The Thirteenth Tale

  ‘Hmm.’

  She did not speak, but let him consider. He stared at the empty wall, deep in thought, while she cast anxious glances in his direction, trying to divine the reception of her theory from his face. Then he was ready to make his pronouncement.

  ‘Whilst this idea of yours in an interesting one,’ he put on a sympathetic smile to soften the effect of his discouragement, ‘I don’t recall ever reading about such a division of character between twins in any of the authorities.’

  She ignored the smile and met his eyes levelly. ‘It isn’t in the authorities, no. If it was going to be anywhere it would be in Lawson and it isn’t.’

  ‘You have read Lawson?’

  ‘Of course. I would not dream of pronouncing an opinion on any subject without being sure of my references first.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There is a reference to the Peruvian boy twins in Harwood that is suggestive, though he stops short of the full conclusion that might be drawn.’

  ‘I remember the example you mean…’ He gave a little start, ‘Oh! I see the connection! Well, I wonder whether the Brasenby case study is of any relevance?’

  ‘I haven’t been able to obtain the full study. Can you lend it to me?’

  So it began.

  Impressed by the acuity of Hester’s observations the doctor lent her the Brasenby case study. When she returned it, there was a sheet of pithily expressed notes and questions attached. He, in the meantime, had obtained a number of other books and articles to complete his library on twins, recently published pieces, copies of work in progress from various specialists, foreign works. He found after a week or two that he could save himself time by passing these to Hester first, and reading for himself just the concise and intelligent resumes she produced. When between them they had read everything it was possible to read, they returned to their own observations. Both of them had compiled notes, his medical, hers psychological; there were copious annotations in his handwriting in the margins of her manuscript, but she had made even more notes on his, and sometimes attached her own cogent essays on separate pieces of paper.

  They read; they thought; they wrote; they met; they discussed. This went on until they knew everything there was to know about twins, but there was still one thing they did not know, and it was the one thing that mattered.

  ‘All this work,’ the doctor said, one evening in the library, ‘all this paper. And we are still no nearer.’ He ran his hand through his hair in an agitated manner. He had told his wife he would be back by half past seven, and he was going to be late. ‘Is it because of Emmeline that Adeline represses the girl in the mist? I think the answer to that question lies outside the bounds of current knowledge.’ He sighed, and tossed his pencil onto the desk, half-annoyed, half-resigned.

  ‘You are quite right. It does.’ You could forgive her for sounding testy: it had taken him four weeks to reach the conclusion she could have given him at the beginning if he had only been willing to listen.

  He turned to her.

  ‘There is only one way to find out,’ she said quietly.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘My experience and observations have led me to believe that there is scope for an original research project here. Of course, as a mere governess I would have difficulty in persuading the appropriate journal to publish anything I produced. They would take one look at my qualifications and think I was nothing but a silly woman with ideas beyond her competence.’ She shrugged and cast her eyes down. ‘Perhaps they are right, and I am. All the same,’ slyly she glanced up again, ‘for a man with the right background and knowledge, I am sure there is a meaty project there.’

  The doctor looked at first surprised, then his eyes turned misty. Original research! The idea was not so very preposterous. It struck him that at this moment, at the culmination of all the reading he had done in recent months, he must surely be the best-read doctor in the country on the subject of twins! Who else knew what he knew? And more to the point, who else had the perfect case study under his nose? Original research? Whyever not?

  She let him indulge himself for a few minutes, and when she saw that her suggestion had taken root in his heart, murmured, ‘Of course if you needed an assistant, I’d be glad to help in any way I could.’

  ‘Very kind of you,’ he nodded. ‘Of course, you’ve worked with the girls…Practical experience…Invaluable…Quite invaluable.’

  He left the house and floated home on a cloud, where he failed to notice that his dinner was cold and his wife bad-tempered.

  Hester gathered up the papers from the desk and left the room; her neat footsteps and firm closing of the door had the ring of satisfaction about them.

  The library seemed empty, but it wasn’t.

  Lying full length on top of the bookcases, a girl was biting her nails and thinking.

  Original research.

  Is it because of Emmeline that Adeline represses the girl in the mist?

  Didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going to happen next.

  They did it at night.

  Emmeline never stirred as they lifted her from her bed. She must have felt herself safe in Hester’s arms; perhaps she recognized the smell of soap in her sleep as she was carried out of the room and along the corridor. Whatever the reason, she didn’t realize that night what was happening. Her awakening to the truth was hours away.

  It was different for Adeline. Quick and sharp, she awoke at once to her sister’s absence. Darted to the door but found it locked already by Hester’s swift hand. In a flash she knew it all, felt it all. Severance. She didn’t shriek, she didn’t fling her fists against the door, she didn’t claw at the lock with her nails. All the fight went out of her. She sank to the floor, collapsed into a little heap against the door, and that is where she stayed all night. The bare boards bit into her jutting bones, but she didn’t feel the pain. There was no fire and her nightdress was thin, but she didn’t feel the cold. She felt nothing. She was broken.

  When they came for her the next morning, she was deaf to the key in the lock, didn’t react when the opening door shunted her out of its way. Her eyes were dead, her skin bloodless. How cold she was. She might have been a corpse, if it had not been for her lips that twitched ceaselessly, repeating a silent mantra that might have been Emmeline, Emmeline, Emmeline.

  Hester lifted Adeline in her arms. Not difficult. The child was fourteen now, but she was skin and bones. All her strength was in her will, and when that was gone, the rest was insubstantial. They carried her down the stairs as easily as if she was a feather pillow going to be aired.

  John drove. Silent. Approving, disapproving, it hardly mattered. Hester did the decision making.

  They told Adeline she was going to see Emmeline, a lie they needn’t have bothered with; they could have taken Adeline anywhere and she’d not have fought them. She was lost. Absent from herself. Without her sister, she was nothing and she was no one. It was just the shell of a person they took to the doctor’s house. They left her there.

  Back at home, they moved Emmeline from the bed in Hester’s room back into her own without waking her. She slept for another hour, and when she did open her eyes was mildly surprised to find her sister gone. As the morning drew on her surprise grew, turning to anxiety in the afternoon. She searched the house. She searched the gardens. She went as far as she dared in the woods, the village.

  At tea time Hester found her at the road edge, staring in the direction that would have taken her, if she had followed it, to the door of the doctor’s house. She had not dared follow it. Hester put a hand on Emmeline’s shoulder and drew her close, then led her back to the house. From time to time, Emmeline stopped, hesitant, wanting to turn back, but Hester took her hand and guided her firmly in the direction of home. Emmeline followed with obedient but puzzled steps. After tea she stood by the window and looked out. She grew fearful as the light faded, but it was not until Hester locked the doors and began the routine of putting Emmeline to bed
that she became distraught.

  All night long she cried. Lonely sobs that seemed to go on for ever. What had snapped in an instant in Adeline took an agonizing twenty-four hours to break in Emmeline. But when dawn came, she was quiet. She had wept and shuddered herself into oblivion.

  The separation of twins is no ordinary separation. Imagine surviving an earthquake. When you come to, you find the world unrecognizable. The horizon is in a different place. The sun has changed colour. Nothing remains of the terrain you know. As for you, you are alive. But it’s not the same as living. It’s no wonder the survivors of such disasters so often wish they had perished with the others.

  Miss Winter sat staring into space. Her famous copper tint had faded to a tender apricot. She had abandoned her hairspray and the solid coils and twists had given way to a soft, shapeless tangle. But her face was set hard and she held herself rigid, as though girding herself against a biting wind that only she could feel. Slowly she turned her eyes to mine.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘Judith says you don’t eat very much.’

  ‘I’ve always been like that.’

  ‘But you look pale.’

  ‘A bit tired, maybe.’

  We finished early. Neither of us, I think, felt up to carrying on.

  Do you Believe in Ghosts?

  The next time I saw her, Miss Winter looked different. She closed her eyes wearily, and it took her longer than usual to conjure the past and begin to speak. While she gathered the threads I watched her, and noticed that she had left off her false eyelashes. There was the habitual purple eyeshadow, there the sweeping line of black. But without the spider lashes, she had the unexpected appearance of a child who had been playing in her mother’s make-up box.

  Things weren’t as Hester and the doctor expected. They were prepared for an Adeline who would rant and rage and kick and fight. As for Emmeline, they were counting on her affection for Hester to reconcile her to her twin’s sudden absence. They were expecting, in short, the same girls they had before, only separate where they had been together. And so, initially, they were surprised by the twins’ collapse into a pair of lifeless rag-dolls.

  Not quite lifeless. The blood continued to circulate, sluggishly, in their veins. They swallowed the soup that was spooned into their mouths by in one house the Missus, in the other the doctor’s wife. But swallowing is a reflex, and they had no appetite. Their eyes, open during the day, were unseeing, and at night, though their eyes closed, they had not the tranquillity of sleep. They were apart; they were alone; they were in a kind of limbo. They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.

  Did the scientists doubt themselves? Stop and wonder whether they were doing the right thing? Did the lolling, unconscious figures of the twins cast a shadow over their beautiful project? They were not wilfully cruel, you know. Only foolish. Misguided by their learning, their ambition, their own, self-deceiving blindness.

  The doctor carried out tests. Hester observed. And they met every day to compare notes. To discuss what at first they optimistically called progress. Behind the doctor’s desk, or in the Angelfield library, they sat together, heads bent over papers on which were recorded every detail of the girls’ lives. Behaviour, diet, sleep. They puzzled over absent appetites, the propensity to sleep all the time – that sleep which was not sleep. They proposed theories to account for the changes in the twins. The experiment was not going as well as they had expected, had begun in fact disastrously, but the two scientists skirted around the possibility that they might be doing harm, preferring to retain the belief that together they could work a miracle.

  The doctor derived great satisfaction from the novelty of working for the first time in decades with a scientific mind of the highest order. He marvelled at his protégée’s ability to grasp a principle one minute and to apply it with professional originality and insight the next. Before long he admitted to himself that she was more a colleague than a protégée. And Hester was thrilled to find that at long last her mind was adequately nourished and challenged. She came out of their daily meetings aglow with excitement and pleasure. So their blindness was only natural. How could they be expected to understand that was doing them such good could be doing such great harm to the children in their care? Unless perhaps, in the evenings, each sitting in solitude to write up the day’s notes, they might individually have raised their eyes to the unmoving, dead-eyed child in a chair in the corner, and felt a doubt cross their minds. Perhaps. But if they did, they did not record it in their notes, did not mention it to the other.

  So dependent did the pair become on their joint undertaking that they quite failed to see the grand project was making no progress at all. Emmeline and Adeline were all but catatonic, and the girl in the mist was nowhere to be seen. Undeterred by their lack of findings, the scientists continued their work: they made tables and charts, proposed theories and developed elaborate experiments to test them. With each failure they told themselves that they had eliminated something from the field of examination and went on to the next big idea.

  The doctor’s wife and the Missus were involved, but at one remove. The physical care of the girls was their responsibility. They spooned soup into the unresisting mouths of their charges three times a day. They dressed the twins, bathed them, did their laundry, brushed their hair. Each woman had her reasons for disapproving of the project; each had her reasons for keeping mum about their thoughts. As for John-the-dig, he was outside it all. His opinion was sought by no one, not that that stopped him making his daily pronouncement to the Missus in the kitchen: ‘No good will come of it. I’m telling you. No good at all.’

  There came a moment when they might have had to give up. All their plans had come to nothing, and though they racked their brains, they were lost for a new trick to try. At precisely this point Hester detected small signs of improvement in Emmeline. The girl had turned her head towards a window. She was found clutching some shiny bauble and would not be separated from it. By listening outside doors (which is not bad manners incidentally when it is done in the name of science) Hester discovered that when left alone the child was whispering to herself in the old twin language.

  ‘She is soothing herself,’ she told the doctor, ‘by imagining the presence of her sister.’

  The doctor began a regime of leaving Adeline alone for periods of several hours and listening outside the door, notepad and pen in hand. He heard nothing.

  Hester and the doctor advised themselves of the need for patience in the more severe case of Adeline, while they congratulated themselves on the improvements in Emmeline. Brightly they noted Emmeline’s increased appetite, her willingness to sit up, the first few steps she took of her own accord. Soon she was wandering around the house and garden again with something of her old purposelessness. Oh yes, Hester and the doctor agreed, the experiment was really going somewhere now! Whether they stopped to consider that what they termed ‘improvements’ were only Emmeline returning to the habits she already displayed before the experiment began, is hard to judge.

  It wasn’t all plain sailing with Emmeline. There was a dreadful day when she followed her nose to the cupboard filled with the rags her sister used to wear. She held them to her face, inhaled the stale, animal odour and then, in delight, arrayed herself in them. It was awkward, but worse was to come. Dressed in this fashion, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and taking her reflection for her sister, she ran headlong into it. The crash was loud enough to bring the Missus running, and she found Emmeline weeping beside the mirror, crying not for her own pain, but for her poor sister who had broken into several pieces and was bleeding.

  Hester took the clothes away from her and instructed John to burn them. As an extra precaution, she ordered the Missus to turn all the mirrors to the wall. Emmeline was perplexed, but there were no more incidents of the kind.

  She would not speak. For all the solitary whispering that went on behind closed doors, always in the old twin lan
guage, Emmeline could not be induced to speak a single word of English to the Missus or to Hester. This was something to confer about. Hester and the doctor held a lengthy meeting in the library, at the end of which they concluded that there was no cause for worry. Emmeline could talk, and she would, given time. The refusal to speak, the incident with the mirror – they were disappointments of course, but science has its disappointments. And look at the progress! Why, wasn’t Emmeline strong enough to be allowed outside? And she spent less time these days loitering at the roadside, at the invisible boundary beyond which she dared not step, staring in the direction of the doctor’s house. Things were going as well as could be expected.

  Progress? It was not what they had hoped at the outset. It was not much at all compared to the results Hester had achieved with the girl when she first arrived. But it was all they had and they made the most of it. Perhaps they were secretly relieved. For what would have been the result of a definitive success? It would have eliminated all reason for their continued collaboration. And though they were blind to the fact, they would not have wanted that.

  They would never have ended the experiment of their own accord. Never. It was going to take something else, something external, to put a stop to it. Something that came quite out of the blue.

  ‘What was it?’

  Though it was the end of our time, though she had the drawn, grey-white look that she got when the time for her medication grew near, though it was forbidden to ask questions, I couldn’t help myself.

  Despite her pain, there was a green gleam of mischief in her eyes as she leant forward confidingly.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Margaret?’

  Do I believe in ghosts? What could I say? I nodded.

  Satisfied, Miss Winter sat back in her chair, and I had the not unfamiliar impression of having given away more than I thought.