The thirteenth tale (46 page)

Skeptics might consider this pure coincidence, or suspect me of
magnifying a chance incidence into a habitual occurrence by imagination, but I
have come to see that when two people work closely together on a joint project—
two intelligent people, I mean to say—a bond of communication develops between
them that can enhance their work. All the while they are jointly engaged on a
task, they are aware of, acutely sensitive to, each other’s tiniest movements,
and can interpret them accordingly. This, even without seeing the infinitesimal
movements. And it is no distraction from the work. On the contrary, it enhances
it, for our speed of understanding is quickened. Let me add one simple example,
small in itself but standing in for countless others. This morning, I was
intent upon some notes, trying to see a pattern of behavior emerging from his
jottings on Adeline. Reaching for a pencil to make an annotation in the margin,
I felt the doctors hand brush mine and he passed the pencil I sought into it. I
looked up to thank him, but he was deeply engrossed in his own papers, quite
unconscious of what had happened. In such a way we work together: minds, hands,
always in conjunction, always anticipating the others needs and thoughts. And
when we are apart, which we are for most of the day, we are always thinking of
small details relating to the project, or else observations about the broader
aspects of life and science, and even this shows how well suited we are for
this joint undertaking.

But I am sleepy, and though I could write at length of the joys
of co-authoring a research paper, it is really time to go to bed.

I have not written for nearly a week and do not offer my usual
excuses. My diary disappeared.

I spoke to Emmeline about it—kindly, severely, with offers of
chocolate and threats of punishment (and yes, my methods have broken down, but
frankly, losing a diary touches one most personally)—but she continues to deny
everything. Her denials were consistent and showed many signs of good faith.
Anyone not knowing the circumstances would have believed her. Knowing her as I
do, I found the theft unexpected myself and find it hard to explain it within
the general progress she has made. She cannot read and has no interest in other
people’s thoughts and inner lives, other than so far as they affect her
directly. Why should she want it? Presumably it is the shine of the lock that
tempted her—her passion for shiny things is undiminished, and I do not try to
reduce it; it is usually harmless enough. But I am disappointed in her.

If I were to judge by her denials and her character alone, I
would conclude that she was innocent of the theft. But the fact remains that it
cannot have been anyone else.

John? Mrs. Dunne? Even supposing that the servants should have
wanted to steal my diary, which I don’t believe for a minute, I remember
clearly that they were busy elsewhere in the house when it went missing. In
case I was wrong about this, I brought the conversation around to their
activities, and John confirms that Mrs. Dunne was in the kitchen all morning
(“making a right racket, too, ” he told me). She confirms that John was at the
coach house mending the car (“noisy old job ”). It cannot have been either of
them.

And so, having eliminated all the other suspects I am obliged to
believe that it was Emmeline.

And yet I cannot shake off my misgivings. Even now I can picture
her face—so innocent in appearance, so distressed at being accused—and I am
forced to wonder, is there some additional factor at play here that I have
failed to take into account? When I view the matter in this light it gives rise
to an uneasiness in me: I am suddenly overwhelmed by the presentiment that none
of my plans is destined to come to fruition. Something has been against me ever
since I came to this house! Something that wants to thwart me and frustrate me
in every project I undertake! I have checked and rechecked my thinking,
retraced every step in my logic, I can find no flaw, yet still I find myself
beset by doubt… What is it that I am failing to see?

Reading over this last paragraph lam struck by the most
uncharacteristic lack of confidence in my tone. It is surely only tiredness
that makes me think thus. An unrested mind is prone to wander into unfruitful
avenues; it is nothing that a good nights sleep cannot cure.

Besides, it is all over now. Here I am, writing in the missing
diary. I locked Emmeline in her room for four hours, the next day for six, and
she knew the day after, it would be eight. On the second day, shortly after I
came down from unlocking her door I found the diary on my desk in the
schoolroom. She must have slipped down very quietly to put it there; I did not
see her go past the library door to the schoolroom even though I left the door
open deliberately. But it was returned. So there is no room for doubt, is there?

I am so tired and yet I cannot sleep. I hear steps in the night,
but when I go to my door and look into the corridor there is no one there.

I confess it made me uneasy—makes me uneasy still—to think that
this little book was out of my possession even for two days. The thought of
another person reading my words is most discomforting. I cannot help but think
how another person would interpret certain things I have written, for when I
write for myself only, and know perfectly well the truth of what I write, I am
perhaps less careful of my expression, and writing at speed, may sometimes
express myself in a way that could be misinterpreted by another who would not
have my insight into what I really mean. Thinking over some of the things I
have written (the doctor and the pencil—such an insignificant event— hardly
worth writing about at all really), I can see that they might appear to a
stranger in a light rather different from what I intended, and I wonder whether
I should tear out these pages and destroy them. Only I do not want to, for
these are the pages that I most want to keep, to read later, when I am old and
gone from here, and think back to the happiness of my work and the challenge of
our great project.

Why should a scientific friendship not be a source of joy? It is
no less scientific for that, is it?

But perhaps the answer is to stop writing altogether, for when I
do write, even now as I write this very sentence, this very word, I am aware of
a ghost reader who leans over my shoulder watching my pen, who twists my words
and perverts my meaning, and makes me uncomfortable in the privacy of my own
thoughts.

It is very aggravating to be presented to oneself in a light so
different from the familiar one, even when it is clearly a false light.

I will not write any more.

Endings

THE GHOST IN THE TALE

Thoughtfully I lifted my eyes from the final page of Hester’s
diary. A number of things had struck my attention as I had been reading it, and
now that I had finished, I had the leisure to consider them more methodically.

Oh, I thought.

Oh.

And then, OH!

How to describe my eureka? It began as a stray what if, a wild
conjecture, an implausible notion. It was, well, not impossible perhaps, but
absurd! For a start—

About to begin marshaling the sensible counterarguments, I
stopped dead in my tracks. For my mind, racing ahead of itself in a momentous
act of premonition, had already submitted to this revised version of events. In
a single moment, a moment of vertiginous, kaleidoscopic bedazzlement, the story
Miss Winter had told me unmade and remade itself, in every event identical, in
every detail the same—yet entirely, profoundly different. Like those images
that reveal a young bride if you hold the page one way, and an old crone if you
hold it the other. Like the sheets of random dots that disguise teapots or
clown faces or Rouen cathedrals if you can only learn to see them. The truth
had been there all along, only now had I seen it.

There followed a long hour of musing. One element at a time,
taking all the different angles separately, I reviewed everything I knew.
Everything I had been told and everything I had discovered. Yes, I thought. And
yes, again. That, and that, and that, too. My new knowledge blew life into the
story. It began to breathe. And as it did so, it began to mend. The jagged
edges smoothed themselves. The gaps filled themselves in. The missing parts
were regenerated. Puzzles explained themselves, and mysteries were mysteries no
longer.

At last, after all the tale telling and all the yarn spinning,
after the smoke screens and the trick mirrors and the double bluffs, I knew.

I knew what Hester saw that day she thought she saw a ghost.

I knew the identity of the boy in the garden.

I knew who attacked Mrs. Maudsley with a violin.

I knew who killed John-the-dig.

I knew who Emmeline was looking for underground.

Details fell into place. Emmeline talking to herself behind a
closed door, when her sister was at the doctor’s house. Jane Eyre, the book
that appears and reappears in the story, like a silver thread in a tapestry. I
understood the mysteries of Hester’s wandering bookmark, the appearance of The
Turn of the Screw and the disappearance of her diary. I understood the
strangeness of John-the-dig’s decision to teach the girl who had once
desecrated his garden how to tend it.

I understood the girl in the mist, and how and why she came out
of it. I understood how it was that a girl like Adeline could melt away and
leave Miss Winter in her place.

‘I am going to tell you a story about twins,“ Miss Winter had
called after me that first evening in the library, when I was on the verge of
leaving. Words that with their unexpected echo of my own story attached me
irresistibly to hers.

Once upon a time there were two baby girls…

Except that now I knew better.

She had pointed me in the right direction that very first night,
if I had only known how to listen.

‘Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Lea?“ she had asked me. ”I am
going to tell you a ghost story.“

And I had told her, “Some other time.”

But she had told me a ghost story.

Once upon a time there were two baby girls…

Or alternatively: Once upon a time there were three.

Once upon a time there was a house and the house was haunted.

The ghost was, in the usual way of ghosts, mostly invisible, and
yet not quite invisible. There was the closing of doors that had been left
open, and the opening of doors left shut. The flash of movement in a mirror
that made you glance up. The shimmer of a draft behind a curtain when there was
no window open. The little ghost was there in the unexpected movement of books
from one room to another, and in the mysterious movement of bookmark from page
to page. It was her hand that lifted a diary from one place and hid it in
another, her hand that replaced it later. If, as you turned into a corridor,
the curious idea occurred to you that you had just missed seeing the sole of a
shoe disappearing around the far corner, then the little ghost was not far
away. And when, surprised by the back of the neck feeling as if someone has
their eye on you, you raised your head to find the room empty, then you could
be sure that the little ghost was hiding in the emptiness somewhere.

Her presence could be divined in any number of ways by those who
had eyes to see. Yet she was not seen.

She haunted softly. On tiptoe, in bare feet, she made never a
sound; and yet she recognized the footfall of every inhabitant of the house,
knew every creaking board and every squeaky door. Every dark corner of the
house was familiar to her, every nook and every cranny. She knew the gaps
behind cupboards and between sets of shelves, she knew the backs of sofas and
the underneath of chairs. The house, to her mind, was a hundred and one hiding
places, and she knew how to move among them invisibly.

Isabelle and Charlie never saw the ghost. Living as they did,
outside logic, outside reason, they were not the sort to be perplexed by the
inexplicable. Losses and breakages and the mislaying of random items seemed to
them part of the natural universe. A shadow that fell across a carpet where a
shadow ought not to be did not cause them to stop and reflect; such mysteries
seemed only a natural extension of the shadows in their hearts and minds. The
little ghost was the movement in their peripheral vision, the unacknowledged
puzzle in the back of their minds, the permanent shadow attached, without their
knowing it, to their lives. She scavenged for leftovers in their pantry like a
mouse, warmed herself at the embers of their fires after they had gone to bed,
disappeared into the recesses of their dilapidation the instant anyone
appeared.

She was the secret of the house.

Like all secrets, she had her guardians.

The housekeeper saw the little ghost as plain as day, despite
her failing eyesight. A good thing, too. Without her collaboration there would
never have been enough scraps in the pantry, enough crumbs from the breakfast
loaf, to sustain the little ghost. For it would be a mistake to think that the
ghost was one of those incorporeal, ethereal specters. No. She had a stomach,
and when it was empty it had to be filled.

But she earned her keep. For as much as she ate, she also
provided. The other person who had the knack of seeing ghosts, you see, was the
gardener, and he was glad of an extra pair of hands. She wore a wide-brimmed
hat and an old pair of John’s trousers, cut off at the ankle and held up with
braces, and her haunting of the garden was fruitful. In the soil potatoes grew
swollen under her care; aboveground the fruit bushes Nourished, producing
clusters of berries that her hands sought out under low leaves. Not only did
she have a magic touch for fruit and vegetables, but the roses bloomed as they
had never bloomed before. Later, he learned the secret desire of box and yew to
become geometry. At her bidding leaves and branches grew corners and angles,
curves and mathematically straight lines.