The Thirteenth Tale, Page 25

  He would have spoken. He opened his mouth to speak but, raising my finger to my lips I commanded his silence. I would not have him speak her name. Had he not tried to shut her away, in the dark? Had he not wanted to forget her? Had he not tried to keep her from me? He had no right to her now.

  I prised the paper from his fingers. Without a word I left the room. On the window seat on the second floor I put the morsel of paper in my mouth, tasted its dry, woody tang, and swallowed. For ten years my parents had buried her name in silence, trying to forget. Now I would protect it in a silence of my own. And remember.

  Alongside my mispronunciation of hello, goodbye and sorry in seventeen languages, and my ability to recite the Greek alphabet forwards and backwards (I who have never learned a word of Greek in my life), the phonetic alphabet was one of those secret, random wells of useless knowledge left over from my bookish childhood. I learned it only to amuse myself – its purpose in those days was merely private – so as the years passed I made no particular effort to practise it. That is why when I came in from the garden and put pencil to paper to capture the sibilants and fricatives, the plosives and trills of Emmeline’s urgent whisper, I had to make several attempts.

  After three or four goes, I sat on the bed and looked at my line of squiggles and symbols and signs. Was it accurate? Doubts began to assail me. Had I remembered the sounds accurately after my five-minute journey back into the house? Was my recollection of the phonetic alphabet itself adequate? What if my first failed attempts had contaminated my memory?

  I whispered what I had written on the paper. Whispered it again, urgently. Waited for the birth of some answering echo in my memory to tell me I had got it right. Nothing came. It was the travestied transcription of something misheard and then only half-remembered. It was useless.

  I wrote the secret name instead. The spell, the charm, the talisman.

  It had never worked. She never came. I was still alone.

  I screwed the paper into a ball and kicked it into a corner.

  The Ladder

  ‘My story isn’t boring you, is it, Miss Lea?’

  I endured a number of such comments the following day as, unable to suppress my yawns, I fidgeted and rubbed my eyes while listening to Miss Winter’s narration.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m just tired.’

  ‘Tired!’ she exclaimed. ‘You look like death warmed up! A proper meal would put you right. Whatever’s the matter with you?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Just tired. That’s all.’

  She pursed her lips and regarded me sternly, but I said nothing more, and she took up her story.

  For six months things went on. We sequestered ourselves in a handful of rooms: the kitchen, where John still slept at night, the drawing room and the library. We girls used the back stairs to get from the kitchen to the one bedroom that seemed secure. The mattresses we slept on were those we had dragged from the old room, the beds themselves being too heavy to move. The house had felt too big anyway since the household had been so diminished in number. We survivors felt more at ease in the security, the manageability of our smaller accommodation. All the same, we could never quite forget the rest of the house, slowly festering behind closed doors, like a moribund limb.

  Emmeline spent much of her time inventing card games. ‘Play with me. Oh go on, do play,’ she would pester. Eventually I gave in and played. Obscure games, with ever-shifting rules; games only she understood, and which she always won, which gave her constant delight. She took baths. She never lost her love of soap and hot water; spent hours luxuriating in the water I’d heated for the laundry and washing up. I didn’t begrudge her. It was better if at least one of us could be happy.

  Before we closed up the rooms, Emmeline had gone through cupboards belonging to Isabelle and taken dresses and scent bottles and shoes, which she hoarded in our campsite of a bedroom. It was like trying to sleep in a dressing-up box. Emmeline wore the dresses. Some were out of date by ten years, others – belonging to Isabelle’s mother, I presume – were thirty and forty years old. Emmeline entertained us in the evenings by making dramatic entrances into the kitchen in the more extravagant outfits. The dresses made her look older than fifteen; they made her look womanly. I remembered Hester’s conversation with the doctor in the garden – There is no reason why Emmeline should not marry one day – and I remembered what the Missus had told me about Isabelle and the picnics – She was the kind of girl men can’t look at without wanting to touch – and I felt a sudden anxiety. But then she flopped down on a kitchen chair, took a pack of cards from a silk purse, and said, all child, ‘Play cards with me, go on.’ I was half-reassured, but still, I made sure she did not leave the house in her finery.

  John was listless. He did rouse himself to do the unthinkable though: he got a boy to help in the garden. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘It’s only old Proctor’s boy, Ambrose. He’s a quiet lad. It won’t be for long. Only till I get the house fixed up.’

  That, I knew, would take for ever.

  The boy came. He was taller than John and broader across the shoulders. They stood hands in pockets the two of them, and discussed the day’s work, and then the boy started. He had a measured, patient way of digging; the smooth, constant chime of spade on soil got on my nerves. ‘Why do we have to have him?’ I wanted to know. ‘He’s an outsider just like the others.’

  But for some reason, the boy wasn’t an outsider to John. Perhaps because he came from John’s world, the world of men, the world I didn’t know.

  ‘He’s a good lad,’ John said, time and time again in answer to my questions. ‘He’s a hard worker. He doesn’t ask too many questions, and he doesn’t talk too much.’

  ‘He might not have a tongue, but he’s got eyes in his head.’

  John shrugged and looked away, uneasy.

  ‘I won’t always be here,’ he said, eventually. ‘Things can’t go on for ever like this.’ He sketched a vague gesture that took in the house, its inhabitants, the life we led in it. ‘One day things will have to change.’

  ‘Change?’

  ‘You’re growing up. It won’t be the same, will it? It’s one thing, being children, but when you’re grown up…’

  But I was already gone. I didn’t want to know what it was he had to say.

  Emmeline was in the bedroom, picking sequins off an evening scarf for her treasure box. I sat down beside her. She was too absorbed in her task to look up when I came in. Her plump, tapered fingers picked relentlessly at a sequin until it came away, then dropped it into the box. It was slow work, but then Emmeline had all the time in the world. Her calm face never changed as she bent over the scarf. Lips together. Her gaze at once intent and dreamy. Every so often her eyelids descended, closing off the green irises, then, as soon as they had touched the lower lid, rising again to reveal the green unchanged.

  Did I really look like that? I wondered. Oh, I knew what a good match my eyes were to hers in the mirror. And I knew we had the same sideways kink underneath the weight of red hair at the back of our necks. And I knew the impact we could make on the villagers on those rare occasions when we walked arm in arm down The Street in matching dresses. But still, I didn’t look like Emmeline, did I? My face could not do that placid concentration. It would be screwed up in frustration. I would be biting my lip, pushing my hair angrily back over my shoulder and out of the way, huffing with impatience. I would not be tranquil like Emmeline. I would bite the sequins off with my teeth.

  You won’t leave me, will you? I wanted to say. Because I won’t leave you. We’ll stay here for ever. Together. Whatever John-the-dig says.

  ‘Why don’t we play?’

  She continued her silent work as though she hadn’t heard me.

  ‘Let’s play getting married. You can be the bride. Go on. You can wear…this.’ I pulled a yellow piece of gauzy stuff from the pile of finery in the corner. ‘It’s like a veil, look.’ She didn’t look up, not even when I tossed it over her head. She just bru
shed it out of her eyes and carried on picking at her sequin.

  And so I turned my attention to her treasure box. Hester’s keys were still in there, still shiny, though Emmeline had, so far as one could tell, forgotten their previous keeper. There were bits and pieces of Isabelle’s jewellery, the coloured wrappers from the sweets Hester had given her one day, an alarming shard of glass from a broken green bottle, a length of ribbon with a gold edge that had used to be mine, given me by the Missus more years ago than I could remember. Underneath all the other junk there would still be the threads of silver she had worked out of the curtains the day Hester arrived. And half-hidden beneath the jumble of rubies, glass and junk, there was something that didn’t seem to belong. Something leather. I put my head on one side to get a better view. Ah! That was why she wanted it! Gold lettering. IAR. What was IAR? Or who was IAR? Tilting my head the other way I caught sight of something else. A tiny lock. And a tiny key. No wonder it was in Emmeline’s treasure box. Gold letters and a key. I should think it was her prize possession. And suddenly it struck me. IAR! Diary!

  I reached out a hand.

  Quick as a flash – her looks could be deceiving – Emmeline’s hand came down like a vice on my wrist, and stopped me from touching. Still she didn’t look at me. She moved my hand away with a firm movement, and brought the lid down on her box.

  There were white pressure marks on my wrist where she had held me.

  ‘I’m going to go away,’ I said, experimentally. My voice didn’t sound terribly convincing. ‘ I am. And I’m going to leave you here. I’m going to grow up and live on my own.’

  Then, full of dignified self-pity, I stood up and walked out of the room.

  It wasn’t until the end of the afternoon that she came to find me on the window seat in the library. I had drawn the curtain to hide me, but she came straight to the place and peered round. I heard her approaching steps, felt the curtain move when she lifted it. Forehead pressed against the glass, I was watching the drops of rain against the windowpane. The wind was making them shiver; they were constantly threatening to set off on one of their zig-zag courses where they swallow up every droplet in their path and leave a brief silvery trail behind. She came to me and rested her head against my shoulder. I shrugged her off, angrily. Would not turn and speak to her. She took my hand, and slipped something onto my finger.

  I waited for her to go before I looked. A ring. She had given me a ring.

  I twisted the stone inwards, to the palm side of my finger, and brought it close to the window. The light brought the stone to life. Green, like the colour of my eyes. Green like the colour of Emmeline’s eyes. She had given me a ring. I closed my fingers into my palm and made a tight fist with the stone at its heart.

  John collected buckets of rainwater and emptied them; he peeled vegetables for the pot; he went to the farm and returned with milk and butter. But after every task, his slowly gathered energy seemed exhausted and every time I wondered whether he would have the strength to heave his lean frame up from the table to get on with the next thing.

  ‘Shall we go to the topiary garden?’ I asked him. ‘You might show me what to do there.’

  He didn’t reply. He hardly heard me, I think. For a few days I left it, then I asked again. And again. And again.

  Eventually he went to the shed, where he sharpened the secateurs with his old smooth rhythm. Then we lifted down the long ladders and carried them out of doors. ‘Like this,’ he said, reaching to show me the safety catch on the ladder. He extended the ladder against the solid garden wall. I practised the safety catch a few times, then went up a few feet, and down again. ‘It won’t feel so secure when it’s resting against yew,’ he told me. ‘It’s safe enough, if you get it right. You have to get a feel for it.’

  And then we went to the topiary garden. He led me to a medium-sized yew shape that had grown shaggy. I went to rest the ladder against it, but ‘No, no,’ he cried. ‘Too impatient.’ Three times he walked slowly around the tree. Then he sat down on the ground and lit a cigarette. I sat down and he lit one for me, too. ‘Never cut into the sun,’ he told me. And ‘Don’t cut into your own shadow.’ He drew a few times on his cigarette. ‘Be wary of clouds. Don’t let them skew your line when they blow about. Find something permanent in your line of vision. A roof or a fence. That’s your anchor. And never be in a hurry. Three times as long in the looking as in the cutting.’ He never lifted his eye from the tree all the time he spoke, and nor did I. ‘You have to have a feeling for the back of the tree while you’re trimming the front, and the other way round. And don’t just cut with the shears. Use your whole arm. All the way up to your shoulder.’

  We finished the cigarettes and stubbed out the ends under the toes of our boots.

  ‘And how you see it now, from a distance, keep that in your head when you’re seeing it close up.’

  I was ready.

  Three times he let me rest the ladder against the tree before he was satisfied it was safe. And then I took the shears and went up.

  I worked for three hours. At first I was conscious of the height, kept looking down, had to force myself to go one more step up the ladder. And each time I moved the ladder, it took me several goes to get it safe. But gradually the task took me over. I hardly knew how high I was, so absorbed was my mind in the shape I was making. John stood by, mostly silent. Once in a while he made a comment: Watch your shadow! or Think of the back! but mostly he just watched, and smoked. It was only when I came down from the ladder for the last time, slipped the safety catch and telescoped it, that I realized how sore my hands were from the weight of the shears. But I didn’t care.

  I stood well back to study my work. I walked three times around the tree. My heart leapt. It was good.

  John nodded. ‘Not bad,’ he pronounced. ‘You’ll do.’

  I went to get the ladder from the shed to trim the big bowler hat, and the ladder was gone. The boy I didn’t like was in the kitchen garden, with the rake. I went up to him, scowling. ‘Where’s the ladder?’ It was the first time I had spoken to him.

  He ignored my brusqueness and answered me politely. ‘Mr Digence took it. He’s round the front, fixing the roof.’

  I helped myself to one of the cigarettes John had left in the shed, and smoked it, sending mean looks to the boy who eyed it enviously. Then I sharpened the secateurs. Then, liking the sharpening, I sharpened the garden knife, taking my time, doing it well. All the time, behind the rhythm of the stone against the blade was the rhythm of the boy’s rake over the soil. Then I looked at the sun and thought it was getting late to be starting on the large bowler hat. Then I went to find John.

  The ladder was lying on the ground. Its two sections made a crazy clock-hands angle; the metal channel that was supposed to hold them at a constant six o’clock had been wrenched from the wood, and great splinters protruded from the gash in the side rail. Beside the ladder lay John. He did not move when I touched his shoulder, but he was warm as the sun that touched his splayed limbs and his bloodied hair. He was staring straight up into the clear-blue sky, but the blue of his eyes was strangely overcast.

  The sensible girl deserted me. All of a sudden I was only myself, just a stupid child, almost nothing at all.

  ‘What shall I do?’ I whispered.

  ‘What shall I do?’ My voice frightened me.

  Stretched out on the ground, with John’s hand clutched in mine and shards of gravel digging into my temple, I watched time pass. The shadow of the library bay spread across the gravel and reached the farthest rungs of the ladder. Rung after rung it crept up the ladder towards us. It reached the safety catch.

  The safety catch. Why had John not checked the safety catch? Surely he would have checked it? Of course he would. But if he did check it, then how…why…?

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Rung, after rung, after rung, the shadow of the bay crept nearer and nearer. It reached John’s worsted trousers, then his green shirt, then his hair – how thin
his hair had grown! Why had I not taken better care of him?

  It didn’t bear thinking about. Yet how not to think? While I was noticing the whiteness of John’s hair, I noticed too the deep grooves cut into the earth by the feet of the ladder as it lurched away from under him. No other signs. Gravel is not sand or snow or even newly dug earth. It does not hold a footprint. No trace to show how someone might have come, how they might have loitered at the base of the ladder, how, when they had finished what they came for, they calmly walked away. For all the gravel could tell me, it might have been a ghost.

  Everything was cold. The gravel, John’s hand, my heart.

  I stood up and left John without looking back. I went round the house to the kitchen garden. The boy was still there; he was putting the rake and the broom away. He stopped when he saw me approach, stared at me. And then, when I stopped – don’t faint! don’t faint! I told myself – he came running forwards to catch me. I watched him as though from a long, long way away. And I didn’t faint. Not quite. Instead, when he came close, I felt a voice rise up inside myself, words that I didn’t choose to say, but which forced their way out of my strangled throat. ‘Why doesn’t anybody help me?’

  He grasped me under my arms; I slumped against him; he helped me gently down to the grass. ‘I’ll help you,’ he said. ‘I will.’