The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

  His eyes flickered from me to Emmeline, from Emmeline to me.

  ‘I think it’s Adeline.’ I saw his lips form the name, and I smiled as all his medical theories and experiments came tumbling down about his feet.

  Catching his eye, I raised my hand to the pair of them. A gracious gesture of thanks to them for coming to the funeral of a man they hardly knew in order to be of service to me. That’s what the solicitor took it for. The doctor may have taken it rather differently.

  Later. Many hours later.

  The funeral over, at last I could cry.

  Except that I couldn’t. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized.

  They would have to stay in for ever now.

  Fossilized Tears

  ‘Excuse me…’ Judith began, and stopped. She pressed her lips tight, then with an uncharacteristic flutter of the hands, ‘The doctor is already out on a call – he won’t be here for an hour. Please…’

  I belted my dressing gown and followed; Judith was half running a few paces ahead. We went up and down flights of stairs, turned into passages and corridors, arrived back on the ground floor but in a part of the house I hadn’t seen before. Finally we came to a series of rooms that I took to be Miss Winter’s private suite. We paused before a closed door, and Judith gave me a troubled look. I well understood her anxiety. From behind the door there came deep, inhuman sounds, bellows of pain interrupted by jagged gasps for breath. Judith opened the final door and we went in.

  I was astonished. No wonder the noise reverberated so! Unlike the rest of the house, with its overstuffed upholstery, lavish drapes, baffled walls and tapestries, this was a spare and naked little room. The walls were bare plaster, the floor simple boards. A plain bookcase in the corner was stuffed with piles of yellowing paper, and in the corner stood a narrow bed with simple white covers. At the window a calico curtain hung limply each side of the panes, letting the night in. Slumped over a plain little school desk, with her back to me, was Miss Winter. Gone were her fiery orange and resplendent purple. She was dressed in a white, long-sleeved chemise, and she was weeping.

  A harsh, atonal scraping of air over vocal cords. Jarring wails that veered into frighteningly animal moans. Her shoulders heaved and crashed and her torso shuddered; the force travelled through her frail neck to her head, along her arms into her hands, which jolted against the desk top. Judith hurried to replace a cushion beneath Miss Winter’s temple; Miss Winter, utterly possessed by the crisis, seemed not to know we were there.

  ‘I’ve never seen her like this before,’ Judith said, fingers pressed to her lips. And with a rising note of panic, ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  Miss Winter’s mouth gaped and grimaced, contorted into wild, ugly shapes by the grief that was too big for it.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said to Judith. It was an agony I knew. I drew up a chair and sat down beside Miss Winter.

  ‘Hush, hush, I know.’ I placed an arm across her shoulder, drew her two hands into mine. Shrouding her body with my own, I bent my ear close to her head and went on with the incantation. ‘It’s all right. It will pass. Hush, child. You’re not alone.’ I rocked her and soothed her and never stopped breathing the magic words. They were not my own words, but my father’s. Words that I knew would work, because they had always worked for me. ‘Hush,’ I whispered. ‘I know. It will pass.’

  The convulsions did not stop, nor the cries become less painful, but they gradually became less violent. She had time between each new paroxysm to take in desperate, shuddering breaths of air.

  ‘You’re not alone. I’m with you.’

  Eventually she was quiet. The curve of her skull pressed into my cheek. Wisps of her hair touched my lips. Against my ribs I could feel her little flutters of breath, the tender convulsions in her lungs. Her hands were very cold in mine.

  ‘There. There now.’

  We sat in silence for minutes. I pulled the shawl up and arranged it more warmly around her shoulders, and tried to rub some warmth into her hands. Her face was ravaged. She could scarcely see out of her swollen eyelids, and her lips were sore and cracked. The birth of a bruise marked the spot where her head had been shaken against the desk.

  ‘He was a good man,’ I said. ‘A good man. And he loved you.’

  Slowly she nodded. Her mouth quivered. Had she tried to say something? Again her lips moved.

  The safety catch? Was that what she had said?

  ‘Was it your sister who interfered with the safety catch?’ It seems a brutal question now, but at the time, with that flood of tears having swept all etiquette away, the directness did not feel out of place.

  My question caused her one last spasm of pain, but when she spoke she was unequivocal.

  ‘Not Emmeline. Not her. Not her.’

  ‘Who then?’

  She squeezed her eyes shut, began to sway and shook her head from side to side. I have seen the same movement in animals in zoos where they have been driven mad by their captivity. Beginning to fear the renewal of her agony, I remembered what it was that my father used to do to console me when I was a child. Gently, tenderly, I stroked her hair until, soothed, she came to rest her head on my shoulder.

  Finally she was quiet enough for Judith to be able to put her to bed. In a sleepy, child-like voice she asked for me to stay and so I stayed with her, kneeling by her bedside and watching her fall asleep. From time to time a shiver disturbed her slumber and a look of fear came on her sleeping face; when this happened I smoothed her hair until her eyelids settled back into peace.

  When was it that my father had consoled me like this? An incident rose out of the depths of my memory. I must have been twelve or so. It was Sunday, Father and I were eating sandwiches by the river when twins appeared. Two blonde girls with their blonde parents, day-trippers come to admire the architecture and enjoy the sunshine. Everyone noticed them; they must have been used to the stares of strangers. But not mine. I saw them and my heart leapt. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing myself complete. With what ardour I stared at them. With what hunger. Nervous, they turned away from the girl with the devouring stare and reached for their parents’ hands. I saw their fear, and a hard hand squeezed my lungs, until the sky went dark. Then later, in the shop, I on the window seat, between sleep and a nightmare; he, crouched on the floor, stroking my hair, murmuring his incantation, ‘Hush, it will pass. It’s all right. You’re not alone.’

  Sometime later Doctor Clifton came. When I turned to see him in the doorway I got the feeling that he may have been there for some time already. I slipped past him on my way out and there was something in his expression I did not know how to read.

  Underwater Cryptography

  I returned to my own rooms, my feet moving as slowly as my thoughts. Nothing made sense. Why had John-the-dig died? Because someone had interfered with the safety catch on the ladder. It can’t have been the boy. Miss Winter’s story gave him a clear alibi: while John and his ladder were tumbling from the balustrade through the empty air to the ground, the boy was eyeing her cigarette, not daring to ask for a drag. Then surely it must have been Emmeline. Except that nothing in the story suggests that Emmeline would do such a thing. She was a harmless child, even Hester said so. And Miss Winter herself couldn’t have been clearer. No. Not Emmeline. Then who? Isabelle was dead. Charlie was gone.

  I came to my rooms, went in, stood by the window. It was too dark to see; there was only my reflection, a pale shadow you could see the night through. Who?’ I asked it.

  At last I listened to the quiet, persistent voice in my head that I had been trying to ignore. Adeline.

  No, I said.

  Yes, it said. Adeline.

  It was not possible. The cries of grief for John-the-dig were still fresh in my mind. No one could mourn a man like that if they had killed him, could they? No one could murder a man they loved enough to cry those tears for?

  But the voice in my head recounted episode after episode from the story I knew so well. The v
iolence in the topiary garden, each swipe of the shears a blow to John’s heart. The attacks on Emmeline, the hair-pulling, the battering, the biting. The baby removed from the perambulator and left carelessly, to die or to be found. One of the twins was not quite right, they said in the village. I remembered and I wondered. Was it possible? Had the tears I had just witnessed been tears of guilt? Tears of remorse? Was it a murderess I had held in my arms and comforted? Was this the secret Miss Winter had hidden from the world for so long? An unpleasant suspicion revealed itself to me. Was this the point of Miss Winter’s story? To make me sympathise with her, exonerate her, forgive her? I shivered.

  But one thing at least I was sure of. She had loved him. How could it be otherwise? I remembered holding her racked and tormented body against mine and knew that only broken love can cause such despair. I remembered the child Adeline reaching into John’s loneliness after the death of the Missus, drawing him back to life by getting him to teach her to prune the topiary.

  The topiary she had damaged.

  Oh, perhaps I wasn’t sure after all!

  My eyes roamed over the darkness outside the window. Her fabulous garden. Was it her homage to John-the-dig? Her life-long penitence for the damage she had wrought?

  I rubbed my tired eyes and knew I ought to go to bed. But I was too tired to sleep. My thoughts, if I did nothing to stop them, would go round in circles all night long. I decided to have a bath.

  While I waited for the tub to fill, I cast about for something to occupy my mind. A ball of paper half visible beneath the dressing table caught my attention. I unfolded it, flattened it out. A row of phonetic script.

  In the bathroom, with the water thundering in the background, I made a few short-lived attempts at picking some kind of meaning out of my string of symbols. Always there was that undermining feeling that I hadn’t captured Emmeline’s utterance quite accurately. I pictured the moonlit garden, the contortions of the witchhazel, the grotesque, urgent face; I heard again the abruptness of Emmeline’s voice. But however hard I tried I could not recall the pronouncement itself.

  I climbed into the bath, leaving the scrap of paper on the edge. The water, warm to my feet, legs, back, felt distinctly cooler against the macula on my side. Eyes closed, I slid right under the surface. Ears, nose, eyes, right to the top of my head. The water rang in my ears, my hair lifted from its roots.

  I came up for air, then instantly plunged underwater again. More air, then water.

  In a loose, underwater fashion, thoughts began to swim in my mind. I knew enough about twin language to know that it was never totally invented. In the case of Emmeline and Adeline it would be based on English or French, or could contain elements of both.

  Air. Water.

  Introduced distortions. In the intonation maybe. Or the vowels. And sometimes, extra bits, added to camouflage rather than to carry meaning.

  Air. Water.

  A puzzle. A secret code. A cryptograph. It wouldn’t be as hard as the Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mycenaean Linear B. How would you have to go about it? Take each syllable separately. It could be a word or a part of a word. Remove the intonation first. Play with the stress. Experiment with lengthening, shortening, flattening the vowel sounds. Then, what did the syllable suggest in English? In French? And what if you left it out, and played with the syllables each side instead? There would be a vast number of possible combinations. Thousands. But not an infinite number. A computing machine could do it. So could a human brain, given a year or two.

  The dead go underground.

  What? I sat bolt upright in shock. The words came to me out of nowhere. They beat painfully in my chest. It was ridiculous. It couldn’t be!

  Trembling, I reached to the edge of the bath where I had left my jottings, and drew it near to me. Anxiously I scanned it. My notes, my symbols and signs, my squiggles and dots, were gone. They had been sitting in a pool of water and had drowned.

  I tried once more to remember the sounds as they had come to me underwater. But they were wiped from my memory. All I could remember was her fraught, intent face, and the five-note sequence she sang as she left.

  The dead go underground. Words that had arrived fully formed in my mind, leaving no trail behind them. Where had they come from? What tricks had my mind been playing to come up with these words out of nowhere?

  I didn’t actually believe that this was what she had said to me, did I?

  Come on, be sensible, I told myself.

  I reached for the soap, and resolved to put my underwater imaginings out of my mind.

  Hair

  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 waste-paper 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 Doctor 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 make-up. Perhaps her medication was at its peak of effectiveness, but there was a tranquillity 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 centre 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 brush stroke. 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 Wi
nter 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, zig-zagged 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 like 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.