The Thirteenth Tale, Page 35

  And someone had been in the potting shed. He hadn’t left the old newspapers in that state, had he? And those crates – they’d been put away tidy; he knew they had.

  For once he put the padlock on before he went home.

  Passing by the garden tap he noticed it dripping again. Gave it a firm half turn without even thinking about it. Then, putting his weight into it, another quarter turn. That should do it.

  In the night he awoke, uneasy in his mind for reasons he couldn’t account for. Where would you sleep, he found himself wondering, if you couldn’t get into the potting shed and make yourself a bed with newspapers in a crate? And where would you get water if the tap was turned off so tight you couldn’t move it? Chiding himself for his midnight foolishness he opened the window to feel the temperature. Too late for frosts. Cool for the time of year, though. And how much colder if you were hungry? And how much darker if you were a child?

  He shook his head and closed the window. No one would abandon a child in his garden, would they? Of course they wouldn’t. Nevertheless, before five he was up and out of bed. He took his walk around the garden early, surveying his vegetables, the topiary garden, planning his work for the day. All morning he kept an eye out for a floppy hat in the fruit bushes. But there was nothing to be seen.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ said the Missus, when he sat in silence at her kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  He drained his cup and went back to the garden. He stood and scanned the fruit bushes with anxious eyes.

  Nothing.

  At lunchtime he ate half a sandwich, discovered he had no appetite, and left the other half on an upturned flower pot by the garden tap. Telling himself he was a fool, he put a biscuit next to it. He turned the tap on. It took quite an effort even for him. He let the water fall, noisily, into a tin watering can, emptied it into the nearest bed and refilled it. The thunder of splashing water resounded around the vegetable garden. He took care not to look up and around.

  Then he took himself a little way off, knelt on the grass, his back to the tap, and started brushing off some old pots. It was an important job; it had to be done; you could spread disease if you didn’t clean your pots properly between planting.

  Behind him, the squeak of the tap.

  He didn’t turn instantly. He finished the pot he was doing, brush, brush, brush.

  Then he was quick. On his feet, over to the tap, faster than a fox.

  But there was no need for such haste.

  The child, frightened, tried to flee, but stumbled. Picking itself up, it limped on a few more steps, then stumbled again. John caught it up, lifted it – the weight of a cat, no more – turned it to face him, and the hat fell off.

  Little chap was a bag of bones. Starving. Eyes gone crusty, hair black with dirt, and smelly. Two hot red spots for cheeks. He put a hand to the child’s forehead and it was burning up. Back in the potting shed he saw its feet. No shoes, scabby and swollen, pus oozing through the dirt. A thorn or something, deep inside. The child trembled. Fever, pain, starvation, fear. If he found an animal in that state, John thought, he’d get his gun and put it out of its misery.

  He locked it in the shed and went to fetch the Missus. She came. She peered, right up close, got a whiff and stepped back.

  ‘No, no, I don’t know whose he is. Perhaps if we cleaned him up a bit?’

  ‘Dunk him in the water butt, you mean?’

  ‘Water butt indeed! I’ll go and fill the tub in the kitchen.’

  They peeled the stinking rags away from the child. ‘They’re for the bonfire,’ the Missus said, and tossed them out into the yard. The dirt went all the way down to the skin; the child was encrusted. The first tub of water turned instantly black. In order to empty and refill the tub, they lifted the child out, and it stood, wavering, on its better foot. Naked and dripping, streaked with rivulets of grey-brown water, all ribs and elbows.

  They looked at the child; at each other; at the child again.

  ‘John, I may be poor of sight, but tell me, are you not seeing what I’m not seeing?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Little chap indeed! It’s a little maid.’

  They boiled kettle after kettle, scrubbed at skin and hair with soap, brushed hardened dirt out from under the nails. Once she was clean they sterilized tweezers, pulled the thorn from the foot – she flinched but didn’t cry out – and they dressed and bandaged the wound. They gently rubbed warmed castor oil into the crust around the eyes. They put calamine lotion onto flea bites, petroleum jelly onto the chapped, split lips. They combed tangles out of long, matted hair. They pressed cool flannels against her forehead and her burning cheeks. At last, they wrapped her in a clean towel and sat her at the kitchen table, where the Missus spooned soup into her mouth, and John peeled her an apple.

  Gulping down the soup, grabbing at the apple slices, she couldn’t get it down fast enough. The Missus cut a slice of bread and spread it with butter. The child ate it ravenously.

  They watched her. The eyes, cleared of their crust, were slivers of emerald green. The hair was drying to a bright red-gold. The cheekbones jutted wide and sharp in the hungry face.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ said John.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Will we tell him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But she does belong here.’

  ‘Aye.’

  They thought for a moment or two.

  ‘What about a doctor?’

  The pink spots in the child’s face were not so bright. The Missus put a hand to the forehead. Still hot, but better.

  ‘We’ll see how she goes tonight. Get the doctor in the morning.’

  ‘If needs be.’

  ‘Aye. If needs be.’

  ‘And so it was settled,’ Miss Winter said. ‘I stayed.’

  ‘What was your name?’

  ‘The Missus tried to call me Mary, but it didn’t stick. John called me Shadow, because I stuck to him like a shadow. He taught me to read, you know, with seed catalogues in the shed, but I soon discovered the library. Emmeline didn’t call me anything. She didn’t need to, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.’

  I thought about it all for a while in silence. The ghost-child. No mother. No name. The child whose very existence was a secret. It was impossible not to feel compassion. And yet…

  ‘What about Aurelius? You knew what it was like to grow up without a mother! Why did he have to be abandoned? The bones they found at Angelfield…I know it must have been Adeline who killed John-the-dig, but what happened to her afterwards? Tell me, what happened the night of the fire?’

  We were talking in the dark, and I couldn’t see the expression on Miss Winter’s face, but she seemed to shiver as she glanced at the figure in the bed.

  ‘Pull the sheet over her face, would you? I will tell you about the baby. I will tell you about the fire. But first, perhaps you could call Judith? She does not know yet. She will need to call Doctor Clifton. There are things that need to be done.’

  When she came, Judith’s first care was for the living. She took one look at Miss Winter’s pallor and insisted on putting her to bed and seeing to her medication before anything. Together we wheeled her to her rooms; Judith helped her into her nightgown; I made a hot water bottle and folded the bed down.

  ‘I’ll telephone Doctor Clifton now,’ Judith said. ‘Will you stay with Miss Winter?’ But it was only a few minutes later that she reappeared in the bedroom doorway and beckoned me into the anteroom.

  ‘I couldn’t speak to him,’ she told me in a whisper. ‘It’s the telephone. The snow has brought the line down.’

  We were cut off.

  I thought of the policeman’s telephone number on the piece of paper in my bag and was relieved.

  We arranged that I would stay with Miss Winter for the first shift, so that Judith could go to Emmeline’s room and do what needed to be done there. She would r
elieve me later, when Miss Winter’s next medication was due.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Baby

  In Miss Winter’s narrow bed, her frame was marked by only the smallest rise and fall in the bedclothes. Warily she stole each breath, as though she expected to be ambushed at any minute. The light from the lamp sought out her skeleton: it caught her pale cheekbone and illuminated the white arc of her brow; it sunk her eye in a deep pool of shadow.

  Over the back of my chair lay a gold silk shawl. I draped it over the shade so that it might diffuse the light, warm it, make it fall less brutally upon Miss Winter’s face.

  Quietly I sat, quietly I watched, and when she spoke I barely heard her whisper.

  ‘The truth? Let me see…’

  The words drifted from her lips into the air; they hung there trembling, then found their way and began their journey.

  I was not kind to Ambrose. I could have been. In another world, I might have been. It wouldn’t have been so very hard: he was tall and strong and his hair was gold in the sun. I knew he liked me and I was not indifferent. But I hardened my heart. I was bound to Emmeline.

  ‘Am I not good enough for you?’ he asked me one day. He came straight out with it, like that.

  I pretended not to hear, but he insisted.

  ‘If I’m not good enough, you tell me so to my face!’

  ‘You can’t read,’ I said, ‘and you can’t write!’

  He smiled. Took my pencil from the kitchen windowsill and began to scratch letters onto a piece of paper. He was slow. The letters were uneven. But it was clear enough. Ambrose. He wrote his name and when he had done it, he took the paper and held it out to show me.

  I snatched it out of his hand, screwed it into a ball and tossed it to the floor.

  He stopped coming into the kitchen for his tea break. I drank my tea in the Missus’s chair, missing my cigarette, while I listened for the sound of his step or the ring of his spade. When he came to the house with the meat, he passed the bag without a word, eyes averted, face frozen. He had given up. Later, cleaning the kitchen, I came across the piece of paper with his name on. I felt ashamed of myself and put the paper in his game bag hanging behind the kitchen door, so it would be out of sight.

  When did I realize Emmeline was pregnant? A few months after the boy stopped coming for tea. I knew it before she knew herself; she was hardly one to notice the changes in her body, or to realize the consequences. I questioned her about Ambrose. It was hard to make her understand the sense of my questions, and she quite failed to see why I was angry. ‘He was so sad,’ was all she would tell me. ‘You were too unkind.’ She spoke very gently, full of compassion for the boy, velveting her reproach for me.

  I could have shaken her.

  ‘You do realize that you’re going to have a baby now, don’t you?’

  Mild astonishment passed across her face, then left it tranquil as before. Nothing, it seemed, could disturb her serenity.

  I dismissed Ambrose. I gave him his pay till the end of the week and sent him away. I didn’t look at him while I spoke to him. I didn’t give him any reasons. He didn’t ask any questions. ‘You may as well go immediately,’ I told him, but that wasn’t his way. He finished the row of planting I had interrupted, cleaned the tools scrupulously, the way John had taught him, and put them back in the garden shed leaving everything neat and tidy. Then he knocked at the kitchen door.

  ‘What will you do for meat? Do you know how to kill a chicken at least?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Come on.’

  He jerked his head in the direction of the pen, and I followed him.

  ‘Don’t waste any time,’ he instructed me. ‘Clean and quick is the way. No second thoughts.’

  He swooped on one of the copper-feathered birds pecking about our feet, and held its body firmly. He mimed the action that would break its neck. ‘See?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Go on then.’

  He released the bird and it flurried to the ground where its round back was soon indistinguishable from its neighbours.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘What else are you going to eat tonight?’

  The sun was gleaming on the feathers of the hens as they pecked for seeds. I reached for a bird, but it scuttled away. The second one slipped through my fingers in the same way. Grabbing for a third, this time, clumsily, I held on to it. It squawked and tried to beat its wings in its panic to escape, and I wondered how the boy had held his so easily. As I struggled to keep it still under my arm and get my hands around its neck at the same time, I felt the boy’s severe eye upon me.

  ‘Clean and quick,’ he reminded me. He doubted me, I could tell from his voice.

  I was going to kill the bird. I had decided to kill the bird. So, gripping the bird’s neck, I squeezed. But my hands would only half obey me. A strangled cry of alarm flew from the bird’s throat, and for a second I hesitated. With a muscular twist and a flap, the bird slipped from under my arm. It was only because I was struck by the paralysis of panic that I still had it by the neck. Wings beating, claws flailing wildly at the air, almost it lurched away from me.

  Swiftly, powerfully, the boy took the bird out of my grasp and in a single movement he had done it.

  He held the body out to me; I forced myself to take it. Warm, heavy, still.

  The sun shone on his hair as he looked at me. His look was worse than the claws, worse than the beating wings. Worse than the limp body in my hands.

  Without a word he turned his back and walked away.

  What good was the boy to me? My heart was not mine to give; it belonged to another, and always had.

  I loved Emmeline.

  I believe that Emmeline loved me too. Only she loved Adeline more.

  It is a painful thing to love a twin. When Adeline was there, Emmeline’s heart was full. She had no need of me, and I was left on the outside, a cast-off, a superfluity, a mere observer of the twins and their twinness.

  Only when Adeline went roaming alone was there space in Emmeline’s heart for another. Then her sorrow was my joy. Little by little I coaxed her away from her loneliness, offering gifts of silver thread and shiny baubles, until she almost forgot she had been abandoned, and gave herself over to the friendship and companionship I could offer. By a fire we played cards, sang, talked. Together we were happy.

  Until Adeline came back. Furious with cold and hunger, she would come raging into the house, and the instant she was there, our world of two came to an end, and I was on the outside again.

  It wasn’t fair. Though Adeline beat her and pulled her hair, Emmeline loved her. Though Adeline abandoned her, Emmeline loved her. Whatever Adeline did, it altered nothing, for Emmeline’s love was total. And me? My hair was copper like Adeline’s. My eyes were green like Adeline’s. In the absence of Adeline, I could fool anyone. But I never fooled Emmeline. Her heart knew the truth.

  Emmeline had her baby in January.

  No one knew. As she had grown bigger, so she had grown lazier; it was no hardship for her to keep to the confines of the house. She was content to stay inside, yawning in the library, the kitchen, her bedroom. Her retreat was not noticed. Why should it have been? The only visitor to the house was Mr Lomax, and he came on regular days at regular hours. Easy as pie to have her out of the way by the time he knocked on the door.

  Our contact with other people was slight. For meat and vegetables we were self-sufficient – I never learnt to like killing chickens, but I learnt to do it. As for other provisions, I went to the farm in person to collect cheese and milk, and when once a week the shop sent a boy on a bicycle with our other requirements, I met him on the drive, and carried the basket to the house myself. I thought it would be a sensible precaution to have another twin seen by someone at least from time to time. Once when Adeline seemed calm enough, I gave her the coin and sent her to meet the boy on the bicycle. ‘It was the other one today,’ I imagined him saying, back at the shop. ‘The weird one.
’ And I wondered what the doctor would make of it, if the boy’s account reached his ears. But it soon grew impossible to use Adeline like this again. Emmeline’s pregnancy affected her twin curiously: for the first time in her life she discovered an appetite. From being a scrawny bag of bones, she developed plump curves and full breasts. There were times – in half-light, from certain angles – when for a moment even I could not tell them apart. So from time to time on a Wednesday morning, I would be Adeline. I would mess my hair, grime my nails, set my face into a tight, agitated mask, and go down the drive to meet the boy on the bicycle. Seeing the speed of my gait as I came down the gravel drive to meet him, he would know it was the other one. I could see his fingers curl anxiously round his handlebars. Watching me surreptitiously he handed over the basket, then he pocketed his tip and was glad to bicycle away. The following week, being met by me as myself, his smile had a touch of relief in it.

  Hiding the pregnancy was not difficult. But I was troubled during those months of waiting about the birth itself. I knew what the dangers of labour might be. Isabelle’s mother had not survived her second labour, and I could not put this thought out of my head for more than a few hours at a time. That Emmeline should suffer, that her life should be put in danger – this was unthinkable. On the other hand, the doctor had been no friend of ours and I did not want him at the house. He had seen Isabelle and taken her away. That could not be allowed to happen to Emmeline. He had separated Emmeline and Adeline. That could not be allowed to happen to Emmeline and me. Besides, how could he come without there being immediate complications? And although he had been persuaded – though he did not understand it – that the girl in the mist had broken through the carapace of the mute, rag-doll Adeline who had once spent several months with him, if he were once to realize that there were three girls at Angelfield House, he would immediately see the truth of the affair. For a single visit, for the birth itself, I could lock Adeline in the old nursery, and we might get away with it. But once it was known there was a baby in the house, there would be no end of visits. It would be impossible to keep our secret.