THIRTEEN TALES

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    Tell me the truth. The words from the letter were trapped in my head, trapped, it seemed, beh the sloping ceiling of my attic flat, like a bird that has got in down the ey. It was natural that the boy’s plea should have affected me; I who had never been told the truth, but left to discover it alone and i. Tell me the truth. Quite. But I resolved to put the words and the letter out of my head. It was nearly time. I moved swiftly. Ihroom I soaped my fad brushed my teeth. By three mio eight I was in my nightdress and slippers, waiting for the kettle to boil. Quickly, quickly. A mio eight. My hot-water bottle was ready, and I filled a glass with water from the tap. Time was of the essence. For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.

    The hours betwee in the evening and one or two in the m have always been my magic hours. Against the blue dlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world. But that night the magic failed. The threads of plot that had bee in suspense ht had somehow gone flaccid during the day, and I found that I could not care about how they would eventually weave together. I made an effort to secure myself to a strand of the plot, but as soon as I had ma, a voiterveell me the truth—that unpicked the knot a it flopping loose again.

    My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in White, Wutheris, Jane Eyre…

    But it was no good. Tell me the truth…

    Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing. Turning out the light, I r<tt></tt>ested my head on the pillow and tried to sleep.

    Echoes of a voice. Fragments of a story. In the dark I heard them louder. Tell me the truth…

    At two in the m I got out of bed, pulled on some socks, unlocked the flat door and, ed in my dressing gown, crept down the narrow staircase and into the shop.

    At the back there is a tiny room, not much bigger than a cupboard, that we use when we o pack a book for the post. It tains a table and, on a shelf, sheets of broer, scissors and a bal?９９lｉｂ?l of string. As well as these items there is also a plain wooden et that holds a dozen or so books.

    The tents of the et rarely ge. If you were to look into it today you would see what I saw that night: a book without a cover resting on its side, ao it an ugly tooled leather volume. A pair of books in Latin standing upright. An old Bible. Three volumes of botany, two of history and a sity book of astronomy. A book in Japanese, another in Polish and some poems in Old English. Why do we keep these books apart? Why are they not kept with their natural panions on our ly labeled shelves? The et is where we keep the esoteric, the valuable, the rare. These volumes are worth as much as the tents of the entire rest of the shop, more even.

    The book that I was after—a small hardback, about four inches by six, only fifty or so years old—was out of plaext to all these antiquities. It had appeared a couple of months ago, placed there I imagined by Father’s ience, and one of these days I meant to ask him about it and shelve it somewhere. But just in case, I put on the white gloves. We keep them in the et to wear when we hahe books because, by a curious paradox, just as the books e to life when we read them, so the oils from our fiips destroy them as we turn the pages. Anyway, with its paper cover intad its ers unbluhe book was in fine dition, one of a popular series produced to quite a high standard by a publishing house that no longer exists. A charming volume, and a first edition, but not the kind of thing that you would expect to find among the Treasures. At jumble sales and village fetes, other volumes in the series sell for a few pence.

    The paper cover was cream and green: a regular motif of shapes like fish scales formed the background, and two regles were left plain, one for the line drawing of a mermaid, the other for the title and author’s hirteen Tales of ge and Desperation by Vida Winter.

    I locked the et, returhe key and flashlight to their places and climbed the stairs back to bed, book in gloved hand.

    I didn’t io read. Not as such. A few phrases were all I wanted. Something bold enough, strong enough, to still the words from the letter that kept going around in my head. Fight fire with fire, people say. A couple of sentences, a page maybe, and then I would be able to sleep.

    I removed the dust jacket and placed it for safety in the special drawer I keep for the purpose. Even with gloves you ’t be too careful. Opening the book, I ihe smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you  taste it.

    The prologue. Just a few words.

    But my eyes, brushing the first line, were snared.

    All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.

    It was like falling into water.

    Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers’ boys, merts and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, <bdo>.</bdo>their familiarity fell away from them. They became strahey became hese characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, meically ag out the story one more time. They were people. The blood that fell from the princess’s finger wheouched the spinning wheel was wet, and it left the tang of metal oongue when she licked her finger before falling asleep. When his atose daughter was brought to him, the king’s tears left salt burns on his face. The stories were shot through with an unfamiliar mood. Everyone achieved their heart’s desire—the king had his daughter restored to life by a stranger’s kiss, the beast was divested of his fur a naked as a man, the mermaid walked—but only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for esg their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to iation, ends up by exag a cruel revenge for happiness.

    The tales were brutal and sharp abreaking. I loved them.

    It was while I was reading “The Mermaid’s Tale”—the twelfth tale—that I began to feel stirrings of an ahat was unected to the story itself. I was distracted: my thumb and right index finger were sending me a message: Not many pages left. The knowledge nagged more insistently until I tilted the book to check. It was true. The thirteenth tale must be a very short one.

    I tinued my reading, fiale twelve and turhe page.

    Blank.

    I flicked back, fain. Nothing.

    There was no thirteenth tale.

    There was a sudden rush in my head, I felt the sick dizziness of the deep-sea diver e too fast to the surface.

    Aspey room came bato view, one by one. My bedspread, the book in my hand, the lamp still shining palely in the daylight that was beginning to creep in through the thin curtains.

    It was m.

    I had read the night away.

    There was no thirteenth tale.

    In the shop my father was sitting at the desk with his head in his hands. He heard me e dowairs and looked up, white-faced.

    ‘Whatever is it?“ I darted forward.

    He was too shocked to speak; his hands roused themselves to a mute gesture of desperation before slowly replag themselves over his horrified eyes. He groaned.

    My hand hovered over his shoulder, but I am not in the habit of toug people, so it fell io the cardigan that he had draped over the back of his chair.

    ‘Is there anything I  do?“ I asked.

    When he spoke, his voice was weary and shaken. “We’ll have to phohe police. In a minute. In a minute…”

    ‘The police? Father, what’s happened?“

    ‘A break-in.“ He made it sound like the end of the world.

    I looked around the shop, bewildered. Everything was  and in order. The desk drawers had not been forced, the shelves not ransacked, the window not broken.

    ‘The et,“ he said, and I began to uand.

    ‘The Thirteen Tales.“ I spoke firmly. ”Upstairs in my flat. I borrowed it.“

    Father looked up at me. His expression bined relief with utter astonishment. “You borrowed it?”

    ‘Yes.“

    “You borrowed it?”

    ‘Yes.“ I uzzled. I was always borrowing things from the shop, as he knew.

    ‘But Vida Winter…?“

    And I realized that some kind of explanation was called for.

    I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages ahs, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, stitute an ending worth the wait. They should e after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nid ly. Endings like this are to be found more only in old han new ones, so I read old novels.

    porary literature is a world I know little of. My father had takeo task on this topiy times during our daily talks about books. He reads as much as I do, but more widely, and I have great respect for his opinions. He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is o human suffering, only endurance. He has spoken of endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive des. He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that I prefer.

    During these talks, I listen with the gravest attention and nod my head, but I always end up tinuing in my old habits. Not that he blames me for it. There is ohing on which we are agreed: There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

    Oher even told me about Vida Winter. “Now, there’s a living writer who would suit you.”

    But I had never read any Vida Winter. Why should I ９9lｉｂ.when there were so many dead writers I had still not discovered?

    Except that now I had e down in the middle of the night to take the Thirteen Tales from the et. My father, with good reason, was w why.

    ‘I got a letter yesterday,“ I began.

    He nodded.

    ‘It was from Vida Winter.“

    Father raised his eyebrows but waited for me to go on.

    ‘It seems to be an invitation for me to visit her. With a view to writing her biography.“

    His eyebrows lifted by another few millimeters.

    ‘I couldn’t sleep, so I came down to get the book.“

    I waited for Father to speak, but he didn’t. He was thinking, a small frown creasing his brow. After a time I spoke again. “Why is it kept in the et? 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 followiion is called Tales of ge and Desperation. ion of thirteen. You’ll have noticed there are only twelve stories?”

    I nodded.

    ‘Presumably there were inally supposed to be thirteen, then only twelve were submitted. But there was a mixup with the jacket design and the book rinted with the inal title and only twelve stories. They had to be recalled.“

    ‘But your copy…“

    ‘Slipped through the . One of a batch sent out by mistake to a shop in Dorset, where one er bought a copy before the shop got the message to pack them up ahem back. Thirty years ago he realized what the value might be and sold it to a collector. The collector’s estate was aued iember and I bought it. With the proceeds from the Avignon deal.“

    ‘The Avignon deal?“ It had taken two years to iate 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 tinuing. “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 ge and Desperation for half a tury.“

    ‘Why is that?“

    ‘It’s what a bination of fame and secrecy does. With real knowledge about her so st, fragments of information like the story of the recalled first edition take on an importance beyond their weight. It has bee part of her mythology. The mystery of the thirteenth tale. It gives people something to speculate about.“

    There is a short silehen, direg 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 ued.”

    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 die truth.” I remembered the Thirteen Tales that took possession of me with its first words and held me captive all night. I wao 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?“

    ‘ 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 aween by Vida Wiwice Is Forever by Vida Winter; Hauntings by Vida Winter; Out of the Arc by Vida Winter; Rules of Affli by Vida Wihe Birthday Girl by Vida Wihe Puppet Show by Vida Wihe covers, all by the same artist, glowed with heat and power: amber and scarlet, gold and deep purple. I even bought a copy of Tales of ge and Desperation; its title looked bare without the Thirteen that makes my father’s copy so valuable. His own copy I had returo the et.

    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. A I ot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impay soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still fet 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 ot fet 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 terparewn with books, when my sleep was blad dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again—the lost joys of readiuro 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 :he stairs. He stared at me. I must have had that dazed look intense reading gives you. “You won’t fet 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 fore<samp></samp>ver with those books. But if I was to go to Yorkshire to meet Miss Wihen there was other work to be done. I took a day off from reading ao the library. In the neer room, I looked at the books pages of the national neers for pieiss Winter’s ret 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 ience, hundreds perhaps. I found almost twenty without looking very hard.

    After the publication of Betwixt aween, she was the secret daughter of a priest and a sistress; a year later in the same neer 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 neers, an orphan raised in a Swiss vent, 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, being actally separated in India from her Scottish missionary parents, she scraped out aence for herself ireets of Bombay, making a living as a storyteller. She told stories about pirees that smelled like the freshest coriander, mountains as beautiful as the Taj Mahal, haggis more delicious than any street-er 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 try she had left as a tiny baby—she was gravely disappoihe pirees smelled nothing like coriander. Snow was cold. Haggis tasted flat. As for the bagpipes…

    Wry aimental, tragid astri, id sly, ead every one of these stories was a masterpie miniature. For a different kind of writer, they might be the pinnacle of her achievement; for Vida Wihey 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 y parents’ house. It never ges; a single lupine exhalation could re-ice it to rubble.

    My mother smiled a small, taut smile and talked brightly while we had tea. The neighbarden, roadworks in town, a new perfume that had brought her up in a rash. Light, empty chat, produced to keep si bay, silen which her demons lived. It was a good performanothing to reveal that she could hardly bear to leave the house, at the most minor ued event gave her a migraihat she mid 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 talk-g about Miss Winter.

    ‘It’s not her real name,“ I told him. ”If it was her real  would be easy to trace her. And everyone who has tried has given up for ant 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 did at all. As if she ied herself at the same time as her book.“

    ‘We know what she chose for a pen hat must reveal something, surely,“ my father suggested.

    ‘Vida. From vita, Latin, meaning life. Though I ’t help thinking : French, too.“

    Vide in French meay. The void. Nothingness. But we don’t ;e words like this in my parents’ house, so I left it for him to infer.

    ‘Quite.“ He nodded. ”And what about Winter?“

    Winter. I looked out of the window for inspiration. Behind my writer’s ghost, dark braretched naked across the darkening sky, and the flower beds were bare black soil. The glass was no prote against the chill; despite the gas fire, the room seemed filled with bleak despair. What did winter mean to me? Ohing only: death.

    There was a silence. When it became necessary to say something so as not to burden the previous exge with an intolerable weight, I said, “It’s a spiky name. V and W. Vida Winter. Very spiky.”

    My mother came back. Plag cups on saucers, p tea, she talked on, her voice moving as freely iightly policed plot of life as though it were seven acres.

    My attention wandered. On the mantel over the fireplace was the one obje the room that might be sidered decorative. A photograph. Every so often my mother talks about putting it away in a drawer, where it will be safe from dust. But my father likes to see it, and since he so rarely opposes her, on this she cedes to him. In the picture are a youthful bride and groom. Father looks the same as ever: quietly handsome, with dark, thoughtful eyes; the years do not ge him. The woman is scarcely reizable. A spontaneous smile, laughter in her eyes, warmth in her gaze as she looks at my father. She looks happy.

    Tragedy alters everything.

    I was born, and the woman in the wedding photo disappeared.

    I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

    ARRIVALI left home on an ordinary winter day, and for miles my train ran . under a gauzy white sky. Then I ged trains, and the clouds assed. They grew thicker and darker, more and more bloated, as I traveled north. At any moment I expected to hear the first scattering of ?ops on the windowpane. Yet the rain did not e.

    At Harrogate, Miss Winter’s driver, a dark-haired, bearded man, as disined to talk. I was glad, for his lack of versatio me free to study the unfamiliar views that unfolded as soon as we left the town behind. I had never been north before. My researches had takeo London and, once or twice, across the el to libraries and chives in Paris. Yorkshire was a ty I knew only from novels, and novels from another tury at that. Once we left the town behind, There were few signs of the porary world, and it ossible to believe I was traveling into the past at the same time as into the tryside. The villages were quaint, with their churches and pubs and stotages; then, the farther we went, the smaller the villages became and the greater the distaween them until isolated farmhouses were the only interruptions to the naked winter fields. At last we left even the farmhouses behind and it grew dark. The car’s headlamps showed me swathes of a colorless, undefined landscape: no fences, no walls, no hedges, no buildings. Just a vergeless road and each side of it, vague undulations of darkness.

    ‘Is this the moors?“ I asked.

    ‘It is,“ the driver said, and I leaned closer to the window, but all I could make out was the waterlogged sky that pressed down claustrophobically on the land, on the road, on the car. Beyond a certain distance even the light from our headlamps was extinguished.

    At an unmarked jun we turned off the road and bumped along for a couple of miles on a stony track. We stopped twice for the driver to open a gate and close it behind us, then on we went, jolting and shaking for another mile.

    Miss Winter’s house lay between two slow rises in die darkness, almost-hills that seemed te into each other and that revealed the presence of a valley and a house only at the last turn of the drive. The sky by now was blooming shades of purple, indigo and gunpowder, and the house beh it crouched long and low and very dark. The driver opehe car door for me, and I stepped out to see that he had already unloaded my case and was ready to pull away, leaving me alone in front of an unlit porch. Barred shutters blacked out the windows and there was not a single sign of human habitation. Closed in upon itself, the place seemed to shun visitors.

    I rang the bell. Its g was oddly muted in the damp air. While I waited I watched the sky. Cold crept through the soles of my shoes, and I rang the bell again. Still no one came to the door.

    About t for a third time, I was caught by surprise when with no sound at all the door ened.

    The woman in the doorway smiled professionally and apologized for keeping me waiting. At first sight she seemed very ordinary. Her short,  hair was the same palish shade as her skin, and her eyes were her blue nray nree was less the absence of color than a lack of expression that made her plain. With some warmth of emotion in them, her eyes could, I suspected, have gleamed with life; and it seemed to me, as she matched my scrutiny lance flahat she maintained her inexpressivity only by deliberate effort.

    ‘Good evening,“ I said. ”I am Margaret Lea.“

    ‘The biographer. We’ve been expeg you.“

    What is it that allows human beings to see through each other’s pretendings? For I uood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit em unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, it only the fact that I had e and was a stranger.

    She ushered me in and closed the door behihe key turhe lock without a sound and there was not a squeak as the well-oiled bolts were slid noiselessly into place.

    Standing there in my coat in the hallway, I experienced for the first time the most profound oddity of the place. Miss Winter’s house was entirely silent.

    The woman told me her name was Judith, and that she was the housekeeper. She asked about my journey aiohe hours of meals and the best times to get hot water. Her mouth opened and closed; as soon as her words fell from her lips they were smothered by the bla of silehat desded ainguished them. The same silence swallowed our footfalls, and muffled the opening and closing of ors as she showed me, oer ahe dining room, the drawing room, the musi.

    There was no magic behind the sile was the soft-furnishings it did it. Overstuffed sofas were piled with velvet cushions; there :re upholstered footstools, chaise lounges and armchairs; tapestries hung on the walls and were used as throws over upholstered furniture, every floor was carpeted, every carpet overlaid with rugs. The damask it draped the windows also baffled the walls. Just as blotting paper absorbs ink, so all this wool a absorbed sound, with one difference: Where blotting paper takes up only excess ink, the fabric of the house seemed to su the very essence of the words we spoke.

    I followed the housekeeper. We turned left and right, and right a, went up and down stairs until I was thhly fused. I quickly lost all sense of how the voluted interior of the house corresponded with its outer plainness. The house had been altered over time, I supposed, added to here and there; probably we were in some wing or extension invisible from the front. “You’ll get the hang of it,” the housekeeper mouthed, seeing my face, and I uood her as if I were lip-reading. Finally we turned from a half-landing and came to a halt. She unlocked a door that opened into a sitting room. There were three more doors leading off it. “Bathroom,” she said, opening one of the doors, “bedroom,” opening another, “and study.” The rooms were as padded with cushions and curtains and hangings as the rest of the house.

    ‘Will you take your meals in the dining room, or here?“ she asked, indig the small table and a single chair by the window.

    I did not know whether meals in the dining room meaing with my hostess, and unsure of my status in the house (was I a guest or an employee?), I hesitated, w whether it oliter to accept or to refuse. Divining the cause of my uainty, the housekeeper added, as though having to overe a habit of retice, “Miss Winter always eats alone.”

    ‘Then if it’s all the same to you, I’ll eat here.“

    ‘I’ll bring you soup and sandwiches straightaway, shall I? You must be hungry after the train. You’ve things to make your tea and coffee just here.“ She opened a cupboard in the er of the bedroom to reveal a kettle, the other paraphernalia for drinks making and even a tiny fridge. ”It will save you from running up and down to the kit,“ she added, and threw in an abashed smile, by way of apology, I thought, for not wanting me in her kit.

    She left me to my unpag.

    In the bedroom it was the work of a mio unpack my few clothes, my books and my toiletries. I pushed the tea and coffee things to one side and replaced them with the packet of cocoa I had brought from home. Then I had just enough time to test the high antique bed— was so lavishly covered with cushions that there could be any number of peas uhe mattress and I would not know it—before the house-keeper returned with a tray. “Miss Winter invites you to meet her in the library at eight o’clock.” She did her best to make it sound like an invitation, but I uood, as I was no doubt meant to, that it was a and.

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