The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

  ‘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 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 upwards towards 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 sombre, 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 sidesteps 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 fibres 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.

  Miss Winter was telling me about something when she interrupted herself. ‘Are you listening to me, Miss Lea?’

  I jerked out of my reverie, and fumbled for an answer. Had I been listening? I had no idea. At that moment I couldn’t have told her what she had been saying, though I’m sure that somewhere in my mind there was a place where it was all recorded. But at the point when she jerked me out of myself, I was in a kind of no-man’s land, a place between places.
The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker. Lost for words I stared at her for a minute, while she grew more and more irritated, then I plucked at the first coherent sentence that presented itself to me.

  ‘Have you ever had a child, Miss Winter?’

  ‘Good Lord, what a question. Of course I haven’t. Have you gone mad, girl?’

  ‘Emmeline, then?’

  ‘We have an agreement, do we not? No questions?’ And then, changing her expression, she bent forwards and scrutinized me closely. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, you are clearly not in your right mind for work.’

  It was a dismissal.

  Back in my room I spent an hour bored, unsettled, plagued by myself. I sat at my desk, pencil in hand, but did not write; felt cold and turned the radiator up, then, too hot, took my cardigan off. I’d have liked a bath, but there was no hot water. I made cocoa and put extra sugar in it; then the sweetness made me nauseous. A book? Would that do it? In the library the shelves were lined with dead words. Nothing there could help me.

  There came a dash of raindrops, scattering against the window, and my heart leapt. Outside. Yes, that was what I needed. And not just the garden. I needed to get away, right away. Onto the moors.

  The main gate was kept locked, I knew, and I had no wish to ask Maurice to open it for me. Instead I headed through the garden to the furthest point from the house, where there was a door in the wall. The door, overgrown with ivy, had not been opened for a long time, and I had to pull the foliage away with my hands before I could open the latch. When the door swung towards me, there was more ivy to be pushed aside before I could step, a little dishevelled, outside.

  I used to think that I loved rain, but in fact I hardly knew it. The rain I loved was genteel town rain, made soft by all the obstacles the skyline put in its path, and warmed by the rising heat of the town itself. On the moors, enraged by the wind and embittered by the chill, the rain was vicious. Needles of ice stung my face and behind me, vessels of freezing water burst against my shoulders.

  Happy birthday.

  If I was at the shop my father would produce a present from beneath the desk as I came down the stairs. There would be a book or books, purchased at auction and put aside during the year. And a record or perfume or a picture. He would have wrapped them in the shop, at the desk, some quiet afternoon when I was at the post office or the library. He would have gone out one lunchtime to choose a card, alone, and he would have written it, Love from Dad and Mother, at the desk. Alone, quite alone. He would go to the bakery for a cake, and somewhere in the shop – I had never discovered where; it was one of the few secrets I had not fathomed – he kept a candle, which came out on this day every year, was lit, and which I blew out, with as good an impression of happiness as I could muster. Then we ate the cake, with tea, and settled down to quiet digestion and cataloguing.

  I knew how it was for him. It was easier now that I was grown up than when I was a child. How much harder had birthdays been in the house. Presents hidden overnight in the shed, not from me, but from my mother who could not bear the sight of them. The inevitable headache was her jealously guarded rite of remembrance, one that made it impossible to invite other children in the house, impossible too to leave her for the treat of a visit to the zoo or the park. My birthday toys were always quiet ones. Cakes were never homemade, and the leftovers had to be divested of their candles and icing before they could be put in the tin for the next day.

  Happy birthday? Father whispered the words, Happy Birthday, hilariously, right in my ear. We played silent card games where the winner pulled gleeful faces and the loser grimaced and slumped, and nothing, not a peep, not a splutter, could be heard in the room above our heads. In between games, up and down he went, my poor father, between the silent pain of the bedroom and the secret birthday downstairs, changing his face from jollity to sympathy, from sympathy back to jollity, in the stairwell.

  Unhappy birthday. From the day I was born grief was always present. It settled like dust upon the household. It covered everyone and everything; it invaded us with every breath we took. It shrouded us in our own separate miseries.

  Only because I was so cold could I bear to contemplate these memories.

  Why couldn’t she love me? Why did my life mean less to her than my sister’s death? Did she blame me for it? Perhaps she was right to. I was only alive now because my sister had died. Every sight of me was a reminder of her loss.

  Would it have been easier for her if we had both died?

  Stupefied, I walked. One foot in front of the other, again and again and again, mesmerized. No interest in where I was heading. Looking nowhere, seeing nothing, I stumbled on.

  Then I bumped into something.

  ‘Margaret! Margaret!’

  I was too cold to be startled, too cold to make my face respond to the vast form that stood before me, shrouded in tent-like drapes of green rainproof fabric. It moved and two hands came down on my shoulders and gave me a shake.

  ‘Margaret!’

  It was Aurelius.

  ‘Look at you! You’re blue with cold! Quick, come with me.’ He took my arm and led me briskly off. My feet stumbled over the ground behind him until we came to a road, a car. He bundled me in. There was a slamming of doors, the hum of an engine, and then a blast of warmth around my ankles and knees. Aurelius opened a Thermos flask and poured a mug of orange tea.

  ‘Drink!’

  I drank. The tea was hot and sweet.

  ‘Eat!’

  I bit into the sandwich he held out.

  In the warmth of the car, drinking hot tea and eating chicken sandwiches, I felt colder than ever. My teeth started to chatter and I shivered uncontrollably.

  ‘Goodness gracious!’ Aurelius exclaimed softly as he passed me one dainty sandwich after another. ‘Dear me!’

  The food seemed to bring me to my senses a little. ‘What are you doing here, Aurelius?’

  ‘I came to give you this,’ he said, and he reached over to the back and lifted a cake tin through the gap between the seats.

  Placing the tin on my lap, he beamed gloriously at me as he removed the lid.

  Inside was a cake. A homemade cake. And on the cake, in curly icing letters, were three words: Happy Birthday Margaret.

  I was too cold to cry. Instead the combination of cold and cake set me talking. Words emerged from me, randomly, like objects disgorged by glaciers as they thaw. Nocturnal singing, a garden with eyes, sisters, a baby, a spoon. ‘And she even knows the house,’ I babbled while Aurelius dried my hair with paper towels, ‘your house and Mrs Love’s. She looked through the window and thought Mrs Love was like a fairytale grandmother…Don’t you see what it means?’

  Aurelius shook his head. ‘But she told me—’

  ‘She lied to you, Aurelius! When you came to see her in your brown suit, she lied. She has admitted it.’

  ‘Bless me!’ exclaimed Aurelius. ‘However did you know about that brown suit of mine? I had to pretend to be a journalist, you know.’ But then, as what I was telling him began to sink in, ‘A spoon like mine, you say? And she knew the house?’

  ‘She’s your aunt, Aurelius. And Emmeline is your mother.’

  Aurelius stopped patting my hair, and for a long moment he stared out of the car window in the direction of the house. ‘My mother,’ he murmured, ‘there.’

  I nodded.

  There was another silence, and then he turned to me. ‘Take me to her, Margaret.’

  I seemed to wake up. ‘The thing is, Aurelius, she’s not well.’

  ‘Ill? Then you must take me to her. Without delay!’

  ‘Not ill exactly.’ How to explain? ‘She was injured in the fire, Aurelius. Not only her face. Her mind.’

  He absorbed this new information, added it to his store of loss and pain, and when he spoke again i
t was with a grave firmness of purpose. ‘Take me to her.’

  Was it illness that dictated my response? Was it the fact that it was my birthday? Was it my own motherlessness? These factors might have had something to do with it, but more significant than all of them was Aurelius’s expression as he waited for my answer. There were a hundred and one reasons to say no to his demand, but faced with the ferocity of his need they faded to nothing.

  I said yes.

  Reunion

  My bath went some way towards thawing me out, but did nothing to soothe the ache behind my eyes. I gave up all thoughts of working for the rest of the afternoon and crept into bed, pulling the extra covers well up over my ears. Inside I was still shivering. In a shallow sleep I saw strange visions. Hester and my father and the twins and my mother, visions in which everyone had someone else’s face, in which everyone was someone else disguised, and even my own face was disturbing to me, as it shifted and altered, sometimes myself, sometimes another. Then Aurelius’ bright head appeared in my dream: himself, always himself, only himself, and he smiled and the phantoms were banished. Darkness closed over me like water, and I sank to the depths of sleep.

  I awoke with a headache, aches in my limbs and my joints and my back. A tiredness that had nothing to do with exertion or lack of sleep weighed me down and slowed my thoughts. The darkness had thickened. Had I slept through the hour of my appointment with Aurelius? The thought nagged at me but only very distantly, and long minutes passed before I could rouse myself to look at my watch. For during my sleep, an obscure sentiment had formed within me – trepidation? nostalgia? excitement? – and it had given rise to a sense of expectation. The past was returning! My sister was near. There was no doubting it. I couldn’t see her, couldn’t smell her, but my inner ear, attuned always and only to her, had caught her vibration and it filled me with a dark and soporific joy.

  There was no need to put off Aurelius. My sister would find me, wherever I was. Was she not my twin? In fact I had half an hour before I was due to meet him at the garden door. I dragged myself heavily from my bed and, too cold and weary to take off my pyjamas before dressing, I pulled a thick skirt and sweater on over the top. Bundled up like a child on firework night, I went downstairs to the kitchen. Judith had left a cold meal for me but I had no appetite and left the food untouched. For ten minutes I sat at the kitchen table, longing to close my eyes and not daring to, in case I gave in to the torpor that was inviting my head towards the hard tabletop.