The thirteenth tale (27 page)

On the first day of silence, and as if nothing had ever happened
to interrupt it, the house picked up again its long, slow project of decay.
Small things first: Dirt began to seep from every crevice in every object in
every room. Surfaces secreted dust. Windows covered themselves with the first
fine layer of grime. All of Hester’s changes had been superficial. They
required daily attention to be maintained. And as the Missus’s cleaning
schedules at first wavered, then crashed, the real, permanent nature of the
house began to reassert itself. The time came when you couldn’t pick anything
up without feeling the old cling of grime on your fingers.

Objects, too, went quickly back to their old ways. The keys were
first to go walkabout. Overnight they slipped themselves out of locks and off
keyrings, then they gathered together in dusty companionship in the cavity
beneath a loose floorboard. Silver candlesticks, while they still had their
gleam of Hester’s polish, made their way from the drawing room mantelpiece to
Emmeline’s stash of treasure under the bed. Books left their library shelves
and took themselves upstairs, where they rested in corners and under sofas.
Curtains took to drawing and closing themselves. Even the furniture made the
most of the lack of supervision to move about. A sofa inched forward from its
place against the wall, a chair shifted two feet to the left. All evidence of the
house ghost reasserting herself.

A roof in the process of being repaired gets worse before it
gets better. Some of the holes left by the roofer were larger than the ones he
had been called in to mend. It was all right to lie on the floor of the attic and
feel the sunshine on your face, but rain was another matter. The floorboards
began to soften, then water dripped through into the rooms below. There were
places you knew not to tread, where the floor sagged precariously beneath your
feet. Soon it would collapse and you would be able to see straight through into
the room below. And how long before that room’s floor gave way and you would
see into the library? And could the library floor give way? Would it one day be
possible to stand in the cellars and look up through four floors of rooms to
the sky? Water, like God, moves in mysterious ways. Once inside a house, it
obeys the force of gravity indirectly. Inside walls and under floors it finds
secret gullies and runways; it seeps and trickles in unexpected directions;
surfaces in the most unlikely places. All around the house were cloths to soak
up the wet, but no one ever wrung them out; saucepans and bowls were placed
here and there to catch drips, but they overflowed before anyone remembered to
change them. The constant wet-less brought the plaster off the walls and was
eating into the mortar. In the attic, there were walls so unsteady that with
one hand you could rock them like a loose tooth. And the twins in all of this?

It was a serious wound that Hester and the doctor had inflicted.
Of course things would never be the same again. The twins would always hare a
scar, and the effects of the separation would never be entirely eradicated. Yet
they felt the scar differently. Adeline after all had fallen quickly into a
state of fugue once she understood what Hester and the doctor were about. She
lost herself almost at the moment she lost her twin and had no recollection of
the time passed away from her. As far as she knew, the blackness that had been
interposed between losing her twin and finding her again might have been a year
or a second. Not that it mattered now. For it was over, and she had come to
life again.

For Emmeline, things were different. She had not had the relief
of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was
agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before
anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so
much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend.
There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain
but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able,
for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief. In short, Emmeline
adapted to her twin’s absence. She learned how to exist apart.

Yet still they reconnected and were twins again. Though Emmeline
was not the same twin as before, and this was something Adeline did not
immediately know.

At the beginning there was only the delight of reunion. They
were inseparable. Where one went, the other followed. In the topiary gardens
they circled around the old trees, playing endless games of
now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t, a repetition of their recent experience of loss
and rediscovery that Adeline never seemed to tire of. For Emmeline, the novelty
began gradually to wear off. Some of the old antagonism crept in. Emmeline
wanted to go one way, Adeline the other, so they fought. And as before, it was
usually Emmeline who gave in. In her new, secret self, she minded this.

Though Emmeline had once been fond of Hester, she didn’t miss
her now. During the experiment her affection had waned. She knew, after all,
that it was Hester who had separated her from her sister. And not only that,
but Hester had been so taken up with her reports and her scientific
consultations that, perhaps without realizing it, she had neglected Emmeline.
During that time, finding herself in unaccustomed solitude, Emmeline had found
ways of distracting herself from her sorrow. She discovered amusements and
entertainments that she grew to enjoy for their own sake. Games that she did
not expect to give up just because her sister was back.

So it was that on the third day after the reunion, Emmeline
abandoned the lost-and-found game in the topiary garden and wandered off to the
billiards room, where she kept a pack of cards. Lying on her stomach in the
middle of the baize table, she began her game. It was a version of solitaire,
but the simplest, most childish kind. Emmeline won every time; the game was
designed so that she couldn’t fail. And every time she was delighted.

Halfway through a game, she tilted her head. She couldn’t
exactly hear it, but her inner ear, which was tuned constantly to her twin,
told her Adeline was calling her. Emmeline ignored it. She was busy. She could
see Adeline later. When she had finished her game.

An hour later, when Adeline came storming into the room, eyes
screwed tight with rage, there was nothing Emmeline could do to defend herself.
Adeline clambered onto the table and, hysterical with fury, launched herself at
Emmeline.

Emmeline did not raise a finger to defend herself. Nor did she
cry. She made not a sound, neither during the attack nor when it was all over.

When Adeline’s rage was spent, she stood for a few minutes
watch-g her sister. Blood was seeping into the green baize. Playing cards ere
scattered everywhere. Emmeline was curled into a ball, and her shoulders were
jerkily rising and falling with her breath. Adeline turned her back and walked
away.

Emmeline remained where she was, on the table, until John came
to find her hours later. He took her to the Missus, who washed the blood out of
her hair, put a compress on her eye and treated her bruises with witch hazel.
“This wouldn’t have happened when Hester was here,” she commented. “I do wish I
knew when she was coming back.”

‘She won’t be coming back,“ John said, trying to contain his
annoyance. He didn’t like to see the child like this either.

‘But I don’t see why she would have gone like that. Without a
word. Whatever can have happened? Some emergency, I suppose. With her family…“

John shook his head. He’d heard this a dozen times, this idea
the Missus clung to, that Hester would be coming back. The whole village knew
she would not come back. The Maudsleys’ servant had heard everything. She
professed to have seen it, too, and more besides, and by now it was impossible
that there was a single adult in the village who did not know for a fact that
the plain-faced governess had been carrying on an adulterous affair with the
doctor.

It was inevitable that one day rumors of Hester’s “behavior” (a
village euphemism for misbehavior) should reach the ears of the Missus. At
first she was scandalized. She refused to entertain the idea that Hester—her
Hester—could have done such a thing. But when she reported angrily to John what
was being said, he only confirmed it. He had been at the doctor’s that day, he
reminded her, collecting the child. He had heard it directly from the
housemaid. On the very day it occurred. And besides, why would Hester have left
so suddenly, without warning, if something out of the ordinary hadn’t occurred?

‘Her family,“ the Missus stammered, ”an emergency…“

‘Where’s the letter, then? She’d have written, wouldn’t she, if
she meant to come back? She’d have explained. Have you had a letter?“

The Missus shook her head.

‘Well then,“ finished John, unable to keep the satisfaction from
his voice, ”she’s done something that she didn’t ought to, and she won’t be
coming back. She’s gone for good. Take it from me.“

The Missus went round and around it in her head. She didn’t know
what to believe. The world had become a very confusing place.

GONE!

Only Charlie was unaffected. There were changes, of course. The
proper meals that under Hester’s regime had been placed outside the door at
breakfast, lunch and dinner became occasional sandwiches, a cold chop and a
tomato, a bowl of congealed scrambled egg, appearing at unpredictable intervals,
whenever the Missus remembered. It didn’t make any difference to Charlie. If he
felt hungry and it was there, he might eat a mouthful of yesterday’s chop, or a
dry end of bread, but if it isn’t there he wouldn’t, and his hunger didn’t
bother him. He had a more powerful hunger to worry about. It was the essence of
his life and something that Hester, in her arrival and in her departure, had
not changed.

Yet change did come for Charlie, though it had nothing to do
with Hester.

From time to time a letter would come to the house, and from
time to time someone would open it. A few days after John-the-dig’s comment
about there having been no letter from Hester, the Missus, finding herself in
the hall, noticed a small pile of letters gathering dust on the mat under the
letter box. She opened them.

One from Charlie’s banker: was he interested in an investment
opportunity… ?

The second was an invoice from the builders for the work done on
the roof.

Was the third from Hester?

No. The third was from the asylum. Isabelle was dead.

The Missus stared at the letter. Dead! Isabelle! Could it be
true? Influenza, the letter said.

Charlie would have to be told, but the Missus quailed at the
prospect. Better talk to Dig first, she resolved, putting the letters aside.
But later, when John was sitting at his place at the kitchen table and she was
topping up his cup with fresh tea, there remained no trace of the letter in her
mind. It had joined those other, increasingly frequent, lost moments, lived and
felt but unrecorded and then lost. Nevertheless, a few days later, passing
through the hall with a tray of burnt toast and bacon, she mechanically put the
letters on the tray with the food, though she had no memory at all of their
contents.

And then the days passed and nothing seemed to happen at all,
except that the dust got thicker, and the grime accumulated on the windowpanes,
and the playing cards crept farther and farther from their box in the drawing
room, and it became easier and easier to forget that there had ever been a
Hester.

It was John-the-dig who realized in the silence of the days that
something had happened.

He was an outdoors man and not domesticated. Nevertheless he
knew that there comes a time when cups cannot be made to do for one more cup of
tea without being first washed, and he knew moreover that a plate that has held
raw meat cannot be used straight after for cooked. He saw how things were going
with the Missus; he was no fool. So when the pile of dirty plates and cups
piled up, he would set to and do the washing up. It was an odd thing to see him
at the sink in his Wellington boots and his cap, so clumsy with the cloth and
china where he was so adroit with his terra-cotta pots and tender plants. And
it came to his attention that the number of cups and plates was diminishing.
Soon there would not be enough. Where was the missing crockery? He thought
instantly of the Missus making her haphazard way upstairs with a plate for
Master Charlie. Had he ever seen her return an empty plate to the kitchen? No.

He went upstairs. Outside the locked door, plates and cups were
arranged in a long queue. The food, untouched by Charlie, was providing a fine
feast for the flies that buzzed over it, and there was a powerful, unpleasant
smell. How many days had the Missus been leaving food here without noticing
that the previous day’s was still untouched? He toted up the number of plates
and cups and frowned. That is when he knew.

He did not knock at the door. What was the point? He had to go
to his shed for a piece of timber strong enough to use as a battering ram. The
noise of it against the oak, the creaking and smashing as metal hinges tore
away from wood, was enough to bring us all, even the Missus, to the door.

When the battered door fell open, half broken off its hinges, we
could hear buzzing flies, and a terrible stench billowed out, knocking Emmeline
and the Missus back a few steps. Even John put his hand to his mouth and turned
a shade whiter. “Stay back,” he ordered as he entered the room. A few paces
behind, I followed him.