‘You see that cupboard?“ he said ”There to your left? Would you open it?“
‘And that,“ he was saying, ”is how Mrs. Love settled on Aurelius. Though I might just as easily be Alphonse, I suppose.“
‘They’re a family. They live in The Street. The house with the swing. Karen looks after the deer here.“
‘Started to. It was about a little girl. She’s lost her family, and so her aunt takes her in. I thought I was on to something with that. Nasty woman, the aunt, not like Mrs. Love at all. This is one of her cousins throwing the book at her, on this page. But later she goes to school, a terrible school, terrible food, but she does make a friend.“ He smiled, remembering his reading. ”Only then the friend died.“ His face fell. ”And after that… I seemed to lose interest. Didn’t read the end. I couldn’t see how it fitted after that.“ He shrugged off his puzzlement. ”Have you read it? What happened to her in the end? Is it relevant?“
‘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.
I blinked.
Once the fire was burning strongly again, she said, “Do you have a moment? Sit down, Margaret.”
Aurelius took up the phrase and continued, reading not from the page but from memory: “… not soon enough however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it.”
Aurelius opened the oven door and took out a tray of pale gold biscuits that he set to cool. Then he filled the kettle and prepared a tray. Cups and saucers, a sugar bowl, a milk jug and little plates.
I went into Mrs. Love’s front room and sat in a chair by the fireplace, leaving him to stow his inheritance—his invaluable, indecipherable inheritance—safely away.
The family in mackintoshes, turning back toward the lodge gates, had clearly reached the same decision.
‘Can’t you?“
Thinking he wanted a piece of equipment, I opened the cupboard door.
‘I don’t like games like this.“
I opened the book and began to leaf through it. Victoria sponge, date and walnut loaf, scones, ginger cake, maids of honor, bakewell tart, rich fruit cake… the spelling and the handwriting improving as the pages turned.
I rubbed my thumb nervously against a rough edge of nail on my middle finger.
And after a minute of silence she said this.
‘Last chance.“
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.
He pointed. “It got wet in the rain, but here, just here—” He led me :o the window, gestured at me to hold the paper scrap up to the light. ‘Something like an A at the beginning. And then an S. Just here, toward he end. Of course, it’s faded a bit, over the years; you have to look lard, but you can see it, can’t you?“
‘Look at the stitching here—and here. It’s been mended more than nee. And this button doesn’t match. Other babies wore this before you.“
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.
Aurelius pulled out a chair for me and I sat at a small table by a bookcase. The shelves were filled with cookbooks, in French, English, Italian. One book, unlike the others, was out on the table. It was a thick notebook, corners blunt with age, and covered in brown paper that had gone transparent after decades of being handled with butteryfingers. Someone had written RECIPIES on the front, in old-fashioned, school-formed capitals. Some years later the writer had crossed out the second I, using a different pen.
The scene was bleak. The house, or what remained of it, was ghostly. A smudge of gray against a gray sky. The upper stories on the left-hand side were all gone. The ground floor remained, the door frame demarcated by its dark stone lintel and the steps that led up to it, but the door itself was gone. It was not a day to be open to the elements, and I shivered for the half-dismantled house. Even the stone cats had abandoned it. Like the deer, they had taken themselves off out of the wet. The right-hand side of the building was still largely intact, though to judge by the position of the crane it would be next to go. Was all that machinery really necessary? I caught myself thinking. For it looked as if the walls were simply dissolving in the rain; those stones still standing, pale and insubstantial as rice paper, seemed ready to melt away under my very eyes if I just stood there long enough.
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.
‘Ah.“ His forehead wrinkled as he tried to puzzle it all out. But he gave up. ”No. It doesn’t make sense, does it? The beginning, perhaps. The girl without the mother. But after that… I wish someone could tell me what it means. I wish there was someone who could just tell me the truth.“
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.
‘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.
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.
By the time I returned to myself, the pictures were in her hands.
‘You see! It’s obvious when you know what you’re looking for, isn’t it?
“Jane Eyre.”
‘Your pocket,“ she repeated. ”You have something in your pocket.“
‘Still time, but only just. Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?“
It was a small stone cottage. Built for endurance rather than decoration, but attractive all the same, in its simple and solid lines. Aurelius led me around the side of the house. Was it a hundred years old or two hundred? It was hard to tell. It wasn’t the kind of house that a hundred years made much difference to. Except that at the back there was a large new extension, almost as large as the house itself, and taken up entirely with a kitchen.
‘It’s the bag I was found in.“
When Judith had gone, Miss Winter asked, “What are you looking for?”
“Middlemarch, ” I supplied.
‘Two thirds gone. Just one person, Margaret. Just one tiny, insignificant little person.“
He laughed at himself, sadly, uneasily, and turned away. “The only other thing was the spoon. But you’ve seen that.” He reached into his top pocket and took out the silver spoon I had seen at our first meeting, when we ate ginger cake while sitting on the giant cats flanking the steps of Angelfield House.
He turned back to the torn-out page. “Probably it’s not the book that’s important at all. Perhaps it’s just this page. Perhaps it has some secret meaning. Look here—”
The things looked like a pile of discarded junk waiting to be swept into the bin, but he gazed at them with the intensity of a boy staring at a treasure trove. “These things are my story,” he said. “These things tell me who I am. It’s just a matter of… of understanding them.” His bafflement was intent but resigned. “I’ve tried all my life to piece them together. I keep thinking, If only I could find the thread… it would all fall into place. Take that, for instance—”
‘You open it—I’ve got flour on my hands.“
‘No, that’s silly.“
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.
The bag he was found in? My eyes moved slowly from the satchel to Aurelius. Even bent over his kneading he was over six feet tall. I had thought him a storybook giant when I first set eyes on him, I remembered. Today the strap wouldn’t even go around his girth, yet sixty years ago he had been small enough to fit inside. Dizzy at the thought of what time can do, I sat down again. Who was it that had placed a baby in this satchel so long ago? Folded its canvas around him, fastened the buckle against the weather and placed the strap over her body to carry him, through the night, to Mrs. Love’s? I ran my fingers over the places she had touched. Canvas, buckle, strap. Seeking some trace of her. A clue, in Braille or invisible ink or code, that my touch might reveal if only it knew how. It did not know how.
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.
She shivered.
Then, “Home,” Aurelius pronounced.
He turned back to combining his ingredients.
‘And there’s this.“ He pointed at a page of print. It was torn from a book and riddled with creases. Taking it in my hands I started to read.
‘Yes.“
‘He turns the lever to On. The conveyor belt has started.“
‘My sanctuary,“ he said as he showed me in.
Just as he struck his pose there came a small miracle. A shaft of sun-light found its way through a gap in the cloud and fell upon the boy, illuminating him in his moment of glory. I clicked the shutter and my photo was taken. The boy in the hat, over his left shoulder a yellow Keep Out sign, and to his right, in the background, the house, a dismal smudge of gray.
I sighed and closed my eyes.
‘… 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 I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it.
‘She falls in love with her employer. His wife—she’s mad, lives in the house but secretly—tries to burn the house down, and Jane goes away. When she comes back, the wife has died, and Mr. Rochester is blind, and Jane marries him.“
And she picked up her story where she had left it.
She did not remove her gaze from me.
Aurelius and I walked through the woods in silent friendship.
Jane Eyre. I was suddenly dry-mouthed.
I made a vague motion with my head, neither nod nor shake.
Blink. Blink.
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.
It was a kind of satchel. Old and curiously designed, its sides were not stitched but just tucked in. It fastened with a buckle, and a long, broad leather strap, attached with a rusty clasp at each side, allowed you presumably to wear it diagonally across your body. The leather was dry and cracked, and the canvas that might once have been khaki was now just the color of age.
‘No. She just looks after them. They’re a nice family.“
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.
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.
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.
A massive stainless-steel oven, white walls, two vast fridges—it was a real kitchen for a real cook.
‘They’re falling faster now.“
“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.
‘Of course.“
For a second he raised his eyes from the bowl to me.
My camera was slung around my neck. I disentangled it from under my coat and raised it to my eyes. Was it possible to capture the evanescent appearance of the house through all this wetness? I doubted it but was willing to try.
‘It’s exasperating, isn’t it?“ Aurelius said.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
‘It’s very old.“
Was it the boy himself who interested her?
I undid the buckle and opened the pleats of canvas. They unfolded into a flat circle in the center of which lay a tangle of paper and rag.
This is one.
‘Just a bag,“ he said vaguely. He lifted it to his face and sniffed it delicately. ”It used to smell of smoke, but not anymore.“ He passed it to me, and I bent my nose to it. ”You see? It’s faded now.“
I stared at the stain.
In the woods there is a clearing. Beneath it, the ground falls away steeply and is covered in patchy scrub before it levels out and there are trees again. Because of this, it provides an unexpected vantage point from which to view the house. It was in this clearing that I stopped, on my way back from Aurelius’s cottage.
‘But it’s too extreme, it’s hypothetical.“
‘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.“
‘You’ll find a bag hanging on a peg inside.“
‘Older than that, even.“
‘Wuthering Heights coming up. Going to let that burn, are you?“
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.
JANE EYRE AND THE FURNACE
Jane Eyre was no more.
I left the house with something scratching at my mind. Was it something Aurelius had said? Yes. Some echo or connection had vaguely appealed for my attention but had been swept away by the rest of his story. It didn’t matter. It would come back to me.
Aurelius was rapt by the family tableau.
‘Suit yourself. In it goes. Same for Jane Eyre?“
‘What is it?“ I asked.
I heard him slide something into the oven and close the door, then I felt him behind me, looking over my shoulder.
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.
‘It’s what I was wearing,“ Aurelius explained.
‘Have you read it?“
On my way out, I returned to the shelf of Jane 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.
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.
‘And the bag itself,“ I wondered. ”What kind of a bag is it?“
Aurelius turned a dial on the oven, then, moving lightly, assembled his ingredients.After that everything was within reach, and he stretched out an arm for a sieve or a knife without looking. He moved in his kitchen the way drivers change gear in their cars: an arm reaching out smoothly, independently, knowing exactly what to do, while his eyes never left the fixed spot in front of him: the bowl in which he was combining his ingredients. He sieved flour, chopped butter into dice, zested an orange. It was as natural as breathing.
‘I’ve seen them before,“ I said. ”Do you know who they are?“
‘Half of them gone. Think, Margaret. All of Jane Eyre will soon havedisappeared forever. Think.“
‘First of all, Shirley goes over the edge.“
‘May I?“ I asked.
His eyes flitted from the scrap of linen to me and back to the cloth, hungry for knowledge.
‘I think—“ Aurelius stuttered, ”well, Mrs. Love thought— We both agreed, in fact“—he looked at me in hope—”that it must be my name.“
‘Now George Sand starts to go up in flames.“
‘You recognized it? Yes, it is. I asked a man in a library. It’s by Charlotte someone. She had a lot of sisters, apparently.“
‘Do you like Jane Eyre?“ she asked.
I continued to look, but the phantom letters that he could see were invisible to my eye.
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.
‘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?“
“It’s a mile and a half direct,” he said, pointing into the woods, “longer by road.”
‘You take this,“ he said, passing the tray to me. He opened a door that showed a glimpse of a sitting room, old comfy chairs and floral cushions. ”Make yourself at home. I’ll bring the rest in a minute.“ He kept his back to me, head bowed as he washed his hands. ”I’ll be with you when I’ve put these things away.“
‘My hand. Do excuse me,“ she murmured as I bent down to retrieve the pictures, but I wasn’t deceived.
It was a piece of cloth. Linen, once white, now yellow. I disentangled it from the other objects and smoothed it out. It was embroidered with a pattern of stars and flowers also in white; there were four dainty mother-of-pearl buttons; it was an infant’s dress or nightgown. Aurelius’s broad fingers hovered over the tiny garment, wanting to touch, not wanting to mark it with flour. The narrow sleeves would just fit over a finger now.
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.
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.
I was adjusting the long-distance lens when I caught a slight movement at the edge of the frame. Not my ghost. The children were back. They had seen something in the grass, were bending over it excitedly. What was it? A hedgehog? A snake? Curious, I fine-tuned the focus to see more clearly.
Of course I recognized it. How could I not, for I had read it goodness knows how many times. “Jane Eyre, ” I said wonderingly.
‘As old as me, I suppose.“
Enviously he gazed after them, then he broke his attention with a shake of his head. “Mrs. Love was very good to me,” he said, “and I loved her. All this other stuff—” He made a dismissive gesture and turned toward the woods. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
The sun disappeared, and I took my eye off the children to wind the film and tuck my camera away in the dry. When I looked back, the children were halfway down the drive. His left hand in her right, they were whirling around and around as they approached the lodge gates, equal stride, equal weight, each one a perfect counterbalance to the other. With the tails of their mackintoshes flaring behind them, feet barely skimming the ground, they looked as if they were about to lift into the air and fly.
‘My inheritance,“ he announced.
I couldn’t help myself. I saw the books, saw their steady process to the mouth of the furnace, and flinched.
Aurelius shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in helpless ignorance, and I dropped the feather with relief.
I knew it was hopeless.
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.
There were no leaves to cut out the light and the branches, blackened by rain, reached dark across the watery sky. Stretching out an arm to push away low branches, Aurelius dislodged extra raindrops to add to those that fell on us from the sky. We came across a fallen tree and leaned over it, staring into the dark pool of rain in its hollow that had softened the rotting bark almost to fur.
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.
‘I propose a more flexible timetable for our meetings,“ she said when she was settled in her circle of light.
‘Do you think so?“
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.
‘What about this?“ I picked up the next object and couldn’t help giving a shudder. Clearly it had been a feather once, but now it was a nasty, dirty-looking thing. Its oils dried up, the barbs had separated into stiff brown spikes along the cracked spine.
‘Very much. Do you?“
One of the children reached into the long grass and lifted the discovery out of it. It was a yellow builder’s hat. With a delighted smile he pushed back his sou’wester—I could see it was the boy now—and placed the hat on his head. Stiff as a soldier he stood, chest out, head up, arms by his side, face intent with concentration to keep the too-large hat from slipping.
‘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.“
‘… 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—“
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.
And that is all. Apart from these things there was nothing else. Only the eternal twilight and the story.
‘What?“ I said.
Miss Winter blinked.
And then there was just one more thing. “Now this…” Aurelius began, but he didn’t finish. It was a scrap of paper, roughly torn, with a faded ink stain that might once have been a word. I peered at it closely.
She lowered her eyelids as if a wave of pain had come over her. “I suppose so.”
We crossed the deer park and had nearly reached the edge of the woods when we heard voices. It was a woman’s voice that swam through the rain, up the gravel drive to her children and over the park as far as us. “I told you, Tom. It’s too wet. They can’t work when it’s raining like this.” The children had come to a halt in disappointment at seeing the stationary cranes and machinery. With their sou’westers over their blond heads, I could not tell them apart. The woman caught up with them, and the family huddled for a moment in a brief conference of mackintoshes.
Inside the back cover of his childhood recipe book were tightly packed columns and rows of numbers and letters written in a large, boyish hand. “I used to think it was a code,” he explained. “I tried to decipher it. I tried the first letter of every word, the first of every line. Or the second. Then I tried replacing one letter for another.” He pointed to his various trials, eyes feverish, as though there was still a chance he might see something that had escaped him before.
‘Do they still hunt here?“
‘Shall I stoke up the fire for you?“
