The Thirteenth Tale

JANE EYRE AND THE FURNACE

When I went back to Yorkshire, I received no explanation for my banishment. Judith greeted me with a constrained smile. The grayness of the daylight had crept under her skin, collected in shadows under her eyes. She pulled the curtains back a few more inches in my sitting room, exposing a bit more window, but it made no difference to the gloom. "Blasted weather," she exclaimed, and I thought she seemed at the end of her tether.

Though it was only days, it felt like an eternity. Often night, but never quite day, the darkening effect of the heavy sky threw us all out of time. Miss Winter arrived late to one of our morning meetings. She, too, was pale-faced; I didn't know whether it was the memory of recent pain that put the darkness in her eyes or something else.

"I propose a more flexible timetable for our meetings," she said when she was settled in her circle of light.

"Of course." I knew of her bad nights from my interview with the doctor, could see when the medication she took to control her pain was wearing off or had not yet taken full effect. And so we agreed that instead of presenting myself at nine every morning, I would wait instead for a tap at my door.

At first the tap came always between nine and ten. Then it drifted to later. After the doctor altered her dosage, she took to asking for me early in the mornings, but our meetings were shorter; then we fell into a habit of meeting twice or three times a day, at random times. Sometimes she called me when she felt well and spoke at length, and in detail. At other times she called me when she was in pain. Then it was not so much the company she wanted as the anesthetic qualities of the storytelling itself.

The end of my nine o'clocks was another anchor in time gone. I listened to her story, I wrote the story, when I slept I dreamed the story, and when I was awake it was the story that formed the constant backdrop of my thoughts. It was like living entirely inside a book. I didn't even need to emerge to eat, for I could sit at my desk reading my transcript while I ate the meals that Judith brought to my room. Porridge meant it was morning. Soup and salad meant lunchtime. Steak and kidney pie was evening. I remember pondering for a long time over a dish of scrambled egg. What did it mean? It could mean anything. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed the plate away.

In this long, undifferentiated lapse of time, there were a few incidents that stood out. I noted them at the time, separately from the story, and they are worth recalling here.

This is one.

I was in the library. I was looking for Jane Eyre and found almost a whole shelf of copies. It was the collection of a fanatic: There were cheap, modern copies, with no secondhand value; editions that came up so rarely on the market it would be hard to put a price to them; copies that fell at every point between these two extremes. The one I was looking for was an ordinary, though particular, edition from the turn of the century. While I was browsing, Judith brought Miss Winter in and settled her in her chair by the fire.

When Judith had gone, Miss Winter asked, "What are you looking for?"

Jane Eyre.

"Do you likeJane Eyre}" she asked.

"Very much. Do you?"

"Yes." She shivered. "Shall I stoke up the fire for you?" She lowered her eyelids as if a wave of pain had come over her. "I suppose so." Once the fire was burning strongly again, she said, "Do you have a moment? Sit down, Margaret." And after a minute of silence she said this. "Picture a conveyor belt, a huge conveyor belt, and at the end of it a massive furnace. And on the conveyor belt are books. Every copy in the world of every book you've ever loved. All lined up.Jane Eyre. Villette. The Woman in White."

"Middlemarch, " I supplied

"Thank you. Middlemarch. And imagine a lever with two labels, On and Off. At the moment the lever is off. And next to it is a human being, with his hand on the lever. About to turn it on. And you can stop it. You have a gun in your hand. All you have to do is pull the trigger. What do you do?"

"No, that's silly."

"He turns the lever to On. The conveyor belt has started."

"But it's too extreme, it's hypothetical."

"First of all, Shirley goes over the edge."

"I don't like games like this."

"Now George Sand starts to go up in flames."

I sighed and closed my eyes.

" Wuthering Heights coming up. Going to let that burn, are you?"

I couldn't help myself. I saw the books, saw their steady process to the mouth of the furnace, and flinched. "Suit yourself. In it goes. Same for Jane Eyre}" Jane Eyre. I was suddenly dry-mouthed.

"All you have to do is shoot. I won't tell. No one need ever know." She waited. "They've started to fall. Just the first few. But there are a lot of copies. You have a moment to make up your mind."

I rubbed my thumb nervously against a rough edge of nail on my middle finger. "They're falling faster now." She did not remove her gaze from me. "Half of them gone. Think, Margaret. All of Jane Eyre will soon have disappeared forever. Think." Miss Winter blinked. "Two thirds gone. Just one person, Margaret. Just one tiny, insignificant little person." I blinked. "Still time, but only just. Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?" Blink. Blink. "Last chance." Blink. Blink. Blink.

Jane Eyre was no more.

"Margaret!"Miss Winter's face twisted in vexation as she spoke; she beat her left hand against the arm of her chair. Even the right hand, injured though it was, twitched in her lap.

Later, when I transcribed it, I thought it was the most spontaneous expression of feeling I had ever seen in Miss Winter. It was a surprising amount of feeling to invest in a mere game.

And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so.

On my way out, I returned to the shelf oijane Eyres and took the one volume that met my criteria. Right age, right kind of paper, right typeface. In my room I turned the pages till I found the place.

"… not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm-not soon enough however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and Ifell, striking my head against thedoor andcutting it. "

The book was intact. Not a single page was missing. This was not the volume Aurelius's page had been torn from. But in any case, why should it be? If his page had come from Angelfield-if it had-then it would have burned with the rest of the house.

For a time I sat doing nothing, only thinking of Jane Eyre and a library and a furnace and a house fire, but no matter how I combined and recombined them, I could not make sense of it.

The other thing I remember from this time was the incident of the photograph. A small parcel appeared with my breakfast tray one morning, addressed to me in my father's narrow handwriting. It was my photographs of Angelfield; I had sent him the canister of film, and he had had it developed for me. There were a few clear pictures from my first day: brambles growing through the wreckage of the library, ivy snaking its way up the stone staircase. I halted at the picture of the bedroom where I had come face-to-face with my ghost; over the old fireplace there was only the glare of a flashbulb reflected. Still, I took it out of the bundle and tucked it inside the cover of my book, to keep.

The rest of the photographs were from my second visit, when the weather had been against me. Most of them were nothing but puzzling compositions of murkiness. What I remembered was shades of gray overlaid with silver; the mist moving like a veil of gauze; my own breath at tipping point between air and water. But my camera had captured none of that, nor was it possible in the dark smudges that interrupted the gray to make out a stone, a wall, a tree or a forest. After half a dozen such pictures, I gave up looking. Stuffing the wad of photos in my cardigan pocket, I went downstairs to the library.

We were about halfway through the interview when I became aware of a silence. I was dreaming. Lost, as usual, in her world of childhood twinship. I replayed the sound track of her voice, recalled a changed tone, the fact that she had addressed me, but could not recall the words.

"What?" I said.

"Your pocket," she repeated. "You have something in your pocket."

"Oh… It's some photographs… " In that limbo state halfway between a story and your life, when you haven't caught up with your wits yet, I mumbled on. "Angelfield," I said.

By the time I returned to myself, the pictures were in her hands.

At first she looked closely at each one, straining through her glasses to make sense of the blurred shapes. As one indecipherable image followed another, she let out a small Vida Winter sigh, one that implied her low expectations had been amply fulfilled, and her mouth tightened into a critical line. With her good hand she began to flick through the pile of pictures more cursorily; to show that she no longer expected to find anything of interest, she tossed each one after the briefest glance onto the table at her side.

I was mesmerized by the discarded photos landing at a regular rhythm on the table. They formed a messy sprawl on the surface, flopping on top of each other and gliding over each other's slippery surfaces with a sound like useless, useless, useless.

Then the rhythm came to a halt. Miss Winter was sitting with intent rigidity, holding up a single picture and studying it with a frown. She's seen a ghost, I thought. Then, after a long moment, pretending not to feel my gaze upon her, she tucked the photo behind the remaining dozen and looked at the rest, tossing them down just as before. When the one that had arrested her attention resurfaced, she barely glanced at it but added it to the others. "I wouldn't have been able to tell it was Angelfield, but if you say so… " she said icily, and then, in an apparently artless movement, she picked up the whole pile and, holding them toward me, dropped them.

"My hand. Do excuse me," she murmured as I bent down to retrieve the pictures, but I wasn't deceived.

And she picked up her story where she had left it.

Later I looked through the pictures again. For all that the dropping of the photos had muddled the order, it wasn't difficult to tell which one had struck her so forcefully. In the bundle of blurred gray images there was really only one that stood out from the rest. I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at the image, remembering the moment well. The thinning of the mist and the warming of the sun had combined at just the right time to allow a ray of light to fall onto a boy who posed stiffly for the camera, chin up, back straight, eyes betraying the anxious knowledge that at any minute his hard yellow hat was going to slip sideways on his head.

Why had she been so taken by that photograph? I scanned the background, but the house, half demolished already, was only a dismal smear of gray over the child's right shoulder. Closer to him, all that was visible was the grille of the safety barrier and the corner of the Keep Out sign.

Was it the boy himself who interested her?

I puzzled over the picture for half an hour, but by the time I came to put it away, I was no nearer an explanation. Because it perplexed me, I slipped it inside the cover of my book along with the picture of an absence in a mirror frame.

Apart from the photograph of the boy and the game of Jane Eyre and the furnace, not much else pierced the cloak the story had cast over me.

The cat, I remember. He took note of my unusual hours, came scratching at my door for a bit of fuss at random hours of the day and night. Finished up bits of egg or fish from my plate. He liked to sit on my piles of paper, watching me write. For hours I could sit scratching at my pages, wandering in the dark labyrinth of Miss Winter's story, but no matter how far I forgot myself, I never quite lost my sense of being watched over, and when I got particularly lost, it was the gaze of the cat that seemed to reach into my muddle and light my way back to my room, my notes, my pencils and my pencil sharpener. He even slept with me on my bed some nights, and I took to leaving my curtains open so that if he woke he could sit on my windowsill seeing things move in the dark that were invisible to the human eye.

And that is all. Apart from these things there was nothing else. Only the eternal twilight and the story.