THE ALMANACS

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.

    Where else to begin my research but at home, in the shop? I was fasated by the old almanacs. Since I was a child, any moment of boredom or ay or fear would seo these shelves to flick through the pages of names and dates and annotations. Between these covers, past lives were summarized in a few brutally ral lines. It was a world where men were baros and bishops and ministers of parliament, and women were wives and daughters. There was nothing to tell you whether these men liked kidneys for breakfast, nothing to tell you whom they loved or what form their fear gave to the shapes in the dark after they blew the dle out at night. There was nothing personal at all. What was it, then, that moved me so in these sparse annotations of the lives of dead men? Only that they were men, that they had lived, that now they were dead.

    Reading them, I felt a stirring in me. In me, but not of me. Reading the lists, the part of me that was already oher side woke and caressed me.

    I never explaio anyone why the almanacs meant so mue; I never even said I liked them. But my father took note of my preference, and whenever volumes of the sort came up at au, he made sure to get them. And so it was that all the illustrious dead of the try, going back many geions, were <bdi>.</bdi>spending their afterlife tranquilly on the shelves of our sed floor. With me for pany.

    It was on the sed floor, crouched in the window seat, that I turhe pages of names. I had found Miss Winter’s grandfather Gee Angelfield. He was not a baro, nor a minister, nor a bishop, but still, here he was. The family had aristocratic ins—there had once been a title, but a few geions earlier there had been a split in the family: the title had gone one way, the money and the property another. He was on the property side. The almanacs teo follow the titles, but still, the e was close enough to merit ary, so here he was: Angelfield, Gee; his date of birth; residing at Angelfield House in Oxfordshire; married to Mathilde Monnier of Reims, France; one son, Charles. Trag him through the almanacs for later years, I found an ame a decade later: one son, Charles; one daughter, Isabelle. After a little more page-turning, I found firmation of Gee Angelfield’s death and, by looking her up under March, Roland, Isabelle’s marriage.

    For a moment it amused me to think that I had gone all the way to Yorkshire to hear Miss Winter’s story, when all the time it was here, in the almanacs, a few feet under my bed. But then I started thinking properly. What did it prove, this paper trail? Only that such people as Gee and Mathilde and their children, Charles and Isabelle, existed. There was nothing to say that Miss Winter had not found them the same way I had, by flig through a book. These almanacs could be found in libraries all over the place. Anyone who wanted could look through them. Might she not have found a set of names and dates and embroidered a story around them to eain herself?

    Alongside these misgivings I had another problem. Roland March had died, and with his death the paper trail for Isabelle came to an end. The world of the almanac was a queer one. In the real world, families branched like trees, blood mixed by marriage passed from one geion to the , making an ever-wider  of es. Titles, oher hand, passed from one man to one man, and it was this narrow, linear progression that the almanac liked to highlight. On each side of the title line were a few younger brothers, nephews, cousins, who came close enough to fall within the span of the almanac’s illumination. The men who might have been lord or baro. And, though it was not said, the men who still might, if the right string edies were to occur. But after a certain number of brangs in the family tree, the names fell out of the margins and into the ether. No bination of shipwreck, plague ahquake would be powerful enough to restore these third cousins to promihe almanac had its limits. So it was with Isabelle. She was a woman; her babies were girls; her husband (not a lord) was dead; her father (not a lord) was dead. The almanac cut her and her babies adrift; she and they fell into the vast oc<u></u>ean of ordinary people, whose births ahs and marriages are, like their loves and fears and breakfast prefereoo insignifit to be worth rec for posterity.

    Charlie, though, was a male. The almanac could stretch <u></u>itself— just—to include him, though the dimness of insignifice was already casting its shadow. Information was st. His name was Charles Angelfield. He had been born. He lived at Angelfield. He was not married. He was not dead. As far as the almanac was ed, this information was suffit.

    I took out one volume after another, found again and again the same sketchy half-life. With every ome I thought, This will be the year they leave him out. But each year, there he was, still Charles Angelfield, still of Angelfield, still unmarried. I thought again about what Miss Winter had told me about Charlie and his sister, and <s></s>bit my lip thinking about what his long bachelorhood signified.

    And then, when he would have been in his late forties, I found a surprise. His name, his date of birth, his place of residend a strange abbreviation—Ldd—that I had never noticed before.

    I turo the table of abbreviations.

    Ldd: legal decree of decease.

    Turning back to Charlie’s entry, I stared at it for a long time, frowning, as though if I looked hard enough, there would be revealed in the grain or the watermark of the paper itself the elucidation of the mystery.

    In this year he had been legally decreed to be dead. As far as I uood, a legal decree of decease was what happened when a person disappeared and after a certain time his family, for reasons of iance, was allowed to assume that he was dead, though there was no proof and no body. I had a feeling that a person had to be lost without trace for seven years before he could be decreed dead. He might have died at any time in that period. He might not even be dead at all, but only gone, lost or wandering, far from everyone who had ever known him. Dead in law, but that didn’t necessarily mean dead in person. What kind of life was it, I wohat could end in this vague, unsatisfactory way? Ldd.

    I closed the almanac, put it ba its position on the shelf a down to the shop to make cocoa.

    ‘What do you know about the legal procedures you have to take to have someone declared dead?“ I called to my father while I stood over the pan of milk oove.

    ‘No more than you do, I should think,“ came the answer.

    Then he appeared in the doorway <bdi></bdi>and handed me one of -eared er cards. “This is the man to ask. Retired professor of law. Lives in Wales now, but he es here every summer for a browse and a walk by the river. Nice fellow. Why don’t you write? You might ask whether he wants me to hold that Justitiae Naturalis Principia for him at the same time.”

    When I’d finished my cocoa, I went back to the almanac to find out what else I could about Roland Mard his family. His uncle had dabbled in art and when I went to the art history se to follow this up, I learhat his portraits, while now aowledged to be mediocre, had been for a short period the height of fashion. Mortimer’s English Provincial Portraiture taihe reprodu of an early portrait by Lewis Anthony March, entitled Roland, nephew of the artist. It is an odd thing to look into the face of a boy who is not quite yet a man, in search of the features of an old woman, his daughter. For some minutes I studied his fleshy, sensual features, his glossy blond hair, the lazy set of his head.

    Then I closed the book. I was wasting my time. Were I to look all day and all night, I knew I would not find a trace of the twins he was supposed to have fathered.

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.