The thirteenth tale (4 page)

Mother looked pale and tired. Going out would have started one
of her headaches.

‘Yes,“ she said. ”Good girl.“

‘And so, how was it, sweetheart? Being home on your own?“

‘It was fine.“

‘Thought it would be,“ he said. And then, unable to stop
himself, he gave me another hug, a happy, two-armed affair, and kissed the top
of my head. ”Time for bed. And don’t read too long.“

‘I won’t.“

Later I heard my parents going about the business of getting
ready for bed. Father opening the medicine cupboard to find Mother’s pills,
filling a glass with water. His voice saying, as it so frequently did, “You’ll
feel better after a good night’s sleep.” Then the door of the guest room
closed. A few moments later the bed creaked in the other room, and I heard my
father’s light click off.

I knew about twins. A cell that should ordinarily become one
person inexplicably becomes two identical people instead.

I was a twin.

My twin was dead.

What did that make me now?

Under the covers I pressed my hand against the silver-pink
crescent on my torso. The shadow my sister had left behind. Like an
archaeologist of the flesh, I explored my body for evidence of its ancient
history. I ‘as as cold as a corpse.

With the letter still in my hand, I left the shop and went
upstairs to my flat, he staircase narrowed at each of the three stories of
books. As I went, turning out lights behind me, I began to prepare phrases for
a polite letter refusal. I was, I could tell Miss Winter, the wrong kind of
biographer. I had no interest in contemporary writing. I had read none of Miss
Winter’s books. I was at home in libraries and archives and had never
interviewed a living writer in my life. I was more at ease with dead people and
was, if the truth be told, nervous of the living.

It probably wasn’t necessary to put that last bit in the letter.

I couldn’t be bothered to make a meal. A cup of cocoa would do.

Waiting for the milk to heat, I looked out of the window. In the
night glass was a face so pale you could see the blackness of the sky through
it. We pressed cheek to cold, glassy cheek. If you had seen us, you would have
known that were it not for this glass, there was really nothing to tell us
apart.

THIRTEEN TALES

Tell me the truth. The words from the letter were trapped in my
head, trapped, it seemed, beneath the sloping ceiling of my attic flat, like a
bird that has got in down the chimney. It was natural that the boy’s plea
should have affected me; I who had never been told the truth, but left to
discover it alone and in secret. Tell me the truth. Quite. But I resolved to
put the words and the letter out of my head. It was nearly time. I moved
swiftly. In the bathroom I soaped my face and brushed my teeth. By three
minutes to eight I was in my nightdress and slippers, waiting for the kettle to
boil. Quickly, quickly. A minute to eight. My hot-water bottle was ready, and I
filled a glass with water from the tap. Time was of the essence. For at eight
o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the
morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread
the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the
gateway to another world. But that night the magic failed. The threads of plot
that had been left in suspense overnight had somehow gone flaccid during the
day, and I found that I could not care about how they would eventually weave
together. I made an effort to secure myself to a strand of the plot, but as
soon as I had managed it, a voice intervened—Tell me the truth—that unpicked
the knot and left it flopping loose again.

My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in
White, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre…

But it was no good. Tell me the truth…

Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one
sure thing. Turning out the light, I rested my head on the pillow and tried to
sleep.

Echoes of a voice. Fragments of a story. In the dark I heard
them louder. Tell me the truth…

At two in the morning I got out of bed, pulled on some socks,
unlocked the flat door and, wrapped in my dressing gown, crept down the narrow
staircase and into the shop.

At the back there is a tiny room, not much bigger than a
cupboard, that we use when we need to pack a book for the post. It contains a
table and, on a shelf, sheets of brown paper, scissors and a ball of string. As
well as these items there is also a plain wooden cabinet that holds a dozen or
so books.

The contents of the cabinet rarely change. If you were to look
into it today you would see what I saw that night: a book without a cover
resting on its side, and next to it an ugly tooled leather volume. A pair of books
in Latin standing upright. An old Bible. Three volumes of botany, two of
history and a single tatty book of astronomy. A book in Japanese, another in
Polish and some poems in Old English. Why do we keep these books apart? Why are
they not kept with their natural companions on our neatly labeled shelves? The
cabinet is where we keep the esoteric, the valuable, the rare. These volumes
are worth as much as the contents of the entire rest of the shop, more even.

The book that I was after—a small hardback, about four inches by
six, only fifty or so years old—was out of place next to all these antiquities.
It had appeared a couple of months ago, placed there I imagined by Father’s
inadvertence, and one of these days I meant to ask him about it and shelve it
somewhere. But just in case, I put on the white gloves. We keep them in the
cabinet to wear when we handle the books because, by a curious paradox, just as
the books come to life when we read them, so the oils from our fingertips
destroy them as we turn the pages. Anyway, with its paper cover intact and its
corners unblunted, the book was in fine condition, one of a popular series
produced to quite a high standard by a publishing house that no longer exists.
A charming volume, and a first edition, but not the kind of thing that you
would expect to find among the Treasures. At jumble sales and village fetes,
other volumes in the series sell for a few pence.

The paper cover was cream and green: a regular motif of shapes
like fish scales formed the background, and two rectangles were left plain, one
for the line drawing of a mermaid, the other for the title and author’s name.
Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation by Vida Winter.

I locked the cabinet, returned the key and flashlight to their
places and climbed the stairs back to bed, book in gloved hand.

I didn’t intend to read. Not as such. A few phrases were all I
wanted. Something bold enough, strong enough, to still the words from the
letter that kept going around in my head. Fight fire with fire, people say. A
couple of sentences, a page maybe, and then I would be able to sleep.

I removed the dust jacket and placed it for safety in the
special drawer I keep for the purpose. Even with gloves you can’t be too
careful. Opening the book, I inhaled. The smell of old books, so sharp, so dry
you can taste it.

The prologue. Just a few words.

But my eyes, brushing the first line, were snared.

All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait.
You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when
he was born. What you get won’t be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing
is more telling than a story.

It was like falling into water.

Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers’ boys, merchants and
mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a
hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But
gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became
strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I
remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story
one more time. They were people. The blood that fell from the princess’s finger
when she touched the spinning wheel was wet, and it left the tang of metal on
her tongue when she licked her finger before falling asleep. When his comatose
daughter was brought to him, the king’s tears left salt burns on his face. The
stories were shot through with an unfamiliar mood. Everyone achieved their heart’s
desire—the king had his daughter restored to life by a stranger’s kiss, the
beast was divested of his fur and left naked as a man, the mermaid walked—but
only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping
their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable,
so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for
happiness.

The tales were brutal and sharp and heartbreaking. I loved them.

It was while I was reading “The Mermaid’s Tale”—the twelfth
tale—that I began to feel stirrings of an anxiety that was unconnected to the
story itself. I was distracted: my thumb and right index finger were sending me
a message: Not many pages left. The knowledge nagged more insistently until I
tilted the book to check. It was true. The thirteenth tale must be a very short
one.

I continued my reading, finished tale twelve and turned the
page.

Blank.

I flicked back, forward again. Nothing.

There was no thirteenth tale.

There was a sudden rush in my head, I felt the sick dizziness of
the deep-sea diver come too fast to the surface.

Aspects of my room came back into view, one by one. My
bedspread, the book in my hand, the lamp still shining palely in the daylight
that was beginning to creep in through the thin curtains.

It was morning.

I had read the night away.

There was no thirteenth tale.

In the shop my father was sitting at the desk with his head in
his hands. He heard me come down the stairs and looked up, white-faced.

‘Whatever is it?“ I darted forward.

He was too shocked to speak; his hands roused themselves to a
mute gesture of desperation before slowly replacing themselves over his
horrified eyes. He groaned.

My hand hovered over his shoulder, but I am not in the habit of
touching people, so it fell instead to the cardigan that he had draped over the
back of his chair.

‘Is there anything I can do?“ I asked.

When he spoke, his voice was weary and shaken. “We’ll have to
phone the police. In a minute. In a minute…”

‘The police? Father, what’s happened?“

‘A break-in.“ He made it sound like the end of the world.

I looked around the shop, bewildered. Everything was neat and in
order. The desk drawers had not been forced, the shelves not ransacked, the
window not broken.

‘The cabinet,“ he said, and I began to understand.

‘The Thirteen Tales.“ I spoke firmly. ”Upstairs in my flat. I
borrowed it.“

Father looked up at me. His expression combined relief with
utter astonishment. “You borrowed it?”

‘Yes.“

“You borrowed it?”

‘Yes.“ I was puzzled. I was always borrowing things from the
shop, as he knew.

‘But Vida Winter…?“

And I realized that some kind of explanation was called for.

I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper
endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations,
tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled;
these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after
adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and
neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new
ones, so I read old novels.

Contemporary literature is a world I know little of. My father
had taken me to task on this topic many times during our daily talks about
books. He reads as much as I do, but more widely, and I have great respect for
his opinions. He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful
desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is
no end to human suffering, only endurance. He has spoken of endings that are
muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive
denouements. He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more
nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that I prefer.

During these talks, I listen with the gravest attention and nod
my head, but I always end up continuing in my old habits. Not that he blames me
for it. There is one thing on which we are agreed: There are too many books in
the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

Once Father even told me about Vida Winter. “Now, there’s a
living writer who would suit you.”

But I had never read any Vida Winter. Why should I when there
were so many dead writers I had still not discovered?

Except that now I had come down in the middle of the night to
take the Thirteen Tales from the cabinet. My father, with good reason, was
wondering why.