The Thirteenth Tale

spoke again. 'Why is it kept in the cabinet? What makes it so valuable?'

Father pulled himself away from his train of thought to answer. 'Partly because it's the first edition of the first book by the most famous living writer in the English language. But mostly because it's flawed. Every following edition is called Tales of Change and Desperation. No mention of thirteen. You'll have noticed there are only twelve stories?'

I nodded.

'Presumably there were originally supposed to be thirteen, then only twelve were submitted. But there was a mixup with the jacket design and the book was printed with the original title and only twelve stories. They had to be recalled.'

'But your copy…'

'Slipped through the net. One of a batch sent out by mistake to a shop in Dorset, where one customer bought a copy before the shop got the message to pack them up and send them back. Thirty years ago he realized what the value might be and sold it to a collector. The collector's estate was auctioned in September and I bought it. With the proceeds from the Avignon deal.'

'The Avignon deal?' It had taken two years to negotiate the Avignon deal. It was one of Father's most lucrative successes.

'You wore the gloves, of course?' he asked sheepishly.

'Who do you take me for?'

He smiled before continuing. 'All that effort for nothing.'

'What do you mean?'

'Recalling all those books because the title was wrong. Yet people still call it the Thirteen Tales, even though it's been published as Tales of

Changeand Desperation for half a century.' 'Why is that?' 'It's what a combination of fame and secrecy does. With real knowledge about her so scant, fragments of information like the story of the recalled first edition take on an importance beyond their weight. It has become part of her mythology. The mystery of the thirteenth tale. It gives people something to speculate about.'

There is a short silence. Then, directing his gaze vaguely into the middle distance, and speaking lightly so that I could pick up his words or let them go, as I chose, he murmured, 'And now a biography… How unexpected.'

I remembered the letter, my fear that its writer was not to be trusted. I remembered the insistence of the young man's words, 'Tell me the truth.' I remembered the Thirteen Tales that took possession of me with its first words and held me captive all night. I wanted to be held hostage again.

'I don't know what to do,' I told my father. 'It is different from what you have done before. Vida Winter is a living subject. Interviews instead of archives.' I nodded. 'But you want to know the person who wrote the Thirteen Tales.' I nodded again. My father put his hands on his knees and sighed. He knows what reading is. How it takes you. 'When does she want you to go?' 'Monday,' I told him. 'I'll run you to the station, shall I?' 'Thank you. And-' 'Yes?' 'Can I have some time off? I ought to do some more reading before

I go up there.' 'Yes,' he said, with a smile that didn't hide his worry. 'Yes, of course.'

There followed one of the most glorious times of my adult life. For the first time ever I had on my bedside table a pile of brand-new, glossy paperbacks, purchased from a regular bookshop. Betwixt and Between by Vida Winter; Twice IsForever by Vida Winter; Hauntings by Vida Winter; Out of the Arc by Vida Winter; Rules ofAffliction by Vida Winter;The Birthday Girl by Vida Winter; The Puppet Show by Vida Winter. The covers, all by the same artist, glowed with heat and power: amber and scarlet, gold and deep purple. I even bought a copy of Talesof Change and Desperation; its title looked bare without the Thirteen that makes my father's copy so valuable. His own copy I had returned to the cabinet.

Of course one always hopes for something special when one reads an author one hasn't read before, and Miss Winter's books gave me the same thrill I had when I discovered the Landier diaries, for instance. But it was more than that. I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again-the lost joys of reading returned to me. Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

From time to time my father would knock at the door at the top of the stairs. He stared at me. I must have had that dazed look intense reading gives you. 'You won't forget to eat, will you?' he said, as he handed me a bag of groceries or a pint of milk.

I would have liked to stay in my flat forever with those books. But if I was to go to Yorkshire to meet Miss Winter, then there was other work to be done. I took a day off from reading and went to the library. In the newspaper room, I looked at the books pages of the national newspapers for pieces on Miss Winter's recent novels. For every new book that came out, she summoned a number of journalists to a hotel in Harrogate, where she met them one by one and gave them, separately, what she termed her life story. There must have been dozens of these stories in existence, hundreds perhaps. I found almost twenty without looking very hard.

After the publication of Betwixt and Between, she was the secret daughter of a priest and a schoolmistress; a year later in the same newspaper she got publicity for Hauntings by telling how she was the runaway child of a Parisian courtesan. For The Puppet Show, she was, in various newspapers, an orphan raised in a Swiss convent, a street child from the backstreets of the East End and the stifled only girl in a family of ten boisterous boys. I particularly liked the one in which, becoming accidentally separated in India from her Scottish missionary parents, she scraped out an existence for herself in the streets of Bombay, making a living as a storyteller. She told stories about pine trees that smelled like the freshest coriander, mountains as beautiful as the Taj Mahal, haggis more delicious than any street-corner pakora and bagpipes. Oh, the sound of the bagpipes! So beautiful it defied description. When many years later she was able to return to Scotland-a country she had left as a tiny baby-she was gravely disappointed. The pine trees smelled nothing like coriander. Snow was cold. Haggis tasted flat. As for the bagpipes…

Wry and sentimental, tragic and astringent, comic and sly, each and every one of these stories was a masterpiece in miniature. For a different kind of writer, they might be the pinnacle of her achievement; for Vida Winter they were mere throwaways. No one, I think, would have mistaken them for the truth.

The day before my departure was Sunday and I spent the afternoon at my parents' house. It never changes;a single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble.

My mother smiled a small, taut smile and talked brightly while we had tea. The neighbor's garden, roadworks in town, a new perfume that had brought her up in a rash. Light, empty chat, produced to keep silence at bay, silence in which her demons lived. It was a good performance: nothing to reveal that she could hardly bear to leave the house, that the most minor unexpected event gave her a migraine, that she could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.

Father and I waited until Mother went to make fresh tea before talking about Miss Winter.

'It's not her real name,' I told him. 'If it was her real name, it would be easy to trace her. And everyone who has tried has given up for want of information. No one knows even the simplest fact about her.'

'How curious.'

'It's as if she came from nowhere. As if before being a writer she didn't exist at all. As if she invented herself at the same time as her book.' 'We know what she chose for a pen name. That must reveal some thing, surely,'