The thirteenth tale (3 page)

When I was twelve, Father set me looking for lost books. We
designated items lost when they were in stock according to the records but
missing from their rightful position on the shelves. They might have been
stolen but, more likely, they had been left in the wrong place by an
absentminded browser. There were seven rooms in the shop, lined floor to
ceiling with books, thousands of volumes.

‘And while you’re at it, check the alphabetization,“ Father
said.

It was a job that would take forever; I wonder now whether he
was entirely serious in entrusting it to me. To tell the truth it hardly
mattered, for in undertaking it, it was serious.

It took me a whole summer of mornings, but at the beginning of
September, when school started, every lost book had been found, every misplaced
volume returned to its home. Not only that, but—and in retrospect, this is the
thing that seems important-—my fingers had made contact, albeit briefly, with
every book in the shop.

By the time I was in my teens, I was giving my father so much
assistance that on quiet afternoons we had little real work to do. Once the
morning’s work was done, the new stock shelved, the letters written, once we
had eaten our sandwiches by the river and fed the ducks, it was back to the
shop to read.

Gradually my reading grew less random. More and more often I
found myself meandering on the second floor. Nineteenth-century literature,
biography, autobiography, memoirs, diaries and letters.

My father noticed the direction of my reading. He came home from
fairs and sales with books he thought might be interesting for me. shabby
little books, in manuscript mostly, yellowed pages tied with ribbon or string,
sometimes handbound. The ordinary lives of ordinary people. I did not simply
read them. I devoured them. Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger
for books was constant. It was the beginning of my vocation.

I am not a proper biographer. In fact I am hardly a biographer
at all. or my own pleasure mainly, I have written a number of short
biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My
invest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who
lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death,
have sunk into profound obscurity. I like to disinter lives tat have been
buried in unopened diaries on archive shelves for a hundred years or more.
Rekindling breath from memoirs that have been out of print for decades pleases
me more than almost anything else.

From time to time one of my subjects is just significant enough
to rouse the interest of a local academic publisher, and so I have a small
number of publications to my name. Not books. Nothing so grand. Just says
really, a few flimsy pages stapled in a paper cover. One of my essays—“The
Fraternal Muse,” a piece on the Landier brothers, Jules and Edmond, and the
diary that they wrote in tandem—caught the eye of a story editor and was
included in a hardback collection of essays on writing and the family in the
nineteenth century. It must have been this ay that captured the attention of
Vida Winter, but its presence in the lection is quite misleading. It sits
surrounded by the work of academics and professional writers, just as though I
were a proper biographer, when in fact I am only a dilettante, a talented
amateur.

Lives—dead ones—are just a hobby of mine. My real work is in the
bookshop. My job is not to sell the books—my father does that—but to look after
them. Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all,
reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they’re not old enough
to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by
collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as
dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there
is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these
words significant enough to write them down.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the
warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory
of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an
exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to
exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods.
Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort
you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are
dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to
the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper,
preserved. It is a kind of magic.

As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I
clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a
volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten
dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when
their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is
their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do
hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.

Although I have touched here on my very private preoccupations,
I can see nonetheless that I have been putting off the essential. I am not
given to acts of self-revelation; it rather looks as though in forcing myself
to overcome my habitual reticence, I have written anything and everything in
order to avoid writing the one thing that matters.

And yet I will write it. “Silence is not a natural environment
for stories,” Miss Winter told me once. “They need words. Without them they
grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.” Quite right, too. So here
is my story.

I was ten when I discovered the secret my mother was keeping.
The reason it matters is that it wasn’t her secret to keep. It was mine.

My parents were out that evening. They didn’t go out often, and
when they did, I was sent next door to sit in Mrs. Robb’s kitchen. The
next-door house was exactly like ours but reversed, and the backward-less of it
all made me feel seasick, so when parents’ evening out rolled around, I argued
once again that I was old enough and sensible enough to be left at home without
a babysitter. I had no great hope of success, yet this time my father agreed.
Mother allowed herself to be persuaded with only the proviso that Mrs. Robb
would look in at half past eight.

They left the house at seven o’clock, and I celebrated by
pouring a lass of milk and drinking it on the sofa, full of admiration at my
own grandness. Margaret Lea, old enough to stay home without a sitter, after
the milk I felt unexpectedly bored. What to do with this freedom? set off on a
wander, marking the territory of my new freedom: the dining room, the hall, the
downstairs toilet. Everything was just as it had ways been. For no particular
reason, I was reminded of one of my baby fears, about the wolf and the three
pigs. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down! He wouldn’t have
had any trouble blowing my parents’ house down. The pale, airy rooms were too
insubstantial to rest, and the furniture, with its brittle delicacy, would
collapse like a pile matchsticks if a wolf so much as looked at it. Yes, that
wolf would have the house down with a mere whistle, and the three of us would
be breakfast in no time. I began to wish I was in the shop, where I was never
afraid. The wolf could huff and puff all he liked; with all those books
doubling the thickness of the walls Father and I would be as safe as in a
fortress.

Upstairs I peered into the bathroom mirror. It was for
reassurance, to see what I looked like as a grown-up girl. Head tilted to the
left, then to the right, I studied my reflection from all angles, willing
myself to see someone different. But it was only me looking back at myself.

My own room held no promise. I knew every inch of it and it knew
me; we were dull companions now. Instead, I pushed open the door of the guest
room. The blank-faced wardrobe and bare dressing table paid lip service to the
idea that you could brush your hair and get dressed here, but somehow you knew
that behind their doors and drawer fronts they were empty. The bed, its sheets
and blankets tightly tucked in and smoothed down, was uninviting. The thin
pillows looked as though they had had the life drained out of them. It was
always called the guest room, but we never had guests. It was where my mother
slept.

Perplexed, I backed out of the room and stood on the landing.

This was it. The rite of passage. Staying home alone. I was
joining the ranks of the grown-up children: Tomorrow I would be able to say, in
the playground, “Last night I didn’t go to a sitter. I stayed home by myself.”
The other girls would be wide-eyed. For so long I had wanted this, and now that
it was here, I didn’t know what to make of it. I’d expected that I would expand
to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the
person I was destined to be. I’d expected the world to give up its childlike
and familiar appearance to show me its secret, adult side. Instead, cloaked in
my new independence, I felt younger than ever. Was there something wrong with
me? Would I ever find out how to grow up?

I toyed with the idea of going round to Mrs. Robb’s. But no.
There was a better place. I crawled under my father’s bed.

The space between the floor and the bed frame had shrunk since I
was last there. Hard against one shoulder was the holiday suitcase, as gray in
daylight as it was here in the dark. It held all our summer paraphernalia:
sunglasses, spare film for the camera, the swimming costume that my mother
never wore but never threw away. On the other side vas a cardboard box. My
fingers fumbled with the corrugated flaps, bund a way in, and rummaged. The
tangled skein of Christmas-tree lights. Feathers covering the skirt of the tree
angel. The last time I was under this bed I had believed in Father Christmas.
Now I didn’t. Was that a kind of growing up?

Wriggling out from under the bed, I dislodged an old biscuit
tin. “here it was, half sticking out from under the frill of the valance. I
remembered the tin—it had been there forever. A picture of Scottish crags and
firs on a lid too tight to open. Absently I tried the lid. It gave way so
easily under my older, stronger fingers that I felt a pang of shock. Inside was
Father’s passport and various, differently sized pieces of paper. Forms, part
printed, part handwritten. Here and there a signature.

For me, to see is to read. It has always been that way. I
flicked through the documents. My parents’ marriage certificate. Their birth certificates.
My own birth certificate. Red print on cream paper. My father’s signature. I
refolded it carefully, put it with the other forms I’d ready read, and passed
on to the next. It was identical. I was puzzled. Why would I have two birth
certificates?

Then I saw it. Same father, same mother, same date of birth,
same ace of birth, different name.

What happened to me in that moment? Inside my head everything
came to pieces and came back together differently, in one of those
kaleidoscopic reorganizations the brain is capable of.

I had a twin.

Ignoring the tumult in my head, my curious fingers unfolded a
sec-id piece of paper.

A death certificate.

My twin was dead.

I knew what it was that had stained me.

Though I was stupefied by the discovery, I was not surprised.
For ire had always been a feeling. The knowledge, too familiar to have ever
needed words, that there was something. An altered quality in the air to my
right. A coagulation of light. Something peculiar to me that set empty space
vibrating. My pale shadow.

Pressing my hands to my right side, I bowed my head, nose almost
to shoulder. It was an old gesture, one that had always come to me in pain, in
perplexity, under duress of any kind. Too familiar to be pondered until now, my
discovery revealed its meaning. I was looking for my twin. Where she should
have been. By my side.

When I saw the two pieces of paper, and when the world had
recovered itself enough to start turning again on its slow axis, I thought, So
that’s it. Loss. Sorrow. Loneliness. There was a feeling that had kept me apart
from other people—and kept me company—all my life, and now that I had found the
certificates, I knew what the feeling was. My sister.

After a long time there came the sound of the kitchen door
opening downstairs. Pins and needles in my calves, I went as far as the
landing, and Mrs. Robb appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Is everything all right, Margaret?“

‘Yes.“

‘Have you got everything you need?“

‘Yes.“

‘Well, come round if you need to.“

‘All right.“

‘They won’t be long now, your mum and dad.“

She left.

I returned the documents to the tin and put the tin back under
the bed. I left the bedroom, closing the door behind me. In front of the
bathroom mirror I felt the shock of contact as my eyes locked together with the
eyes of another. My face tingled under her gaze. I could feel the bones under
my skin.

Later, my parents’ steps on the stairs.

I opened the door, and on the landing Father gave me a hug.

‘Well done,“ he said. ”Good marks all round.“