The thirteenth tale (25 page)

Hester lifted Adeline in her arms. Not difficult. The child was
fourteen now, but she was skin and bones. All her strength was in her will, and
when that was gone, the rest was insubstantial. They carried her down the
stairs as easily as if she were a feather pillow going to be aired.

John drove. Silent. Approving, disapproving, it hardly mattered.
Hester did the decision making.

They told Adeline she was going to see Emmeline; a lie they
needn’t have bothered with; they could have taken Adeline anywhere and she’d
not have fought them. She was lost. Absent from herself. Without her sister,
she was nothing and she was no one. It was just the shell of a person they took
to the doctor’s house. They left her there.

Back at home, they moved Emmeline from the bed in Hester’s room
back into her own without waking her. She slept for another hour, and when she
did open her eyes was mildly surprised to find her sister gone. As the morning
drew on, her surprise grew, turning to anxiety in the afternoon. She searched
the house. She searched the gardens. She went as far as she dared in the woods,
the village.

At teatime Hester found her at the road’s edge, staring in the
direction that would have taken her, if she had followed it, to the door of the
doctor’s house. She had not dared follow it. Hester put a hand on Emmeline’s
shoulder and drew her close, then led her back to the house. From time to time,
Emmeline stopped, hesitant, wanting to turn back, but Hester took her hand and
guided her firmly in the direction of home. Emmeline followed with obedient but
puzzled steps. After tea she stood by the window and looked out. She grew
fearful as the light faded, but it was not until Hester locked the doors and
began the routine of putting Emmeline to bed that she became distraught.

All night long she cried. Lonely sobs that seemed to go on
forever. What had snapped in an instant in Adeline took an agonizing
twenty-four hours to break in Emmeline. But when dawn came, she was quiet. She
had wept and shuddered herself into oblivion.

The separation of twins is no ordinary separation. Imagine
surviving an earthquake. When you come to, you find the world unrecognizable.
The horizon is in a different place. The sun has changed color. Nothing remains
of the terrain you know. As for you, you are alive. But it’s not the same as
living. It’s no wonder the survivors of such disasters so often wish they had
perished with the others.

Miss Winter sat staring into space. Her famous copper tint had
faded to a tender apricot. She had abandoned her hairspray and the solid coils
and twists had given way to a soft, shapeless tangle. But her face was set hard
and she held herself rigid, as though girding herself against a biting wind
that only she could feel. Slowly she turned her eyes to mine.

‘Are you all right?“ she asked. ”Judith says you don’t eat very
much.“

‘I’ve always been like that.“

‘But you look pale.“

‘A bit tired, maybe.“

We finished early. Neither of us, I think, felt up to carrying
on.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?

The next time I saw her, Miss Winter looked different. She
closed her eyes wearily, and it took her longer than usual to conjure the past
and begin to speak. While she gathered the threads, I watched her and noticed
that she had left off her false eyelashes. There was the habitual purple eye
shadow, the sweeping line of black. But without the spider lashes, she had the
unexpected appearance of a child who had been playing in her mother’s makeup
box.

Things weren’t as Hester and the doctor expected. They were
prepared for an Adeline who would rant and rage and kick and fight. As for
Emmeline, they were counting on her affection for Hester to reconcile her to
her twin’s sudden absence. They were expecting, in short, the same girls they had
before, only separate where they had been together. And so, initially, they
were surprised by the twins’ collapse into a pair of lifeless rag dolls.

Not quite lifeless. The blood continued to circulate,
sluggishly, in their veins. They swallowed the soup that was spooned into their
mouths by in one house the Missus, in the other the doctor’s wife. But
swallowing is a reflex, and they had no appetite. Their eyes, open during the
day, were unseeing, and at night, though their eyes closed, they had not the
tranquility of sleep. They were apart; they were alone; they were in a kind of
limbo. They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but
their very souls.

Did the scientists doubt themselves? Stop and wonder whether they
were doing the right thing? Did the lolling, unconscious figures of the twins
cast a shadow over their beautiful project? They were not willfully cruel, you
know. Only foolish. Misguided by their learning, their ambition, their own
self-deceiving blindness.

The doctor carried out tests. Hester observed. And they met
every day, to compare notes. To discuss what at first they optimistically
called progress. Behind the doctor’s desk, or in the Angelfield library, they
sat together, heads bent over papers on which were recorded every detail of the
girls’ lives. Behavior, diet, sleep. They puzzled over absent appetites, the
propensity to sleep all the time—that sleep which was not sleep. They proposed
theories to account for the changes in the twins. The experiment was not going
as well as they had expected, had begun in fact disastrously, but the two
scientists skirted around the possibility that they might be doing harm,
preferring to retain the belief that together they could work a miracle.

The doctor derived great satisfaction from the novelty of
working for the first time in decades with a scientific mind of the highest
order. He marveled at his protegee’s ability to grasp a principle one minute
and to apply it with professional originality and insight the next. Before long
he admitted to himself that she was more a colleague than a protegee. And
Hester was thrilled to find that at long last her mind was adequately nourished
and challenged. She came out of their daily meetings aglow with excitement and pleasure.
So their blindness was only natural. How could they be expected to understand
that what was doing them such good could be doing such great harm to the
children in their care? Unless perhaps, in the evenings, each sitting in
solitude to write up the day’s notes, they might individually have raised their
eyes to the unmoving, dead-eyed child in a chair in the corner and felt a doubt
cross their minds. Perhaps. But if they did, they did not record it n their
notes, did not mention it to the other.

So dependent did the pair become on their joint undertaking that
hey quite failed to see that the grand project was making no progress at ill.
Emmeline and Adeline were all but catatonic, and the girl in the mist vas
nowhere to be seen. Undeterred by their lack of findings, the scientists
continued their work: They made tables and charts, proposed theories and
developed elaborate experiments to test them. With each failure hey told
themselves that they had eliminated something from the field of examination and
went on to the next big idea.

The doctor’s wife and the Missus were involved, but at one
remove, the physical care of the girls was their responsibility. They spooned
soup into the unresisting mouths of their charges three times a day. they
dressed the twins, bathed them, did their laundry, brushed their hair. Each
woman had her reasons for disapproving of the project; each had her reasons for
keeping mum about her thoughts. As for John-the-dig, he was outside it all. His
opinion was sought by no one, not that that stopped him making his daily
pronouncement to the Missus in the kitchen: “No good will come of it. I’m
telling you. No good at all.”

There came a moment when they might have had to give up. All
their plans had come to nothing, and though they racked their brains, they were
lost for a new trick to try. At precisely this point Hester detected small
signs of improvement in Emmeline. The girl had turned her head toward a window.
She was found clutching some shiny bauble and would not be separated from it.
By listening outside doors (which is lot bad manners, incidentally, when it is
done in the name of science) Hester discovered that when left alone the child
was whispering to herself in the old twin language.

‘She is soothing herself,“ she told the doctor, ”by imagining
the presence of her sister.“

The doctor began a regime of leaving Adeline alone for periods
of several hours and listening outside the door, notepad and pen in hand, he
heard nothing.

Hester and the doctor advised themselves of the need for
patience in the more severe case of Adeline, while they congratulated
themselves on the improvements in Emmeline. Brightly they noted Emmeline’s
increased appetite, her willingness to sit up, the first few steps she took of
her own accord. Soon she was wandering around the house and garden again with
something of her old purposelessness. Oh yes, Hester and the doctor agreed, the
experiment was really going somewhere now! Whether they stopped to consider
that what they termed “improvements” were only Emmeline returning to the habits
she already displayed before the experiment began is hard to judge.

It wasn’t all plain sailing with Emmeline. There was a dreadful
day when she followed her nose to the cupboard filled with the rags her sister
used to wear. She held them to her face, inhaled the stale, animal odor and
then, in delight, arrayed herself in them. It was awkward, but worse was to
come. Dressed in this fashion, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and,
taking her reflection for her sister, ran headlong into it. The crash was loud
enough to bring the Missus running, and she found Emmeline weeping beside the
mirror, crying not for her own pain but for her poor sister, who had broken
into several pieces and was bleeding.

Hester took the clothes away from her and instructed John to
burn them. As an extra precaution, she ordered the Missus to turn all the
mirrors to the wall. Emmeline was perplexed, but there were no more incidents
of the kind.

She would not speak. For all the solitary whispering that went
on behind closed doors, always in the old twin language, Emmeline could not be
induced to speak a single word of English to the Missus or to Hester. This was
something to confer about. Hester and the doctor held a lengthy meeting in the
library, at the end of which they concluded that there was no cause for worry.
Emmeline could talk, and she would, given time. The refusal to speak, the
incident with the mirror—they were disappointments, of course, but science has
its disappointments. And look at the progress! Why, wasn’t Emmeline strong
enough to be allowed outside? And she spent less time these days loitering at
the roadside, at the invisible boundary beyond which she dared not step,
staring in the direction of the doctor’s house. Things were going as well as
could be expected.

Progress? It was not what they had hoped at the outset. It was
not much at all compared to the results Hester had achieved with the girl when
she first arrived. But it was all they had and they made the most of it.
Perhaps they were secretly relieved. For what would have been the result of a
definitive success? It would have eliminated all reason for their continued
collaboration. And though they were blind to the fact, they would not have
wanted that.

They would never have ended the experiment of their own accord.
Never. It was going to take something else, something external, to put a stop
to it. Something that came quite out of the blue.

‘What was it?“

Though it was the end of our time, though she had the drawn,
gray-white look that she got when the time for her medication grew near, though
it was forbidden to ask questions, I couldn’t help myself.

Despite her pain, there was a green gleam of mischief in her
eyes as she leaned forward confidingly.

‘Do you believe in ghosts, Margaret?“

Do I believe in ghosts? What could I say? I nodded.

Satisfied, Miss Winter sat back in her chair, and I had the not
unfamiliar impression of having given away more than I thought.

‘Hester didn’t. Not scientific, you see. So, not believing in
ghosts, she had a good deal of trouble when she saw one.“

It was like this:

One bright day Hester, having finished her duties in plenty of
time, left the house early and decided to take the long way round to the
doctor’s house. The sky was gloriously blue, the air fresh-smelling and clear,
and she felt full of a powerful energy that she couldn’t put a name to but that
made her yearn for strenuous activity.

The path around the fields took her up a slight incline that,
though not much of a hill, gave her a fine view of the fields and land around.
She was about halfway to the doctor’s, striding out vigorously, heartbeat
raised but without the slightest sense of overexertion, feeling quite probably
that she could fly if she just put her mind to it, when she saw something that
stopped her dead.

In the distance, playing together in a field, were Emmeline and
Adeline. Unmistakable. Two manes of red hair, two pairs of black shoes; one
child in the navy poplin that the Missus had put Emmeline in that morning, the
other in green.

It was impossible.

But no. Hester was scientific. She was seeing them, hence they
were there. There must be an explanation. Adeline had escaped from the doctor’s
house. Her torpor had left her as suddenly as it had come and, taking advantage
of an open window or a set of keys left unattended, she had escaped before
anyone had noticed her recovery. That was it.