The Thirteenth Tale

HAIR

At Miss Winter's house I never looked at the clock. For seconds I had words, minutes were lines of pencil script. Eleven words to the line, twenty-three lines to the page was my new chronometry. At regular intervals I stopped to turn the handle of the pencil sharpener and watch curls of lead-edged wood dangle their way to the wastepaper basket; these pauses marked my "hours."

I was so preoccupied by the story I was hearing, writing, that I had no wish for anything else. My own life, such as it was, had dwindled to nothing. My daytime thoughts and my nighttime dreams were peopled by figures not from my world but from Miss Winter's. It was Hester and Emmeline, Isabelle and Charlie, who wandered through my imagination, and the place to which my thoughts turned constantly was Angelfield.

In truth I was not unwilling to abdicate my own life. Plunging deep into Miss Winter's story was a way of turning my back on my own. Yet one cannot simply snuff oneself out in that fashion. For all my willed blindness, I could not escape the knowledge that it was December. In the back of my mind, on the edge of my sleep, in the margins of the pages I filled so frenetically with script, I was aware that December was counting down the days, and I felt the anniversary crawling closer all the time.

On the day after the night of the tears, I did not see Miss Winter. She stayed in bed, seeing only Judith and Dr. Clifton. This was convenient. I had not slept well myself. But the following day she asked for me. I went to her plain little room and found her in bed.

Her eyes seemed to have grown larger in her face. She wore not a trace of makeup. Perhaps her medication was at its peak of effectiveness, for there was a tranquillity about her that seemed new. She did not smile at me, but when she looked up as I entered, there was kindness in her eyes.

"You don't need your notebook and pencil," she said. "I want you to do something else for me today."

"What?"

Judith came in. She spread a sheet on the floor, then brought Miss Winter's chair in from the adjoining room and lifted her into it. In the center of the sheet she positioned the chair, angling it so that Miss Winter could see out of the window. Then she tucked a towel around Miss Winter's shoulders and spread her mass of orange hair over it.

Before she left she handed me a pair of scissors. "Good luck," she said with a smile.

"But what am I supposed to do?" I asked Miss Winter.

"Cut my hair, of course."

"Cut your hair?"

"Yes. Don't look like that. There's nothing to it."

"But I don't know how."

"Just take the scissors and cut." She sighed. "I don't care how you do it. I don't care what it looks like. Just get rid of it." "But I-"

"Please."

Reluctantly I took up position behind her. After two days in bed, her hair was a tangle of orange, wiry threads. It was dry to the touch, so dry I almost expected it to crackle, and punctuated with gritty little knots.

"I'd better brush it first."

The knots were numerous. Though she spoke not a word of reproach, I felt her flinch at every brushstroke. I put the brush down; it would be kinder to simply cut the knots out.

Tentatively I made the first cut. A few inches off the ends, halfway down her back. The blades sheared cleanly through the hair, and the clippings fell to the sheet.

"Shorter than that," Miss Winter said mildly.

"To here?" I touched her shoulders.

"Shorter."

I took a lock of hair and snipped at it nervously. An orange snake slithered to my feet, and Miss Winter began to speak.

I remember a few days after the funeral, I was in Hester's old room. Not for any special reason. I was just standing there, by the window, staring at nothing. My fingers found a little ridge in the curtain. A tear that she had mended. Hester was a very neat needlewoman. But there was a bit of thread that had come loose at the end. And in an idle, rather absent sort of way, I began to worry at it. I had no intention of pulling it, I had no intention of any sort, really… But all of a sudden, there it was, loose in my fingers. The thread, the whole length of it, zigzagged with the memory of the stitches. And the hole in the curtain gaping open. Now it would start to fray.

John never liked having Hester at the house. He was glad she went. But the fact remained: If Hester had been there, John would not have been on the roof. If Hester had been there, no one would have meddled with the safety catch. If Hester had been there, that day would have dawned like any other day, and as on any other day, John would have gone about his business in the garden. When the bay window cast its afternoon shadow over the gravel, there would have been no ladder, no rungs, no John sprawled on the ground to be taken in by its chill. The day would have come and gone like any other, and at the end of it John would have gone to bed and slept soundly, without even a dream of falling through the empty air.

If Hester had been there.

I found that fraying hole in the curtain utterly unbearable.

I had been snipping at Miss Winter's hair all the time she was talking, and when it was level with her earlobes, I stopped.

She lifted a hand to her head and felt the length.

"Shorter," she said.

I picked up the scissors again and carried on.

The boy still came every day. He dug and weeded and planted and mulched. I supposed he kept coming because of the money he was owed. But when the solicitor gave me some cash-"To keep you going till your uncle gets back"-and I paid the boy, he still kept coming. I watched him from the upstairs windows. More than once he looked up in my direction and I jumped out of view, but on one occasion he caught sight of me, and when he did, he waved. I did not wave back.

Every morning he brought vegetables to the kitchen door, sometimes with a skinned rabbit or a plucked hen, and every afternoon he came to collect the peelings for the compost. He lingered in the doorway, and now that I had paid him, more often than not he had a cigarette between his lips.

I had finished John's cigarettes, and it annoyed me that the boy could smoke and I couldn't. I never said a word about it, but one day, shoulder against the door frame, he caught me eyeing the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket.

"Swap you one for a cup of tea," he said.

He came into the kitchen-it was the first time he had actually come in since the day John died-and sat in John's chair, elbows on the table. I sat in the chair in the corner, where the Missus used to sit. We drank our tea in silence and exhaled cigarette smoke that rose upward toward the dingy ceiling in lazy clouds and spirals. When we had taken our last drag and stubbed the cigarettes out on our saucers, he rose without a word, walked out of the kitchen and returned to his work. But the next day, when he knocked with the vegetables, he walked straight in, sat in John's chair and tossed a cigarette across to me before I had even put the kettle on.

We never spoke. But we had our habits.

Emmeline, who never rose before lunchtime, sometimes spent the afternoons outdoors looking on as the boy did his work. I scolded her about it. "You're the daughter of the house. He's a gardener. For God's sake, Emmeline!" But it made no difference. She would smile her slow smile at anyone who caught her fancy. I watched them closely, mindful of what the Missus had told me about men who couldn't see Isabelle without wanting to touch her. But the boy showed no indication of wanting to touch Emmeline, though he spoke kindly to her and liked to make her laugh. I couldn't be easy in my mind about it, though.

Sometimes from an upstairs window I would watch the two of them together. One sunny day I saw her lolling on the grass, head on hand, supported by her elbow. It showed the rise from her waist to her hips. He turned his head to answer something she said and while he looked at her, she rolled onto her back, raised a hand and brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead. It was a languorous, sensuous movement that made me think she would not mind it if he did touch her.

But when the boy had finished what he was saying, he turned his back to Emmeline as though he hadn't seen and continued his work.

The next morning we were smoking in the kitchen. I broke our usual silence.

"Don't touch Emmeline," I told him.

He looked surprised. "I haven't touched Emmeline."

"Good. Well, don't."

I thought that was that. We both took another drag on our cigarettes and I prepared to lapse back into silence, but after exhaling, he spoke again. "I don't want to touch Emmeline."

I heard him. I heard what he said. That curious little intonation. I heard what he meant. I took a drag of my cigarette and didn't look at him. Slowly I exhaled. I didn't look at him. "She's kinder than you are," he said. My cigarette wasn't even half finished, but I stubbed it out. I strode to the kitchen door and flung it open. In the doorway he paused level with me. I stood stiffly, staring straight ahead at the buttons on his shirt. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. His voice was a murmur. "Be kind, Adeline."

Stung to anger I lifted my eyes up, meaning to fire daggers at him. But I was startled by the tenderness in his face. For a moment I was… confused.

He took advantage. Raised his hand. Was about to stroke my cheek. But I was quicker. I raised my fist, lashed his hand away. I didn't hurt him. I couldn't have hurt him. But he looked bewildered. Disappointed. And then he was gone. The kitchen was very empty after that. The Missus was gone. John was gone. Now even the boy was gone. "I'll help you," he had said. But it was impossible. How could a boy like him help me? How could anybody help me?

The sheet was covered in orange hair. I was walking on hair and hair was stuck to my shoes. All the old dye had been cut away; the sparse tufts that clung to Miss Winter's scalp were pure white.

I took the towel away and blew the stray bits of hair from the back of her neck. "Give me the mirror," Miss Winter said. I handed her the looking glass. With her hair shorn, she looked like a grizzled child.

She stared at the glass. Her eyes met her own, naked and somber, and she looked at herself for a long time. Then she put the mirror, glass side down, on the table.

"That is exactly what I wanted. Thank you, Margaret."

I left her, and when I went back to my room I thought about the boy. I thought about him and Adeline, and I thought about him and Emmeline. Then I thought about Aurelius, found as an infant, wearing an old-fashioned garment and wrapped in a satchel, with a spoon from Angelfield and a page oijane Eyre. I thought about it all at length, but for all my thinking, I did not arrive at any conclusion.

One thing did occur to me, though, in one of those unfathomable side steps of the mind. I remembered what it was Aurelius had said the last time I was at Angelfield: "I just wish there was someone to tell me the truth." And I found its echo: "Tell me the truth." The boy in the brown suit. Now, that would explain why the Banbury Herald had no record of the interview their young reporter had gone to Yorkshire for. He wasn't a reporter at all. It was Aurelius all along.