MEETING MISS WINTER

百度搜索 The Thirteenth Tale 天涯 或 The Thirteenth Tale 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.

    Whether by luck or act I ot say, but I found my way to the library a full twenty minutes earlier than I had been ao attend. It was not a problem. What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, what better way to get to know someohan through her choid treatment of books?

    My first impression was of the room as a whole, and it struck me by its marked difference from the rest of the house. The other rooms were thick with the corpses of suffocated words; here in the library you could breathe. Instead of being<tt></tt> shrouded in fabric, it was a room made of wood. There were floorboards underfoot, shutters at the tall windows and the walls were lined with solid oak shelves.

    It was a high room, much lohan it was wide. On one side five arched windows reached from ceiling almost to floor; at their base window seats had been installed. Fag them were five similarly shaped mirrors, positioo reflect the view outside, but tonight eg the carved panels of the shutters. The bookshelves extended from the walls into the rooms, f bays; in each recess an amber-shaded lamp laced on a small table. Apart from the fire at the far end of the room, this was the only lighting, and it created soft, ools of illumination at the edge of which rows of books melted into darkness.

    Slowly I made my way down the ter of the room, taking a look to the bays on my right a. After my first glances I found myself nodding. It roper, well-maintained library. Categorized, alphabetized and , it was just as I would have do myself. All my favorites were there, with a great number of rare and valuable volumes as well as more ordinary, well-thumbed copies. Not only Jane Eyre, Wutheris, The Woman in White, but The Castle of Otranto, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Spectre Bride. I was thrilled to e across a Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so rare that my father had given up believing in its existence.

    Marveling at th<var></var>e rich sele of volumes on Miss Winter’s shelves, I browsed my way toward the fireplace at the far end of the room. In the final bay on the right, one particular set of shelves stood it even from some distance: Instead of displaying the mellow, preemily brown stripes that were the spines of the older books, this stack showed the silvery blues, sage greens and pink-beiges of more :t decades. They were the only modern books in the room. Miss Winter’s own works. With her earliest titles at the top of the stad ;t novels at the bottom, each work was represented in its many differeions and even in different languages. I saw no Thirteen Tales, the mistitled book I had read at the bookshop, but in its uise as Tales of ge and Desperation there were more than a dozen differeions.

    I selected a copy of Miss Winter’s most ret book. On page one an elderly nun arrives at a small house in the backstreets of an uown that seems to be in Italy; she is shown into a room where a pompous young man, whom we take to be English or Ameri, greets her in some surprise. (I turhe page. The first paragraphs had drawn me in, just as I had been drawn iime I had opened one of her books, and without meaning to, I began to read in ear.) The young man does not at first appreciate what the reader already uands: that his visitor has e on a grave mission, ohat will alter is life in ways he ot be expected to foresee. She begins her explanation and bears it patiently (I turhe page; I had fotten the library, fotten Miss Winter, fotten myself) whereats her with the levity of indulged youth…

    And then somethirated through my reading and drew me out of the book. A prig sensation at the back of the neck.

    Someone was watg me.

    I know the back-of-the-neck experience is not an unon phenomenon; it was, however, the first time it had happeo me. Like those of a great many solitary people, my senses are acutely attuo the presence of others, and I am more used to being the invisible spy in a room than to being spied upon. Now someone was watg me, and not only that, but whoever it was had been watg me for some time. How long had that unmistakable sensatioig me? I thought back over the past mirying to retrace the memory of the body behind my memory of the book. Was it sihe nun began to speak to the young man? Since she was shown into the house? Or earlier? Without moving a muscle, head bent over the page as though I had notiothing, I tried to remember.

    Then I realized.

    I had felt it even before I picked up the book.

    Needing a moment to recover myself, I turhe page, tinuing the pretense of reading.

    ‘You ’t fool me.“

    Imperious, declamatory, magisterial.

    There was nothing to be do turn and face her.

    Vida Winter’s appearance was not calculated for cealment. She was an a queen, sorceress oddess. Her stiff figure rally out of a profusion of fat purple and red cushions. Draped around her shoulders, the folds of the turquoise-and-green cloth that cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into an elaborate fe of twists, curls and coils. Her face, as intricately lined as a map, owdered white and finished with bold scarlet lipstick. In her lap, her hands were a cluster of rubies, emeralds and white, bony knuckles; only her nails, unvarnished, cut short, square like my own, stru ingruous note. What unnerved me more than all the rest were her sunglasses. I lid not see her eyes but, as I remembered the inhuman green irises in the poster, her dark lenses seemed to develop the force of a search-it; I had the impression that from behind them she was looking through my skin and into my very soul.

    I drew a veil over myself, masked myself irality, hid behind appearance.

    For an instant I think she was surprised that I was not transparent,‘t she could not see straight through me, but she recovered quickly, re quickly than I had.

    ‘Very well,“ she said tartly, and her smile was for herself more thao business. Your letter gives me to uand that you have reservations about the ission I am  you.“

    “Well, yes, that is—”

    The voice ran on as if it had nistered the interruption. “I could suggest increasing the monthly stipend and the final fee.”

    I licked my lips, sought the right words. Before I could speak, Miss Winter’s dark shades had bobbed up and down, taking in my flat brown bags, my straight skirt and navy cardigan. She smiled a small, pitying smile and overrode my iion to speak. “But peiary i is clearly not in your nature. How quaint.” Her tone was dry. “I have fotten about people who don’t care for money, but I never expected to meet one.” She leaned back against the cushions. “Therefore I clude that the difficulty s iy. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal iy.”

    She waved a hand, dismissing my words before they were out of my mouth. “You are afraid of uaking an authorized biography in case your independence is promised. You suspect that I want to exert trol over the tent of the finished book. You know that I have resisted biographers in the past and are w what my agenda is in ging my mind now. Above all”—that dark gaze of her sunglasses again—“you are afraid I mean to lie to you.”

    I opened my mouth to protest but found nothing to say. She was right.

    ‘You see, you don’t know what to say, do you? Are you embarrassed to accuse me of wanting to lie to you? People don’t like to accuse each other of lying. And for heaven’s sake, sit down.“

    I sat down. “I don’t accuse you of anything,” I began mildly, but immediately she interrupted me.

    ‘Don’t be so polite. If there’s ohing I ’t abide, it’s politeness.“

    Her forehead twitched, and an eyebrow rose over the top of the sunglasses. A strong black arch that bore ion to any natural brow.

    ‘Politeness. Now, there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the trary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep w whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But then he was a genius.“

    Her voice flowed relentlessly on, recalling instaer instance of genius and its bedfellow selfishness, and the folds of her shawl never moved as she spoke. She must be made of steel, I thought.

    Eventually she drew her lecture to a close with the words: “Politeness is a virtue I her possess eem in others. We need not  ourselves with it.” And with the air of having had the final word on the subject, she stopped.

    ‘You raised the topic of lying,“ I said. ”That is something we might  ourselves with.“

    ‘In what respect?“ Through the dark lenses, I could just see the movements of Miss Winter’s lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye, like the long legs of a spider around its body.

    ‘You have given een different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alohat’s just the ones I found on a lick search. There are many more. Hundreds, probably.“

    She shrugged. “It’s my profession. I’m a storyteller.”

    ‘I am a biographer. I work with facts.“

    She tossed her head aiff curls moved as one. “How horribly ill. I could never have been a biographer. Don’t you think one  tell’s truth much better with a story?”

    ‘Not iories you have told the world so far.“

    Miss Winter ceded a nod. “Miss Lea,” she began. Her voice was lower. “I had my reasons for creating a smoke s around my past, lose reasons, I assure you, are no longer valid.”

    ‘What reasons?“

    ‘Life is post.“

    I blinked.

    ‘You think that a strahing to say, but it’s true. All my life and all my experiehe events that have befallehe people I have own, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the post heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, anic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unreizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a post heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the post, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germiakes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel.“

    I nodded, liking the analogy.

    ‘Readers,“ tinued Miss Winter, ”are fools. They believe all writ-; is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer’s life ime to rot away before it  be used to nourish a work of fi. It must be allowed to decay. That’s why I couldn’t have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.“

    I sidered her ahen asked, “And what has happeo ge things now?”

    ‘I am old. I am ill. Put those two facts together, biographer, and what do you get? The end of the story, I think.“

    I bit my lip. “And why not write the book yourself?”

    ‘I have left it too late. Besides, who would believe me? I have cried wolf too often.“

    ‘Do you io tell me the truth?“ I asked.

    ‘Yes,“ she said, but I had heard the hesitatiohough it lasted only a fra of a sed.

    ‘And why do you want to tell it to me?“

    She paused. “Do you know, I have been asking myself the very same question for the last quarter of an hour. Just what kind of a person are you, Miss Lea?”

    I fixed my mask in place before replying. “I am a shop assistant. I work in an antiquarian bookshop. I am an amateur biographer. Presumably you have read my work on the Landier brothers? ”

    ‘It’s not much to go on, is it? If we are to work together, I shall o know a little more about who you are. I  hardly spill the secrets of a lifetime to a person of whom I know nothing. So, tell me about yourself. What are your favorite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?“

    On the instant I was too affroo reply.

    ‘Well, answer me! Foodness’ sake! Am I to have a stranger living under my roof? A stranger w for me? It is not reasoell me this, do you believe in ghosts?“

    Governed by something strohan reason, I rose from my chair.

    ‘Whatever are you doing? Where are you going? Wait!“

    I took oep after arying not to run, scious of the rhythm of my feet rapping out on the wooden boards, while she called to me in a voice that tained an edge of panic.

    ‘e back!“ she cried. ”I am going to tell you a story—a marvelous story!“

    I did not stop.

    ‘Once upon a time there was a haunted house—“

    I reached the door. My fingers closed on the handle.

    ‘Once upon a time there was a library—“

    I opehe door and was about to step into its emptiness when, in a ice hoarse with something like fear, she lauhe words that stopped me in my tracks.

    ‘Once upon a time there were twins—“

    I waited until the words stopped their ringing in the air and thee herself, I looked back. I saw the back of a head, and hands that rose, trembling, to the averted face.

    Tentatively I took a step bato the room. At the sound of my feet, the copper curls turned.

    I was stuhe glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as glass and as real, looked to me with something like a plea. For a moment I simply stared back. Then, “Miss Lea, won’t you please sit down,” said a ice shakily, a voice that was and was not Vida Winter’s.

    Drawn by something beyond my trol, I moved toward the chair and sat down.

    ‘I’m not making any promises,“ I said wearily.

    ‘I’m not in a position to exay,“ came the answer in a small ice.

    Truce.

    “Why did you e?” I asked again, and this time she answered.

    ‘Because of your work on the Landier brothers. Because you know about siblings.“

    ‘And will you tell me the truth?“

    ‘I will tell you the truth.“

    The words were unambiguous enough, but I heard the tremor that determihem. She meant to tell me the truth, I did not doubt it. She had decided to tell. Perhaps she even wao tell. Only she did not quite believe that she would. Her promise of hoy oken as much to vince herself as to persuade me, and she heard the lack of vi at its heart as clearly as I did.

    And so I made a suggestion. “I will ask you three things. Things that are a matter of public record. When I leave here, I will be able to check what you tell me. If I find you have told me the truth about them, I will accept the ission.”

    ‘Ah, the rule of three… The magiumber. Three trials before the prince wins the hand of the fair princess. Three wishes grao the fisherman by the magic talking fish. Three bears foldilocks and Three Billy Goats Gruff. Miss Lea, if you had asked me two questions or four I might have been able to lie, but three…“

    I slid my pencil from the ring binding of my pad and opehe cover.

    ‘What is your real name?“

    She swallowed. “Are you quite sure this is the best way to proceed? I could tell you a ghost story—a rather good one, even if I do say so myself. It might be a better way of getting to the heart of things…”

    I shook my head. “Tell me your name.”

    The jumble of knuckles and rubies shifted in her lap; the stones glowed in the firelight.

    ‘My name is Vida Winter. I went through the necessary legal procedures in order to be able to call myself by that name legally and holy. What you want to know is the name by which I was known prior to the ge. That name was—“

    She paused, needing to overe some obstacle within herself, and when she pronouhe  was with a noticeable rality, an utter absence of intonation, as though it were a word in some fn language she had never applied herself to learning: “That name was Adeline March.”

    As though to cut short even the minimal vibration the name carried in the air, she tinued rather tartly, “I hope you’re not going to ask my date of birth. I am of a which it is de rigueur to have fotten it.”

    ‘I  mahout, if you give me your place of birth.“

    She released an irritated sigh. “I could tell you much better, if you would only allow me to tell it my way…”

    ‘This is what we have agreed. Three facts on public record.“

    She pursed her lips. “You will find it is a matter of record that Adeline March was born in Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. I  hardly be expected to offer any personal guarantee of the veracity of that detail. Though I am an exceptional person, I am not so exceptional that I  remember my own birth.”

    I  down.

    Now the third question. I had, it must be admitted, no particular third question prepared. She did not want to tell me her age, and I hardly needed her date of birth. With her long publishing history and the date of her first book, she could not be less thay-three or four, and to judge by her appearance, altered though it was by illness and makeup, she could be no more thay. But the uainty didn’t matter; with her name and her place of birth, I could find the date out for myself anyway. From my first two questions, I already had the formation I needed in order to ascertain that a person by the name of Adeline March actually existed. What to ask, then? Perhaps it was my desire to hear Miss Wiell a story, but when the occasion arose to play my third question as a wild card, I seized it.

    ‘Tell me,“ I began slowly, carefully. Iories with the wizards, is always with the third wish that everything so dangerously won is disastrously snatched away. ”Tell me something that happeo you in the days before you ged your name, for which there exists a public record.“ Educational successes, I was thinking. School sp achievements. Those minor triumphs that are recorded for proud parents and for posterity.

    In the hush that followed, Miss Winter seemed to draw all of her external self into her core; under my very eyes she mao absent herself from herself, and I began to uand how it was that earlier I had failed to see her. I watched the shell of her, marveled at the impossibility of knowing what was going oh the surface.

    And then she emerged.

    ‘Do you know why my books are so successful?“

    ‘Freat many reasons, I believe.“

    ‘Possibly. Largely it is because they have a beginning, a middle and an end. In the right order. Of course all stories have beginnings, middles and endings; it is having them in the right order that matters. That is why people like my boo<samp>.?</samp>ks.“

    She sighed and fidgeted with her hands. “I am going to answer your question. I am going to tell you something about myself, which happened before I became a writer and ged my name, and it is something for which there exists a public record. It is the most important thing that has ever happeo me. But I did not expect to find myself telling it to you so soon. I shall have to break one of my rules to do it. I shall have to tell you the end of my story before I tell you the beginning.”

    ‘The end of your story? How  that be, if it happened before you started writing? “

    ‘Quite simply because my story—my own personal story—ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling iime since everything finished.“

    I waited, and she drew in her breath like a chess player who finds his key piece ered.

    ‘I would sooner not tell you. But I have promised, haven’t I? The rule of three. It’s unavoidable. The wizard might beg the boy not to make a third wish, because he knows it will end in disaster, but the boy will make a third wish and the wizard is bound to grant it because it is in the rules of the story. You asked me to tell you the truth about three things, and I must, because of the rule of three. But let me first ask you something iurn.“

    ‘What?“

    ‘After this, no more jumping about iory. From tomorrow, I’ll tell you my story, beginning at the beginning, tinuing with the middle, and with the end at the end. Everything in its proper plao eating. No looking ahead. No questions. No sneaky gla the last page.

    Did she have the right to place ditions on our deal, having already accepted it? Not really. Still, I nodded.

    ‘I agree.“

    She could not quite look at me as she spoke.

    ‘I lived at Angelfield.“

    Her voice trembled over the plaame, and she scratched nervously at her palm in an unscious gesture.

    ‘I was sixteen.“

    Her voice grew stilted; fluency deserted her.

    ‘There was a fire.“

    The words were expelled from her throat hard and dry, like stones.

    ‘I lost everything.“

    And then, the cry breaking from her lips before she could stop it, “Oh, Emmeline!”

    There are cultures in which it is believed that a name tains all a person’s mystical power. That a name should be known only to God d to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name, either one’s own or someone else’s, is to invite jeopardy. This, it seemed, was such a name.

    Miss Winter pressed her lips together, too late. A tremor ran rough the muscles uhe skin.

    Now I knew I was tied to the <u></u>story. I had stumbled upon the heart the tale that I had been issioo tell. It was love. And loss. For what else could the sorrow of that exclamatio bereavement? In a flash I saw beyond the mask of white makeup and the exotic aperies. For a few seds it seemed to me that I could see right into Miss Winter’s heart, right into her thoughts. I reized the very essence of her—how could I fail to, for was it not the essene?

    We were both lowins. With this realization, the leash of the story tightened around my wrists, and my excitement was suddenly cut through with fear.

    ‘Where  I find a public record of this fire?“ I asked, trying not to let my perturbed feelings show in my voice.

    ‘The loeer. The Banbury Herald.“

    I nodded, made a note in my pad and flipped the cover closed.

    ‘Although,“ she added, ”there is a record of a different kind that I  show you now.“

    I raised an eyebrow.

    ‘e nearer.“

    I rose from my chair and took a step, halving the distaween us.

    Slowly she raised her right arm, and held out to me a closed fist that seemed three-quarters precious stones in their clawlike settings. In a movement that spoke of great effort, she turned her hand and ope, as though she had some surprise gift cealed and was about to offer it tome.

    But there was no gift. The surprise was the hand itself.

    The flesh of her palm was like no flesh I had seen before. Its whitened ridges and purple furrows bore ion to the pink mound at the base of my fingers, the pale valley of my palm. Melted by fire, her flesh had cooled into airely unreizable landscape, like a se left permaly altered by the passage of a flow of lava. Her fingers did not lie open but were drawn into a claw by the shruightness of the scar tissue. In the heart of her palm, scar within a scar, burn inside burn, was a grotesque mark. It was set very deep in her clutch, so deep that with a sudden nausea I wondered what had happeo the bohat should be there. It made sense of the odd set of the hand at the wrist, the way it seemed to weigh upon her arm as though it had no life of its own. The mark was a circle embedded in her palm, aending from it, in the dire of the thumb, a short line.

    Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this ued and painful act of revealment, it had no such clarity, and it disturbed me by the appearan a page of English of an unfamiliar symbol from a lost and unreadable language.

    A suddeigo took hold of me and I reached behind me for my air.

    ‘I’m sorry,“ I heard her say. ”Os so used to one’s own horrors, one fets how they must seem to other people.“

    I sat down and gradually the blaess at the edge of my vision receded.

    Miss Winter closed her fingers into her damaged palm, swiveled her wrist and drew the jewel-encrusted fist bato her lap. In a protective gesture she curled the fingers of her other hand around it.

    ‘I’m sorry you didn’t want to hear my ghost story, Miss Lea.“

    ‘I’ll hear it aime.“

    Our interview was over.

    On my way bay quarters I thought of the letter she had sehe strained and painstaking hand that I had never seen the like of before. I had put it down to illness. Arthritis perhaps. Now I uood. From the very first book and through her entire career, Miss Winter had written her masterpieces with her left hand.

    In my study the velvet curtains were green, and a pale gold watermark tin covered the walls. Despite the woolly hush, I leased with the room, for the overall effect was relieved by the broad wooden desk and e plain upright chair that stood uhe window. I switched on the desk lamp and laid out the ream of paper I had brought with me, and my twelve pencils. They were brand-new: unsharpened ns of red, just what I like to start a new project with. The last thing I took from my bag was my pencil sharpener. I screwed it like a vise to the edge of the desk ahe paper basket directly underh.

    On impulse I climbed onto the desk and reached behind the elaborate valao the curtain pole. My fingers groped for the tops of the curtains, and I felt for the hooks and stitches that attached them. It was hardly a job for one person; the curtains were floor length, lined and interlined, and their weight, flung over my shoulder, was crushing. But after a few minutes, first oheher curtain was folded and in a cupboard. I stood in the ter of the floor and surveyed the result of my work.

    The window was a large expanse of dark glass, and in the ter of it, my ghost, darkly transparent, was staring in at me. Her world was not unlike my own: the pale outline of a desk oher side of the glass, and farther back a deeply buttoned armchair placed ihe circle of light cast by a standard lamp. But where my chair was red, hers was gray; and where my chair stood on an Indian rug, surrounded by light gold walls, her chair hovered spectrally in an undefined, endless plane of darkness in which vague forms, like waves, seemed to shift and breathe.

    Together we begatle ritual of preparing our desks. We divided a ream of paper into smaller piles and flicked through eae, to let the air in. One by one we sharpened our pencils, turning the handle and watg the long shavings curl and daheir way to the paper bin below. When the last pencil had been shaved to a fine point, we did not put it down with the others, but kept hold of it.

    ‘There,“ I said to her. ”Ready for work.“

    She opened her mouth, seemed to speak to me. I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

    I have no shorthand. During the interview I had simply jotted down lists of keywords, and my hope was that if I wrote up our interviews immediately afterward, these words would be enough to jog my memory. And from that first meeting, it worked well. Glang at my notebook from time to time, I filled the ter of my sheets of foolscap with Miss Winter’s words, juring her image in my mind, hearing her voice, seeing her mannerisms. Soon I was hardly aware of my notebook but was taking dictation from the Miss Winter in my head.

    I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any mannerisms, expressions aures that seemed to add something to her meaning.

    The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here that I would enter my own thoughts, ents, questions.

    I felt as though I had worked for hours. I emerged to make myself a cup of cocoa, but it was time suspended and did not disturb the flow of my recreation; I returo my work and picked up the thread as though there had been no interruption.

    ‘Os so used to one’s own horrors, one fets how they must seem to other people,“ I wrote at last in the middle n, and in the left I added a note describing the way she closed the fingers of her good hand over the closed fist of the damaged one.

    I drew a double line uhe last line of script, and stretched. In the window the other me stretched as well. She took the pencils whose points she had worn and sharpehem one by one.

    She was mid-yawn when something began to happen to her face. First it was a sudden blurring in the ter of her forehead, like a blister. Another mark appeared on her cheek, theh her eye, on her nose, on her lips. Eaew blemish was apanied by a dull thud, a percussion that grew faster and faster. In a few seds her entire face, it seemed, had deposed.

    But it was not the work of death. It was only rain. The long-awaited rain.

    I opehe window, let my hand be drehen wiped the water over my eyes and face. I shivered. Time for bed.

    I left the window ajar so that I could listen to the rain as it tio fall with an even, muffled softness. I heard it while I was undressing, while I was reading and while I slept. It apanied my dreams like a poorly tuned radio left on through the night, broadcasting a fuzzy white noise beh which were the barely audible whispers of fn languages and snatches of unfamiliar tunes.

百度搜索 The Thirteenth Tale 天涯 或 The Thirteenth Tale 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.