But for Mark's proposal and my refusal, I would have left Lydstep Old Hall that very evening. But I couldn't go to the man I had said no to and tell him I had changed my mind and would he take me in? And there was another reason for staying. Along with my refusal of John, I had found myself feeling tender towards him in a way I had never been before. Though I could do nothing for him while I was there except respect him and his wishes, I felt there would be a kind of betrayal in deserting him just when what he had asked me seemed to indicate a need I had never before suspected.
So I forced myself to come down that evening and the next day and the next and try to behave as if nothing had happened. This was hard because Mrs Cosway seemed to blame me for John's behaviour, while several times I caught Winifred staring at me in wonder as if she was amazed by her brother's choice or was speculating as to what I had done to deserve it. Perhaps she, like her mother, thought my red hair a grave disadvantage in the attraction stakes. Ella had heard, probably from her, about John's very public proposal and was so enthralled by the whole idea that she wanted to talk about it all the time, trying to lure me with offers of rosé and chocolates to her room, where I was expected to analyse John's feelings and my own. I resisted most of it but the very act of resistance made me tired and exasperated.
The cold weather came back and we had a heavy snowfall. Driving was impossible until the snow-ploughs came out and cleared the roads. I was used to snow at home and had brought a pair of padded waterproof boots with me, new to English eyes and pronounced by Winifred to be ‘not very elegant’. These boots enabled me to get down into Windrose and do the shopping, which I brought up from the village on an old toboggan I found in one of the outbuildings and dragged up the hill behind me. Apart from the kitchen boiler, the open fire in the drawing room and the two new electric heaters, Lydstep Old Hall was now to be heated by paraffin stoves, fetched by Ida from the ‘boot room’. I had never before seen anything like these black cylinders that Mrs Cosway called ‘lamps' and which were fuelled by paraffin. This was among the items I was asked to bring back from the village, told by Ida to buy the kind which was coloured pink because blue paraffin smelt. The pink smelt quite strongly enough to me. Its powerful chemical reek, even less pleasant than the smell of petrol, spread through the whole house with no chance of escape as all the windows were kept firmly shut against the cold. Mrs Cosway switched off the ‘electric fires’, as she called them, whenever she was near one, on the principle that using them would overload the system and the house would catch fire.
No one else went out. In a way I thought opposed to all her usual habits, Mrs Cosway built up her strength by flexing the foot she had injured and describing circles with both feet. It was a kind of physiotherapy formulated by herself and it seemed to work. She had always been thin and upright. Now her strength was coming back. She told Winifred this was a regime for getting herself fit for the wedding. Winifred received all such remarks and good wishes with indifference, barely smiling. If anyone pressed the point she said, ‘Let's get Christmas over first.’
A lot of people I encountered on my shopping trips to Windrose talked like this, making the feast which I had always loved into a burden and speaking about it as if it were an ordeal to get through before the business of normal living could resume. Only Ella spoke of Christmas with a childlike thrill in her voice. As the cold intensified and, after a brief thaw, nightly frosts closed in on us, John sought refuge in the airing cupboard or, with two paraffin heaters in the drawing room and the fire built up high, huddled himself inside a sleeping bag Ella had found in one of those rooms off the kitchen I had passed through on my first morning there. He never again referred to his proposal. He took no more or less notice of me than he had ever done. This didn't stop Mrs Cosway taking up a station by his chair when her pacing was over for the day. She brought an upright chair for herself and sat there, stitching at the tapestry, as if protecting him from some onslaught I might make.
One evening when I went into the dining room to switch on the electric heater half an hour before dinner, Winifred was in there making a phone call. I left the room at once but not before I had seen from her guilty look and darting eyes that Ella was wrong and she had been telling Mike at the Rose that this was Tamara with a message for Felix. Zorah too stayed at home, though scarcely showing herself. A male friend of hers appeared, turning up in a jeep-like vehicle high above the snow. She must have given him a key to the house for, though I saw him arrive, the front-door bell never rang and no one came to let him in. Late that evening, when I went up to bed, I heard laughter from behind her door and the sound of music. There was a heavy fall of snow that night and the visitor's car, buried in a drift, became an igloo by morning. He stayed up there with Zorah for another twenty-four hours, finally dug his car out on Christmas Eve and drove away.
This had always been Christmas to me, as it is in much of the continent of Europe, and it came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to find that in England it was nothing more than the eve of the Great Feast. A time of last-minute preparations, cooking, present-wrapping, cake-decorating, table-laying, but not of festivity. Eric came, bringing Felix with him, and the two of them joined Winifred in the kitchen to drink sherry while she mixed stuffing, iced the cake and made crumbs from a white loaf for bread sauce. I went out there at one point to fetch a hot drink for Mrs Cosway and found Winifred flushed and laughing, obviously excited at being the focus of attention for not one but two men, she who until quite recently had been on the shelf and heading for old maidhood.
‘The silent guy’, as Felix always referred to John, had begun to treat him with antagonism. This would have mattered not at all but for Winifred's determination that her brother and her lover must like each other. I have noticed this phenomenon since in families, when a woman is so besotted with a boyfriend that she expects all her relations and everyone she knows to admire him as she does. But with a man like John, certainly not insane but suffering from a peculiar mental condition, she ought to have known better. She had no more chance of success with John than she had with her mother. At least Mrs Cosway was coldly polite to Felix. John could only express his true feelings, egocentric, indifferent to others' sensibilities, insensitive, isolationist, for this was Asperger's unchangeable nature. I believe Winifred still thought, as I once had, that now the medication was in the past, he would gradually become like everyone else.
This would never happen, and when the men came into the drawing room, each holding a newly refilled sherry glass, John, who had been working out some mathematical puzzle with paper, pencil and magnifying glass, looked up and said to Felix, ‘You're drunk.’
Winifred, inheritor of her mother's short fuse, screamed at him to shut up – how dared he speak like that? I half-expected Felix to laugh but his vanity had been hurt and perhaps he was aware that the accusation was not far off the truth. He scowled and said, ‘Thank you very much. You don't pull your punches.’
While Eric was muttering, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, how very unfortunate,’ Winifred began playing the difficult game of apologizing to Felix and scolding John at the same time, managing a sweet smile in one direction and a ferocious frown in the other, rather like the masks of comedy and tragedy you see in theatres.
‘There's no use making a fuss about it,’ Mrs Cosway said. ‘It's been said and now you might as well forget it.’ She addressed Eric. ‘If only Pontius Pilate had given one the tablets Selwyn Lombard prescribed none of this would have happened.’
‘It isn't too late, you know,’ Winifred said to her brother. ‘There are other doctors. You could be back on it next week and it won't be up to you. It will be Mother's decision.’ She turned to Felix and said in a scathing tone, ‘Asking Kerstin to marry him! That's the kind of thing that happens when he's deprived of his medicine.’
I didn't like this but there was nothing I could do. Throughout it all John had been half-buried as he always was these days in sleeping bag, quilts and blankets. Trailing them behind him, hitching them up as he went and still clutching the magnifying glass, he shuffled across to the high-backed sofa and crawled into the three-sided cave between it and the wall. A pink satin eiderdown effectively blocked the opening behind him. Everyone but Felix knew he would be there for hours, possibly all night.
Mark had gone to his parents in Shropshire. We hadn't met since that weekend when he proposed to me but this was as much due to the snow as to any awkwardness between us. Next morning I was due at White Lodge to spend a day and a night and a day with the Trintowels. Determined not to dwell morbidly on Winifred's remark, I fiercely pushed her words out of my mind. But what took its place wasn't much improvement. I went to bed early, thinking how absurd it was that I, who was quite without any religious faith, should be feeling melancholy and lonely because for once I was deprived of a Christmas Eve celebration with my parents and my brother and sister. I found it hard to sleep and I was still awake when Eric brought Winifred back from the midnight service of lessons and carols.
I had bought small gifts for Jane and Gerald Trintowel but nothing for the Cosways and I was surprised when Ella knocked on my door at eight in the morning with a present for me.
‘No one can sleep properly the night before Christmas, can they?’ she said. ‘So I didn't think you'd mind me bringing this bright and early.’
Not to be outdone and thinking fast, I gave her the gift of soap and perfume which was an extra I had wrapped up for Jane in addition to their wine and chocolates. Years later I told Jane. She smiled and said it was just as well as she had always disliked that particular scent.
‘I want to laugh,’ she said, ‘but I can't when it's anything to do with that family. It seems wrong to think of them in any way but tragic.’
Ella gave me a doll. It was smaller than those in her bedroom, a twenty-centimetre-tall blonde of the Barbie type in a short yellow dress and knee boots.
‘It's a Courrèges copy. I must say I'm rather proud of her boots. I made them out of the fingers of Mother's gloves. I'm keeping my fingers crossed she won't decide she needs them.’
I still have that doll. It is ugly and absurd and I would never have dreamt of putting it on show in any home of mine but somehow I can't throw it away. My daughter found it when she was a little girl and wanted to play with it. I refused – not because I ever treasured it but because of where it came from and the dreadful events associated with it. Thirty-five years later it is as clean and its clothes as exquisitely made as when Ella gave it to me in my bedroom at Lydstep Old Hall, as the sun coming up over Windrose coloured the fields of snow with her favourite pink.
With his bedclothes and his magnifying glass, John had buried himself behind the sofa for eighteen hours. Twice he had come out to go to the lavatory and on each occasion, she told me, Ida had been worried that he would lock himself in and carry on his vigil or strike or whatever it was from there.
‘There is nothing to be done, I suppose,’ she said. ‘If I take the key away it's going to be so embarrassing for guests not being able to lock themselves in. Did you have a good time?’
I said it had been very nice, thank you.
‘They've got two sons, haven't they? The younger one used to play the organ in church in the days when I went. I met the older one once. D'you know, Kerstin, I'd have thought he'd be just your type.’
She was right but of course I didn't say so, if I even knew it then. ‘I've got a boyfriend,’ I said.
The question of the hour – of several days to come in fact – was who was to give Winifred away. Apparently, in the absence of her father, some male relative of the bride or family friend had to do this and Winifred might have fixed on an uncle or the nephew who was one of the John Cosway Trust trustees. But the Lydstep Old Hall people, with the exception of Zorah, had fallen out with them and relations were now confined entirely to business.
‘Of course John ought to do it,’ Winifred had remarked during Christmas lunch while her brother was still behind the sofa. ‘He could have done if he'd still had his medicine. He'd have bumbled through it all right.’
Her mother told her not to be silly and Eric was very shocked. Ella, who told me about it, said, ‘So Mother said she assumed she was going to do it. It was surely possible for a woman to give her daughter away and Eric said, yes, it was, and it would be quite suitable. And then what do you think happened? You'd never guess in a million years. Winifred said, “Why shouldn't Felix give me away? He's a family friend and he's Eric's friend. I thought it would be nice for him to be Eric's best man but George Cusp is up for that, so why shouldn't he give me away?” Well, Mother was absolutely furious, she said she'd never heard of anything so preposterous and if that happened she wouldn't even go to the wedding.’
I asked Ella what the person who gave away the bride would have to do and say.
‘He isn't supposed to say anything. He goes with the bride to the church and takes her arm up the aisle – you see how John couldn't possibly have done it. The parson – it'll be the Archdeacon – says, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” and he doesn't say anything, just stands there, but most get it wrong and say, “I do,” and then he walks away and sits down and the bridegroom says that bit about taking thee to my wedded wife. Well, Winifred got quite excited at her idea and when we'd finished the Christmas pudding and Ida was handing round chocolates, she got the Prayer Book and she and Felix started going through it together, their heads touching if you can believe it, and laughing and reading bits out. I don't know what Eric thought but he didn't say anything. Felix read out the bit about the minister “receiving the woman at her father's or friend's hand” and said that was clear enough. It meant he was more suitable than Mother because there was nothing about the minister receiving Winifred at her mother's hands.’
‘So what happened in the end?’
‘Well, nothing really. Eric said it wasn't necessary to have anyone to give a bride away and it was time to change the subject. He seemed a bit uneasy by that time.’
I asked her why Winifred wanted Felix.
‘I see it as a symbol,’ said Ella. ‘It means she's giving him up to get married. He's giving her up to another man. You'll say it's in very bad taste and I'd agree but it's what a father does in a sort of way.’
‘In a sort of way,’ I said.
Zorah hadn't been with them at lunch but appeared in the afternoon, beautifully dressed, her hair done in a new way and wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes ‘I'd have given years off my life for’, said Ella. Having put away a ‘vast amount’ of the sherry, burgundy and brandy, all of it provided by Zorah, Felix had fallen asleep, sprawled out in the armchair where John usually sat. Mrs Cosway was also asleep, Eric dozing and Winifred lying back with closed eyes, fairly typical it seemed for any English family on Christmas afternoon. Zorah looked carefully at Felix, walking round him and putting her head on one side, like someone studying an unusual specimen of wildlife.
Though she said very little, John must have heard her voice for he came out at last, dragging his bedclothes with him.
‘Felix was asleep in his chair and that made John angry, said Ella. ‘He stood over him, staring. It was awful. I thought he was going to hit him but Felix woke up. John said, “You're in my chair. Get up,” and Felix did, very quickly. Winifred told John never to behave like that again, which was absurd, you know, because it's always useless saying anything like that to him. Zorah started laughing when John said what he said and then she told him not to forget she'd be driving him to London in the middle of next week to see the specialist. Then Mother said, “Let's see if he puts you back on your Largactil.”
‘Felix left soon after that. He hadn't taken offence, I don't mean that. He said he'd enjoy the walk home, it would clear his head. But I know him and I think he was going straight to the pub. They'd just opened. But I think Winifred is giving him up,’ said Ella, ‘or he's giving her up. After the wedding Felix will just be Eric's best friend until some new person comes to Windrose.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you think he'll come back to me?’
‘Surely you wouldn't want him?’ I should have known better.
‘Oh, yes, I would, Kerstin. I'm not proud. I know he's a drunk and faithless and he'll never be successful but I love him.’
Zorah had taken John to Sudbury for an eye test a week before Christmas and he was promised new glasses. The day before he was due to go to London with her I too went there and spent the afternoon and evening with Mark, returning on the last train.
He looked very serious when I told him of the latest Cosway troubles. ‘I think you ought to leave,’ he said. ‘It sounds as if something nasty is going to happen.’
‘What sort of something nasty?’
‘I don't know and I may be quite wrong. I don't understand why you want to stay on.’
‘Don't you?’ I said.
‘If you mean because of what I asked you, you can still come and share this room. If you don't want me to I'll never mention marriage again. I'm in love with you but I won't mention that either.’
On the way back in the train I thought about taking up his offer. I could wait until Zorah had taken John to London, Ella was at her sewing, Winifred at the Rectory – or The Studio? – and Ida being a housewife, and then break the news to Mrs Cosway. Only one doesn't break good news and I was sure she would be pleased. It would be a relief. It meant nothing to her that I took half the work off Ida's shoulders. Ida could manage on her own. She always had before I came.
Things would be better, I thought (and wrote down when I got back to Lydstep) after Winifred had gone. The constant sparring between her and Ella would be over and Felix would no longer come there; I was sure Ella was wrong and he wouldn't return to her, not that when he was ‘hers' he had ever made that plain in public. No, he would become, for a while, a frequent visitor at the Rectory, neither he nor Winifred betraying by a glance or a catching of eyes or exchanged half-smiles that they had ever been more to each other than friendly acquaintances. So I was thinking as the train came to a stop at Marks Tey, and because rain was falling, washing away the snow, I was obliged to take an expensive taxi back to Lydstep.
There was one week to go before the wedding. Winifred asked me if I would like to hear her banns called for ‘the third time of asking’. I had no idea what banns were or what asking meant in this context; she explained and told me too that Eric wouldn't be calling his own banns (perhaps this wasn't allowed, I don't know) but the vicar of the next parish would do it as he had done on the two previous occasions. In the event, I, Mrs Cosway, Ella and Winifred all went to church, while Ida stayed at home to be with John, happier with his new glasses and able to dispense with the magnifying glass.
I read in the paper the other day, thirty-five years later, that the publishing of banns of marriage is likely to disappear along with other Church ‘reforms’. I don't know why and maybe there is no good reason. It was pleasing to hear the ancient formula spoken by Mr Moxon from St John's, Lydstel le Grand, as he asked us, all thirty or so of us, if we knew ‘cause, or any just impediment, why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony’. It made me think of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester's wedding and the first wife's brother speaking up to tell of the impediment, but Eric had no first wife and the bride having a lover is no cause for not refusing to join two persons together in matrimony. Felix was there, sitting where he had sat that Sunday in summer when Winifred had reproved him for his clothes, and when the organist, who wasn't a patch on James Trintowel, struck up ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’, sang as lustily as he had done before.
I thought of John and his proposal. He was a single man, a ‘bachelor of this parish’, and I was a single woman. We were free and there was no impediment to stop us marrying. If it was what John wanted he could have spoken the responses, said the words. Recalling the terms of Mr Cosway's will, I could see why Mrs Cosway was worried and why she sat close by John to protect him from his predatory carer.
The Church of England fascinated me then. Now it only disappoints me. In those days I used to marvel at an institution dedicated to a religion where no one seemed to believe in God and everyone believed passionately in ritual and rubric. It was my first visit for some weeks and I watched, rapt, as some knelt, some remained sitting, all closed their eyes in prayer, some crossed themselves while others witnessed the crossing disapprovingly, some sang ‘Hallelujah!’, others ‘Alleluia!’ and all gave a kind of court bow, dipping their heads, when the Creed was said and the words ‘Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord’ were reached. I don't know why. I didn't then and I don't know now. Were their minds devoutly full of Christ's passion, his suffering, his descent into hell, and his mystical resurrection? Or did they think of the roasting joint and whether their neighbours would be coming back after church for sherry?
Eric was to come to the Hall for lunch. This had been the usual arrangement for weeks by then but this time Felix wouldn't be with him. There was something formal, I thought, almost ceremonial in the way he said goodbye to Winifred, taking both her hands in his and, to everyone's surprise, not least her own, kissing her cheek. In the days of Ella's ascendancy there had been nothing like this and as I watched them the puzzle of why Felix seemed to prefer the older sister was solved. For all her prissy ways, her apparent devoutness and her Sunday school-teacherish way of talking, Winifred gave off a charge of sexual energy entirely absent from Ella. I felt it then, a powerful sexiness in the way she breathed and the gaze of her eyes and the parting of her painted lips. If I could feel it, how much more must Felix? He had awakened this in her, he must have done, for I am sure it wasn't there before.
She wanted him to come back to the Hall with her. Without him her day was spoilt. She had only Eric, an encumbrance and a nuisance as well, a stumbling block to any plans she might make, but an inescapable and in some ways desired fate. She had to have a husband. Without a husband, she was no better than Ida or Ella, an old maid, a spinster. But did she have to give up Felix?
Because I wouldn't be at the wedding, I was to be shown Winifred's dress, a special treat. It was a classic bridal gown, of white silk and having about it those special wedding-dress features you never seem to see in connection with any other kind of costume, points on the long sleeves that extend over the hand, a standup collar like a calla lily, a train which would be carried up the aisle by Ella or June Prothero and which would make the dress unwearable on any subsequent occasion. The headdress which went with it was rather like those worn in portraits by Elizabethan ladies and which always seemed to be shaped like a gable on the front of a house. A veil would be attached to float down Winifred's back.
It was absurd, of course, all of it was, not least because this kind of regalia was once designed for a young virgin being delivered from her father's hands into her husband's. Winifred would be forty-one a week after the wedding and a man who was not her future husband had recently been her lover. And it was true that a few months before, in the heavy make-up and the dirty-fingernails days, these clothes would have seemed grotesquely unsuitable for her. She would have been taking a risk in wearing them lest she set off giggling in the church. Not so by the time I saw them. Her natural good looks had come into their own, she had shed years off her age and there was a spring in her step. She had become young, six or seven years older than I was; through love or sex or something of that sort, she had regained her youth. She would no longer disgrace that gown and it would no longer show her up for a fool without taste or judgement.
Winifred had been abroad very little so she was excited, or seemed to be, about the prospect of her unknown honeymoon destination. For once Eric was doing the romantic thing and taking her away to a holiday place he refused to reveal.
‘You can tell me,’ said Mrs Cosway ‘I won't give the secret away.’
‘It will be much easier for you not to if you don't know,’ said Eric.
‘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.