The thirteenth tale (15 page)

The doctor knew his wife was beautiful, but they had been
married too long for it to make any difference to him.

‘They think in the village that the girls are mentally
retarded.“

‘Surely not!“

‘It’s what Wilfred Bonner thinks, at least.“

She shook her head in wonderment. “He is afraid of them because
hey are twins. Poor Wilfred. It is just old-fashioned ignorance. Thank goodness
the younger generation is more understanding.”

The doctor was a man of science. Though he knew it was
statistically unlikely that there was any mental abnormality in the twins, he
could not rule it out until he had seen them. It did not surprise him, though,
that his wife, whose religion forbade her to believe ill of any-me, would take
for granted that the rumor was ill-founded gossip.

‘I’m sure you are right,“ he murmured with a vagueness that
meant he was sure she was wrong. He had given up trying to get her to believe
only what was true; she had been raised to the kind of religion that could
admit no difference between what was true and what was good.

‘What will you do, then?“ she asked him.

‘Go and see the family. Charles Angelfield is a bit of a hermit,
but he’ll have to see me if I go.“

Mrs. Maudsley nodded, which was her way of disagreeing with her
husband, though he didn’t know it. “What about the mother? What do you know of
her?”

‘Very little.“

And the doctor continued to think in silence, and Mrs. Maudsley
continued her sewing, and after a quarter of an hour had passed, the doctor
said, “Perhaps you might go, Theodora? The mother might sooner see another
woman than a man. What do you say?”

And so three days later Mrs. Maudsley arrived at the house and
knocked at the front door. Astonished to get no answer, she frowned— after all,
she had sent a note to say she was coming—and walked round to the back. The
kitchen door was ajar, so with a quick knock she went in. No one was there.
Mrs. Maudsley looked around. Three apples on the table, brown and wrinkled and
starting to collapse upon themselves, black dishcloth next to a sink piled high
with dirty plates, and the window so filthy that inside you could hardly tell
day from night. Her linty white nose sniffed the air. It told her everything
she needed to know. She pursed her lips, set her shoulders, took a tight grip
on the tortoiseshell handle of her bag and set off on her crusade. She went
from room to room looking for Isabelle, but on the way taking in the squalor,
the mess, the unkemptness that lurked everywhere.

The Missus tired easily, and she couldn’t manage the stairs very
well, and her sight was going, and she often thought she had cleaned things
when she hadn’t, or meant to clean them and then forgot, and to be honest, she
knew nobody really cared, so she mostly concentrated on feeding the girls, and
they were lucky she managed that much. So the house was dirty, and it was
dusty, and when a picture was knocked wonky it stayed wonky for a decade, and
when one day Charlie couldn’t find the paper bin in his study, he just dropped
the paper onto the floor in the place where the paper bin used to be, and it
soon occurred to him that it was less fuss to chuck it out once a year than to
do it once a week.

Mrs. Maudsley didn’t like what she saw at all. She frowned at
the half-closed curtains, and sighed at the tarnished silver, and shook her
head in amazement at the saucepans on the stairs and the sheet music that was
scattered all over the floor of the hallway. In the drawing room, she bent down
automatically to retrieve a playing card, the three of spades, that was lying
dropped or discarded in the middle of the floor, but when she looked around the
room for the rest of the pack, she was at a loss, so great was the disorder.
Glancing helplessly back at the card she became aware of the dust covering it
and, being a fastidious, white-gloved woman, was overwhelmed with the desire to
put it down, only where? For a few seconds she was paralyzed with anxiety, torn
between the desire to end the contact between her pristine glove and the dusty,
faintly sticky playing card, and her own unwillingness to put the card down in
a place that wasn’t the right one. Eventually, with a perceptible shudder of
the shoulders, she placed it on the arm of the leather armchair and walked with
relief out of the room.

The library seemed better. It was dusty, certainly, and the
carpet was threadbare, but the books themselves were in their places, which was
something. Yet even in the library, just when she was preparing herself to believe
that there remained some small feeling for order buried in this filthy, chaotic
family, she came across a makeshift bed. Tucked into a dark corner between two
sets of shelves, it was just a flea-ridden blanket and a filthy pillow, and at
first she took it for a cat’s bed. Then, looking again, she spotted the corner
of a book visible beneath the pillow. She drew it out. It was Jane Eyre.

From the library she passed to the music room, where she found
the same disorder she had seen elsewhere. The furniture was arranged bizarrely,
as though to facilitate the playing of hide-and-seek. A chaise lounge was
turned to face a wall, a chair was half hidden by a chest that had been dragged
from its place under the window—there was a broad sweep of carpet behind it
where the dust was less thick and the green color showed through more
distinctly. On the piano, a vase contained blackened, brittle stems, and around
it a neat circle of papery petals like ashes. Mrs. Maudsley reached her hand
toward one and picked it up; it crumbled, leaving a nasty yellow-gray stain
between her white-gloved fingers.

Mrs. Maudsley seemed to slump down onto the piano stool.

The doctor’s wife wasn’t a bad woman. She was sufficiently
convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch
everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up
with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to
notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means
that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

What was going on in her mind as she sat there on the piano
stool, staring into space? These were people who couldn’t keep their flower
vases topped up. No wonder their children were misbehaving! The extent of the
problem seemed suddenly to have been revealed to her through the dead flowers,
and it was in a distracted, absent fashion that she pulled off her gloves and
spread her fingers on the black and gray keys of the piano.

The sound that resounded in the room was the harshest, most
un-pianolike noise imaginable. This was in part because the piano had been
neglected, unplayed and untuned, for many years. It was also because the
vibration of the instrument’s strings was instantly accompanied by another
noise, equally unmelodic. It was a kind of a howling hiss, an irritated, wild
sort of a screech, like that of a cat whose tail has got under your feet.

Mrs. Maudsley was shaken entirely out of her reverie by it. On
hearing the yowl, she stared at the piano in disbelief and stood up, her hands
to her cheeks. In her bewilderment she had only the barest moment to register
that she was not alone.

There, rising from the chaise lounge, a slight figure in white—

Poor Mrs. Maudsley.

She had not the time to appreciate that the white-robed figure
was brandishing a violin, and that the violin was descending very quickly and
with great force toward her own head. Before she could take in any of this, the
violin made contact with her skull, blackness overwhelmed her and she fell,
unconscious, to the floor.

With her arms sprawled any old how, and her neat white
handkerchief still tucked inside her watch strap, she looked as though there
wasn’t a drop of life left in her. Little puffs of dust that had come up from
the carpet when she landed fell gently back down.

There she lay for a good half hour, until the Missus, back from
the farm where she had been to collect eggs, happened to glance in at the door
and see a dark shape where she hadn’t seen a dark shape before.

There was no sign of a figure in white.

As I transcribed from memory, Miss Winter’s voice seemed to fill
my room with the same degree of reality with which it had filled the library.
She had a way of speaking that engraved itself on my memory and was as reliable
as a phonograph recording. But at this point, where she said, “There was no
sign of a figure in white,” she had paused, and so now I paused, pencil
hovering above the page, as I considered what had happened next.

I had been engrossed in the story, and so it took me a moment to
re-focus my eye from the prone figure of the doctor’s wife in the story to the
storyteller herself. When I did I was dismayed. Miss Winter’s normal pallor had
given way to an ugly yellow-gray tint, and her frame, always rigid it must be
said, seemed at present to be girding itself against some invisible assault.
There was a trembling around her mouth, and I guessed that she was on the point
of losing the struggle to hold her lips in a firm line and that a repressed
grimace was close to winning the day.

I rose from my chair in alarm but had no idea what I ought to
do.

‘Miss Winter,“ I exclaimed helplessly, ”whatever is it?“

‘My wolf,“ I thought I heard her say, but the effort to speak
was enough to send her lips into a quiver. She closed her eyes, seemed to
struggle to measure her breathing. Just as I was on the point of running to
find Judith, Miss Winter regained control. The rise and fall of her chest
slowed, the tremors in her face ceased, and though she was still pale as death,
she opened her eyes and looked at me.

‘Better…“ she said weakly.

Slowly I returned to my chair.

‘I thought you said something about a wolf,“ I began.

‘Yes. That black beast that gnaws at my bones whenever he gets a
chance. He loiters in corners and behind doors most of the time, because he’s
afraid of these.“ She indicated the white pills on the table beside her. ”But
they don’t last forever. It’s nearly twelve and they are wearing off. He is sniffing
at my neck. By half past he will be digging his teeth and claws in. Until one,
when I can take another tablet and he will have to return to his corner. We are
always clockwatching, he and I. He pounces five minutes earlier every day. But
I cannot take my tablets five minutes earlier. That stays the same.“

‘But surely the doctor—“

‘Of course. Once a week, or once every ten days, he adjusts the
dose. Only never quite enough. He does not want to be the one to kill me, you
see. And so when it comes, it must be the wolf that finishes me off.“

She looked at me, very matter-of-fact, then relented.

‘The pills are here, look. And the glass of water. If I wanted
to, I could put an end to it myself. Whenever I chose. So do not feel sorry for
me. I have chosen this way because I have things to do.“

I nodded. “All right.”

‘So. Let’s get on and do them, shall we? Where were we?“

‘The doctor’s wife. In the music room. With the violin.“

And we continued our work.

Charlie wasn’t used to dealing with problems.

He had problems. Plenty of them—holes in the roof, cracked
windowpanes, pigeons moldering away in the attic rooms—but he ignored them. Or
perhaps was so far removed from the world that he just didn’t notice them. When
the water penetration got too bad he just closed up a room and started using
another one. The house was big enough, after all. One wonders whether in his
slow-moving mind he realized that other people actively maintained their homes.
But then, dilapidation was his natural environment. He felt at home in it.

Still, a doctor’s wife apparently dead in the music room was a
problem he couldn’t ignore. If it had been one of us… But an outsider. That was
another matter. Something had to be done, although he had no notion of what
that something might be, and he stared, stricken, at the doctor’s wife as she
put her hand to her throbbing head and moaned. He might be stupid, but he knew
what this meant. Calamity was coming.

The Missus sent John-the-dig for the doctor and in due course
the doctor arrived. And it seemed for a while that premonitions of disaster
were ill-founded, for it was found that the doctor’s wife was not badly hurt at
all, barely even concussed. She refused a tot of brandy, accepted tea and after
a short while was as right as rain. “It was a woman,” she said. “A woman in
white.”

‘Nonsense,“ said the Missus, at once reassuring and dismissive.
”There is no woman in white in the house.“

Tears glittered in Mrs. Maudsley’s brown eyes, but she was
adamant. “Yes, a woman, slightly built, there on the chaise lounge. She heard
the piano and rose up and—”

‘Did you see her for long?“ Dr. Maudsley asked.

‘No, it was just for a moment.“

‘Well then, you see? It cannot be,“ the Missus interrupted her,
and though her voice was sympathetic it was also firm. ”There is no woman in
white. You must have seen a ghost.“

And then for the first time, John-the-dig’s voice was heard.
“They do say that the house is haunted.”

For a moment the assembled group looked at the broken violin
abandoned on the floor, and considered the lump that was forming on Mrs.
Maudsley’s temple, but before anyone had time to respond to the theory,
Isabelle appeared in the doorway. Slim and willowy, she was wearing a pale
lemon dress; her haphazard topknot was unkempt and her eyes, though beautiful,
were wild.