by Barbara Vine
If Strickland had looked at my drawings he said nothing about them. They, at least, needed no translation.
‘Now, I know you won't want to see her,’ said Jane, who was taking me over with a kind of motherly bossiness unknown in my own family. She made me her daughter long before I became her daughter-in-law. ‘What shall I tell her? I don't in the least mind being rude.’
I laughed. ‘Of course I'll see her. I rather like her.’
Jane wasn't too pleased. ‘On your own head be it.’
Ella threw herself on me. Not exactly into my arms because they weren't outstretched. To say she put me into her arms would be more accurate. ‘Oh, I do love this house, don't you, Kerstin? I haven't been here for years and there have been lots of changes. I think that's lovely, don't you? That's the trouble with the Hall’. The Cosways always referred to their home as ‘the Hall’. ‘It never changes. I don't think Mrs Trintowel was very pleased to see me but I can't help that. I came to see you. How are you?’
‘I'm fine.’
‘A man came looking for you.’ It was then that she told me about Mark's visit and how he had called on the Cosways. ‘It just made me think how lucky you were to have your man want to find you. Felix hasn't given the slightest sign he wants to find me. I've phoned the pub over and over but I've given up now, it got humiliating. I've been to The Studio too but he doesn't answer the door. You'll tell me I ought to go into the pub because I'll find him there, won't you?'
Knowing it would do no good, I assured her this was the last thing I would tell her. But I lacked the heart to say he couldn't have made it plainer that all was over between them.
‘I've cried so much I don't think I've any water left in my eyes.’ This was a line from a recent film I had seen with Mark and I knew Ella had seen with Bridget Mills. ‘I shall never get over him,’ she said. ‘I shall never marry now. I shall never have children. What goes on in the head of someone like him who goes about ruining women's lives? Do you know, Kerstin?’
I said truthfully that I did not.
‘Now, I have to ask you something. You may say no but I do hope you won't. Mother wants to see you. She's very sorry for the way she behaved and she knows it's too late to make all that right but it would be a great favour on your part if you'd just come and see her for half an hour. Ill actually fetch you if you like.’
The proffered lift I wouldn't need. I said I would come. At any rate, I thought, I could make my own time and said I would be with Mrs Cosway on Sunday morning.
‘You're mad,’ said Jane when she had shown Ella out. ‘Letting that woman walk all over you.’
‘I don't think she'll do that,’ I said, while having no idea what she would do or why she wanted to see me. I was accepting the invitation for the sake of finding out about John.
I had several telephone conversations with Mark. I felt grateful to him for coming to look for me and even more grateful to him for not finding me. Perhaps I knew that if he had and I had gone back to London with him, our relationship would have moved on to a permanent footing. He thought that too. He was cold with me, or rather he was cool. But that word has taken on such an over-used new meaning that it can hardly any longer be applied in its old sense. It was only when I said that I was determined to stay friends with him, and communicating attentive friends, that he warmed to me and told me about Anna. I agreed to meet him in London, and meet her too, before he left for America.
I hadn't gone down to the village once since I went to stay at White Lodge. Fear of meeting a Cosway kept me away but once I had agreed to the invitation to Lydstep Old Hall, I felt that encountering one of them would no longer be an ordeal but only a preliminary step towards Sunday morning. In the event I met none of them.
It was a bright blue-skied day, the low-hanging sun making the kind of long shadows that seem uncanny at eleven in the morning. The greengrocer's was crowded, but nothing to Walthams' shop, which brimmed with people, and at first it looked as if everyone I knew except the Cosways were in there: Eric, Bridget Mills, June Prothero, Bill Cusp and his son George and the architect's wife Felix had walked home from church that day. He wasn't there and nor was Serena Lombard, who had moved into her father's house. I had no shopping to do, for, except when she ran out of essentials, Jane did all hers for the household in the Sudbury shops, and I was turning away when Eric came out with two carrier bags of food.
‘I mustn't be a minute,’ he said. ‘I have a bride to marry in half an hour.’
I wasn't aware at that time of that particular usage, that a vicar or rector ‘marries' a couple just as they ‘marry’ each other, and I must have looked at him aghast, thinking he must be deranged or that he had really already found a substitute for Winifred.
‘A wedding,’ he said, realizing I hadn't understood. ‘Diane Waltham and her fiancé from Duke's Colne.’ His bags on the ground on either side of him, he took off his glasses, rubbed them on his sleeve and put them on again. ‘Life must go on.’
This I recognized as a reference to his loss.
‘I have been spending a lot of time at the Hall since I came back from my sister's,’ he said. ‘We find each other's company mutually comforting. I gather you have left them. May I hope to see you in church on Sunday?’
I told him Mrs Cosway had invited me to come and see her on Sunday morning.
‘Some other time, then.’ He made church attendance sound like a purely social duty. ‘I must get off. This wedding, you know.’ I thought then that in all the time I knew him I had never heard Eric make a single reference to God or the Christian faith or heaven or hell except when he was conducting a service.
Guests started arriving at the church about two minutes after he had closed the Rectory door behind him. Felix's signboard can't have been very securely fixed to the gate for it was already hanging off at an angle. The bridegroom and his best man (I supposed), both in grey morning suits and carrying grey top hats, arrived in a battered old car, its rear numberplate tied on with string. Standing about, I was beginning to feel cold and I continued with my walk, taking the long road round back to White Lodge.
A section of that road passed through woodland, where branches of trees on either side come close to meeting in the middle. I heard a car behind me and stepped on to the grass verge, close to the trunks of those trees, as Zorah's Lotus went past me, not fast enough to prevent my seeing Felix sitting next to her, his arm resting lightly along the back of the driver's seat.
28
Charles offered to wait for me, parked on the forecourt, but I told him I had no idea how long I would be and I would walk back. Yet when I saw his car disappear down the drive, I felt a great sense of isolation, very different from my feelings when I had first come there seven months before. The house had been hidden under its quivering mantle of green leaves while now it was veiled in a dark web. I wondered why nothing was ever planted in those two red earthenware pots and why, kept empty, they were there at all, and then I rang the doorbell.
As that first time, Ida came. For once she was without her apron and she had shoes on instead of slippers. It looked as if they were going out or, more likely, some guest, deemed special, was expected for lunch. The drawing room was diminished by the absence of the Roman vase, its gloom not much alleviated by an alabaster lamp and a set of watercolours, restored by Zorah. Ella, in bright pink wool, got up and kissed me, an action I saw as showing defiance to her mother. But Mrs Cosway was as affable as she ever could be, asking me to sit down close to the fireplace.
‘We were just about to have coffee,’ said Ida. ‘Can I offer you some?’
I had had my fill of Ida's coffee every morning for seven months but I accepted for the sake of being polite. This time, when she came back with the tray, she had resumed her apron but the pins in her hair were gone. The cotton gloves were no longer on her hands. They had been replaced by sticking plasters, which were soon streaked with black when she had made up the fire with pieces of coal to supplement the logs. Mrs Cosway too had
patched hands. She was as usual in her unrelieved black, a tall, crow-like figure, folded up on the sofa, her legs too long for the distance between seat cushions and floor. On the console table behind her, the geode had replaced the Roman vase. But the worst thing about that room was that the bloodstains, splashes and drops, were still there; paler, yellower, but resistant as blood is to soap and water and cleansers. Only redecorating and a replacement carpet would serve, as the police had advised. If I knew the Cosways, and I believe I did, those dull yellow-brown spots and streaks would be there as long as they were.
In spite of what Ella had said, I knew Mrs Cosway wouldn't apologize to me. I wouldn't have known how to react if she had, saying sorry would be such a departure from the norm for her. She went as far to compensate by asking me how I was, an inquiry to which I am certain she wanted no reply, so I only smiled and took my cup of coffee from Ida.
‘I don't know how much you have heard about what's happening to my son,’ Mrs Cosway said. ‘Of course there's so much tittle-tattle in this village that one can't keep anything dark for a moment.’
I hadn't heard any gossip, I said, but the police had told me he was in hospital.
‘He has probably appeared in the magistrates' court by now. Of course, nobody tells me anything. They haven't the courtesy for that. His trial proper may not be for a long time.’ Mrs Cosway looked hard at me, then from one daughter to the other, as if expecting a chorus of support. ‘If it takes place at all.’
‘Don't be so cryptic, Mother,’ said Ella.
‘I was merely leading up to what must be a very shocking disclosure, Ella. I never have believed it necessary to call a spade a bloody shovel without preamble.’ There could be no mistaking from the way Mrs Cosway leaned towards me, lifting her head, that I was being particularly addressed. ‘It is most probable, indeed a foregone conclusion, that John will be found unfit to plead.’
The triumph in her face was chilling. ‘I don't know what that means,’ I said.
‘It's no good asking me.’ Mrs Cosway's assumed graciousness was quickly giving place to her usual manner. ‘I don't know the ins and outs of these things. All it means to me is that since John is in an advanced state of schizophrenia, in other words, he's stark mad, he won't be able to understand the charge or say whether he's guilty or not guilty or, probably, even remember what he's done. The trial will stop and he'll be sent to a prison for the criminally insane. There you are.’
I think that even Ida and Ella were shocked. This, after all, was John's mother talking. She seemed to read our faces.
‘Dr Lombard told me his trouble was brought on by a severe emotional shock. He always knew what he was talking about, he was a wonderful man. Possibly the birth of Ella. John wasn't the precious baby any more, you see. That was Dr Lombard's view and he was always right.’
Perhaps my ‘Really?’ sounded doubtful.
‘Please don't start arguing with me again, Kerstin. Dr Lombard was sure and that was quite enough for me. It should be enough for you.’
‘Why did you want me to come?’ I could easily have asked her this back in June. Seven months later it took a great deal of screwing up my courage. ‘Was it just to tell me this?’
‘Isn't it enough?’ It was a week since I had heard the Cosway laugh, the coughing bark, as often as not uttered with the mouth closed. Mrs Cosway laughed like this for a long while, shaking her head. ‘My purpose was principally to tell you that John will be unfit to plead. This will be something for you to tell all your new friends. And if you want an explanation I should ask that son of the house who brought you here. Oh, yes, Ida saw him from the hall window. He's a lawyer. Ask him.’
I did ask him. But first, of course, I said goodbye and thank you for the coffee, before escaping from that drawing room. I had been in there less than half an hour and wished very much I had asked Charles to wait or at least come back for me. A little way down the drive, Ella caught up with me. She had put on a pink parka with white fur or faux fur round hood and hem, a garment more suitable for skiing than the Essex countryside on a damp grey day. The tree branches hung quite still and thin shreds of mist wove themselves round their trunks. Grey and white toadstools like hats with frilled brims grew along the wet grass verge.
‘You can eat them, you know,’ Ella said, picking one and holding it up to my face. ‘They're quite harmless but people are such cowards, aren't they? Felix cooks fungus for himself. It doesn't cost anything, you see. Have you seen anything of him?’
The last thing I would have mentioned was my sighting of him and Zorah in the Lotus. ‘Have you?’
‘I think he's gone away. Not for good, I don't mean that. He'll be back. I don't think he's capable of love. What do you think?’
‘I don't know, Ella. I suppose everyone is capable of it.’
‘When John is sent to Broadmoor or wherever it is, I mean a place for the criminally insane, the house reverts to Mother for her life and the money comes to us. Well, it was never right that John had it.’
‘Wasn't it?’
‘If Felix knew I was going to have money of my own, do you think he'd come back to me?’
The morning had brought too many shocks. This last one had almost struck me dumb. I don't know how I would have answered her for, at that moment, Eric's car came up the hill and drew up beside us.
‘Goodness, I quite forgot he was coming to lunch,’ Ella said but she got into the passenger seat beside him and waved goodbye to me.
Alone and thankful to be, I considered what she had said and thought it quite possible that Felix might return to her when he knew about the money. Of course, whatever she got from the estate would be very little compared with what Zorah had but Zorah would never marry him. If he was a playboy or would have liked to be, then she was a playgirl and successful at it.
Charles told me a lot about an accused's fitness to plead. He said that the issue could be raised by the trial judge on his own initiative or at the request of the prosecution or the defence. If neither party does so, the judge should do so himself if he has doubts about the accused's fitness. If the issue is raised by either party, or the judge has doubts, the issue must be tried by a jury specially empanelled for the purpose. If it were decided that John was unfit to plead, an order would be made committing him to a hospital for the criminally insane.
‘Prison, really,’ said Charles. ‘His life in there would be hell on earth.’
‘How long for?’ I asked.
‘During Her Majesty's pleasure, is how they put it. For life is what it probably means.’
Those words stayed in my mind and whenever I was alone they surfaced. I fretted miserably about John, fearing I would have to go home to Sweden without knowing what his fate was to be. Then he came home. I heard the news no more than a few hours after he was brought back to Lydstep Old Hall, Jane running into the house to tell me.
I will never know if it was the diary or what I said to Strickland, John's love for the Roman vase, his unwounded hands or the cut hands of Ida and her mother, which released him. But at home he was, the police apparently having insufficient evidence to charge him with anything.
Once at Lydstep Old Hall, he seemed to me to be in danger from those two, though I wasn't able to formulate what they might realistically do to him. But Ella, at least, was in the house, for what that was worth. I had had dreadful misgivings about her, sometimes thinking she was losing her mind. Like some operatic heroine, a Lucia di Lammermoor perhaps, she was distraught and wandering, saying things that seemed scarcely sane, that she would camp on Felix's doorstep, she would kill him and herself.
She wanted to spend part of every day with me. Telling me repeatedly that I was her only friend and no one else cared about her, she still had some diffidence about invading White Lodge. Charles had gone back to London, James was up at his university and Gerald mostly out somewhere, but Jane was usually at home and Ella, insensitive as she was, couldn't fail to notice that she wasn't welcome. I too was made very aware of
the difficulties attendant on being a guest, even a very kindly received and wonderfully treated guest, in someone else's house. Not that I particularly wanted to see Ella but I longed to be free to see her. Jane made it very clear how deeply she disliked the Cosways. Also she had heard all about the scene at the Rectory gate, as had everyone else in the village, churchgoers or not.
‘Even Julia herself wouldn't have behaved like that,’ was her comment.
So Ella and I arranged to meet on neutral ground. There was a teashop in Windrose, the front part of it selling handicrafts and souvenirs no one ever seemed to buy, so depressing and shabby had they become over the years, and the back part a café with four sets of tables and chairs and a counter where the cakes under a glass dome looked as old as the souvenirs. There Ella and I had begun meeting either for morning coffee or afternoon tea. Ella wanted to vary our venue to take in the White Rose but there I was adamant, fearing another encounter with Felix.
‘I know he and I will never be together again, Kerstin,’ she said sadly. ‘It's just that I thought if we went to the pub I could look at him across the bar. I could just look at him and remember. He'll never see me in my bridesmaid's dress now, will he?’
‘How is John?’ I said. He was my concern and I wished passionately I could see him, though I knew the chances were that, like Felix and the pink silk dress, I never would.
‘I don't know,’ Ella said. She sounded impatient. ‘I hardly see him. He's in the library all the time.’
That pleased me. He was happier in there than I had ever seen him. I could imagine him trying to discover the square root of minus one, doing the theorems which soothed him, moving the hated Bible from Longinus's hands and replacing it with the works of one of those writers of classical antiquity. Who would replace it now Winifred was gone?
‘No one had been in there,’ said Ella, ‘since they came and took him away. Mother said there was a trail of blood leading into the middle bit but there wasn't. I looked. And there couldn't have been, you know, because John's hands weren't cut. She must know that now, though she's never said.’
