The Thirteenth Tale, Page 22

  ‘I believe you,’ I repeated, my tongue thick with all the waiting words. ‘I’ve had that feeling, too. Knowing things you can’t know. From before you can remember.’

  And there it was again! A sudden movement in the corner of my eye, there and gone in the same instant.

  ‘Did you see that, Aurelius?’

  He followed my gaze to the topiary pyramids and beyond. ‘See what? No, I didn’t see anything.’

  It had gone. Or else it had never been there at all.

  I turned back to Aurelius, but I had lost my nerve. The moment for confidences was gone.

  ‘Have you got a birthday?’ Aurelius asked.

  ‘Yes. I’ve got a birthday.’

  All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years.

  ‘I’ll make a note of it, shall I?’ he said brightly. ‘Then I can send you a card.’

  I feigned a smile. ‘It’s coming up soon, actually.’

  Aurelius opened a little blue notebook divided into months.

  ‘The nineteenth,’ I told him, and he wrote it down with a pencil so small it looked like a toothpick in his huge hand.

  Mrs Love Turns a Heel

  When it started to rain we put our hoods up and made our way hurriedly to the shelter of the church. In the porch we did a little jig to drive the raindrops off our coats, and then went inside.

  We sat in a pew near the altar and I stared up at the pale, vaulted ceiling until I made myself dizzy.

  ‘Tell me about when you were found,’ I said. ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘I know what Mrs Love told me,’ he answered. ‘I can tell you that. And of course there’s always my inheritance.’

  ‘You have an inheritance?’

  ‘Yes. It’s nothing much. Not what people usually mean when they talk about an inheritance, but all the same…In fact I could show it to you later.’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘Yes…Because I was thinking, nine is a bit too adjacent to breakfast for cake, isn’t it?’ It was said with a reluctant grimace which turned into a gleam with his next words: ‘So I thought, invite Margaret back for elevenses. Cake and coffee, how does that sound? You could do with feeding up. And I’ll show you my inheritance at the same time. What little there is to see.’

  I accepted the invitation.

  Aurelius took his glasses from his pocket and began to polish them absently with a handkerchief.

  ‘Well now.’ Slowly he took a deep breath. Slowly he exhaled. ‘As it was told to me. Mrs Love, and her story.’

  His face settled into passive neutrality, a sign that in the way of all storytellers, he was disappearing to make way for the voice of the story itself. And then he recited, and from his very first words, at the heart of his voice, it was Mrs Love I heard, conjured from the grave by the memory of her story.

  Her story, and Aurelius’s, and also, perhaps, Emmeline’s.

  There was a pitch-black sky that night, and a storm was brewing in it. In the tree tops the wind was whistling and it was raining fit to break the windows. I was knitting in this chair by the fire, a grey sock it was, the second one, and I was just turning the heel. Well, I felt a shiver. Not that I was cold, mind you. I’d a nice lot of firewood piled up in the log basket that I’d brought in from the shed that afternoon, and I’d only just put another log on. So I wasn’t cold, not at all, but I thought to myself, What a night, I’m glad I’m not some poor soul caught outdoors away from home on a night like this, and it was thinking of that poor soul as made me shiver.

  Everything was quiet indoors, only the crack of the fire every so often, and the click click of the knitting needles, and my sighs. My sighs, you say? Well yes, my sighs. Because I wasn’t happy. I’d fallen into remembering, and that’s a bad habit for a woman of fifty. I’d got a warm fire, a roof over my head and a cooked dinner inside me, but was I content? Not I. So there I sat sighing over my grey sock, while the rain kept coming. After a time I got up to fetch a slice of plum cake from the pantry, nice and mature, fed with brandy. Cheered me up no end. But when I came back and picked up my knitting, my heart quite turned over. Do you know why? I’d turned the heel of that sock twice!

  Now that bothered me. It really bothered me, because I’m a careful knitter, not slapdash like my sister Kitty used to be, nor half blind like my poor old mother when she got near the end. I’d only made that mistake twice in my life.

  The first time I turned a heel too often was when I was a young thing. A sunny afternoon. I was sitting by an open window, enjoying the smell of everything blooming in the garden. It was a blue sock then. For…well, for a young man. My young man. I won’t tell you his name; there’s no need. Well I’d been daydreaming. Silly. White dresses and white cakes and a lot of nonsense like that. And all of a sudden I looked down and saw that I’d turned the heel twice. There it was plain as day. A ribbed leg part, a heel, more ribbing for the foot and then – another heel. I laughed out loud. It didn’t matter. Easy enough to undo it and put it right.

  I’d already drawn the needles out when Kitty came running up the garden path. ‘What’s up with her?’ I thought, all of a hurry. I saw her face was greenish white, and then she stopped dead the minute she saw me through the window. That’s when I knew it wasn’t a trouble for her, but for me. She opened her mouth but she couldn’t even say my name. She was crying. And then out she came with it.

  There’d been an accident. He’d been out with his brother, my young man. After some grouse. Where they didn’t ought to a been. Someone saw them and they took fright. Ran off. Daniel, the brother, he got to the stile first and hopped over. My young man, he was too hasty. His gun got caught in the stile. He should have slowed down, taken his time. He heard footsteps coming after them and panicked. Yanked at the gun. I don’t need to spell it out, do I? You can guess what happened.

  I undid my knitting. All those little knots that you make one after another, row by row, to knit a sock, I undid them. It’s easy. Take the needles out, a little tug and they just fall apart. One after another, row by row. I undid the extra heel and then I just kept going. The foot, the first heel, the ribbing of the leg. All those loops unravelling themselves as you pull the wool. Then there was nothing left to unravel, only a pile of crinkled blue wool in my lap.

  It doesn’t take long to knit a sock and it takes a lot less to undo it.

  I expect I wound the blue wool into a ball to make something else. But I don’t remember that.

  The second time I turned a heel twice I was beginning to get old. Kitty and me were sitting by the fireside here, together. It was a year since her husband had died, nearly a year since she’d come to live with me. She was getting so much better, I thought. She’d been smiling more. Taking an interest in things. She could hear his name without welling up. We sat here and I was knitting – a nice pair of bedsocks it was for Kitty, softest lambs’ wool, pink to go with her dressing gown – and she had a book in her lap. She can’t have been looking at it though, because she said, ‘Joan, you’ve turned that heel twice.’

  I held up my work and she was right. ‘Well I’m blowed,’ I said.

  She said if it had been her knitting she wouldn’t be surprised. She was always turning heels twice, or else forgetting to turn at all. More than once she’d knitted a sock for her man with no heel, just a leg and a toe. We laughed. But she was surprised at me, she said. It wasn’t like me to be so absent-minded.

  Well I said, I have made this mistake before. Only the once. And I reminded her of what I’ve just told you. All about my young man. And while I was reminiscing aloud, I carefully undid the second heel and got started to put it right. Takes a bit of concentration, and the light was going. Well, I finished my story, and she didn’t say anything, and I thought she was thinking about her husband. You know, me talking about my loss all those years ago, and hers so recent by comparison.

  It was too dark to finish the toe properly so I put it aside, and looked up. ‘Kitty?’ I said. ‘
Kitty?’ There was no answer. I did for a moment think she might be asleep. But she wasn’t.

  She looked so peaceful there. She had a smile on her face. As if she was happy to be back with him. Back with her husband. In the time I’d been peering at that bedsock in the dark, chattering away with my old story, she’d gone to him.

  So it bothered me, that night of the pitch-black sky, to find that I’d knitted a second heel. Once I’d done it and lost my young man. Twice and I’d lost my sister. Now a third time. I had no one left to lose. There was only me now.

  I looked at the sock. Grey wool. A plain thing. It was meant for me.

  Perhaps it didn’t matter, I told myself. Who was there to miss me? No one would suffer from my going. That was a blessing. After all, at least I’d had a life, not like my young man. And also I remembered the look on Kitty’s face, that happy, peaceful look. Can’t be so bad, I thought.

  I set to unravelling the extra heel. What was the point of that, you might wonder. Well, I didn’t want to be found with it. ‘Silly old woman,’ I imagined them saying. ‘They found her with her knitting in her lap and guess what? She’d turned her heel twice.’ I didn’t want them saying that. So I undid it. And as I worked I was readying myself to go, in my mind.

  I don’t know how long I sat there like that. But eventually a noise found its way into my ear. From out of doors. A cry, like some lost animal. I was away in my thoughts, not expecting anything to come now between me and my end, so at first I paid no notice. But I heard it again. It seemed to be calling me. For who else was going to hear it, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere? I thought perhaps it was a cat, lost its mother or something. And although I was preparing to meet my maker, the image of this little cat, with its wet fur, kept distracting me. And I thought, just because I’m dying, that’s no reason to deny one of God’s creatures a bit of warmth and something to eat. And I might as well tell you, I didn’t mind the thought of having some living creature by me right at that moment. So I went to the door.

  And what did I find there?

  Tucked in the porch, out of the rain, a baby! Swaddled in canvas, mewling like a kitten. Poor little mite. Cold and wet and hungry you were. I could hardly believe my eyes. I bent down and picked you up, and the minute you saw me you stopped crying.

  I didn’t linger outdoors. You wanted feeding and some dry things. So no, I didn’t stop long in the porch. Just a quick look. Nothing there. Nobody at all. Just the wind rustling the trees at the edge of the wood, and – odd this – smoke rising into the sky off towards Angelfield.

  I clutched you to me, came inside and closed the door.

  Twice before I had knitted two heels into a sock, and death had come close to me. The third time, and it was life that came to the door. That taught me not to go reading too much into coincidences. I had no time to be thinking about death after that, anyway.

  I had you to think about.

  And we lived happily ever after.

  Aurelius swallowed. His voice had grown hoarse and broken. The words had come out of him like an incantation; words that he had heard a thousand times as a boy, repeated inside himself for decades as a man.

  When the story was finished we sat in silence, contemplating the altar. Outside the rain continued to fall, unhurried. Aurelius was still as a statue by my side yet his thoughts, I suspected, were anything but quiet.

  There were lots of things I might have said, but I said nothing. I just waited for him to return to the present in his own time. When he did, he spoke to me.

  ‘The thing is, it’s not my story, is it? I mean, I’m in it, that’s obvious, but it’s not my story. It belongs to Mrs Love. The man she wanted to marry; her sister Kitty; her knitting. Her baking. All that is her story. And then just when she thinks it’s all coming to an end, I arrive and give the story a new start instead.

  ‘But that doesn’t make it my story, does it? Because before she opened the door—Before she heard the sound in the night—Before—’

  He halted, breathless, made a gesture to cut off his sentence and start again: ‘Because for someone to find a baby like that, just find him, all alone like that in the rain, it means that, before then – in order for it to happen – of necessity—’

  Another frantic erasing gesture of the hands, eyes ranging wildly around the church ceiling as though somewhere he would spot the verb he needed that would allow him finally to anchor what it was he wanted to say: ‘Because if Mrs Love found me, it can only mean that before that happened, someone else, some other person, some mother must have—’

  There it was. That verb.

  His face froze into despair. His hands, halfway through an agitated gesture, were arrested in an attitude that suggested a plea or a prayer.

  There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. I read Aurelius.

  Do not abandon me.

  I touched my hand to his, and the statue returned to life.

  ‘There’s no point waiting for the rain to stop,’ I whispered. ‘It’s set in for the day. My photos can wait. We may as well go.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, with a gruff edge in his throat. ‘We may as well.’

  The Inheritance

  ‘It’s a mile and a half direct,’ he said, pointing into the woods, ‘longer by road.’

  We crossed the deer park and had nearly reached the edge of the woods when we heard voices. It was a woman’s voice that swam through the rain, up the gravel drive to her children, and over the park as far as us. ‘I told you, Tom. It’s too wet. They can’t work when it’s raining like this.’ The children had come to a halt in disappointment at seeing the stationary cranes and machinery. With their sou’westers over their blond heads, I could not tell them apart. The woman caught up with them, and the family huddled for a moment in a brief conference of mackintoshes.

  Aurelius was rapt by the family tableau.

  ‘I’ve seen them before,’ I said. ‘Do you know who they are?’

  ‘They’re a family. They live in The Street. The house with the swing. Karen looks after the deer here.’

  ‘Do they still hunt here?’

  ‘No. She just looks after them. They’re a nice family.’

  Enviously he gazed after them, then he broke his attention with a shake of his head. ‘Mrs Love was very good to me,’ he said, ‘and I loved her. All this other stuff—’ He made a dismissive gesture, and turned towards the woods. ‘Come on. Let’s go home.’

  The family in mackintoshes, turning back towards the lodge gates, had clearly reached the same decision.

  Aurelius and I walked through the woods in silent friendship.

  There were no leaves to cut out the light and the branches, blackened by rain, reached dark across the watery sky. Stretching out an arm to push away low branches, Aurelius dislodged extra raindrops to add to those that fell on us from the sky. We came across a fallen tree and leant over it, staring into the dark pool of rain in its hollow that had softened the rotting bark almost to fur.

  Then, ‘Home,’ Aurelius pronounced.

  It was a small stone cottage. Built for endurance rather than decoration, but attractive all the same, in its simple and solid lines. Aurelius led me around the side of the house. Was it a hundred years old or two hundred? It was hard to tell. It wasn’t the kind of house that a hundred years made much difference to. Except that at the back there was a large, new extension, almost as large as the house itself, and taken up entirely with a kitchen.

  ‘My sanctuary,’ he said, as he showed me in.

  A massive stainless steel oven, white walls, two vast fridges – it was a real kitchen for a real cook.

  Aurelius pulled out a chair for me and I sat at a small table by a bookcase. The shelves were filled with cookbooks, in French, English, Italian. One book, unlike the others, was out on the table. It was a thick notebook, corners blunt with age, and covered in brown paper that had gone transparent after d
ecades of being handled with buttery fingers. Someone had written RECIPIES on the front, in old-fashioned, school-formed capitals. Some years later the writer had crossed out the second I, using a different pen.

  ‘May I?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  I opened the book and began to leaf through it. Victoria sponge, date and walnut loaf, scones, ginger cake, maids of honour, Bakewell tart, rich fruit cake…the spelling and the handwriting improving as the pages turned.

  Aurelius turned a dial on the oven, then, moving lightly, assembled his ingredients. After that everything was within reach, and he stretched out an arm for a sieve or a knife without looking. He moved in his kitchen the way drivers change gear in their cars: an arm reaching out smoothly, independently, knowing exactly what to do, while his eyes never left the fixed spot in front of him: the bowl in which he was combining his ingredients. He sieved flour, chopped butter into dice, zested an orange. It was as natural as breathing.

  ‘You see that cupboard?’ he said ‘There to your left? Would you open it?’

  Thinking he wanted a piece of equipment, I opened the cupboard door.

  ‘You’ll find a bag hanging on a peg, inside.’

  It was a kind of satchel, old and curiously designed. Its sides were not stitched, but just tucked in. It fastened with a buckle, and a long, broad leather strap, attached with a rusty clasp at each side, which allowed you presumably to wear it diagonally across your body. The leather was dry and cracked, and the canvas that might once have been khaki was now just the colour of age.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  For a second he raised his eyes from the bowl to me.

  ‘It’s the bag I was found in.’

  He turned back to combining his ingredients.

  The bag he was found in? My eyes moved slowly from the satchel to Aurelius. Even bent over his kneading he was over six feet tall. I had thought him a storybook giant when I first set eyes on him, I remembered. Today the strap wouldn’t even go around his girth, yet sixty years ago he had been small enough to fit inside. Dizzy at the thought of what time can do, I sat down again. Who was it that had placed a baby in this satchel so long ago? Folded its canvas around him, fastened the buckle against the weather, and placed the strap over her body to carry him, through the night, to Mrs Love’s? I ran my fingers over the places she had touched. Canvas, buckle, strap. Seeking some trace of her. A clue, in Braille or invisible ink or code, that my touch might reveal if only it knew how. It did not know how.