by Barbara Vine
I hadn't, but I said I had and added humbly that did she think it would be all right for me to make a phone call to London?
‘Well, as far as I'm concerned, Kerstin, it's fine. Better do it before Mother comes in here. Oh, and don't be too long, will you, in case Felix is trying to get through to me? I know he will. He'll want to say sorry for the way he behaved yesterday.’
There was no reply from Mark and no way of letting him know what was going on, in those days before answering machines and faxes and text messaging and emails. A sudden darkening in the dining room drew me to the window and I saw that the brightness of the day was past. Great ponderous snow clouds, black and streaked with livid light, were gathering overhead.
Lunch was a horrible English dish which at the present day, thank God, seems to have disappeared entirely from cooks' repertoires: toad-in-the-hole, pork sausages in a Yorkshire pudding-like batter. In spite of what she had said, Ella sat down at the table with us. She had brought a bottle of rosé – I was beginning to wonder if she had a running order with a Sudbury wine merchant – and offered it to everyone, this being the only way, I suppose, of being able to drink it herself. The bottle might have contained arsenic from the look Mrs Cosway gave it.
‘No one used to drink wine at luncheon,’ she said. ‘It is a nasty habit we've picked up from the French.’
‘Ida?’ said Ella. ‘Kerstin?’
My nervous state was such that I wasn't able to resist. Under her mother's horrified eyes, Ella poured me a large glassful. It was a poisoned chalice and I knew it. No good could come of it. But I was both so relieved that I had been allowed to sit down to eat with the family and so afraid of what might be said at any moment about my presence there, the diary, my phone calls and my talking to Strickland in private, that my hands shook and my mouth was dry. Six months before I had thought myself a confident, intrepid girl but all that was gone, driven out of me by this frowning old woman with her pinched, grim face.
As it happened, nothing was said, at least on the subjects of phone calls, the diary and my interview with the police, for the duration of the meal. A good deal of comment was made on the weather, for the storm clouds had begun to shed their load of snow. Big fluffy flakes of it were flying at the window panes and quickly covering paving and grass and tree branches. Ella drank her glass of rosé, then a second. Mine was welcome, yet nauseating. I began to realize that Mrs Cosway, though addressing both her daughters, hadn't said a word to me. She was making it plain that she excluded me by calling them by their Christian names each time she spoke.
Normally, she would have made her statement to the assembled company but at that lunchtime, she singled out both sisters. ‘Zorah should be here by three, Ida and Ella. I do hope this snow doesn't hold her up.’
It was childish, it was grotesque, it was the kind of thing adolescent girls do, and I was a fool to be affected by it. Yet I don't think that anything which had been said in my presence before then or much afterwards made me feel so alone and so utterly rejected as Mrs Cosway's remark about Zorah. Ida smiled slightly – she hardly ever did smile more than slightly – but Ella, wrapped up as she was in her own woes, reached for my hand under the tablecloth and squeezed it. It made me like her. Perhaps it was this which, all those years later, made me bother to ask her to meet me for a drink that evening in Riga.
I drank my wine, though I'd have been wiser not to. The meal was over. I was getting up from the table to help Ida clear away when Mrs Cosway expelled me or gave me the order of release, depending how you look at it. She said to me, without using my name, ‘When you've taken those things out you can go. Now, I mean, this afternoon. Pack your bags and what you can't carry we shall have sent on.’
In Cosway fashion, Ella screamed, ‘You can't do this, Mother. You're crazy.’
‘And you are not to give her a lift anywhere, Ella. Not if you want to come back into this house.’
Ella began to say something, incomprehensible to me, about having things she could say if she chose to the ‘authorities' but the rest of it I didn't hear. Nausea overcame me and with my napkin over my mouth I ran to the downstairs lavatory, getting there just in time. I was very sick, throwing up again and again. Afterwards, drinking water with my mouth held under the cold tap, I felt so weak I had to sit down in there and rest, gasping. John and his sojourns in that very place came back to me and how he had locked himself in.
About ten minutes went by before I came out and went upstairs. There was no sign of any of them. The smell of sausages in batter and overcooked cauliflower pervaded the place. In my bedroom I threw things into my cases, keeping back a second sweater to wear on top of the one I had on in case I had to be outdoors a long time. It was the way characters in films pack, folding nothing, tossing clothes and shoes in haphazardly on top of each other. I was putting my toothbrush and toothpaste into my sponge bag when Ella came in to promise to send on the bags I couldn't carry.
‘You do see I can't drive you anywhere, don't you, Kerstin? Mother and Ida really wouldn't let me back in. All the outer doors can be bolted, you know.’
I said I did see.
‘Please don't lose touch. You must write to me as soon as you're settled somewhere or I shall be so dreadfully worried. Besides, you'll want to know what's happening with me and Felix. I've got a sort of feeling he'll ring before the day is out and I'm determined not to stray far from the phone. That's actually another reason why I can't take you to the station.’
Promising to write to her, I put the diary-notebook in on top of the clothes in my overnight bag, closed it and picked it up along with the smaller of the other two. But I had to set them down again as Ella threw her arms round me. She covered my face with kisses in an almost amorous way, explaining herself when she released me.
‘That's what I'd do if you were Felix, you see. You don't mind, do you?’
27
I walked out of Lydstep Old Hall at three-thirty in the afternoon. It would have been dark by then in Gothenburg and it was growing dark here, the snow still falling but lightly, as a fine powder. Wearing my padded boots and my thick coat with its hood, I felt better and more myself, my old self, than I had for weeks, so fast was the effect of the Cosways shed once I was out of the house. This return to an old, once habitual feeling restored what I thought I had once had in abundance, a sense of well-being. Exercising it, I looked at what the Cosways had done and began to laugh at the whole concept, so dear to the hearts of those Victorian novelists, of the young woman, whatever she might be, some dependant or governess, turned out into the snow. The cold, cold snow.
I was laughing like this when Zorah's Lotus passed me. Whether she recognized me or not, she very likely didn't want to stop for a madwoman who was prancing down the road laughing. It was hysterical, of course, and the happiness I felt was illusory. Still, I had left. I had shaken the dust of Lydstep Old Hall off my feet for ever. At once I asked myself why I hadn't done so weeks before, when I first thought of it. But for a few minutes I was happy and then, when I thought of John, I became sombre again. At least I knew that he was in a hospital as a voluntary patient. I need no longer have those visions I had been experiencing, especially in the night-time, of him in a prison cell, insufficiently heated and with nowhere to hide. I wondered then if I would ever see him again and as I remembered him, the things he liked doing and the things they stopped him doing, I realized that I loved him. Not as I had once or twice loved a lover or would love my husband, but nearer to the feeling I had for my brother. Coupled with that was a tenderness which had begun, I believe, from his asking me to marry him. Many would have said that his proposal was all nonsense, that he had no idea of what marriage was, but I knew that he would only have made his offer because he liked me enough to want me to be with him, because he knew that I, of all the people in that household, to some extent understood the strange workings of his mind. I make an exception there for Zorah. She was fond of him and ‘on his side’ but I think she had been made too egotistical by the way life
and her family had treated her to care very much for anyone else at all. So I thought then, walking down the hill into Windrose.
I had decided to seek refuge with Eric. For a night or two. The Rectory was huge and it seemed to me that he would hardly notice I was there. If he wanted me to do things for him, I could cook and clean and wash. While I was there I would decide where to go and what to do next. First of all I had to find out from the police if I was expected to stay in the immediate neighbourhood. I would keep trying Mark until I got hold of him. I would phone my parents from Eric's and pay for the call. I had plenty of money, having had nothing much but train fares on which to spend my wages while at Lydstep.
Lights were on in The Studio as I passed it. In fact, I didn't immediately pass it, but stood by the gate for a moment, looking into the half-lit, disordered sitting room, but then I thought that if Felix saw me and came out he would certainly invite me to stay with him, a situation to be avoided. The White Rose was shut, as it was bound to be at this hour, but the general store was open. I went in to buy myself a bar of chocolate. Jane Trintowel was standing at the counter, being served with a tin of coffee and twenty cigarettes.
I remember these things because I stood staring at them for perhaps a whole minute before she must have become aware of my gaze and turned round. She said hallo, then saw my big suitcase which I had rested on the floor.
‘You've left!’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, just like that? What else?’
‘They threw me out.’ The whole shop could hear but I cared very little about that. Jane didn't ask me why but paid for her groceries and moved across into a corner. I went with her. ‘I'm going to Eric,’ I said. ‘Just for a couple of nights.’
‘No, you aren't. He's staying with his sister. Mr Moxon is taking the services. You're coming to us.’
Of course, I did. I made deprecating noises at first, I couldn't possibly, it would be an imposition, that sort of thing.
‘If you don't,’ Jane said, ‘Charles will never forgive me.’
Mr Waltham, the grocer, said he would look after my cases until Gerald Trintowel brought the car and fetched them up to White Lodge. Jane was very hospitable and fond of company and, not to underrate her kindness, I think she was quite excited at doing something which, as she put it, was ‘one in the eye for the Cosways’.
A tremendous gossip, she wanted to know everything. Had John done it? If he had, why? Was it something to do with ‘both those women carrying on with Felix Dunsford’? Ignorant of village life, I was amazed that she knew but I soon understood that the whole of Windrose did.
‘Even Eric?’ I said.
‘Oh, well, probably not, but they always say the husband, or in this case the fiancé, is the last to know, don't they?’
She wanted to know if it was true the Cosways possessed a solid-gold Roman figurine and that this was the murder weapon. I disappointed her by telling her it was a glass vase and it was broken, though it had been Roman.
‘And he hit her with it in front of everyone, those three girls – well, they're not girls any more, are they? and their mother and you?
‘Not Zorah and not me,’ I said. ‘I wasn't there and Ella wasn't.’
As I said it I knew I wished I had been. I wished I had seen what had happened so that I could have helped John, but then Gerald came into the room with my two cases and gave us drinks, a strong vodka and orange for me which he said I must need after being turned out into the snow.
After I'd been up to my bedroom, the same one as they had given me when I stayed on Christmas Night, I asked Jane if I could make a phone call to London. It would be nothing these days, a call one made as casually and easily as phoning the people next door or in the flat upstairs. Things were different then. This was ‘long distance’, almost a serious undertaking. Of course she said I could but again I failed to get an answer and I felt I couldn't ask again without saying I would pay, an offer which I knew she would refuse. Of an inveterately inquiring turn of mind – nosy, according to Gerald – she wanted to know if it was ‘some very close friend you wanted to ring’.
I had to tell her, though as I did so I remembered what she had said about Charles never forgiving her. ‘He's my boyfriend but I don't think he is any more. Still, I ought to let him know what's happened.’
‘Try again in the morning,’ she said.
I had slept as soundly as usual since Winifred's death but that night I couldn't get to sleep, although there was no doubt White Lodge was a far warmer and more comfortable house than Lydstep Old Hall. Perhaps my wakefulness had something to do with the fact that, taking off my skirt, I felt in one of the pockets and found the triangular piece of green glass I had picked up off the drawing-room floor. Though I handled it with care, I still cut my finger on its razor-sharp edge.
Next day Mark came to Lydstep to look for me. He came on the train and walked to Windrose from Marks Tey. While I was trying to phone him he was half a mile away down the hill, inquiring for me in the White Rose and in the shop. If Mrs Waltham had been serving there when Jane and I met the day before, a piece of gossip as juicy as the foreign girl being turned out of Lydstep Old Hall would have been all over the village before nightfall. But her husband was rather a taciturn man and the shop assistant from Sudbury had no interest in me, the Cosways or the Trintowels. All that concerned her was knocking off and going home as soon as possible. So she had no information on my whereabouts to offer him. The landlord of the White Rose had no idea who I was. I had never been in there and he had never heard my name.
By then Mark had already been to Lydstep Old Hall. Apparently – according to Ella later – he had been very worried about me. Being Mark, interested in people the way I believe few men are, he must have remembered all the things I had told him about the Cosways' eccentricities and decided I was in some sort of danger. He hadn't seen Mrs Cosway, only Ida, who told him I had left the day before, saying I would like my luggage sent on. I had gone to London, she supposed. Mark had phoned his brother, Isabel's husband, but they knew nothing of my whereabouts.
Circumstances seemed to conspire against him finding me. Eric, from whom he might have inquired and who would have made an intelligent guess that I was with the Trintowels, was away, staying with his sister. Mark went to various houses in the village, ringing doorbells at random, but by chance not to June Prothero's or Bridget Mills's parents. At last he came to White Lodge but it was a fine day and Gerald was playing golf while Jane and I had driven in to Sudbury to visit the market.
He told me all this weeks later, not by then, for another reason, regretting any of it. My failure to get in touch with him when I was in what was, after all, a dire situation showed him that our relationship was over. If I had loved him as he loved me, I would have gone straight to him and all the invitations from country neighbours would have meant nothing to me. So, very dispirited and low, he went back to London.
The train had come from Ipswich and there was already someone in the carriage he got into, a girl of about my own age. She was hunting through her bags, looking more and more distraught. He asked her what was wrong and she told him she had lost her wallet or it had been stolen. Few people had credit cards then but twenty pounds had been in that wallet and her ticket. Of course, it was the oldest con trick in the world but Mark didn't think it was a con trick and he was right. He explained to the ticket collector and was obliged to buy her a new ticket. He lent her five pounds it went quite a long way in those days bought her a cup of tea at Liverpool Street Station and escorted her on the Tube to the flat she shared with four others in Islington. She told him her name was Anna and he, sore from what he thought of as my rejection of him, asked when he could see her again.
She has been his wife for as long as I have been married to Charles. So failing to find me was good for him and for Anna too.
Charles came down for the weekend and we met again.
But before that, two visitors came to see me at White Lodge. Strickland wa
s the first of them. My diary, he said, had been ‘infinitely helpful’, though he didn't say in what way. It must have had something to do with the characters of the people involved and, notably, John's.
I asked about him. When he came out of hospital, they would release him, wouldn't they?
He didn't answer. Disappointment and a kind of fear descended on me but I managed quite a comprehensive answer when Strickland asked me about the Roman vase.
‘You said in your diary that John Cosway loved it,’ he said. ‘What did you mean by that?’
‘It wasn't his in the way the objects were that he carried in his dressing-gown pockets,’ I said. ‘I suppose it didn't really belong to any of them. It should have been public property, in a museum somewhere. But I think it was the only thing he truly loved, the way he isn't really able to love people. He used to touch it – well, caress it.’ I was proud of that word, which I had just learnt, though I feared misusing it. I didn't think of this before,’ said. ‘It suddenly came into my head. But I think he was lying on the ground after it happened, not because he'd done what was done to Winifred but because the vase that was so precious to him was broken.’
Strickland looked strangely at me but he thanked me for what I'd said. I held up my hand with the sticking plaster round my left forefinger. ‘I cut myself on a piece of it,’ I said. ‘That happened much later. It was a piece I picked up from the carpet. Apart from Ella, John was the only one who didn't have cut hands after…it happened. He couldn't have picked up that vase and struck Winifred with it without cutting his hands. I know he couldn't.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You put that in your diary.’
After he had gone I reflected on it, quite astonished at the discovery I had made and voiced without any prior consideration or even realizing I had made it. But I was convinced of its truth. The whole essence of John, of what he was, seemed contained in his grief over a broken object, the whole truth in the evidence of the cut and the intact hands.
