The Thirteenth Tale

  The delegation of village men included the baby’s father, his grandfather and the publican, a weary-looking fellow who didn’t like to be left out of anything. Doctor Maudsley welcomed the trio and listened attentively as two of the three men recounted their tale. They began with the gates left open, went on to the vexed issue of the missing saucepans and arrived after some minutes at the climax of their story: the kidnapping of the infant in the perambulator.

  ‘They’re running wild,’ the younger Fred Jameson said, finally.

  ‘Out of control,’ added the older Fred Jameson.

  ‘And what do you say?’ asked Doctor Maudsley of the third man. Wilfred Bonner, standing to one side had, until now, remained silent.

  Mr Bonner took his cap off and drew in a slow, whistling breath. ‘Well. I’m no medical man, but it seems to me them girls is not right.’ He accompanied his words with a look full of significance, then, in case he hadn’t got his message across, tapped his bald head, once, twice, three times.

  All three men looked gravely at their shoes.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll speak to the family.’

  And the men left. They had done their bit. It was up to the doctor, the village elder, now.

  Though he’d said he would speak to the family, what the doctor actually did was speak to his wife.

  ‘I doubt they meant any harm by it,’ she said, when he had finished telling the story. ‘You know what girls are. A baby is so much more fun to play with than a doll. They wouldn’t have hurt him. Still, they must be told not to do it again. Poor Mary.’ And she lifted her eyes from her sewing and turned her face to her husband.

  Mrs Maudsley was an exceedingly attractive woman. She had large, brown eyes with long lashes that curled prettily, and her dark hair that had not a trace of grey in it was pulled back in a style of such simplicity that only a true beauty would not be made plain by it. When she moved, her form had a rounded, womanly grace.

  The doctor knew his wife was beautiful, but they had been married too long for it to make any difference to him.

  ‘They think in the village that the girls are mentally retarded.’

  ‘Surely not!’

  ‘It’s what Wilfred Bonner thinks, at least.’

  She shook her head in wonderment. ‘He is afraid of them because they are twins. Poor Wilfred. It is just old-fashioned ignorance. Thank goodness the younger generation is more understanding.’

  The doctor was a man of science. Though he knew it was statistically unlikely that there was any mental abnormality in the twins, he would not rule it out until he had seen them. It did not surprise him though that his wife, whose religion forbade her to believe ill of anyone, would take for granted that the rumour was ill-founded gossip.

  ‘I’m sure you are right,’ he murmured with a vagueness that meant he was sure she was wrong. He had given up trying to get her to believe only what was true; she had been raised to the kind of religion that could admit no difference between what was true and what was good.

  ‘What will you do, then?’ she asked him.

  ‘Go and see the family. Charles Angelfield is a bit of a hermit, but he’ll have to see me if I go.’

  Mrs Maudsley nodded, which was her way of disagreeing with her husband, though he didn’t know it. ‘What about the mother? What do you know of her?’

  ‘Very little.’

  And the doctor continued to think in silence, and Mrs Maudsley continued her sewing, and after a quarter of an hour had passed, the doctor said, ‘Perhaps you might go, Theodora? The mother might sooner see another woman than a man. What do you say?’

  And so three days later Mrs Maudsley arrived at the house and knocked at the front door. Astonished to get no answer, she frowned – after all she had sent a note to say she was coming – and walked round to the back. The kitchen door was ajar so with a quick knock she went in. No one was there. Mrs Maudsley looked around. Three apples on the table, brown and wrinkled and starting to collapse upon themselves, a black dishcloth next to a sink piled high with dirty plates, and the window so filthy that inside you could hardly tell day from night. Her dainty, white nose sniffed the air. It told her everything she needed to know. She pursed her lips, set her shoulders, took a tight grip on the tortoiseshell handle of her bag and set off on her crusade. She went from room to room looking for Isabelle, but on the way taking in the squalor, the mess, the unkemptness that lurked everywhere.

  The Missus tired easily, and she couldn’t manage the stairs very well, and her sight was going, and she often thought she had cleaned things when she hadn’t, or meant to clean them and then forgot, and to be honest, she knew nobody really cared, so she mostly concentrated on feeding the girls, and they were lucky she managed that much. So the house was dirty, and it was dusty, and when a picture was knocked wonky it stayed wonky for a decade, and when one day Charlie couldn’t find the paper bin in his study he just dropped the paper onto the floor in the place where the paper bin used to be, and it soon occurred to him that it was less fuss to chuck it out once a year than to do it once a week.

  Mrs Maudsley didn’t like what she saw at all. She frowned at the half-closed curtains, and sighed at the tarnished silver, and shook her head in amazement at the saucepans on the stairs and the sheet music that was scattered all over the floor of the hallway. In the drawing room she bent down automatically to retrieve a playing card, the three of spades, that was lying dropped or discarded in the middle of the floor, but when she looked around the room for the rest of the pack, she was at a loss, so great was the disorder. Glancing helplessly back at the card she became aware of the dust covering it and being a fastidious, white-gloved woman, was overwhelmed with the desire to put it down, only where? For a few seconds she was paralysed with anxiety, torn between the desire to end the contact between her pristine glove and the dusty, faintly sticky playing card, and her own unwillingness to put the card down in a place that wasn’t the right one. Eventually, with a perceptible shudder of the shoulders, she placed it on the arm of the leather armchair, and walked with relief out of the room.

  The library seemed better. It was dusty, certainly, and the carpet was threadbare, but the books themselves were in their place, which was something. Yet even in the library, just when she was preparing herself to believe that there remained some small feeling for order buried in this filthy, chaotic family she came across a makeshift bed. Tucked into a dark corner between two sets of shelves, it was just a flea-ridden blanket and a filthy pillow, and at first she took it for a cat’s bed. Then, looking again, she spotted the corner of a book visible beneath the pillow. She drew it out. It was Jane Eyre.

  From the library she passed to the music room where she found the same disorder she had seen elsewhere. The furniture was arranged bizarrely as though to facilitate the playing of hide and seek. A chaise longue was turned to face a wall; a chair was half hidden by a chest that had been dragged from its place under the window – there was a broad sweep of carpet behind it where the dust was less thick and the green colour showed through more distinctly. On the piano a vase contained blackened, brittle stems, and around it a neat circle of papery petals like ashes. Mrs Maudsley reached her hand towards one and picked it up; it crumbled, leaving a nasty yellow-grey stain between her white-gloved fingers.

  Mrs Maudsley seemed to slump down onto the piano stool.

  The doctor’s wife wasn’t a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

  What was going on in her mind as she sat there on the piano stool, staring into space? These were people who couldn’t keep their flower vases topped up. No wonder their children were misbehaving! The extent of the problem seemed suddenl
y to have been revealed to her through the dead flowers, and it was in a distracted, absent fashion that she pulled off her gloves and spread her fingers on the black and grey keys of the piano.

  The sound that resounded in the room was the harshest, most unpiano-like noise imaginable. This was in part because the piano had been neglected, unplayed and untuned, for many years. It was also because the vibration of the instrument’s strings was instantly accompanied by another noise, equally unmelodic. It was a kind of a howling hiss, an irritated, wild sort of a screech, like a cat whose tail has got under your feet.

  Mrs Maudsley was shaken entirely out of her reverie by it. On hearing the yowl, she stared at the piano in disbelief and stood up, her hands to her cheeks. In her bewilderment she had only the barest moment to register that she was not alone.

  There, rising from the chaise longue, a slight figure in white—

  Poor Mrs Maudsley.

  She had not the time to appreciate that the white-robed figure was brandishing a violin, and that the violin was descending very quickly and with great force towards her own head. Before she could take in any of this, the violin made contact with her skull, blackness overwhelmed her, and she fell, unconscious, to the floor.

  With her arms sprawled any old how, and her neat white handkerchief still tucked inside her watch strap, she looked as though there wasn’t a drop of life left in her. Little puffs of dust that had come up from the carpet when she landed fell gently back down.

  There she lay for a good half hour, until the Missus, back from the farm where she had been to collect eggs, happened to glance in at the door and see a dark shape where she hadn’t seen a dark shape before.

  There was no sign of a figure in white.

  As I transcribed from memory, Miss Winter’s voice seemed to fill my room with the same degree of reality with which it had filled the library. She had a way of speaking that engraved itself on my memory and was as reliable as a phonograph recording. But at this point, where she said, ‘There was no sign of a figure in white,’ she had paused, and so now I paused, pencil hovering above the page, as I considered what had happened next.

  I had been engrossed in the story and so it took me a moment to refocus my eye from the prone figure of the doctor’s wife in the story to the storyteller herself. When I did I was dismayed. Miss Winter’s normal pallor had given way to an ugly yellow-grey tint, and her frame, always rigid it must be said, seemed at present to be girding itself against some invisible assault. There was a trembling around her mouth, and I guessed that she was on the point of losing the struggle to hold her lips in a firm line and that a repressed grimace was close to winning the day.

  I rose from my chair in alarm, but had no idea what I ought to do.

  ‘Miss Winter,’ I exclaimed helplessly, ‘whatever is it?’

  ‘My wolf,’ I thought I heard her say, but the effort to speak was enough to send her lips into a quiver. She closed her eyes, seemed to struggle to measure her breathing. Just as I was on the point of running to find Judith, Miss Winter regained control. The rise and fall of her chest slowed, the tremors in her face ceased, and though she was still pale as death she opened her eyes and looked at me.

  ‘Better…’ she said, weakly.

  Slowly I returned to my chair.

  ‘I thought you said something about a wolf,’ I began.

  ‘Yes. That black beast that gnaws at my bones whenever he gets a chance. He loiters in corners and behind doors most of the time, because he’s afraid of these.’ She indicated the white pills on the table beside her. ‘But they don’t last for ever. It’s nearly twelve and they are wearing off. He is sniffing at my neck. By half past he will be digging his teeth and claws in. Until one, when I can take another tablet and he will have to return to his corner. We are always clockwatching, he and I. He pounces five minutes earlier every day. But I cannot take my tablets five minutes earlier. That stays the same.’

  ‘But surely the doctor—’

  ‘Of course. Once a week, or once every ten days he adjusts the dose. Only never quite enough. He does not want to be the one to kill me, you see. And so when it comes, it must be the wolf that finishes me off.’

  She looked at me, very matter of fact, then relented.

  ‘The pills are here, look. And the glass of water. If I wanted to, I could put an end to it myself. Whenever I chose. So do not feel sorry for me. I have chosen this way because I have things to do.’

  I nodded. ‘All right.’

  ‘So. Let’s get on and do them, shall we? Where were we?’

  ‘The doctor’s wife. In the music room. With the violin.’

  And we continued our work.

  Charlie wasn’t used to dealing with problems.

  He had problems. Plenty of them. Holes in the roof, cracked window panes, pigeons mouldering away in the attic rooms – but he ignored them. Or perhaps was so far removed from the world that he just didn’t notice them. When the water penetration got too bad he just closed up a room and started using another one. The house was big enough, after all. One wonders whether in his slow-moving mind he realized that other people actively maintained their homes. But then, dilapidation was his natural environment. He felt at home in it.

  Still, a doctor’s wife apparently dead in the music room was a problem he couldn’t ignore. If it had been one of us…But an outsider. That was another matter. Something had to be done, although he had no notion of what that something might be, and he stared, stricken, at the doctor’s wife as she put her hand to her throbbing head and moaned. He might be stupid, but he knew what this meant. Calamity was coming.

  The Missus sent John-the-dig for the doctor and in due course the doctor arrived. And it seemed for a while that premonitions of disaster were ill-founded, for it was found that the doctor’s wife was not badly hurt at all, barely even concussed. She refused a tot of brandy, accepted tea, and after a short while was as right as rain. ‘It was a woman,’ she said. ‘A woman in white.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the Missus, at once reassuring and dismissive. ‘There is no woman in white in the house.’

  Tears glittered in Mrs Maudsley’s brown eyes, but she was adamant. ‘Yes, a woman, slightly built, there on the chaise longue. She heard the piano and rose up and—’

  ‘Did you see her for long?’ Dr Maudsley asked.

  ‘No, it was just for a moment.’

  ‘Well then, you see? It cannot be,’ the Missus interrupted her, and though her voice was sympathetic it was also firm. ‘There is no woman in white. You must have seen a ghost.’

  And then for the first time, John-the-dig’s voice was heard. ‘They do say that the house is haunted.’

  For a moment the assembled group looked at the broken violin abandoned on the floor, and considered the lump that was forming on Mrs Maudsley’s temple, but before anyone had time to respond to the theory, Isabelle appeared in the doorway. Slim and willowy, she was wearing a pale lemon dress; her haphazard topknot was unkempt and her eyes, though beautiful, were wild.

  ‘Could this be the person you saw?’ the doctor asked his wife.

  Mrs Maudsley measured Isabelle against the picture in her mind. How many shades separate white from pale yellow? Where exactly is the borderline between slight and slim? How might a blow to the head affect a person’s memory? She wavered, then seeing the emerald eyes and finding an exact match in her memory, decided.

  ‘Yes. This is the person.’

  The Missus and John-the-dig avoided exchanging a glance.

  From that moment, forgetting his wife, it was Isabelle the doctor attended to. He looked at her closely, kindly, with worry in the back of his eyes while he asked her question after question. When she refused to answer he was unrattled, but when she was bothered to reply – by turns arch, impatient, nonsensical – he listened carefully, nodding as he made notes in his doctor’s pad. Taking her wrist to measure her pulse, he noted with alarm the cuts and scars that marked the inside of her forearm.

  ‘D
oes she do this herself?’

  Reluctantly honest the Missus murmured, ‘Yes,’ and the doctor pressed his lips into a worried line.

  ‘May I have a word with you, sir?’ he asked, turning to Charlie. Charlie looked blankly at him, but the doctor took him by the elbow – ‘The library, perhaps?’ – and led him firmly out of the room.

  In the drawing room the Missus and the doctor’s wife waited and pretended not to pay any attention to the sounds that came from the library. There was the hum not of voices but of a single voice, calm and measured. When it stopped, we heard ‘No’ and again, ‘No!’ in Charlie’s raised voice, and then again the low tones of the doctor. They were gone for some time, and we heard Charlie’s protestations over and over before the door opened and the doctor came out, looking serious and shaken. Behind him, there was a great howl of despair and impotence, but the doctor only winced and pulled the door to behind him.

  ‘I’ll make the arrangements with the asylum,’ he told the Missus. ‘Leave the transport to me. Will two o’clock be all right?’

  Baffled, she nodded her head, and the doctor’s wife rose to leave.

  At two o’ clock three men came to the house, and they led Isabelle out to a brougham in the drive. She submitted herself to them like a lamb, settled obediently in the seat, never even looked out as the horses trotted slowly down the drive, towards the lodge gates.

  The twins, unconcerned, were drawing circles with their toes in the gravel of the drive.

  Charlie stood on the steps watching the brougham as it grew smaller and smaller. He had the air of a child whose favourite toy is being taken away, and who cannot believe – not quite, not yet – that it is really happening.

  From the hall the Missus and John-the-dig watched him anxiously, waiting for the realization to dawn.

  The car reached the lodge gates and disappeared through them. Charlie continued to stare at the open gates for three, four, five seconds. Then his mouth opened. A wide circle, twitching and trembling, that revealed his quivering tongue, the fleshy redness of his throat, strings of spittle across a dark cavity. Mesmerized we watched, waiting for the awful noise to emerge from the gaping, juddering mouth, but the sound was not ready to come. For long seconds it built up, accumulating inside him until his whole body seemed full of pent-up sound. At long last he fell to his knees on the steps and the cry emerged from him. It was not the elephantine bellow we were expecting, but a damp, nasal snort.