The thirteenth tale (7 page)

I opened my mouth to protest but found nothing to say. She was
right.

‘You see, you don’t know what to say, do you? Are you
embarrassed to accuse me of wanting to lie to you? People don’t like to accuse
each other of lying. And for heaven’s sake, sit down.“

I sat down. “I don’t accuse you of anything,” I began mildly,
but immediately she interrupted me.

‘Don’t be so polite. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s
politeness.“

Her forehead twitched, and an eyebrow rose over the top of the
sunglasses. A strong black arch that bore no relation to any natural brow.

‘Politeness. Now, there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was
one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After
all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the
contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People
with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly
suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But
then he was a genius.“

Her voice flowed relentlessly on, recalling instance after
instance of genius and its bedfellow selfishness, and the folds of her shawl
never moved as she spoke. She must be made of steel, I thought.

Eventually she drew her lecture to a close with the words:
“Politeness is a virtue I neither possess nor esteem in others. We need not
concern ourselves with it.” And with the air of having had the final word on
the subject, she stopped.

‘You raised the topic of lying,“ I said. ”That is something we
might concern ourselves with.“

‘In what respect?“ Through the dark lenses, I could just see the
movements of Miss Winter’s lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye,
like the long legs of a spider around its body.

‘You have given nineteen different versions of your life story
to journalists in the last two years alone. That’s just the ones I found on a
lick search. There are many more. Hundreds, probably.“

She shrugged. “It’s my profession. I’m a storyteller.”

‘I am a biographer. I work with facts.“

She tossed her head and her stiff curls moved as one. “How
horribly ill. I could never have been a biographer. Don’t you think one can
tell’s truth much better with a story?”

‘Not in the stories you have told the world so far.“

Miss Winter conceded a nod. “Miss Lea,” she began. Her voice was
lower. “I had my reasons for creating a smoke screen around my past, lose
reasons, I assure you, are no longer valid.”

‘What reasons?“

‘Life is compost.“

I blinked.

‘You think that a strange thing to say, but it’s true. All my
life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have
own, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of
that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down
to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it
unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a
compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait.
It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its
own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until
one fine day I have a story, or a novel.“

I nodded, liking the analogy.

‘Readers,“ continued Miss Winter, ”are fools. They believe all
writ-; is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The
writer’s life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of
fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That’s why I couldn’t have journalists
and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it,
preserving it in their words. To write my books I needed my past left in peace,
for time to do its work.“

I considered her answer, then asked, “And what has happened to
change things now?”

‘I am old. I am ill. Put those two facts together, biographer,
and what do you get? The end of the story, I think.“

I bit my lip. “And why not write the book yourself?”

‘I have left it too late. Besides, who would believe me? I have
cried wolf too often.“

‘Do you intend to tell me the truth?“ I asked.

‘Yes,“ she said, but I had heard the hesitation even though it
lasted only a fraction of a second.

‘And why do you want to tell it to me?“

She paused. “Do you know, I have been asking myself the very
same question for the last quarter of an hour. Just what kind of a person are
you, Miss Lea?”

I fixed my mask in place before replying. “I am a shop
assistant. I work in an antiquarian bookshop. I am an amateur biographer.
Presumably you have read my work on the Landier brothers? ”

‘It’s not much to go on, is it? If we are to work together, I
shall need to know a little more about who you are. I can hardly spill the
secrets of a lifetime to a person of whom I know nothing. So, tell me about
yourself. What are your favorite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you
love?“

On the instant I was too affronted to reply.

‘Well, answer me! For goodness’ sake! Am I to have a stranger
living under my roof? A stranger working for me? It is not reasonable. Tell me
this, do you believe in ghosts?“

Governed by something stronger than reason, I rose from my
chair.

‘Whatever are you doing? Where are you going? Wait!“

I took one step after another, trying not to run, conscious of
the rhythm of my feet rapping out on the wooden boards, while she called to me
in a voice that contained an edge of panic.

‘Come back!“ she cried. ”I am going to tell you a story—a
marvelous story!“

I did not stop.

‘Once upon a time there was a haunted house—“

I reached the door. My fingers closed on the handle.

‘Once upon a time there was a library—“

I opened the door and was about to step into its emptiness when,
in a ice hoarse with something like fear, she launched the words that stopped
me in my tracks.

‘Once upon a time there were twins—“

I waited until the words stopped their ringing in the air and
then, despite herself, I looked back. I saw the back of a head, and hands that
rose, trembling, to the averted face.

Tentatively I took a step back into the room. At the sound of my
feet, the copper curls turned.

I was stunned. The glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as
glass and as real, looked to me with something like a plea. For a moment I
simply stared back. Then, “Miss Lea, won’t you please sit down,” said a ice
shakily, a voice that was and was not Vida Winter’s.

Drawn by something beyond my control, I moved toward the chair
and sat down.

‘I’m not making any promises,“ I said wearily.

‘I’m not in a position to exact any,“ came the answer in a small
ice.

Truce.

“Why did you choose me?” I asked again, and this time she
answered.

‘Because of your work on the Landier brothers. Because you know
about siblings.“

‘And will you tell me the truth?“

‘I will tell you the truth.“

The words were unambiguous enough, but I heard the tremor that
determined them. She meant to tell me the truth, I did not doubt it. She had
decided to tell. Perhaps she even wanted to tell. Only she did not quite
believe that she would. Her promise of honesty was spoken as much to convince
herself as to persuade me, and she heard the lack of conviction at its heart as
clearly as I did.

And so I made a suggestion. “I will ask you three things. Things
that are a matter of public record. When I leave here, I will be able to check
what you tell me. If I find you have told me the truth about them, I will
accept the commission.”

‘Ah, the rule of three… The magic number. Three trials before
the prince wins the hand of the fair princess. Three wishes granted to the
fisherman by the magic talking fish. Three bears for Goldilocks and Three Billy
Goats Gruff. Miss Lea, if you had asked me two questions or four I might have
been able to lie, but three…“

I slid my pencil from the ring binding of my pad and opened the
cover.

‘What is your real name?“

She swallowed. “Are you quite sure this is the best way to
proceed? I could tell you a ghost story—a rather good one, even if I do say so
myself. It might be a better way of getting to the heart of things…”

I shook my head. “Tell me your name.”

The jumble of knuckles and rubies shifted in her lap; the stones
glowed in the firelight.

‘My name is Vida Winter. I went through the necessary legal
procedures in order to be able to call myself by that name legally and
honestly. What you want to know is the name by which I was known prior to the
change. That name was—“

She paused, needing to overcome some obstacle within herself,
and when she pronounced the name it was with a noticeable neutrality, an utter
absence of intonation, as though it were a word in some foreign language she
had never applied herself to learning: “That name was Adeline March.”

As though to cut short even the minimal vibration the name
carried in the air, she continued rather tartly, “I hope you’re not going to
ask my date of birth. I am of an age at which it is de rigueur to have
forgotten it.”

‘I can manage without, if you give me your place of birth.“

She released an irritated sigh. “I could tell you much better,
if you would only allow me to tell it my way…”

‘This is what we have agreed. Three facts on public record.“

She pursed her lips. “You will find it is a matter of record
that Adeline March was born in Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. I can
hardly be expected to offer any personal guarantee of the veracity of that
detail. Though I am an exceptional person, I am not so exceptional that I can
remember my own birth.”

I noted it down.

Now the third question. I had, it must be admitted, no
particular third question prepared. She did not want to tell me her age, and I
hardly needed her date of birth. With her long publishing history and the date
of her first book, she could not be less than seventy-three or four, and to
judge by her appearance, altered though it was by illness and makeup, she could
be no more than eighty. But the uncertainty didn’t matter; with her name and
her place of birth, I could find the date out for myself anyway. From my first
two questions, I already had the formation I needed in order to ascertain that
a person by the name of Adeline March actually existed. What to ask, then?
Perhaps it was my desire to hear Miss Winter tell a story, but when the
occasion arose to play my third question as a wild card, I seized it.

‘Tell me,“ I began slowly, carefully. In the stories with the
wizards, is always with the third wish that everything so dangerously won is
disastrously snatched away. ”Tell me something that happened to you in the days
before you changed your name, for which there exists a public record.“
Educational successes, I was thinking. School sporting achievements. Those
minor triumphs that are recorded for proud parents and for posterity.

In the hush that followed, Miss Winter seemed to draw all of her
external self into her core; under my very eyes she managed to absent herself
from herself, and I began to understand how it was that earlier I had failed to
see her. I watched the shell of her, marveled at the impossibility of knowing
what was going on beneath the surface.

And then she emerged.

‘Do you know why my books are so successful?“

‘For a great many reasons, I believe.“

‘Possibly. Largely it is because they have a beginning, a middle
and an end. In the right order. Of course all stories have beginnings, middles
and endings; it is having them in the right order that matters. That is why
people like my books.“

She sighed and fidgeted with her hands. “I am going to answer
your question. I am going to tell you something about myself, which happened
before I became a writer and changed my name, and it is something for which
there exists a public record. It is the most important thing that has ever
happened to me. But I did not expect to find myself telling it to you so soon.
I shall have to break one of my rules to do it. I shall have to tell you the
end of my story before I tell you the beginning.”

‘The end of your story? How can that be, if it happened before
you started writing? “

‘Quite simply because my story—my own personal story—ended
before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in
the time since everything finished.“

I waited, and she drew in her breath like a chess player who
finds his key piece cornered.

‘I would sooner not tell you. But I have promised, haven’t I?
The rule of three. It’s unavoidable. The wizard might beg the boy not to make a
third wish, because he knows it will end in disaster, but the boy will make a
third wish and the wizard is bound to grant it because it is in the rules of
the story. You asked me to tell you the truth about three things, and I must,
because of the rule of three. But let me first ask you something in return.“