The Thirteenth Tale

THE ALMANACS

Where else to begin my research but at home, in the shop? I was fascinated by the old almanacs. Since I was a child, any moment of boredom or anxiety or fear would send me to these shelves to flick through the pages of names and dates and annotations. Between these covers, past lives were summarized in a few brutally neutral lines. It was a world where men were baronets 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 candle 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 on the other side woke and caressed me.

I never explained to anyone why the almanacs meant so much to me; I never even said I liked them. But my father took note of my preference, and whenever volumes of the sort came up at auction, he made sure to get them. And so it was that all the illustrious dead of the country, going back many generations, were spending their afterlife tranquilly on the shelves of our second floor. With me for company.

It was on the second floor, crouched in the window seat, that I turned the pages of names. I had found Miss Winter's grandfather George Angelfield. He was not a baronet, nor a minister, nor a bishop, but still, here he was. The family had aristocratic origins-there had once been a title, but a few generations 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 tended to follow the titles, but still, the connection was close enough to merit an entry, so here he was: Angelfield, George; his date of birth; residing at Angelfield House in Oxfordshire; married to Mathilde Monnier of Reims, France; one son, Charles. Tracing him through the almanacs for later years, I found an amendment a decade later: one son, Charles; one daughter, Isabelle. After a little more page-turning, I found confirmation of George 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 George 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 flicking 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 entertain 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 generation to the next, making an ever-wider net of connections. Titles, on the other 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 baronet. And, though it was not said, the men who still might, if the right string of tragedies were to occur. But after a certain number of branchings in the family tree, the names fell out of the margins and into the ether. No combination of shipwreck, plague and earthquake would be powerful enough to restore these third cousins to prominence. The 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 ocean of ordinary people, whose births and deaths and marriages are, like their loves and fears and breakfast preferences, too insignificant to be worth recording for posterity.

Charlie, though, was a male. The almanac could stretch itself- just-to include him, though the dimness of insignificance was already casting its shadow. Information was scant. 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 concerned, this information was sufficient.

I took out one volume after another, found again and again the same sketchy half-life. With every new tome 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 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 residence and a strange abbreviation-Idd-that I had never noticed before.

I turned to 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 understood, a legal decree of decease was what happened when a person disappeared and after a certain time his family, for reasons of inheritance, 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 wondered, that could end in this vague, unsatisfactory way? Ldd.

I closed the almanac, put it back in its position on the shelf and went 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 on the stove.

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

Then he appeared in the doorway and handed me one of our dog-eared customer cards. "This is the man to ask. Retired professor of law. Lives in Wales now, but he comes 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 thatJustitiae 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 March and his family. His uncle had dabbled in art and when I went to the art history section to follow this up, I learned that his portraits, while now acknowledged to be mediocre, had been for a short period the height of fashion. Mortimer's English Provincial Portraiture contained the reproduction of an early portrait by Lewis Anthony March, entitled Roland, nephewof 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.