The thirteenth tale (12 page)

Following the paths, I wandered from one section to another, but
I could not fathom the layout. Hedges that looked solid viewed straight on,
sometimes revealed a diagonal passageway when viewed obliquely. Shrubberies
were easy to wander into and near-impossible to escape from. Fountains and
statues that I thought I had left well behind me reappeared. I spent a lot of
time stock-still, looking around me in perplexity and shaking my head. Nature
had made a maze of itself and was setting out deliberately to thwart me.

Turning a corner, I came across the reticent, bearded man who
had driven me from the station. “Maurice is what they call me,” he said,
reluctantly introducing himself.

‘How do you manage not to get lost?“ I wanted to know. ”Is there
a trick to it?“

‘Only time,“ he said, without looking up from his work. He was
kneeling over an area of churned-up soil, leveling it and pressing the earth
around the roots of the plants.

Maurice, I could tell, did not welcome my presence in the
garden. I didn’t mind, being of a solitary nature myself. After that I made a
point, whenever I saw him, of taking a path in the opposite direction, and I
think he shared my discretion, for once or twice, catching a glimpse of
movement out of the corner of my eye, I glanced up to see Maurice backing out
of an entrance or making a sudden, divergent turn. In this way we successfully
left each other in peace. There was ample room for us to avoid each other
without any sense of constraint.

Later that day I went to Miss Winter and she told me more about
the household at Angelfield.

The name of the Missus was Mrs. Dunne, but to the children of
the family she had always been the Missus, and she had been in the house it
seemed forever. This was a rarity: Staff came and went quickly at Angelfield,
and since departures were slightly more frequent than arrivals, he day came
when she was the only indoors servant remaining. Technically the housekeeper,
in reality she did everything. She scrubbed pots and laid fires like an
underhousemaid; when it was time to make a meal he was cook and when it was
time to serve it she was butler. Yet by the time the twins were born she was
growing old. Her hearing was poor, her sight poorer, and although she didn’t
like to admit it, there was much she couldn’t manage.

The Missus knew how children ought to be brought up: regular
mealtimes, regular bedtimes, regular baths. Isabelle and Charlie had grown up
overindulged and neglected at the same time, and it broke her heart to see how
they turned out. Their neglect of the twins was her chance, she hoped, to break
the pattern. She had a plan. Under their noses, in the heart of all their
chaos, she meant to raise two normal, ordinary little girls. Three square meals
a day, bedtime at six, church on Sunday.

But it was harder than she thought.

For a start there was the fighting. Adeline would fly at her
sister, fists and feet flailing, yanking at hair and landing blows wherever she
could. She chased her sister wielding red-hot coals in the fire tongs. The
Missus hardly knew what worried her more: Adeline’s persistent and merciless
aggression, or Emmeline’s constant, ungrudging acceptance of it. For Emmeline,
though she pleaded with her sister to stop tormenting her, never once retaliated.
Instead, she bowed her head passively and waited for the blows that rained down
on her shoulders and back to stop. The Missus had never once known Emmeline to
raise a hand against Adeline. She had the goodness of two children in her, and
Adeline the wickedness of two. In a way, the Missus thought, it made sense.

Then there was the vexed issue of food. At mealtimes, more often
than not, the children simply could not be found. Emmeline adored eating, but
her love of food never translated itself into the discipline of meals. Her
hunger could not be accommodated by three meals a day; it was a ravenous,
capricious thing. Ten, twenty, fifty times a day, it struck, making urgent
demands for food, and when it had been satisfied with a few mouthfuls of something,
it departed and food became an irrelevance again. Emmeline’s plumpness was
maintained by a pocket constantly full of bread and raisins, a portable feast
that she would take a bite from whenever and wherever she fancied. She came to
the table only to replenish these pockets before wandering off to loll by the
fire or lie in a field somewhere.

Her sister was quite different. Adeline was made like a piece of
wire with knots for knees and elbows. Her fuel was not the same as that of
other mortals. Meals were not for her. No one ever saw her eat; like the wheel
of perpetual motion she was a closed circuit, running on energy provided from
some miraculous inner source. But the wheel that spins eternally is a myth, and
when the Missus noticed in the morning an empty plate where there had been a
slice of gammon the night before, or a loaf of bread with a chunk missing, she
guessed where they had gone and sighed. Why wouldn’t her girls eat food off a
plate, like normal children?

Perhaps she might have managed better if she’d been younger. Or
if the girls had been one instead of two. But the Angelfield blood carried a
code that no amount of nursery food and strict routine could rewrite. She
didn’t want to see it; she tried not to see it for a long time, but in the end
she realized. The twins were odd, there were no two ways about it. They were
strange all through, right into their very hearts.

The way they talked, for instance. She would see them through
the kitchen window, a blurred pair of forms whose mouths appeared to be moving
nineteen to the dozen. As they approached the house, she caught fragments of
the buzz of speech. And then they came in. Silent. “Speak up!” she was always
telling them. But she was going deaf and they were shy; their chat was for themselves,
not for others. “Don’t be silly,” she told Dig when he told her the girls
couldn’t speak properly. “There’s no stopping them, when they get going.”

The realization came to her one day in winter. For once both
girls were indoors; Adeline had been induced by Emmeline to stay in the warmth,
by the fire, out of the rain. Ordinarily the Missus lived in a blur of fog; on
this day she was blessed by an unexpected clearing in her vision, a new
sharpness of hearing, and as she passed the door of the drawing room she caught
a fragment of their noise and stopped. Sounds flew backward and forward between
them, like tennis balls in some game; sounds that made them smile or laugh or
send each other malicious glances. Their voices rose in squeals and swooped down
in whispers. From any distance you’d have thought it the lively, free-flowing
chatter of ordinary children. But her heart sank. It was no language she had
ever heard. Not English, and not the French that she had got used to when
George’s Mathilde was alive and that Charlie still used with Isabelle. John was
right. They didn’t talk properly.

The shock of understanding froze her there in the doorway. And
as sometimes happens, one illumination opened the door to another. The clock on
the mantelpiece chimed and, as always, the mechanism under glass sent a little
bird out of a cage to flap a mechanical circuit before reentering the cage on
the other side. As soon as the girls heard the first chime, they looked up at
the clock. Two pairs of wide green eyes watched, unblinking, as the bird
labored around the inside of the bell, wings up, wings down, wings up, wings
down.

There was nothing particularly cold, particularly inhuman about
their gaze. It was just the way children look at inanimate moving objects. But
it froze the Missus to the core. For it was exactly the same as the way they
looked at her, when she scolded, chided or exhorted.

They don’t realize that I am alive, she thought. They don’t know
that anyone is alive but themselves.

It is a tribute to her goodness that she didn’t find them
monstrous. Instead, she felt sorry for them.

How lonely they must be. How very lonely.

And she turned from the doorway and shuffled away.

From that day on the Missus revised her expectations. Regular
mealtimes and bathtimes, church on Sunday, two nice, normal children—all these
dreams went out of the window. She had just one job now. To keep the girls
safe.

Turning it over in her head, she thought she understood why it
was. Twins, always together, always two. If it was normal in their world to be
two, what would other people, who came not in twos but ones, seem like to them?
We must seem like halves, the Missus mused. And she remembered a word, a
strange word it had seemed at the time, that meant people who had lost parts of
themselves. Amputees. That’s what we are to them. Amputees.

Normal? No. The girls were not and would never be normal. But,
she reassured herself, things being as they were, the twins being twins,
perhaps their strangeness was only natural.

Of course all amputees hanker after the state of twinness.
Ordinary people, untwins, seek their soul mate, take lovers, marry. Tormented
by their incompleteness they strive to be part of a pair. The Missus was no
different from anyone else in this respect. And she had her other half:
John-the-dig.

They were not a couple in the traditional sense. They were not
married; they were not even lovers. A dozen or fifteen years older than he, she
was not old enough to be his mother, quite, but was older than he would have
expected for a wife. At the time they met, she was of an age when she no longer
expected to marry anyone. While he, a man in his prime, expected to marry, but
somehow never did. Besides, once he was working with the Missus, drinking tea
with her every morning and sitting at the kitchen table to eat her food every
evening, he fell out of the habit of seeking the company of young women. With a
bit more imagination they might have been able to leap the bounds of their own
expectations; they might have recognized their feelings for what they were:
love of the deepest and most respectful kind. In another day, another culture,
he might have asked her to be his wife and she might have said yes. At the very
least, one can imagine that some Friday night after their fish and mash, after
their fruit pie and custard, he might have taken her hand—or she his—and they
might have led each other in bashful silence to one or other of their beds. But
the thought never entered their heads. So they became friends, the way old
married couples often do, and enjoyed the tender loyalty that awaits the lucky
on the other side of passion, without ever living the passion itself.

His name was John-the-dig, John Digence to those who didn’t know
him. Never a great one for writing, once the school years were past (and they
were soon past, for there were not many of them), he took to leaving off the
last letters of his surname to save time. The first three letters seemed more
than adequate: Did they not say who he was, what he did, more succinctly, more
accurately, even, than his full name? And so he used to sign himself John Dig,
and to the children he became John-the-dig.

He was a colorful man. Blue eyes like pieces of blue glass with
the sun behind. White hair that grew straight up on top of his head, like
plants reaching for the sun. And cheeks that went bright pink with exertion
when he was digging. No one could dig like him. He had a special way of
gardening, with the phases of the moon: planting when the moon was waxing,
measuring time by its cycles. In the evening, he pored over tables of figures,
calculating the best time for everything. His great-grandfather gardened like
that, and his grandfather and his father. They maintained the knowledge.

John-the-dig’s family had always been gardeners at Angelfield.
In the old days, when the house had a head gardener and seven hands, his
great-grandfather had rooted out a box hedge under a window and, so as not to
be wasteful, he’d taken hundreds of cuttings a few inches long. He grew them on
in a nursery bed, and when they reached ten inches, he planted them in the
garden. He clipped some into low, sharp-edged hedges, let others grow shaggy,
and when they were broad enough, took his shears to them and made spheres.
Some, he could see, wanted to be pyramids, cones, top hats. To shape his green
material, this man with the large, rough hands learned the patient, meticulous
delicacy of a lacemaker. He created no animals, no human figures. Not for him
the peacocks, lions, life-size men on bicycles that you saw in other gardens.
The shapes that pleased him were either strictly geometric or bafflingly,
bulgingly abstract.

By the time of his last years, the topiary garden was the only
thing that mattered. He was always eager to be finished with his other work of
the day; all he wanted was to be in “his” garden, running his hands over the
surfaces of the shapes he had made, as he imagined the time, fifty, a hundred
years hence, when his garden would have grown to maturity.

At his death, his shears passed into the hands of his son and,
decades later, his grandson. Then, when this grandson died, it was
John-the-dig, who had finished his apprenticeship at a large garden some thirty
miles away, who came home to take on the job that had to be his. Although he
was only the undergardener, the topiary had been his responsibility from the
very beginning. How could it be otherwise? He picked up the shears, their
wooden handles worn to shape by his father’s hand, and felt his fingers fit the
grooves. He was home.

In the years after George Angelfield lost his wife, when the
number of staff diminished so dramatically, John-the-dig stayed on. Gardeners
left and were not replaced. When he was still a young man he became, by
default, head gardener, though he was also the only gardener. The workload was
enormous; his employer took no interest; he worked without thanks. There were
other jobs, other gardens. He would have been offered any job he had applied
for—you only had to see him to trust him. But he never left Angelfield. How
could he? Working in the topiary garden, putting his shears into their leather
sheath when the light began to fade, he didn’t need to reflect that the trees
he was pruning were the very same trees that his great-grandfather had planted,
that the routines and motions of his work were the same ones that three
generations of his family had done before him. All this was too deeply known to
require thought. He could take it for granted. Like his trees, he was rooted to
Angelfield.