The Thirteenth Tale

COLLAPSE

Isabelle had gone. Hester had gone. Charlie had gone. Now Miss Winter told me of further losses.

Up in the attic I leaned with my back against the creaking wall. I pressed back to make it give, then released it. Over and over. I was tempting fate. What would happen, I wondered, if the wall came down? Would the roof cave in? Would the weight of it falling cause the floorboards to collapse? Would roof tiles and beams and stone come crashing through ceilings onto the beds and boxes as if there were an earthquake? And then what? Would it stop there? How far would it go? I rocked and rocked, taunting the wall, daring it to fall, but it didn't. Even under duress, it is astonishing just how long a dead wall will stay standing.

Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up, ears ajangle. The noise of it was finished already, but I could still feel it resounding in my eardrums and in my chest. I leaped out of bed and ran to the stairs, Emmeline at my heels.

We arrived on the galleried landing at the same time that John, who slept in the kitchen, arrived at the foot of the stairs, and we all stared. In the middle of the hallway the Missus was standing in her nightdress, staring upward. At her feet was a huge block of stone, and above her head, a jagged hole in the ceiling. The air was thick with gray dust. It rose and fell in the air, undecided where to settle. Fragments of plaster, mortar, wood were still falling from the floor above, with a sound like mice scattering, and from time to time I felt Emmeline jump as planks and bricks fell in the floors above.

The stone steps were cold, then splinters of wood and shards of plaster and mortar dug into my feet. In the center of all the detritus of our broken house, with the swirls of dust slowly settling around her, the Missus stood like a ghost. Dust-gray hair, dust-gray face and hands, dust-gray the folds of her long nightdress. She stood perfectly still and looked up. I came close to her and joined my stare to hers. We gazed through the hole in the ceiling, and beyond that another hole in another ceiling and then yet another hole in another ceiling. We saw the peony wallpaper in the bedroom above, the ivy trellis pattern in the room above that, and the pale gray walls of the little attic room. Above all of that, high above our heads, we saw the hole in the roof itself and the sky. There were no stars.

I took her hand. "Come on," I said. "It's no use looking up there." I led her away, and she followed me like a little child. "I'll put her to bed," I told John.

Ghost-white, he nodded. "Yes," he said, in a voice thick with dust. He could hardly bear to look at her. He made a slow gesture toward the destroyed ceiling. It was the slow motion of a drowning man dragged under by the current. "And I'll sort this out."

But an hour later, when the Missus was clean, and in a fresh nightdress, tucked up in bed and asleep, he was still there. Exactly as I had left him. Staring at the spot where she had been.

The next morning, when the Missus did not appear in the kitchen, it was I who went to wake her. She could not be woken. Her soul had departed through the hole in the roof, and she was gone.

"We've lost her," I told John in the kitchen. "She's dead."

His face didn't change. He continued to stare across the kitchen table as though he hadn't heard me. "Yes," he said eventually, in a voice that did not expect to be heard. "Yes."

It felt as if everything had come to an end. I had only one wish: to sit like John, immobile, staring into space and doing nothing. Yet time did not stop. I could still feel my heartbeat measuring out the seconds. I could feel hunger growing in my stomach and thirst in my throat. I was so sad I thought I would die, yet instead I was scandalously and absurdly alive-so alive I swear I could feel my hair and my fingernails growing.

For all the unbearable weight on my heart I could not, like John, give myself up to the misery. Hester was gone; Charlie was gone; the Missus was gone; John, in his own way, was gone, though I hoped he would find his way back. In the meantime the girl in the mist was going to have to come out of the shadows. It was time to stop playing and grow up.

"I'll put the kettle on, then," I said. "Make a cup of tea."

My voice was not my own. Some other girl, some sensible, capable, ordinary girl had found her way into my skin and taken me over. She seemed to know just what to do. I was only partly surprised. Hadn't I spent half my life watching people live their lives? Watching Hester, watching the Missus, watching the villagers?

I settled quietly inside myself while the capable girl boiled the kettle, measured out the tea leaves, stirred and poured. She put two sugars in John's tea, three in mine. When it was made, I drank it, and as the hot, sweet tea reached my stomach, at last I stopped trembling.