The thirteenth tale (34 page)

Emmeline! Miss Winter’s twin! Alive, and living in this house!

My mind was in turmoil; blood was pounding in my ears; shock
paralyzed me. She stared at me unblinking, and I realized she was less startled
than I was. But still, she seemed to be under the same spell as me. We were
both cast into immobility.

She was the first to recover. In an urgent gesture she raised a
dark, soil-covered hand toward me and, in a hoarse voice, rasped a string of
senseless sounds.

Bewilderment slowed my responses; I could not even stammer her name
before she turned and hurried away, leaning forward, shoulders hunched. From
out of the shadows emerged the cat. He stretched calmly and, ignoring me, took
himself off after her. They disappeared under the arch and I was alone. Me and
a patch of churned-up soil.

Foxes indeed.

Once they were gone I might have been able to persuade myself
that I had imagined it. That I had been sleepwalking, and that in my sleep I
had dreamed that Adeline’s twin appeared to me and hissed a secret,
unintelligible message. But I knew it was real. And though she was no longer
visible, I could hear her singing as she departed. That infuriating, tuneless
five-note fragment. La la la la la.

I stood, listening, until it faded completely away.

Then, realizing that my feet and hands were freezing, I turned
back to the house.

PHONETIC ALPHABET

A great many years had passed since I learned the phonetic
alphabet. It began with a chart in a linguistics book in father’s shop. There
was no reason for my interest at first, other than that I had nothing to do one
weekend and was enamored of the signs and symbols it contained. There were
familiar letters and foreign ones. There were capital N’s that weren’t the same
as little n’s and capital K’s that weren’t the same as little k’s. Other
letters, n’s and d’s and s’s and z’s, had funny little tails and loops
attached, and you could cross h’s and i’s and u’s as if they were t’s. I loved
these wild and fanciful hybrids: I filled pages of paper with m’s that turned
into j’s, and v’s that perched precariously on tiny o’s like performing dogs on
balls at the circus. My father came across my pages of symbols and taught me
the sounds that went with each. In the international phonetic alphabet, I
discovered, you could write words that looked like math, words that looked like
secret code, words that looked like lost languages.

I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with
the lost. I used to write one special word over and over again. My sister’s
name. A talisman. I folded the word into elaborate miniature origami, kept my
pleat of paper always close to me. In winter it lived in my coat pocket; in
summer it tickled my ankle inside the fold of my sock. At night, I fell asleep
clutching it in my hand. For all my care, I did not always keep track of these
bits of paper. I lost them, made new ones, then came across the old ones. When
my mother tried to prize one from my fingers, I swallowed it to thwart her,
even though she wouldn’t have been able to read it. But when I saw my father
pick a grayed and fraying fold of paper out of the junk in the bottom of a
drawer and unfold it, I did nothing to stop him. When he read the secret name,
his face seemed to break, and his eyes, when they rose to me, were full of
sorrow.

He would have spoken. He opened his mouth to speak but, raising
my finger to my lips, I commanded his silence. I would not have him speak her
name. Had he not tried to shut her away, in the dark? Had he not wanted to
forget her? Had he not tried to keep her from me? He had no right to her now.

I prized the paper from his fingers. Without a word I left the
room. On the window seat on the second floor I put the morsel of paper in my
mouth, tasted its dry, woody tang, and swallowed. For ten years my parents had
buried her name in silence, trying to forget. Now I would protect it in a
silence of my own. And remember.

Alongside my mispronunciation of hello, good-bye and sorry in
seventeen languages, and my ability to recite the Greek alphabet forward and
backward (I who have never learned a word of Greek in my life), the phonetic
alphabet was one of those secret, random wells of useless knowledge left over
from my bookish childhood. I learned it only to amuse myself; its purpose in
those days was merely private, so as the years passed I made no particular
effort to practice it. That is why, when I came in from the garden and put
pencil to paper to capture the sibilants and fricatives, the plosives and
trills of Emmeline’s urgent whisper, I had to make several attempts.

After three or four goes, I sat on the bed and looked at my line
of squiggles and symbols and signs. Was it accurate? Doubts began to assail me.
Had I remembered the sounds accurately after my five-minute journey back into
the house? Was my recollection of the phonetic alphabet itself adequate? What
if my first failed attempts had contaminated my memory?

I whispered what I had written on the paper. Whispered it again,
urgently. Waited for the birth of some answering echo in my memory to tell me I
had got it right. Nothing came. It was the travestied transcription of
something misheard and then only half-remembered. It was useless.

I wrote the secret name instead. The spell, the charm, the
talisman.

It had never worked. She never came. I was still alone.

I screwed the paper into a ball and kicked it into a corner.

THE LADDER

My story isn’t boring you, is it, Miss Lea?“ I endured a number
of such comments the following day as, unable to suppress my yawns, I fidgeted
and rubbed my eyes while listening to Miss Winter’s narration.

‘I’m sorry. I’m just tired.“

‘Tired!“ she exclaimed. ”You look like death warmed up! A proper
meal would put you right. Whatever’s the matter with you?“

I shrugged my shoulders. “Just tired. That’s all.”

She pursed her lips and regarded me sternly, but I said nothing
more, and she took up her story.

For six months things went on. We sequestered ourselves in a
handful of rooms: the kitchen, where John still slept at night, the drawing
room and the library. We girls used the back stairs to get from the kitchen to
the one bedroom that seemed secure. The mattresses we slept on were those we
had dragged from the old room, the beds themselves being too heavy to move. The
house had felt too big anyway, since the household had been so diminished in
number. We survivors felt more at ease in the security, the manageability of
our smaller accommodation. All the same, we could never quite forget the rest
of the house, slowly festering behind closed doors, like a moribund limb.

Emmeline spent much of her time inventing card games. “Play with
me. Oh, go on, do play,” she would pester. Eventually I gave in and played.
Obscure games with ever-shifting rules, games only she understood, and which
she always won, which gave her constant delight. She took baths. She never lost
her love of soap and hot water, spent hours luxuriating in the water I’d heated
for the laundry and washing up. I didn’t begrudge her. It was better if at
least one of us could be happy.

Before we closed up the rooms, Emmeline had gone through
cupboards belonging to Isabelle and taken dresses and scent bottles and shoes,
which she hoarded in our campsite of a bedroom. It was like trying to sleep in
a dressing-up box. Emmeline wore the dresses. Some were out of date by ten
years, others—belonging to Isabelle’s mother, I presume—were thirty and forty
years old. Emmeline entertained us in the evenings by making dramatic entrances
into the kitchen in the more extravagant outfits. The dresses made her look older
than fifteen; they made her look womanly. I remembered Hester’s conversation
with the doctor in the garden—There is no reason why Emmeline should not marry
one day—and I remembered what the Missus had told me about Isabelle and the
picnics—She was the kind of girl men can’t look at without wanting to touch—and
I felt a sudden anxiety. But then she flopped down on a kitchen chair, took a
pack of cards from a silk purse and said, all child, “Play cards with me, go
on.” I was half reassured, but still, I made sure she did not leave the house
in her finery.

John was listless. He did rouse himself to do the unthinkable,
though: He got a boy to help in the garden. “It’ll be all right,” he said.
“It’s only old Proctor’s boy, Ambrose. He’s a quiet lad. It won’t be for long.
Only till I get the house fixed up.”

That, I knew, would take forever.

The boy came. He was taller than John and broader across the
shoulders. They stood hands in pockets, the two of them, and discussed the
day’s work, and then the boy started. He had a measured, patient way of
digging; the smooth, constant chime of spade on soil got on my nerves. “Why do
we have to have him?” I wanted to know. “He’s an outsider just like the
others.”

But for some reason, the boy wasn’t an outsider to John. Perhaps
because he came from John’s world, the world of men, the world I didn’t know.

‘He’s a good lad,“ John said time and time again in answer to my
questions. ”He’s a hard worker. He doesn’t ask too many questions, and he
doesn’t talk too much.“

‘He might not have a tongue, but he’s got eyes in his head.“

John shrugged and looked away, uneasy.

‘I won’t always be here,“ he said eventually. ”Things can’t go
on forever like this.“ He sketched a vague gesture that took in the house, its
inhabitants, the life we led in it. ”One day things will have to change.“

“Change?”

‘You’re growing up. It won’t be the same, will it? It’s one
thing, being children, but when you’re grown up…“

But I was already gone. I didn’t want to know what it was he had
to say.

Emmeline was in the bedroom, picking sequins off an evening
scarf for her treasure box. I sat down beside her. She was too absorbed in her
task to look up when I came in. Her plump, tapered fingers picked relentlessly
at a sequin until it came away, then dropped it into the box. It was slow work,
but then Emmeline had all the time in the world. Her calm face never changed as
she bent over the scarf. Lips together. Her gaze at once intent and dreamy.
Every so often her eyelids descended, closing off the green irises, then, as
soon as they had touched the lower lid, rising again to reveal the green
unchanged.

Did I really look like that? I wondered. Oh, I knew what a good
match my eyes were to hers in the mirror. And I knew we had the same sideways
kink underneath the weight of red hair at the back of our necks. And I knew the
impact we could make on the villagers on those rare occasions when we walked
arm in arm down The Street in matching dresses. But still, I didn’t look like
Emmeline, did I? My face could not do that placid concentration. It would be
screwed up in frustration. I would be biting my lip, pushing my hair angrily
back over my shoulder and out of the way, huffing with impatience. I would not
be tranquil like Emmeline. I would bite the sequins off with my teeth.

You won’t leave me, will you? I wanted to say. Because I won’t
leave you. We’ll stay here forever. Together. Whatever John-the-dig says.

‘Why don’t we play?“

She continued her silent work as though she hadn’t heard me.

‘Let’s play getting married. You can be the bride. Go on. You
can wear… this.“ I pulled a yellow piece of gauzy stuff from the pile of finery
in the corner. ”It’s like a veil, look.“ She didn’t look up, not even when I
tossed it over her head. She just brushed it out of her eyes and carried on
picking at her sequin.

And so I turned my attention to her treasure box. Hester’s keys
were still in there, still shiny, though Emmeline had, so far as one could
tell, forgotten their previous keeper. There were bits and pieces of Isabelle’s
jewelry, the colored wrappers from the sweets Hester had given her one day, an
alarming shard of glass from a broken green bottle, a length of ribbon with a
gold edge that used to be mine, given to me by the Missus more years ago than I
could remember. Underneath all the other junk there would still be the threads
of silver she had worked out of the curtains the day Hester arrived. And
half-hidden beneath the jumble of rubies, glass and junk, there was something
that didn’t seem to belong. Something leather. I put my head on one side to get
a better view. Ah! That was why she wanted it! Gold lettering. I A R. What was
I A R? Or who was I A R? Tilting my head the other way I caught sight of
something else. A tiny lock. And a tiny key. No wonder it was in Emmeline’s
treasure box. Gold letters and a key. I should think it was her prize
possession. And suddenly it struck me. I A R! Diary!

I reached out a hand.

Quick as a flash—her looks could be deceiving—Emmeline’s hand
came down like a vise on my wrist and stopped me from touching. Still she
didn’t look at me. She moved my hand away with a firm movement and brought the
lid down on her box.

There were white pressure marks on my wrist where she had held
me.

‘I’m going to go away,“ I said experimentally. My voice didn’t
sound terribly convincing. ”I am. And I’m going to leave you here. I’m going to
grow up and live on my own.“