The thirteenth tale (51 page)

I take the baby to her. I glance in at the window, as I have
before, see her in her usual place by the fire, knitting. Thoughtful and quiet.
She is undoing her knitting. Just sitting there pulling the stitches out, with
the needles on the table beside her. There is a dry place in the porch for the
baby. I settle him there and wait behind a tree.

She opens the door. Takes him up. I know when I see her
expression that he will be safe with her. She looks up and around. In my
direction. As if she’s seen something. Have I rustled the leaves, betrayed my
presence? It crosses my mind to step forward. Surely she would befriend me? I
hesitate, and the wind changes direction. I smell the fire at the same moment
she does. She turns away, looks to the sky, gasps at the smoke that rises over
the spot where Angelfield House stands. And then puzzlement shows in her face.
She holds the baby close to her nose and sniffs. The smell of fire is on him,
transferred from my clothes. One more glance at the smoke and she steps firmly
back into her house and closes the door.

I am alone.

No name.

No home.

No family.

I am nothing.

I have nowhere to go.

I have no one who belongs to me.

I stare at my burned palm but cannot feel the pain.

What kind of a thing am I? Am I even alive?

I could go anywhere, but I walk back to Angelfield. It is the
only place I know.

Emerging from the trees, I approach the scene. A fire engine.
Villagers with their buckets, standing back, dazed and with smoke-blackened
faces, watching the professionals do battle with the flames. Women, mesmerized
by smoke rising into the black sky. An ambulance. Dr. Maudsley kneeling over a
figure on the grass.

No one sees me.

On the edge of all the activity I stand, invisible. Perhaps I
really am nothing. Perhaps no one can see me at all. Perhaps I died in the fire
and haven’t realized it yet. Perhaps I am finally what I have always been: a
ghost.

Then one of the women looks in my direction.

‘Look,“ she cries, pointing. ”She’s here!“ and people turn.
Stare. One of the women runs to alert the men. They turn from the fire and
look, too. ”Thank God!“ someone says.

I open my mouth to say… I don’t know what. But I say nothing.
Just stand there, making shapes with my mouth, no voice, and no words.

‘Don’t try to speak.“ Dr. Maudsley is by my side now.

I stare at the girl on the lawn. “She’ll survive,” says the
doctor.

I look at the house.

The flames. My books. I don’t think I can bear it. I remember
the page of Jane Eyre, the ball of words I saved from the pyre. I have left it
behind with the baby.

I begin to weep.

‘She’s in shock,“ says the doctor to one of the women. ”Keep her
warm and stay with her, while we put the sister in the ambulance.“

A woman comes to me, clucking her concern. She takes off her
coat and wraps it around me, tenderly, as though dressing a baby, and she
murmurs, “Don’t worry, you’ll be all right, your sister’s all right, oh, my
poor dear.”

They lift the girl from the grass and place her on the bed in
the ambulance. Then they help me in. Sit me down opposite. And they drive us to
the hospital.

She stares into space. Eyes open, empty. After the first moment
I don’t look. The ambulance man bends over her, assures himself that she is
breathing, then turns to me.

‘What about that hand, eh?“

I am clutching my right hand in my left, unconscious of the pain
in my mind, but my body giving the secret away.

He takes my hand, and I let him unfold my fingers. A mark is
burned deep into my palm. The key.

‘That’ll heal up,“ he tells me. ”Don’t worry. Now, are you
Adeline or are you Emmeline?“

He gestures to the other one. “Is this Emmeline?”

I can’t answer, can’t feel myself, can’t move.

‘Not to worry,“ he said. ”All in good time.“

He gives up on making me understand him. Mutters for his own
benefit, “Still, we’ve got to call you something. Adeline, Emmeline, Emmeline,
Adeline. Fifty-fifty, isn’t it? It’ll all come out in the wash.”

The hospital. Opening the ambulance doors. All noise and bustle.
Voices speaking fast. The stretcher, lifted onto a trolley and wheeled away at
speed. A wheelchair. Hands on my shoulders. “Sit down, dear.” The chair moving.
A voice behind my back. “Don’t worry, child. We’ll take care of you and your
sister. You’re safe now, Adeline.”

Miss Winter slept.

I saw the tender slackness of her open mouth, the tuft of unruly
hair that did not lay straight from her temple, and in her sleep she seemed
very, very old and very, very young. With every breath she took the bedclothes
rose and fell over her thin shoulders, and at each sinking the ribboned edge of
the blanket brushed against her face. She seemed unaware of it, but all the
same, I bent over her to fold the covers back and smooth the curl of pale hair
back into place.

She did not stir. Was she really asleep, I wondered, or was this
unconsciousness already?

I can’t say how long I watched her after that. There was a
clock, but the movements of its hands were as meaningless as a map of the
surface of the sea. Wave after wave of time lapped over me as I sat with my
eyes closed, not sleeping, but with the vigilance of a mother for the breathing
of her child.

I hardly know what to say about the next thing. Is it possible
that I hallucinated in my tiredness? Did I fall asleep and dream? Or did Miss
Winter really speak one last time?

I will give your message to your sister.

I jerked my eyes open, but hers were closed. She seemed to be
sleeping as deeply as before.

I did not see the wolf when he came. I did not hear him. There
was only this: A little before dawn I became aware of a hush, and I realized
that the only breathing to be heard in the room was my own.

Beginnings

SNOW

Miss Winter died and the snow kept falling. When Judith came she
stood with me for a time at the window, and we watched the eerie illumination
of the night sky. Then, when an alteration in the whiteness told us it was
morning, she sent me to bed.

I awoke at the end of the afternoon.

The snow that had already deadened the telephone now reached the
window ledges and drifted halfway up the doors. It separated us from the rest
of the world as effectively as a prison key. Miss Winter had escaped; so had
the woman Judith referred to as Emmeline, and whom I avoided naming. The rest
of us, Judith, Maurice and I, were trapped.

The cat was restless. It was the snow that put him out; he did
not like this change in the appearance of his universe. He went from one
windowsill to another in search of his lost world, and meowed urgently at
Judith, Maurice and me, as though its restoration was in our hands. In
comparison, the loss of his mistresses was a small matter that, if he noticed
it at all, left him fundamentally undisturbed.

The snow had blockaded us into a sideways extension of time, and
we each found our own way of enduring it. Judith, imperturbable, made vegetable
soup, cleaned the kitchen cupboards out and, when she ran out of jobs,
manicured her nails and did a face pack. Maurice, chafing at the confinement
and the inactivity, played endless games of solitaire, but when he had to drink
his tea black for lack of milk, Judith played rummy with him to distract him
from the bitterness.

As for me, I spent two days writing up my final notes, but when
that was done, I found I could not settle to reading. Even Sherlock Holmes
could not reach me in the snowlocked landscape. Alone in my room I spent an
hour examining my melancholy, trying to name what I thought was a new element
in it. I realized that I missed Miss Winter. So, hopeful of human company, I
made my way to the kitchen. Maurice was glad to play cards with me, even though
I knew only children’s games. Then, when Judith’s nails were drying, I made the
cocoa and tea with no milk, and later let Judith file and polish my own nails.

In this way, we three and the cat sat out the days, locked in
with our dead, and with the old year seeming to linger on past its time.

On the fifth day I allowed myself to be overcome by a vast
sorrow.

I had done the washing up, and Maurice had dried while Judith
played solitaire at the table. We were all glad of a change. And when the
washing up was done, I took myself away from their company to the drawing room.
The window looked out onto the part of the garden that was in the lee of the
house. Here the snow did not drift so high. I opened a window, climbed out into
the whiteness and walked across the snow. All the grief I had kept at bay for
years by means of books and bookcases approached me now. On a bench sheltered
by a tall hedge of yew I abandoned myself to a sorrow that was wide and deep as
the snow itself, and as untainted. I cried for Miss Winter, for her ghost, for
Adeline and Emmeline. For my sister, my mother and my father. Mostly, and most
terribly, I cried for myself. My grief was that of the infant, newly severed
from her other half; of the child bent over an old tin, making sudden, shocking
sense of a few pieces of paper; and of a grown woman, sitting crying on a bench
in the hallucinatory light and silence of the snow.

When I came to myself Dr. Clifton was there. He put an arm
around me. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

He didn’t know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he
said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our
sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief
are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. “I know,”
he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

He led me inside, to warmth.

‘Oh dear,“ said Judith. ”Shall I bring cocoa?“

‘With a touch of brandy in it, I think,“ he said.

Maurice pulled out a chair for me and began to stoke the fire.

I sipped the cocoa slowly. There was milk—the doctor had brought
it when he came with the farmer on the tractor.

Judith tucked a shawl around me, then started peeling potatoes
for dinner. She and Maurice and the doctor made the occasional comment—what we
could have for supper, whether the snow was lighter now, how long it would be
before the telephone line was restored—and in making them, took it upon
themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again after death
had stopped us all in its tracks.

Little by little the comments melded together and became a
conversation.

I listened to their voices and, after a time, joined in.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

I went home.

To the bookshop.

‘Miss Winter is dead,“ I told my father.

‘And you? How are you?“ he asked.

‘Alive.“

He smiled.

‘Tell me about Mum,“ I said to him. ”Why is she the way she is?“

He told me. “She was very ill when you were born. She never saw
you before you were taken away. She never saw your sister. She nearly died. By
the time she came around, your operation had already taken place and your
sister…”

‘My sister had died.“

‘Yes. There was no knowing how it would go with you. I went from
her bedside to yours… I thought I was going to lose all three of you. I prayed
to every God I had ever heard of to save you. And my prayers were answered. In
part. You survived. Your mother never really came back.“

There was one other thing I needed to know.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? About being a twin?“

The face he turned to me was devastated. He swallowed, and when he
spoke his voice was hoarse. “The story of your birth is a sad one Your mother
thought it too heavy for a child to bear. At least that’s what your mother
said. I would have borne it for you, Margaret, if I could. I would have done
anything to spare you.”

We sat in silence. I thought of all the other questions I might
have asked, but now that the moment had come I didn’t need to.

I reached for my father’s hand at the same moment as he reached
for mine.

I attended three funerals in as many days.

Miss Winter’s mourners were many. The nation grieved for its
favorite storyteller, and thousands of readers turned out to pay their
respects. I came away as soon as I could, having said my good-byes already.

The second was a quiet affair. There were only Judith, Maurice,
the doctor and me to mourn the woman referred to throughout the service as
Emmeline. Afterward we said brief farewells and parted.

The third was lonelier still. In a crematorium in Banbury I was
the only person in attendance when a bland-faced clergyman oversaw the passing
into God’s hands of a set of bones, identity unknown. Into God’s hands, except
that it was me who collected the urn later, “on behalf of the Angelfield
family.”