The thirteenth tale (21 page)

Later came the sound of the household getting ready for bed.
Footsteps on the stairs, the Missus, saying, “I hope you’ll be comfortable,
Miss,” and the voice of the governess, steel in velvet, “I’m sure I will, Mrs.
Dunne. Thank you for all your trouble.”

‘About the girls, Miss Barrow-—“

‘Don’t you worry about them, Mrs. Dunne. They’ll be all right.
Good night.“

And after the sound of the Missus’s feet shuffling cautiously
down the stairs, all was quiet.

Night fell and the house slept. Except us. The Missus’s attempts
to teach us that nighttime was for sleeping had failed as all her lessons had
failed, and we had no fear of the dark. Outside the governess’s door we
listened and heard nothing but the faint scratch scratch of a mouse under the
boards, so we went on downstairs, to the larder.

The door would not open. The lock had never been used in our
lifetime, but tonight it betrayed itself with a trace of fresh oil.

Emmeline waited patiently, blankly, for the door to open, as she
had always waited before. Confident that in a moment there would be bread and
butter and jam for the taking.

But there was no need to panic. The Missus’s apron pocket.
That’s where the key would be. That’s where the keys always were: a ring of
rusted keys, unused, for doors and locks and cupboards all over the house, and
any amount of fiddling to know which key matched which lock.

The pocket was empty.

Emmeline stirred, wondered distantly at the delay.

The governess was shaping up into a real challenge. But she
wouldn’t catch us that way. We would go out. You could always get into one of
the cottages for a snack.

The handle of the kitchen door turned, then stopped. No amount
of tugging and jiggling could free it. It was padlocked.

The broken window in the drawing room had been boarded up, and
the shutters secured in the dining room. There was only one other chance. To
the hall and the great double doors we went. Emmeline, bewildered, padded along
behind. She was hungry. Why all this fuss with doors and windows? How long
before she could fill her tummy with food? A shaft of moonlight, tinted blue by
the colored glass in the hall windows, was enough to highlight the huge bolts,
heavy and out of reach, that had been oiled and slid into place at the top of
the double doors.

We were imprisoned.

Emmeline spoke. “Yum yum,” she said. She was hungry. And when
Emmeline was hungry, Emmeline had to be fed. It was as simple as that. We were
in a fix. It was a long time coming, but eventually Emmeline’s poor little
brain realized that the food she longed for could not be had. A look of
bewilderment came into her eyes, and she opened her mouth and wailed.

The sound of her cry carried up the stone staircase, turned into
the corridor to the left, rose up another flight of stairs and slipped under
the door of the new governess’s bedroom.

Soon another noise was added to it. Not the blind shuffle of the
Missus, but the smart, metronomic step of Hester Barrow’s feet. A brisk,
unhurried click, click, click. Down a set of stairs, along a corridor, to the
gallery.

I took refuge in the folds of the long curtains just before she
emerged onto the galleried landing. It was midnight. At the top of the stairs
she stood, a compact little figure, neither fat nor thin, set on a sturdy pair
of legs, the whole topped by that calm and determined countenance. In her
firmly belted blue dressing gown and with her hair neatly brushed, she looked
for all the world as though she slept sitting up and ready for morning. Her
hair was thin and stuck flat to her head, her face was lumpen and her nose was
pudgy. She was plain, if not worse than plain, but plainness on Hester had not
remotely the same effect that it might on any other woman. She drew the eye.

Emmeline, at the foot of the stairs, had been sobbing with
hunger a moment ago, yet the instant Hester appeared in all her glory, she
stopped crying and stared, apparently placated, as though it were a cakestand
piled high with cake that had appeared before her.

‘How nice to see you,“ said Hester, coming down the stairs.
”Now, who are you? Adeline or Emmeline?“

Emmeline, openmouthed, was silent.

‘No matter,“ the governess said. ”Would you like some supper?
And where is your sister? Would she like some, too?“

‘Yum,“ said Emmeline, and I didn’t know if it was the word
supper or Hester herself who had provoked it.

Hester looked around, seeking the other twin. The curtain
appeared to her as just a curtain, for after a cursory glance she turned all
her attention to Emmeline. “Come with me.” She smiled. She drew a key out of
her blue pocket. It was a clean blue-silver, buffed to a high shine, and it
glinted tantalizingly in the blue light.

It did the trick. “Shiny,” Emmeline pronounced and, without
knowing what it was or the magic it could work, she followed the key—and Hester
with it—back through the cold corridors to the kitchen.

In the folds of the curtain my hunger pangs gave way to anger.
Hester and her key! Emmeline! It was like the perambulator all over again. It
was love.

That was the first night and it was Hester’s victory.

The grubbiness of the house did not transfer itself to our
pristine governess the way one might have expected. Instead it was the other
way around. The few rays of light, drained and dusty, that managed to penetrate
the uncleaned windows and the heavy curtains seemed always to fall on Hester.
She gathered them to herself and reflected them back into the gloom, refreshed
and vitalized by their contact with her. Little by little the gleam extended
from Hester herself to the house. On the first full day it was just her own
room that was affected. She took the curtains down and plunged them into a tub
of soapy water. She pegged them on the line where the sun and wind woke up the
unsuspected pattern of pink and yellow roses. While they were drying, she
cleaned the window with newspaper and vinegar to let the light in, and when she
could see what she was doing, she scrubbed the room from floor to ceiling. By
nightfall she had created a little haven of cleanliness within those four
walls. And that was just the beginning.

With soap and with bleach, with energy and with determination,
she imposed hygiene on that house. Where for generations the inhabitants had
lumbered half-seeing and purposeless, circling after nothing but their own
squalid obsessions, Hester came as a spring-cleaning miracle. For thirty years
the pace of life indoors had been measured by the slow movement of the motes of
dust caught in an occasional ray of weary sunlight. Now Hester’s little feet
paced out the minutes and the seconds, and with a vigorous swish of a duster,
the motes were gone.

After cleanliness came order, and the house was first to feel
the changes. Our new governess did a very thorough tour. She went from bottom
to top, tutting and frowning on every floor. There was not a single cupboard or
alcove that escaped her attention; with pencil and notebook in hand, she
scrutinized every room, noting damp patches and rattling windows, testing doors
and floorboards for squeaks, trying old keys in old locks, and labeling them.
She left doors locked behind her. Though it was only a first “going over,” a
preparatory stage to the main restoration, nevertheless she made a change in
every room she entered: a pile of blankets in a corner folded and left tidily
on a chair; a book picked up and tucked under her arm to be returned later to
the library; the line of a curtain set straight. All this done with noticeable
haste but without the slightest impression of hurry. It seemed she had only to
cast her eye about a room for the darkness in it to recede, for the chaos to
begin shamefacedly to put itself in order, for the ghosts to beat a retreat. In
this manner, every room was Hestered.

The attic, it is true, did stop her in her tracks. Her jaw
dropped and she looked aghast at the state of the roof cavity. But even in this
chaos she was invincible. She gathered herself together, tightening her lips,
and scratched and scribbled away at her page with even greater vigor. The very
next day, a builder came. We knew him from the village—an unhurried man with a
strolling pace. In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a
rest before the next consonant. He kept six or seven jobs going at once and
rarely finished any of them; he spent his working days smoking cigarettes and
eyeing the job in hand with a fatalistic shake of the head. He climbed our
stairs in his typical lazy fashion, but after he’d been five minutes with
Hester we heard his hammer going nineteen to the dozen. She had galvanized him.

Within a few days there were mealtimes, bedtimes, getting-up
times. A few days more and there were clean shoes for indoors, clean boots for
out. Not only that, but the silk dresses were cleaned, mended, made to fit and
hung away for some mythical “best,” and new dresses in navy and green cotton
poplin with white sashes and collars appeared for everyday.

Emmeline thrived under the new regime. She was well fed at
regular hours, allowed to play—under tight supervision—with Hester’s shiny
keys. She even developed a passion for baths. She struggled at first, yelled
and kicked as Hester and the Missus stripped her and lowered her into the tub,
but when she saw herself in the mirror afterward, saw herself clean and with
her hair neatly braided and tied with a green bow, her mouth opened and she
fell into another of her trances. She liked being shiny. Whenever Emmeline was
in Hester’s presence she used to study her face on the sly, on the lookout for
a smile. When Hester did smile—it was not infrequent—Emmeline gazed at her face
in delight. Before long she learned to smile back.

Other members of the household flourished, too. The Missus had
her eyes examined by the doctor, and with much complaining was taken to a
specialist. On her return she could see again. The Missus was so pleased at
seeing the house in its new state of cleanliness that all the years she’d lived
in a state of grayness fell away from her, and she was rejuvenated sufficiently
to join Hester in this brave new world. Even John-the-dig, who obeyed Hester’s
orders morosely and kept his dark eyes always firmly averted from her bright,
all-seeing ones, could not resist the positive effect of her energy in the
household. Without a word to anyone, he took up his shears and entered the
topiary garden for the first time since the catastrophe. There he joined his
efforts to those already being made by nature to mend the violence of the past.

Charlie was less directly influenced. He kept out of her way and
that suited both of them. She had no desire to do anything other than her job,
and her job was us. Our minds, our bodies and our souls, yes, but our guardian
was outside her jurisdiction, and so she left him alone. She was no Jane Eyre
and he was no Mr. Rochester. In the face of her spruce energy he retreated to
the old nursery rooms on the second floor behind a firmly locked door, where he
and his memories festered together in squalor. For him the Hester effect was
limited to an improvement in his diet and a firmer hand over his finances,
which, under the honest but flimsy control of the Missus, had been plundered by
unscrupulous traders and businesspeople. Neither of these changes for the good
did he notice, and if he had noticed them I doubt he would have cared.

But Hester did keep the children under control and out of sight,
and had he given it any thought he would have been grateful for this. Under
Hester’s reign there was no cause for hostile neighbors to come complaining
about the twins, no imperative to visit the kitchen and have a sandwich made by
the Missus, above all, no need to leave, even for a minute, that realm of the
imagination that he inhabited with Isabelle, only with Isabelle, always with
Isabelle. What he gave up in territory, he gained in freedom. He never heard
Hester; he never saw her; the thought of her never once entered his head. She
was entirely satisfactory.

Hester had triumphed. She might have looked like a potato, but
there was nothing that girl couldn’t do, once she put her mind to it.

Miss Winter paused, her eyes set fixedly on the corner of the
room, where her past presented itself to her with more reality than the present
and me. At the corners of her mouth and eyes flickered half-expressions of
sorrow and distress. Aware of the thinness of the thread that connected her to
her past, I was anxious not to break it, but equally anxious for her not to
stop her story.

The pause lengthened.

‘And you?“ I prompted softly. ”What about you?“

‘Me?“ She blinked vaguely. ”Oh, I liked her. That was the
trouble.“

‘Trouble?“

She blinked again, shuffled in her seat and looked at me with a
new, sharp gaze. She had cut the thread.

‘I think that’s enough for today. You can go now.“

THE BOX OF LIVES

With the story of Hester, I fell quickly back into my routine.
In the mornings I listened to Miss Winter tell me her story, hardly bothering
now with my notebook. Later in my room, with my reams of paper, my twelve red
pencils and my trusty sharpener, I transcribed what I had memorized. As the
words flowed from the point of my pencil onto the page, they conjured up Miss
Winter’s voice in my ear; later, when I read aloud what I had written, I felt
my face rearranging itself into her expressions. My left hand rose and fell in
mimicry of her emphatic gestures, while my right lay, as though maimed, in my
lap. The words turned to pictures in my head. Hester, clean and neat and surrounded
by a silvery gleam, an all-body halo that grew broader all the time,
encompassing first her room, then the house, then its inhabitants. The Missus
transformed from a slow-moving figure in darkness to one whose eyes darted
about, bright with seeing. And Emmeline, under the spell of Hester’s shiny
aura, allowing herself to be changed from a dirty, malnourished vagabond into a
clean, affectionate and plump little girl. Hester cast her light even into the
topiary garden, where it shone onto the ravaged branches of the yews and
brought forth fresh green growth. There was Charlie, of course, lumbering in
the darkness outside the circle, heard but not seen. And John-the-dig, the
strangely named gardener, brooding on its perimeter, reluctant to be drawn into
the light. And Adeline, the mysterious and dark-hearted Adeline.