The thirteenth tale (17 page)

The next morning Maurice drove me to the station and I took the
train south.

THE ALMANACS

Where else to begin my research but at home, in the shop? I was
fascinated by the old almanacs. Since I was a child, any moment of boredom or
anxiety or fear would send me to these shelves to flick through the pages of
names and dates and annotations. Between these covers, past lives were
summarized in a few brutally neutral lines. It was a world where men were
baronets and bishops and ministers of parliament, and women were wives and
daughters. There was nothing to tell you whether these men liked kidneys for
breakfast, nothing to tell you whom they loved or what form their fear gave to
the shapes in the dark after they blew the candle out at night. There was
nothing personal at all. What was it, then, that moved me so in these sparse
annotations of the lives of dead men? Only that they were men, that they had
lived, that now they were dead.

Reading them, I felt a stirring in me. In me, but not of me.
Reading the lists, the part of me that was already on the other side woke and
caressed me.

I never explained to anyone why the almanacs meant so much to
me; I never even said I liked them. But my father took note of my preference,
and whenever volumes of the sort came up at auction, he made sure to get them.
And so it was that all the illustrious dead of the country, going back many
generations, were spending their afterlife tranquilly on the shelves of our
second floor. With me for company.

It was on the second floor, crouched in the window seat, that I
turned the pages of names. I had found Miss Winter’s grandfather George
Angelfield. He was not a baronet, nor a minister, nor a bishop, but still, here
he was. The family had aristocratic origins—there had once been a title, but a
few generations earlier there had been a split in the family: the title had
gone one way, the money and the property another. He was on the property side.
The almanacs tended to follow the titles, but still, the connection was close
enough to merit an entry, so here he was: Angelfield, George; his date of
birth; residing at Angelfield House in Oxfordshire; married to Mathilde Monnier
of Reims, France; one son, Charles. Tracing him through the almanacs for later
years, I found an amendment a decade later: one son, Charles; one daughter,
Isabelle. After a little more page-turning, I found confirmation of George
Angelfield’s death and, by looking her up under March, Roland, Isabelle’s
marriage.

For a moment it amused me to think that I had gone all the way
to Yorkshire to hear Miss Winter’s story, when all the time it was here, in the
almanacs, a few feet under my bed. But then I started thinking properly. What
did it prove, this paper trail? Only that such people as George and Mathilde
and their children, Charles and Isabelle, existed. There was nothing to say
that Miss Winter had not found them the same way I had, by flicking through a
book. These almanacs could be found in libraries all over the place. Anyone who
wanted could look through them. Might she not have found a set of names and
dates and embroidered a story around them to entertain herself?

Alongside these misgivings I had another problem. Roland March
had died, and with his death the paper trail for Isabelle came to an end. The
world of the almanac was a queer one. In the real world, families branched like
trees, blood mixed by marriage passed from one generation to the next, making
an ever-wider net of connections. Titles, on the other hand, passed from one
man to one man, and it was this narrow, linear progression that the almanac
liked to highlight. On each side of the title line were a few younger brothers,
nephews, cousins, who came close enough to fall within the span of the
almanac’s illumination. The men who might have been lord or baronet. And,
though it was not said, the men who still might, if the right string of
tragedies were to occur. But after a certain number of branchings in the family
tree, the names fell out of the margins and into the ether. No combination of
shipwreck, plague and earthquake would be powerful enough to restore these
third cousins to prominence. The almanac had its limits. So it was with
Isabelle. She was a woman; her babies were girls; her husband (not a lord) was
dead; her father (not a lord) was dead. The almanac cut her and her babies
adrift; she and they fell into the vast ocean of ordinary people, whose births
and deaths and marriages are, like their loves and fears and breakfast
preferences, too insignificant to be worth recording for posterity.

Charlie, though, was a male. The almanac could stretch itself—
just—to include him, though the dimness of insignificance was already casting
its shadow. Information was scant. His name was Charles Angelfield. He had been
born. He lived at Angelfield. He was not married. He was not dead. As far as
the almanac was concerned, this information was sufficient.

I took out one volume after another, found again and again the
same sketchy half-life. With every new tome I thought, This will be the year
they leave him out. But each year, there he was, still Charles Angelfield,
still of Angelfield, still unmarried. I thought again about what Miss Winter
had told me about Charlie and his sister, and bit my lip thinking about what
his long bachelorhood signified.

And then, when he would have been in his late forties, I found a
surprise. His name, his date of birth, his place of residence and a strange
abbreviation—Ldd—that I had never noticed before.

I turned to the table of abbreviations.

Ldd: legal decree of decease.

Turning back to Charlie’s entry, I stared at it for a long time,
frowning, as though if I looked hard enough, there would be revealed in the
grain or the watermark of the paper itself the elucidation of the mystery.

In this year he had been legally decreed to be dead. As far as I
understood, a legal decree of decease was what happened when a person
disappeared and after a certain time his family, for reasons of inheritance,
was allowed to assume that he was dead, though there was no proof and no body.
I had a feeling that a person had to be lost without trace for seven years
before he could be decreed dead. He might have died at any time in that period.
He might not even be dead at all, but only gone, lost or wandering, far from
everyone who had ever known him. Dead in law, but that didn’t necessarily mean
dead in person. What kind of life was it, I wondered, that could end in this
vague, unsatisfactory way? Ldd.

I closed the almanac, put it back in its position on the shelf
and went down to the shop to make cocoa.

‘What do you know about the legal procedures you have to take to
have someone declared dead?“ I called to my father while I stood over the pan
of milk on the stove.

‘No more than you do, I should think,“ came the answer.

Then he appeared in the doorway and handed me one of our
dog-eared customer cards. “This is the man to ask. Retired professor of law.
Lives in Wales now, but he comes here every summer for a browse and a walk by
the river. Nice fellow. Why don’t you write? You might ask whether he wants me
to hold that Justitiae Naturalis Principia for him at the same time.”

When I’d finished my cocoa, I went back to the almanac to find
out what else I could about Roland March and his family. His uncle had dabbled
in art and when I went to the art history section to follow this up, I learned
that his portraits, while now acknowledged to be mediocre, had been for a short
period the height of fashion. Mortimer’s English Provincial Portraiture
contained the reproduction of an early portrait by Lewis Anthony March,
entitled Roland, nephew of the artist. It is an odd thing to look into the face
of a boy who is not quite yet a man, in search of the features of an old woman,
his daughter. For some minutes I studied his fleshy, sensual features, his
glossy blond hair, the lazy set of his head.

Then I closed the book. I was wasting my time. Were I to look
all day and all night, I knew I would not find a trace of the twins he was
supposed to have fathered.

IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE BANBURY
HERALD

The next day I took the train to Banbury, to the offices of the
Banbury Herald.

It was a young man who showed me the archives. The word archive
might sound rather impressive to someone who has not had much to do with them,
but to me, who has spent her holidays for years in such places, it came as no
surprise to be shown into what was essentially a large, windowless basement
cupboard.

‘A house fire at Angelfield,“ I explained briefly, ”about sixty
years ago.“

The boy showed me the shelf where the holdings for the relevant
period were shelved.

‘I’ll lift the boxes for you, shall I?“

‘And the books pages, too, from about forty years ago, but I’m
not sure which year.“

‘Books pages? Didn’t know the Herald ewer had books pages.“ And
he moved his ladder, retrieved another set of boxes and placed them beside the
first one on a long table under a bright light.

‘There you are then,“ he said cheerily, and he left me to it.

The Angelfield fire, I learned, was probably caused by an
accident. It was not uncommon for people to stockpile fuel at the time, and it
was this that had caused the fire to take hold so fiercely. There had been no
one in the house but the two nieces of the owner, both of whom escaped and were
in hospital. The owner himself was believed to be abroad. (Believed to be ... I
wondered. I made a quick note of the dates—another six years were to elapse
before the ldd.) The column ended with some comments on the architectural
significance of the house, and it was noted that it was uninhabitable in its
current state.

I copied out the story and scanned headlines in the following
issues in case there were updates but, finding nothing, I put the papers away
and turned to the other boxes.

‘Tell me the truth,“ he had said. The young man in the
old-fashioned suit who had interviewed Vida Winter for the Banbury Herald forty
years ago. And she had never forgotten his words.

There was no trace of the interview. There was nothing even that
could properly be called a books page. The only literary items at all were
occasional book reviews under the heading “You might like to read…” by a
reviewer called Miss Jenkinsop. Twice my eye came to rest on Miss Winter’s name
in these paragraphs. Miss Jenkinsop had clearly read and enjoyed Miss Winter’s
novels; her praise was enthusiastic and just, if unscholarly in expression, but
it was plain she had never met their author and equally plain that she was not
the man in the brown suit.

I closed the last newspaper and folded it neatly in its box.

The man in the brown suit was a fiction. A device to snare me.
The fly with which a fisherman baits his line to draw the fish in. It was only
to be expected. Perhaps it was the confirmation of the existence of George and
Mathilde, Charlie and Isabelle that had raised my hopes. They at least were
real people; the man in the brown suit was not.

Putting my hat and gloves on, I left the offices of the Banbury
Herald and stepped out into the street.

As I walked along the winter streets looking for a cafe, I remembered
the letter Miss Winter had sent me. I remembered the words of the man in the
brown suit, and how they had echoed around the rafters of my rooms under the
eaves. Yet the man in the brown suit was a figment of her imagination. I should
have expected it. She was a spinner of yarns, wasn’t she? A storyteller. A
fabulist. A liar. And the plea that had so moved me—Tell me the truth—had been
uttered by a man who was not even real.

I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness of my
disappointment.

RUIN

From Banbury I took a bus. “Angelfield?” said the bus driver.
“No, there’s no service to Angelfield. Not yet, anyhow. Might be different when
the hotel’s built.”

‘Are they building there, then?“

‘Some old ruin they’re pulling down. Going to be a fancy hotel.
They might run a bus then, for the staff, but for now the best you can do is
get off at the Hare and Hounds on the Cheneys Road and walk from there. ’Bout a
mile, I reckon.“

There wasn’t much in Angelfield. A single street whose wooden
sign read, with logical simplicity, The Street. I walked past a dozen cottages,
built in pairs. Here and there a distinctive feature stood out—a large yew
tree, a children’s swing, a wooden bench—but for the most part each dwelling,
with its neatly embroidered thatch, its white gables and the restrained
artistry in its brickwork, resembled its neighbor like a mirror image.

The cottage windows looked out onto fields that were neatly
defined with hedges and studded here and there with trees. Farther away sheep
and cows were visible, and then a densely wooded area, beyond which, according
to my map, was the deer park. There was no pavement as such, but that hardly
mattered for there was no traffic, either. In fact I saw no sign of human life
at all until I passed the last cottage and came to a combined post office and
general store.

Two children in yellow mackintoshes came out of the shop and ran
down to the road ahead of their mother, who had stopped at the post-box. Small
and fair, she was struggling to stick stamps onto envelopes without dropping
the newspaper tucked under her arm. The older child, a boy, reached up to put
his sweet wrapper in the bin attached to a post at the roadside. He went to
take his sister’s wrapper, but she resisted. “I can do it! I can do it!” She
stood on tiptoe and stretched up her arm, ignoring her brother’s protestations,
then tossed the paper toward the mouth of the bin. A breeze caught it and
carried it across the road.