The thirteenth tale (37 page)

His eyes flickered from me to Emmeline, from Emmeline to me.

‘I think it’s Adeline.“ I saw his lips form the name, and I
smiled as all his medical theories and experiments came tumbling down about his
feet.

Catching his eye, I raised my hand to the pair of them. A
gracious gesture of thanks to them for coming to the funeral of a man they
hardly knew in order to be of service to me. That’s what the solicitor took it
for. The doctor may have taken it rather differently.

Later. Many hours later.

The funeral over, at last I could cry.

Except that I couldn’t. My tears, kept in too long, had
fossilized.

They would have to stay in forever now.

FOSSILIZED TEARS

“Excuse me…” Judith began, and stopped. She pressed her lips
tight, then with an uncharacteristic flutter of the hands, “The doctor is
already out on a call—he won’t be here for an hour. Please…” I belted my
dressing gown and followed; Judith was half running a few paces ahead. We went
up and down flights of stairs, turned into passages and corridors, arrived back
on the ground floor but in a part of the house I hadn’t seen before. Finally we
came to a series of rooms that I took to be Miss Winter’s private suite. We
paused before a closed door, and Judith gave me a troubled look. I well
understood her anxiety, from behind the door there came deep, inhuman sounds,
bellows of pain interrupted by jagged gasps for breath. Judith opened the final
door and we went in.

I was astonished. No wonder the noise reverberated so! Unlike
the rest of the house, with its overstuffed upholstery, lavish drapes, baffled
alls and tapestries, this was a spare and naked little room. The walls were
bare plaster, the floor simple boards. A plain bookcase in the corner was
stuffed with piles of yellowing paper, and in the corner stood a narrow bed
with simple white covers. At the window a calico curtain hung limply each side
of the panes, letting the night in. Slumped over a plain little school desk,
with her back to me, was Miss Winter. Gone were her fiery orange and
resplendent purple. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved chemise, and she
was weeping.

A harsh, atonal scraping of air over vocal cords. Jarring wails
that veered into frighteningly animal moans. Her shoulders heaved and crashed
and her torso shuddered; the force traveled through her frail neck to her head,
along her arms into her hands, which jolted against the desktop. Judith hurried
to replace a cushion beneath Miss Winter’s temple; Miss Winter, utterly
possessed by the crisis, seemed not to know we were there.

‘I’ve never seen her like this before,“ Judith said, fingers
pressed to her lips. And with a rising note of panic, ”I don’t know what to
do.“

Miss Winter’s mouth gaped and grimaced, contorted into wild,
ugly shapes by the grief that was too big for it.

‘It’s all right,“ I said to Judith. It was an agony I knew. I
drew up a chair and sat down beside Miss Winter.

‘Hush, hush, I know.“ I placed an arm across her shoulder, drew
her two hands into mine. Shrouding her body with my own, I bent my ear close to
her head and went on with the incantation. ”It’s all right. It will pass. Hush,
child. You’re not alone.“ I rocked her and soothed her and never stopped
breathing the magic words. They were not my own words, but my father’s. Words
that I knew would work, because they had always worked for me. ”Hush,“ I
whispered. ”I know. It will pass.“

The convulsions did not stop, nor the cries become less painful,
but they gradually became less violent. She had time between each new paroxysm
to take in desperate, shuddering breaths of air.

‘You’re not alone. I’m with you.“

Eventually she was quiet. The curve of her skull pressed into my
cheek. Wisps of her hair touched my lips. Against my ribs I could feel her
little flutters of breath, the tender convulsions in her lungs. Her hands were
very cold in mine.

‘There. There now.“

We sat in silence for minutes. I pulled the shawl up and arranged
it more warmly around her shoulders, and tried to rub some warmth into her
hands. Her face was ravaged. She could scarcely see out of her swollen eyelids,
and her lips were sore and cracked. The birth of a bruise marked the spot where
her head had been shaken against the desk.

‘He was a good man,“ I said. ”A good man. And he loved you.“
Slowly she nodded. Her mouth quivered. Had she tried to say something? Again
her lips moved.

The safety catch? Was that what she had said? “Was it your
sister who interfered with the safety catch? ” It seems a brutal question now,
but at the time, with that flood of tears having swept all etiquette away, the
directness did not feel out of place.

My question caused her one last spasm of pain, but when she
spoke, she was unequivocal.

‘Not Emmeline. Not her. Not her.“

“Who, then?”

She squeezed her eyes shut, began to sway and shook her head
from side to side. I have seen the same movement in animals in zoos when hey
have been driven mad by their captivity. Beginning to fear the renewal of her
agony, I remembered what it was that my father used to do to console me when I
was a child. Gently, tenderly, I stroked her hair until, soothed, she came to
rest her head on my shoulder.

Finally she was quiet enough for Judith to be able to put her to
bed. in a sleepy, childlike voice she asked for me to stay, and so I stayed
with her, kneeling by her bedside and watching her fall asleep. From time to
time a shiver disturbed her slumber and a look of fear came on her sleeping
face; when this happened I smoothed her hair until her eyelids settled back
into peace.

When was it that my father had consoled me like this? An
incident rose out of the depths of my memory. I must have been twelve or so. It
was Sunday; Father and I were eating sandwiches by the river when twins
appeared. Two blond girls with their blond parents, day-trippers come to admire
the architecture and enjoy the sunshine. Everyone noticed them; they must have
been used to the stares of strangers. But not mine. I saw them and my heart
leaped. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing myself complete. With what
ardor I stared at them. With what hunger. Nervous, they turned away from the
girl with the devouring stare and reached for their parents’ hands. I saw their
fear, and a hard hand squeezed my lungs until the sky went dark. Then later, in
the shop. I on the window seat, between sleep and a nightmare; he, crouched on
the floor, stroking my hair, murmuring his incantation, “Hush, it will pass.
It’s all right. You’re not alone.”

Sometime later, Dr. Clifton came. When I turned to see him in
the doorway I got the feeling that he may have been there for some time
already. I slipped past him on my way out, and there was something in his expression
I did not know how to read.

UNDERWATER CRYPTOGRAPHY

I returned to my own rooms, my feet moving as slowly as my
thoughts. Nothing made sense. Why had John-the-dig died? Because someone had
interfered with the safety catch on the ladder. It can’t have been the boy.
Miss Winter’s story gave him a clear alibi: While John and his ladder were
tumbling from the balustrade through the empty air to the ground, the boy was
eyeing her cigarette, not daring to ask for a drag. Then surely it must have
been Emmeline. Except that nothing in the story suggests that Emmeline would do
such a thing. She was a harmless child, even Hester said so. And Miss Winter
herself couldn’t have been clearer. No. Not Emmeline. Then who? Isabelle was
dead. Charlie was gone.

I came to my rooms, went in, stood by the window. It was too
dark to see; there was only my reflection, a pale shadow you could see the
night through. “Who?” I asked it.

At last I listened to the quiet, persistent voice in my head
that I had been trying to ignore. Adeline.

No, I said.

Yes, it said. Adeline.

It was not possible. The cries of grief for John-the-dig were
still fresh in my mind. No one could mourn a man like that if she had killed
him, could she? No one could murder a man she loved enough to cry those tears
for?

But the voice in my head recounted episode after episode from
the story I knew so well. The violence in the topiary garden, each swipe of the
shears a blow to John’s heart. The attacks on Emmeline, the hair-pulling, the
battering, the biting. The baby removed from the perambulator and left
carelessly, to die or to be found. One of the twins was not quite right, they
said in the village. I remembered and I wondered. Was it possible? Had the
tears I had just witnessed been tears of guilt? Tears of remorse? Was it a
murderess I had held in my arms and comforted? Was this the secret Miss Winter
had hidden from the world for so long? An unpleasant suspicion revealed itself
to me. Was this the point of Miss Winter’s story? To make me sympathize with
her, exonerate her, forgive her? I shivered.

But one thing at least I was sure of. She had loved him. How
could it be otherwise? I remembered holding her racked and tormented body
against mine and knew that only broken love can cause such despair. I
remembered the child Adeline reaching into John’s loneliness after the death of
the Missus, drawing him back to life by getting him to teach her to prune the
topiary.

The topiary she had damaged.

Oh, perhaps I wasn’t sure after all!

My eyes roamed over the darkness outside the window. Her
fabulous garden. Was it her homage to John-the-dig? Her lifelong penitence for
the damage she had wrought?

I rubbed my tired eyes and knew I ought to go to bed. But I was
too tired to sleep. My thoughts, if I did nothing to stop them, would go round
in circles all night long. I decided to have a bath.

While I waited for the tub to fill, I cast about for something
to occupy my mind. A ball of paper half visible beneath the dressing table
caught my attention. I unfolded it, flattened it out. A row of phonetic script.

In the bathroom, with the water thundering in the background, I
made a few short-lived attempts at picking some kind of meaning out of my
string of symbols. Always there was that undermining feeling that I hadn’t
captured Emmeline’s utterance quite accurately. I pictured the moonlit garden,
the contortions of the witch hazel, the grotesque, urgent face; I heard again
the abruptness of Emmeline’s voice. But however hard I tried, I could not
recall the pronouncement itself.

I climbed into the bath, leaving the scrap of paper on the edge.
The water, warm to my feet, legs, back, felt distinctly cooler against the
macula on my side. Eyes closed, I slid right under the surface. Ears, nose,
eyes, right to the top of my head. The water rang in my ears, my hair lifted
from its roots.

I came up for air, then instantly plunged underwater again. More
air, then water.

In a loose, underwater fashion, thoughts began to swim in my
mind. I knew enough about twin language to know that it was never totally
invented. In the case of Emmeline and Adeline, it would be based on English or
French or could contain elements of both.

Air. Water.

Introduced distortions. In the intonation, maybe. Or the vowels.
And sometimes extra bits, added to camouflage rather than to carry meaning.

Air. Water.

A puzzle. A secret code. A cryptograph. It wouldn’t be as hard
as the Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mycenaean Linear B. How would you have to go
about it? Take each syllable separately. It could be a word or a part of a
word. Remove the intonation first. Play with the stress. Experiment with
lengthening, shortening, flattening the vowel sounds. Then what did the
syllable suggest in English? In French? And what if you left it out and played
with the syllables on either side instead? There would be a vast number of
possible combinations. Thousands. But not an infinite number. A computing
machine could do it. So could a human brain, given a year or two.

The dead go underground.

What? I sat bolt upright in shock. The words came to me out of
nowhere.

They beat painfully in my chest. It was ridiculous. It couldn’t
be!

Trembling, I reached to the edge of the bath where I had left my
jottings, and drew the paper near to me. Anxiously I scanned it. My notes, my
symbols and signs, my squiggles and dots, were gone. They had been sitting in a
pool of water and had drowned.

I tried once more to remember the sounds as they had come to me
underwater. But they were wiped from my memory. All I could remember was her
fraught, intent face and the five-note sequence she sang as she left.

The dead go underground. Words that had arrived fully formed in
my mind, leaving no trail behind them. Where had they come from? What tricks
had my mind been playing to come up with these words out of nowhere?

I didn’t actually believe that this was what she had said to me,
did I?

Come on, be sensible, I told myself.

I reached for the soap and resolved to put my underwater imaginings
out of my mind.

HAIR