The thirteenth tale (11 page)

Her father looked up. “Isabelle!” He was pleased to see her.
Since she had taken to going out more he was especially gratified when she came
to seek him out like this.

‘Darling Pa!“ She smiled at him.

He caught a glint of something in her eye. “Is there something
afoot?”

Her eyes traveled to a corner of the ceiling and she smiled.
Without lifting her gaze from the dark corner, she told him she was leaving.

At first he hardly understood what she had said. He felt a pulse
beat his ears. His vision blurred. He closed his eyes, but inside his head
there were volcanoes, meteorite strikes and explosions. When the flames died
down and there was nothing left in his inner world but a silent, devastated
landscape, he opened his eyes.

What had he done?

In his hand was a lock of hair, with a bloodied clod of skin
attached at one end. Isabelle was there, her back to the door, her hands behind
her. One beautiful green eye was bloodshot; one cheek looked red and slightly
swollen. A trickle of blood crept from her scalp, reached her eyebrow and was
diverted away from her eye.

He was aghast at himself and at her. He turned away from her in
silence and she left the room.

Afterward he sat for hours, twisting the auburn hair that he had
found in his hand, twisting and twisting, tighter and tighter around his
finger, until it dug deep into his skin, until it was so matted that it could
not be unwound. And finally, when the sensation of pain had at last completed
its slow journey from his finger to his consciousness, he cried.

Charlie was absent that day and did not return home until
midnight. Finding Isabelle’s room empty he wandered through the house, knowing
by some sixth sense that disaster had struck. Not finding his sister, he went
to his father’s study. One look at the gray-faced man told him everything.
Father and son regarded each other for a moment, but the fact that their loss
was shared did not unite them. There was nothing they could do for each other.

In his room Charlie sat on the chair next to the window, sat
there for hours, a silhouette against a rectangle of moonlight. At some point
he opened a drawer and removed the gun he had obtained by extortion from a
local poacher, and two or three times he raised it to his temple. Each time the
force of gravity soon returned it to his lap.

At four o’clock in the morning he put the gun away, and took up
instead the long needle that he had pilfered from the Missus’s sewing box a
decade before and which had since seen much use. He pulled up his trouser leg,
pushed his sock down and made a new puncture mark in his skin. His shoulders
shook, but his hand was steady as on his shinbone he scored a single word:
Isabelle.

Isabelle by this time was long gone. She had returned to her
room for a few minutes and then left it again, taking the back stairs to the
kitchen. Here she had given the Missus a strange, hard hug, which was quite
unlike her, and then she slipped out of the side door and darted through the
kitchen garden toward the garden door, set in a stone wall. The Missus’s sight
had been fading for a very long time, but she had developed the ability to
judge people’s movements by sensing vibrations in the air, and she had the
impression that Isabelle hesitated, for the briefest of moments, before she
closed the garden door behind her.

When it became apparent to George Angelfield that Isabelle was
gone, he went into his library and locked the door. He refused food, he refused
visitors. There were only the vicar and the doctor to come calling now, and
both of them got short shrift. “Tell your God he can go to hell!” and “Let a
wounded animal die in peace, won’t you!” was the limit of their welcome.

A few days later they returned and called the gardener to break
the door down. George Angelfield was dead. A brief examination was enough to
establish that the man had died from septicemia, caused by the circle of human
hair that was deeply embedded in the flesh of his ring finger.

Charlie did not die, though he didn’t understand why not. He
wandered about the house. He made a trail of footprints in the dust and
followed it every day, starting at the top of the house and working down. Attic
bedrooms not used for years, servants’ rooms, family rooms, the study, the
library, the music room, the drawing room, the kitchens. It was a restless,
endless, hopeless search. At night he went out to roam the estate, his legs
carrying him tirelessly forward, forward, forward. All the while he fingered
the Missus’s needle in his pocket. His finger-tips were a bloody, scabby mess.
He missed Isabelle.

Charlie lived like this through September, October, November,
December, January and February, and at the beginning of March, Isabelle
returned.

Charlie was in the kitchen, tracing his footsteps, when he heard
the sound of hooves and wheels approaching the house. Scowling, he went to the
window. He wanted no visitors.

A familiar figure stepped down from the car—and his heart stood
still.

He was at the door, on the steps, beside the car all in one
moment, and Isabelle was there.

He stared at her.

Isabelle laughed. “Here,” she said, “take this.” And she handed
him a heavy parcel wrapped up in cloth. She reached into the back of the
carriage and took something out. “And this one.” He tucked it obediently under
his arm. “Now, what I’d like most in the world is a very large brandy.”

Stunned, Charlie followed Isabelle into the house and to the
study. She made straight for the drinks cupboard and took out glasses and a
bottle. She poured a generous slug into a glass and drank it in one go, showing
the whiteness of her throat, then she refilled her own glass and the second,
which she held out to her brother. He stood there, paralyzed and speechless,
his hands full with the tightly wrapped bundles. Isabelle’s laughter resounded
about his ears again and it was like being too close to an enormous church
bell. His head started to spin and tears sprang to his eyes. “Put them down,”
Isabelle instructed. “We’ll drink a toast.” He took the glass and inhaled the
spirit fumes. “To the future!” He swallowed the brandy in one gulp and coughed
at its unfamiliar burn.

‘You haven’t even seen them, have you?“ she asked.

He frowned.

‘Look.“ Isabelle turned to the parcels he had placed on the
study desk, pulled the soft wrapping away, and stood back so that he could see.
Slowly he turned his head and looked. The parcels were babies. Two babies.
Twins. He blinked. Registered dimly that some kind of response was called for,
but didn’t know what he was supposed to say or do.

‘Oh, Charlie, wake up, for goodness’ sake!“ and his sister took
both his hands in hers and dragged him into a madcap dance around the room. She
swirled him around and around and around, until the dizziness started to clear
his head, and when they came to a halt she took his face in her hands and spoke
to him. ”Roland’s dead, Charlie. It’s you and me now. Do you understand?“

He nodded.

‘Good. Now, where’s Pa?“

When he told her, she was quite hysterical. The Missus, roused
from the kitchen by the shrill cries, put her to bed in her old room, and when
at last she was quiet again, asked, “These babies… what are they called?”

‘March,“ Isabelle responded.

But the Missus knew that. Word of the marriage had reached her
some months before, and news of the birth (she’d not needed to count the months
on her fingers, but she did it anyway and pursed her lips). She knew of
Roland’s death from pneumonia a few weeks ago; knew too how old Mr. and Mrs.
March, devastated by the death of their only son and repelled by the fey
insouciance of their new daughter-in-law, now quietly shunned Isabelle and her
children, wishing only to grieve.

‘What about Christian names?“

‘Adeline and Emmeline,“ said Isabelle sleepily.

‘And how do you tell them apart?“

But the child-widow was sleeping already. And as she dreamed in
tier old bed, her escapade and her husband already forgotten, her virgin’s name
was restored to her. When she woke in the morning it would be as if her
marriage had never been, and the babies themselves would appear to her not as
her own children—she had not a single maternal bone in her body—but as mere
spirits of the house.

The babies slept, too. In the kitchen, the Missus and the
gardener Dent over their smooth, pale faces and talked in low voices.

‘Which one is which?“ he asked.

‘I don’t know.“

One each side of the old crib, they watched. Two half-moon sets
of lashes, two puckered mouths, two downy scalps. Then one of the babies gave a
little flutter of the eyelids and half opened one eye. The gardener and the
Missus held their breath. But the eye closed again and the baby lapsed into
sleep.

‘That one can be Adeline,“ the Missus whispered. She took a
striped tea towel from a drawer and cut strips from it. She plaited the strips
into two lengths, tied the red one around the wrist of the baby who had
stirred, the white one around the wrist of the baby who had not.

Housekeeper and gardener, each with a hand on the crib, watched,
until the Missus turned a glad and tender face to the gardener and spoke again.

‘Two babies. Honestly, Dig. At our age!“

When he raised his eyes from the babies, he saw the tears that
misted her round brown eyes.

His rough hand reached out across the crib. She wiped her
foolishness away and, smiling, put her small, plump hand in his. He felt the
wetness of her tears pressed against his own fingers.

Beneath the arch of their clasped hands, beneath the trembling
line of their gaze, the babies were dreaming.

It was late when I finished transcribing the story of Isabelle
and Charlie. The sky was dark and the house was asleep. All of the afternoon
and evening and for part of the night I had been bent over my desk, with the
story retelling itself in my ears while my pencil scratched line after line,
obeying its dictation. My pages were densely packed with script: Miss Winter’s
own flood of words. From time to time my hand moved to the left and I scribbled
a note in the left-hand margin, when her tone of voice or a gesture seemed to
be part of the narrative itself.

Now I pushed the last sheet of paper from me, set down my pencil
and clenched and stretched my aching fingers. For hours Miss Winter’s voice had
conjured another world, raising the dead for me, and I had seen nothing but the
puppet show her words had made. But when her voice fell still in my head, her
image remained and I remembered the gray cat that had appeared, as if by magic,
on her lap. Silently he had sat under her stroking hand, regarding me fixedly
with his round yellow eyes. If he saw my ghosts, if he saw my secrets, he did
not seem the least perturbed, but only blinked and continued to stare
indifferently.

‘What’s his name?“ I had asked.

‘Shadow,“ she absently replied.

At last in bed, I turned out the light and closed my eyes. I
could still feel the place on the pad of my finger where the pencil had made a
groove in my skin. In my right shoulder, a knot from writing was not yet ready
to untie itself. Though it was dark, and though my eyes were closed, all I
could see was a sheet of paper, lines of my own handwriting with wide margins.
The right-hand margin drew my attention. Unmarked, pristine, it glowed white,
made my eyes sting. It was the column I reserved for my own comments, notes and
questions.

In the dark, my fingers closed around a ghost pencil and
twitched in response to the questions that penetrated my drowsiness. I wondered
about the secret tattoo Charlie bore inside his body, his sister’s name etched
onto his bone. How long would the inscription have remained? Could a living
bone mend itself? Or was it with him till he died? In his coffin, underground,
as his flesh rotted away from the bone, was the name Isabelle revealed to the
darkness? Roland March, the dead husband, so soon forgotten… Isabelle and
Charlie. Charlie and Isabelle. Who was the twins’ father? And behind my
thoughts, the scar on Miss Winter’s palm rose into view. The letter Q for
question, seared into human flesh.

As I started to sleepwrite my questions, the margin seemed to
expand. The paper throbbed with light. Swelling, it engulfed me, until I
realized with a mixture of trepidation and wonderment that I was enclosed in
the grain of the paper, embedded in the white interior of the story itself.
Weightless, I wandered all night long in Miss Winter’s story, plotting its
landscape, measuring its contours and, on tiptoe at its borers, peering at the
mysteries beyond its bounds.

GARDENS

I woke early. Too early. The monotonous fragment of a tune was
scratching at my brain. With more than an hour to wait before Judith’s knock at
the door with breakfast, I made myself a cup of cocoa, drank it scaldingly hot
and went outdoors.

Miss Winter’s garden was something of a puzzle. The sheer size
of it was overwhelming for a start. What I had taken at first sight to be the
border of the garden-—the hedge of yew on the other side of the formal beds—was
only a kind of inner wall that divided one part of the garden from another. And
the garden was full of such divisions. There were hedges of hawthorne and
privet and copper beech, stone walls covered with ivy, winter clematis and the
bare, scrambling stems of rambling roses, and fences, neatly paneled or woven
in willow.