The end of my nine o’clocks was another anchor in time gone. I listened to her story, I wrote the story, when I slept I dreamed the story, and when I was awake it was the story that formed the constant backdrop of my thoughts. It was like living entirely inside a book. I didn’t even need to emerge to eat, for I could sit at my desk reading my transcript while I ate the meals that Judith brought to my room. Porridge meant it was morning. Soup and salad meant lunchtime. Steak and kidney pie was evening. I remember pondering for a long time over a dish of scrambled egg. What did it mean? It could mean anything. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed the plate away.
In this long, undifferentiated lapse of time, there were a few incidents that stood out. I noted them at the time, separately from the story, and they are worth recalling here.
This is one.
I was in the library. I was looking for Jane Eyre and found almost a whole shelf of copies. It was the collection of a fanatic: There were cheap, modern copies, with no secondhand value; editions that came up so rarely on the market it would be hard to put a price to them; copies that fell at every point between these two extremes. The one I was looking for was an ordinary, though particular, edition from the turn of the century. While I was browsing, Judith brought Miss Winter in and settled her in her chair by the fire.
When Judith had gone, Miss Winter asked, “What are you looking for?”
“Jane Eyre.”
‘Do you like Jane Eyre?“ she asked.
‘Very much. Do you?“
‘Yes.“
She shivered.
‘Shall I stoke up the fire for you?“
She lowered her eyelids as if a wave of pain had come over her. “I suppose so.”
Once the fire was burning strongly again, she said, “Do you have a moment? Sit down, Margaret.”
And after a minute of silence she said this.
‘Picture a conveyor belt, a huge conveyor belt, and at the end of it a massive furnace. And on the conveyor belt are books. Every copy in the world of every book you’ve ever loved. All lined up. Jane Eyre. Villette. The Woman in White.“
“Middlemarch, ” I supplied.
‘Thank you. Middlemarch. And imagine a lever with two labels, On and Off. At the moment the lever is off. And next to it is a human being, with his hand on the lever. About to turn it on. And you can stop it. You have a gun in your hand. All you have to do is pull the trigger. What do you do?“
‘No, that’s silly.“
‘He turns the lever to On. The conveyor belt has started.“
‘But it’s too extreme, it’s hypothetical.“
‘First of all, Shirley goes over the edge.“
‘I don’t like games like this.“
‘Now George Sand starts to go up in flames.“
I sighed and closed my eyes.
‘Wuthering Heights coming up. Going to let that burn, are you?“
I couldn’t help myself. I saw the books, saw their steady process to the mouth of the furnace, and flinched.
‘Suit yourself. In it goes. Same for Jane Eyre?“
Jane Eyre. I was suddenly dry-mouthed.
‘All you have to do is shoot. I won’t tell. No one need ever know.“ She waited. ”They’ve started to fall. Just the first few. But there are a lot of copies. You have a moment to make up your mind.“
I rubbed my thumb nervously against a rough edge of nail on my middle finger.
‘They’re falling faster now.“
She did not remove her gaze from me.
‘Half of them gone. Think, Margaret. All of Jane Eyre will soon have disappeared forever. Think.“
Miss Winter blinked.
‘Two thirds gone. Just one person, Margaret. Just one tiny, insignificant little person.“
I blinked.
‘Still time, but only just. Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?“
Blink. Blink.
‘Last chance.“
Blink. Blink. Blink.
Jane Eyre was no more.
“Margaret!” Miss Winter’s face twisted in vexation as she spoke; she beat her left hand against the arm of her chair. Even the right hand, injured though it was, twitched in her lap.
Later, when I transcribed it, I thought it was the most spontaneous expression of feeling I had ever seen in Miss Winter. It was a surprising amount of feeling to invest in a mere game.
And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so.
On my way out, I returned to the shelf of Jane Eyres and took the one volume that met my criteria. Right age, right kind of paper, right typeface. In my room I turned the pages till I found the place.
‘… not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm—not soon enough however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it.
The book was intact. Not a single page was missing. This was not the volume Aurelius’s page had been torn from. But in any case, why should it be? If his page had come from Angelfield—if it had—then it would have burned with the rest of the house.
For a time I sat doing nothing, only thinking of Jane Eyre and a library and a furnace and a house fire, but no matter how I combined and recombined them, I could not make sense of it.
The other thing I remember from this time was the incident of the photograph. A small parcel appeared with my breakfast tray one morning, addressed to me in my father’s narrow handwriting. It was my photographs of Angelfield; I had sent him the canister of film, and he had had it developed for me. There were a few clear pictures from my first day: brambles growing through the wreckage of the library, ivy snaking its way up the stone staircase. I halted at the picture of the bedroom where I had come face-to-face with my ghost; over the old fireplace there was only the glare of a flashbulb reflected. Still, I took it out of the bundle and tucked it inside the cover of my book, to keep.
The rest of the photographs were from my second visit, when the weather had been against me. Most of them were nothing but puzzling compositions of murkiness. What I remembered was shades of gray overlaid with silver; the mist moving like a veil of gauze; my own breath at tipping point between air and water. But my camera had captured none of that, nor was it possible in the dark smudges that interrupted the gray to make out a stone, a wall, a tree or a forest. After half a dozen such pictures, I gave up looking. Stuffing the wad of photos in my cardigan pocket, I went downstairs to the library.
We were about halfway through the interview when I became aware of a silence. I was dreaming. Lost, as usual, in her world of childhood twinship. I replayed the sound track of her voice, recalled a changed tone, the fact that she had addressed me, but could not recall the words.
‘What?“ I said.
‘Your pocket,“ she repeated. ”You have something in your pocket.“
‘Oh… It’s some photographs…“ In that limbo state halfway between a story and your life, when you haven’t caught up with your wits yet, I mumbled on. ”Angelfield,“ I said.
By the time I returned to myself, the pictures were in her hands.
At first she looked closely at each one, straining through her glasses to make sense of the blurred shapes. As one indecipherable image followed another, she let out a small Vida Winter sigh, one that implied her low expectations had been amply fulfilled, and her mouth tightened into a critical line. With her good hand she began to flick through the pile of pictures more cursorily; to show that she no longer expected to find anything of interest, she tossed each one after the briefest glance onto the table at her side.
I was mesmerized by the discarded photos landing at a regular rhythm on the table. They formed a messy sprawl on the surface, flopping on top of each other and gliding over each other’s slippery surfaces with a sound like useless, useless, useless.
Then the rhythm came to a halt. Miss Winter was sitting with intent rigidity, holding up a single picture and studying it with a frown. She’s seen a ghost, I thought. Then, after a long moment, pretending not to feel my gaze upon her, she tucked the photo behind the remaining dozen and looked at the rest, tossing them down just as before. When the one that had arrested her attention resurfaced, she barely glanced at it but added it to the others. “I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was Angelfield, but if you say so…” she said icily, and then, in an apparently artless movement, she picked up the whole pile and, holding them toward me, dropped them.
‘My hand. Do excuse me,“ she murmured as I bent down to retrieve the pictures, but I wasn’t deceived.
And she picked up her story where she had left it.
Later I looked through the pictures again. For all that the dropping of the photos had muddled the order, it wasn’t difficult to tell which one had struck her so forcefully. In the bundle of blurred gray images there was really only one that stood out from the rest. I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at the image, remembering the moment well. The thinning of the mist and the warming of the sun had combined at just the right time to allow a ray of light to fall onto a boy who posed stiffly for the camera, chin up, back straight, eyes betraying the anxious knowledge that at any minute his hard yellow hat was going to slip sideways on his head.
Why had she been so taken by that photograph? I scanned the background, but the house, half demolished already, was only a dismal smear of gray over the child’s right shoulder. Closer to him, all that was visible was the grille of the safety barrier and the corner of the Keep Out sign.
Was it the boy himself who interested her?
I puzzled over the picture for half an hour, but by the time I came to put it away, I was no nearer an explanation. Because it perplexed me, I slipped it inside the cover of my book along with the picture of an absence in a mirror frame.
Apart from the photograph of the boy and the game of Jane Eyre and the furnace, not much else pierced the cloak the story had cast over me.
The cat, I remember. He took note of my unusual hours, came scratching at my door for a bit of fuss at random hours of the day and night. Finished up bits of egg or fish from my plate. He liked to sit on my piles of paper, watching me write. For hours I could sit scratching at my pages, wandering in the dark labyrinth of Miss Winter’s story, but no matter how far I forgot myself, I never quite lost my sense of being watched over, and when I got particularly lost, it was the gaze of the cat that seemed to reach into my muddle and light my way back to my room, my notes, my pencils and my pencil sharpener. He even slept with me on my bed some nights, and I took to leaving my curtains open so that if he woke he could sit on my windowsill seeing things move in the dark that were invisible to the human eye.
And that is all. Apart from these things there was nothing else. Only the eternal twilight and the story.
COLLAPSE
Isabelle had gone. Hester had gone. Charlie had gone. Now Miss Winter told me of further losses.
Up in the attic I leaned with my back against the creaking wall. I pressed back to make it give, then released it. Over and over. I was tempting fate. What would happen, I wondered, if the wall came down? Would the roof cave in? Would the weight of it falling cause the floorboards to collapse? Would roof tiles and beams and stone come crashing through ceilings onto the beds and boxes as if there were an earthquake? And then what? Would it stop there? How far would it go? I rocked and rocked, taunting the wall, daring it to fall, but it didn’t. Even under duress, it is astonishing just how long a dead wall will stay standing.
Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up, ears ajangle. The noise of it was finished already, but I could still feel it resounding in my eardrums and in my chest. I leaped out of bed and ran to the stairs, Emmeline at my heels.
We arrived on the galleried landing at the same time that John, who slept in the kitchen, arrived at the foot of the stairs, and we all stared. In the middle of the hallway the Missus was standing in her nightdress, staring upward. At her feet was a huge block of stone, and above her head, a jagged hole in the ceiling. The air was thick with gray dust. It rose and fell in the air, undecided where to settle. Fragments of plaster, mortar, wood were still falling from the floor above, with a sound like mice scattering, and from time to time I felt Emmeline jump as planks and bricks fell in the floors above.
The stone steps were cold, then splinters of wood and shards of plaster and mortar dug into my feet. In the center of all the detritus of our broken house, with the swirls of dust slowly settling around her, the Missus stood like a ghost. Dust-gray hair, dust-gray face and hands, dust-gray the folds of her long nightdress. She stood perfectly still and looked up. I came close to her and joined my stare to hers. We gazed through the hole in the ceiling, and beyond that another hole in another ceiling and then yet another hole in another ceiling. We saw the peony wallpaper in the bedroom above, the ivy trellis pattern in the room above that, and the pale gray walls of the little attic room. Above all of that, high above our heads, we saw the hole in the roof itself and the sky. There were no stars.
I took her hand. “Come on,” I said. “It’s no use looking up there.”
I led her away, and she followed me like a little child. “I’ll put her to bed,” I told John.
Ghost-white, he nodded. “Yes,” he said, in a voice thick with dust. He could hardly bear to look at her. He made a slow gesture toward the destroyed ceiling. It was the slow motion of a drowning man dragged under by the current. “And I’ll sort this out.”
But an hour later, when the Missus was clean, and in a fresh nightdress, tucked up in bed and asleep, he was still there. Exactly as I had left him. Staring at the spot where she had been.
The next morning, when the Missus did not appear in the kitchen, it was I who went to wake her. She could not be woken. Her soul had departed through the hole in the roof, and she was gone.
‘We’ve lost her,“ I told John in the kitchen. ”She’s dead.“
His face didn’t change. He continued to stare across the kitchen table as though he hadn’t heard me. “Yes,” he said eventually, in a voice that did not expect to be heard. “Yes.”
It felt as if everything had come to an end. I had only one wish: to sit like John, immobile, staring into space and doing nothing. Yet time did not stop. I could still feel my heartbeat measuring out the seconds. I could feel hunger growing in my stomach and thirst in my throat. I was so sad I thought I would die, yet instead I was scandalously and absurdly alive—so alive I swear I could feel my hair and my fingernails growing.
For all the unbearable weight on my heart I could not, like John, give myself up to the misery. Hester was gone; Charlie was gone; the Missus was gone; John, in his own way, was gone, though I hoped he would find his way back. In the meantime the girl in the mist was going to have to come out of the shadows. It was time to stop playing and grow up.
‘I’ll put the kettle on, then,“ I said. ”Make a cup of tea.“
My voice was not my own. Some other girl, some sensible, capable, ordinary girl had found her way into my skin and taken me over. She seemed to know just what to do. I was only partly surprised. Hadn’t I spent half my life watching people live their lives? Watching Hester, watching the Missus, watching the villagers?
I settled quietly inside myself while the capable girl boiled the kettle, measured out the tea leaves, stirred and poured. She put two sugars in John’s tea, three in mine. When it was made, I drank it, and as the hot, sweet tea reached my stomach, at last I stopped trembling.
THE SILVER GARDEN
Before I was quite awake I had the sense that something was different. And a moment later, before I even opened my eyes, I knew what it was. There was light.
Gone were the shadows that had lurked in my room since the beginning of the month; gone, too, the gloomy corners and the air of mournfulness. The window was a pale rectangle, and from it there entered a shimmering paleness that illuminated every aspect of my room. It was so long since I had seen it that I felt a surge of joy, as though it weren’t just a night that had ended but winter. It was as if spring had come.
The cat was on the window ledge, gazing intently into the garden. Hearing me stir, he immediately jumped down and pawed at the door to go out. I pulled my clothes and coat on, and we crept downstairs together, to the kitchen and the garden.
I realized my mistake the moment I stepped outdoors. It was not day. It was not the sun, but moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the leaves with silver and touching the outlines of the statuary figures. I stopped still and stared at the moon. It was a perfect circle, hanging palely in a clear sky. Mesmerized, I could have stood there till daybreak, but the cat, impatient, pressed my ankles for attention, and I bent to stroke him. No sooner had I touched him than he moved away, only to pause a few yards off and look over his shoulder.
I turned up the collar of my coat, shoved my cold hands in my pockets and followed.
He led me first down the grassy path between the long borders. On our left the yew hedge gleamed brightly; on the right the hedge was dark in the moon shadow. We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered—a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky—but I could not stop. All the time, the cat stalked on ahead of me with a purposeful, even step, tail raised like a tour guide’s umbrella signaling this way, follow me. In the walled garden he jumped up onto the wall that bordered the fountain pool and padded halfway around its perimeter, ignoring the moon’s reflection that shone in the water like a bright coin at the bottom of the pool. And when he came level with the arched entrance to the winter garden, he jumped down and walked toward it.
Under the arch he paused. He looked left and right, intent. Saw something. And slunk off, out of sight, toward it.
Curious, I tiptoed forward to stand where he had, and look around.
A winter garden is colorful when you see it at the right time of day, at the right time of year. Largely it depends on daylight to bring it to life. The midnight visitor has to look harder to see its attractions. It was too dark to see the low, wide spread of hellebore leaves against the dark soil; too early in the season for the brightness of snowdrops; too cold for the daphne to release its fragrance. There was witch hazel, though; soon its branches would be decorated with trembling yellow and orange tassels, but for now it was the branches themselves that were the main attraction. Fine and leafless, they were delicately knotted, twisting randomly and with elegant restraint.
At its foot, hunched over the ground, was the rounded silhouette of a human figure.
I froze.
The figure heaved and shifted laboriously, releasing gasping puffs of breath and effortful grunts.
In a long, slow second my mind raced to explain the presence of another human being in Miss Winter’s garden at night. Some things I knew instantly without needing even to think about them. For a start, it was not Maurice kneeling on the ground there. Though he was the least unlikely person to find in the garden, it never occurred to me to wonder whether it might be him. This was not his wiry frame, these not his measured movements. Equally it was not Judith. Neat, calm, Judith with her clean nails, perfect hair and polished shoes scrabbling about in the garden in the middle of the night? Impossible. I did not need to consider these two, and so I didn’t.
Instead, in that second, my mind reeled to and fro a hundred times between two thoughts.
It was Miss Winter.
It couldn’t be Miss Winter.
It was Miss Winter because… because it was. I could tell. I could sense it. It was her and I knew it.
It couldn’t be her. Miss Winter was frail and ill. Miss Winter was always in her wheelchair. Miss Winter was too unwell to bend to pluck out a weed, let alone crouch on the cold ground disturbing the soil in this frantic fashion.
It wasn’t Miss Winter.
But somehow, impossibly, despite everything, it was.
That first second was long and confusing. The second, when it finally came, was sudden.
The figure froze… swiveled… rose… and I knew.
Miss Winter’s eyes. Brilliant, supernatural green.
But not Miss Winter’s face.
A patchwork of scarred and mottled flesh, crisscrossed by crevices deeper than age could make. Two uneven dumplings of cheeks. Lopsided lips, one half a perfect bow that told of former beauty, the other a twisted graft of white flesh.
Emmeline! Miss Winter’s twin! Alive, and living in this house!
My mind was in turmoil; blood was pounding in my ears; shock paralyzed me. She stared at me unblinking, and I realized she was less startled than I was. But still, she seemed to be under the same spell as me. We were both cast into immobility.
She was the first to recover. In an urgent gesture she raised a dark, soil-covered hand toward me and, in a hoarse voice, rasped a string of senseless sounds.
Bewilderment slowed my responses; I could not even stammer her name before she turned and hurried away, leaning forward, shoulders hunched. From out of the shadows emerged the cat. He stretched calmly and, ignoring me, took himself off after her. They disappeared under the arch and I was alone. Me and a patch of churned-up soil.
Foxes indeed.
Once they were gone I might have been able to persuade myself that I had imagined it. That I had been sleepwalking, and that in my sleep I had dreamed that Adeline’s twin appeared to me and hissed a secret, unintelligible message. But I knew it was real. And though she was no longer visible, I could hear her singing as she departed. That infuriating, tuneless five-note fragment. La la la la la.
I stood, listening, until it faded completely away.
Then, realizing that my feet and hands were freezing, I turned back to the house.
PHONETIC ALPHABET
A great many years had passed since I learned the phonetic alphabet. It began with a chart in a linguistics book in father’s shop. There was no reason for my interest at first, other than that I had nothing to do one weekend and was enamored of the signs and symbols it contained. There were familiar letters and foreign ones. There were capital N’s that weren’t the same as little n’s and capital K’s that weren’t the same as little k’s. Other letters, n’s and d’s and s’s and z’s, had funny little tails and loops attached, and you could cross h’s and i’s and u’s as if they were t’s. I loved these wild and fanciful hybrids: I filled pages of paper with m’s that turned into j’s, and v’s that perched precariously on tiny o’s like performing dogs on balls at the circus. My father came across my pages of symbols and taught me the sounds that went with each. In the international phonetic alphabet, I discovered, you could write words that looked like math, words that looked like secret code, words that looked like lost languages.
I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost. I used to write one special word over and over again. My sister’s name. A talisman. I folded the word into elaborate miniature origami, kept my pleat of paper always close to me. In winter it lived in my coat pocket; in summer it tickled my ankle inside the fold of my sock. At night, I fell asleep clutching it in my hand. For all my care, I did not always keep track of these bits of paper. I lost them, made new ones, then came across the old ones. When my mother tried to prize one from my fingers, I swallowed it to thwart her, even though she wouldn’t have been able to read it. But when I saw my father pick a grayed and fraying fold of paper out of the junk in the bottom of a drawer and unfold it, I did nothing to stop him. When he read the secret name, his face seemed to break, and his eyes, when they rose to me, were full of sorrow.
He would have spoken. He opened his mouth to speak but, raising my finger to my lips, I commanded his silence. I would not have him speak her name. Had he not tried to shut her away, in the dark? Had he not wanted to forget her? Had he not tried to keep her from me? He had no right to her now.
I prized the paper from his fingers. Without a word I left the room. On the window seat on the second floor I put the morsel of paper in my mouth, tasted its dry, woody tang, and swallowed. For ten years my parents had buried her name in silence, trying to forget. Now I would protect it in a silence of my own. And remember.
Alongside my mispronunciation of hello, good-bye and sorry in seventeen languages, and my ability to recite the Greek alphabet forward and backward (I who have never learned a word of Greek in my life), the phonetic alphabet was one of those secret, random wells of useless knowledge left over from my bookish childhood. I learned it only to amuse myself; its purpose in those days was merely private, so as the years passed I made no particular effort to practice it. That is why, when I came in from the garden and put pencil to paper to capture the sibilants and fricatives, the plosives and trills of Emmeline’s urgent whisper, I had to make several attempts.
After three or four goes, I sat on the bed and looked at my line of squiggles and symbols and signs. Was it accurate? Doubts began to assail me. Had I remembered the sounds accurately after my five-minute journey back into the house? Was my recollection of the phonetic alphabet itself adequate? What if my first failed attempts had contaminated my memory?
I whispered what I had written on the paper. Whispered it again, urgently. Waited for the birth of some answering echo in my memory to tell me I had got it right. Nothing came. It was the travestied transcription of something misheard and then only half-remembered. It was useless.
I wrote the secret name instead. The spell, the charm, the talisman.
It had never worked. She never came. I was still alone.
I screwed the paper into a ball and kicked it into a corner.
THE LADDER
My story isn’t boring you, is it, Miss Lea?“ I endured a number of such comments the following day as, unable to suppress my yawns, I fidgeted and rubbed my eyes while listening to Miss Winter’s narration.
‘I’m sorry. I’m just tired.“
‘Tired!“ she exclaimed. ”You look like death warmed up! A proper meal would put you right. Whatever’s the matter with you?“
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