The thirteenth tale (41 page)

I could judge how much better I was by the fact that my thoughts
turned not to the treasures of Miss Winter’s library, but to her own story.
Upstairs I retrieved my pile of paper, neglected since the day of my collapse,
and brought it back to the warmth of the hearth where, with Shadow by my side,
I spent the best part of the daylight hours reading. I read and I read and I
read, discovering the story all over again, reminding myself of its puzzles,
mysteries and secrets. But there were no revelations. At the end of it all I
was as baffled as I had been before I started. Had someone tampered with
John-the-dig’s ladder? But who? And what was it that Hester had seen when she
thought she saw a ghost? And, more inexplicable than all the rest, how had
Adeline, that violent vagabond of a child, unable to communicate with anyone
but her slow-witted sister and capable of heartbreaking acts of horticultural
destruction, developed into Miss Winter, the self-disciplined author of dozens
of best-selling novels and, furthermore, maker of an exquisite garden?

I pushed my pile of papers to one side, stroked Shadow and
stared into the fire, longing for the comfort of a story where everything had
been planned well in advance, where the confusion of the middle was invented
only for my enjoyment, and where I could measure how far away the solution was
by feeling the thickness of pages still to come. I had no idea how many pages
it would take to complete the story of Emmeline and Adeline, nor even whether
there would be time to complete it.

Despite my absorption in my notes, I couldn’t help wondering why
I hadn’t seen Miss Winter. Each time I asked after her Judith gave me the same
reply: She is with Miss Emmeline. Until evening, when she came with a message
from Miss Winter herself: Was I feeling well enough to read to her for a while
before supper?

When I went to her I found a book—Lady Audley’s Secret—on the
table by Miss Winter’s side. I opened it at the bookmark and read. But I had
read only a chapter when I stopped, sensing that she wanted to talk tome.

‘What did happen that night?“ Miss Winter asked. ”The night you
fell ill?“

I was nervously glad to have an opportunity for explanation. “I
already knew Emmeline was in the house. I had heard her at night. I had seen
her in the garden. I found her rooms. Then on that particular night I brought
someone to see her. Emmeline was startled. The last thing I intended was to
frighten her. But she was taken by surprise when she saw us, and—” My voice
caught in my throat.

‘This is not your fault, you know. Don’t alarm yourself. The
wailing and the nervous collapse—it is something I and Judith and the doctor
have seen many times before. If anyone is to blame, it is me, for not letting
you know sooner that she was here. I have a tendency to be over-protective. I
was foolish not to tell you.“ She paused. ”Do you intend to tell me whom it was
you brought with you?“

‘Emmeline had a baby,“ I said. ”That’s the person who came with
me. The man in the brown suit.“ And after I’d told what I knew, the questions I
didn’t know the answer to came rushing to my lips, as though my own frankness
might encourage her to be candid in return. ”What is it Emmeline was looking
for in the garden? She was trying to dig something up when I saw her there. She
often does it: Maurice says it’s the work of foxes, but I know that is not the
truth.“

Miss Winter was silent and very still.

“The dead go underground,” I quoted. “That’s what she told me.
Who does she think is buried? Is it her child? Hester? Who is she looking for
underground?”

Miss Winter uttered a murmur, and though it was faint, it
instantly awakened the lost memory of the hoarse pronouncement launched at me
by Emmeline in the garden. The very words! “Is that it?” added Miss Winter. “Is
that what she said?”

I nodded.

‘In twin language?“

I nodded again.

Miss Winter looked at me with interest. “You are doing very
well, Margaret. Better than I thought. The trouble is, the timing of this story
is getting rather out of hand. We are getting ahead of ourselves.” She paused,
staring into her palm, then looked straight at me. “I said I meant to tell you
the truth, Margaret. And I do. But before I can tell you, something must happen
first. It is going to happen. But it has not happened yet.”

‘What—?“

But before I could finish my question, she shook her head. “Let
us return to Lady Audley and her secret, shall we?”

I read for another half hour or so, but my mind was not on the
story, and I had the impression Miss Winter’s attention was wandering, too.
When Judith tapped at the door at suppertime, I closed the book and put it to
one side, and as if there had been no interruption, as if it were a continuation
of the discussion we had been having before, Miss Winter said, “If you are not
too tired, why don’t you come and see Emmeline this evening?”

SISTERS

When it was time, I went to Emmeline’s quarters. It was the
first time I had been there as an invited guest, and the first thing I noticed,
before I even entered the bedroom, was the thickness of the silence. I paused
in the doorway—they had not noticed me yet—and realized it was their
whispering. On the edge of inaudibility, the rub of breath over vocal cords
made ripples in the air. Soft plosives that were gone before you could hear
them, muffled sibilants that you might mistake for the sound of your own blood
in your ears. Each time I thought it had stopped a hushed sussuration brushed
against my ear like a moth alighting on my hair, then fluttered away again.

I cleared my throat.

‘Margaret.“ Miss Winter, her wheelchair positioned next to her
sister, gestured to a chair on the other side of the bed. ”How good of you.“

I looked at Emmeline’s face on the pillow. The red and the white
were the same red and white of scarring and burn damage that I had seen before;
she had lost none of her well-fed plumpness; her hair was still the tangled
skein of white. Listlessly her gaze wandered over the ceiling; she appeared
indifferent to my presence. Where was the difference? For she was different.
Some alteration had taken place in her, a change instantly visible to the eye,
though too elusive to define. She had lost nothing of her strength, though. One
arm extended outside the coverlet and in it she had Miss Winter’s hand in a
firm grip.

‘How are you, Emmeline?“ I asked nervously.

‘She is not well,“ said Miss Winter.

Miss Winter, too, had changed in recent days. But in her disease
was a distillation: The more it reduced her, the more it exposed her essence.
Every time I saw her she seemed diminished: thinner, frailer, more transparent,
and the weaker she grew, the more the steel at her center was revealed.

All the same, it was a very thin, weak hand that Emmeline was
grasping in the clutch of her own heavy fist.

‘Would you like me to read?“ I asked.

‘By all means.“

I read a chapter. Then, “She’s asleep,” Miss Winter murmured.
Emmeline’s eyes were closed; her breathing was deep and regular. She had
released her grip on her sister’s hand, and Miss Winter was rubbing the life
back into it. There were the beginnings of bruises on her fingers.

Seeing the direction of my gaze, she drew her hands into her
shawl. “I’m sorry about this interruption to our work,” she said. “I had to
send you away once before when Emmeline was ill. And now, too, I must spend my
time with her, and our project must wait. But it won’t be long now. And there
is Christmas coming. You will be wanting to leave us and be with your family.
When you come back after the holiday we will see how things stand. I expect…
”—it was the briefest of pauses—“we shall be able to work again by then.”

I did not immediately understand her meaning. The words were
ambiguous; it was her voice that gave it away. My eyes leaped to Emmeline’s
sleeping face.

‘Do you mean… ?“

Miss Winter sighed. “Don’t be taken in by the fact that she
seems so strong. She has been ill for a very long time. For years I assumed
that I would live to see her depart before me. Then, when I fell ill, I was not
so sure. And now it seems we are in a race to the finish line.”

So that’s what we were waiting for. The event without which the
story could not end.

Suddenly my throat was dry and my heart was frightened as a child’s.

Dying. Emmeline was dying.

‘Is it my fault?“

‘Your fault? How should it be your fault?“ Miss Winter shook her
head. ”That night had nothing to do with it.“

She gave me one of her old, sharp looks that understood more
than I meant to reveal. “Why does this upset you, Margaret? My sister is a
stranger to you. And it is hardly compassion for me that distresses you so, is
it? Tell me, Margaret, what is the matter?”

In part she was wrong. I did feel compassion for her. For I
believed I knew what Miss Winter was going through. She was about to join me in
the ranks of the amputees. Bereaved twins are half-souls. The line between life
and death is narrow and dark, and a bereaved twin lives closer to it than most.
Though she was often short-tempered and contrary, I had grown to like Miss
Winter. In particular I liked the child she had once been, the child who
emerged more and more frequently nowadays. With her cropped hair, her naked
face, her frail hands denuded of their heavy stones, she seemed to grow more
childlike every day. To my mind it was this child who was losing her sister,
and this is where Miss Winter’s sorrow met my own. Her drama was going to be
played out here in this house, in the coming days, and it was the very same
drama that had shaped my life, though it had taken place for me in the days
before I could remember.

I watched Emmeline’s face on the pillow. She was approaching the
divide that already separated me from my sister. Soon she would cross it and be
lost to us, a new arrival in that other place. I was filled with the absurd
desire to whisper in her ear, a message for my sister, entrusted to one who
might see her soon. Only what to say?

I felt Miss Winter’s curious gaze upon my face. I restrained my
folly.

‘How long?“ I asked.

‘Days. A week, perhaps. Not long.“

I sat up late that night with Miss Winter. I was there again at
the side of Emmeline’s bed the next day, too. We sat, reading aloud or in
silence for long periods, with only Dr. Clifton coming to interrupt our vigil.
He seemed to take my presence there as a natural thing, included me in the same
grave smile he bestowed on Miss Winter as he spoke gently about Emmeline’s
decline. And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our
limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in
which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering
Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into
Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn’t matter.
Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to
console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed
rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline’s breathing.

Then the day faded and tomorrow would be Christmas Eve, the day
of my departure. In a way I did not want to leave. The hush of this house, the
splendid solitariness offered by its garden, were all I wanted of the world at
present. The shop and my father seemed very small and far away, my mother, as
ever, more distant still. As for Christmas… In our house the festive season
followed too close upon my birthday for my mother to be able to bear the
celebration of the birth of some other woman’s child, no matter how long ago. I
thought of my father, opening the Christmas cards from my parents’ few friends,
arranging over the fireplace the innocuous Santas, snow scenes and robins and
putting aside the ones that showed the Madonna. Every year he collected a secret
pile of them: jewel-colored images of the mother gazing in rapture at her
single, complete, perfect infant; the infant gazing back at her; the two of
them making a blissful circle of love and wholeness. Every year they went in
the trash, the lot of them.

Miss Winter, I knew, would not object if I asked to stay. She
might even be glad to have a companion in the days ahead. But I did not ask. I
could not. I had seen Emmeline’s decline. As she had weakened, so the hand on
my heart had squeezed more tightly, and my growing anguish told me that the end
was not far off. It was cowardly of me, but when Christmas came, it was an
opportunity to escape, and I took it.

In the evening, I went to my room and did my packing, then went
back to Emmeline’s quarters to say good-bye to Miss Winter. All the sisters’
whispers had fluttered away, the dimness hung heavier, stiller than before.
Miss Winter had a book in her lap, but if she had been reading, she could see
to read no longer; instead, her eyes watched in sadness her sister’s face. In
her bed, Emmeline lay immobile, the covers rising and falling gently with her
breath. Her eyes were closed and she looked deeply asleep.

‘Margaret,“ Miss Winter murmured, indicating a chair. She seemed
pleased that I had come. Together we waited for the light to fade, listening to
the tide of Emmeline’s breath.