The Thirteenth Tale

DICKENS'S STUDY

I finished writing up that day's notes. All dozen pencils were blunt now; I had some serious sharpening to do. One by one, I inserted the lead ends into the sharpener. If you turn the handle slowly and evenly you can sometimes get the coil of lead-edged wood to twist and dangle in a single drop all the way to the paper bin, but tonight I was tired, and they kept breaking under their own weight.

I thought about the story. I had warmed to the Missus and John-thedig. Charlie and Isabelle made me nervous. The doctor and his wife had the best of motives, but I suspected their intervention in the lives of the twins would come to no good.

The twins themselves puzzled me. I knew what other people thought of them. John-the-dig thought they couldn't speak properly; the Missus believed they didn't understand other people were alive; the villagers thought they were wrong in the head. What I didn't know- and this was more than curious-was what the storyteller thought. In telling her tale, Miss Winter was like the light that illuminates everything but itself. She was the disappearing point at the heart of the narrative. She spoke oî they; more recently she had spoken of we; the absence that perplexed me was /. What could it be that had caused her to distance herself from her story in this way?

If I were to ask her about it, I knew what she would say. "Miss Lea, we made an agreement." Already I had asked her questions about one or two details of the story, and though from time to time she would answer, when she didn't want to, she would remind me of our first meeting. "No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions."

I reconciled myself to remaining curious for a long time, and yet, as it happened, something happened that very evening that cast a certain illumination on the matter.

I had tidied my desk and was setting about my packing when there came a tap on my door. I opened it to find Judith in the corridor. "Miss Winter wonders whether you have time to see her for a moment." This was Judith's polite translation of a more abrupt Fetch Miss Lea, I was in no doubt.

I finished folding a blouse and went down to the library.

Miss Winter was seated in her usual position and the fire was blazing, but otherwise the room was in darkness. "Would you like me to put some lights on?" I asked from the doorway.

"No." Her answer came distantly to my ears, and so I walked down the aisle toward her. The shutters were open, and the dark sky, pricked all over with stars, was reflected in the mirrors.

When I arrived beside her, the dancing light from the fire showed me that Miss Winter was distracted. In silence I sat in my place, lulled by the warmth of the fire, staring into the night sky reflected in the library mirrors. A quarter of an hour passed while she ruminated, and I waited.

Then she spoke.

"Have you ever seen that picture of Dickens in his study? It's by a man called Buss, I believe. I've a reproduction of it somewhere, I'll look it out for you. Anyway, in the picture, he has pushed his chair back from his desk and is drowsing, eyes closed, bearded chin on chest. He is wearing his slippers. Around his head, characters from his books are drifting in the air like cigar smoke; some throng above the papers on the desk, others have drifted behind him, or floated downward as though they believe themselves capable of walking on their own two feet on the floor. And why not? They are presented with the same firm lines as the writer himself, so why should they not be as real as him? They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness.

"Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.

"My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.

"And every so often, through all these writing years, I have lifted my head from my page-at the end of a chapter, or in the quiet pause for thought after a death scene, or sometimes just searching for the right word-and have seen a face at the back of the crowd. A familiar face. Pale skin, red hair, a steady green-eyed gaze. I know exactly who she is, yet am always surprised to see her. Every time she manages to catch me off my guard. Often she has opened her mouth to speak to me, but for decades she was too far away to be heard, and besides, as soon as I became aware of her presence I would avert my gaze and pretend I hadn't seen her. She was not, I think, taken in.

"People wonder what makes me so prolific. Well, it's because of her. If I have started a new book five minutes after finishing the last, it is because to look up from my desk would mean meeting her eye.

"The years have passed; the number of my books on the bookshop shelves has grown, and consequently the crowd of personages floating in the air of my study has thinned. With every book that I have written, the babble of voices has grown quieter, the sense of bustle in my head reduced. The faces pressing for attention have diminished, and always, at the back of the group but nearer with every book, there she was. The green-eyed girl. Waiting.

"The day came when I finished the final draft of my final book. I wrote the last sentence, placed the last full stop. I knew what was coming. The pen slipped from my hand and I closed my eyes. 'So,' I heard her say, or perhaps it was me, 'it's just the two of us now.'

"I argued with her for a bit. 'It will never work,' I told her. 'It was too long ago, I was only a child, I've forgotten.' Though I was only going through the motions.

" 'But /haven't forgotten,' she says. 'Remember when

"Even I know the inevitable when I see it. I do remember."

The faint vibration in the air fell still. I turned from my stargazing to Miss Winter. Her green eyes were staring at a spot in the room as though they were at that very moment seeing the green-eyed child with the copper hair.

"The girl is you."

"Me?" Miss Winter's eyes turned slowly away from the ghost child and in my direction. "No, she is not me. She is-" She hesitated. "She is someone I used to be. That child ceased existing a long, long time ago.

Her life came to an end the night of the fire as surely as though she had perished in the flames. The person you see before you now is nothing." "But your career… the stories… " "When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void." Then we sat in silence and watched the fire. From time to time Miss

Winter rubbed absently at her palm. "Your essay on Jules and Edmond Landier," she began after a time. I turned reluctantly to her. "What made you choose them as a subject? You must have had some particular interest? Some personal attraction?" I shook my head. "Nothing special, no." And then there was just the stillness of the stars and the crackling of the fire. It must have been an hour or so later, when the flames were lower, that she spoke a third time. "Margaret." I believe it was the first time she had called me by my first name. "When you leave here tomorrow… " "Yes?" "You will come back, won't you?" It was hard to judge her expression in the flickering, dying light of the fire, and it was hard to tell how far the trembling in her voice was the effect of fatigue or illness, but it seemed to me, in the moment before I answered-"Yes. Of course I will come back"-that Miss Winter was afraid.

The next morning Maurice drove me to the station and I took the train south.