The Thirteenth Tale, Page 24

  The other thing I remember from this time was the incident of the photograph. A small parcel appeared with my breakfast tray one morning, addressed to me in my father’s narrow handwriting. It was my photographs of Angelfield; I had sent him the canister of film, and he had had it developed for me. There were a few clear pictures from my first day: brambles growing through the wreckage of the library, ivy snaking its way up the stone staircase. I halted at the picture of the bedroom where I had come face to face with my ghost; over the old fireplace there was only the glare of a flash bulb reflected. Still, I took it out of the bundle and tucked it inside the cover of my book, to keep.

  The rest of the photographs were from my second visit though, when the weather had been against me. Most of them were nothing but puzzling compositions of murkiness. What I remembered was shades of grey overlaid with silver; the mist moving like a veil of gauze; my own breath at tipping point between air and water. But my camera had captured none of that, nor was it possible in the dark smudges that interrupted the grey to make out a stone, a wall, a tree or a forest. After half a dozen such pictures, I gave up looking. Stuffing the wad of photos in my cardigan pocket, I went downstairs to the library.

  We were about halfway through the interview when I became aware of a silence. I was dreaming. Lost, as usual, in her world of childhood twinship. I replayed the soundtrack of her voice, recalled a changed tone, the fact that she had addressed me, but could not recall the words.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Your pocket,’ she repeated. ‘You have something in your pocket.’

  ‘Oh…It’s some photographs…’ In that limbo state halfway between a story and your life, when you haven’t caught up with your wits yet, I mumbled on. ‘Angelfield,’ I said.

  By the time I returned to myself the pictures were in her hands.

  At first she looked closely at each one, straining through her glasses to make sense of the blurred shapes. As one indecipherable image followed another, she let out a small Vida Winter sigh, one that implied her low expectations had been amply fulfilled, and her mouth tightened into a critical line. With her good hand she began to flick through the pile of pictures more cursorily; to show that she no longer expected to find anything of interest, she tossed each one after the briefest glance onto the table at her side.

  I was mesmerized by the discarded photos landing at a regular rhythm on the table. They formed a messy sprawl on the surface, flopping on top of each other and gliding over each others’ slippery surfaces with a sound like useless, useless, useless.

  Then the rhythm came to a halt. Miss Winter was sitting with intent rigidity, holding up a single picture and studying it with a frown. She’s seen a ghost, I thought. Then, after a long moment, pretending not to feel my gaze upon her, she tucked the photo behind the remaining dozen, and looked at the rest, tossing them down just as before. When the one that had arrested her attention resurfaced she barely glanced at it, but added it to the others. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was Angelfield, but if you say so…’ she said, icily, and then, in an apparently artless movement, she picked up the whole pile and holding them towards me, dropped them.

  ‘My hand. Do excuse me,’ she murmured, as I bent down to retrieve the pictures, but I wasn’t deceived.

  And she picked up her story where she had left it.

  Later I looked through the pictures again. For all that the dropping of the photos had muddled the order, it wasn’t difficult to tell which it was that had struck her so forcefully. In the bundle of blurred, grey images there was really only one that stood out from the rest. I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at the image, remembering the moment well. The thinning of the mist and the warming of the sun had combined at just the right time to allow a ray of light to fall onto a boy who posed stiffly for the camera, chin up, back straight, eyes betraying the anxious knowledge that at any minute his hard yellow hat was going to slip sideways on his head.

  Why had she been so taken by that photograph? I scanned the background, but the house, half demolished already, was only a smear of grey over the child’s right shoulder. Closer to him, all that was visible was the grille of the safety barrier and the corner of the Keep Out sign.

  Was it the boy himself who interested her?

  I puzzled over the picture for half an hour, but by the time I came to put it away, I was no nearer an explanation. Because it perplexed me, I slipped it inside the cover of my book along with the picture of an absence in a mirror frame.

  Apart from the photograph of the boy and the game of Jane Eyre and the furnace, not much else pierced the cloak the story had cast over me. Unless you count the cat. He took note of my unusual hours, came scratching at my door for a bit of fuss at random hours of the day and night. Finished up bits of egg or fish from my plate. He liked to sit on my piles of paper, watching me write. For hours I could sit scratching at my pages, wandering in the dark labyrinth of Miss Winter’s story, but no matter how far I forgot myself, I never quite lost my sense of being watched over, and when I got particularly lost, it was the gaze of the cat that seemed to reach into my muddle and light my way back to my room, my notes, my pencils and my pencil sharpener. He even slept with me on my bed some nights, and I took to leaving my curtains open so that if he woke he could sit on my windowsill seeing things move in the dark that were invisible to the human eye.

  And that is all. Apart from these details there was nothing else. Only the eternal twilight and the story.

  Collapse

  Isabelle had gone. Hester had gone. Charlie had gone. Now Miss Winter told me of further losses.

  Up in the attic I leant with my back against the creaking wall. I pressed back to make it give, then released it. Over and over. I was tempting fate. What would happen, I wondered, if the wall came down? Would the roof cave in? Would the weight of it falling cause the floorboards to collapse? Would roof tiles and beams and stone come crashing through ceilings onto the beds and boxes as if there was an earthquake? And then what? Would it stop there? How far would it go? I rocked and rocked, taunting the wall, daring it to fall, but it didn’t. Even under duress, it is astonishing just how long a dead wall will stay standing,

  Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up, ears ajangle. The noise of it was finished already, but I could still feel it resounding in my eardrums and in my chest. I leapt out of bed and ran to the stairs, Emmeline at my heels.

  We arrived on the galleried landing at the same time that John, who slept in the kitchen, arrived at the foot of the stairs, and we all stared. In the middle of the hallway the Missus was standing in her nightdress, staring upwards. At her feet was a huge block of stone, and above her head, a jagged hole in the ceiling. The air was thick with grey dust. It rose and fell in the air, undecided where to settle. Fragments of plaster, mortar, wood, were still falling from the floor above, with a sound like mice scattering, and from time to time I felt Emmeline jump as planks and bricks fell in the floors above.

  The stone steps were cold, then splinters of wood and shards of plaster and mortar dug into my feet. In the centre of all the detritus of our broken house, with the swirls of dust slowly settling around her, the Missus stood like a ghost. Dust-grey hair, dust-grey face and hands, dust-grey the folds of her long nightdress. She stood perfectly still and looked up. I came close to her, and joined my stare to hers. We gazed through the hole in the ceiling, and beyond that another hole in another ceiling and then yet another hole in another ceiling. We saw the peony wall paper in the bedroom above, the ivy trellis pattern in the room above that, and the pale grey walls of the little attic room. Above all of that, high above our heads, we saw the hole in the roof itself and the sky. There were no stars.

  I took her hand. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s no use looking up there.’

  I led her away, and she followed me like a little child. ‘I’ll put her to bed,’ I told John.

  Ghost-white, he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a voice thick with dust. He could hardly
bear to look at her. He made a slow gesture towards the destroyed ceiling. It was the slow motion of a drowning man dragged under by the current. ‘And I’ll sort this out.’

  But an hour later, when the Missus was clean, and in a fresh nightdress, tucked up in bed and asleep, he was still there. Exactly as I had left him. Staring at the spot where she had been.

  The next morning, when the Missus did not appear in the kitchen, it was I who went to wake her. She could not be woken. Her soul had departed through the hole in the roof, and she was gone.

  ‘We’ve lost her,’ I told John in the kitchen. ‘She’s dead.’

  His face didn’t change. He continued to stare across the kitchen table as though he hadn’t heard me. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually, in a voice that did not expect to be heard. ‘Yes.’

  It felt as if everything had come to an end. I had only one wish: to sit like John, immobile, staring into space and doing nothing. Yet time did not stop. I could still feel my heartbeat measuring out the seconds. I could feel hunger growing in my stomach, and thirst in my throat. I was so sad I thought I would die, yet instead I was scandalously and absurdly alive – so alive I swear I could feel my hair and my fingernails growing.

  For all the unbearable weight on my heart I could not, like John, give myself up to the misery. Hester was gone; Charlie was gone; the Missus was gone; John, in his own way, was gone, though I hoped he would find his way back. In the meantime the girl in the mist was going to have to come out of the shadows. It was time to stop playing and grow up.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on, then,’ I said. ‘Make a cup of tea.’

  My voice was not my own. Some other girl, some sensible, capable, ordinary girl had found her way into my skin and taken me over. She seemed to know just what to do. I was only partly surprised. Hadn’t I spent half a lifetime watching people live their lives? Watching Hester, watching the Missus, watching the villagers?

  I settled quietly inside myself while the capable girl boiled the kettle, measured out the tea leaves, stirred and poured. She put two sugars in John’s tea, three in mine. When it was made I drank it, and as the hot, sweet tea reached my stomach at last I stopped trembling.

  The Silver Garden

  Before I was quite awake I had the sense that something was different. And a moment later, before I even opened my eyes, I knew what it was. There was light.

  Gone were the shadows that had lurked in my room since the beginning of the month; gone, too, the gloomy corners and the air of mournfulness. The window was a pale rectangle, and from it there entered a shimmering paleness that illuminated every aspect of my room. It was so long since I had seen it that I felt a surge of joy, as though it wasn’t just a night that had ended, but winter. It was as if spring had come.

  The cat was on the window ledge, gazing intently into the garden. Hearing me stir, he immediately jumped down and pawed at the door to go out. I pulled my clothes and coat on, and we crept downstairs together, to the kitchen, and the garden.

  I realized my mistake the moment I stepped outdoors. It was not day. It was not the sun, but moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the leaves with silver and touching the outlines of the statuary figures. I stopped still and stared at the moon. It was a perfect circle, hanging palely in a clear sky. Mesmerized, I could have stood there till daybreak, but the cat, impatient, pressed my ankles for attention, and I bent to stroke him. No sooner had I touched him than he moved away, only to pause a few yards off and look over his shoulder.

  I turned up the collar of my coat, shoved my cold hands in my pockets, and followed.

  He led me first down the grassy path between the long borders. On our left the yew hedge gleamed brightly; on the right the hedge was dark in the moon shadow. We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, here black. A dozen times I would have lingered: a single ivy leaf twisted at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky – but I could not stop. All the time, the cat stalked on ahead of me with a purposeful, even step, tail raised like a tour guide’s umbrella signalling this way, follow me. In the walled garden he jumped up onto the wall that bordered the fountain pool and padded halfway around its perimeter, ignoring the moon’s reflection that shone in the water like a bright coin at the bottom of the pool. And when he came level with the arched entrance to the winter garden, he jumped down and walked towards it.

  Under the arch he paused. He looked left and right, intent. Saw something. And slunk off, out of sight, towards it.

  Curious, I tiptoed forwards to stand where he had, and look around.

  A winter garden is colourful when you see it at the right time of day, at the right time of year. Largely it depends on daylight to bring it to life. The midnight visitor has to look harder to see its attractions. It was too dark to see the low, wide spread of hellebore leaves against the dark soil; too early in the season for the brightness of snowdrops; too cold for the daphne to release its fragrance. There was witchhazel though; soon its branches would be decorated with trembling yellow and orange tassells, but for now it was the branches themselves that were the main attraction. Fine and leafless, they were delicately knotted, twisting randomly and with elegant restraint.

  At its foot, hunched over the ground, was the rounded silhouette of a human figure.

  I froze.

  The figure heaved and shifted laboriously, releasing gasping puffs of breath and effortful grunts.

  In a long, slow second my mind raced to explain the presence of another human being in Miss Winter’s garden at night. Some things I knew instantly without needing even to think about them. For a start, it was not Maurice kneeling on the ground there. Though he was the least unlikely person to find in the garden, it never occurred to me to wonder whether it might be him. This was not his wiry frame, these not his measured movements. Equally it was not Judith. Neat, calm, Judith with her clean nails, perfect hair and polished shoes scrabbling about in the garden in the middle of the night? Impossible. I did not need to consider these two, and so I didn’t.

  Instead, in that second, my mind reeled to and fro a hundred times between two thoughts.

  It was Miss Winter.

  It couldn’t be Miss Winter.

  It was Miss Winter because – because it was. I could tell. I could sense it. It was her and I knew it.

  It couldn’t be her. Miss Winter was frail and ill. Miss Winter was always in her wheelchair. Miss Winter was too unwell to bend to pluck out a weed, let alone crouch on the cold ground disturbing the soil in this frantic fashion.

  It wasn’t Miss Winter.

  But somehow, impossibly, despite everything, it was.

  That first second was long and confusing. The second, when it finally came, was sudden.

  The figure froze…swivelled…rose…and I knew.

  Miss Winter’s eyes. Brilliant, supernatural green.

  But not Miss Winter’s face.

  A patchwork of scarred and mottled flesh, criss-crossed by crevices deeper than age could make. Two uneven dumplings of cheeks. Lopsided lips, one half a perfect bow that told of former beauty, the other a twisted graft of white flesh.

  Emmeline! Miss Winter’s twin! Alive, and living in this house!

  My mind was in turmoil; blood was pounding in my ears; shock paralysed me. She stared at me unblinking, and I realized she was less startled than I was. But still, she seemed to be under the same spell as me. We were both cast into immobility.

  She was the first to recover. In an urgent gesture she raised a dark, soil-covered hand towards me and, in a hoarse voice rasped a string of senseless sounds.

  Bewilderment slowed my responses; I could not even stammer her name before she turned and hurried away, leaning forward, shoulders hunched. From out of the shadows emerged the cat. He stret
ched calmly and, ignoring me, took himself off after her. They disappeared under the arch and I was alone. Me and a patch of churned-up soil.

  Foxes indeed.

  Once they were gone I might have been able to persuade myself that I had imagined it. That I had been sleepwalking, and that in my sleep I had dreamt that Adeline’s twin appeared to me and hissed a secret, unintelligible message. But I knew it was real. And though she was no longer visible, I could hear her singing as she departed. That infuriating, tuneless, five-note fragment. La la la la la.

  I stood, listening, until it faded completely away.

  Then, realizing that my feet and hands were freezing, I turned back to the house.

  Phonetic Alphabet

  A great many years had passed since I learnt the phonetic alphabet. It began with a chart in a linguistics book in Father’s shop. There was no reason for my interest at first, other than that I had nothing to do one weekend, and was enamoured of the signs and symbols it contained. There were familiar letters and foreign ones. There were capital N’s that weren’t the same as little n’s and capital Y’s that weren’t the same as little y’s. Other letters, n’s and d’s and s’s and z’s, had funny little tails and loops attached, and you could cross h’s and i’s and u’s as if they were t’s. I loved these wild and fanciful hybrids: I filled pages of paper with m’s that turned into j’s, and v’s that perched precariously on tiny o’s like performing dogs on balls at the circus. My father came across my pages of symbols and taught me the sounds that went with each. In the international phonetic alphabet, I discovered, you could write words that looked like maths, words that looked like secret code, words that looked like lost languages.

  I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost. I used to write one special word over and over again. My sister’s name. A talisman. I folded the word into elaborate miniature origami, kept my pleat of paper always close to me. In winter it lived in my coat pocket; in summer it tickled my ankle inside the fold of my sock. At night, I fell asleep clutching it in my hand. For all my care, I did not always keep track of these bits of paper. I lost them, made new ones, then came across the old ones. When my mother tried to prise one from my fingers, I swallowed it to thwart her, even though she wouldn’t have been able to read it. But when I saw my father pick a greyed and fraying fold of paper out of the junk in the bottom of a drawer and unfold it, I did nothing to stop him. When he read the secret name his face seemed to break, and his eyes when they rose to me were full of sorrow.