The thirteenth tale (13 page)

What were his feelings that day, when he went into his garden
and found it ravaged? Great gashes in the sides of the yews, exposing the brown
wood of their hearts. The mop-heads decapitated, their spherical tops lying at
their feet. The perfect balance of the pyramids now lopsided, the cones hacked
about, the top hats chopped into and left in tatters. He stared at the long
branches, still green, still fresh, that were strewn on the lawn. Their slow
shriveling, their curling desiccation, their dying was yet to come.

Stunned, with a trembling that seemed to pass from his heart to
his legs and into the ground beneath his feet, he tried to understand what had
happened. Was it some bolt from the sky that had picked out his garden for
destruction? But what freak storm is it that strikes in silence?

No. Someone had done this.

Turning a corner he found the proof: abandoned on the dewy
grass, blades agape, the large shears and next to them the saw.

When he didn’t come in for lunch, the Missus, worried, went to
find him. Reaching the topiary garden she raised a hand to her mouth in horror,
then, gripping her apron, walked on with a new urgency.

When she found him, she raised him from the ground. He leaned
heavily on her as she led him with tender care to the kitchen and sat him in a
chair. She made tea, sweet and hot, and he stared, unseeing, into space.
Without a word, holding the cup to his lips, she tilted sips of the scalding
liquid into his mouth. At last his eyes sought hers, and when she saw the loss
in them, she felt her own tears spring up.

‘Oh Dig! I know. I know.“

His hands grasped her shoulders and the shaking of his body was
the shaking of her body.

The twins did not appear that afternoon, and the Missus did not
go to find them. When they turned up in the evening, John was still in his
chair, white and haggard. He flinched at the sight of them. Curious and
indifferent, their green eyes passed over his face just as they had passed over
the drawing room clock.

Before she put the twins to bed the Missus dressed the cuts on
their hands from the saw and the shears. “Don’t touch the things in John’s
shed,” she grumbled. “They’re sharp; they’ll hurt you.”

And then, still not expecting to be heeded, “Why did you do it?
Oh, why did you do it? You have broken his heart.”

She felt the touch of a child’s hand on hers. “Missus sad,” the
girl said. It was Emmeline.

Startled, the Missus blinked away the fog of her tears and
stared.

The child spoke again. “John-the-dig sad.”

‘Yes,“ the Missus whispered. ”We are sad.“

The girl smiled. It was a smile without malice. Without guilt.
It was simply a smile of satisfaction at having noted something and correctly
identified it. She had seen tears. She had been puzzled. But now she had found
the answer to the puzzle. It was sadness.

The Missus closed the door and went downstairs. This was a
breakthrough. It was communication, and it was the beginning, perhaps, of
something greater than that. Was it possible that one day the girl might
understand?

She opened the door to the kitchen and went in to rejoin John in
his despair.

That night I had a dream.

Walking in Miss Winter’s garden, I met my sister.

Radiant, she unfolded her vast golden wings, as though to
embrace me, and I was filled with joy. But when I approached I saw her eyes
were blind and she could not see me. Then despair filled my heart.

Waking, I curled into a ball until the stinging heat on my torso
had subsided.

MERRILY AND THE PERAMBULATOR

Miss Winter’s house was so isolated, and the life of its
inhabitants so solitary, that I was surprised during my first week there to
hear a vehicle arriving on the gravel at the front of the house. Peering from
the library window, I saw the door of a large black car swing open and caught a
glimpse of a tall, dark-haired man. He disappeared into the porch and I heard
the brief ring of the bell.

I saw him again the next day. I was in the garden, perhaps ten
feet from the front porch, when I heard the crackle of tires on gravel. I stood
still, retreated inside myself. To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was
plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually
what they see. The man did not see me.

His face was grave. The heavy line of his brow cast his eyes
into shadow, while the rest of his face was distinguished by a numb stillness.
He reached into his car for his case, slammed the door and went up the steps to
ring the bell.

I heard the door open. Neither he nor Judith spoke a word, and
he disappeared inside the house.

Later that day, Miss Winter told me the story of Merrily and the
perambulator.

As the twins grew older, they explored farther and farther
afield and soon knew all the farms and all the gardens on the estate. They had
no sense of boundaries, no understanding of property, and so they went where
they wished. They opened gates and didn’t always close them. They climbed over
fences when they got in their way. They tried kitchen doors, and when they
opened—usually they did, people didn’t lock doors much in Angelfield—they went
inside. They helped themselves to anything tasty in the pantry, slept for an
hour on the beds upstairs if they felt weary, took saucepans and spoons away
with them to scare birds in the fields.

The local families got upset about it. For every accusation
made, there was someone who had seen the twins at the relevant time in another
distant place; at least they had seen one of them; at least they thought they
had. And then it came about that all the old ghost stories were remembered. No
old house is without its stories; no old house is without its ghosts. And the
very twinness of the girls had a spookiness about it. There was something not
right about them, everyone agreed, and whether it was because of the girls
themselves or for some other reason, there came to be a disinclination to
approach the old house, as much among the adults as the children, for fear of
what might be seen there.

But eventually the inconvenience of the incursions won ground
over the thrill of ghost talk, and the women grew angry. On several occasions
they cornered the girls red-handed and shouted. Anger pulled their faces all
out of shape, and their mouths opened and closed so quickly, it made the girls
laugh. The women didn’t understand why the girls were laughing. They didn’t
know it was the speed and jumble of the words pouring from their own mouths
that had bewildered the twins. They thought it was pure devilment and shouted
even more. For a time the twins stayed to watch the spectacle of the villagers’
anger, then they turned their backs and walked off.

When their husbands came home from the fields, the women would
complain, say something had to be done, and the men would say, “You’re forgetting
they’re the children of the big house.” And the women said in return, “Big
house or no, children didn’t ought to be allowed to run riot the way them two
girls do. It’s not right. Something’s got to be done.” And the men would sit
quiet over their plates of potato and meat and shake their heads and nothing
would be done.

Until the incident of the perambulator.

There was a woman in the village called Mary Jameson. She was
the wife of Fred Jameson, one of the farm laborers, and she lived with her
husband and his parents in one of the cottages. The couple were newly-weds, and
before her marriage the woman had been called Mary Leigh, which explains the
name the twins invented for her in their own language: They called her Merrily,
and it was a good name for her. Sometimes she would go and meet her husband
from the fields and they would sit in the shelter of a hedge at the end of the
day, while he had a cigarette. He was a tall brown man with big feet and he
used to put his arm around her waist and tickle her and blow down the front of
her dress to make her laugh. She tried not to laugh, to tease him, but she
wanted to laugh really, and eventually she always did.

She’d have been a plain woman if it wasn’t for that laugh of
hers. Her hair was a dirty color that was too dark to be blond, her chin was
big and her eyes were small. But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so
beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your
ears and she was transformed. Her eyes disappeared altogether above her fat
moon cheeks, and suddenly, in their absence, you noticed her mouth. Plump
cherry-colored lips and even white teeth— no one else in Angelfield had teeth
to match hers—and a little pink tongue that was like a kitten’s. And the sound.
That beautiful, rippling, unstoppable music that came gurgling out of her
throat like spring-water from an underground stream. It was the sound of joy.
He married her for it. And when she laughed his voice went soft, and he put his
lips against her neck and said her name, Mary, over and over again. And the
vibration of his voice on her skin tickled her and made her laugh, and laugh,
and laugh.

Anyway, during the winter, while the twins kept to the gardens
and the park, Merrily had a baby. The first warm days of spring found her in
the garden, hanging out little clothes on a line. Behind her was a black
perambulator. Heaven knows where it had come from; it wasn’t the usual kind of
thing for a village girl to have; no doubt it was some second or thirdhand
thing, bought cheap by the family (though no doubt seeming very dear) in order
to mark the importance of this first child and grandchild. In any case, as
Merrily bent for another little vest, another little chemise, and pegged them
on the line, she was singing, like one of the birds that were singing, too, and
her song seemed destined for the beautiful black perambulator. Its wheels were
silver and very high, so although the carriage was large and black and rounded,
the impression was of speed and weightlessness.

The garden gave onto fields at the back; a hedge divided the two
spaces. Merrily did not know that from behind the hedge two pairs of green eyes
were fixed on the perambulator.

Babies make a lot of washing, and Merrily was a hardworking and
devoted mother. Every day she was out in the garden, putting the washing out
and taking it in. From the kitchen window, as she washed napkins and vests in
the sink, she kept an eye on the fine perambulator outdoors in the sun. Every
five minutes it seemed she was nipping outdoors to adjust the hood, tuck in an
extra blanket or simply sing.

Merrily was not the only one who was devoted to the
perambulator. Emmeline and Adeline were besotted.

Merrily emerged one day from under the back porch with a basket
of washing under one arm, and the perambulator wasn’t there. She halted
abruptly. Her mouth opened and her hands came up to her cheeks; the basket
tumbled into the flower bed, tipping collars and socks onto the wallflowers.
Merrily never looked once toward the fence and the brambles. She turned her
head left and right as if she couldn’t believe her eyes, left and right, left
and right, left and right, all the time with the panic building up inside her,
and in the end she let out a shriek, a high-pitched noise that rose into the
blue sky as if it could rend it in two.

Mr. Griffin looked up from his vegetable plot and came to the
fence, three doors down. Next door old Granny Stokes frowned at the kitchen
sink and came out onto her porch. Astounded, they looked at Merrily, wondering
whether their laughing neighbor was really capable of making such a sound, and
she looked wildly back at them, dumbstruck, as though her cry had used up a
lifetime’s supply of words.

Eventually she said it. “My baby’s gone.”

And once the words were out they sprang into action. Mr. Griffin
jumped over three fences in a flash, took Merrily by the arm and led her around
to the front of her house, saying, “Gone? Where’s he gone?” Granny Stokes
disappeared from her back porch and a second later her voice floated in the air
from the front garden, calling out for help.

And then a growing hubbub: “What is it? What’s happened?”

‘Taken! From the garden! In the perambulator!“

‘You two go that way, and you others go that way.“

‘Run and fetch her husband, somebody.“

All the noise, all the commotion at the front of the house.

At the back everything was quiet. Merrily’s washing bobbed about
in the lazy sunshine, Mr. Griffin’s spade rested tranquilly in the well-turned
soil, Emmeline caressed the silver spokes in blind, quiet ecstasy and Adeline
kicked her out of the way so that they could get the thing moving.

They had a name for it. It was the voom.

They dragged the perambulator along the backs of the houses. It
was harder than they had thought. For a start the pram was heavier than it
appeared, and also they were pulling it along very uneven ground. The edge of
the field was slightly banked, which tilted the pram at an angle. They could
have put all four wheels on the level, but the newly turned earth was softer
there, and the wheels sank into the clods of soil. Thistles and brambles
snagged in the spokes and slowed them down, and it was a miracle that they kept
going after the first twenty yards. But they were in their element. They pushed
with all their might to get that pram home, gave it all their strength, and
hardly seemed to feel the effort at all. They made their fingers bleed tearing
the thistles away from the wheels, but on they went, Emmeline still crooning
her love song to it, giving it a surreptitious stroke with her fingers from
time to time, kissing it.