The thirteenth tale (8 page)

‘What?“

‘After this, no more jumping about in the story. From tomorrow,
I’ll tell you my story, beginning at the beginning, continuing with the middle,
and with the end at the end. Everything in its proper place. No eating. No
looking ahead. No questions. No sneaky glances at the last page.

Did she have the right to place conditions on our deal, having
already accepted it? Not really. Still, I nodded.

‘I agree.“

She could not quite look at me as she spoke.

‘I lived at Angelfield.“

Her voice trembled over the place name, and she scratched
nervously at her palm in an unconscious gesture.

‘I was sixteen.“

Her voice grew stilted; fluency deserted her.

‘There was a fire.“

The words were expelled from her throat hard and dry, like
stones.

‘I lost everything.“

And then, the cry breaking from her lips before she could stop
it, “Oh, Emmeline!”

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains
all a person’s mystical power. That a name should be known only to God d to the
person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a
name, either one’s own or someone else’s, is to invite jeopardy. This, it
seemed, was such a name.

Miss Winter pressed her lips together, too late. A tremor ran
rough the muscles under the skin.

Now I knew I was tied to the story. I had stumbled upon the
heart the tale that I had been commissioned to tell. It was love. And loss. For
what else could the sorrow of that exclamation be but bereavement? In a flash I
saw beyond the mask of white makeup and the exotic aperies. For a few seconds
it seemed to me that I could see right into Miss Winter’s heart, right into her
thoughts. I recognized the very essence of her—how could I fail to, for was it
not the essence of me?

We were both lone twins. With this realization, the leash of the
story tightened around my wrists, and my excitement was suddenly cut through
with fear.

‘Where can I find a public record of this fire?“ I asked, trying
not to let my perturbed feelings show in my voice.

‘The local newspaper. The Banbury Herald.“

I nodded, made a note in my pad and flipped the cover closed.

‘Although,“ she added, ”there is a record of a different kind
that I can show you now.“

I raised an eyebrow.

‘Come nearer.“

I rose from my chair and took a step, halving the distance
between us.

Slowly she raised her right arm, and held out to me a closed
fist that seemed three-quarters precious stones in their clawlike settings. In
a movement that spoke of great effort, she turned her hand and opened it, as
though she had some surprise gift concealed and was about to offer it tome.

But there was no gift. The surprise was the hand itself.

The flesh of her palm was like no flesh I had seen before. Its
whitened ridges and purple furrows bore no relation to the pink mound at the
base of my fingers, the pale valley of my palm. Melted by fire, her flesh had
cooled into an entirely unrecognizable landscape, like a scene left permanently
altered by the passage of a flow of lava. Her fingers did not lie open but were
drawn into a claw by the shrunken tightness of the scar tissue. In the heart of
her palm, scar within a scar, burn inside burn, was a grotesque mark. It was
set very deep in her clutch, so deep that with a sudden nausea I wondered what
had happened to the bone that should be there. It made sense of the odd set of
the hand at the wrist, the way it seemed to weigh upon her arm as though it had
no life of its own. The mark was a circle embedded in her palm, and extending
from it, in the direction of the thumb, a short line.

Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less
the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this unexpected and painful
act of revealment, it had no such clarity, and it disturbed me by the
appearance on a page of English of an unfamiliar symbol from a lost and
unreadable language.

A sudden vertigo took hold of me and I reached behind me for my
air.

‘I’m sorry,“ I heard her say. ”One gets so used to one’s own
horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.“

I sat down and gradually the blackness at the edge of my vision
receded.

Miss Winter closed her fingers into her damaged palm, swiveled
her wrist and drew the jewel-encrusted fist back into her lap. In a protective
gesture she curled the fingers of her other hand around it.

‘I’m sorry you didn’t want to hear my ghost story, Miss Lea.“

‘I’ll hear it another time.“

Our interview was over.

On my way back to my quarters I thought of the letter she had
sent me. The strained and painstaking hand that I had never seen the like of
before. I had put it down to illness. Arthritis perhaps. Now I understood. From
the very first book and through her entire career, Miss Winter had written her
masterpieces with her left hand.

In my study the velvet curtains were green, and a pale gold
watermark tin covered the walls. Despite the woolly hush, I was pleased with
the room, for the overall effect was relieved by the broad wooden desk and e
plain upright chair that stood under the window. I switched on the desk lamp
and laid out the ream of paper I had brought with me, and my twelve pencils.
They were brand-new: unsharpened columns of red, just what I like to start a
new project with. The last thing I took from my bag was my pencil sharpener. I
screwed it like a vise to the edge of the desk and set the paper basket
directly underneath.

On impulse I climbed onto the desk and reached behind the
elaborate valance to the curtain pole. My fingers groped for the tops of the
curtains, and I felt for the hooks and stitches that attached them. It was
hardly a job for one person; the curtains were floor length, lined and
interlined, and their weight, flung over my shoulder, was crushing. But after a
few minutes, first one then the other curtain was folded and in a cupboard. I
stood in the center of the floor and surveyed the result of my work.

The window was a large expanse of dark glass, and in the center
of it, my ghost, darkly transparent, was staring in at me. Her world was not
unlike my own: the pale outline of a desk on the other side of the glass, and
farther back a deeply buttoned armchair placed inside the circle of light cast
by a standard lamp. But where my chair was red, hers was gray; and where my
chair stood on an Indian rug, surrounded by light gold walls, her chair hovered
spectrally in an undefined, endless plane of darkness in which vague forms,
like waves, seemed to shift and breathe.

Together we began the little ritual of preparing our desks. We
divided a ream of paper into smaller piles and flicked through each one, to let
the air in. One by one we sharpened our pencils, turning the handle and
watching the long shavings curl and dangle their way to the paper bin below.
When the last pencil had been shaved to a fine point, we did not put it down
with the others, but kept hold of it.

‘There,“ I said to her. ”Ready for work.“

She opened her mouth, seemed to speak to me. I couldn’t hear
what she was saying.

I have no shorthand. During the interview I had simply jotted
down lists of keywords, and my hope was that if I wrote up our interviews
immediately afterward, these words would be enough to jog my memory. And from
that first meeting, it worked well. Glancing at my notebook from time to time,
I filled the center of my sheets of foolscap with Miss Winter’s words,
conjuring her image in my mind, hearing her voice, seeing her mannerisms. Soon
I was hardly aware of my notebook but was taking dictation from the Miss Winter
in my head.

I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any
mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her
meaning.

The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here
that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions.

I felt as though I had worked for hours. I emerged to make
myself a cup of cocoa, but it was time suspended and did not disturb the flow
of my recreation; I returned to my work and picked up the thread as though
there had been no interruption.

‘One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they
must seem to other people,“ I wrote at last in the middle column, and in the
left I added a note describing the way she closed the fingers of her good hand
over the closed fist of the damaged one.

I drew a double line under the last line of script, and
stretched. In the window the other me stretched as well. She took the pencils
whose points she had worn and sharpened them one by one.

She was mid-yawn when something began to happen to her face.
First it was a sudden blurring in the center of her forehead, like a blister.
Another mark appeared on her cheek, then beneath her eye, on her nose, on her
lips. Each new blemish was accompanied by a dull thud, a percussion that grew
faster and faster. In a few seconds her entire face, it seemed, had decomposed.

But it was not the work of death. It was only rain. The
long-awaited rain.

I opened the window, let my hand be drenched, then wiped the
water over my eyes and face. I shivered. Time for bed.

I left the window ajar so that I could listen to the rain as it
continued to fall with an even, muffled softness. I heard it while I was
undressing, while I was reading and while I slept. It accompanied my dreams
like a poorly tuned radio left on through the night, broadcasting a fuzzy white
noise beneath which were the barely audible whispers of foreign languages and
snatches of unfamiliar tunes.

AND SO WE BEGAN…

At nine o’clock the next morning Miss Winter sent for me and I
went to her in the library.

By daylight the room was quite different. With the shutters
folded back, the full-height windows let the light flood in from the pale sky.
The garden, still wet from the night’s downpour, gleamed in the morning sun.
The exotic plants by the window seats seemed to touch leaf with their hardier,
damper cousins beyond the glass, and the delicate framework that held the panes
in place seemed no more solid than the glimmering threads of a spider’s web
stretched across a garden path from branch to branch. The library itself,
slighter, narrower seemingly than the night before, appeared as a mirage of
books in the wet winter garden.

In contrast to the palely blue sky and the milk-white sun, Miss
Winter was all heat and fire, an exotic hothouse flower in a northern winter
garden. She wore no sunglasses today, but her eyelids were colored purple,
lined Cleopatra-style with kohl and fringed with the same heavy black lashes as
yesterday. In the clear daylight I saw what I had not seen the night before:
along the ruler-straight parting in Miss Winter’s copper curls was a narrow
margin of pure white.

‘You remember our agreement,“ she began, as I sat down in the
chair on the other side of the fire. ”Beginnings, middles and endings, all in
the correct order. No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions.“

I was tired. A strange bed in a strange place, and I had woken
with a dull, atonic tune ringing in my head. “Start where you like,” I said.

‘I shall start at the beginning. Though of course the beginning
is never where you think it is. Our lives are so important to us that we tend
to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then
I was born… Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can
be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are
webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating.
Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

‘My story is not only mine; it is the story of Angelfield.
Angelfield the village. Angelfield the house. And the Angelfield family itself.
George and Mathilde; their children, Charlie and Isabelle; Isabelle’s children,
Emmeline and Adeline. Their house, their fortunes, their Fears. And their
ghost. One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn’t one, Miss Lea?“

She gave me a sharp look; I pretended not to see it.

‘A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are
not really your own but only the continuation of someone else’s story. Take me,
for instance. To look at me now, you would think my birth must have been
something special, wouldn’t you? Accompanied by strange portents, and attended
by witches and fairy godmothers. But no. Not a bit of it. In act, when I was
born I was no more than a subplot.

‘But how do I know this story that precedes my birth, I hear you
thinking. What are the sources? Where does the information come from? Well,
where does any information come from in a house like Angelfield? The servants,
of course. The Missus, in particular. Not that I earned it all directly from
her lips. Sometimes, it is true, she would reminisce about the past while she
sat cleaning the silverware, and seem o forget my presence as she spoke. She
frowned as she remembered village rumors and local gossip. Events and
conversations and scenes rose to her lips and played themselves out afresh over
the kitchen table. But sooner or later the story would lead her into areas
unsuitable for a child—unsuitable in particular for me—then suddenly she would
remember I was there, break off her account mid-sentence and start rubbing the
cutlery vigorously, as if to erase the past altogether. But there can be no
secrets in a house where there are children. I pieced the story together
another way. When the Missus talked with the gardener over their morning tea, I
learned to interpret the sudden silences that punctuated seemingly innocent
conversations. Without appearing to notice anything, I saw the silent glances
that certain words provoked between them. And when they thought they were alone
and could talk privately… they were not in fact alone. In this way I understood
the story of my origins. And later, when the Missus was no longer the woman she
used to be, when age confused her and released her tongue, then her meanderings
confirmed the story I had spent years divining. It is this story—the one that
came to me in hints, glances and silences—I am going to translate into words
for you now.“