The Thirteenth Tale

  The girls looked up from their toe circles for a moment, then returned impassively to them. John-the-dig tightened his lips and turned away, heading back to the garden and work. There was nothing for him to do here. The Missus went to Charlie, placed a consoling hand on his shoulder and attempted to persuade him into the house, but he was deaf to her words, and only snuffled and squeaked like a thwarted schoolboy.

  And that was that.

  That was that? The words were a curiously understated endnote to the disappearance of Miss Winter’s mother. It was clear that Miss Winter didn’t think much of Isabelle’s abilities as a parent; indeed the word mother seemed absent from her lexicon. Perhaps it was understandable: from what I could see Isabelle was the least maternal of women. But who was I to judge other people’s relations with their mothers?

  I closed my book, slid my pencil into the spiral, and stood up.

  ‘I’ll be away for three days,’ I reminded her. ‘I’ll be back on Thursday.’

  And I left her alone with her wolf.

  Dickens’ Study

  I finished writing up that day’s notes. All dozen pencils were blunt now; I had some serious sharpening to do. One by one, I inserted the lead ends into the sharpener. If you turn the handle slowly and evenly you can sometimes get the coil of lead-edged wood to twist and dangle in a single drop all the way to the paper bin, but tonight I was tired, and they kept breaking under their own weight.

  I thought about the story. I had warmed to the Missus and John-the-dig. Charlie and Isabelle made me nervous. The doctor and his wife had the best of motives, but I suspected their intervention in the lives of the twins would come to no good.

  The twins themselves puzzled me. I knew what other people thought of them. John-the-dig thought they couldn’t speak properly; the Missus believed they didn’t understand other people were alive; the villagers thought they were wrong in the head. What I didn’t know – and this was more than curious – was what the storyteller thought. In telling her tale, Miss Winter was like the light that illuminates everything but itself. She was the disappearing point at the heart of the narrative. She spoke of they, more recently she had spoken of we; the absence that perplexed me was I.

  If I were to ask her about it, I knew what she would say. ‘Miss Lea, we made an agreement.’ Already I had asked her questions about one or two details of the story, and though from time to time she would answer, when she didn’t want to she would remind me of our first meeting. ‘No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions.’

  I reconciled myself to remaining curious for a long time, and yet, as it happened, something happened that very evening that cast a certain illumination on the matter.

  I had tidied my desk and was setting about my packing when there came a tap on my door. I opened it to find Judith in the corridor.

  ‘Miss Winter wonders whether you have time to see her for a moment.’ This was Judith’s polite translation of a more abrupt Fetch Miss Lea, I was in no doubt.

  I finished folding a blouse and went down to the library.

  Miss Winter was seated in her usual position and the fire was blazing, but otherwise the room was in darkness.

  ‘Would you like me to put some lights on?’ I asked from the doorway.

  ‘No.’ Her answer came distantly to my ears, and so I walked down the aisle towards her. The shutters were open, and the dark sky, pricked all over with stars, was reflected in the mirrors.

  When I arrived beside her, the dancing light from the fire showed me that Miss Winter was distracted. In silence I sat in my place, lulled by the warmth of the fire, staring into the night sky reflected in the library mirrors. A quarter of an hour passed while she ruminated, and I waited.

  Then she spoke.

  ‘Have you ever seen that picture of Dickens in his study? It’s by a man called Buss, I believe. I’ve a reproduction of it somewhere, I’ll look it out for you. Anyway, in the picture, he has pushed his chair back from his desk and is drowsing, eyes closed, bearded chin on chest. He is wearing his slippers. Around his head characters from his books are drifting in the air like cigar smoke; some throng above the papers on the desk, others have drifted behind him, or floated downwards, as though they believe themselves capable of walking on their own two feet on the floor. And why not? They are presented with the same firm lines as the writer himself, so why should they not be as real as him? They are more real than the books on the shelves, books which are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness.

  ‘Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leant over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.

  ‘My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, “Me next! Go on! My turn!” I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamour starts up again.

  ‘And every so often, through all these writing years, I have lifted my head from my page – at the end of a chapter, or in the quiet pause for thought after a death scene, or sometimes just searching for the right word – and have seen a face at the back of the crowd. A familiar face. Pale skin, red hair, a steady, green-eyed gaze. I know exactly who she is, yet am always surprised to see her. Every time she manages to catch me off my guard. Often she has opened her mouth to speak to me, but for decades she was too far away to be heard, and besides, as soon as I became aware of her presence I would avert my gaze and pretend I hadn’t seen her. She was not, I think, taken in.

  ‘People wonder what makes me so prolific. Well, it’s because of her. If I have started a new book five minutes after finishing the last, it is because to look up from my desk would mean meeting her eye.

  ‘The years have passed; the number of my books on the bookshop shelves has grown, and consequently the crowd of personages floating in the air of my study has thinned. With every book that I have written, the babble of voices has grown quieter, the sense of bustle in my head reduced. The faces pressing for attention have diminished, and always, at the back of the group but nearer with every book, there she was. The green-eyed girl. Waiting.

  ‘The day came when I finished the final draft of my final book. I wrote the last sentence, placed the last full stop. I knew what was coming. The pen slipped from my hand and I closed my eyes. “So,” I heard her say, or perhaps it was me, “it’s just the two of us now.”

  ‘I argued with her for a bit. “It will never work,” I told her. “It was too long ago, I was only a child, I’ve forgotten.” Though I was only going through the motions.

  ‘“But I haven’t forgotten,” she says. “Remember when…”’

  ‘Even I know the inevitable when I see it. I do remember.’

  The faint vibration in the air fell still. I turned from my star-gazing to Miss Winter. Her green eyes were staring at a spot in the room as though they were at that very moment seeing the green-eyed child with the copper hair.

  ‘The girl is you.’

  ‘Me?’ Miss Winter’s eyes turned slowly away from the ghost child and in my direction. ‘No, she is not me. She is…’ She hesitated. ‘She is someone I used to
be. That child ceased existing a long, long time ago. Her life came to an end the night of the fire as surely as though she had perished in the flames. The person you see before you now is nothing.’

  ‘But your career…the stories…’

  ‘When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.’

  Then we sat in silence, and watched the fire. From time to time Miss Winter rubbed absently at her palm.

  ‘Your essay on Jules and Edmond Landier,’ she began after a time.

  I turned reluctantly to her.

  ‘What made you choose them as a subject? You must have had some particular interest? Some personal attraction?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing special, no.’

  And then there was just the stillness of the stars and the crackling of the fire.

  It must have been an hour or so later, when the flames were lower, that she spoke a third time.

  ‘Margaret,’ I believe it was the first time she had called me by my first name. ‘When you leave here tomorrow…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You will come back, won’t you?’

  It was hard to judge her expression in the flickering, dying light of the fire, and it was hard to tell how far the trembling in her voice was the effect of fatigue or illness, but it seemed to me, in the moment before I answered – ‘Yes. Of course I will come back,’ – that Miss Winter was afraid.

  The next morning Maurice drove me to the station and I took the train south.

  The Almanacs

  Where else to begin my research but at home, in the shop?

  I was fascinated by the old almanacs. Since I was a child, any moment of boredom or anxiety or fear would send me to these shelves to flick through the pages of names and dates and annotations. Between these covers, past lives were summarized in a few brutally neutral lines. It was a world where men were baronets and bishops and ministers of parliament, and women were wives and daughters. There was nothing to tell you whether these men liked kidneys for breakfast, nothing to tell you whom they loved or what form their fear gave to the shapes in the dark after they blew the candle out at night. There was nothing personal at all. What was it then that moved me so in these sparse annotations of the lives of dead men? Only that they were men, that they had lived, that now they were dead.

  Reading them, there was a stirring in me. In me, but not of me. Reading the lists, the part of me that was already on the other side woke and caressed me.

  I never explained to anyone why the almanacs meant so much to me; I never even said I liked them. But my father took note of my preference, and whenever volumes of the sort came up at auction he made sure to get them. And so it was that all the illustrious dead of the country, going back many generations, were spending their afterlife tranquilly on the shelves of our second floor. With me for company.

  It was on the second floor, crouched in the window seat, that I turned the pages of names. I had found Miss Winter’s grandfather, George Angelfield. He was not a baronet, nor a minister, nor a bishop, but still, here he was. The family had aristocratic origins – there had once been a title, but a few generations earlier there had been a split in the family: the title had gone one way, the money and the property another. He was on the property side. The almanacs tended to follow the titles, but still, the connection was close enough to merit an entry, so here he was: Angelfield, George; his date of birth; residing at Angelfield House in Oxfordshire; married to Mathilde Monnier of Reims, France; one son, Charles. Tracing him through the almanacs for later years, a decade later I found an amendment: one son, Charles, one daughter, Isabelle. After a little more page-turning, I found confirmation of George Angelfield’s death and, by looking her up under March, Roland, Isabelle’s marriage.

  For a moment it amused me to think that I had gone all the way to Yorkshire to hear Miss Winter’s story, when all the time it was here, in the almanacs, a few feet under my bed. But then I started thinking properly. What did it prove, this paper trail? Only that such people as George and Mathilde and their children Charles and Isabelle existed. There was nothing to say that Miss Winter had not found them the same way I had, by flicking through a book. These almanacs could be found in libraries all over the place. Anyone who wanted could look through them. Might she not have found a set of names and dates, and embroidered a story around them to entertain herself?

  Alongside these misgivings I had another problem. Roland March had died, and with his death the paper trail for Isabelle came to an end. The world of the almanac was a queer one. In the real world, families branched like trees, blood mixed by marriage passed from one generation to the next, making an ever wider net of connections. Titles on the other hand passed from one man to one man, and it was this narrow, linear progression that the almanac liked to highlight. On each side of the title line were a few younger brothers, nephews, cousins, who came close enough to fall within the span of the almanac’s illumination. The men who might have been lord or baronet. And, though it was not said, the men who still might, if the right string of tragedies were to occur. But after a certain number of branchings in the family tree, the names fell out of the margins and into the ether. No combination of shipwreck, plague and earthquake would be powerful enough to restore these third-cousins to prominence. The almanac had its limits. So it was with Isabelle. She was a woman; her babies were girls; her husband (not a lord) was dead; her father (not a lord) was dead. The almanac cut her and her babies adrift; she and they fell into the vast ocean of ordinary people, whose births and deaths and marriages are, like their loves and fears and breakfast preferences, too insignificant to be worth recording for posterity.

  Charlie, though, was male. The almanac could stretch itself – just – to include him, though the dimness of insignificance was already casting its shadow. Information was scant. His name was Charles Angelfield. He had been born. He lived at Angelfield. He was not married. He was not dead. As far as the almanac was concerned, this information was sufficient.

  I took out one volume after another, found again and again the same sketchy half-life. With every new tome I thought, This will be the year they leave him out. But each year, there he was, still Charles Angelfield, still of Angelfield, still unmarried. I thought again about what Miss Winter had told me about Charlie and his sister, and bit my lip thinking about what his long bachelorhood signified.

  And then, when he would have been in his late forties, I found a surprise. His name, his date of birth, his place of residence, and a strange abbreviation – ldd – that I had never noticed before.

  I turned to the table of abbreviations.

  Ldd: legal decree of decease.

  Turning back to Charlie’s entry, I stared at it for a long time, frowning, as though if I looked hard enough, there would be revealed in the grain or the watermark of the paper itself the elucidation of the mystery.

  In this year he had been legally decreed to be dead. As far as I understood, a legal decree of decease was what happened when a person disappeared and after a certain time his family, for reasons of inheritance, was allowed to assume that he was dead, though there was no proof and no body. I had a feeling that a person had to be lost without trace for seven years before he could be decreed dead. They might have died at any time in that period. They might not even be dead at all, but only gone, lost or wandering, far from everyone who had ever known them. Dead in law, but that didn’t necessarily mean dead in person. What kind of life was it, I wondered, that could end in this vague, unsatisfactory way? Ldd.

  I closed the almanac, put it back in its position on the shelf, and went down to the shop to make cocoa.

  ‘What do you know about the legal procedures you have to take to have someone declared dead?’ I called to Father, while I stood over the pan of milk on the stove.

  ‘No more than you do, I should think,’ came the answer.

  Then he appeared in the doorway and handed me one of our dog-eared customer cards. ‘This is the man to ask. Retired professor of law. Lives i
n Wales now, but he comes here every summer for a browse and a walk by the river. Nice fellow. Why don’t you write? You might ask whether he wants me to hold that Justitiae Naturalis Principia for him at the same time.’

  When I’d finished my cocoa, I went back to the almanac to find out what else I could about Roland March and his family. His uncle had dabbled in art, and when I went to the art history section to follow this up, I learned that his portraits – whilst now acknowledged to be mediocre – had been for a short period the height of fashion. Mortimer’s English Provincial Portraiture contained the reproduction of an early portrait by Lewis Anthony March, entitled ‘Roland, nephew of the artist’. It is an odd thing to look into the face of a boy who is not quite yet a man, in search of the features of an old woman, his daughter. For some minutes I studied his fleshy, sensual features, his glossy blond hair, the lazy set of his head.

  Then I closed the book. I was wasting my time. Were I to look all day and all night I knew I would not find a trace of the twins he was supposed to have fathered.

  In the Archives of the Banbury Herald

  The next day I took the train to Banbury, to the offices of the Banbury Herald.

  It was a young man who showed me the archives. The word archive might sound rather impressive to someone who has not had much to do with them, but to me, who has spent her holidays for years in such places, it came as no surprise to be shown into what was essentially a large, windowless basement cupboard.