The Thirteenth Tale

her from one word to the next had slipped through her fingers in the darkness.

He kept food coming from the kitchen garden. He cooked; he cut up meat on the Missus's plate and put tiny forkfuls in her mouth. He poured out her cold cups of tea and made fresh ones. He was no carpenter, but he nailed fresh boards over rotten ones here and there, kept the saucepans emptied in the main rooms and stood in the attic, looking at the holes in the roof and scratching his head. 'We'll have to get that sorted,' he would say with an air of decision, but it wasn't raining much, and it wasn't snowing, and it was a job that could wait. There was so much else to do. He washed sheets and clothes. They dried stiff and sticky with the residue of soap flakes. He skinned rabbits and plucked pheasants and roasted them. He did the washing up and cleaned the sink. He knew what needed to be done. He had seen the Missus do it a hundred times.

From time to time he spent half an hour in the topiary garden, but he could not enjoy it. The pleasure of being there was overshadowed by worry about what might be going on indoors, in his absence. And besides, to do it properly required more time than he was able to give it. In the end, the only part of the garden that he kept up was the kitchen garden and the rest he let go.

Once we got used to it, there was a certain comfort in our new existence. The wine cellar proved a substantial and discreet source of household finance, and as time went by, our way of life began to feel sustainable. Better really if Charlie were just to stay absent. Unfound and unreturning, neither dead nor alive, he could do no harm to anyone.

So I kept my knowledge to myself.

In the woods there was a hovel. Unused for a hundred years, overgrown with thorns and surrounded by nettles, it was where Charlie and Isabelle used to go. After Isabelle was taken to the asylum, Charlie went there still; I knew, because I had seen him there, sniveling, scratching love letters on his bones with that old needle.

It was the obvious place. So when he disappeared, I had gone there again. I squeezed through the brambles and hanging growth that masked the entrance into air sweet with rottenness, and there, in the gloom, I found him. Slumped in a corner, gun by his side, face half blown away. I recognized the other half, despite the maggots. It was Charlie, all right.

I backed out of the doorway, not caring about the nettles and the thorns. I couldn't wait to get away from the sight of him. But his image stayed with me and, though I ran, it seemed impossible to escape his hollow, one-eyed stare.

Where to find comfort?

There was a house I knew. A simple little house in the woods. I had stolen food there once or twice. That was where I went. By the window I hid, getting my breath back, knowing I was close to ordinary life. And when I had stopped gasping for air, I stood looking in, at a woman in her chair, knitting. Though she didn't know I was there, her presence soothed me, like a kind grandmother in a fairy tale.

I watched her, cleansing my eyes, until the vision of Charlie's body had faded and my heartbeat returned to normal. I walked back to Angelfield. And I didn't tell. We were better off as we were. And anyway, it couldn't make any difference to him, could it? He was the first of my ghosts.

It seemed to me that the doctor's car was forever in Miss Winter's drive. When I first arrived in Yorkshire he would call every third day, then it became every other day, then every day and now he was coming to the house twice a day. I studied Miss Winter carefully. I knew the facts. Miss Winter was ill. Miss Winter was dying. All the same, when she was telling me her story she seemed to draw on a well of strength that was unaffected by age and illness. I explained the paradox by telling myself it was the very constancy of the doctor's attention that was sustaining her.

And yet in ways invisible to my eyes, she must have been weakening quite seriously. For what else could explain Judith's unexpected announcement one morning? Quite out of the blue she told me that Miss Winter was too unwell to meet me. That for a day or two she would be unable to engage in our interviews. That with nothing to do here, I may as well take a short holiday.

'A holiday? After the fuss she made about my going away last time, I would have thought the last thing she would do would be to send me on a holiday now. And with Christmas only a few weeks away, too!'

Though Judith blushed, she was not forthcoming with any more information. Something wasn't right. I was being shifted out of the way. 'I can pack a case for you, if it would help?' she offered. She smiled apologetically, knowing I knew she was hiding something.

'I can do my own packing.' Annoyance made me curt.

'It's Maurice's day off, but Dr. Clifton will run you to the station.'

Poor Judith. She hated deceit and was no good at subterfuge.

'And Miss Winter? I'd like a quick word with her. Before I go.'

'Miss Winter? I'm afraid she…' 'Won't see me?' 'Can't see you.' Relief flooded her face and sincerity rang out in her voice as at last she was able to say something true. 'Believe me, Miss

Lea. She just can't' Whatever it was that Judith knew, Dr. Clifton knew it, too. 'Whereabouts in Cambridge is your father's shop?' he wanted to know, and 'Does he deal in medical history at all?' I answered him briefly, more concerned with my own questions than his, and after a time his attempts at small talk came to an end. As we drove into Harrow-gate, the atmosphere in the car was heavy with Miss Winter's oppressive silence.

ANGELFIELD AGAIN

The day before, on the train, I had imagined activity and noise: shouted instructions and arms sending messages in urgent semaphore; cranes, plangent and slow; stone crashing on stone. Instead, as I arrived at the lodge gates and looked toward the demolition site, everything was silent and still.

There was nothing to see; the mist that hung in the air made everything invisible that was more than a short distance away. Even the path was indistinct. My feet were there one moment, gone the next. Lifting my head, I walked blindly, tracing the path as I remembered it from my last visit, as I remembered it from Miss Winter's descriptions.

My mind map was accurate: I came to the garden exactly when I expected to. The dark shapes of the yew stood like a hazily painted stage set, flattened into two dimensions by the blank background. Like ethereal bowler hats, a pair of domed forms floated on the cloudlike mist, the trunks that supported them fading into the whiteness beneath. Sixty years had left them overgrown and out of shape, but it was easy today to suppose that it was the mist that was softening the geometry of the forms, that when it lifted, it would reveal the garden as it was then, in all its mathematical perfection, set in the grounds not of a demolition site, nor of a ruin, but of a house intact.

Half a century, as insubstantial as the water suspended in this air, was ready to evaporate with the first ray of winter sun.

brought my wrist close to my face and read the time. I had arranged to meet Aurelius, but how to find him in this mist? I could wander forever without seeing him, even if he passed within arm's reach.

I called out 'Hello!' and a man's voice was carried back to me.

'Hello!'

Impossible to tell whether he was distant or close by. 'Where are you?' I pictured Aurelius staring into the mist looking for a landmark. 'I'm next to a tree.' The words were muffled. 'So am I,' I called back. 'I don't think yours is the same tree as mine. You sound too far away.'

'You sound quite near, though.'

'Do I? Why don't you stay where you are and keep talking, and I'll find you!'

'Right you are! An excellent plan! Though I shall have to think of something to say, won't I? How hard it is to speak to order, when it seems so easy the rest of the time… What dismal weather we 're having. Never known murkiness like it.'

And so Aurelius thought aloud, while I stepped into a cloud and followed the thread of his voice in the air.

That is when I saw it. A shadow that glided past me, pale in the watery light. I think I knew it was not