Minotaur

Kerstin Kvist enters crumbling Lydstep Old Hall to live with the Cosways and to act as nurse to John: a grown man fed drugs by his family to control his lunatic episodes. But John's strangeness is grotesquely mirrored in that of his four sisters who roam the dark, mazy Essex country house under the strict gaze of eighty-year-old Mrs Cosway. Despite being treated as an outsider, Kerstin is nevertheless determined to help John. But she soon discovers that there are others in the family who are equally as determined that John remain isolated, for sinister reasons of their own ... Extract Mark's sister-in-law Isabel Croft got me the job. She had been at school with the youngest Cosway girl. 'Zorah won't be living at home any longer,' she said when I asked her to tell me about the family. 'I don't really know who will. Ida, certainly. She housekeeps for them. Her two other sisters I never knew well. They may have married or gone to live elsewhere. The house actually belongs to John.' 'The one I'm to have charge of? He's schizophrenic, is that right?' 'I don't know,' she said. '"Charge" is rather a strange word to use.' 'Mrs Cosway's,' I said, 'not mine.' 'I never heard a name for what's wrong with John,' Isabel said. 'It rather puzzles me - but there, I expect Mrs Cosway knows what she's talking about. There's a trust to administer the estate. It's a strange business, something to do with the way Mr Cosway left things in his will. I don't suppose you want to know the details. His marriage had gone wrong, I think, and he and Mrs Cosway hardly spoke to each other in his last years. Mrs Cosway was always nice to me but she is rather a difficult woman. Well, you'll see. The house is very big but they keep some of the rooms shut up.' I asked her what she was going to say about being puzzled. She hadn't finished her sentence. 'I was going to say I wouldn't have thought John needed looking after. You've been a nurse and he didn't need a nurse when I knew him. Of course he sometimes behaved strangely but he never did any harm. But I don't really know.' There were so many things she didn't say. Most of them she simply knew nothing about. The Cosways were good at keeping things hidden - from other people and one another.
In the novels of the nineteenth century which I had read while studying English, girls taking posts in country families are always met at the nearest station by some old retainer with a pony and trap. No such offer had been made to me. The Cosways had neither retainer nor pony and the one car they possessed was used by Ella Cosway to go to work. I took a taxi. There were always taxis outside Colchester station and still are for all I know. The route it followed has been much built up since then and the old road has become a three-lane highway. We drove along winding lanes, some of them narrow, for part of the way following the valley of the River Colne, passing the gates of several great houses. I had read a little about the architecture of Essex and knew that the country lacked building stone. Wood, brick, chalk and flint were the materials used and another material called pudding stone, oblong and rounded pebbles of flint, much used in the construction of churches and of some walls. But the most important material of all was timber and I gazed out of the taxi window, happy to see the information I had read of confirmed in mansions and farmhouses built of tiny Tudor bricks with weatherboarding and half-timbering. Of course it aroused my expectations of what the house I was going to would be like, for Isabel had never described it. It might have a moat, as some did, part of its roof might be thatched, its windows mullioned and its woodwork bare and unstained. And then there was the maze. 'In the grounds, do you mean?' I'd said to her. 'Made of hedges?' But she only laughed and said, 'You'll see.'