed but they seemed never to learn.
We went to bed. I could hear John's shouting for a long time and when it stopped the silence seemed deeper than I had ever known. He would be lying on the library floor, wrapped in his quilts and surrounded by the books he had swept from the shelves. It was cold but there were worse places to spend the night and he had done it before. Yet I thought of how alone we were out here in the midst of nowhere, in the deep darkness, surrounded by empty fields. The purplish-blue sky was covered with stars. Without a breath of wind, yet very cold, the air was utterly still and the garden was still spotted with old snow in shaded places. Unable to sleep, I had wrapped my eiderdown round me and sat at the window looking out. I hadn't heard her come in but I assumed Winifred was long back from what was perhaps her last meeting with Felix, that she had put the car away and was now fast asleep in her bedroom along the passage.
So I was surprised when I heard a car coming. The engine sounded loud and clear in the still cold air. Winifred parked and got out. With no coat over her thin blouse, and flimsy high-heeled shoes on her feet, she stood on the crumbling concrete steps and stretched her arms up to the sky, throwing back her head and smiling at the stars. She seemed to be in a kind of ecstasy. A white moon, nearly at the full, showed her to me in clear detail, her breasts lifted, her fingers stretched out, her arms embracing the night.
It is like this that I remember her best. Not as the fussy, churchy moralist, the doer of good works in the parish, the Rector's fiancée, the bad-tempered, embittered sister with no real role in the family, the ‘professional’ cook, but as this beautiful woman, transfigured by passion and exulting in the man she loved. This is how I thought of her when, meeting Ella and her daughter in Riga and asked who Zoë reminded me of, I said, ‘Winifred.’
24
My drawing of Winifred was the last one I ever did in the diary. Now, as I turn its pages, I see that everyone in the household had her place there, even Mrs Lilly, but not John and not Cox the gardener, who never while I was there showed his face indoors. Mrs Cosway appears twice and as a caricature, I am afraid, her frown and glare exaggerated, her thinness stick-like. Among her dolls, Ella looks pretty, and I doubt if she would have had much objection to this sketch if she had ever seen it. Ida appears as a drudge, a Mrs Mopp character with a broom and curlers in her hair, and I don't even know if she would have minded. As for Zorah, she couldn't fail to be flattered.
The Roman vase is like an illustration in a book about archaeology. I think the police were pleased to see it, just as they must have been pleased by my drawing of Winifred, for by the time they saw the diary, both woman and vase were gone. Of one, nothing remains but her niece's resemblance to her; of the other, the small sharp fragment I still possess.
I remember very clearly where we all were and what we were doing the day before Winifred's wedding. Everyone got married on a Saturday then, it was taken for granted that your wedding would be a Saturday, so Friday must have been the day it happened. A cold day but without snow, a dark day, the sky like a grey blanket spread low across the countrysid
e.
Lunch was a makeshift affair of cold leftovers. The English are proud of serving inadequate and unappetizing meals the day before any sort of feast. Tomorrow they would have lunch at a Sudbury hotel so today we must fast on scraps of tinned ham and pickles found in the bottoms of jars. All of us were there for this meal, which was taken at the kitchen table under that great iron rack I was always afraid might drop down on to my head. John was supposed to sit next to his mother but he wasn't having any of that and had moved himself to the far end of the table, where he rearranged his cutlery and cut his bread and butter into very small triangles. Ida had a seat next to me but she was seldom in it, taking the chance while she was actually in the kitchen to bob up and down, fetching things out of cupboards and putting plates in the sink. Opposite me Mrs Cosway and Winifred sat side by side while Ella was at the head of the table, facing her brother. All the time I was in that house, Zorah only once ate with the rest of the family, and it wasn't on that Friday. She had driven away in the morning with no intention of coming back.
‘I've given you a very expensive wedding present,’ I heard her say to Winifred. ‘You can't expect me to be there as well.’
But for the fridge, which was at the Rectory, the presents were all over the dining room, the reason for our eating in the kitchen. Isabel had sent an electric mixer. It looked rather incongruous in that room with its dreadful dust-coloured curtains and the lithograph of the youth and the maiden in the amphitheatre. A cheque from Mrs Cosway remained discreetly in its envelope, Ella had given them the very unlikely present of a secondhand set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Ida a firescreen for which she had embroidered a peacock perched on a branch of cherry blossom. This wasn't the only picture among the gifts. Felix's small oil of lovers on a bed was as unlike the amphitheatre engraving as could be, being poised between the erotic and the pornographic. The idea of it hanging in the Rectory made me smile – surely my last smile of that day. When lunch was over John set off for his walk without telling anyone he was going. I knew because I caught sight of him on the lawn, making his way towards a gate in the perimeter wall, and I caught up with him as he reached the path through the shrubbery.
