The Thirteenth Tale, Page 38

  He looked from the gravestone to the white sky. ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why suggest it?’

  I slid my arm from his and tucked my cold hands under the arms of my coat. ‘It’s what my mother would say. She thinks a weightless story is better than one that’s too heavy.’

  ‘So. My story is a heavy one.’

  I said nothing, and when the silence grew long, I told him not his story but my own.

  ‘I had a sister,’ I began. ‘A twin.’

  He turned to face me. His shoulders were solid and wide against the sky and he listened gravely to the story I poured out to him.

  ‘We were joined. Here…’ and I brushed my hand down my left side. ‘She couldn’t live without me. She needed my heart to beat for her. But I couldn’t live with her. She was draining my strength. They separated us, and she died.’

  My other hand joined the first over my scar, and I pressed hard.

  ‘My mother never told me. She thought it was better for me not to know.’

  ‘A weightless story.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you do know.’

  I pressed harder. ‘I found out by accident.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  I felt my hands taken by his, and he enclosed both of them into one great fist. Then with his other arm he drew me to him. Through layers of coats I felt the softness of his belly, and a rush of noise came to my ear. It is the beating of his heart, I thought. A human heart. By my side. So this is what it’s like. I listened.

  Then we drew apart.

  ‘And is it better to know?’ he asked me.

  ‘I can’t tell you. But once you know it’s impossible to go back.’

  ‘And you know my story.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My true story.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He barely hesitated. Just took a breath and seemed to grow a little bigger.

  ‘You had better tell me then,’ he said.

  I told. And while I told we walked, and when I finished telling we were standing at the place where the snowdrops were pointing through the whiteness of the snow.

  With the casket in his hands, Aurelius hesitated. ‘I have a feeling this is against the rules.’

  I thought it was too. ‘But what else can we do?’

  ‘The rules don’t work for this case, do they?’

  ‘Nothing else would be right.’

  ‘Come on then.’

  We used the cake knife to gouge a hollow in the frozen earth above the coffin of the woman I knew as Emmeline. Aurelius tipped the ashes into it, and we replaced the earth to cover them. Aurelius pressed down with all his weight, and then we rearranged the flowers to hide the disturbance.

  ‘It will level out with the melting of the snow,’ he said. And he brushed the snow from his trouser legs.

  ‘Aurelius, there is more to your story.’

  I led him to another part of the churchyard. ‘You know about your mother now. But you had a father, too.’ I indicated Ambrose’s gravestone. ‘The A and the S on the piece of paper you showed me. It was his name. His bag too. It was used for carrying game. That explains the feather.’

  I paused. It was a lot for Aurelius to take in. When after a long moment he nodded, I went on. ‘He was a good man. You are very like him.’

  Aurelius stared. Dazed. More knowledge. More loss. ‘He is dead. I see.’

  ‘That’s not all,’ I said softly. He turned his eyes slowly to mine, and I read in them the fear that there was to be no end to the story of his abandonment.

  I took his hand. I smiled at him.

  ‘After you were born Ambrose married. He had another child.’

  It took a moment for him to realize what it meant, and when he did, a jolt of excitement brought his frame to life. ‘You mean—I have—And she—he—she—’

  ‘Yes! A sister!’

  The smile grew broad on his face.

  I went on. ‘And she has her own children in turn. A boy and a girl!’

  ‘A niece! And a nephew!’

  I took his hands into mine to stop them shaking. ‘A family, Aurelius. Your family. You know them already. And they are expecting you.’

  I could hardly keep up with him as we passed through the lychgate and strode down the avenue to the white gatehouse. Aurelius never looked back. Only at the gatehouse did we pause, and that was because of me.

  ‘Aurelius! I almost forgot to give you this.’

  He took the white envelope and opened it, distracted by joy. He drew out the card and gave me a look. ‘What? Not really?’

  ‘Yes. Really.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Today!’ Something possessed me at that moment. I did something I have never done in my life before and never expected to do either. I opened my mouth and shouted at the top of my voice. ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY!’

  I must have been a bit mad. In any case, I felt embarrassed. Not that Aurelius cared. He was standing motionless, arms stretched out each side of him, eyes closed and face turned skywards. All the happiness in the world was falling on him with the snow.

  In Karen’s garden the snow bore the prints of chase games, small footprints and smaller ones following each other in broad circles. The children were nowhere to be seen, but as we got nearer we heard their voices coming from the niche in the yew tree.

  ‘Let’s play Snow White.’

  ‘That’s a girls’ story.’

  ‘What story do you want to play?’

  ‘A story about rockets.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a rocket. Let’s be boats.’

  ‘We were boats yesterday.’

  Hearing the latch of the gate they peered out of the tree, and with their hoods hiding their hair you could hardly tell brother from sister.

  ‘It’s the cake man!’

  Karen stepped out of the house and came across the lawn. ‘Shall I tell you who this is?’ she asked the children, as she smiled shyly at Aurelius. ‘This is your uncle.’

  Aurelius looked from Karen to the children and back to Karen, his eyes scarcely big enough to take in everything he wanted to. He was lost for words, but Karen reached out a tentative hand, and he took it in his.

  ‘It’s all a bit…’ he began.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ she agreed. ‘But we’ll get used to it, won’t we?’

  He nodded.

  The children were staring with curiosity at the adult scene.

  ‘What are you playing?’ Karen asked, to distract them.

  ‘We don’t know,’ the girl said.

  ‘We can’t decide,’ said her brother.

  ‘Do you know any stories?’ Emma asked Aurelius.

  ‘Only one,’ he told her.

  ‘Only one?’ She was astounded. ‘Has it got any frogs in it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dinosaurs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Secret passages?’

  ‘No.’

  The children looked at each other. It wasn’t much of a story, clearly.

  ‘We know loads of stories,’ Tom said.

  ‘Loads,’ she echoed, dreamily. ‘Princesses, frogs, magic castles, fairy godmothers—’

  ‘Caterpillars, rabbits, elephants—’

  ‘All sorts of animals.’

  ‘All sorts.’

  They fell into silence, absorbed in shared contemplation of countless different worlds.

  Aurelius watched them as though they were a miracle.

  Then they returned to the real world. ‘Millions of stories,’ the boy said.

  ‘Shall I tell you a story?’ the girl asked.

  I thought perhaps Aurelius had had enough stories for one day, but he nodded his head.

  She picked up an imaginary object and placed it in the palm of her right hand. With her left she mimed the opening of a book cover. She glanced up to be sure she had the full attention of her companions. Then her eyes returned to the book in her hand, and she began.

/>   ‘Once upon a time…’

  Karen and Tom and Aurelius: three sets of eyes all resting on Emma and her storytelling. They would be all right together.

  Unnoticed, I stepped back from the gate and slipped away along the street.

  The Thirteenth Tale

  I will not publish the biography of Vida Winter. The world may well be agog for the story, but it is not mine to tell. Adeline and Emmeline, the fire and the ghost, these are stories that belong to Aurelius now. The graves in the churchyard are his, so is the birthday that he can mark as he chooses. The truth is heavy enough without the additional weight of the world’s scrutiny on his shoulders. Left to their own devices he and Karen can turn the page, start afresh.

  But time passes. One day Aurelius will be no more; one day Karen too will leave this world. The children, Tom and Emma, are already more distant from the events I have told here than their uncle. With the help of their mother they have begun to forge their own stories; stories that are strong and solid and true. The day will come when Isabelle and Charlie, Adeline and Emmeline, the Missus and John-the-dig, the girl without a name, will be so far in the past that their old bones will have no power to cause fear or pain. They will be nothing but an old story, unable to do any harm to anyone. And when that day comes – I will be old myself by then – I shall give Tom and Emma this document. To read and, if they choose, to publish.

  I hope that they will publish. For until they do, the spirit of that ghost child will haunt me. She will roam in my thoughts, linger in my dreams, my memory her only playground. It is not much, this posthumous life of hers, but it is not oblivion. It will be enough, until the day when Tom and Emma release this manuscript and she will be able to exist more fully after death than she ever lived before it.

  And so, the story of the ghost girl is not to be published for many years, if at all. That does not mean however that I have nothing to give the world immediately to satisfy its curiosity about Vida Winter. For there is something. At the end of my last meeting with Mr Lomax, I was about to leave when he stopped me. ‘Just one more thing.’ And he opened his desk and took out an envelope.

  I had that envelope with me when I slipped unremarked out of Karen’s garden and turned my steps back towards the lodge gates. The ground for the new hotel had been flattened, and when I tried to remember the old house, I could find only photographs in my memory. But then it came to me how it always seemed to face the wrong way. It had been twisted. The new building was going to be better. It would face straight towards you.

  I diverged from the gravel pathway to cross the snow-covered lawn towards the old deer park and the woods. The dark branches were heavy with snow, which sometimes fell in soft swathes at my passing. I came at last to the vantage point on the slope. You can see everything from there. The church and its graveyard, the wreaths of flowers bright against the snow. The lodge gates, chalk-white against the blue sky. The coachhouse, denuded of its shroud of thorns. Only the house had gone, and it had gone completely. The men in their yellow hats had reduced the past to a blank page. We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future.

  I took the envelope from my bag. I had been waiting. For the right time. The right place.

  The letters on the envelope were curiously misformed. The uneven strokes either faded into nothing or else were engraved into the paper. There was no sense of flow: each letter gave the impression of having been completed individually, at great cost, the next undertaken as a new and daunting enterprise. It was like the hand of a child or a very old person. It was addressed to Miss Margaret Lea.

  I slit open the flap. I drew out the contents. And I sat on a felled tree to read it, because I never read standing up.

  Dear Margaret,

  Here is the piece I told you about.

  I have tried to finish it, and find that I cannot. And so this story that the world has made so much fuss about must do as it is. It is a flimsy thing: something of nothing. Do with it what you will.

  As for titles, the one that springs to my mind is Cinderella’s Child, but I know quite enough about readers to understand that whatever I might choose to call it, it will only ever go by one title in the world, and it won’t be mine.

  There was no signature. No name.

  But there was a story.

  It was the story of Cinderella, like I’d never read it before. Laconic, hard, and angry. Miss Winter’s sentences were shards of glass, brilliant and lethal.

  Picture this, the story begins. A boy and a girl; one rich, one poor. Most often it’s the girl who’s got no gold and that’s how it is in the story I’m telling. There didn’t have to be a ball. A walk in the woods was enough for these two to stumble into each other’s paths. Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times. Our girl’s pumpkin is just a pumpkin, and she crawls home after midnight, blood on her petticoats, violated. There will be no footman at the door with moleskin slippers tomorrow. She knows that already. She’s not stupid. She is pregnant, though.

  In the rest of the story, Cinderella gives birth to a girl, raises her in poverty and filth, abandons her after a few years in the grounds of the house owned by her violator. The story ends abruptly.

  Halfway along a path in a garden she has never been to before, cold and hungry, the child suddenly realizes she is alone. Behind her is the garden door that leads into the forest. It remains ajar. Is her mother behind it still? Ahead of her is a shed that, to her child’s mind, has the look of a little house. A place she might shelter. Who knows, there might even be something to eat.

  The garden door? Or the little house?

  Door? Or house?

  The child hesitates.

  She hesitates…

  And the story ends there.

  Miss Winter’s earliest memory? Or just a story? The story invented by an imaginative child to fill the space where her mother ought to have been?

  The thirteenth tale. The final, the famous, the unfinished story.

  I read the story and grieved.

  Gradually my thoughts turned away from Miss Winter and to myself. She might not be perfect, but at least I had a mother. Was it too late to make something of ourselves? But that was another story.

  I put the envelope in my bag, stood up and brushed the bark dust from my trousers before heading back to the road.

  I was engaged to write the story of Miss Winter’s life, and I have done it. There is really nothing more I need do in order to fulfil the terms of the contract. One copy of this document is to be deposited with Mr Lomax, who will store it in a bank vault and then arrange for a large amount of money to be paid to me. Apparently he doesn’t even have to check that the pages I give him are not blank.

  ‘She trusted you,’ he told me.

  Clearly she did trust me. Her intentions in the contract that I never read or signed are quite unmistakable. She wanted to tell me the story before she died; she wanted me to make a record of it. What I did with it after that was my business. I have told the solicitor about my intentions regarding Tom and Emma, and we have made an appointment to formalize my wishes in a will just in case. And that ought to be the end of it.

  But I don’t feel I am quite done. I don’t know who or how many people will eventually read this, but no matter how few they are, no matter how distant in time from this moment, I feel a responsibility towards them. And although I have told them all there is to know about Adeline and Emmeline and the ghost child, I realize that for some that will not be quite enough. I know what it is like to finish a book and find oneself wondering a day or a week later, what happened to the butcher or who got the diamonds, or whether or not the dowager was ever reconciled with her niece. I can imagine readers pondering what became of Judith and Maurice, whether anyone kept up the g
lorious garden, who came to live in the house.

  And so, in case you are wondering, let me tell you. Judith and Maurice stayed on. The house was not sold; provision had been made in Miss Winter’s will for the house and garden to be converted into a kind of literary museum. Of course it is the garden that has real value (‘an unsuspected gem’ an early horticultural review has called it), but Miss Winter realized that it was her reputation for storytelling more than her gardening skill that would draw the crowds. And so there are to be tours of the rooms, a teashop, and a bookshop. Coaches that bring tourists to the Brontë museum can come afterwards to ‘Vida Winter’s Secret Garden’. Judith will continue as housekeeper, and Maurice as head gardener. Their first job, before the conversion can begin, is to clear Emmeline’s rooms. These will not be visited, for there will be nothing to see.

  And Hester. Now this will surprise you; it certainly surprised me. I had a letter from Emmanuel Drake. To tell you the truth I’d forgotten all about him. Slowly and methodically he continued his searches, and against all odds, late in the day, he found her. ‘It was the Italian connection that threw me off track,’ his letter explained, ‘when your governess had gone the other way entirely – to America!’ For a year Hester had worked as clerical assistant to an academic neurologist, and when the year was up, guess who came to join her? Doctor Maudsley! His wife died (nothing more sinister than the flu, I did check), and within days of the funeral he was on the boat. It was love. They are both deceased now, but after a long and happy life together. They had four children, one of whom has written to me, and I have sent the original of his mother’s diary to him to keep. I doubt he will be able to make out much more than one word in ten; if he asks me for elucidation I will tell him that his mother knew his father here in England, during the time of his father’s first marriage, but if he does not ask, I will keep my silence. In his letter to me, he enclosed a list of his parents’ joint publications. They researched and wrote dozens of highly regarded articles (none on twins; I think they knew when to call it a day) and published them jointly: Dr E. and Mrs H. J. Maudsley.