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The Thirteenth Tale, Page 23

Diane Setterfield


  ‘It’s exasperating, isn’t it?’ Aurelius said.

  I heard him slide something into the oven and close the door, then I felt him behind me, looking over my shoulder.

  ‘You open it – I’ve got flour on my hands.’

  I undid the buckle and opened the pleats of canvas. They unfolded into a flat circle in the centre of which lay a tangle of paper and rag.

  ‘My inheritance,’ he announced.

  The things looked like a pile of discarded junk waiting to be swept into the bin, but he gazed at them with the intensity of a boy staring at a treasure trove. ‘These things are my story,’ he said. ‘These things tell me who I am. It’s just a matter of – of understanding them.’ His bafflement was intent but resigned. ‘I’ve tried all my life to piece them together. I keep thinking, if only I could find the thread…It would all fall into place. Take that for instance—’

  It was a piece of cloth. Linen, once white, now yellow. I disentangled it from the other objects and smoothed it out. It was embroidered with a pattern of stars and flowers also in white; there were four dainty mother-of-pearl buttons; it was an infant’s dress or nightgown. Aurelius’s broad fingers dusted with flour hovered over the tiny garment, wanting to touch, not wanting to mark it with flour. The narrow sleeves would just fit over a finger now.

  ‘It’s what I was wearing,’ Aurelius explained.

  ‘It’s very old.’

  ‘As old as me, I suppose.’

  ‘Older than that, even.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Look at the stitching here – and here. It’s been mended more than once. And this button doesn’t match. Other babies wore this before you.’

  His eyes flitted from the scrap of linen to me and back to the cloth, hungry for knowledge.

  ‘And there’s this.’ He pointed at a page of print. It was torn from a book, and riddled with creases. Taking it in my hands I started to read.

  ‘…not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm—’

  Aurelius took up the phrase and continued, reading not from the page but from memory: ‘—not soon enough however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it.’

  Of course I recognized it. How could I not, for I had read it goodness knows how many times? ‘Jane Eyre,’ I said wonderingly.

  ‘You recognized it? Yes, it is. I asked a man in a library. It’s by Charlotte someone. She had a lot of sisters, apparently.’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Started to. It was about a little girl. She’s lost her family, and so her aunt takes her in. I thought I was on to something, with that. Nasty woman, the aunt, not like Mrs Love at all. This is one of her cousins throwing the book at her, on this page. But later she goes to school, a terrible school, terrible food, but she does make a friend.’ He smiled, remembering his reading. ‘Only then the friend died.’ His face fell. ‘And after that – I seemed to lose interest. Didn’t read the end. I couldn’t see how it fitted, after that.’ He shrugged off his puzzlement. ‘Have you read it? What happened to her in the end? Is it relevant?’

  ‘She falls in love with her employer. His wife – she’s mad, lives in the house but secretly – tries to burn the house down, and Jane goes away. When she comes back, the wife has died, and Mr Rochester is blind, and Jane marries him.’

  ‘Ah.’ His forehead wrinkled as he tried to puzzle it all out. But he gave up. ‘No. It doesn’t make sense, does it? The beginning, perhaps. The girl without the mother. But after that…I wish someone could tell me what it means. I wish there was someone who could just tell me the truth.’

  He turned back to the torn-out page. ‘Probably it’s not the book that’s important at all. Perhaps it’s just this page. Perhaps it has some secret meaning. Look here.’

  Inside the back cover of his childhood recipe book were tightly packed columns and rows of numbers and letters written in a large, boyish hand. ‘I used to think it was a code,’ he explained. ‘I tried to decipher it. I tried the first letter of every word, the first of every line. Or the second. Then I tried replacing one letter for another.’ He pointed to his various trials, eyes feverish, as though there was still a chance he might see something that had escaped him before.

  I knew it was hopeless.

  ‘What about this?’ I picked up the next object, and couldn’t help giving a shudder. Clearly it had been a feather once, but now it was a nasty, dirty-looking thing. Its oils dried up, the barbs had separated into stiff brown spikes along the cracked spine.

  Aurelius shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in helpless ignorance, and I dropped the feather with relief.

  And then there was just one more thing. ‘Now this…’ Aurelius began, but he didn’t finish. It was a scrap of paper, roughly torn, with a faded ink stain that might once have been a word. I peered at it closely.

  ‘I think—’ Aurelius stuttered, ‘Well, Mrs Love thought—We both agreed, in fact—’ he looked at me in hope, ‘that it must be my name.’

  He pointed. ‘It got wet in the rain, but here, just here—’ He led me to the window; gestured me to hold the paper scrap up to the light. ‘Something like an A at the beginning. And then an S. Just here, towards the end. Of course, it’s faded a bit, over the years; you have to look hard, but you can see it, can’t you?’

  I stared at the stain.

  ‘Can’t you?’

  I made a vague motion with my head, neither nod nor shake.

  ‘You see! It’s obvious when you know what you’re looking for, isn’t it?’

  I continued to look, but the phantom letters that he could see were invisible to my eye.

  ‘And that,’ he was saying, ‘is how Mrs Love settled on Aurelius. Though I might just as easily be Alphonse, I suppose.’

  He laughed at himself, sadly, uneasily, and turned away. ‘The only other thing was the spoon. But you’ve seen that.’ He reached into his top pocket and took out the silver spoon I had seen at our first meeting, when we ate ginger cake while sitting on the giant cats flanking the steps of Angelfield House.

  ‘And the bag itself,’ I wondered. ‘What kind of a bag is it?’

  ‘Just a bag,’ he said vaguely. He lifted it to his face and sniffed it delicately. ‘It used to smell of smoke, but not any more.’ He passed it to me, and I bent my nose to it. ‘You see? It’s faded now.’

  Aurelius opened the oven door and took out a tray of pale gold biscuits which he set to cool. Then he filled the kettle and prepared a tray. Cups and saucers, a sugar bowl, a milk jug and little plates.

  ‘You take this,’ he said, passing the tray to me. He opened a door that showed a glimpse of a sitting room, old comfy chairs and floral cushions. ‘Make yourself at home. I’ll bring the rest in a minute.’ He kept his back to me, head bowed as he washed his hands. ‘I’ll be with you when I’ve put these things away.’

  I went into Mrs Love’s front room and sat in a chair by the fireplace, leaving him to stow his inheritance – his invaluable, indecipherable inheritance – safely away.

  I left the house with something scratching at my mind. Was it something Aurelius had said? Yes. Some echo or connection had vaguely appealed for my attention but had been swept away by the rest of his story. It didn’t matter. It would come back to me.

  In the woods there is a clearing. Beneath it, the ground falls away steeply and is covered in patchy scrub before it levels out and there are trees again. Because of this, it provides an unexpected vantage point from which to view the house. It was in this clearing that I stopped, on my way back from Aurelius’s cottage.

  The scene was bleak. The house, or what remained of it, was ghostly. A smudge of grey against a grey sky. The upper storeys on the left-hand side were all gone. The ground floor remained, the door frame demarcated by its dark stone lintel and the steps that led up to it, but the door itself
was gone. It was not a day to be open to the elements, and I shivered for the half-dismantled house. Even the stone cats had abandoned it. Like the deer, they had taken themselves off out of the wet. The right-hand side of the building was still largely intact, though to judge by the position of the crane it would be next to go. Was all that machinery really necessary? I caught myself thinking. For it looked as if the walls were simply dissolving in the rain; those stones still standing, pale and insubstantial as rice paper, seemed ready to melt away under my very eyes if I just stood there long enough.

  My camera was slung around my neck. I disentangled it from under my coat and raised it to my eyes. Was it possible to capture the evanescent appearance of the house through all this wetness? I doubted it, but was willing to try.

  I was adjusting the long-distance lens when I caught a slight movement at the edge of the frame. Not my ghost. The children were back. They had seen something in the grass, were bending over it excitedly. What was it? A hedgehog? A snake? Curious, I fine-tuned the focus to see more clearly.

  One of the children reached into the long grass and lifted the discovery out of it. It was a yellow builder’s hat. With a delighted smile he pushed back his sou’wester – I could see it was the boy now – and placed the hat on his head. Stiff as a soldier he stood, chest out, head up, arms by his side, face intent with concentration to keep the too-large hat from slipping. Just as he struck his pose there came a small miracle. A shaft of sunlight found its way through a gap in the cloud, and fell upon the boy, illuminating him in his moment of glory. I clicked the shutter and my photo was taken. The boy in the hat, over his left shoulder a yellow Keep Out sign, and to his right, in the background, the house, a dismal smudge of grey.

  The sun disappeared, I took my eye off the children to wind on the film and tuck my camera away in the dry. When I looked back, the children were halfway down the drive. His left hand in her right, they were whirling round and round as they approached the lodge gates, equal stride, equal weight, each one a perfect counter-balance to the other. With the tails of their mackintoshes flaring behind them, feet barely skimming the ground, they looked as if they were about to lift into the air and fly.

  Jane Eyre and the Furnace

  When I went back to Yorkshire I received no explanation for my banishment. Judith greeted me with a constrained smile. The greyness of the daylight had crept under her skin, collected in shadows under her eyes. She pulled the curtains back a few more inches in my sitting room, exposing a bit more window, but it made no difference to the gloom. ‘Blasted weather,’ she exclaimed, and I thought she seemed at the end of her tether.

  Though it was only days, it felt like an eternity. Often night, but never quite day, the darkening effect of the heavy sky threw us all out of time. Miss Winter arrived late at one of our morning meetings. She too was pale-faced; I didn’t know whether it was the memory of recent pain that put the darkness in her eyes or something else.

  ‘I propose a more flexible timetable for our meetings,’ she said, when she was settled in her circle of light.

  ‘Of course.’ I knew of her bad nights from my interview with the doctor, could see when the medication she took to control her pain was wearing off or had not yet taken full effect. And so we agreed that instead of presenting myself at nine every morning, I would wait instead for a tap at my door.

  At first the tap came always between nine and ten. Then it drifted to later. After the doctor altered her dosage she took to asking for me early in the mornings, but our meetings were shorter; then we fell into a habit of meeting twice or three times a day, at random times. Sometimes she called me when she felt well, and spoke at length, and in detail. At other times she called me when she was in pain. Then it was not so much the company she wanted as the anaesthetic qualities of the storytelling itself.

  The end of my nine o’clocks was another anchor in time gone. I listened to her story, I wrote the story, when I slept I dreamt the story, and when I was awake it was the story that formed the constant backdrop of my thoughts. It was like living entirely inside a book. I didn’t even need to emerge to eat, for I could sit at my desk reading my transcript while I ate the meals that Judith brought to my room. Porridge meant it was morning. Soup and salad meant lunchtime. Steak and kidney pie was evening. I remember pondering for a long time over a dish of scrambled egg. What did it mean? It could mean anything. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed the plate away.

  In this long, undifferentiated lapse of time, there were a few incidents that stood out. I noted them at the time, separately from the story, and they are worth recalling here.

  This is one.

  I was in the library. I was looking for Jane Eyre, and found almost a whole shelf of copies. It was the collection of a fanatic: there were cheap, modern copies, with no second-hand value; editions that came up so rarely on the market it would be hard to put a price to them; copies that fell at every point between these two extremes. The one I was looking for was an ordinary – though particular – edition from the turn of the century. While I was browsing, Judith brought Miss Winter in and settled her in her chair by the fire.

  When Judith had gone, Miss Winter asked, ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Jane Eyre.’

  ‘Do you like Jane Eyre?’ she asked.

  ‘Very much. Do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She shivered.

  ‘Shall I stoke up the fire for you?’

  She lowered her eyelids as if a wave of pain had come over her. ‘I suppose so.’

  Once the fire was burning strongly again, she said, ‘Do you have a moment? Sit down, Margaret.’

  And after a minute of silence she said this.

  ‘Picture a conveyor belt, a huge conveyor belt and at the end of it a massive furnace. And on the conveyor belt are books. Every copy in the world of every book you’ve ever loved. All lined up. Jane Eyre. Villette. The Woman in White.’

  ‘Middlemarch,’ I supplied

  ‘Thank you. Middlemarch. And imagine a lever with two labels, ON and OFF. At the moment the lever is off. And next to it is a human being, with his hand on the lever. About to turn it on. And you can stop it. You have a gun in your hand. All you have to do is pull the trigger. What do you do?’

  ‘No, that’s silly.’

  ‘He turns the lever to on. The conveyor belt has started.’

  ‘But it’s too extreme, it’s hypothetical.’

  ‘First of all Shirley goes over the edge.’

  ‘I don’t like games like this.’

  ‘Now George Sand starts to go up in flames.’

  I sighed and closed my eyes.

  ‘Wuthering Heights coming up. Going to let that burn, are you?’

  I couldn’t help myself. I saw the books, saw their steady process to the mouth of the furnace and flinched.

  ‘Suit yourself. In it goes. Same for Jane Eyre?’

  Jane Eyre. I was suddenly dry-mouthed.

  ‘All you have to do is shoot. I won’t tell. No one need ever know.’ She waited. ‘They’ve started to fall. Just the first few. But there are a lot of copies. You have a moment to make up your mind.’

  I rubbed my thumb nervously against a rough edge of nail on my middle finger.

  ‘They’re falling faster now.’

  She did not remove her gaze from me.

  ‘Half of them gone. Think, Margaret. All of Jane Eyre will soon have disappeared for ever. Think.’

  Miss Winter blinked.

  ‘Two thirds gone. Just one person, Margaret. Just one tiny, insignificant little person.’

  I blinked.

  ‘Still time, but only just. Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?’

  Blink. Blink.

  ‘Last chance.’

  Blink. Blink. Blink.

  Jane Eyre was no more.

  ‘Margaret!’ Miss Winter’s face twisted in vexation as she spoke, she beat her left hand against the arm of her chair. Even the right hand,
injured though it was, twitched in her lap.

  Later, when I transcribed it, I thought it was the most spontaneous expression of feeling I had ever seen in Miss Winter. It was a surprising amount of feeling to invest in a mere game.

  And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter I had been ashamed to say so.

  On my way out, I returned to the shelf of Jane Eyres and took the one volume that met my criteria. Right age, right kind of paper, right typeface. In my room I turned the pages till I found the place.

  ‘…not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm – not soon enough however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it.’

  The book was intact. Not a single page was missing. This was not the volume Aurelius’s page had been torn from. But in any case, why should it be? If his page had come from Angelfield – if it had – then it would have burned with the rest of the house.

  For a time I sat doing nothing, only thinking of Jane Eyre and a library and a furnace and a house fire, but no matter how I combined and recombined them, I could not make sense of it.