The thirteenth tale (33 page)

Then the rhythm came to a halt. Miss Winter was sitting with
intent rigidity, holding up a single picture and studying it with a frown.
She’s seen a ghost, I thought. Then, after a long moment, pretending not to
feel my gaze upon her, she tucked the photo behind the remaining dozen and
looked at the rest, tossing them down just as before. When the one that had
arrested her attention resurfaced, she barely glanced at it but added it to the
others. “I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was Angelfield, but if you say
so…” she said icily, and then, in an apparently artless movement, she picked up
the whole pile and, holding them toward me, dropped them.

‘My hand. Do excuse me,“ she murmured as I bent down to retrieve
the pictures, but I wasn’t deceived.

And she picked up her story where she had left it.

Later I looked through the pictures again. For all that the
dropping of the photos had muddled the order, it wasn’t difficult to tell which
one had struck her so forcefully. In the bundle of blurred gray images there
was really only one that stood out from the rest. I sat on the edge of my bed,
looking at the image, remembering the moment well. The thinning of the mist and
the warming of the sun had combined at just the right time to allow a ray of
light to fall onto a boy who posed stiffly for the camera, chin up, back
straight, eyes betraying the anxious knowledge that at any minute his hard
yellow hat was going to slip sideways on his head.

Why had she been so taken by that photograph? I scanned the
background, but the house, half demolished already, was only a dismal smear of
gray over the child’s right shoulder. Closer to him, all that was visible was
the grille of the safety barrier and the corner of the Keep Out sign.

Was it the boy himself who interested her?

I puzzled over the picture for half an hour, but by the time I
came to put it away, I was no nearer an explanation. Because it perplexed me, I
slipped it inside the cover of my book along with the picture of an absence in
a mirror frame.

Apart from the photograph of the boy and the game of Jane Eyre
and the furnace, not much else pierced the cloak the story had cast over me.

The cat, I remember. He took note of my unusual hours, came
scratching at my door for a bit of fuss at random hours of the day and night.
Finished up bits of egg or fish from my plate. He liked to sit on my piles of
paper, watching me write. For hours I could sit scratching at my pages,
wandering in the dark labyrinth of Miss Winter’s story, but no matter how far I
forgot myself, I never quite lost my sense of being watched over, and when I
got particularly lost, it was the gaze of the cat that seemed to reach into my
muddle and light my way back to my room, my notes, my pencils and my pencil
sharpener. He even slept with me on my bed some nights, and I took to leaving
my curtains open so that if he woke he could sit on my windowsill seeing things
move in the dark that were invisible to the human eye.

And that is all. Apart from these things there was nothing else.
Only the eternal twilight and the story.

COLLAPSE

Isabelle had gone. Hester had gone. Charlie had gone. Now Miss
Winter told me of further losses.

Up in the attic I leaned with my back against the creaking wall.
I pressed back to make it give, then released it. Over and over. I was tempting
fate. What would happen, I wondered, if the wall came down? Would the roof cave
in? Would the weight of it falling cause the floorboards to collapse? Would
roof tiles and beams and stone come crashing through ceilings onto the beds and
boxes as if there were an earthquake? And then what? Would it stop there? How
far would it go? I rocked and rocked, taunting the wall, daring it to fall, but
it didn’t. Even under duress, it is astonishing just how long a dead wall will
stay standing.

Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up, ears ajangle. The
noise of it was finished already, but I could still feel it resounding in my
eardrums and in my chest. I leaped out of bed and ran to the stairs, Emmeline
at my heels.

We arrived on the galleried landing at the same time that John,
who slept in the kitchen, arrived at the foot of the stairs, and we all stared.
In the middle of the hallway the Missus was standing in her nightdress, staring
upward. At her feet was a huge block of stone, and above her head, a jagged
hole in the ceiling. The air was thick with gray dust. It rose and fell in the
air, undecided where to settle. Fragments of plaster, mortar, wood were still
falling from the floor above, with a sound like mice scattering, and from time
to time I felt Emmeline jump as planks and bricks fell in the floors above.

The stone steps were cold, then splinters of wood and shards of
plaster and mortar dug into my feet. In the center of all the detritus of our
broken house, with the swirls of dust slowly settling around her, the Missus
stood like a ghost. Dust-gray hair, dust-gray face and hands, dust-gray the
folds of her long nightdress. She stood perfectly still and looked up. I came
close to her and joined my stare to hers. We gazed through the hole in the
ceiling, and beyond that another hole in another ceiling and then yet another
hole in another ceiling. We saw the peony wallpaper in the bedroom above, the
ivy trellis pattern in the room above that, and the pale gray walls of the
little attic room. Above all of that, high above our heads, we saw the hole in
the roof itself and the sky. There were no stars.

I took her hand. “Come on,” I said. “It’s no use looking up
there.”

I led her away, and she followed me like a little child. “I’ll
put her to bed,” I told John.

Ghost-white, he nodded. “Yes,” he said, in a voice thick with
dust. He could hardly bear to look at her. He made a slow gesture toward the
destroyed ceiling. It was the slow motion of a drowning man dragged under by
the current. “And I’ll sort this out.”

But an hour later, when the Missus was clean, and in a fresh
nightdress, tucked up in bed and asleep, he was still there. Exactly as I had
left him. Staring at the spot where she had been.

The next morning, when the Missus did not appear in the kitchen,
it was I who went to wake her. She could not be woken. Her soul had departed
through the hole in the roof, and she was gone.

‘We’ve lost her,“ I told John in the kitchen. ”She’s dead.“

His face didn’t change. He continued to stare across the kitchen
table as though he hadn’t heard me. “Yes,” he said eventually, in a voice that
did not expect to be heard. “Yes.”

It felt as if everything had come to an end. I had only one
wish: to sit like John, immobile, staring into space and doing nothing. Yet
time did not stop. I could still feel my heartbeat measuring out the seconds. I
could feel hunger growing in my stomach and thirst in my throat. I was so sad I
thought I would die, yet instead I was scandalously and absurdly alive—so alive
I swear I could feel my hair and my fingernails growing.

For all the unbearable weight on my heart I could not, like
John, give myself up to the misery. Hester was gone; Charlie was gone; the
Missus was gone; John, in his own way, was gone, though I hoped he would find
his way back. In the meantime the girl in the mist was going to have to come
out of the shadows. It was time to stop playing and grow up.

‘I’ll put the kettle on, then,“ I said. ”Make a cup of tea.“

My voice was not my own. Some other girl, some sensible,
capable, ordinary girl had found her way into my skin and taken me over. She
seemed to know just what to do. I was only partly surprised. Hadn’t I spent
half my life watching people live their lives? Watching Hester, watching the
Missus, watching the villagers?

I settled quietly inside myself while the capable girl boiled
the kettle, measured out the tea leaves, stirred and poured. She put two sugars
in John’s tea, three in mine. When it was made, I drank it, and as the hot,
sweet tea reached my stomach, at last I stopped trembling.

THE SILVER GARDEN

Before I was quite awake I had the sense that something was
different. And a moment later, before I even opened my eyes, I knew what it
was. There was light.

Gone were the shadows that had lurked in my room since the
beginning of the month; gone, too, the gloomy corners and the air of
mournfulness. The window was a pale rectangle, and from it there entered a
shimmering paleness that illuminated every aspect of my room. It was so long
since I had seen it that I felt a surge of joy, as though it weren’t just a
night that had ended but winter. It was as if spring had come.

The cat was on the window ledge, gazing intently into the
garden. Hearing me stir, he immediately jumped down and pawed at the door to go
out. I pulled my clothes and coat on, and we crept downstairs together, to the
kitchen and the garden.

I realized my mistake the moment I stepped outdoors. It was not
day. It was not the sun, but moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the
leaves with silver and touching the outlines of the statuary figures. I stopped
still and stared at the moon. It was a perfect circle, hanging palely in a
clear sky. Mesmerized, I could have stood there till daybreak, but the cat,
impatient, pressed my ankles for attention, and I bent to stroke him. No sooner
had I touched him than he moved away, only to pause a few yards off and look
over his shoulder.

I turned up the collar of my coat, shoved my cold hands in my
pockets and followed.

He led me first down the grassy path between the long borders.
On our left the yew hedge gleamed brightly; on the right the hedge was dark in
the moon shadow. We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes
appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that
surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the
moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have
lingered—a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly;
a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the
pale sky—but I could not stop. All the time, the cat stalked on ahead of me
with a purposeful, even step, tail raised like a tour guide’s umbrella
signaling this way, follow me. In the walled garden he jumped up onto the wall that
bordered the fountain pool and padded halfway around its perimeter, ignoring
the moon’s reflection that shone in the water like a bright coin at the bottom
of the pool. And when he came level with the arched entrance to the winter
garden, he jumped down and walked toward it.

Under the arch he paused. He looked left and right, intent. Saw
something. And slunk off, out of sight, toward it.

Curious, I tiptoed forward to stand where he had, and look
around.

A winter garden is colorful when you see it at the right time of
day, at the right time of year. Largely it depends on daylight to bring it to
life. The midnight visitor has to look harder to see its attractions. It was
too dark to see the low, wide spread of hellebore leaves against the dark soil;
too early in the season for the brightness of snowdrops; too cold for the
daphne to release its fragrance. There was witch hazel, though; soon its
branches would be decorated with trembling yellow and orange tassels, but for
now it was the branches themselves that were the main attraction. Fine and
leafless, they were delicately knotted, twisting randomly and with elegant
restraint.

At its foot, hunched over the ground, was the rounded silhouette
of a human figure.

I froze.

The figure heaved and shifted laboriously, releasing gasping
puffs of breath and effortful grunts.

In a long, slow second my mind raced to explain the presence of
another human being in Miss Winter’s garden at night. Some things I knew
instantly without needing even to think about them. For a start, it was not
Maurice kneeling on the ground there. Though he was the least unlikely person
to find in the garden, it never occurred to me to wonder whether it might be
him. This was not his wiry frame, these not his measured movements. Equally it
was not Judith. Neat, calm, Judith with her clean nails, perfect hair and
polished shoes scrabbling about in the garden in the middle of the night?
Impossible. I did not need to consider these two, and so I didn’t.

Instead, in that second, my mind reeled to and fro a hundred
times between two thoughts.

It was Miss Winter.

It couldn’t be Miss Winter.

It was Miss Winter because… because it was. I could tell. I
could sense it. It was her and I knew it.

It couldn’t be her. Miss Winter was frail and ill. Miss Winter
was always in her wheelchair. Miss Winter was too unwell to bend to pluck out a
weed, let alone crouch on the cold ground disturbing the soil in this frantic
fashion.

It wasn’t Miss Winter.

But somehow, impossibly, despite everything, it was.

That first second was long and confusing. The second, when it
finally came, was sudden.

The figure froze… swiveled… rose… and I knew.

Miss Winter’s eyes. Brilliant, supernatural green.

But not Miss Winter’s face.

A patchwork of scarred and mottled flesh, crisscrossed by
crevices deeper than age could make. Two uneven dumplings of cheeks. Lopsided
lips, one half a perfect bow that told of former beauty, the other a twisted
graft of white flesh.