The thirteenth tale (32 page)

I left the house with something scratching at my mind. Was it
something Aurelius had said? Yes. Some echo or connection had vaguely appealed
for my attention but had been swept away by the rest of his story. It didn’t
matter. It would come back to me.

In the woods there is a clearing. Beneath it, the ground falls
away steeply and is covered in patchy scrub before it levels out and there are
trees again. Because of this, it provides an unexpected vantage point from
which to view the house. It was in this clearing that I stopped, on my way back
from Aurelius’s cottage.

The scene was bleak. The house, or what remained of it, was
ghostly. A smudge of gray against a gray sky. The upper stories on the
left-hand side were all gone. The ground floor remained, the door frame
demarcated by its dark stone lintel and the steps that led up to it, but the
door itself was gone. It was not a day to be open to the elements, and I
shivered for the half-dismantled house. Even the stone cats had abandoned it.
Like the deer, they had taken themselves off out of the wet. The right-hand
side of the building was still largely intact, though to judge by the position
of the crane it would be next to go. Was all that machinery really necessary? I
caught myself thinking. For it looked as if the walls were simply dissolving in
the rain; those stones still standing, pale and insubstantial as rice paper,
seemed ready to melt away under my very eyes if I just stood there long enough.

My camera was slung around my neck. I disentangled it from under
my coat and raised it to my eyes. Was it possible to capture the evanescent
appearance of the house through all this wetness? I doubted it but was willing
to try.

I was adjusting the long-distance lens when I caught a slight
movement at the edge of the frame. Not my ghost. The children were back. They
had seen something in the grass, were bending over it excitedly. What was it? A
hedgehog? A snake? Curious, I fine-tuned the focus to see more clearly.

One of the children reached into the long grass and lifted the
discovery out of it. It was a yellow builder’s hat. With a delighted smile he
pushed back his sou’wester—I could see it was the boy now—and placed the hat on
his head. Stiff as a soldier he stood, chest out, head up, arms by his side,
face intent with concentration to keep the too-large hat from slipping.

Just as he struck his pose there came a small miracle. A shaft
of sun-light found its way through a gap in the cloud and fell upon the boy,
illuminating him in his moment of glory. I clicked the shutter and my photo was
taken. The boy in the hat, over his left shoulder a yellow Keep Out sign, and
to his right, in the background, the house, a dismal smudge of gray.

The sun disappeared, and I took my eye off the children to wind
the film and tuck my camera away in the dry. When I looked back, the children
were halfway down the drive. His left hand in her right, they were whirling
around and around as they approached the lodge gates, equal stride, equal
weight, each one a perfect counterbalance to the other. With the tails of their
mackintoshes flaring behind them, feet barely skimming the ground, they looked
as if they were about to lift into the air and fly.

JANE EYRE AND THE FURNACE

When I went back to Yorkshire, I received no explanation for my
banishment. Judith greeted me with a constrained smile. The grayness of the
daylight had crept under her skin, collected in shadows under her eyes. She
pulled the curtains back a few more inches in my sitting room, exposing a bit
more window, but it made no difference to the gloom. “Blasted weather,” she
exclaimed, and I thought she seemed at the end of her tether.

Though it was only days, it felt like an eternity. Often night,
but never quite day, the darkening effect of the heavy sky threw us all out of
time. Miss Winter arrived late to one of our morning meetings. She, too, was
pale-faced; I didn’t know whether it was the memory of recent pain that put the
darkness in her eyes or something else.

‘I propose a more flexible timetable for our meetings,“ she said
when she was settled in her circle of light.

‘Of course.“ I knew of her bad nights from my interview with the
doctor, could see when the medication she took to control her pain was wearing
off or had not yet taken full effect. And so we agreed that instead of
presenting myself at nine every morning, I would wait instead for a tap at my
door.

At first the tap came always between nine and ten. Then it
drifted to later. After the doctor altered her dosage, she took to asking for
me early in the mornings, but our meetings were shorter; then we fell into a habit
of meeting twice or three times a day, at random times. Sometimes she called me
when she felt well and spoke at length, and in detail. At other times she
called me when she was in pain. Then it was not so much the company she wanted
as the anesthetic qualities of the storytelling itself.

The end of my nine o’clocks was another anchor in time gone. I
listened to her story, I wrote the story, when I slept I dreamed the story, and
when I was awake it was the story that formed the constant backdrop of my
thoughts. It was like living entirely inside a book. I didn’t even need to
emerge to eat, for I could sit at my desk reading my transcript while I ate the
meals that Judith brought to my room. Porridge meant it was morning. Soup and
salad meant lunchtime. Steak and kidney pie was evening. I remember pondering
for a long time over a dish of scrambled egg. What did it mean? It could mean
anything. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed the plate away.

In this long, undifferentiated lapse of time, there were a few
incidents that stood out. I noted them at the time, separately from the story,
and they are worth recalling here.

This is one.

I was in the library. I was looking for Jane Eyre and found
almost a whole shelf of copies. It was the collection of a fanatic: There were
cheap, modern copies, with no secondhand value; editions that came up so rarely
on the market it would be hard to put a price to them; copies that fell at
every point between these two extremes. The one I was looking for was an
ordinary, though particular, edition from the turn of the century. While I was
browsing, Judith brought Miss Winter in and settled her in her chair by the
fire.

When Judith had gone, Miss Winter asked, “What are you looking
for?”

“Jane Eyre.”

‘Do you like Jane Eyre?“ she asked.

‘Very much. Do you?“

‘Yes.“

She shivered.

‘Shall I stoke up the fire for you?“

She lowered her eyelids as if a wave of pain had come over her.
“I suppose so.”

Once the fire was burning strongly again, she said, “Do you have
a moment? Sit down, Margaret.”

And after a minute of silence she said this.

‘Picture a conveyor belt, a huge conveyor belt, and at the end
of it a massive furnace. And on the conveyor belt are books. Every copy in the
world of every book you’ve ever loved. All lined up. Jane Eyre. Villette. The
Woman in White.“

“Middlemarch, ” I supplied.

‘Thank you. Middlemarch. And imagine a lever with two labels, On
and Off. At the moment the lever is off. And next to it is a human being, with
his hand on the lever. About to turn it on. And you can stop it. You have a gun
in your hand. All you have to do is pull the trigger. What do you do?“

‘No, that’s silly.“

‘He turns the lever to On. The conveyor belt has started.“

‘But it’s too extreme, it’s hypothetical.“

‘First of all, Shirley goes over the edge.“

‘I don’t like games like this.“

‘Now George Sand starts to go up in flames.“

I sighed and closed my eyes.

‘Wuthering Heights coming up. Going to let that burn, are you?“

I couldn’t help myself. I saw the books, saw their steady
process to the mouth of the furnace, and flinched.

‘Suit yourself. In it goes. Same for Jane Eyre?“

Jane Eyre. I was suddenly dry-mouthed.

‘All you have to do is shoot. I won’t tell. No one need ever
know.“ She waited. ”They’ve started to fall. Just the first few. But there are
a lot of copies. You have a moment to make up your mind.“

I rubbed my thumb nervously against a rough edge of nail on my
middle finger.

‘They’re falling faster now.“

She did not remove her gaze from me.

‘Half of them gone. Think, Margaret. All of Jane Eyre will soon
have disappeared forever. Think.“

Miss Winter blinked.

‘Two thirds gone. Just one person, Margaret. Just one tiny,
insignificant little person.“

I blinked.

‘Still time, but only just. Remember, this person burns books.
Does he really deserve to live?“

Blink. Blink.

‘Last chance.“

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Jane Eyre was no more.

“Margaret!” Miss Winter’s face twisted in vexation as she spoke;
she beat her left hand against the arm of her chair. Even the right hand,
injured though it was, twitched in her lap.

Later, when I transcribed it, I thought it was the most
spontaneous expression of feeling I had ever seen in Miss Winter. It was a surprising
amount of feeling to invest in a mere game.

And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved
books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous
stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth
more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to
say so.

On my way out, I returned to the shelf of Jane Eyres and took
the one volume that met my criteria. Right age, right kind of paper, right
typeface. In my room I turned the pages till I found the place.

‘… not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him
lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started
aside with a cry of alarm—not soon enough however; the volume was flung, it hit
me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it.

The book was intact. Not a single page was missing. This was not
the volume Aurelius’s page had been torn from. But in any case, why should it
be? If his page had come from Angelfield—if it had—then it would have burned
with the rest of the house.

For a time I sat doing nothing, only thinking of Jane Eyre and a
library and a furnace and a house fire, but no matter how I combined and
recombined them, I could not make sense of it.

The other thing I remember from this time was the incident of
the photograph. A small parcel appeared with my breakfast tray one morning,
addressed to me in my father’s narrow handwriting. It was my photographs of
Angelfield; I had sent him the canister of film, and he had had it developed
for me. There were a few clear pictures from my first day: brambles growing
through the wreckage of the library, ivy snaking its way up the stone
staircase. I halted at the picture of the bedroom where I had come face-to-face
with my ghost; over the old fireplace there was only the glare of a flashbulb
reflected. Still, I took it out of the bundle and tucked it inside the cover of
my book, to keep.

The rest of the photographs were from my second visit, when the
weather had been against me. Most of them were nothing but puzzling
compositions of murkiness. What I remembered was shades of gray overlaid with
silver; the mist moving like a veil of gauze; my own breath at tipping point
between air and water. But my camera had captured none of that, nor was it
possible in the dark smudges that interrupted the gray to make out a stone, a
wall, a tree or a forest. After half a dozen such pictures, I gave up looking.
Stuffing the wad of photos in my cardigan pocket, I went downstairs to the
library.

We were about halfway through the interview when I became aware
of a silence. I was dreaming. Lost, as usual, in her world of childhood
twinship. I replayed the sound track of her voice, recalled a changed tone, the
fact that she had addressed me, but could not recall the words.

‘What?“ I said.

‘Your pocket,“ she repeated. ”You have something in your
pocket.“

‘Oh… It’s some photographs…“ In that limbo state halfway between
a story and your life, when you haven’t caught up with your wits yet, I mumbled
on. ”Angelfield,“ I said.

By the time I returned to myself, the pictures were in her
hands.

At first she looked closely at each one, straining through her
glasses to make sense of the blurred shapes. As one indecipherable image
followed another, she let out a small Vida Winter sigh, one that implied her
low expectations had been amply fulfilled, and her mouth tightened into a
critical line. With her good hand she began to flick through the pile of
pictures more cursorily; to show that she no longer expected to find anything
of interest, she tossed each one after the briefest glance onto the table at
her side.

I was mesmerized by the discarded photos landing at a regular
rhythm on the table. They formed a messy sprawl on the surface, flopping on top
of each other and gliding over each other’s slippery surfaces with a sound like
useless, useless, useless.