The thirteenth tale (20 page)

Before we parted, Aurelius took my hand and patted it in an
easy, old-fashioned manner. Then his massive frame glided gracefully up the
wide sweep of steps and he closed the heavy doors behind him.

Slowly I walked down the drive to the church, my mind full of
the stranger I had just met—met and befriended. It was most unlike me. And as I
passed through the lych-gate, I reflected that perhaps I was the stranger. Was
it just my imagination, or since meeting Miss Winter was I not quite myself?

GRAVES

I had left it too late for the light, and photographs were out
of the question. So I took my notebook out for my walk in the churchyard.
Angelfield was an old community but a small one, and there were not so very
many graves. I found John Digence, Gathered to the Garden of the Lord, and a
woman, Martha Dunne, Loyal Servant of our Lord, whose dates corresponded
closely enough with what I expected for the Missus. I copied the names, dates
and inscriptions into my notebook. One of the graves had fresh flowers on it, a
gay bunch of orange chrysanthemums, and I went closer to see who it was who was
remembered so warmly. It was Joan Mary Love, Never Forgotten.

Though I looked, I could not see the Angelfield name anywhere.
But it did not puzzle me for more than a minute. The family of the house would
not have ordinary graves in the churchyard. Their tombs would be grander
affairs, marked by effigies and with long histories carved into their marble
slabs. And they would be inside, in the chapel. The church was gloomy. The
ancient windows, narrow pieces of greenish glass held in a thick stone
framework of arches, let in a sepulchral light that weakly illuminated the pale
stone arches and columns, the whitened vaults between the black roof timbers
and the smooth polished wood of the pews. When my eyes had adjusted, I peered
at the memorial stones and monuments in the tiny chapel. Angelfields dead for
centuries all had their epitaphs here, line after loquacious line of encomium,
expensively carved into costly marble. Another day I would come back to
decipher the engravings of these earlier generations; for today it was only a
handful of names I was looking for.

With the death of George Angelfield, the family’s loquacity came
to an end. Charlie and Isabelle—for presumably it was they who decided—seemed
not to have gone to any great lengths in summing up their father’s life and
death for generations to come. Released from earthly sorrows, he is with his
Savior now, was the stone’s laconic message. Isabelle’s role in this world and
her departure from it were summed up in the most conventional terms: Much loved
mother and sister, she is gone to a better place. But I copied it into my
notebook all the same and did a quick calculation. Younger than me! Not so
tragically young as her husband, but still, not an age to die.

I almost missed Charlie’s. Having eliminated every other stone
in the chapel, I was about to give up, when my eye finally made out a small,
dark stone. So small was it, and so black, that it seemed designed for
invisibility, or at least insignificance. There was no gold leaf to give relief
to the letters so, unable to make them out by eye, I raised my hand and felt
the carving, Braille style, with my fingertips, one word at a time.

CHARLIE ANGELFIELD

HE IS GONE INTO THE DARK NIGHT.

WE SHALL NEVER SEE HIM MORE.

There were no dates.

I felt a sudden chill. Who had selected these words, I wondered?
Was it Vida Winter? And what was the mood behind them? It seemed to me that
there was room for a certain ambiguity in the expression. Was it the sorrow of
bereavement? Or the triumphant farewell of the survivors to a bad lot?

Leaving the church and walking slowly down the gravel drive to
the lodge gates, I felt a light, almost weightless scrutiny on my back.
Aurelius was gone, so what was it? The Angelfield ghost, perhaps? Or the
burned-out eyes of the house itself? Most probably it was just a deer, watching
me invisibly from the shadow of the woods.

‘It’s a shame,“ said my father in the shop that evening, ”that
you can’t come home for a few hours.“

‘I am home,“ I protested, feigning ignorance. But I knew it was
my mother he was talking about. The truth was that I couldn’t bear her tinny
brightness, nor the pristine paleness of her house. I lived in shadows, had
made friends with my grief, but in my mother’s house I knew my sorrow was
unwelcome. She might have loved a cheerful, chatty daughter, whose brightness
would have helped banish her own fears. As it was, she was afraid of my
silences. I preferred to stay away. ”I have so little time,“ I explained. ”Miss
Winter is anxious that we should press on with the work. And it’s only a few
weeks till Christmas, after all. I’ll be back again then.“

‘Yes,“ he said. ”It will be Christmas soon.“

He seemed sad and worried. I knew I was the cause, and I was
sorry I couldn’t do anything about it.

‘I’ve packed a few books to take back to Miss Winter’s with me.
I’ve put a note on the cards in the index.“

‘That’s fine. No problem.“

That night, drawing me out of sleep, a pressure on the edge of
my bed. The angularity of bone pressing against my flesh through the
bedclothes.

It is her! Come for me at last!

All I have to do is open my eyes and look at her. But fear
paralyzes me. What will she be like? Like me? Tall and thin with dark eyes? Or—
it is this I fear—has she come direct from the grave? What terrible thing is it
that I am about to join myself—rejoin myself—to?

The fear dissolves.

I have woken up.

The pressure through the blankets is gone, a figment of sleep. I
do not know whether I am relieved or disappointed.

I got up, repacked my things, and in the bleakness of the winter
dawn walked to the station for the first train north.

Middles

HESTER ARRIVES‘

When I left Yorkshire, November was going strong; by the time I
returned it was in its dying days, about to tilt into December.

December gives me headaches and diminishes my already small
appetite. It makes me restless in my reading. It keeps me awake at night with
its damp, chilly darkness. There is a clock inside me that starts to tick on
the first of December, measuring the days, the hours and the minutes, counting
down to a certain day, the anniversary of the day my life was made and then
unmade: my birthday. I do not like December.

This year the sense of foreboding was made worse by the weather.
A heavy sky hovered repressively over the house, casting us into an eternal dim
twilight. I arrived back to find Judith scurrying from room to room, collecting
desk lamps and standard lamps and reading lamps from guest rooms that were
never used, and arranging them in the library, the drawing room, my own rooms.
Anything to keep at bay the murky grayness that lurked in every corner, under
every chair, in the folds of the curtains and the pleats of the upholstery.

Miss Winter asked no questions about my absence, nor did she
tell me anything about the progression of her illness, but even after so short
an absence, her decline was clear to see. The cashmere wraps fell in apparently
empty folds around her diminished frame, and on her fingers the rubies and
emeralds seemed to have expanded, so thin had her hands become. The fine white
line that had been visible in her parting before I left had broadened; it crept
along each hair, diluting the metallic tones to a weaker shade of orange. But
despite her physical frailty, she seemed full of some force, some energy, that
overrode both illness and age and made her powerful. As soon as I presented
myself in the room, almost before I had sat down and taken out my notebook, she
began to speak, picking up the story where she had left off, as though it were
brimful in her and could not be contained a moment longer.

With Isabelle gone, it was felt in the village that something
should be done for the children. They were thirteen; it was not an age to be
left unattended; they needed a woman’s influence. Should they not be sent to
school somewhere? Though what school would accept children such as these? When
a school was found to be out of the question, it was decided that a governess
should be employed.

A governess was found. Her name was Hester. Hester Barrow. It
was not a pretty name, but then she was not a pretty girl.

Dr. Maudsley organized it all. Charlie, locked in his grief, was
scarcely aware of what was going on, and John-the-dig and the Missus, mere
servants in the house, were not consulted. The doctor approached Mr. Lomax, the
family solicitor, and between the two of them and with a hand from the bank
manager, all the arrangements were made. Then it was done.

Helpless, passive, we all shared in the anticipation, each with
our particular mix of emotion. The Missus was divided. She felt an instinctive
suspicion of this stranger who was to come into her domain, and connected with
this suspicion was the fear of being found wanting—for she had been in charge
for years and knew her limitations. She also felt hope. Hope that the new
arrival would instill a sense of discipline in the children and restore manners
and sanity to the house. In fact, so great was her desire for a settled and
well-run domestic life that in the advent of the governess’s arrival she took
to issuing orders, as though we were the sort of children who might comply.
Needless to say, we took no notice.

John-the-dig’s feelings were less divided, were in fact entirely
hostile. He would not be drawn into the Missus’s long wonderings about how
things would be, and refused by stony silence to encourage the optimism that
was ready to take root in her heart. “If she’s the right kind of person…” she
would say, or “There’s no knowing how much better things could be…” but he
stared out of the kitchen window and would not be drawn. When the doctor
suggested that he take the brougham to meet the governess at the station he was
downright rude. “I’ve not got the time to be traipsing across the county after
damned schoolmistresses,” he replied, and the doctor was obliged to make
arrangements to collect her himself. Since the incident with the topiary
garden, John had not been the same, and now, with the coming of this new
change, he spent hours alone, brooding over his own fears and concerns for the
future. This incomer meant a fresh pair of eyes, a fresh pair of ears, in a
house where no one had looked or listened properly for years. John-the-dig,
habituated to secrecy, foresaw trouble.

In our separate ways we all felt daunted. All except Charlie,
that is. When the day came, only Charlie was his usual self. Though he was
locked away and out of sight, his presence was nonetheless made known by the
thundering and clattering that shook the house from time to time, a din to
which we’d all become so accustomed that we scarcely even noticed. In his vigil
for Isabelle, the man had no notion of day or time, and the arrival of a
governess meant nothing to him.

We were idling that morning in one of the front rooms on the
first floor. A bedroom, you’d have called it, if the bed had been visible under
the pile of junk that had accumulated there the way junk does over the decades.
Emmeline was working away with her nails at the silver embroidery threads that
ran through the pattern of the curtains. When she succeeded in freeing one, she
surreptitiously put it in her pocket, ready to add later to the magpie stash
under her bed. But her concentration was broken. Someone was coming, and
whether she knew what that meant or not, she had been contaminated by the sense
of expectation that hung about the house.

It was Emmeline who first heard the brougham. From the window we
watched the new arrival alight, brush the creases out of her skirt with two
brisk strokes of her palms and look about her. She looked at the front door, to
her left, to her right, and then—I leaped back—up. Perhaps she took us for a
trick of the light or a window drape lifted by the breeze from a broken
windowpane. Whatever she saw, it can’t have been us.

But we saw her. Through Emmeline’s new hole in the curtain we
stared. We didn’t know what to think. Hester was of average height. Average
build. She had hair that was neither yellow nor brown. Skin the same color.
Coat, shoes, dress, hat: all in the same indistinct tint. Her face was devoid
of any distinguishing feature. And yet we stared. We stared at her until our
eyes ached. Every pore in her plain little face was illuminated. Something
shone in her clothes and in her hair. Something radiated from her luggage.
Something cast a glow around her person, like a lightbulb. Something made her
exotic.

We had no idea what it was. We’d never imagined the like of it
before.

We found out later, though.

Hester was clean. Scrubbed and soaped and rinsed and buffed and
polished all over.

You can imagine what she thought of Angelfield.

When she’d been in the house about a quarter of an hour she had
the Missus call us. We ignored it and waited to see what happened next. We
waited. And waited. Nothing happened. That was where she wrong-footed us for
the first time, had we only known it. All our expertise in hiding was useless
if she wasn’t going to come looking for us. And she did not come. We hung about
in the room, growing bored, then vexed by the curiosity that seeded itself in
us despite our resistance. We became attentive to the sounds from downstairs:
John-the-dig’s voice, the dragging of furniture, some banging and knocking.
Then it fell quiet. At lunchtime we were called and did not go. At six the
Missus called us again, “Come and have supper with your new governess,
children.” We stayed on in the room. No one came. There was the beginning of a
sense that the newcomer was a force to be reckoned with.