The Thirteenth Tale

another in broad circles. The children were nowhere to be seen, but as we got nearer we heard their voices coming from the niche in the yew tree. 'Let's play Snow White.' 'That's a girls'story.' 'What story do you want to play?' 'A story about rockets.' 'I don't want to be a rocket. Let's be boats.' 'We were boats yesterday.' Hearing the latch of the gate, they peered out o( the tree, and with their hoods hiding their hair, you could hardly tell brother from sister. 'It's the cake man!' Karen stepped out of the house and came across the lawn. 'Shall I tell you who this is?' she asked the children as she smiled shyly at Aurelius. 'This is your uncle.'

Aurelius looked from Karen to the children and back to Karen, his eyes scarcely big enough to take in everything he wanted to. He was lost for words, but Karen reached out a tentative hand, and he took it in his.

'It's all a bit…' he began.

'Isn't it?' she agreed. 'But we'll get used to it, won't we?'

He nodded.

The children were staring with curiosity at the adult scene.

'What are you playing?' Karen asked, to distract them.

'We don't know,' the girl said.

'We can't decide,' said her brother.

'Do you know any stories?' Emma asked Aurelius.

'Only one,' he told her.

'Only one?' She was astounded. 'Has it got any frogs in it?'

'No.'

'Dinosaurs?'

'No.'

'Secret passages?'

'No.'

The children looked at each other. It wasn't much of a story, clearly.

'We know loads of stories,' Tom said.

'Loads,' she echoed dreamily. 'Princesses, frogs, magic castles, fairy godmothers-' 'Caterpillars, rabbits, elephants-' 'All sorts of animals.' 'All sorts.' They fell into silence, absorbed in shared contemplation of countless different worlds.

Aurelius watched them as though they were a miracle.

Then they returned to the real world. 'Millions of stories,' the boy said. 'Shall I tellyou a story?' the girl asked. I thought perhaps Aurelius had had enough stories for one day, but he nodded his head.

She picked up an imaginary object and placed it in the palm of her right hand. With her left she mimed the opening of a book cover. She glanced up to be sure she had the full attention of her companions. Then her eyes returned to the book in her hand, and she began.

'Once upon a time…'

Karen and Tom and Aurelius: three sets of eyes all resting on Emma and her storytelling. They would be all right together.

Unnoticed, I stepped back from the gate and slipped away along the street.

THE THIRTEENTH TALE

I will not publish the biography of Vida Winter. The world may well be agog for the story, but it is not mine to tell. Adeline and Emme-line, the fire and the ghost, these are stories that belong to Aurelius now. The graves in the churchyard are his; so is the birthday that he can mark as he chooses. The truth is heavy enough without the additional weight of the world's scrutiny on his shoulders. Left to their own devices, he and Karen can turn the page, start afresh.

But time passes. One day Aurelius will be no more; one day Karen, too, will leave this world. The children, Tom and Emma, are already more distant from the events I have told here than their uncle. With the help of their mother they have begun to forge their own stories; stories that are strong and solid and true. The day will come when Isabelle and Charlie, Adeline and Emmeline, the Missus and John-the-dig, the girl without a name, will be so far in the past that their old bones will have no power to cause fear or pain. They will be nothing but an old story, unable to do any harm to anyone. And when that day comes-I will be old myself by then-I shall give Tom and Emma this document. To read and, if they choose, to publish.

I hope that they will publish. For until they do, the spirit of that ghost-child will haunt me. She will roam in my thoughts, linger in my dreams, my memory her only playground. It is not much, this posthumous life of hers, but it is not oblivion. It will be enough, until the day when Tom and Emma release this manuscript and she will be able to exist more fully after death than she ever lived before it.

And so the story of the ghost girl is not to be published for many years, if at all. That does not mean, however, that I have nothing to give the world immediately to satisfy its curiosity about Vida Winter. For there is something. At the end of my last meeting with Mr. Lomax, I was about to leave when he stopped me. 'Just one more thing.' And he opened his desk and took out an envelope.

I had that envelope with me when I slipped unremarked out of Karen's garden and turned my steps back toward the lodge gates. The ground for the new hotel had been flattened, and when I tried to remember the old house, I could find only photographs in my memory. But then it came to me how it always seemed to face the wrong way. It had been twisted. The new building was going to be much better. It would face straight toward you.

I diverged from the gravel pathway to cross the snow-covered lawn toward the old deer park and the woods. The dark branches were heavy with snow, which sometimes fell in soft swathes at my passing. I came at last to the vantage point on the slope. You can see everything from there. The church and its graveyard, the wreaths of flowers bright against the snow. The lodge gates, chalk-white against the blue sky. The coach house, denuded of its shroud of thorns. Only the house had gone, and it had gone completely. The men in their yellow hats had reduced the past to a blank page. We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future.

I took the envelope from my bag. I had been waiting. For the right time. The right place. The letters on the envelope were curiously misformed. The uneven strokes either faded into nothing or else were engraved into the paper. There was no sense of flow: Each letter gave the impression of having been completed individually, at great cost, the next undertaken as a new and daunting enterprise. It was like the hand of a child or a very old person. It was addressed to Miss Margaret Lea.

I slit open the flap. I drew out the contents. And I sat on a felled tree to read it, because I never read standing up.

Dear Margaret, Here is the piece I toldyou about. I have tried to finish it, and find that I cannot. And so this story that the world has made so much fuss about must do as it is. It is a flimsy thing: something of nothing. Do with it what you will.

As for titles, the one that springs to my mind is 'Cinderella's Child, ' but I know quite enough about readers to understand that whatever I might choose to call it, it will only ever go by one title in the world, and it won't be mine.

There was no signature. No name. But there was a story. It was the story of Cinderella, like I'd never read it before. Laconic, hard and angry. Miss Winter's sentences were shards of glass, brilliant and lethal.

Picture this, the story begins. A boy and a girl; onerich, one poor. Most often it's the girl who's got no gold and that's how it is in the story I'm telling. There didn't have to be a ball. A walk in the woods was enough for these two to stumble into each other's paths. Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. Thisstory is about one of those other times. Our girl's pumpkin is just a pumpkin, and she crawls home after midnight, blood on herpetticoats, violated. There will be no