The thirteenth tale (39 page)

Miss Winter was telling me about something when she interrupted
herself. “Are you listening to me, Miss Lea?”

I jerked out of my reverie and fumbled for an answer. Had I been
listening? I had no idea. At that moment I couldn’t have told her what she had
been saying, though I’m sure that somewhere in my mind there was a place where
it was all recorded. But at the point when she jerked me out of myself, I was
in a kind of no-man’s-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of
tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a
white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker. Lost
for words, I stared at her for a minute, while she grew more and more
irritated, then I plucked at the first coherent sentence that presented itself
to me.

‘Have you ever had a child, Miss Winter?“

‘Good Lord, what a question. Of course I haven’t. Have you gone
mad, girl?“

‘Emmeline, then?“

‘We have an agreement, do we not? No questions?“ And then,
changing her expression, she bent forward and scrutinized me closely. ”Are you
ill?“

‘No, I don’t think so.“

‘Well, you are clearly not in your right mind for work.“

It was a dismissal.

Back in my room I spent an hour bored, unsettled, plagued by
myself. I sat at my desk, pencil in hand, but did not write; felt cold and
turned the radiator up, then, too hot, took my cardigan off. I’d have liked a
bath, but there was no hot water. I made cocoa and put extra sugar in it; then
the sweetness nauseated me. A book? Would that do it? In the library the
shelves were lined with dead words. Nothing there could help me.

There came a dash of raindrops, scattering against the window,
and my heart leaped. Outside. Yes, that was what I needed. And not just the
garden. I needed to get away, right away. Onto the moors.

The main gate was kept locked, I knew, and I had no wish to ask
Maurice to open it for me. Instead, I headed through the garden to the farthest
point from the house, where there was a door in the wall. The door, overgrown
with ivy, had not been opened for a long time, and I had to pull the foliage
away with my hands before I could open the latch. When the door swung toward
me, there was more ivy to be pushed aside before I could step, a little
disheveled, outside.

I used to think that I loved rain, but in fact I hardly knew it.
The rain I loved was genteel town rain, made soft by all the obstacles the
skyline put in its path, and warmed by the rising heat of the town itself. On
the moors, enraged by the wind and embittered by the chill, the rain was
vicious. Needles of ice stung my face and, behind me, vessels of freezing water
burst against my shoulders.

Happy birthday.

If I was at the shop, my father would produce a present from
beneath the desk as I came down the stairs. There would be a book or books,
purchased at auction and put aside during the year. And a record or perfume or
a picture. He would have wrapped them in the shop, at the desk, some quiet
afternoon when I was at the post office or the library. He would have gone out
one lunchtime to choose a card, alone, and he would have written in it, Love
from Dad and Mother, at the desk. Alone, quite alone. He would go to the bakery
for a cake, and somewhere in the shop—I had never discovered where; it was one
of the few secrets I had not fathomed—he kept a candle, which came out on this
day every year, was lit, and which I blew out, with as good an impression of
happiness as I could muster. Then we ate the cake, with tea, and settled down
to quiet digestion and cataloging.

I knew how it was for him. It was easier now that I was grown up
than when I was a child. How much harder birthdays had been in the house.
Presents hidden overnight in the shed, not from me, but from my mother, who
could not bear the sight of them. The inevitable headache was her jealously
guarded rite of remembrance, one that made it impossible to invite other
children in the house, impossible, too, to leave her for the treat of a visit
to the zoo or the park. My birthday toys were always quiet ones. Cakes were
never homemade, and the leftovers had to be divested of their candles and icing
before they could be put in the tin for the next day.

Happy birthday? Father whispered the words, Happy Birthday,
hilariously, right in my ear. We played silent card games where the winner
pulled gleeful faces and the loser grimaced and slumped, and nothing, not a
peep, not a splutter, could be heard in the room above our heads. In between
games, up and down he went, my poor father, between the silent pain of the
bedroom and the secret birthday downstairs, changing his face from jollity to
sympathy, from sympathy back to jollity, in the stairwell.

Unhappy birthday. From the day I was born, grief was always
present. It settled like dust upon the household. It covered everyone and
everything; it invaded us with every breath we took. It shrouded us in our own
separate miseries.

Only because I was so cold could I bear to contemplate these
memories.

Why couldn’t she love me? Why did my life mean less to her than
my sister’s death? Did she blame me for it? Perhaps she was right to. I was
alive now only because my sister had died. Every sight of me was a reminder of
her loss.

Would it have been easier for her if we had both died?

Stupefied, I walked. One foot in front of the other, again and
again and again, mesmerized. No interest in where I was heading. Looking
nowhere, seeing nothing, I stumbled on.

Then I bumped into something.

‘Margaret! Margaret!“

I was too cold to be startled, too cold to make my face respond
to he vast form that stood before me, shrouded in tentlike drapes of green
rainproof fabric. It moved, and two hands came down on my shoulders and gave me
a shake.

‘Margaret!“

It was Aurelius.

‘Look at you! You’re blue with cold! Quick, come with me.“ He
took my arm and led me briskly off. My feet stumbled over the ground behind him
until we came to a road, a car. He bundled me in. There was a slamming of
doors, the hum of an engine, and then a blast of warmth around my ankles and
knees. Aurelius opened a Thermos flask and poured a mug of orange tea.

‘Drink!“

I drank. The tea was hot and sweet.

‘Eat!“

I bit into the sandwich he held out.

In the warmth of the car, drinking hot tea and eating chicken
sandwiches, I felt colder than ever. My teeth started to chatter and I shivered
uncontrollably.

‘Goodness gracious!“ Aurelius exclaimed softly as he passed me one
dainty sandwich after another. ”Dear me!“

The food seemed to bring me to my senses a little. “What are you
doing here, Aurelius?”

‘I came to give you this,“ he said, and he reached over to the
back and lifted a cake tin through the gap between the seats.

Placing the tin on my lap, he beamed gloriously at me as he
removed the lid.

Inside was a cake. A homemade cake. And on the cake, in curly
icing letters, were three words: Happy Birthday Margaret.

I was too cold to cry. Instead the combination of cold and cake
set me talking. Words emerged from me, randomly, like objects disgorged by
glaciers as they thaw. Nocturnal singing, a garden with eyes, sisters, a baby,
a spoon. “And she even knows the house,” I babbled while Aurelius dried my hair
with paper towels, “your house and Mrs. Love’s. She looked through the window
and thought Mrs. Love was like a fairytale grandmother… Don’t you see what it
means? ”

Aurelius shook his head. “But she told me—”

‘She lied to you, Aurelius! When you came to see her in your
brown suit, she lied. She has admitted it.“

‘Bless me!“ exclaimed Aurelius. ”However did you know about that
brown suit of mine? I had to pretend to be a journalist, you know.“ But then,
as what I was telling him began to sink in, ”A spoon like mine, you say? And
she knew the house?“

‘She’s your aunt, Aurelius. And Emmeline is your mother.“

Aurelius stopped patting my hair, and for a long moment he
stared out of the car window in the direction of the house. “My mother,” he
murmured, “there.”

I nodded.

There was another silence, and then he turned to me. “Take me to
her, Margaret.”

I seemed to wake up. “The thing is, Aurelius, she’s not well.”

‘Ill? Then you must take me to her. Without delay!“

‘Not ill, exactly.“ How to explain? ”She was injured in the
fire, Aurelius. Not only her face. Her mind.“

He absorbed this new information, added it to his store of loss
and pain, and when he spoke again it was with a grave firmness of purpose.
“Take me to her.”

Was it illness that dictated my response? Was it the fact that
it was my birthday? Was it my own motherlessness? These factors might have lad
something to do with it, but more significant than all of them was Aurelius’s
expression as he waited for my answer. There were a hundred and one reasons to
say no to his demand, but faced with the ferocity of his need, they faded to
nothing.

I said yes.

REUNION

My bath went some way toward thawing me out, but did nothing to
soothe the ache behind my eyes. I gave up all thoughts of working for the rest
of the afternoon and crept into bed, pulling the extra covers well up over my
ears. Inside I was still shivering. In a shallow sleep I saw strange visions.
Hester and my father and the twins and my mother, visions in which everyone had
someone else’s face, in which everyone was someone else disguised, and even my
own face was disturbing to me as it shifted and altered, sometimes myself,
sometimes another. Then Aurelius’s bright head appeared in my dream: himself,
always himself, only himself, and he smiled and the phantoms were banished.
Darkness closed over me like water, and I sank to the depths of sleep.

I awoke with a headache, aches in my limbs and my joints and my
back. A tiredness that had nothing to do with exertion or lack of sleep weighed
me down and slowed my thoughts. The darkness had thickened. Had I slept through
the hour of my appointment with Aurelius? The thought nagged at me but only
very distantly, and long minutes passed before I could rouse myself to look at
my watch. For during my sleep, an obscure sentiment had formed within
me—trepidation? nostalgia? excitement?—and it had given rise to a sense of
expectation.

The past was returning! My sister was near. There was no
doubting it. I couldn’t see her, couldn’t smell her, but my inner ear, attuned
always and only to her, had caught her vibration, and it filled me with a dark
and soporific joy.

There was no need to put off Aurelius. My sister would find me,
wherever I was. Was she not my twin? In fact, I had half an hour before I was
due to meet him at the garden door. I dragged myself heavily from my bed and,
too cold and weary to take off my pajamas before dressing, I pulled a thick
skirt and sweater on over the top. Bundled up like a child on firework night, I
went downstairs to the kitchen. Judith had left a cold meal for me, but I had
no appetite and left the food untouched. For ten minutes I sat at the kitchen
table, longing to close my eyes and not daring to, in case I gave in to the
torpor that was inviting my head toward the hard tabletop.

With five minutes to spare, I opened the kitchen door and
slipped into the garden.

No light from the house, no stars. I stumbled in the darkness;
soft soil underfoot and the brush of leaves and branches told me when I had
veered off the path. Out of nowhere a branch scratched my face and I closed my
eyes to protect them. Inside my head was a half-painful, half-euphoric
vibration. I understood entirely. It was her song. My sister was coming.

I reached the meeting point. The darkness stirred itself. It was
him. My hand bumped clumsily against him, then felt itself clasped.

‘Are you all right?“

I heard the question, but distantly.

‘Do you have a temperature?“

The words were there; it was curious that they had no meaning.

I’d have liked to tell him about the glorious vibrations, to
tell him that my sister was coming, that she would be here with me any minute
now. I knew it; I knew it from the heat radiating from her mark on my side. But
the white sound of her stood between me and my words and made me dumb.

Aurelius let go of my hand to remove a glove, and I felt his
palm, strangely cool in the hot night, on my forehead. “You should be in bed,”
he said.

I pulled at Aurelius’s sleeve, a feeble tug, but enough. He
followed me through the garden as smoothly as a statue on casters.

I have no memory of Judith’s keys in my hand, though I must have
taken them. We must have walked through the long corridors to Emmeline’s
apartment, but that, too, has been wiped from my mind. I do remember the door,
but the picture that presents itself to my mind is that it swung open as we
reached it, slowly and of its own accord, which I know to be quite impossible.
I must have unlocked it, but this piece of reality has been lost and the image
of the door opening by itself persists.