The Thirteenth Tale, Page 37

  The key that sits in the lock, unused since the days of Hester, is hot. It burns my palm as I turn it. Nothing else hurts me that night, but the key sears my palm and I smell my flesh as it chars. Emmeline puts out a hand to clutch the key and open it again. The metal burns her, and as she feels the shock of it I pull her hand away.

  A great cry fills my head. Is it human? Or is it the sound of the fire itself? I don’t even know whether it is coming from inside the room or outside with me. From a guttural start it gathers strength as it rises, reaches a shrill peak of intensity, and when I think it must be at the end of its breath, it continues, impossibly low, impossibly long, a boundless sound that fills the world and engulfs it and contains it.

  And then the sound is gone and there is only the roar of the fire.

  Outdoors. Rain. The grass is soaked. We sink to the ground; we roll on the wet grass to damp our smouldering clothes and hair, feel the cool wet on our scorched flesh. On our backs we rest there, flat against the earth. I open my mouth, and drink the rain. It falls on my face, cools my eyes, and I can see again. Never has there been a sky like it, deep indigo with fast-moving slate black clouds, the rain coming down in blade edges of silver, and every so often a plume, a spray of bright orange from the house, a fountain of fire. A bolt of lightning cracks the sky in two, then again, and again.

  The baby. I must tell Emmeline about the baby. She will be happy that I have saved him. It will make things all right.

  I turn to her and open my mouth to speak. Her face—

  Her poor, beautiful face is black and red, all smoke and blood and fire.

  Her eyes, her green gaze, ravaged, unseeing, unknowing.

  I look at her face and cannot find my beloved in it.

  ‘Emmeline?’ I whisper. ‘Emmeline?’

  She does not reply.

  I feel my heart die. What have I done? Have I…? Is it possible that…?

  I cannot bear to know.

  I cannot bear not to know.

  ‘Adeline?’ My voice is a broken thing.

  But she – this person, this someone, this one or the other, this might or might not be, this darling, this monster, this I don’t know who she is – does not reply.

  People are coming. Running up the drive, voices calling urgently in the night.

  I rise to a crouch and scuttle away. Keeping low. Hiding. They reach the girl on the grass, and when I am sure they have found her I leave them to it. In the church I put the satchel over my shoulder, clutching the baby in his papoose to my side, and set off.

  It is quiet in the woods. The rain, slowed by the canopy of leaves, falls softly on the undergrowth. The child whimpers, then sleeps. My feet carry me to a small house on the other edge of the woods. I know the house. I have seen it often during my haunting years. A woman lives there, alone. Spying her through the window knitting or baking, I have always thought she looks nice, and when I read about kindly grandmothers and fairy godmothers in my books, I supply them with her face.

  I take the baby to her. I glance in at the window, as I have before, see her in her usual place by the fire, knitting. Thoughtful and quiet. She is undoing her knitting. Just sitting there pulling the stitches out, with the needles on the table beside her. There is a dry place in the porch for the baby. I settle him there and wait behind a tree.

  She opens the door. Takes him up. I know when I see her expression that he will be safe with her. She looks up and around. In my direction. As if she’s seen something. Have I rustled the leaves, betrayed my presence? It crosses my mind to step forward. Surely she would befriend me? I hesitate, and the wind changes direction. I smell the fire at the same moment she does. She turns away, looks to the sky, gasps at the smoke that rises over the spot where Angelfield House stands. And then puzzlement shows in her face. She holds the baby close to her nose, and sniffs. The smell of fire is on him, transferred from my clothes. One more glance at the smoke and she steps firmly back into her house and closes the door.

  I am alone.

  No name.

  No home.

  No family.

  I am nothing.

  I have nowhere to go.

  I have no one who belongs to me.

  I stare at my burnt palm but cannot feel the pain.

  What kind of a thing am I? Am I even alive?

  I could go anywhere, but I walk back to Angelfield. It is the only place I know.

  Emerging from the trees I approach the scene. A fire engine. Villagers with their buckets, standing back, dazed and with smoke-blackened faces, watching the professionals do battle with the flames. Women, mesmerized by smoke rising into the black sky. An ambulance. Doctor Maudsley kneeling over a figure on the grass.

  No one sees me.

  On the edge of all the activity I stand, invisible. Perhaps I really am nothing. Perhaps no one can see me at all. Perhaps I died in the fire and haven’t realized it yet. Perhaps I am finally what I have always been: a ghost.

  Then one of the women looks in my direction.

  ‘Look,’ she cries, pointing. ‘She’s here!’ and people turn. Stare. One of the women runs to alert the men. They turn from the fire and look too. ‘Thank God!’ someone says.

  I open my mouth to say – I don’t know what. But I say nothing. Just stand there, making shapes with my mouth, no voice, and no words.

  ‘Don’t try to speak.’ Doctor Maudsley is by my side now.

  I stare at the girl on the lawn. ‘She’ll survive,’ says the doctor.

  I look at the house.

  The flames. My books. I don’t think I can bear it. I remember the page of Jane Eyre, the ball of words I saved from the pyre. I have left it behind with the baby.

  I begin to weep.

  ‘She’s in shock,’ says the doctor to one of the women. ‘Keep her warm and stay with her, while we put the sister in the ambulance.’

  A woman comes to me, clucking her concern. She takes off her coat and wraps it round me, tenderly, as though dressing a baby, and she murmurs, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be all right, your sister’s all right, oh, my poor dear.’

  They lift the girl from the grass and place her on the bed in the ambulance. Then they help me in. Sit me down opposite. And they drive us to the hospital.

  She stares into space. Eyes open, empty. After the first moment I don’t look. The ambulance man bends over her, assures himself that she is breathing, then turns to me.

  ‘What about that hand, eh?’

  I am clutching my right hand in my left, unconscious of the pain in my mind, but my body giving the secret away.

  He takes my hand, and I let him unfold my fingers. A mark is burnt deep into my palm. The key.

  ‘That’ll heal up,’ he tells me. ‘Don’t worry. Now are you Adeline or are you Emmeline?’

  He gestures to the other one. ‘Is this Emmeline?’

  I can’t answer, can’t feel myself, can’t move.

  ‘Not to worry,’ he said. ‘All in good time.’

  He gives up on making me understand him. Mutters for his own benefit, ‘Still, we’ve got to call you something. Adeline, Emmeline, Emmeline, Adeline. Fifty fifty, isn’t it? It’ll all come out in the wash.’

  The hospital. Opening the ambulance doors. All noise and bustle. Voices speaking fast. The stretcher, lifted onto a trolley and wheeled away at speed. A wheelchair. Hands on my shoulder. ‘Sit down, dear.’ The chair moving. A voice behind my back. ‘Don’t worry, child. We’ll take care of you and your sister. You’re safe now, Adeline.’

  Miss Winter slept.

  I saw the tender slackness of her open mouth, the tuft of unruly hair that did not lay straight from her temple, and in her sleep she seemed very, very old and very, very young. With every breath she took the bedclothes rose and fell over her thin shoulders, and at each sinking the ribboned edge of the blanket brushed against her face. She seemed unaware of it, but all the same, I bent over her to fold the covers back and smooth the curl of pale hair back into place.

  She did
not stir. Was she really asleep, I wondered, or was this unconsciousness already?

  I can’t say how long I watched her after that. There was a clock, but the movements of its hands were as meaningless as a map of the surface of the sea. Wave after wave of time lapped over me as I sat with my eyes closed, not sleeping, but with the vigilance of a mother for the breathing of her child.

  I hardly know what to say about the next thing. Is it possible that I hallucinated in my tiredness? Did I fall asleep and dream? Or did Miss Winter really speak one last time?

  I will give your message to your sister.

  I jerked my eyes open, but hers were closed. She seemed to be sleeping as deeply as before.

  I did not see the wolf when he came. I did not hear him. There was only this: a little before dawn I became aware of a hush, and I realized that the only breathing to be heard in the room was my own.

  Beginnings

  Snow

  Miss Winter died and the snow kept falling.

  When Judith came she stood with me for a time at the window, and we watched the eerie illumination of the night sky. Then, when an alteration in the whiteness told us it was morning, she sent me to bed.

  I awoke at the end of the afternoon.

  The snow that had already deadened the telephone now reached the window ledges, and drifted halfway up the doors. It separated us from the rest of the world as effectively as a prison key. Miss Winter had escaped; so had the woman Judith referred to as Emmeline, and whom I avoided naming. The rest of us, Judith, Maurice and myself were trapped.

  The cat was restless. It was the snow that put him out; he did not like this change in the appearance of his universe. He went from one windowsill to another in search of his lost world, and miaowed urgently at Judith, Maurice and me, as though its restoration was in our hands. In comparison, the loss of his mistresses was a small matter which, if he noticed it at all, left him fundamentally undisturbed.

  The snow had blockaded us into a sideways extension of time, and we each found our own way of enduring it. Judith, imperturbable, made vegetable soup, cleaned the kitchen cupboards out and, when she ran out of jobs, manicured her nails and did a face pack. Maurice, chafing at the confinement and the inactivity, played endless games of solitaire, but when he had to drink his tea black for lack of milk, Judith played rummy with him to distract him from the bitterness.

  As for me, I spent two days writing up my final notes, but when that was done, I found I could not settle to reading. Even Sherlock Holmes could not reach me, in the snowlocked landscape. Alone in my room I spent an hour examining my melancholy, trying to name what I thought was a new element in it. I realized that I missed Miss Winter. So, hopeful of human company, I made my way to the kitchen. Maurice was glad to play cards with me, even though I only knew children’s games. Then, when Judith’s nails were drying, I made the cocoa and tea with no milk, and later let Judith file and polish my own nails.

  In this way, we three and the cat sat out the days, locked in with our dead, and with the old year seeming to linger on past its time.

  On the fifth day I allowed myself to be overcome by a vast sorrow.

  I had done the washing up, and Maurice had dried while Judith played solitaire at the table. We were all glad of a change. And when the washing up was done, I took myself away from their company to the drawing room. The window looked out onto the part of the garden that was in the lee of the house. Here the snow did not drift so high. I opened a window, climbed out into the whiteness and walked across the snow. All the grief I had kept at bay for years by means of books and bookcases approached me now. On a bench sheltered by a tall hedge of yew I abandoned myself to a sorrow that was wide and deep as the snow itself, and as untainted. I cried for Miss Winter, for her ghost, for Adeline and Emmeline. For my sister, my mother and my father. Mostly, and most terribly, I cried for myself. My grief was that of the infant, newly severed from her other half; of the child bent over an old tin, making sudden, shocking sense of a few pieces of paper; and of a grown woman, sitting crying on a bench in the hallucinatory light and silence of the snow.

  When I came to myself Dr Clifton was there. He put an arm around me. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know.’

  He didn’t know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, the weight and the dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the colour of grief is common to us all. ‘I know,’ he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

  He led me inside, to warmth.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Judith. ‘Shall I bring cocoa?’

  ‘With a touch of brandy in it, I think,’ he said.

  Maurice pulled out a chair for me and began to stoke the fire.

  I sipped the cocoa slowly. There was milk: the doctor had brought it when he came with the farmer on the tractor.

  Judith tucked a shawl around me, then started peeling potatoes for dinner. She and Maurice and the doctor made the occasional comment – what we could have for supper, whether the snow was lighter now, how long it would be before the telephone line was restored – and in making them, took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again after death had stopped us all in its tracks.

  Little by little the comments melded together and became a conversation.

  I listened to their voices and, after a time, joined in.

  Happy Birthday

  I went home.

  To the bookshop.

  ‘Miss Winter is dead,’ I told my father.

  ‘And you? How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Alive.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Tell me about Mum,’ I asked him. ‘Why is she the way she is?’

  He told me. ‘She was very ill when you were born. She never saw you before you were taken away. She never saw your sister. She nearly died. By the time she came round, your operation had already taken place and your sister—’

  ‘My sister had died.’

  ‘Yes. There was no knowing how it would go with you. I went from her bedside to yours…I thought I was going to lose all three of you. I prayed to every God I had ever heard of to save you. And my prayers were answered. In part. You survived. Your mother never really came back.’

  There was one other thing I needed to know.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? About being a twin?’

  The face he turned to me was devastated. He swallowed, and when he spoke his voice was hoarse. ‘The story of your birth is a sad one. Your mother thought it too heavy for a child to bear. I would have borne it for you, Margaret, if I could. I would have done anything to spare you.’

  We sat in silence. I thought of all the other questions I might have asked, but now the moment had come I didn’t need to.

  I reached for my father’s hand at the same moment as he reached for mine.

  I attended three funerals in as many days.

  Miss Winter’s mourners were many. The nation grieved for its favourite storyteller and thousands of readers turned out to pay their respects. I came away as soon as I could, having said my goodbyes already.

  The second was a quiet affair. There were only Judith, Maurice, the doctor and myself to mourn the woman referred to throughout the service as Emmeline. Afterwards we said brief farewells and parted.

  The third was lonelier still. In a crematorium in Banbury I was the only person in attendance when a bland-faced clergyman oversaw the passing into God’s hands of a set of bones, identity unknown. Into God’s hands, except that it was me who collected the urn later, ‘on behalf of the Angelfield family’.

  There were snowdrops in Angelfield. At least, the first signs of them, boring their way through the frozen ground and showing their points, green and fresh, above the snow.

  As I stood up I heard a sound. It was Aurelius, arriving at the lychgate. Snow had settled on his shoulders and he was carrying flowers.


  ‘Aurelius!’ How could he have grown so sad? So pale? ‘You’ve changed,’ I said.

  ‘I have worn myself out on a wild goose chase.’ His eyes, always mild, had lightened to the same washed-out blue as the January sky; you could see straight through their transparency to his disappointed heart. ‘All my life I have wanted to find my family. I wanted to know who I was. And lately I have felt hopeful. I thought there might be some chance of restoration. Now I fear I was mistaken.’

  We walked along the grass path between the graves and cleared the snow from the bench and sat down before more could fall. Aurelius delved into his pocket and unwrapped two pieces of cake. Absently he handed one to me and dug his teeth into the other.

  ‘Is that what you have for me?’ he asked, looking at the casket. ‘Is that the rest of my story?’

  I handed him the casket.

  ‘Isn’t it light? Light as air. And yet…’ His hand veered to his heart; he sought a gesture to show how heavy his heart was; not finding it, he put the casket down and took another bite of cake.

  When he had finished the last morsel he spoke. ‘If she was my mother, why was I not with her? Why did I not die with her, in this place? Why would she take me away to Mrs Love’s house and then come back here to a house on fire? Why? It doesn’t make sense.’

  I followed him as he stepped off the central path and made his way into the maze of narrow borders between the graves. He stopped at a grave I had looked at before, and laid down his flowers. The stone was a simple one.

  Joan Mary Love

  Never Forgotten

  Poor Aurelius. He was so very weary. He hardly seemed to notice as I slipped my arm through his. But then he turned to face me fully. ‘Perhaps it’s better not to have a story at all, rather than have one that keeps changing. I have spent my whole life chasing after my story, and never quite catching it. Running after my story, when I had Mrs Love all along. She loved me, you know.’

  ‘I never doubted it.’ She had been a good mother to him. Better than either of the twins could have been. ‘Perhaps it’s better not to know,’ I suggested.