The Thirteenth Tale

Thirteen Tales

Tell me the truth. The words from the letter were trapped in my head, trapped, it seemed, beneath the sloping ceiling of my attic flat, like a bird that has got in down the chimney. It was natural that the boy's plea should have affected me; I who had never been told the truth, but left to discover it alone and in secret. Tell me the truth. Quite.

But I resolved to put the words and the letter out of my head.

It was nearly time. I moved swiftly. In the bathroom I soaped my face and brushed my teeth. By three minutes to eight I was in my nightdress and slippers, waiting for the kettle to boil. Quickly, quickly. A minute to eight. My hot-water bottle was ready, and I filled a glass with water from the tap. Time was of the essence. For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world. But that night the magic failed. The threads of plot that had been left in suspense overnight had somehow gone flaccid during the day, and I found that I could not care about how they would eventually weave together. I made an effort to secure myself to a strand of the plot, but as soon as I had managed it, a voice intervened-Tell me the truth-that unpicked the knot and left it flopping loose again. My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in White, WutheringHeights, Jane Eyre…

But it was no good. Tell me the truth.…

Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing. Turning out the light, I rested my head on the pillow and tried to sleep. Echoes of a voice. Fragments of a story. In the dark I heard them louder. Tell me the truth.…

At two in the morning I got out of bed, pulled on some socks, unlocked the flat door and, wrapped in my dressing gown, crept down the narrow staircase and into the shop.

At the back there is a tiny room, not much bigger than a cupboard, that we use when we need to pack a book for the post. It contains a table and, on a shelf, sheets of brown paper, scissors and a ball of string. As well as these items there is also a plain wooden cabinet that holds a dozen or so books.

The contents of the cabinet rarely change. If you were to look into it today you would see what I saw that night: a book without a cover resting on its side, and next to it an ugly tooled leather volume. A pair of books in Latin standing upright. An old Bible. Three volumes of botany, two of history and a single tatty book of astronomy. A book in Japanese, another in Polish and some poems in Old English. Why do we keep these books apart? Why are they not kept with their natural companions on our neatly labeled shelves? The cabinet is where we keep the esoteric, the valuable, the rare. These volumes are worth as much as the contents of the entire rest of the shop, more even.

The book that I was after-a small hardback, about four inches by six, only fifty or so years old-was out of place next to all these antiquities. It had appeared a couple of months ago, placed there I imagined by Father's inadvertence, and one of these days I meant to ask him about it and shelve it somewhere. But just in case, I put on the white gloves. We keep them in the cabinet to wear when we handle the books because, by a curious paradox, just as the books come to life when we read them, so the oils from our fingertips destroy them as we turn the pages. Anyway, with its paper cover intact and its corners unblunted, the book was in fine condition, one of a popular series produced to quite a high standard by a publishing house that no longer exists. A charming volume, and a first edition, but not the kind of thing that you would expect to find among the Treasures. At jumble sales and village fêtes, other volumes in the series sell for a few pence.

The paper cover was cream and green: a regular motif of shapes like fish scales formed the background, and two rectangles were left plain, one for the line drawing of a mermaid, the other for the title and author's name. Thirteen Tales ofChange and Desperation by Vida Winter.

I locked the cabinet, returned the key and flashlight to their places and climbed the stairs back to bed, book in gloved hand.

I didn't intend to read. Not as such. A few phrases were all I wanted. Something bold enough, strong enough, to still the words from the letter that kept going around in my head. Fight fire with fire, people say. A couple of sentences, a page maybe, and then I would be able to sleep.

I removed the dust jacket and placed it for safety in the special drawer I keep for the purpose. Even with gloves you can't be too careful. Opening the book, I inhaled. The smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.

The prologue. Just a few words.

But my eyes, brushing the first line, were snared.

All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.

It was like falling into water. Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story one more time. They were people. The blood that fell from the princess's finger when she touched the spinning wheel was wet, and it left the tang of metal on her tongue when she licked her finger before falling asleep. When his comatose daughter was brought to him, the king's tears left salt burns on his face. The stories were shot through with an unfamiliar mood. Everyone achieved their heart's desire-the king had his daughter restored to life by a stranger's kiss, the beast was divested of his fur and left naked as a man, the mermaid walked-but only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

The tales were brutal and sharp and heartbreaking. I loved them.

It was while I was reading "The Mermaid's Tale"-the twelfth tale-that I began to feel stirrings of an anxiety that was unconnected to the story itself. I was distracted: my thumb and right index finger were sending me a message: Not many pages left. The knowledge nagged more insistently until I tilted the book to check. It was true. The thirteenth tale must be a very short one.

I continued my reading, finished tale twelve and turned the page.

Blank.

I flicked back, forward again. Nothing.

There was no thirteenth tale.

There was a sudden rush in my head, I felt the sick dizziness of the deep-sea diver come too fast to the surface.

Aspects of my room came back into view, one by one. My bedspread, the book in my hand, the lamp still shining palely in the daylight that was beginning to creep in through the thin curtains.

It was morning. I had read the night away. There was no thirteenth tale.

In the shop my father was sitting at the desk with his head in his hands.

He heard me come down the stairs and looked up, white-faced. "Whatever is it?" I darted forward. He was too shocked to speak; his hands roused themselves to a mute gesture of desperation before slowly replacing themselves over his horrified eyes. He groaned.

My hand hovered over his shoulder, but I am not in the habit of touching people, so it fell instead to the cardigan that he had draped over the back of his chair.

"Is there anything I can do?" I asked. When he spoke, his voice was weary and shaken. "We'll have to phone the police. In a minute. In a minute… " "The police? Father, what's happened?" "A break-in." He made it sound like the end of the world. I looked around the shop, bewildered. Everything was neat and in order. The desk drawers had not been forced, the shelves not ransacked, the window not broken. "The cabinet," he said, and I began to understand. "The Thirteen Tales." I spoke firmly. "Upstairs in my flat. I borrowed it." Father looked up at me. His expression combined relief with utter astonishment. "You borrowed'it?" "Yes." " You borrowed it? " "Yes." I was puzzled. I was always borrowing things from the shop, as he knew. "But Vida Winter…}" And I realized that some kind of explanation was called for.

I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new ones, so I read old novels.

Contemporary literature is a world I know little of. My father had taken me to task on this topic many times during our daily talks about books. He reads as much as I do, but more widely, and I have great respect for his opinions. He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance. He has spoken of endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements. He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that I prefer.

During these talks, I listen with the gravest attention and nod my head, but I always end up continuing in my old habits. Not that he blames me for it. There is one thing on which we are agreed: There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

Once Father even told me about Vida Winter. "Now, there's a living writer who would suit you."

But I had never read any Vida Winter. Why should I when there were so many dead writers I had still not discovered?

Except that now I had come down in the middle of the night to take the Thirteen Tales from the cabinet. My father, with good reason, was wondering why.

"I got a letter yesterday," I began.

He nodded.

"It was from Vida Winter."

Father raised his eyebrows but waited for me to go on.

"It seems to be an invitation for me to visit her. With a view to writing her biography."

His eyebrows lifted by another few millimeters.

"I couldn't sleep, so I came down to get the book."

I waited for Father to speak, but he didn't. He was thinking, a small frown creasing his brow. After a time I spoke again. "Why is it kept in the cabinet? What makes it so valuable?"

Father pulled himself away from his train of thought to answer. "Partly because it's the first edition of the first book by the most famous living writer in the English language. But mostly because it's flawed. Every following edition is called Tales of Change and Desperation. No mention of thirteen. You'll have noticed there are only twelve stories?"

I nodded.

"Presumably there were originally supposed to be thirteen, then only twelve were submitted. But there was a mixup with the jacket design and the book was printed with the original title and only twelve stories. They had to be recalled."

"But your copy…"

"Slipped through the net. One of a batch sent out by mistake to a shop in Dorset, where one customer bought a copy before the shop got the message to pack them up and send them back. Thirty years ago he realized what the value might be and sold it to a collector. The collector's estate was auctioned in September and I bought it. With the proceeds from the Avignon deal."

"The Avignon deal?" It had taken two years to negotiate the Avignon deal. It was one of Father's most lucrative successes.

"You wore the gloves, of course?" he asked sheepishly.

"Who do you take me for?"

He smiled before continuing. "All that effort for nothing."

"What do you mean?"

"Recalling all those books because the title was wrong. Yet people still call it the Thirteen Tales, even though it's been published as Tales of

Changeand Desperation for half a century." "Why is that?" "It's what a combination of fame and secrecy does. With real knowledge about her so scant, fragments of information like the story of the recalled first edition take on an importance beyond their weight. It has become part of her mythology. The mystery of the thirteenth tale. It gives people something to speculate about."

There is a short silence. Then, directing his gaze vaguely into the middle distance, and speaking lightly so that I could pick up his words or let them go, as I chose, he murmured, "And now a biography… How unexpected."

I remembered the letter, my fear that its writer was not to be trusted. I remembered the insistence of the young man's words, "Tell me the truth." I remembered the Thirteen Tales that took possession of me with its first words and held me captive all night. I wanted to be held hostage again.

"I don't know what to do," I told my father. "It is different from what you have done before. Vida Winter is a living subject. Interviews instead of archives." I nodded. "But you want to know the person who wrote the Thirteen Tales." I nodded again. My father put his hands on his knees and sighed. He knows what reading is. How it takes you. "When does she want you to go?" "Monday," I told him. "I'll run you to the station, shall I?" "Thank you. And-" "Yes?" "Can I have some time off? I ought to do some more reading before

I go up there." "Yes," he said, with a smile that didn't hide his worry. "Yes, of course."

There followed one of the most glorious times of my adult life. For the first time ever I had on my bedside table a pile of brand-new, glossy paperbacks, purchased from a regular bookshop. Betwixt and Between by Vida Winter; Twice IsForever by Vida Winter; Hauntings by Vida Winter; Out of the Arc by Vida Winter; Rules ofAffliction by Vida Winter;The Birthday Girl by Vida Winter; The Puppet Show by Vida Winter. The covers, all by the same artist, glowed with heat and power: amber and scarlet, gold and deep purple. I even bought a copy of Talesof Change and Desperation; its title looked bare without the Thirteen that makes my father's copy so valuable. His own copy I had returned to the cabinet.

Of course one always hopes for something special when one reads an author one hasn't read before, and Miss Winter's books gave me the same thrill I had when I discovered the Landier diaries, for instance. But it was more than that. I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again-the lost joys of reading returned to me. Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

From time to time my father would knock at the door at the top of the stairs. He stared at me. I must have had that dazed look intense reading gives you. "You won't forget to eat, will you?" he said, as he handed me a bag of groceries or a pint of milk.

I would have liked to stay in my flat forever with those books. But if I was to go to Yorkshire to meet Miss Winter, then there was other work to be done. I took a day off from reading and went to the library. In the newspaper room, I looked at the books pages of the national newspapers for pieces on Miss Winter's recent novels. For every new book that came out, she summoned a number of journalists to a hotel in Harrogate, where she met them one by one and gave them, separately, what she termed her life story. There must have been dozens of these stories in existence, hundreds perhaps. I found almost twenty without looking very hard.

After the publication of Betwixt and Between, she was the secret daughter of a priest and a schoolmistress; a year later in the same newspaper she got publicity for Hauntings by telling how she was the runaway child of a Parisian courtesan. For The Puppet Show, she was, in various newspapers, an orphan raised in a Swiss convent, a street child from the backstreets of the East End and the stifled only girl in a family of ten boisterous boys. I particularly liked the one in which, becoming accidentally separated in India from her Scottish missionary parents, she scraped out an existence for herself in the streets of Bombay, making a living as a storyteller. She told stories about pine trees that smelled like the freshest coriander, mountains as beautiful as the Taj Mahal, haggis more delicious than any street-corner pakora and bagpipes. Oh, the sound of the bagpipes! So beautiful it defied description. When many years later she was able to return to Scotland-a country she had left as a tiny baby-she was gravely disappointed. The pine trees smelled nothing like coriander. Snow was cold. Haggis tasted flat. As for the bagpipes…

Wry and sentimental, tragic and astringent, comic and sly, each and every one of these stories was a masterpiece in miniature. For a different kind of writer, they might be the pinnacle of her achievement; for Vida Winter they were mere throwaways. No one, I think, would have mistaken them for the truth.

The day before my departure was Sunday and I spent the afternoon at my parents' house. It never changes;a single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble.

My mother smiled a small, taut smile and talked brightly while we had tea. The neighbor's garden, roadworks in town, a new perfume that had brought her up in a rash. Light, empty chat, produced to keep silence at bay, silence in which her demons lived. It was a good performance: nothing to reveal that she could hardly bear to leave the house, that the most minor unexpected event gave her a migraine, that she could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.

Father and I waited until Mother went to make fresh tea before talking about Miss Winter.

"It's not her real name," I told him. "If it was her real name, it would be easy to trace her. And everyone who has tried has given up for want of information. No one knows even the simplest fact about her."

"How curious."

"It's as if she came from nowhere. As if before being a writer she didn't exist at all. As if she invented herself at the same time as her book." "We know what she chose for a pen name. That must reveal some thing, surely," my father suggested. "Vida. From vita, Latin, meaning life. Though I can't help thinking of French, too." Vide in French means empty. The void. Nothingness. But we don't use words like this in my parents' house, so I left it for him to infer.

"Quite." He nodded. "And what about Winter?"

Winter. I looked out of the window for inspiration. Behind my sister's ghost, dark branches stretched naked across the darkening sky, and the flower beds were bare black soil. The glass was no protection against the chill; despite the gas fire, the room seemed filled with bleak despair. What did winter mean to me? One thing only: death.

There was a silence. When it became necessary to say something so as not to burden the previous exchange with an intolerable weight, I said, "It's a spiky name. V and W. Vida Winter. Very spiky."

My mother came back. Placing cups on saucers, pouring tea, she talked on, her voice moving as freely in her tightly policed plot of life as though it were seven acres.

My attention wandered. On the mantel over the fireplace was the one object in the room that might be considered decorative. A photograph. Every so often my mother talks about putting it away in a drawer, where it will be safe from dust. But my father likes to see it, and since he so rarely opposes her, on this she cedes to him. In the picture are a youthful bride and groom. Father looks the same as ever: quietly handsome, with dark, thoughtful eyes; the years do not change him. The woman is scarcely recognizable. A spontaneous smile, laughter in her eyes, warmth in her gaze as she looks at my father. She looks happy.

Tragedy alters everything.

I was born, and the woman in the wedding photo disappeared.

I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?