wanting to turn back, but Hester took her hand and guided her firmly in the direction of home. Emmeline followed with obedient but puzzled steps. After tea she stood by the window and looked out. She grew fearful as the light faded, but it was not until Hester locked the doors and began the routine of putting Emmeline to bed that she became distraught.
All night long she cried. Lonely sobs that seemed to go on forever. What had snapped in an instant in Adeline took an agonizing twenty-four hours to break in Emmeline. But when dawn came, she was quiet. She had wept and shuddered herself into oblivion.
The separation of twins is no ordinary separation. Imagine surviving an earthquake. When you come to, you find the world unrecognizable. The horizon is in a different place. The sun has changed color. Nothing remains of the terrain you know. As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living. It's no wonder the survivors of such disasters so often wish they had perished with the others.
Miss Winter sat staring into space. Her famous copper tint had faded to a tender apricot. She had abandoned her hairspray and the solid coils and twists had given way to a soft, shapeless tangle. But her face was set hard and she held herself rigid, as though girding herself against a biting wind that only she could feel. Slowly she turned her eyes to mine. 'Are you all right?' she asked. 'Judith says you don't eat very much.'
'I've always been like that.'
'But you look pale.'
'A bit tired, maybe.'
We finished early. Neither of us, I think, felt up to carrying on.
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?
The next time I saw her, Miss Winter looked different. She closed her eyes wearily, and it took her longer than usual to conjure the past and begin to speak. While she gathered the threads, I watched her and noticed that she had left off her false eyelashes. There was the habitual purple eye shadow, the sweeping line of black. But without the spider lashes, she had the unexpected appearance of a child who had been playing in her mother's makeup box.
Things weren't as Hester and the doctor expected. They were prepared for an Adeline who would rant and rage and kick and fight. As for Emmeline, they were counting on her affection for Hester to reconcile her to her twin's sudden absence. They were expecting, in short, the same girls they had before, only separate where they had been together. And so, initially, they were surprised by the twins' collapse into a pair of lifeless rag dolls.
Not quite lifeless. The blood continued to circulate, sluggishly, in their veins. They swallowed the soup that was spooned into their mouths by in one house the Missus, in the other the doctor's wife. But swallowing is a reflex, and they had no appetite. Their eyes, open during the day, were unseeing, and at night, though their eyes closed, they had not the tranquillity of sleep. They were apart; they were alone; they were in a kind of limbo. They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.
Did the scientists doubt themselves? Stop and wonder whether they were doing the right thing? Did the lolling, unconscious figures of the twins cast a shadow over their beautiful project? They were not willfully cruel, you know. Only foolish. Misguided by their learning, their ambition, their own self-deceiving blindness.
The doctor carried out tests. Hester observed. And they met every day, to compare notes. To discuss what at first they optimistically called progress. Behind the doctor's desk, or in the Angelfield library, they sat together, heads bent over papers on which were recorded every detail of the girls' lives. Behavior, diet, sleep. They puzzled over absent appetites, the propensity to sleep all the time-that sleep which was not sleep. They proposed theories to account for the changes in the twins. The experiment was not going as well as they had expected, had begun in fact disastrously, but the two scientists skirted around the possibility that they might be doing harm, preferring to retain the belief that together they could work a miracle.
The doctor derived great satisfaction from the novelty of working for the first time in decades with a scientific mind of the highest order. He marveled at his protegee's ability to grasp a principle one minute and to apply it with professional originality and insight the next. Before long he admitted to himself that she was more a colleague than a protegee. And Hester was thrilled to find that at long last her mind was adequately nourished and challenged. She came out of their daily meetings aglow with excitement and pleasure. So their blindness was only natural. How could they be expected to understand that what was doing them such good could be doing such great harm to the children in their care? Unless perhaps, in the evenings, each sitting in solitude to write up the day's notes, they might individually have raised their eyes to the unmoving, dead-eyed child in a chair in the corner and felt a doubt cross their minds. Perhaps. But if they did, they did not record it in their notes, did not mention it to the other.
So dependent did the pair become on their joint undertaking that they quite failed to see that the grand project was making no progress at all. Emmeline and Adeline were all but catatonic, and the girl in the mist was nowhere to be seen. Undeterred by their lack of findings, the scientists continued their work: They made tables and charts, proposed theories and developed elaborate experiments to test them. With each failure they told themselves that they had eliminated something from the field of examination and went on to the next big idea.
The doctor's wife and the Missus were involved, but at one remove. The physical care of the girls was their responsibility. They spooned soup into the unresisting mouths of their charges three times a day. They dressed the twins, bathed them, did their laundry, brushed their hair. Each woman had her reasons for disapproving of the project; each had her reasons for keeping mum about her thoughts. As for John-thedig, he was outside it all. His opinion was sought by no one, not that that stopped him making his daily pronouncement to the Missus in the kitchen: 'No good will come of it. I'm telling you. No good at all.'
There came a moment when they might have had to give up. All their plans had come to nothing, and though they racked their brains, they were lost for a new trick to try. At precisely this point Hester detected small signs of improvement in Emmeline. The girl had turned her head toward a window. She was found clutching some shiny bauble and would not be separated from it. By listening outside doors (which is not bad manners, incidentally, when it is done in the name of science) Hester discovered that when left alone the child was whispering to herself in the old twin language.
'She is soothing herself,' she told the doctor, 'by imagining the presence of her sister.'
The doctor began a regime of leaving Adeline alone for periods of several hours and listening outside the door, notepad and pen in hand. He heard nothing.
Hester and the doctor advised themselves of the need for patience in the more severe case of Adeline, while they congratulated themselves on the improvements in Emmeline. Brightly they noted Emmeline's increased appetite, her willingness to sit up, the first few steps she took of her own accord. Soon she was wandering around the house and garden again with something of her old purposelessness. Oh yes, Hester and the doctor agreed, the experiment was really going somewhere now! Whether they stopped to consider that what they termed 'improvements' were only Emmeline returning to the habits she already displayed before the experiment began is hard to judge.
It wasn't all plain sailing with Emmeline. There was a dreadful day when she followed her nose to the cupboard filled with the rags her sister used to wear. She held them to her face, inhaled the stale, animal odor and then, in delight, arrayed herself in them. It was awkward, but worse was to come. Dressed in this fashion, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and, taking her reflection for her sister, ran headlong into it. The crash was loud enough to bring the Missus running, and she found Emmeline weeping beside the mirror, crying not for her own pain but for her poor sister, who had broken into several pieces and was bleeding.
Hester took the clothes away from her and instructed John to burn them. As an extra precaution, she ordered the Missus to turn all the mirrors to the wall. Emmeline was perplexed, but there were no more incidents of the kind.
She would not speak. For all the solitary whispering that went on behind closed doors, always in the old twin language, Emmeline could not be induced to speak a single word of English to the Missus or to Hester. This was something to confer about. Hester and the doctor held a lengthy meeting in the library, at the end of which they
