The thirteenth tale (5 page)

‘I got a letter yesterday,“ I began.

He nodded.

‘It was from Vida Winter.“

Father raised his eyebrows but waited for me to go on.

‘It seems to be an invitation for me to visit her. With a view
to writing her biography.“

His eyebrows lifted by another few millimeters.

‘I couldn’t sleep, so I came down to get the book.“

I waited for Father to speak, but he didn’t. He was thinking, a
small frown creasing his brow. After a time I spoke again. “Why is it kept in
the cabinet? What makes it so valuable?”

Father pulled himself away from his train of thought to answer.
“Partly because it’s the first edition of the first book by the most famous
living writer in the English language. But mostly because it’s flawed. Every
following edition is called Tales of Change and Desperation. No mention of
thirteen. You’ll have noticed there are only twelve stories?”

I nodded.

‘Presumably there were originally supposed to be thirteen, then
only twelve were submitted. But there was a mixup with the jacket design and
the book was printed with the original title and only twelve stories. They had
to be recalled.“

‘But your copy…“

‘Slipped through the net. One of a batch sent out by mistake to
a shop in Dorset, where one customer bought a copy before the shop got the
message to pack them up and send them back. Thirty years ago he realized what
the value might be and sold it to a collector. The collector’s estate was
auctioned in September and I bought it. With the proceeds from the Avignon
deal.“

‘The Avignon deal?“ It had taken two years to negotiate the
Avignon deal. It was one of Father’s most lucrative successes.

‘You wore the gloves, of course?“ he asked sheepishly.

‘Who do you take me for?“

He smiled before continuing. “All that effort for nothing.”

‘What do you mean?“

‘Recalling all those books because the title was wrong. Yet
people still call it the Thirteen Tales, even though it’s been published as
Tales of Change and Desperation for half a century.“

‘Why is that?“

‘It’s what a combination of fame and secrecy does. With real
knowledge about her so scant, fragments of information like the story of the
recalled first edition take on an importance beyond their weight. It has become
part of her mythology. The mystery of the thirteenth tale. It gives people
something to speculate about.“

There is a short silence. Then, directing his gaze vaguely into
the middle distance, and speaking lightly so that I could pick up his words or
let them go, as I chose, he murmured, “And now a biography… How unexpected.”

I remembered the letter, my fear that its writer was not to be
trusted. I remembered the insistence of the young man’s words, “Tell me die
truth.” I remembered the Thirteen Tales that took possession of me with its
first words and held me captive all night. I wanted to be held hostage again.

‘I don’t know what to do,“ I told my father.

‘It is different from what you have done before. Vida Winter is
a living subject. Interviews instead of archives.“

I nodded.

‘But you want to know the person who wrote the Thirteen Tales.“

I nodded again.

My father put his hands on his knees and sighed. He knows what
reading is. How it takes you.

‘When does she want you to go?“

‘Monday,“ I told him.

‘I’ll run you to the station, shall I?“

‘Thank you. And—“

‘Yes?“

‘Can I have some time off? I ought to do some more reading
before I go up there.“

‘Yes,“ he said, with a smile that didn’t hide his worry. ”Yes,
of course.“

*       
*         *

There followed one of the most glorious times of my adult life.
For the first time ever I had on my bedside table a pile of brand-new, glossy
paperbacks, purchased from a regular bookshop. Betwixt and Between by Vida
Winter; Twice Is Forever by Vida Winter; Hauntings by Vida Winter; Out of the
Arc by Vida Winter; Rules of Affliction by Vida Winter; The Birthday Girl by
Vida Winter; The Puppet Show by Vida Winter. The covers, all by the same
artist, glowed with heat and power: amber and scarlet, gold and deep purple. I
even bought a copy of Tales of Change and Desperation; its title looked bare
without the Thirteen that makes my father’s copy so valuable. His own copy I
had returned to the cabinet.

Of course one always hopes for something special when one reads
an author one hasn’t read before, and Miss Winter’s books gave me the same
thrill I had when I discovered the Landier diaries, for instance. But it was
more than that. I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my
life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And
yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in
its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories.
I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the
same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I
cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and
more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so
there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It
is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during this time,
these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a
counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed
in a flash and I woke to read again—the lost joys of reading returned to me.
Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and
then with her stories she ravished me.

From time to time my father would knock at the door at the top of
:he stairs. He stared at me. I must have had that dazed look intense reading
gives you. “You won’t forget to eat, will you?” he said, as he handed me a bag
of groceries or a pint of milk.

I would have liked to stay in my flat forever with those books.
But if I was to go to Yorkshire to meet Miss Winter, then there was other work
to be done. I took a day off from reading and went to the library. In the
newspaper room, I looked at the books pages of the national newspapers for
pieces on Miss Winter’s recent novels. For every new book that came out, she
summoned a number of journalists to a hotel in Harrogate, where she met them
one by one and gave them, separately, what she termed her life story. There
must have been dozens of these stories in existence, hundreds perhaps. I found
almost twenty without looking very hard.

After the publication of Betwixt and Between, she was the secret
daughter of a priest and a schoolmistress; a year later in the same newspaper
she got publicity for Hauntings by telling how she was the runaway child of a
Parisian courtesan. For The Puppet Show, she was, in various newspapers, an
orphan raised in a Swiss convent, a street child from the backstreets of the
East End and the stifled only girl in a family of ten boisterous boys. I
particularly liked the one in which, becoming accidentally separated in India
from her Scottish missionary parents, she scraped out an existence for herself
in the streets of Bombay, making a living as a storyteller. She told stories
about pine trees that smelled like the freshest coriander, mountains as
beautiful as the Taj Mahal, haggis more delicious than any street-corner pakora
and bagpipes. Oh, the sound of the bagpipes! So beautiful it defied
description. When many years later she was able to return to Scotland—a country
she had left as a tiny baby—she was gravely disappointed. The pine trees
smelled nothing like coriander. Snow was cold. Haggis tasted flat. As for the
bagpipes…

Wry and sentimental, tragic and astringent, comic and sly, each
and every one of these stories was a masterpiece in miniature. For a different
kind of writer, they might be the pinnacle of her achievement; for Vida Winter
they were mere throwaways. No one, I think, would have mistaken them for the
truth.

The day before my departure was Sunday and I spent the afternoon
at y parents’ house. It never changes; a single lupine exhalation could re-ice
it to rubble.

My mother smiled a small, taut smile and talked brightly while
we had tea. The neighbor’s garden, roadworks in town, a new perfume that had
brought her up in a rash. Light, empty chat, produced to keep since at bay,
silence in which her demons lived. It was a good performance: nothing to reveal
that she could hardly bear to leave the house, at the most minor unexpected
event gave her a migraine, that she mid not read a book for fear of the
feelings she might find in it.

Father and I waited until Mother went to make fresh tea before
talk-g about Miss Winter.

‘It’s not her real name,“ I told him. ”If it was her real name,
it would be easy to trace her. And everyone who has tried has given up for ant
of information. No one knows even the simplest fact about her.“

‘How curious.“

‘It’s as if she came from nowhere. As if before being a writer
she didn’t exist at all. As if she invented herself at the same time as her
book.“

‘We know what she chose for a pen name. That must reveal
something, surely,“ my father suggested.

‘Vida. From vita, Latin, meaning life. Though I can’t help
thinking : French, too.“

Vide in French means empty. The void. Nothingness. But we don’t
;e words like this in my parents’ house, so I left it for him to infer.

‘Quite.“ He nodded. ”And what about Winter?“

Winter. I looked out of the window for inspiration. Behind my
writer’s ghost, dark branches stretched naked across the darkening sky, and the
flower beds were bare black soil. The glass was no protection against the
chill; despite the gas fire, the room seemed filled with bleak despair. What
did winter mean to me? One thing only: death.

There was a silence. When it became necessary to say something
so as not to burden the previous exchange with an intolerable weight, I said,
“It’s a spiky name. V and W. Vida Winter. Very spiky.”

My mother came back. Placing cups on saucers, pouring tea, she
talked on, her voice moving as freely in her tightly policed plot of life as
though it were seven acres.

My attention wandered. On the mantel over the fireplace was the
one object in the room that might be considered decorative. A photograph. Every
so often my mother talks about putting it away in a drawer, where it will be
safe from dust. But my father likes to see it, and since he so rarely opposes
her, on this she cedes to him. In the picture are a youthful bride and groom.
Father looks the same as ever: quietly handsome, with dark, thoughtful eyes;
the years do not change him. The woman is scarcely recognizable. A spontaneous
smile, laughter in her eyes, warmth in her gaze as she looks at my father. She
looks happy.

Tragedy alters everything.

I was born, and the woman in the wedding photo disappeared.

I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my
shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of
us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that
this was life and that we were really living it?

ARRIVAL

I left home on an ordinary winter day, and for miles my train
ran . under a gauzy white sky. Then I changed trains, and the clouds assed. They
grew thicker and darker, more and more bloated, as I traveled north. At any
moment I expected to hear the first scattering of •ops on the windowpane. Yet
the rain did not come.

At Harrogate, Miss Winter’s driver, a dark-haired, bearded man,
as disinclined to talk. I was glad, for his lack of conversation left me free
to study the unfamiliar views that unfolded as soon as we left the town behind.
I had never been north before. My researches had taken e to London and, once or
twice, across the channel to libraries and chives in Paris. Yorkshire was a
county I knew only from novels, and novels from another century at that. Once
we left the town behind, There were few signs of the contemporary world, and it
was possible to believe I was traveling into the past at the same time as into
the countryside. The villages were quaint, with their churches and pubs and
stone cottages; then, the farther we went, the smaller the villages became and
the greater the distance between them until isolated farmhouses were the only
interruptions to the naked winter fields. At last we left even the farmhouses
behind and it grew dark. The car’s headlamps showed me swathes of a colorless,
undefined landscape: no fences, no walls, no hedges, no buildings. Just a
vergeless road and each side of it, vague undulations of darkness.

‘Is this the moors?“ I asked.

‘It is,“ the driver said, and I leaned closer to the window, but
all I could make out was the waterlogged sky that pressed down
claustrophobically on the land, on the road, on the car. Beyond a certain
distance even the light from our headlamps was extinguished.

At an unmarked junction we turned off the road and bumped along
for a couple of miles on a stony track. We stopped twice for the driver to open
a gate and close it behind us, then on we went, jolting and shaking for another
mile.