The Thirteenth Tale

MRS. LOVE TURNS A HEEL

When it started to rain we put our hoods up and made our way hurriedly to the shelter of the church. In the porch we did a little jig to drive the raindrops off our coats, and then went inside. We sat in a pew near the altar and I stared up at the pale, vaulted ceiling until I made myself dizzy. "Tell me about when you were found," I said. "What do you know aboutit?" "I know what Mrs. Love told me," he answered. "I can tell you that.

And of course there's always my inheritance." "You have an inheritance?" "Yes. It's nothing much. Not what people usually mean when they talk about an inheritance, but all the same… In fact, I could show it to you later." "That would be nice." "Yes… Because I was thinking, nine is a bit too adjacent to breakfast for cake, isn't it?" It was said with a reluctant grimace that turned into a gleam with his next words: "So I thought, Invite Margaret back for elevenses. Cake and coffee, how does that sound? You could do with feeding up. And I'll show you my inheritance at the same time. What little there is to see."

I accepted the invitation. Aurelius took his glasses from his pocket and began to polish them absently with a handkerchief. "Well now." Slowly he took a deep breath. Slowly he exhaled. "As it was told to me. Mrs. Love, and her story."

His face settled into passive neutrality, a sign that, in the way of all storytellers, he was disappearing to make way for the voice of the story itself. And then he recited, and from his very first words, at the heart of his voice, it was Mrs. Love I heard, conjured from the grave by the memory of her story.

Her story, and Aurelius's, and also, perhaps, Emmeline's.

There was a pitch-black sky that night, and a storm was brewing in it. In the treetops the wind was whistling, and it was raining fit to break the windows. I was knitting in this chair by the fire, a gray sock it was, the second one, and I was just turning the heel. Well, I felt a shiver. Not that I was cold, mind you. I'd a nice lot of firewood piled up in the log basket that I'd brought in from the shed that afternoon, and I'd only just put another log on. So I wasn't cold, not at all, but I thought to myself, What a night, I'm glad I'm not some poor soul caught outdoors away from home on a night like this, and it was thinking of that poor soul as made me shiver.

Everything was quiet indoors, only the crack of the fire every so often, and the click-click of the knitting needles, and my sighs. My sighs, you say? Well, yes, my sighs. Because I wasn't happy. I'd fallen into remembering, and that's a bad habit for a woman of fifty. I'd got a warm fire, a roof over my head and a cooked dinner inside me, but was I content? Not I. So there I sat sighing over my gray sock, while the rain kept coming. After a time I got up to fetch a slice of plum cake from the pantry, nice and mature, fed with brandy. Cheered me up no end. But when I came back and picked up my knitting, my heart quite turned over. Do you know why? I'd turned the heel of that sock twice!

Now that bothered me. It really bothered me, because I'm a careful knitter, not slapdash like my sister Kitty used to be, nor half blind like my poor old mother when she got near the end. I'd only made that mistake twice in my life.

The first time I turned a heel too often was when I was a young thing. A sunny afternoon. I was sitting by an open window, enjoying the smell of everything blooming in the garden. It was a blue sock then. For… well, for a young man. My young man. I won't tell you his name, there's no need. Well, I'd been daydreaming. Silly. White dresses and white cakes and a lot of nonsense like that. And all of a sudden I looked down and saw that I'd turned the heel twice. There it was, plain as day. A ribbed leg part, a heel, more ribbing for the foot and then- another heel. I laughed out loud. It didn't matter. Easy enough to undo it and put it right.

I'd already drawn the needles out when Kitty came running up the garden path. What's up with her? I thought, all of a hurry. I saw her face was greenish white, and then she stopped dead the minute she saw me through the window. That's when I knew it wasn't a trouble for her but for me. She opened her mouth but she couldn't even say my name. She was crying. And then out she came with it.

There'd been an accident. He'd been out with his brother, my young man. After some grouse. Where they didn't ought to have been. Someone saw them and they took fright. Ran off. Daniel, the brother, he got to the stile first and hopped over. My young man, he was too hasty. His gun got caught in the stile. He should have slowed down, taken his time. He heard footsteps coming after them and panicked. Yanked at the gun. I don't need to spell it out, do I? You can guess what happened.

I undid my knitting. All those little knots that you make one after another, row by row, to knit a sock, I undid them. It's easy. Take the needles out, a little tug and they just fall apart. One after another, row by row. I undid the extra heel and then I just kept going. The foot, the first heel, the ribbing of the leg. All those loops unraveling themselves as you pull the wool. Then there was nothing left to unravel, only a pile of crinkled blue wool in my lap.

It doesn't take long to knit a sock and it takes a lot less to undo it.

I expect I wound the blue wool into a ball to make something else. But I don't remember that.

The second time I turned a heel twice, I was beginning to get old. Kitty and me were sitting by the fireside here, together. It was a year since her husband had died, nearly a year since she'd come to live with me. She was getting so much better, I thought. She'd been smiling more. Taking an interest in things. She could hear his name without welling up. We sat here and I was knitting-a nice pair of bed socks it was, for Kitty, softest lambs' wool, pink to go with her dressing gown- and she had a book in her lap. She can't have been looking at it, though, because she said, "Joan, you've turned that heel twice."

I held up my work and she was right. "Well, I'm blowed," I said.

She said if it had been her knitting, she wouldn't be surprised. She was always turning heels twice, or else forgetting to turn at all. More than once she'd knitted a sock for her man with no heel, just a leg and a toe. We laughed. But she was surprised at me, she said. It wasn't like me to be so absentminded.

"Well," I said, "I have made this mistake before. Only the once." And I reminded her of what I've just told you. All about my young man. And while I was reminiscing aloud, I carefully undid the second heel and got started to put it right. Takes a bit of concentration, and the light was going. Well, I finished my story, and she didn't say anything, and I thought she was thinking about her husband. You know, me talking about my loss all those years ago, and hers so recent by comparison.

It was too dark to finish the toe properly, so I put it aside and looked up. "Kitty?" I said. "Kitty?" There was no answer. I did for a moment think she might be asleep. But she wasn't.

She looked so peaceful there. She had a smile on her face. As if she was happy to be back with him. Back with her husband. In the time I'd been peering at that bed sock in the dark, chattering away with my old story, she 'd gone to him.

So it bothered me, that night of the pitch-black sky, to find that I'd knitted a second heel. Once I'd done it and lost my young man. Twice and I'd lost my sister. Now a third time. I had no one left to lose. There was only me now.

I looked at the sock. Gray wool. A plain thing. It was meant for me.

Perhaps it didn't matter, I told myself. Who was there to miss me? No one "would suffer from my going. That was a blessing. After all, at least I'd had a life, not like my young man. And also I remembered the look on Kitty's face, that happy, peaceful look. Can't be so bad, I thought.

I set to unraveling the extra heel. What was the point of that, you might wonder. Well, I didn't want to be found with it. "Silly old woman," I imagined them saying. "They found her with her knitting in her lap, and guess what? She'd turned her heel twice." I didn't want them saying that. So I undid it. And as I worked I was readying myself to go, in my mind.

I don't know how long I sat there like that. But eventually a noise found its way into my ear. From out-of-doors. A cry, like some lost animal. I was away in my thoughts, not expecting anything to come now between me and my end, so at first I paid no notice. But I heard it again. It seemed to be calling me. For who else was going to hear it, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere? I thought perhaps it was a cat, lost its mother or something. And although I was preparing to meet my maker, the image of this little cat, with its wet fur, kept distracting me. And I thought, Just because I'm dying, that's no reason to deny one of God's creatures a bit of warmth and something to eat. And I might as well tell you, I didn't mind the thought of having some living creature by me right at that moment. So I went to the door.

And what did I find there? Tucked in the porch, out of the rain, a baby! Swaddled in canvas, mewling like a kitten. Poor little mite. Cold and wet and hungry, you were. I could hardly believe my eyes. I bent down and picked you up, and the minute you saw me you stopped crying.

I didn't linger outdoors. You wanted feeding and some dry things. So no, I didn't stop long in the porch. Just a quick look. Nothing there. Nobody at all. Just the wind rustling the trees at the edge of the wood, and-odd this-smoke rising into the sky off toward Angelfield?

I clutched you to me, came inside and closed the door.

Twice before I had knitted two heels into a sock, and death had come close to me. The third time, and it was life that came to the door. That taught me not to go reading too much into coincidences. I had no time to be thinking about death after that, anyway.

I had you to think about.

And we lived happily ever after.

Aurelius swallowed. His voice had grown hoarse and broken. The words had come out of him like an incantation; words that he had heard a thousand times as a boy, repeated inside himself for decades as a man.

When the story was finished, we sat in silence, contemplating the altar. Outside the rain continued to fall, unhurried. Aurelius was still as a statue by my side, yet his thoughts, I suspected, were anything but quiet.

There were lots of things I might have said, but I said nothing. I just waited for him to return to the present in his own time. When he did, he spoke to me.

"The thing is, it's not my story, is it? I mean, I'm in it, that's obvious, but it's not my story. It belongs to Mrs. Love. The man she wanted to marry; her sister Kitty; her knitting. Her baking. All that is her story. And then just when she thinks it's all coming to an end, I arrive and give the story a new start.

"But that doesn't make it my story, does it? Because before she opened the door… before she heard the sound in the night… before-"

He halted, breathless, made a gesture to cut off his sentence and start again:

"Because for someone to find a baby like that, just find'him, all alone like that in the rain, it means that befiore then, in order for it to happen, of necessity-"

Another frantic erasing gesture of the hands, eyes ranging wildly around the church ceiling as though somewhere he would spot the verb he needed that would allow him finally to anchor what it was he wanted to say:

"Because if Mrs. hove found me, it can only mean that before that happened, someone else, some other person, some mother must have-"

There it was. That verb.

His face froze into despair. His hands, halfway through an agitated gesture, were arrested in an attitude that suggested a plea or a prayer.

There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. I read Aurelius.

Do not abandonme.

I touched my hand to his, and the statue returned to life.

"There's no point waiting for the rain to stop," I whispered. "It's set in for the day. My photos can wait. We may as well go."

"Yes," he said, with a gruff edge in his throat. "We may as well."