The thirteenth tale (23 page)

Hester disregarded his comment and began her explanation.

‘Adeline is a hostile and aggressive child. She resents my
presence in the house and resists all my efforts to impose order. Her eating is
erratic; she refuses food until she is half starving, and only then will she
eat but the merest morsel. She has to be bathed by force, and, despite her
thinness, it takes two people to hold her in the water. Any warmth I show her
is met by utter indifference. She seems incapable of all the normal range of
human emotion, and, I speak frankly to you, Dr. Maudsley, I have wondered
whether she has it in her to return to the fold of common humanity.“

‘Is she intelligent?“

‘She is wily. She is cunning. But she cannot be stimulated to
take an interest in anything beyond the realm of her own wishes, desires and
appetites.“

‘And in the classroom?“

‘You appreciate of course that with girls like these the
classroom is not what it might be for normal children. There is no arithmetic,
no Latin, no geography. Still, in the interests of order and routine, the
children are made to attend for two hours, twice a day, and I educate them by
telling stories.“

‘Does she appreciate these lessons?“

‘If only I knew how to answer that question! She is quite wild,
Dr. Maudsley. She has to be trapped in the room by trickery, or sometimes I
have to get John to bring her by force. She will do anything to avoid it,
flailing her arms or else holding her whole body rigid to make it awkward to
carry her through the door. Seating her behind a desk is practically
impossible. More often than not John is obliged to simply leave her on the
floor. She will neither look at me nor listen to me in the classroom, but
retreats to some inner world of her own.“

The doctor listened closely and nodded. “It is a difficult case.
Her behavior causes you greater anxiety and you fear that the results of your
efforts may be less successful than with her sister. And yet”—his smile was
charming—“forgive me, Miss Barrow, if I do not see why you profess to be
baffled by her. On the contrary, your account of her behavior and mental state
is more coherent than many a medical student might make, given the same
evidence.”

She eyed him levelly. “I have not yet come to the confusing
part.”

‘Ah.“

‘There are methods that have been successful with children like
Adeline in the past. There are strategies of my own that I have some faith in
and would not hesitate to put into action were it not that…“

Hester hesitated, and this time the doctor was wise enough to
wait for her to go on. When she spoke again it was slowly, and she weighed her
words with care.

‘It is as though there is a mist in Adeline, a mist that
separates her not only from humanity but from herself. And sometimes the mist
thins, and sometimes the mist clears, and another Adeline appears. And then the
mist returns and she is as before.“

Hester looked at the doctor, watching his reaction. He frowned,
but above his frown, where his hair was receding, his skin was an unwrinkled
pink. “What is she like during these periods?”

‘The outward signs are very small. For several weeks I was not
aware of the phenomenon, and even then I waited some time before being sure
enough to come to you.“ I see.

‘First of all there is her breathing. It changes sometimes, and
I know that though she is pretending to be in a world of her own, she is
listening to me. And her hands—“

‘Her hands?“

‘Usually they are splayed, tense, like this“—Hester
demonstrated—”but then sometimes I notice they relax, like this“—and her own
fingers relaxed into softness. ”It is as if her involvement with the story has
captured her attention and in doing so undermined her defenses, so that she
relaxes and forgets her show of rejection and defiance. I have worked with a
great many difficult children, Dr. Maudsley. I have considerable expertise. And
what I have seen amounts to this: Against all the odds, there is a fermentation
in her.“

The doctor did not answer immediately but considered, and Hester
seemed gratified at his application.

‘Is there any pattern to the emergence of these signs?“

‘Nothing I can be sure of as yet, but…“

He put his head on one side, encouraging her to go on.

‘It’s probably nothing, but certain stories…“

‘Stories?“

“Jane Eyre, for instance. I told them a shortened version of the
first part, over several days, and I certainly noticed it then. Dickens, too.
The historical tales and the moral tales have never had the same effect.”

The doctor frowned. “And is it consistent? Does reading Jane
Eyre always bring about the changes you have described?”

‘No. That is the difficulty.“

‘Hmm. So what do you mean to do?“

‘There are methods for managing selfish and resistant children
such as Adeline. A strict regime now might be enough to keep her out of an
institution later in life. However, this regime, involving the imposition of
strict routine and the removal of much that stimulates her, would be most
detrimental to—“

‘To the child we see through the gaps in the mist?“

‘Precisely. In fact, for that child, nothing would be worse.“

‘And that child, the girl in the mist, what future could you
foresee for her?“

‘It is a premature question. Suffice it to say that I cannot at
present countenance her being lost. Who knows what she might become? “

They sat in silence, gazing at the leafy geometry opposite and
contemplating the problem Hester had set out while, unbeknownst to them, the
problem itself, well concealed by topiary, stared back at them through the gaps
in the branches.

Finally the doctor spoke. “There is no medical condition I know
of that would cause mental effects of quite the kind you describe. However,
that may be my own ignorance.” He waited for her to protest; she didn’t.
“H-hum. It would be sensible for me to give the child a thorough examination in
order to establish her overall state of health, both mental and physical, as a
first step.”

‘That is just what I was thinking,“ Hester replied. ”Now… “—she
rummaged in her pocket—”here are my notes. You will find descriptions of each
instance I have witnessed, together with some preliminary analysis. Perhaps
after the medical you might stay for half an hour to give me your first
thoughts? We can decide on the appropriate next step then.“

He looked at her in some amazement. She had stepped out of her
role as governess, was behaving as though she were some fellow expert!

Hester had caught herself out.

She hesitated. Could she backtrack? Was it too late? She made
her resolution. In for a penny, in for a pound. “It’s not a dodecahedron,” she
told him slyly. “It’s a tetrahedron.”

The doctor rose from the bench, stepped toward the topiary
shape. one, two, three, four… His lips moved as he counted.

My heart stopped. Was he going to walk around the tree, making
his ally of planes and corners? Was he going to trip over me?

But he reached six and stopped. He knew she was right.

Then there was a curious little moment when they just looked at
each other. His face was uncertain. What was this woman? By what authority did
she speak to him the way she did? She was just a dumpy, potato-faced,
provincial governess. Wasn’t she?

In silence she stared back at him, transfixed by the uncertainty
glimmering in his face.

The world seemed to tilt a fraction on its axis, and they each
looked awkwardly away.

‘The medical,“ Hester began.

‘Wednesday afternoon, perhaps?“ proposed the doctor. ”Wednesday
afternoon.“ And the world returned to its proper axis.

They walked back toward the house, and at the turn in the path
the doctor took his leave.

Behind the yew the little spy bit her nails and wondered.

FIVE NOTES

A scratchy veil of fatigue irritated my eyes. My mind was paper
thin. I had been working all day and half the night, and now I was afraid to go
to sleep.

Was my mind playing tricks on me? It seemed that I could hear a
tune. Well, hardly a tune. Just five lost notes. I opened the window to be
sure. Yes. There was definitely sound coming from the garden.

Words I can understand. Give me a torn or damaged fragment of
text and I can divine what must have come before and what must come after. Or
if not, I can at least reduce the number of possibilities to the most likely
option. But music is not my language. Were these five notes e opening of a
lullaby? Or the dying fall of a lament? It was impossible to say. With no
beginning and no ending to frame them, no melody hold them in place, whatever
it was that bound them together seemed precariously insecure. Every time the
first note struck up its call, there was a moment of anxiety while it waited to
find out whether its companion was still there, or had drifted off, lost for
good, blown away by the wind. And so with the third and the fourth. And with
the fifth, no solution, only the feeling that sooner or later the fragile bonds
that linked this random set of notes would give way as the links with the rest
the tune had given way, and even this last, empty fragment would be gone for
good, scattered to the wind like the last leaves from a winter tree.

Stubbornly mute whenever my conscious mind called upon them to
perform, the notes came to me out of nowhere when I was not thinking of them.
Lost in my work in the evening, I would become aware that they had been
repeating themselves in my mind for some time. Or else in bed, drifting between
sleep and wakefulness, I would hear them in the distance, singing their
indistinct, meaningless song to me.

But now I really heard it. A single note first, its companions
drowned in the rain that rapped at the window. It was nothing, I told myself,
and prepared to go back to sleep. But then, in a lull in the rainstorm, three
notes raised themselves above the water.

The night was very thick. So black was the sky that only the
sound of the rain allowed me to picture the garden. That percussion was the
rain on the windows. The soft, random squalls were fresh rain on the lawn. The
trickling sound was water coming down gutters and into drains. Drip… drip…
drip. Water falling from leaves to the ground. Behind all this, beneath it,
between it, if I was not mad or dreaming, came the five notes. La la la la la.

I pulled on boots and a coat and went outside into the
blackness.

I could not see my hand in front of my face. Nothing to hear but
the squelch of my boots on the lawn. And then I caught a trace of it. A harsh,
unmusical sound; not an instrument, but an atonal, discordant human voice.

Slowly and with frequent stops I tracked the notes. I went down
the long borders and turned into the garden with the pond—at least I think that
is where I went. Then I mistook my way, blundered across soft soil where I
thought a path should be, and ended up not beside the yew as I expected, but in
a patch of knee-high shrubs with thorns that caught at my clothes. From then on
I gave up trying to work out where I was, took my bearings from my ears alone,
followed the notes like Ariane’s thread through a labyrinth I had ceased to
recognize. It sounded at irregular intervals, and each time I would head toward
it, until the silence stopped me and I paused, waiting for a new clue. How long
did I stumble after it in the dark? Was it a quarter of an hour? Half an hour?
All I know is that at the end of that time I found myself back at the very door
by which I had left the house. I had come—or been led—full circle.

The silence was very final. The notes had died, and in their
place, the rain started again.

Instead of going in, I sat on the bench, rested my head on my
crossed arms, feeling the rain tap on my back, my neck, my hair.

It began to seem a foolish thing to have gone chasing about the
garden after something so insubstantial, and I managed to persuade myself,
almost, that I had heard nothing but the creation of my own imagination. Then
my thoughts turned in other directions. I wondered when my father would send me
advice about searching for Hester. I thought about Angelfield and frowned: What
would Aurelius do when the house was demolished? Thinking about Angelfield made
me think of the ghost, and that made me think of my own ghost, the photograph I
bad taken of her, lost in a blur of white. I made a resolution to telephone my
mother the next day, but it was a safe resolution; no one can hold on to a
decision made in the middle of the night.

And then my spine sent me an alarm.

A presence. Here. Now. At my side.

I jerked up and looked around.

The darkness was total. There was nothing and no one to see.
Everything, even the great oak, had been swallowed up in the darkness, and the
world had shrunk to the eyes that were watching me and the wild frenzy of my
heart.

Not Miss Winter. Not here. Not at this time of night.

Then who?

I felt it before I felt it. The touch against my side—the here
and gone again—