The Thirteenth Tale, Page 8

  Charlie, indifferent to the scrutiny, was looking at Isabelle.

  ‘Have you thought how similar Isabelle and Sybilla are?’ Isabelle said, carelessly. Charlie glared. ‘The sounds of the names, I mean. Almost interchangeable, wouldn’t you say?’ She sent a sharp glance at her brother, forcing him to understand. ‘Roland and I are going to walk a bit further. But Sybilla’s tired. You stay with her.’ Isabelle took Roland’s arm.

  Charlie looked coldly at Sybilla, registered the disarrangement of her dress. She stared back at him, eyes wide, mouth slightly open.

  When he turned back to where Isabelle had been, she was already gone. Only her laughter came back to him from the darkness, her laughter and the low rumble of Roland’s voice. He would get his own back later. He would. Time and time again she would pay for this.

  In the meantime he had to vent his feelings somehow.

  He turned to Sybilla.

  The summer was full of picnics. And for Charlie, it was full of Sybillas. But for Isabelle there was only one Roland. Every day she slipped out of Charlie’s sight, escaped his grasp and disappeared on her bicycle. Charlie could never find out where the pair met, was too slow to follow her as she took flight, the bicycle wheels spinning beneath her, hair flying behind. Sometimes she would not return until darkness had fallen, sometimes not even then. When he scolded her, she laughed at him and turned her back as though he simply wasn’t there. He tried to hurt her, to maim her, but as she eluded him time after time, slipping through his fingers like water, he realized how much their games had been dependent on her willingness. However great his strength, her quickness and cleverness meant she got away from him every time. Like a boar enraged by a bee, he was powerless.

  Once in a while, placatory, she gave in to his entreaties. For an hour or two she lent herself to his will, allowing him to enjoy the illusion that she was back for good and that everything between them was as it always had been. But it was an illusion, as Charlie soon learned, and her renewed absence after these interludes was all the more agonizing.

  Charlie forgot his pain only momentarily with the Sybillas. For a time his sister prepared the way for him, then as she became more and more delighted with Roland, Charlie was left to make his own arrangements. He lacked his sister’s subtlety; there was an incident that could have been a scandal, and a vexed Isabelle told him that if that was how he intended to go about things then he would have to choose a different sort of woman. He turned from the daughters of minor aristocrats to those of farriers, farmers and foresters. Personally he couldn’t tell the difference, yet the world seemed to mind less.

  Frequent though they were, these instants of forgetfulness were fleeting. The shocked eyes, the bruised arms, the bloodied thighs were erased from memory the moment he turned away from them. Nothing could touch the great passion in his life: his feeling for Isabelle.

  One morning towards the end of the summer, Isabelle turned the blank pages in her diary and counted the days. She closed the book and replaced it in the drawer, thoughtfully. When she had decided, she went downstairs to her father’s study.

  Her father looked up. ‘Isabelle!’ He was pleased to see her. Since she had taken to going out more he was especially gratified when she came to seek him out like this.

  ‘Darling Pa!’ She smiled at him. He caught a glint of something in her eye.

  ‘Is there something afoot?’

  Her eyes travelled to a corner of the ceiling and she smiled. Without shifting her gaze from the dark corner, she told him she was leaving.

  At first he hardly understood what she had said. He felt a pulse beat in his ears. His vision blurred. He closed his eyes, but inside his head there were volcanoes, meteorite strikes and explosions. When the flames died down and there was nothing left in his inner world but a silent, devastated landscape, he opened his eyes.

  What had he done?

  In his hand was a lock of hair, with a bloodied clod of skin attached at one end. Isabelle was there, her back to the door, her hands behind her. One beautiful green eye was bloodshot; one cheek looked red and slightly swollen. A trickle of blood crept from her scalp, reached her eyebrow and was diverted away from her eye.

  He was aghast at himself and at her. He turned away from her in silence and she left the room.

  Afterwards he sat for hours, twisting the auburn hair that he had found in his hand, twisting and twisting, tighter and tighter around his finger, until it dug deep into his skin, until it was so matted that it could not be unwound. And finally, when the sensation of pain had at last completed its slow journey from his finger to his consciousness, he cried.

  Charlie was absent that day and did not return home until midnight. Finding Isabelle’s room empty he wandered through the house, knowing by some sixth sense that disaster had struck. Not finding his sister, he went to his father’s study. One look at the grey-faced man told him everything. Father and son regarded each other for a moment, but the fact that their loss was shared did not unite them. There was nothing they could do for each other.

  In his room Charlie sat on the chair next to the window, sat there for hours, a silhouette against a rectangle of moonlight. At some point he opened a drawer and removed the gun he had obtained by extortion from a local poacher, and two or three times he raised it to his temple. Each time the force of gravity soon returned it to his lap.

  At four o’clock in the morning he put the gun away, and took up instead the long needle that he had pilfered from the Missus’s sewing box a decade before and which had since seen much use. He pulled up his trouser leg, pushed his sock down, and made a new puncture mark in his skin. His shoulders shook, but his hand was steady as on his shin bone he scored a single word: Isabelle.

  Isabelle by this time was long gone. She had returned to her room for a few minutes and then left it again, taking the back stairs to the kitchen. Here she had given the Missus a strange, hard hug, which was quite unlike her, and then she slipped out of the side door and darted through the kitchen garden towards the garden door, set in a stone wall. The Missus’s sight had been fading for a very long time, but she had developed the ability to judge people’s movements by sensing vibrations in the air, and she had the impression that Isabelle hesitated, for the briefest of moments, before she closed the garden door behind her.

  When it became apparent to George Angelfield that Isabelle was gone, he went into his library and locked the door. He refused food and visitors. There were only the vicar and the doctor to come calling now, and both of them got short shrift. ‘Tell your God he can go to hell!’ and ‘Let a wounded animal die in peace, won’t you!’ was the limit of their welcome.

  A few days later they returned and called the gardener to break the door down. George Angelfield was dead. A brief examination was enough to establish that the man had died from septicaemia, caused by the circle of human hair that was deeply embedded in the flesh of his ring finger.

  Charlie did not die, though he didn’t understand why not. He wandered about the house. He made a trail of footprints in the dust, and followed it every day, starting at the top of the house and working down. Attic bedrooms not used for years, servants’ rooms, family rooms, the study, the library, the music room, the drawing room, the kitchens. It was a restless, endless, hopeless search. At night he went out to roam the estate, his legs carrying him tirelessly forwards, forwards, forwards. All the while he fingered the Missus’s needle in his pocket. His fingertips were a bloody, scabby mess. He missed Isabelle.

  Charlie lived like this through September, October, November, December, January and February, and at the beginning of March, Isabelle returned.

  Charlie was in the kitchen, tracing his footsteps, when he heard the sound of hooves and wheels approaching the house. Scowling, he went to the window. He wanted no visitors.

  A familiar figure stepped down from the carriage – and his heart stood still.

  He was at the door, on the steps, beside the carriage all in one moment, and Isabelle was th
ere.

  He stared at her.

  Isabelle laughed. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘take this.’ And she handed him a heavy parcel wrapped up in cloth. She reached into the back of the carriage and took something out. ‘And this one.’ He tucked it obediently under his arm. ‘Now, what I’d like most in the world is a very large brandy.’

  Stunned, Charlie followed Isabelle into the house and to the study. She made straight for the drinks cupboard and took out glasses and a bottle. She poured a generous slug into a glass and drank it in one go, showing the whiteness of her throat, then she refilled her own glass and the second which she held out to her brother. He stood there, paralysed and speechless, his hands full with the tightly wrapped bundles. Isabelle’s laughter resounded about his ears again and it was like being too close to an enormous church bell. His head started to spin and tears sprang to his eyes. ‘Put them down,’ Isabelle instructed. ‘We’ll drink a toast.’ He took the glass and inhaled the spirit fumes. ‘To the future!’ He swallowed the brandy in one gulp and coughed at its unfamiliar burn.

  ‘You haven’t even seen them, have you?’ she asked.

  He frowned.

  ‘Look.’ Isabelle turned to the parcels he had placed on the study desk, pulled the soft wrapping away, and stood back so that he could see. Slowly he turned his head and looked. The parcels were babies. Two babies. Twins. He blinked. Registered dimly that some kind of response was called for, but didn’t know what he was supposed to say or do.

  ‘Oh Charlie, wake up for goodness’ sake!’ and his sister took both his hands in hers and dragged him into a madcap dance around the room. She swirled him round and around and around, until the dizziness started to clear his head, and when they came to a halt she took his face in her hands and spoke to him. ‘Roland’s dead, Charlie. It’s you and me, now. Do you understand?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Good. Now, where’s Pa?’

  When he told her, she was quite hysterical. The Missus, roused from the kitchen by the shrill cries, put her to bed in her old room, and when at last she was quiet again, asked, ‘These babies – what are they called?’

  ‘March,’ Isabelle responded.

  But the Missus knew that. Word of the marriage had reached her some months before, and news of the birth (she’d not needed to count the months on her fingers, but she did it anyway and pursed her lips). She knew of Roland’s death from pneumonia a few weeks ago; knew too how old Mr and Mrs March, devastated by the death of their only son and repelled by the fey insouciance of their new daughter-in-law now quietly shunned Isabelle and her children, wishing only to grieve.

  ‘What about Christian names?’

  ‘Adeline and Emmeline,’ said Isabelle sleepily.

  ‘And how do you tell them apart?’

  But the child-widow was sleeping already. And as she dreamed in her old bed, her escapade and her husband already forgotten, her virgin’s name was restored to her. When she woke in the morning it would be as if her marriage had never been, and the babies themselves would appear to her not as her own children – she had not a single maternal bone in her body – but as mere spirits of the house.

  The babies slept, too. In the kitchen, the Missus and the gardener bent over their smooth, pale faces and talked in low voices.

  ‘Which one is which?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  One each side of the old crib, they watched. Two half-moon sets of lashes, two puckered mouths, two downy scalps. Then one of the babies gave a little flutter of the eyelids and half-opened one eye. The gardener and the Missus held their breath. But the eye closed again and the baby lapsed into sleep.

  ‘That one can be Adeline,’ the Missus whispered. She took a striped tea towel from a drawer and cut strips from it. She plaited the strips into two lengths, tied the red one around the wrist of the baby who had stirred, the white one round the wrist of the baby who had not.

  Housekeeper and gardener, each with a hand on the crib, watched, until the Missus turned a glad and tender face to the gardener and spoke again.

  ‘Two babies. Honestly, Dig. At our age!’

  When he raised his eyes from the babies, he saw the tear that misted her round, brown eyes.

  His rough hand reached out across the crib. She wiped her foolishness away and, smiling, put her small, plump hand in his. He felt the wetness of her tear pressed against his own fingers.

  Beneath the arch of their clasped hands, beneath the trembling line of their gaze, the babies were dreaming.

  It was late when I finished transcribing the story of Isabelle and Charlie. The sky was dark and the house was asleep. All of the afternoon and evening and for part of the night I had been bent over my desk, with the story retelling itself in my ears while my pencil scratched line after line, obeying its dictation. My pages were densely packed with script: Miss Winter’s own flood of words. From time to time my hand moved to the left and I scribbled a note in the left-hand margin, when her tone of voice or a gesture seemed to be part of the narrative itself.

  Now I pushed the last sheet of paper from me, set down my pencil and clenched and stretched my aching fingers. For hours Miss Winter’s voice had conjured another world, raising the dead for me, and I had seen nothing but the puppet show her words had made. But when her voice fell still in my head, her image remained and I remembered the grey cat that had appeared, as if by magic, on her lap. Silently he had sat under her stroking hand, regarding me fixedly with his round, yellow eyes. If he saw my ghosts, if he saw my secrets, he did not seem the least perturbed, but only blinked and continued indifferently to stare.

  ‘What’s his name?’ I had asked.

  ‘Shadow,’ she absently replied.

  At last in bed, I turned out the light and closed my eyes. I could still feel the place on the pad of my finger where the pencil had made a groove in my skin. In my right shoulder, a knot from writing was not yet ready to untie itself. Though it was dark, and though my eyes were closed, all I could see was a sheet of paper, lines of my own handwriting with wide margins. The right-hand margin drew my attention. Unmarked, pristine, it glowed white, made my eyes sting. It was the column I reserved for my own comments, notes and questions.

  In the dark, my fingers closed around a ghost pencil, and twitched in response to the questions that penetrated my drowsiness. I wondered about the secret tattoo Charlie bore inside his body, his sister’s name etched onto his bone. How long would the inscription have remained? Could a living bone mend itself? Or was it with him till he died? In his coffin, underground, as his flesh rotted away from the bone, was the name Isabelle revealed to the darkness? Roland March, the dead husband, so soon forgotten…Isabelle and Charlie. Charlie and Isabelle. Who was the twins’ father? And behind my thoughts, the scar on Miss Winter’s palm rose into view. The letter Q for question, seared into human flesh.

  As I started to sleepwrite my questions, the margin seemed to expand. The paper throbbed with light. Swelling, it engulfed me, until I realized with a mixture of trepidation and wonderment that I was enclosed in the grain of the paper, embedded in the white interior of the story itself. Weightless, I wandered all night long in Miss Winter’s story, plotting its landscape, measuring its contours and, on tip-toe at its borders, peering at the mysteries beyond its bounds.

  Gardens

  I woke early. Too early. The monotonous fragment of a tune was scratching at my brain. With more than an hour to wait before Judith’s knock at the door with breakfast, I made myself a cup of cocoa, drank it scaldingly hot, and went outdoors.

  Miss Winter’s garden was something of a puzzle. The sheer size of it was overwhelming for a start. What I had taken at first sight to be the border of the garden – the hedge of yew on the other side of the formal beds – was only a kind of inner wall that divided one part of the garden from another. And the garden was full of such divisions. There were hedges of hawthorn and privet and copper beech, stone walls covered with ivy, winter clematis and the bare, scrambling ste
ms of rambling roses, and fences, neatly panelled or woven in willow.

  Following the paths, I wandered from one section to another, but I could not fathom the layout. Hedges that looked solid viewed straight on, sometimes revealed a diagonal passageway when viewed obliquely. Shrubberies were easy to wander into and near-impossible to escape from. Fountains and statues that I thought I had left well behind me, reappeared. I spent a lot of time stock still, looking around me in perplexity and shaking my head. Nature had made a maze of itself and was setting out deliberately to thwart me.

  Turning a corner, I came across the reticent, bearded man who had driven me from the station. ‘Maurice is what they call me,’ he said, reluctantly introducing himself.

  ‘How do you manage not to get lost?’ I wanted to know. ‘Is there a trick to it?’

  ‘Only time,’ he said, without looking up from his work. He was kneeling over an area of churned up soil, levelling it and pressing the earth around the roots of the plants.

  Maurice, I could tell, did not welcome my presence in the garden. I didn’t mind, being of a solitary nature myself. After that I made a point, whenever I saw him, of taking a path in the opposite direction, and I think he shared my discretion, for once or twice, catching a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye, I glanced up to see Maurice backing out of an entrance or making a sudden, divergent turn. In this way we successfully left each other in peace. There was ample room for us to avoid each other without any sense of constraint.

  Later that day I went to Miss Winter and she told me more about the household at Angelfield.

  The name of the Missus was Mrs Dunne, but to the children of the family she had always been the Missus, and she had been in the house it seemed for ever. This was a rarity: staff came and went quickly at Angelfield, and since departures were slightly more frequent than arrivals, the day came when she was the only indoors servant remaining. Technically the housekeeper, in reality she did everything. She scrubbed pots and lay fires like an underhousemaid; when it was time to make a meal she was cook and when it was time to serve it she was butler. Yet by the time the twins were born she was growing old. Her hearing was poor, her sight poorer, and although she didn’t like to admit it, there was much she couldn’t manage.