The thirteenth tale (38 page)

At Miss Winter’s house I never looked at the clock. For seconds
I had words, minutes were lines of pencil script. Eleven words to the line,
twenty-three lines to the page was my new chronometry. At regular intervals I
stopped to turn the handle of the pencil sharpener and watch curls of
lead-edged wood dangle their way to the wastepaper basket; these pauses marked
my “hours.”

I was so preoccupied by the story I was hearing, writing, that I
had no wish for anything else. My own life, such as it was, had dwindled to
nothing. My daytime thoughts and my nighttime dreams were peopled by figures
not from my world but from Miss Winter’s. It was Hester and Emmeline, Isabelle
and Charlie, who wandered through my imagination, and the place to which my
thoughts turned constantly was Angelfield.

In truth I was not unwilling to abdicate my own life. Plunging
deep into Miss Winter’s story was a way of turning my back on my own. Yet one
cannot simply snuff oneself out in that fashion. For all my willed blindness, I
could not escape the knowledge that it was December. In the back of my mind, on
the edge of my sleep, in the margins of the pages I filled so frenetically with
script, I was aware that December was counting down the days, and I felt the
anniversary crawling closer all the time.

On the day after the night of the tears, I did not see Miss
Winter. She stayed in bed, seeing only Judith and Dr. Clifton. This was
convenient. I had not slept well myself. But the following day she asked for
me. I went to her plain little room and found her in bed.

Her eyes seemed to have grown larger in her face. She wore not a
trace of makeup. Perhaps her medication was at its peak of effectiveness, for
there was a tranquility about her that seemed new. She did not smile at me, but
when she looked up as I entered, there was kindness in her eyes.

‘You don’t need your notebook and pencil,“ she said. ”I want you
to do something else for me today.“

‘What?“

Judith came in. She spread a sheet on the floor, then brought
Miss Winter’s chair in from the adjoining room and lifted her into it. In the
center of the sheet she positioned the chair, angling it so that Miss Winter
could see out of the window. Then she tucked a towel around Miss Winter’s
shoulders and spread her mass of orange hair over it.

Before she left she handed me a pair of scissors. “Good luck,”
she said with a smile.

‘But what am I supposed to do?“ I asked Miss Winter.

‘Cut my hair, of course.“

‘Cut your hair?“

‘Yes. Don’t look like that. There’s nothing to it.“

‘But I don’t know how.“

‘Just take the scissors and cut.“ She sighed. ”I don’t care how
you do it. I don’t care what it looks like. Just get rid of it.“

‘But I—“

“Please.”

Reluctantly I took up position behind her. After two days in
bed, her hair was a tangle of orange, wiry threads. It was dry to the touch, so
dry I almost expected it to crackle, and punctuated with gritty little knots.

‘I’d better brush it first.“

The knots were numerous. Though she spoke not a word of
reproach, I felt her flinch at every brushstroke. I put the brush down; it
would be kinder to simply cut the knots out.

Tentatively I made the first cut. A few inches off the ends,
halfway down her back. The blades sheared cleanly through the hair, and the
clippings fell to the sheet.

‘Shorter than that,“ Miss Winter said mildly.

‘To here?“ I touched her shoulders.

‘Shorter.“

I took a lock of hair and snipped at it nervously. An orange
snake slithered to my feet, and Miss Winter began to speak.

I remember a few days after the funeral, I was in Hester’s old
room. Not for any special reason. I was just standing there, by the window,
staring at nothing. My fingers found a little ridge in the curtain. A tear that
she had mended. Hester was a very neat needlewoman. But there was a bit of
thread that had come loose at the end. And in an idle, rather absent sort of
way, I began to worry at it. I had no intention of pulling it, I had no
intention of any sort, really… But all of a sudden, there it was, loose in my
fingers. The thread, the whole length of it, zigzagged with the memory of the
stitches. And the hole in the curtain gaping open. Now it would start to fray.

John never liked having Hester at the house. He was glad she
went. But the fact remained: If Hester had been there, John would not have been
on the roof. If Hester had been there, no one would have meddled with the
safety catch. If Hester had been there, that day would have dawned like any
other day, and as on any other day, John would have gone about his business in
the garden. When the bay window cast its afternoon shadow over the gravel,
there would have been no ladder, no rungs, no John sprawled on the ground to be
taken in by its chill. The day would have come and gone like any other, and at
the end of it John would have gone to bed and slept soundly, without even a
dream of falling through the empty air.

If Hester had been there.

I found that fraying hole in the curtain utterly unbearable.

I had been snipping at Miss Winter’s hair all the time she was
talking, and when it was level with her earlobes, I stopped.

She lifted a hand to her head and felt the length.

‘Shorter,“ she said.

I picked up the scissors again and carried on.

The boy still came every day. He dug and weeded and planted and
mulched. I supposed he kept coming because of the money he was owed. But when
the solicitor gave me some cash—“To keep you going till your uncle gets
back”—and I paid the boy, he still kept coming. I watched him from the upstairs
windows. More than once he looked up in my direction and I jumped out of view,
but on one occasion he caught sight of me, and when he did, he waved. I did not
wave back.

Every morning he brought vegetables to the kitchen door,
sometimes with a skinned rabbit or a plucked hen, and every afternoon he came
to collect the peelings for the compost. He lingered in the doorway, and now
that I had paid him, more often than not he had a cigarette between his lips.

I had finished John’s cigarettes, and it annoyed me that the boy
could smoke and I couldn’t. I never said a word about it, but one day, shoulder
against the door frame, he caught me eyeing the pack of cigarettes in his
breast pocket.

‘Swap you one for a cup of tea,“ he said.

He came into the kitchen—it was the first time he had actually
come in since the day John died—and sat in John’s chair, elbows on the table. I
sat in the chair in the corner, where the Missus used to sit. We drank our tea
in silence and exhaled cigarette smoke that rose upward toward the dingy
ceiling in lazy clouds and spirals. When we had taken our last drag and stubbed
the cigarettes out on our saucers, he rose without a word, walked out of the
kitchen and returned to his work. But the next day, when he knocked with the
vegetables, he walked straight in, sat in John’s chair and tossed a cigarette
across to me before I had even put the kettle on.

We never spoke. But we had our habits.

Emmeline, who never rose before lunchtime, sometimes spent the
afternoons outdoors looking on as the boy did his work. I scolded her about it.
“You’re the daughter of the house. He’s a gardener. For God’s sake, Emmeline!”
But it made no difference. She would smile her slow smile at anyone who caught
her fancy. I watched them closely, mindful of what the Missus had told me about
men who couldn’t see Isabelle without wanting to touch her. But the boy showed
no indication of wanting to touch Emmeline, though he spoke kindly to her and
liked to make her laugh. I couldn’t be easy in my mind about it, though.

Sometimes from an upstairs window I would watch the two of them
together. One sunny day I saw her lolling on the grass, head on hand, supported
by her elbow. It showed the rise from her waist to her hips. He turned his head
to answer something she said and while he looked at her, she rolled onto her
back, raised a hand and brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead. It was
a languorous, sensuous movement that made me think she would not mind it if he
did touch her.

But when the boy had finished what he was saying, he turned his
back to Emmeline as though he hadn’t seen and continued his work.

The next morning we were smoking in the kitchen. I broke our
usual silence.

‘Don’t touch Emmeline,“ I told him.

He looked surprised. “I haven’t touched Emmeline.”

‘Good. Well, don’t.“

I thought that was that. We both took another drag on our
cigarettes and I prepared to lapse back into silence, but after exhaling, he
spoke again. “I don’t want to touch Emmeline.”

I heard him. I heard what he said. That curious little
intonation. I heard what he meant.

I took a drag of my cigarette and didn’t look at him. Slowly I
exhaled. I didn’t look at him.

‘She’s kinder than you are,“ he said.

My cigarette wasn’t even half finished, but I stubbed it out. I
strode to the kitchen door and flung it open.

In the doorway he paused level with me. I stood stiffly, staring
straight ahead at the buttons on his shirt.

His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. His voice
was a murmur. “Be kind, Adeline.”

Stung to anger I lifted my eyes up, meaning to fire daggers at
him. But I was startled by the tenderness in his face. For a moment I was…
confused.

He took advantage. Raised his hand. Was about to stroke my
cheek.

But I was quicker. I raised my fist, lashed his hand away.

I didn’t hurt him. I couldn’t have hurt him. But he looked
bewildered. Disappointed.

And then he was gone.

The kitchen was very empty after that. The Missus was gone. John
was gone. Now even the boy was gone.

‘I’ll help you,“ he had said. But it was impossible. How could a
boy like him help me? How could anybody help me?

The sheet was covered in orange hair. I was walking on hair and
hair was stuck to my shoes. All the old dye had been cut away; the sparse tufts
that clung to Miss Winter’s scalp were pure white.

I took the towel away and blew the stray bits of hair from the
back of her neck.

‘Give me the mirror,“ Miss Winter said.

I handed her the looking glass. With her hair shorn, she looked
like a grizzled child.

She stared at the glass. Her eyes met her own, naked and somber,
and she looked at herself for a long time. Then she put the mirror, glass side
down, on the table.

‘That is exactly what I wanted. Thank you, Margaret.“

I left her, and when I went back to my room I thought about the
boy. I thought about him and Adeline, and I thought about him and Emmeline.
Then I thought about Aurelius, found as an infant, wearing an old-fashioned
garment and wrapped in a satchel, with a spoon from Angelfield and a page of
Jane Eyre. I thought about it all at length, but for all my thinking, I did not
arrive at any conclusion.

One thing did occur to me, though, in one of those unfathomable
side steps of the mind. I remembered what it was Aurelius had said the last
time I was at Angelfield: “I just wish there was someone to tell me the truth.”
And I found its echo: “Tell me the truth.” The boy in the brown suit. Now, that
would explain why the Banbury Herald had no record of the interview their young
reporter had gone to Yorkshire for. He wasn’t a reporter at all. It was
Aurelius all along.

RAIN AND CAKE

The next day I woke to it: today, today, today. A tolling bell
only I could hear. The twilight seemed to have penetrated my soul; I felt an
unearthly weariness. My birthday. My deathday.

Judith brought a card from my father with the breakfast tray. A
picture of flowers, his habitual, vaguely worded greetings and a note. He hoped
I was well. He was well. He had some books for me. Should he send them? My
mother had not signed the card; he had signed it for both of them. Love from
Dad and Mother. It was all wrong. I knew it and he knew it, but what could
anyone do?

Judith came. “Miss Winter says would now… ?”

I slid the card under my pillow before she could see it. “Now
would be fine,” I said, and picked up my pencil and pad.

‘Have you been sleeping well?“ Miss Winter wanted to know, and
then, ”You look a little pale. You don’t eat enough.“

‘I’m fine,“ I assured her, though I wasn’t.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one
world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you
start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close
behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters
even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they
are still with you. Well, it was like that. All day I had been prey to
distractions. Thoughts, memories, feelings, irrelevant fragments of my own
life, playing havoc with my concentration.