The thirteenth tale (9 page)

Miss Winter cleared her throat, preparing to start.

‘Isabelle Angelfield was odd.“

Her voice seemed to slip away from her, and she stopped,
surprised. When she spoke again, her tone was cautious.

‘Isabelle Angelfield was born during a rainstorm.“

It came again, the abrupt loss of voice.

So used was she to hiding the truth that it had become atrophied
in her. She made one false start, then another. But, like a gifted musician
who, after years without playing, takes up her instrument again, she finally
found her way.

She told me the story of Isabelle and Charlie.

Isabelle Angelfield was odd.

Isabelle Angelfield was born during a rainstorm.

It is impossible to know whether or not these facts are
connected.

But when, two and a half decades later, Isabelle left home for
the second time, people in the village looked back and remembered the
endlessness of the rain on the day of her birth. Some remembered as if it was
yesterday that the doctor was late, delayed by the floods caused by the river having
burst its banks. Others recalled beyond the shadow of a doubt that the cord had
been wrapped round the baby’s neck, almost strangling her before she could be
born. Yes, it was a difficult birth, all right, for on the stroke of six, just
as the baby was born and the doctor rang the bell, hadn’t the mother passed
away, out of this world and into the next? So if the weather had been fine, and
the doctor had been earlier, and if the cord had not deprived the child of
oxygen, and if the mother had not died…

And if, and if, and if. Such thinking is pointless. Isabelle was
as Isabelle was, and that is all there is to say about the matter.

The infant, a white scrap of fury, was motherless. And at the
beginning, to all intents and purposes, it looked like she’d be fatherless,
too. For her father, George Angelfield, fell into a decline. He locked himself
in the library and refused point-blank to come out. This might seem excessive;
ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection, but Angelfield
was an odd fellow, and there it was. He had loved his wife—his ill-tempered,
lazy, selfish and pretty Mathilde. He had loved her more than he loved his
horses, more even than his dog. As for their son, Charlie, a boy of nine, it
never entered George’s head to wonder whether he loved him more or less than
Mathilde, for the fact was, he never thought of Charlie at all.

Bereaved, driven half mad with grief, George Angelfield sat all
day in the library, eating nothing, seeing no one. And he spent his nights
there, too, on the daybed, not sleeping but staring red-eyed at the moon. This
went on for months. His pale cheeks became paler; he grew thin; tie stopped
speaking. Specialists were called from London. The vicar came and left again.
The dog pined away from want of affection, and when it died, George Angelfield
barely noticed.

In the end the Missus got fed up with it all. She picked up baby
Isabelle from the crib in the nursery and took her downstairs. She strode past
the butler, ignoring his protestations, and went into the library without
knocking. Up to the desk she marched, and she plumped the baby down in George
Angelfield’s arms without a word. Then she turned her back and walked out,
slamming the door behind her.

The butler made to go in, thinking to retrieve the infant, but
the Missus raised her finger and hissed, “Don’t you dare!” He was so startled
that he obeyed. The household servants gathered outside the library door,
looking at one another, not knowing what to do. But the force of the Missus’s
conviction held them paralyzed, and they did nothing.

It was a long afternoon, and at the end of it one of the
underhouse maids ran to the nursery. “He’s come out! The master’s come out!”

At her normal pace and in her normal manner, the Missus came
downstairs to hear what had happened.

The servants had stood about in the hall for hours, listening at
the door and peeking through the keyhole. At first their master just sat there,
looking at the baby, with a dull and perplexed expression on his face. The baby
wriggled and gurgled. When George Angelfield was heard cooing and chuckling in
response, the servants exchanged looks of astonishment, but they were more
astonished later to hear lullabies. The baby slept and there was silence. Her
father, the servants reported, did not once take his eyes from his daughter’s
face. Then she awoke, hungry, and set to crying. Her shrieks rose in intensity
and pitch until finally the door was flung open.

There stood my grandfather with his baby in his arms.

Seeing his servants standing idly about, he glared at them and
his voice boomed out: “Is a baby left to starve in this house?”

From that day on George Angelfield took personal charge of his
daughter. He fed her, bathed her and the rest, moved her cot into his room in
case she cried of loneliness in the night, fashioned a papoose so that he could
take her riding, read to her (business letters, the sports pages and romantic
novels), and shared all his thoughts and plans with her. He behaved, in short,
as though Isabelle was a sensible, pleasant companion and not a wild and
ignorant child.

Perhaps it was her looks that made her father love her. Charlie,
the neglected older child, nine years Isabelle’s senior, was his father’s son:
a lumpen, pasty, carrot-topped boy, with heavy feet and a slow expression. But
Isabelle inherited her looks from both her parents. The ginger hair shared by
her father and brother was burnished in the girl child to a rich, glossy
auburn. In her, the pale Angelfield complexion was stretched over fine French
bones. She had the better chin from the father’s side, and the better mouth
from the mother’s. She had Mathilde’s slanting eyes and long lashes, but when
they lifted, it was to reveal the astonishing emerald irises that were the
emblem of the Angelfields. She was, physically at least, perfection itself.

The household adapted to the unusual state of affairs. They
lived with the unspoken agreement to behave as though it were entirely normal
for a father to dote on his baby daughter. It was not to be considered unmanly,
ungentlemanly or ridiculous that he kept her constantly by him.

But what about Charlie, the baby’s brother? He was a slow-witted
boy whose mind turned in circles around his few obsessions and preoccupations,
but who could not be prevailed upon to learn new ideas or think logically. He
ignored the baby and welcomed the changes her arrival introduced to the
household. Before Isabelle there had been two parents to whom the Missus might
report instances of bad behavior, two parents whose reactions were impossible
to foresee. His mother had been an inconsistent disciplinarian; sometimes
having him spanked for bad behavior, at other times merely laughing. His
father, although stern, was distracted, and the punishments he intended were
frequently forgotten. Catching sight of the boy, though, he would have the
vague sense that there might be some misdemeanor to correct, and he would spank
the child, thinking that if it wasn’t actually owed it would do in advance for
next time. This taught the boy a good lesson: He stayed out of the way of his
father.

With the coming of the baby Isabelle, all this changed. Mamma
was gone, and Papa as good as, too busy with his little Isabelle to concern
himself with hysterical reports from housemaids about mice roasted with the
Sunday joint or pins pressed by malicious hands deep into the soap. Charlie was
free to do as he pleased, and what pleased him was removing floorboards at the
top of the attic stairs and watching the housemaids tumble down and sprain
their ankles.

The Missus could scold, but then she was only the Missus, and in
this new, free life he could maim and wound to his heart’s content, in the
certain knowledge that he would get away with it. Consistent adult behavior is
said to be good for children, and consistent neglect certainly suited this
child, for in these early years of his semi-orphanhood Charlie Angelfield was
as happy as the day is long.

George Angelfield’s adoration of his daughter persisted through
all the trials a child can inflict on a parent. When she started to talk, he
discovered her to be preternaturally gifted, a veritable Oracle, and he began
to consult her on everything, until the household came to be run according to
the caprices of a three-year-old child.

Visitors were rare, and as the household descended from
eccentricity into chaos, they became rarer. Then the servants began to complain
among themselves. The butler had left before the child was two. Cook put up for
a year longer with the irregular mealtimes that the child demanded, then the
day came when she, too, handed in her notice. When she left she took the
kitchen girl with her, and in the end it was left to the Missus to ensure the
provision of cake and jelly at odd hours. The housemaids felt under no
obligation to occupy themselves with chores: Not unreasonably they believed
that their small salaries barely compensated them for the cuts and bruises,
sprained ankles and stomach upsets they incurred owing to Charlie’s sadistic experiments.
They left and were replaced by a succession of temporary help, none of whom
lasted long. Finally even the temporary help was dispensed with.

By the time Isabelle was five the household had shrunk to George
Angelfield, the two children, the Missus, the gardener and the gamekeeper. The
dog was dead, and the cats, fearful of Charlie, kept outdoors, taking refuge in
the garden shed when the weather turned cold. If George Angelfield noticed
their isolation, their domestic squalor, he did not regret it. He had Isabelle;
he was happy.

If anyone missed the servants it was Charlie. Without them he
was lost for subjects for his experiments. When he was scouting around for
someone to hurt, his eye fell, as it was bound sooner or later to do, on his
sister.

He couldn’t afford to make her cry in the presence of his
father, and since she rarely left her father’s side, Charlie was faced with a
difficulty. How to get her away?

By enticement. Whispering promises of magic and surprise,
Charlie , led Isabelle out of the side door, along one end of the knot garden,
between the long borders, out through the topiary garden and along the beech
avenue to the woods. There was a place Charlie knew. An old hovel, dank and
windowless, a good place for secrets.

What Charlie was after was a victim, and his sister, walking
behind him, smaller, younger and weaker, must have seemed ideal. But she was
odd and she was clever, and things did not turn out exactly as he expected.
Charlie pulled his sister’s sleeve up and drew a piece of wire, orange with
rust, along the white inside of her forearm. She stared at the red beads of
blood that were welling up along the livid line, then turned her gaze upon him.
Her green eyes were wide with surprise and something like pleasure. When she
put out her hand for the wire he gave it to her automatically. She pulled up
her other sleeve, punctured the skin and with application drew the wire down
almost to her wrist. Her cut was deeper than the one he had given her, and the
blood rose up at once and trickled. She gave a sigh of satisfaction as she
looked at it and then licked the blood away. Then she offered the wire back to
him and motioned to him to pull up his sleeve.

Charlie was bewildered. But he dug the wire into his arm because
he wanted it, and he laughed through the pain.

Instead of a victim Charlie had found himself the strangest of
conspirators.

*       
*         *

Life went on for the Angelfields, sans parties, sans hunt
meetings, sans housemaids and sans most of the things that people of their
class took for granted in those days. They turned their backs on their
neighbors, allowed their estate to be managed by the tenants, and depended on
the goodwill and honesty of the Missus and the gardener for those day-today
transactions with the world that were necessary for survival.

George Angelfield forgot about the world, and for a time the
world forgot about him. And then they remembered him. It was to do with money.

There were other large houses in the vicinity. Other more or
less aristocratic families. Among them was a man who took great care of his
money. He sought out the best advice, invested large sums where wisdom dictated
and speculated small sums where the risk of loss was greater but the profit, in
the case of success, high. The large sums he lost completely. The small ones
went up—moderately. He found himself in a pickle. In addition he had a lazy,
spendthrift son and a goggle-eyed, thick-ankled daughter. Something had to be
done.

George Angelfield never saw anyone, hence he was never offered
financial tips. When his lawyer sent him recommendations, he ignored them, and
when his bank sent him letters, he did not write back. As a consequence of
this, the Angelfield money, instead of expending itself chasing one deal after
another, lounged in its bank vault and grew fat.

Money talks. Word got out.

‘Doesn’t George Angelfield have a son?“ asked the wife of the
near-bankrupt. ”How old would he be now? Twenty-six?“

And if not the son for their Sybilla, then why not the girl for
Roland? thought the wife. She must be reaching a marriageable age by now. And
the father was known to dote on her: She would not come empty-handed.