The Thirteenth Tale

gets back'-and I paid the boy, he still kept coming. I watched him from the upstairs windows. More than once he looked up in my direction and I jumped out of view, but on one occasion he caught sight of me, and when he did, he waved. I did not wave back.

Every morning he brought vegetables to the kitchen door, sometimes with a skinned rabbit or a plucked hen, and every afternoon he came to collect the peelings for the compost. He lingered in the doorway, and now that I had paid him, more often than not he had a cigarette between his lips.

I had finished John's cigarettes, and it annoyed me that the boy could smoke and I couldn't. I never said a word about it, but one day, shoulder against the door frame, he caught me eyeing the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket.

'Swap you one for a cup of tea,' he said.

He came into the kitchen-it was the first time he had actually come in since the day John died-and sat in John's chair, elbows on the table. I sat in the chair in the corner, where the Missus used to sit. We drank our tea in silence and exhaled cigarette smoke that rose upward toward the dingy ceiling in lazy clouds and spirals. When we had taken our last drag and stubbed the cigarettes out on our saucers, he rose without a word, walked out of the kitchen and returned to his work. But the next day, when he knocked with the vegetables, he walked straight in, sat in John's chair and tossed a cigarette across to me before I had even put the kettle on.

We never spoke. But we had our habits.

Emmeline, who never rose before lunchtime, sometimes spent the afternoons outdoors looking on as the boy did his work. I scolded her about it. 'You're the daughter of the house. He's a gardener. For God's sake, Emmeline!' But it made no difference. She would smile her slow smile at anyone who caught her fancy. I watched them closely, mindful of what the Missus had told me about men who couldn't see Isabelle without wanting to touch her. But the boy showed no indication of wanting to touch Emmeline, though he spoke kindly to her and liked to make her laugh. I couldn't be easy in my mind about it, though.

Sometimes from an upstairs window I would watch the two of them together. One sunny day I saw her lolling on the grass, head on hand, supported by her elbow. It showed the rise from her waist to her hips. He turned his head to answer something she said and while he looked at her, she rolled onto her back, raised a hand and brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead. It was a languorous, sensuous movement that made me think she would not mind it if he did touch her.

But when the boy had finished what he was saying, he turned his back to Emmeline as though he hadn't seen and continued his work.

The next morning we were smoking in the kitchen. I broke our usual silence.

'Don't touch Emmeline,' I told him.

He looked surprised. 'I haven't touched Emmeline.'

'Good. Well, don't.'

I thought that was that. We both took another drag on our cigarettes and I prepared to lapse back into silence, but after exhaling, he spoke again. 'I don't want to touch Emmeline.'

I heard him. I heard what he said. That curious little intonation. I heard what he meant. I took a drag of my cigarette and didn't look at him. Slowly I exhaled. I didn't look at him. 'She's kinder than you are,' he said. My cigarette wasn't even half finished, but I stubbed it out. I strode to the kitchen door and flung it open. In the doorway he paused level with me. I stood stiffly, staring straight ahead at the buttons on his shirt. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. His voice was a murmur. 'Be kind, Adeline.'

Stung to anger I lifted my eyes up, meaning to fire daggers at him. But I was startled by the tenderness in his face. For a moment I was… confused.

He took advantage. Raised his hand. Was about to stroke my cheek. But I was quicker. I raised my fist, lashed his hand away. I didn't hurt him. I couldn't have hurt him. But he looked bewildered. Disappointed. And then he was gone. The kitchen was very empty after that. The Missus was gone. John was gone. Now even the boy was gone. 'I'll help you,' he had said. But it was impossible. How could a boy like him help me? How could anybody help me?

The sheet was covered in orange hair. I was walking on hair and hair was stuck to my shoes. All the old dye had been cut away; the sparse tufts that clung to Miss Winter's scalp were pure white.

I took the towel away and blew the stray bits of hair from the back of her neck. 'Give me the mirror,' Miss Winter said. I handed her the looking glass. With her hair shorn, she looked like a grizzled child.

She stared at the glass. Her eyes met her own, naked and somber, and she looked at herself for a long time. Then she put the mirror, glass side down, on the table.

'That is exactly what I wanted. Thank you, Margaret.'

I left her, and when I went back to my room I thought about the boy. I thought about him and Adeline, and I thought about him and Emmeline. Then I thought about Aurelius, found as an infant, wearing an old-fashioned garment and wrapped in a satchel, with a spoon from Angelfield and a page oijane Eyre. I thought about it all at length, but for all my thinking, I did not arrive at any conclusion.

One thing did occur to me, though, in one of those unfathomable side steps of the mind. I remembered what it was Aurelius had said the last time I was at Angelfield: 'I just wish there was someone to tell me the truth.' And I found its echo: 'Tell me the truth.' The boy in the brown suit. Now, that would explain why the Banbury Herald had no record of the interview their young reporter had gone to Yorkshire for. He wasn't a reporter at all. It was Aurelius all along.

RAIN AND CAKE

The next day I woke to it: today, today, today. A tolling bell only I could hear. The twilight seemed to have penetrated my soul; I felt an unearthly weariness. My birthday. My deathday.

Judith brought a card from my father with the breakfast tray. A picture of flowers, his habitual, vaguely worded greetings and a note. He hoped I was well. He was well. He had some books for me. Should he send them? My mother had not signed the card; he had signed it for both of them. Love from Dad and Mother. It was all wrong. I knew it and he knew it, but what could anyone do?

Judith came. 'Miss Winter says would now…?' I slid the card under my pillow before she could see it. 'Now would be fine,' I said, and picked up my pencil and pad. 'Have you been sleeping well?' Miss Winter wanted to know, and then, 'You look a little pale. You don't eat enough.'

'I'm fine,' I assured her, though I wasn't.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes-characters even-caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. Well, it was like that. All day I had been prey to distractions. Thoughts, memories, feelings, irrelevant fragments of my own life, playing havoc with my concentration.

Miss Winter was telling me about something when she interrupted herself. 'Are you listening to me, Miss Lea?'

I jerked out of my reverie and fumbled for an answer. Had I been listening? I had no idea. At that moment I couldn't have told her what she had been saying, though I'm sure that somewhere in my mind there was a place where it was all recorded. But at the point when she jerked me out of myself, I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker. Lost for words, I stared at her for a minute, while she grew more and more irritated, then I plucked at the first coherent sentence that presented itself to me.

'Have you ever had a child, Miss Winter?'

'Good Lord, what a question. Of course I haven't. Have you gone mad, girl?'

'Emmeline, then?'