Kerstin Kvist didn't quite know what to expect when she took up a job with the Cosway family at their odd, almost grand, house, Lydstep Old Hall, deep in the Essex countryside. All that
mattered to her then was the fact that it was near London where her boyfriend lived - she'd come over from Sweden to keep their affair going.
The family turned out to be even odder than the house: living at home with the widowed Mrs. Cosway were her three unmarried daughters, in thrall to the old lady; but there was also a mysterious
fourth daughter - a widow herself and apparently quite rich - who came and went infrequently, with ill-disguised contempt for the others. Even more puzzling, and increasingly upsetting for
Kerstin, was the position of Mrs. Cosway's son, John, a sad, self-absorbed figure in his thirties who haunted the house. Kerstin had trained as a nurse and knew it wasn't right to be
administering such powerful drugs to a vulnerable figure like John.
Then, just as she was beginning to get some inkling of what was going on in the house, a stranger with a glamorously Bohemian aura moved into the village, and his presence set the Cosway family
on a path to self-destruction.
In Barbara Vine's new book a sympathetic middle-aged Swedish woman remembers her strange and horrifying stay at an old Essex house almost forty years before, at a time when the sixties
revolution hadn't quite reached rural England.
