Hoping to see more of the Dunsford drama unfold, I decided to go to church in the morning. Several surprises awaited me. The geode was back on the table where I had first seen it, though Ella had apparently lost heart when it came to restoring the watercolours. In the hallway I found Mrs Cosway with Winifred, her shapeless trousers and jumper changed for a pinstriped suit and a small felt hat.
‘You're coming to church, are you, Kerstin? It's just as well Ida says she will take care of John then, isn't it?’
Mrs Cosway had a way of making blameless, even virtuous, behaviour sound self-indulgent. ‘I'll stay here if you like,’ I said. I had too little to do in this house as it was and had left her to accompany John on the previous day. But it was she who had told me to go with Ella and she who in the usual course of things never went to church. ‘I really don't have to go.’
‘No, no. You must go if you want to. Ida has volunteered.’
She said it with a sigh, as if my destination was a nightclub. Because she was with us we had to go in the car and as a result got to church very early. Ella had maintained her elegance, though the torturous sandals had been abandoned. We walked around the churchyard, looking at tombs. It was a warm sunny day and the flowers people had placed on relatives' graves were wilting in the heat. The others stopped in front of one on which a pink marble slab was engraved with the name John Henry Cosway and the dates 1830–1907. I was told that he was the discoverer of the geode but no one said anything about his being the founder of the labyrinth library.
Eric arrived in a rush, his cassock billowing and his face shiny with sweat. He paused to kiss Winifred on the cheek and I noticed that she wiped her face afterwards on her handkerchief, smearing it with brown and pink make-up. Her hair newly washed and glossy, her nails painted a silvery pink – to prevent further biting? – Ella watched her sister with a small superior smile.
As it happened, Felix failed to turn up. Events too intensely anticipated often fail to come off. Probably he felt he had exhausted the possibilities of church. Of the only pretty women he had encountered there, one was engaged and he had already begun his onslaught on the other. Dr Lombard arrived instead. He came in soon after we did. I was sitting in the aisle seat, Winifred next to me, Ella next to her and Mrs Cosway at the end. Perhaps they had arranged things that way for Dr Lombard to slip in next to his friend. A whispered conversation began between them, neither of them being among those who dropped to their knees for silent prayer, and when the service began they remained seated, their heads bowed and their eyes closed. On our way out, presumably because we were inside a place of worship, Dr Lombard told me that wedding cakes were shaped in pillared tiers like St Bride's, Fleet Street, because, long ago, a baker had made one which was a small replica of the church for a marriage reception and created a precedent.
Eric came back to Lydstep with us, bringing Winifred in his car. I wrote in the diary that night that looking at the house as we approached, I thought of how it would be transformed when the leaves fell from the Virginia creeper. Then, instead of cloaked in trembling green, its brickwork would be covered in some sort of web, formed by myriad tendrils. Grey, green or brown? All such thoughts were banished by the sight of a white-faced Ida running down the front steps when she heard the cars.
‘What's the matter?’ Mrs Cosway struggled out of the car, needing Ella's hand to help her get on to her feet. ‘What's wrong?’
‘It's John. He's had a fit.’
We hurried in, I at least having no idea what form this sort of fit might have taken. John was nowhere to be seen. Ida looked at her mother, then at the great heavy sofa, its arms and the frame of its back of carved wood, its upholstery a gingery-brown corduroy. This, it seemed, was familiar territory to Mrs Cosway.
‘Give me a hand, would you, Kerstin?’
For a woman of her age she was very strong. I had helped her move the sofa a little way away from the wall before I fully realized what she was doing. When I saw John I stepped back and I think she saw from my face that I would refuse to expose him further to Eric's aghast gaze and that of his sisters. He was sitting on the floor in the triangle made by the slope of the sofa back and the wall, and he must have squeezed with difficulty but perhaps in extreme stress into this narrow gap. His arms were wrapped round his knees, his head laid on them but turned towards us, and his face was white and wet with tears. I have never seen a face, not even a child's, so drenched with tears, so dripping with water from his red and swollen eyes.
‘What did you do to him?’ Mrs Cosway spoke in a thin, tired voice.
Ida shrugged. ‘I touched him. I didn't mean to. I must have been mad. He suddenly said out of the blue that he'd like to do a crossword puzzle, the one in the paper. I was so pleased. I thought how he hadn't said anything like that for ages and I – oh, I took hold of his hands and squeezed them and he screamed and got in there and – oh, I must have been mad.’
‘As you say, you must have been. It's too late now. I don't know why you said “a fit”. He hasn't had a fit.’
‘The only thing to do, Eric,’ said Winifred, as if he had asked, ‘is just to leave him there until he comes out in his own good time.’
‘But he's weeping.’ I thought it strange that Eric said ‘weeping’ instead of ‘crying’. A biblical usage perhaps?
‘Hadn't we better put the sofa back?’ I said.
Eric helped me and we shoved it back to where it had been before. John made no sound at all. Suddenly recalling her omission, Mrs Cosway said, ruefully but not with much distress, ‘I suppose I forgot to give him his tablet. It's happened once or twice before. But I'm glad you've seen it, Kerstin. Perhaps this will cure you of thinking you know better than I where John's medicine is concerned.’
I was taken aback. It was only once that I had ventured to dispute the need for giving him a pill, and that had been a barbiturate, not the Largactil. Had there been something in my face to show her, when she handed him the sleep drug in the evenings, that I disapproved? Had she read my ‘thinking’ in my expression?
John would have no walk that day. We ate our lunch without him. He remained where he was for hours, Mrs Cosway remarking as she went off to her afternoon sleep that he had no sense of time. While I helped Ida with the dishes, an operation conducted in almost total silence, Winifred and Eric went outside and sat in deckchairs under the mulberry tree, he with a corner-knotted handkerchief spread over his face, she reading, like an elderly couple on the beach.
Ella said to me, ‘Come into my room, I've something to tell you.’
I hoped for great things, though scarcely of so sensational a nature, and I went very willingly up into Ella's pink bedroom with its frills and its doll inhabitants. The first time I had seen them I had been alone with Mrs Cosway. Now seemed the time to comment on them.
‘You dressed all these yourself?’
‘Well, yes. Do you like them?’
‘They're beautifully done,’ I said diplomatically.
‘You might not think me keen on fashion, the way I slop around at weekends, but I actually love it when there's someone to notice. Now I'll open the window, it's really hot today, isn't it, and we'll make ourselves comfy and have a nice drink and a cigarette.’
She produced a bottle of rosé, a very fashionable drink and her favourite. I expected it to be warm but she had kept it in a cold dark cupboard and it was pleasantly cool. We lit cigarettes.
‘You must be wondering what I'm going to say.’
I smiled encouragingly.
‘Oh, don't worry,’ she said. ‘It won't affect you in any way. It's our cross. I mean, the cross we have to bear. Not Winifred much longer, of course, and maybe not me either. Who knows?’
She must have meant rescue by Felix. An English proverb exists about counting one's chickens before they are hatched. I think there should be one about sterile eggs and no chickens ever coming out of them.
But, ‘It's about my father's will,’ she said.
I had intended to ask Mark next time I was in London how I could discover that will's contents. Now I might hardly need to.
‘You'll be wondering how it can concern you and why I should want to tell you family secrets. Well, a will isn't private, it has to be published – thank you, Ella, I thought ‘– so a secret it's not. We do have those – she laughed a little hysterically ‘– but this isn't one of them. It's just that I imagine you must find a lot of things here rather – well, odd. I thought they ought to be cleared up.’
I assumed an interested expression, though not one as avid and fascinated as I felt. It is unwise in these circumstances to look greedy.
‘My father and mother weren't on very good terms. That's making it sound better than it was. They were on very bad terms and had been for some time. I don't know why unless it was something to do with Dr Lombard.’ She changed tack abruptly. ‘John was quite a normal little boy or so they say. He's two years older than I am. He had mumps when he was five and I think that's what changed him. Dr Lombard says no but he doesn't know everything, though he thinks he does. Whatever happened, it didn't make him stupid. He could do amazing algebra problems and that kind of thing.
‘Well, Daddy had made a will, leaving everything including the house to Mother, but something happened to make him change it. He made a completely new will in which he left Mother an annuity and everything else including the house to John. Mother has a life interest in the house but it belongs to John, so neither of them can sell it.’
‘What about the rest of you?’ I said.
‘He thought we'd all get married. That was what he expected women to do and the only real career for them. Zorah was married. He couldn't understand it, that the plainest and youngest of us got married first. Of course what Raymond Todd – that was her husband – liked about her was her brain and her style. All his wives had been clever. The second one was quite a distinguished physicist.
‘As I say, he thought we'd get married and our husbands would keep us.’ Ella gave the Cosway coughing laugh. ‘Ida's engagement was broken off within weeks of his death. I had a chap but there was no chance of him marrying and the one after him was married already. I expect you thought I was a virgin.’
I said not quite truthfully that I hadn't thought about it.
‘Well, I'm not. I suppose Winifred is but I dare say Eric is too. My God, but that'll be some wedding night. I'm digressing, aren't I? I was telling you about the will. Daddy left everything to John on well, certain conditions. That would mean we'd have to ask him for what we wanted – I think he meant we'd have to treat him properly – and in point of fact that means asking the trustees. Daddy set up a trust for John, you see. If he wants something he has to ask the trustees, they're Daddy's nephew Adam, who's a heart specialist, and Daddy's solicitor, Mr Salt, and the son of an old friend of his called Jerome Prance. And Mother. Mr Salt insisted he included Mother but the others always outvote her so her being there isn't much use.
‘John asked for money to spend on impossible things. A sports car, for instance, and then he wanted a boat. The trustees let him have the car and he crashed it into a wall in Great Cornard. I said there were conditions. Daddy thought John would die young, so the will says that if he dies before Mother or if he has to be committed to an institution the house goes to her for her lifetime and the money between those of us who remained unmarried. But only if it's some outside authority that commits him, not if it's Mother. Everything goes to John if she dies first – unless he's in an institution, that is – and passes to us on his death or our children if we're dead. I shouldn't think there'd be any children, would you?’
‘Money must be provided for John's upkeep,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, for all our upkeep really. Mother has to send our food bills to the trustees and bills for Ida's clothes – Ida has literally nothing and Winifred only what she gets paid for cooking that stuff for people – and plumbers' and electricians' bills. There aren't any extras, though. We never have holidays – how could we with John? I suppose Eric and Winifred will go to the seaside for a fortnight every year now. Of course Zorah's got her house in Italy and she goes all over the world as well.
‘John doesn't like being touched and he freaks out, goes crazy, if anyone tries to kiss him. That's a disaster. And he's had fits, real fits. About five years ago Mother started drugging him to keep him quiet. He used to shut himself in the downstairs lavatory for hours on end. It was worse when he shut himself in the library. He loves the library but he'd throw the books about. Mother got it into her head he'd set the house on fire, though he'd never showed the least inclination to that sort of thing. But that was when she and Dr Lombard started the drugs. She gets them from Dr Lombard, it's all above board, they're prescribed for schizophrenics.’
‘Those drugs have been continuous for five years?’
‘There have been times when she's – well, withdrawn them. I may as well tell you why. Zorah's very fond of John, she said it was wrong what Mother was doing. If John needed that kind of dosage he ought to be in a proper mental hospital under supervision.’
‘And Mrs Cosway did what Zorah told her? Just like that?’
‘My mother wouldn't cross Zorah. Zorah – gives her things. Well, money mostly. All the drink in the house comes from her and all the decent food. She pays for Mrs Lilly. The trust wouldn't, not with four women in the house already, they said. She's promised to buy me a new car – well, us a new car – and she will but in her own good time. I suppose she likes keeping us in suspense. Anyway, you can see why Mother wouldn't go against her. Not while she's here, that is.’
‘Does she pay me?’ I said, thinking that if she did I would be obliged to go. I could hardly stay and be party to this bribe and threat game.
But Ella shook her head. She produced a mother-of-pearl inlaid box full of coloured ‘cocktail’ cigarettes. I fancied a black one, she, of course, pink.
‘John pays you. That is, the trust does. Zorah told Mother to lay off the drugs again and see what happened, try an experiment. It actually worked for a few days, he was quite lucid and ordinary, doing his maths again and reading the papers. He told my mother she ought to have help and that's when he got Ida to apply to the trust for – well, for you. I don't think Mother was keen but there wasn't much she could do. John got bad again soon after that, having tantrums and locking himself in the downstairs loo. You'll say Mother and Dr Lombard could have him committed and that would solve a lot of problems.’
I interrupted her to say with perfect truth and indignation that I wouldn't say it.
‘Oh, well, most people would. Daddy was too cunning for that. As I said, my mother only gets the house and the money if John's committed to a mental hospital by an outside authority. That means two doctors and one of them has to be a psychiatrist.’
The prospect of human villainy shocked me in those days. I'm sorry to say that it seldom does now. By the time you get to my age you have seen too much of it to feel anything but sad. But at that time I was very shockable and showed it with a stare and an exclamation.
‘My God, Ella!’
She had a greater capacity for getting the wrong end of the stick than anyone I have ever known. ‘Yes, it's tough on Mother, isn't it? I try to remember that when she's being nasty. She's got a lot to put up with.’
Long after this, my husband, who is a lawyer, though not a solicitor, told me that he doubted if this will would ever stand up in court in the event of anyone contesting it. More than that, he said he wondered what kind of a solicitor this Mr Salt was that he could draw up such a will. It seemed to me at the time only that the Cosways were subject to some very shady advisers, first Dr Lombard and then this Mr Salt, who had also managed to get himself made a trustee.
Still, it wasn't for me to say any of this to Ella. It would have done no good and caused great offence. I asked instead about the library. And since she had offered to take me in there, I could confess that I had already been in with Zorah. When I did she made a face, poured us more wine.
‘John used to spend hours in there, moving the books and rearranging them. It got too much for Mother. He started taking books out and piling them on the floor so you had to step over them to move around and sometimes you couldn't because he'd built a wall of them. And he didn't like the Bible being there – you know, the one Longinus is holding – and he'd take it down and replace it with something he did like. Once it was Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica. He said he was a militant atheist.’
‘John?’ I said, thinking of the poor zombie downstairs.
‘Yes, John. Honestly. Look, Mother's asleep, Ida's in the kitchen and Winifred won't care. Why don't we go down to the library now?’
Now the shock of it was past, I could look at the books the library contained. It was full of treasures, enough desirable books to last me the whole year. Victorian novels by such obscure (to me) authors as Sabine Baring Gould and Mrs Henry Wood filled a whole wall in that passage I had taken to enter the central square. There was The Origin of Species in what may have been a first edition, Paley's Evidences, Gosse's Omphale and Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. There were thousands I had never heard of before and have never come across since.
Another wall, this one in a passage I was nearly sure I had not passed along before, was devoted to the works of philosophers, and one at a right angle to it, to mathematics. Though fairly quick at mental arithmetic, I am hopeless at maths but I know enough to be sure these were not the intellectual recourse of Mrs Cosway or her daughters. Trying not to look at the nightmare face of a stone Milton, I took down Euclid's Elements, brushed, then blew the thick dust off its cover, and brought it under one of the dim lights. John Cosway, his book, 1938 was written in a strong but strange hand on the flyleaf. As I turned the (to me) incomprehensible pages a folded sheet of yellowing paper fell out. In the same handwriting it was headed Euclidean Algorithm and underneath John had written, it was undoubtedly John, the technique used to find the largest natural number that divides (with zero remainder) two given natural numbers. Repeated use of the division algorithm finds this number, called the greatest common divisor.
Now I don't know if there is anything particularly intellectually challenging about this, only that it was so to me, but evidently not to John, who had written underneath a series of numbers and finally one which he called this greatest common divisor. If this paper was written at the same date as his name was put in the book he was nine years old at the time.
I could only think that there must be a mistake somewhere but speculation when one is in possession of so few facts is useless. My companion this time wore the look of a woman gleeful at bringing a delightful surprise to someone else, quite different from Zorah's supercilious expression.
‘It's amazing,’ I said, pleasing her.
Dante, I seemed to remember, was conducted by Virgil round the infernal regions and I wondered if his guide enjoyed himself as much as Ella seemed to enjoy taking me round the labyrinth library.
‘If you come on your own,’ she said, ‘you'll have to bring a ball of wool and unravel it behind you like what's-his-name in that place in Crete.’
Did they all say that when they brought in a visitor? Still, it must happen seldom. She had told me so much, yet so little. So few mysteries had been solved. There seemed to me then to be a life going on in this family and this house underneath the existence they presented to the world and me, a secret force like that which Eric had described that morning as the workings by which God subdues all things to himself.
We made our way back to the double doors, along the narrow and tortuous passages where books themselves were the bricks and mortar forming the walls. That dust itself has a smell was a discovery I made that afternoon. I learnt too how claustrophobia may suddenly come into being in someone who has never known it before. Without being exactly difficult, breathing became something of an effort and panic fluttered under the mind's surface. Coming out of there and into the hot sunshine of the garden was more than relief, it was like stepping into another world.
Ella had gone to put the key back behind the amphitheatre engraving. I was alone, breathing deeply, relishing the light and the warmth, the grass and the green branches swaying in the breeze.