I am alone.
No name.
No home.
No family.
I am nothing.
I have nowhere to go.
I have no one who belongs to me.
I stare at my burned palm but cannot feel the pain.
What kind of a thing am I? Am I even alive?
I could go anywhere, but I walk back to Angelfield. It is the only place I know.
Emerging from the trees, I approach the scene. A fire engine. Villagers with their buckets, standing back, dazed and with smoke-blackened faces, watching the professionals do battle with the flames. Women, mesmerized by smoke rising into the black sky. An ambulance. Dr. Maudsley kneeling over a figure on the grass.
No one sees me.
On the edge of all the activity I stand, invisible. Perhaps I really am nothing. Perhaps no one can see me at all. Perhaps I died in the fire and haven’t realized it yet. Perhaps I am finally what I have always been: a ghost.
Then one of the women looks in my direction.
‘Look,“ she cries, pointing. ”She’s here!“ and people turn. Stare. One of the women runs to alert the men. They turn from the fire and look, too. ”Thank God!“ someone says.
I open my mouth to say… I don’t know what. But I say nothing. Just stand there, making shapes with my mouth, no voice, and no words.
‘Don’t try to speak.“ Dr. Maudsley is by my side now.
I stare at the girl on the lawn. “She’ll survive,” says the doctor.
I look at the house.
The flames. My books. I don’t think I can bear it. I remember the page of Jane Eyre, the ball of words I saved from the pyre. I have left it behind with the baby.
I begin to weep.
‘She’s in shock,“ says the doctor to one of the women. ”Keep her warm and stay with her, while we put the sister in the ambulance.“
A woman comes to me, clucking her concern. She takes off her coat and wraps it around me, tenderly, as though dressing a baby, and she murmurs, “Don’t worry, you’ll be all right, your sister’s all right, oh, my poor dear.”
They lift the girl from the grass and place her on the bed in the ambulance. Then they help me in. Sit me down opposite. And they drive us to the hospital.
She stares into space. Eyes open, empty. After the first moment I don’t look. The ambulance man bends over her, assures himself that she is breathing, then turns to me.
‘What about that hand, eh?“
I am clutching my right hand in my left, unconscious of the pain in my mind, but my body giving the secret away.
He takes my hand, and I let him unfold my fingers. A mark is burned deep into my palm. The key.
‘That’ll heal up,“ he tells me. ”Don’t worry. Now, are you Adeline or are you Emmeline?“
He gestures to the other one. “Is this Emmeline?”
I can’t answer, can’t feel myself, can’t move.
‘Not to worry,“ he said. ”All in good time.“
He gives up on making me understand him. Mutters for his own benefit, “Still, we’ve got to call you something. Adeline, Emmeline, Emmeline, Adeline. Fifty-fifty, isn’t it? It’ll all come out in the wash.”
The hospital. Opening the ambulance doors. All noise and bustle. Voices speaking fast. The stretcher, lifted onto a trolley and wheeled away at speed. A wheelchair. Hands on my shoulders. “Sit down, dear.” The chair moving. A voice behind my back. “Don’t worry, child. We’ll take care of you and your sister. You’re safe now, Adeline.”
Miss Winter slept.
I saw the tender slackness of her open mouth, the tuft of unruly hair that did not lay straight from her temple, and in her sleep she seemed very, very old and very, very young. With every breath she took the bedclothes rose and fell over her thin shoulders, and at each sinking the ribboned edge of the blanket brushed against her face. She seemed unaware of it, but all the same, I bent over her to fold the covers back and smooth the curl of pale hair back into place.
She did not stir. Was she really asleep, I wondered, or was this unconsciousness already?
I can’t say how long I watched her after that. There was a clock, but the movements of its hands were as meaningless as a map of the surface of the sea. Wave after wave of time lapped over me as I sat with my eyes closed, not sleeping, but with the vigilance of a mother for the breathing of her child.
I hardly know what to say about the next thing. Is it possible that I hallucinated in my tiredness? Did I fall asleep and dream? Or did Miss Winter really speak one last time?
I will give your message to your sister.
I jerked my eyes open, but hers were closed. She seemed to be sleeping as deeply as before.
I did not see the wolf when he came. I did not hear him. There was only this: A little before dawn I became aware of a hush, and I realized that the only breathing to be heard in the room was my own.
Beginnings
SNOW
Miss Winter died and the snow kept falling. When Judith came she stood with me for a time at the window, and we watched the eerie illumination of the night sky. Then, when an alteration in the whiteness told us it was morning, she sent me to bed.
I awoke at the end of the afternoon.
The snow that had already deadened the telephone now reached the window ledges and drifted halfway up the doors. It separated us from the rest of the world as effectively as a prison key. Miss Winter had escaped; so had the woman Judith referred to as Emmeline, and whom I avoided naming. The rest of us, Judith, Maurice and I, were trapped.
The cat was restless. It was the snow that put him out; he did not like this change in the appearance of his universe. He went from one windowsill to another in search of his lost world, and meowed urgently at Judith, Maurice and me, as though its restoration was in our hands. In comparison, the loss of his mistresses was a small matter that, if he noticed it at all, left him fundamentally undisturbed.
The snow had blockaded us into a sideways extension of time, and we each found our own way of enduring it. Judith, imperturbable, made vegetable soup, cleaned the kitchen cupboards out and, when she ran out of jobs, manicured her nails and did a face pack. Maurice, chafing at the confinement and the inactivity, played endless games of solitaire, but when he had to drink his tea black for lack of milk, Judith played rummy with him to distract him from the bitterness.
As for me, I spent two days writing up my final notes, but when that was done, I found I could not settle to reading. Even Sherlock Holmes could not reach me in the snowlocked landscape. Alone in my room I spent an hour examining my melancholy, trying to name what I thought was a new element in it. I realized that I missed Miss Winter. So, hopeful of human company, I made my way to the kitchen. Maurice was glad to play cards with me, even though I knew only children’s games. Then, when Judith’s nails were drying, I made the cocoa and tea with no milk, and later let Judith file and polish my own nails.
In this way, we three and the cat sat out the days, locked in with our dead, and with the old year seeming to linger on past its time.
On the fifth day I allowed myself to be overcome by a vast sorrow.
I had done the washing up, and Maurice had dried while Judith played solitaire at the table. We were all glad of a change. And when the washing up was done, I took myself away from their company to the drawing room. The window looked out onto the part of the garden that was in the lee of the house. Here the snow did not drift so high. I opened a window, climbed out into the whiteness and walked across the snow. All the grief I had kept at bay for years by means of books and bookcases approached me now. On a bench sheltered by a tall hedge of yew I abandoned myself to a sorrow that was wide and deep as the snow itself, and as untainted. I cried for Miss Winter, for her ghost, for Adeline and Emmeline. For my sister, my mother and my father. Mostly, and most terribly, I cried for myself. My grief was that of the infant, newly severed from her other half; of the child bent over an old tin, making sudden, shocking sense of a few pieces of paper; and of a grown woman, sitting crying on a bench in the hallucinatory light and silence of the snow.
When I came to myself Dr. Clifton was there. He put an arm around me. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
He didn’t know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. “I know,” he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
He led me inside, to warmth.
‘Oh dear,“ said Judith. ”Shall I bring cocoa?“
‘With a touch of brandy in it, I think,“ he said.
Maurice pulled out a chair for me and began to stoke the fire.
I sipped the cocoa slowly. There was milk—the doctor had brought it when he came with the farmer on the tractor.
Judith tucked a shawl around me, then started peeling potatoes for dinner. She and Maurice and the doctor made the occasional comment—what we could have for supper, whether the snow was lighter now, how long it would be before the telephone line was restored—and in making them, took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again after death had stopped us all in its tracks.
Little by little the comments melded together and became a conversation.
I listened to their voices and, after a time, joined in.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
I went home.
To the bookshop.
‘Miss Winter is dead,“ I told my father.
‘And you? How are you?“ he asked.
‘Alive.“
He smiled.
‘Tell me about Mum,“ I said to him. ”Why is she the way she is?“
He told me. “She was very ill when you were born. She never saw you before you were taken away. She never saw your sister. She nearly died. By the time she came around, your operation had already taken place and your sister…”
‘My sister had died.“
‘Yes. There was no knowing how it would go with you. I went from her bedside to yours… I thought I was going to lose all three of you. I prayed to every God I had ever heard of to save you. And my prayers were answered. In part. You survived. Your mother never really came back.“
There was one other thing I needed to know.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? About being a twin?“
The face he turned to me was devastated. He swallowed, and when he spoke his voice was hoarse. “The story of your birth is a sad one Your mother thought it too heavy for a child to bear. At least that’s what your mother said. I would have borne it for you, Margaret, if I could. I would have done anything to spare you.”
We sat in silence. I thought of all the other questions I might have asked, but now that the moment had come I didn’t need to.
I reached for my father’s hand at the same moment as he reached for mine.
I attended three funerals in as many days.
Miss Winter’s mourners were many. The nation grieved for its favorite storyteller, and thousands of readers turned out to pay their respects. I came away as soon as I could, having said my good-byes already.
The second was a quiet affair. There were only Judith, Maurice, the doctor and me to mourn the woman referred to throughout the service as Emmeline. Afterward we said brief farewells and parted.
The third was lonelier still. In a crematorium in Banbury I was the only person in attendance when a bland-faced clergyman oversaw the passing into God’s hands of a set of bones, identity unknown. Into God’s hands, except that it was me who collected the urn later, “on behalf of the Angelfield family.”
There were snowdrops in Angelfield. At least the first signs of them, boring their way through the frozen ground and showing their points, green and fresh, above the snow.
As I stood up I heard a sound. It was Aurelius, arriving at the lych-gate. Snow had settled on his shoulders and he was carrying flowers.
‘Aurelius!“ How could he have grown so sad? So pale? ”You’ve changed,“ I said.
‘I have worn myself out on a wild-goose chase.“ His eyes, always mild, had lightened to the same washed-out blue as the January sky; you could see straight through their transparency to his disappointed heart. ”All my life I have wanted to find my family. I wanted to know who I was. And lately I have felt hopeful. I thought there might be some chance of restoration. Now I fear I was mistaken.“
We walked along the grass path between the graves and cleared the snow from the bench and sat down before more could fall. Aurelius delved into his pocket and unwrapped two pieces of cake. Absently he handed one to me and dug his teeth into the other.
‘Is that what you have for me?“ he asked, looking at the casket. ”Is that the rest of my story?“
I handed him the casket.
‘Isn’t it light? Light as air. And yet…“ His hand veered to his heart; he sought a gesture to show how heavy his heart was; not finding it, he put down the casket and took another bite of cake.
When he had finished the last morsel he spoke. “If she was my mother, why was I not with her? Why did I not die with her, in this place? Why would she take me away to Mrs. Love’s house and then come back here to a house on fire? Why? It doesn’t make sense.”
I followed him as he stepped off the central path and made his way into the maze of narrow borders between the graves. He stopped at a grave I had looked at before and laid down his flowers. The stone was a simple one.
JOAN MARY LOVE NEVER FORGOTTEN
Poor Aurelius. He was so very weary. He hardly seemed to notice as I slipped my arm through his. But then he turned to face me fully. “Perhaps it’s better not to have a story at all, rather than have one that keeps changing. I have spent my whole life chasing after my story and never quite catching it. Running after my story when I had Mrs. Love all along. She loved me, you know.”
‘I never doubted it.“ She had been a good mother to him. Better than either of the twins could have been. ”Perhaps it’s better not to know,“ I suggested.
He looked from the gravestone to the white sky. “Do you think so?”
‘No.“
‘Then why suggest it?“
I slid my arm from his and tucked my cold hands under the arms of my coat. “It’s what my mother would say. She thinks a weightless story is better than one that’s too heavy.”
‘So. My story is a heavy one.“
I said nothing, and when the silence grew long, I told him not his story but my own.
‘I had a sister,“ I began. ”A twin.“
He turned to face me. His shoulders were solid and wide against the sky and he listened gravely to the story I poured out to him.
‘We were joined. Here—“ and I brushed my hand down my left side. ”She couldn’t live without me. She needed my heart to beat for her. But I couldn’t live with her. She was draining my strength. They separated us, and she died.“
My other hand joined the first over my scar, and I pressed hard.
‘My mother never told me. She thought it was better for me not to know.“
‘A weightless story.“
‘Yes.“
‘But you do know.“
I pressed harder. “I found out by accident.”
‘I am sorry,“ he said.
I felt my hands taken by his, and he enclosed both of them into one great fist. Then, with his other arm, he drew me to him. Through layers of coats I felt the softness of his belly, and a rush of noise came to my ear. It is the beating of his heart, I thought. A human heart. By my side. So this is what it’s like. I listened.
Then we drew apart.
‘And is it better to know?“ he asked me.
‘I can’t tell you. But once you know, it’s impossible to go back.“
‘And you know my story.“
‘Yes.“
‘My true story.“
‘Yes.“
He barely hesitated. Just took a breath and seemed to grow a little bigger.
‘You had better tell me, then,“ he said.
I told. And while I told we walked, and when I finished telling we were standing at the place where the snowdrops were pointing through he whiteness of the snow.
With the casket in his hands, Aurelius hesitated. “I have a feeling this is against the rules.”
I thought it was, too. “But what else can we do?”
‘The rules don’t work for this case, do they?“
‘Nothing else would be right.“
‘Come on, then.“
We used the cake knife to gouge a hollow in the frozen earth above the coffin of the woman I knew as Emmeline. Aurelius tipped the ashes on it, and we replaced the earth to cover them. Aurelius pressed down with all his weight, and then we rearranged the flowers to hide the disturbance.
‘It will level out with the melting of the snow,“ he said. And he brushed the snow from his trouser legs.
‘Aurelius, there is more to your story.“
I led him to another part of the churchyard. “You know about your mother now. But you had a father, too.” I indicated Ambrose’s gravestone.
The A and the S on the piece of paper you showed me. It was his name. His bag, too. It was used for carrying game. That explains the feather.“
I paused. It was a lot for Aurelius to take in. When after a long moment he nodded, I went on. “He was a good man. You are very like him.”
Aurelius stared. Dazed. More knowledge. More loss. “He is dead. I see.”
‘That’s not all,“ I said softly. He turned his eyes slowly to mine, and I read in them the fear that there was to be no end to the story of his abandonment.
I took his hand. I smiled at him.
‘After you were born, Ambrose married. He had another child.“
It took a moment for him to realize what it meant, and when he did, a jolt of excitement brought his frame to life. “You mean… I have… And she… he… she—”
‘Yes! A sister!“
The smile grew broad on his face.
I went on. “And she has her own children in turn. A boy and a girl!”
‘A niece! And a nephew!“
I took his hands into mine to stop them shaking. “A family, Aurelius. Your family. You know them already. And they are expecting you.”
I could hardly keep up with him as we passed through the lych-gate and strode down the avenue to the white gatehouse. Aurelius never looked back. Only at the gatehouse did we pause, and that was because of me.
‘Aurelius! I almost forgot to give you this.“
He took the white envelope and opened it, distracted by joy. He drew out the card and gave me a look. “What? Not really?”
‘Yes. Really.“
‘Today?“
‘Today!“ Something possessed me at that moment. I did something I have never done in my life before and never expected to do, either. I opened my mouth and shouted at the top of my voice, ”HAPPY BIRTHDAY!“
I must have been a bit mad. In any case, I felt embarrassed. Not that Aurelius cared. He was standing motionless, arms stretched out on either side of him, eyes closed and face turned skyward. All the happiness in the world was falling on him with the snow.
In Karen’s garden the snow bore the prints of chase games, small footprints and smaller ones following one another in broad circles. The children were nowhere to be seen, but as we got nearer we heard their voices coming from the niche in the yew tree.
‘Let’s play Snow White.“
‘That’s a girls’ story.“
‘What story do you want to play?“
‘A story about rockets.“
‘I don’t want to be a rocket. Let’s be boats.“
‘We were boats yesterday.“
Hearing the latch of the gate, they peered out of the tree, and with their hoods hiding their hair, you could hardly tell brother from sister.
‘It’s the cake man!“
Karen stepped out of the house and came across the lawn. “Shall I tell you who this is? ” she asked the children as she smiled shyly at Aurelius. “This is your uncle.”
Aurelius looked from Karen to the children and back to Karen, his eyes scarcely big enough to take in everything he wanted to. He was lost for words, but Karen reached out a tentative hand, and he took it in his.
‘It’s all a bit…“ he began.
‘Isn’t it?“ she agreed. ”But we’ll get used to it, won’t we?“
He nodded.
The children were staring with curiosity at the adult scene.
‘What are you playing?“ Karen asked, to distract them.
‘We don’t know,“ the girl said.
‘We can’t decide,“ said her brother.
‘Do you know any stories?“ Emma asked Aurelius.
‘Only one,“ he told her.
‘Only one?“ She was astounded. ”Has it got any frogs in it?“
‘No.“
‘Dinosaurs?“
‘No.“
‘Secret passages?“
‘No.“
The children looked at each other. It wasn’t much of a story, clearly.
‘We know loads of stories,“ Tom said.
‘Loads,“ she echoed dreamily. ”Princesses, frogs, magic castles, fairy godmothers—“
‘Caterpillars, rabbits, elephants—“
‘All sorts of animals.“
‘All sorts.“
They fell into silence, absorbed in shared contemplation of countless different worlds.
Aurelius watched them as though they were a miracle.
Then they returned to the real world. “Millions of stories,” the boy said.
‘Shall I tell you a story?“ the girl asked.
I thought perhaps Aurelius had had enough stories for one day, but he nodded his head.
She picked up an imaginary object and placed it in the palm of her right hand. With her left she mimed the opening of a book cover. She glanced up to be sure she had the full attention of her companions. Then her eyes returned to the book in her hand, and she began.
‘Once upon a time…“
Karen and Tom and Aurelius: three sets of eyes all resting on Emma and her storytelling. They would be all right together.
Unnoticed, I stepped back from the gate and slipped away along the street.
I will not publish the biography of Vida Winter. The world may well be agog for the story, but it is not mine to tell. Adeline and Emmeline, the fire and the ghost, these are stories that belong to Aurelius now. The graves in the churchyard are his; so is the birthday that he can mark as he chooses. The truth is heavy enough without the additional weight of the world’s scrutiny on his shoulders. Left to their own devices, he and Karen can turn the page, start afresh.
But time passes. One day Aurelius will be no more; one day Karen, too, will leave this world. The children, Tom and Emma, are already more distant from the events I have told here than their uncle. With the help of their mother they have begun to forge their own stories; stories that are strong and solid and true. The day will come when Isabelle and Charlie, Adeline and Emmeline, the Missus and John-the-dig, the girl without a name, will be so far in the past that their old bones will have no power to cause fear or pain. They will be nothing but an old story, unable to do any harm to anyone. And when that day comes—I will be old myself by then—I shall give Tom and Emma this document. To read and, if they choose, to publish.
I hope that they will publish. For until they do, the spirit of that ghost-child will haunt me. She will roam in my thoughts, linger in my dreams, my memory her only playground. It is not much, this posthumous life of hers, but it is not oblivion. It will be enough, until the day when Tom and Emma release this manuscript and she will be able to exist more fully after death than she ever lived before it.
And so the story of the ghost girl is not to be published for many years, if at all. That does not mean, however, that I have nothing to give the world immediately to satisfy its curiosity about Vida Winter. For there is something. At the end of my last meeting with Mr. Lomax, I was about to leave when he stopped me. “Just one more thing.” And he opened his desk and took out an envelope.
I had that envelope with me when I slipped unremarked out of Karen’s garden and turned my steps back toward the lodge gates. The ground for the new hotel had been flattened, and when I tried to remember the old house, I could find only photographs in my memory. But then it came to me how it always seemed to face the wrong way. It had been twisted. The new building was going to be much better. It would face straight toward you.
I diverged from the gravel pathway to cross the snow-covered lawn toward the old deer park and the woods. The dark branches were heavy with snow, which sometimes fell in soft swathes at my passing. I came at last to the vantage point on the slope. You can see everything from there. The church and its graveyard, the wreaths of flowers bright against the snow. The lodge gates, chalk-white against the blue sky. The coach house, denuded of its shroud of thorns. Only the house had gone, and it had gone completely. The men in their yellow hats had reduced the past to a blank page. We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future.
I took the envelope from my bag. I had been waiting. For the right time. The right place.
The letters on the envelope were curiously misformed. The uneven strokes either faded into nothing or else were engraved into the paper. There was no sense of flow: Each letter gave the impression of having been completed individually, at great cost, the next undertaken as a new and daunting enterprise. It was like the hand of a child or a very old person. It was addressed to Miss Margaret Lea.
I slit open the flap. I drew out the contents. And I sat on a felled tree to read it, because I never read standing up.
Dear Margaret,
Here is the piece I told you about.
I have tried to finish it, and find that I cannot. And so this story that the world has made so much fuss about must do as it is. It is a flimsy thing: something of nothing. Do with it what you will.
As for titles, the one that springs to my mind is “Cinderella’s Child, ” but I know quite enough about readers to understand that whatever I might choose to call it, it will only ever go by one title in the world, and it won’t be mine.
There was no signature. No name.
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