‘What?’
‘After this, no more jumping about in the story. From tomorrow, I will tell you my story, beginning at the beginning, continuing with the middle, and with the end at the end. Everything in its proper place. No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions. No sneaky glances at the last page.’
Did she have the right to place conditions on our deal, having already accepted it? Not really. Still, I nodded my head.
‘I agree.’
She could not quite look at me as she spoke.
‘I lived at Angelfield.’
Her voice trembled over the place name, and she scratched nervously at her palm in an unconscious gesture.
‘I was sixteen.’
Her voice grew stilted; fluency deserted her.
‘There was a fire.’
The words were expelled from her throat hard and dry, like stones.
‘I lost everything.’
And then, the cry breaking from her lips before she could stop it, ‘Oh, Emmeline!’
There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a person’s mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name, either one’s own or someone else’s, is to invite jeopardy. This, it seemed, was such a name.
Miss Winter pressed her lips together, too late. A tremor ran through the muscles under the skin.
Now I knew I was tied to the story. I had stumbled upon the heart of the tale that I had been commissioned to tell. It was love. And loss. For what else could the sorrow of that exclamation be but bereavement? In a flash I saw beyond the mask of white make-up and the exotic draperies. For a few seconds it seemed to me that I could see right into Miss Winter’s heart, right into her thoughts.
I recognized the very essence of her: how could I fail to, for was it not the essence of me? We were both lone twins. With this realization, the leash of the story tightened around my wrists, and my excitement was suddenly cut through with fear.
‘Where can I find a public record of this fire?’ I asked, trying not to let my perturbed feelings show in my voice.
‘The local newspaper. The Banbury Herald.’
I nodded, made a note in my pad and flipped the cover closed.
‘Although,’ she added, ‘there is a record of a different kind that I can show you now.’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘Come nearer.’
I rose from my chair and took a step, halving the distance between us.
Slowly she raised her right arm, and held out to me a closed fist that seemed three-quarters precious stones in their claw-like settings. In a movement that spoke of great effort she turned her hand and opened it, as though she had some surprise gift concealed and was about to offer it to me.
But there was no gift. The surprise was the hand itself.
The flesh of her palm was like no flesh I had seen before. Its whitened ridges and purple furrows bore no relation to the pink mound at the base of my fingers, the pale valley of my palm. Melted by fire, her flesh had cooled into an entirely unrecognizable landscape, like a scene left permanently altered by the passage of a flow of lava. Her fingers did not lie open, but were drawn into a claw by the shrunken tightness of the scar tissue. In the heart of her palm, scar within a scar, burn inside burn, was a grotesque mark. It was set very deep in her clutch, so deep that with a sudden nausea I wondered what had happened to the bone that should be there. It made sense of the odd set of the hand at the wrist, the way it seemed to weigh upon her arm as though it had no life of its own. The mark was a circle embedded in her palm, and extending from it, in the direction of the thumb, a short line.
The mark had more or less the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this unexpected and painful act of revealment, it had no such clarity and it disturbed me the way I would be disturbed by the appearance on a page of English of an unfamiliar symbol from a lost and unreadable language.
A sudden vertigo took hold of me and I reached behind me for my chair.
‘I’m sorry,’ I heard her say. ‘One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.’
I sat down and gradually the blackness at the edge of my vision receded.
Miss Winter closed her fingers into her damaged palm, swivelled her wrist and drew the jewel-encrusted fist back into her lap. In a protective gesture she curled the fingers of her other hand around it.
‘I’m sorry you didn’t want to hear my ghost story, Miss Lea.’
‘I’ll hear it another time.’
Our interview was over.
On my way back to my quarters I thought of the letter she had sent me. The strained and painstaking hand that I had never seen the like of before. I had put it down to illness. Arthritis perhaps. Now I understood. From the very first book and through her entire career, Miss Winter had written her masterpieces with her left hand.
In my study the velvet curtains were green, and a pale gold watermark satin covered the walls. Despite the woolly hush I was pleased with the room, for the overall effect was relieved by the broad wooden desk and the plain upright chair that stood under the window. I switched on the desk lamp and laid out the ream of paper I had brought with me, and my twelve pencils. They were brand new: unsharpened columns of red, just what I like to start a new project with. The last thing I took from my bag was my pencil sharpener. I screwed it like a vice to the edge of the desk and set the paper basket directly underneath.
On impulse I climbed onto the desk and reached behind the elaborate valance to the curtain pole. My fingers groped for the tops of the curtains and I felt for the hooks and stitches that attached them. It was hardly a job for one person – the curtains were floor length, lined and interlined, and their weight, flung over my shoulder, was crushing. But after a few minutes, first one then the other curtain were folded and in a cupboard. I stood in the centre of the floor and surveyed the result of my work.
The window was a large expanse of dark glass and in the centre of it, my ghost, darkly transparent, was staring in at me. Her world was not unlike my own: the pale outline of a desk the other side of the glass, and further back a deeply buttoned armchair placed inside the circle of light cast by a standard lamp. But where my chair was red, hers was grey; and where my chair stood on an Indian rug, surrounded by light-gold walls, her chair hovered spectrally in an undefined, endless plane of darkness in which vague forms, like waves, seemed to shift and breathe.
Together we began the little ritual of preparing our desks. We divided a ream of paper into smaller piles and flicked through each one, to let the air in. One by one we sharpened our pencils, turning the handle and watching the long shavings curl and dangle their way to the paper bin below. When the last pencil had been shaved to a fine point, we did not put it down with the others, but kept hold of it.
‘There,’ I said to her. ‘Ready for work.’
She opened her mouth, seemed to speak to me. I couldn’t hear what she was saying.
I have no shorthand. During the interview I had simply jotted down lists of keywords, and my hope was that if I wrote up our interviews immediately afterwards, these words would be enough to jog my memory. And from that first meeting, it worked well. Glancing at my notebook from time to time, I filled the centre of my sheets of foolscap with Miss Winter’s words, conjuring her image in my mind, hearing her voice, seeing her mannerisms. Soon I was hardly aware of my notebook, but was taking dictation from the Miss Winter in my head.
I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her meaning. The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions.
I felt as though I had worked for hours. I emerged to make myself a cup of cocoa, but it was time suspended and did not disturb the flow of my recreation; I returned to my work and picked up the thread as though there had b
een no interruption.
‘One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people,’ I wrote at last in the middle column, and in the left I added a note describing the way she closed the fingers of her good hand over the closed fist of the damaged one.
I drew a double line under the last line of script, and stretched. In the window the other me stretched as well. She took the pencils whose points she had worn and sharpened them one by one.
She was mid-yawn when something began to happen to her face. First it was a sudden blurring in the centre of her forehead, like a blister. Another mark appeared on her cheek, then beneath her eye, on her nose, on her lips. Each new blemish was accompanied by a dull thud, a percussion that grew faster and faster. In a few seconds her entire face it seemed had decomposed.
But it was not the work of death. It was only rain. The long-awaited rain.
I opened the window, let my hand be drenched, then wiped the water over my eyes and face. I shivered. Time for bed.
I left the window ajar so that I could listen to the rain as it continued to fall with an even, muffled softness. I heard it while I was undressing, while I was reading, and while I slept. It accompanied my dreams like a poorly tuned radio left on through the night, broadcasting a fuzzy white noise beneath which are the barely audible whispers of foreign languages and snatches of unfamiliar tunes.
And so we Began…
At nine o’clock the next morning Miss Winter sent for me and I went to her in the library.
By daylight the room was quite different. With the shutters folded back the full-height windows let the light flood in from the pale sky. The garden, still wet from the night’s downpour, gleamed in the morning sun. The exotic plants by the window seats seemed to touch leaf with their hardier, damper cousins beyond the glass, and the delicate framework that held the panes in place seemed no more solid than the glimmering threads of a spider’s web stretched across a garden path from branch to branch. The library itself, slighter, narrower seemingly than the night before, appeared as a mirage of books in the wet, winter garden.
In contrast to the palely blue sky and the milk-white sun, Miss Winter was all heat and fire, an exotic hothouse flower in a northern winter garden. She wore no sunglasses today, but her eyelids were coloured purple, lined with a Cleopatra-style line of kohl, and fringed with the same heavy, black lashes as yesterday. In the clear daylight I saw what I had not seen the night before: along the ruler-straight parting in Miss Winter’s copper curls was a narrow margin of pure white.
‘You remember our agreement,’ she began, as I sat down in the chair on the other side of the fire. ‘Beginnings, middles and endings, all in the correct order. No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions.’
I was tired. A strange bed in a strange place, and I had woken with a dull, atonic tune ringing in my head. ‘Start where you like,’ I said.
‘I shall start at the beginning. Though of course the beginning is never where you think it is. Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born…Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.
‘My story is not only mine; it is the story of Angelfield. Angelfield the village. Angelfield the house. And the Angelfield family itself. George and Mathilde; their children, Charlie and Isabelle; Isabelle’s children, Emmeline and Adeline. Their house, their fortunes, their fears. And their ghost. One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn’t one, Miss Lea?’
She gave me a sharp look; I pretended not to see it.
‘A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own, but only the continuation of someone else’s story. Take me, for instance. To look at me now, you would think my birth must have been something special, wouldn’t you? Accompanied by strange portents, and attended by witches and fairy godmothers. But no. Not a bit of it. In fact, when I was born I was no more than a sub-plot.
‘But how do I know this story that precedes my birth, I hear you thinking. What are the sources? Where does the information come from? Well, where does any information come from in a house like Angelfield? The servants, of course. The Missus, in particular. Not that I learnt it all directly from her lips. Sometimes, it is true, she would reminisce about the past while she sat cleaning the silverware, and seem to forget my presence as she spoke. She frowned as she remembered village rumours and local gossip. Events and conversations and scenes rose to her lips and played themselves out afresh over the kitchen table. But sooner or later the story would lead her into areas unsuitable for a child – unsuitable in particular for me – then suddenly she would remember I was there, break off her account mid-sentence and start rubbing the cutlery vigorously as if to erase the past altogether. But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children. I pieced the story together another way. When the Missus talked with the gardener over their morning tea, I learned to interpret the sudden silences that punctuated seemingly innocent conversations. Without appearing to notice anything, I saw the silent glances that certain words provoked between them. And when they thought they were alone and could talk privately…they were not in fact alone. In this way I understood the story of my origins. And later, when the Missus was no longer the woman she used to be, when age confused her and released her tongue, then her meanderings confirmed the story I had spent years divining. It is this story – the one that came to me in hints, glances and silences – that I am going to translate into words for you now.’
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, she looked like being 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 wh
ether 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 day bed, not sleeping but staring red-eyed at the moon. This went on for months. His pale cheeks became paler; he grew thin; he 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 each other, not knowing what to do. But the force of the Missus’s conviction held them paralysed, and they did nothing.
It was a long afternoon and at the end of it one of the under-housemaids 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.