The Thirteenth Tale

the three men recounted their tale. They began with the gates left open, went on to the vexed issue of the missing saucepans and arrived after some minutes at the climax of their story: the kidnapping of the infant in the perambulator.

'They're running wild,' the younger Fred Jameson said finally.

'Out of control,' added the older Fred Jameson.

'And what do you say?' asked Dr. Maudsley of the third man. Wilfred Bonner, standing to one side, had, until now, remained silent.

Mr. Bonner took his cap off and drew in a slow, whistling breath. 'Well, I'm no medical man, but it seems to me them girls is not right.' He accompanied his words with a look full of significance, then, in case he hadn't got his message across, tapped his bald head, once, twice, three times.

All three men looked gravely at their shoes.

'Leave it with me,' said the doctor. 'I'll speak to the family.'

And the men left. They had done their bit. It was up to the doctor, the village elder, now. Though he'd said he would speak to the family, what the doctor actually did was speak to his wife.

'I doubt they meant any harm by it,' she said, when he had finished telling the story. 'You know what girls are. A baby is so much more fun to play with than a doll. They wouldn't have hurt him. Still, they must be told not to do it again. Poor Mary.' And she lifted her eyes from her sewing and turned her face to her husband.

Mrs. Maudsley was an exceedingly attractive woman. She had large brown eyes with long lashes that curled prettily, and her dark hair that had not a trace of gray in it was pulled back in a style of such simplicity that only a true beauty would not be made plain by it. When she moved, her form had a rounded, womanly grace.

The doctor knew his wife was beautiful, but they had been married too long for it to make any difference to him.

'They think in the village that the girls are mentally retarded.'

'Surely not!'

'It's what Wilfred Bonner thinks, at least.'

She shook her head in wonderment. 'He is afraid of them because they are twins. Poor Wilfred. It is just old- fashioned ignorance. Thank goodness the younger generation is more understanding.'

The doctor was a man of science. Though he knew it was statistically unlikely that there was any mental abnormality in the twins, he would not rule it out until he had seen them. It did not surprise him, though, that his wife, whose religion forbade her to believe ill of anyone, would take for granted that the rumor was ill-founded gossip.

'I'm sure you are right,' he murmured with a vagueness that meant he was sure she was wrong. He had given up trying to get her to believe only what was true; she had been raised to the kind of religion that could admit no difference between what was true and what was good.

'What will you do, then?' she asked him. 'Go and see the family. Charles Angelfield is a bit of a hermit, but he'll have to see me if I go.'

Mrs. Maudsley nodded, which was her way of disagreeing with her husband, though he didn't know it. 'What about the mother? What do you know of her?'

'Very little.'

And the doctor continued to think in silence, and Mrs. Maudsley continued her sewing, and after a quarter of an hour had passed, the doctor said, 'Perhaps you might go, Theodora? The mother might sooner see another woman than a man. What do you say? '

And so three days later Mrs. Maudsley arrived at the house and knocked at the front door. Astonished to get no answer, she frowned- after all, she had sent a note to say she was coming-and walked round to the back. The kitchen door was ajar, so with a quick knock she went in. No one was there. Mrs. Maudsley looked around. Three apples on the table, brown and wrinkled and starting to collapse upon themselves, a black dishcloth next to a sink piled high with dirty plates, and the window so filthy that inside you could hardly tell day from night. Her dainty white nose sniffed the air. It told her everything she needed to know. She pursed her lips, set her shoulders, took a tight grip on the tortoiseshell handle of her bag and set off on her crusade. She went from room to room looking for Isabelle, but on the way taking in the squalor, the mess, the unkemptness that lurked everywhere.

The Missus tired easily, and she couldn't manage the stairs very well, and her sight was going, and she often thought she had cleaned things when she hadn't, or meant to clean them and then forgot, and to be honest, she knew nobody really cared, so she mostly concentrated on feeding the girls, and they were lucky she managed that much. So the house was dirty, and it was dusty, and when a picture was knocked wonky it stayed wonky for a decade, and when one day Charlie couldn't find the paper bin in his study, he just dropped the paper onto the floor in the place where the paper bin used to be, and it soon occurred to him that it was less fuss to chuck it out once a year than to do it once a week.

Mrs. Maudsley didn't like what she saw at all. She frowned at the half-closed curtains, and sighed at the tarnished silver, and shook her head in amazement at the saucepans on the stairs and the sheet music that was scattered all over the floor of the hallway. In the drawing room, she bent down automatically to retrieve a playing card, the three of spades, that was lying dropped or discarded in the middle of the floor, but when she looked around the room for the rest of the pack, she was at a loss, so great was the disorder. Glancing helplessly back at the card she became aware of the dust covering it and, being a fastidious, white-gloved woman, was overwhelmed with the desire to put it down, only where? For a few seconds she was paralyzed with anxiety, torn between the desire to end the contact between her pristine glove and the dusty, faintly sticky playing card, and her own unwillingness to put the card down in a place that wasn't the right one. Eventually, with a perceptible shudder of the shoulders, she placed it on the arm of the leather armchair and walked with relief out of the room.

The library seemed better. It was dusty, certainly, and the carpet was threadbare, but the books themselves were in their places, which was something. Yet even in the library, just when she was preparing herself to believe that there remained some small feeling for order buried in this filthy, chaotic family, she came across a makeshift bed. Tucked into a dark corner between two sets of shelves, it was just a flea-ridden blanket and a filthy pillow, and at first she took it for a cat's bed. Then, looking again, she spotted the corner of a book visible beneath the pillow. She drew it out. It wasJane Eyre.

From the library she passed to the music room, where she found the same disorder she had seen elsewhere. The furniture was arranged bizarrely, as though to facilitate the playing of hide-and-seek. A chaise longue was turned to face a wall, a chair was half hidden by a chest that had been dragged from its place under the window- there was a broad sweep of carpet behind it where the dust was less thick and the green color showed through more distinctly. On the piano, a vase contained blackened, brittle stems, and around it a neat circle of papery petals like ashes. Mrs. Maudsley reached her hand toward one and picked it up; it crumbled, leaving a nasty yellow-gray stain between her white-gloved fingers.

Mrs. Maudsley seemed to slump down onto the piano stool.

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

What was going on in her mind as she sat there on the piano stool, staring into space? These were people who couldn't keep their flower vases topped up. No wonder their children were misbehaving! The extent of the problem seemed suddenly to have been revealed to her through the dead flowers, and it was in a distracted, absent fashion that she pulled off her gloves and spread her fingers on the black and gray keys of the piano.

The sound that resounded in the room was the harshest, most unpianolike noise imaginable. This was in part because the piano had been neglected, unplayed and untuned, for many years. It was also because the vibration of the instrument's strings was instantly accompanied by another noise, equally unmelodic. It was a kind of a howling hiss, an irritated, wild sort of a screech, like that of a cat whose tail has got under your feet.

Mrs. Maudsley was shaken entirely out of her reverie by it. On hearing the yowl, she stared at the piano in disbelief and stood up, her hands to her cheeks. In her bewilderment she had only the barest moment to register that she was not alone.

There, rising from the chaise longue, a slight figure in white-

Poor Mrs. Maudsley.