The flesh of her palm was like no flesh I had seen before. Its whitened ridges and purple furrows bore no relation to the pink mound at the base of my fingers, the pale valley of my palm. Melted by fire, her flesh had cooled into an entirely unrecognizable landscape, like a scene left permanently altered by the passage of a flow of lava. Her fingers did not lie open but were drawn into a claw by the shrunken tightness of the scar tissue. In the heart of her palm, scar within a scar, burn inside burn, was a grotesque mark. It was set very deep in her clutch, so deep that with a sudden nausea I wondered what had happened to the bone that should be there. It made sense of the odd set of the hand at the wrist, the way it seemed to weigh upon her arm as though it had no life of its own. The mark was a circle embedded in her palm, and extending from it, in the direction of the thumb, a short line.
Her voice flowed relentlessly on, recalling instance after instance of genius and its bedfellow selfishness, and the folds of her shawl never moved as she spoke. She must be made of steel, I thought.
I blinked.
Miss Winter pressed her lips together, too late. A tremor ran rough the muscles under the skin.
‘Very well,“ she said tartly, and her smile was for herself more than me. ”To business. Your letter gives me to understand that you have reservations about the commission I am offering you.“
‘There,“ I said to her. ”Ready for work.“
I bit my lip. “And why not write the book yourself?”
‘Once upon a time there was a library—“
The jumble of knuckles and rubies shifted in her lap; the stones glowed in the firelight.
I nodded, made a note in my pad and flipped the cover closed.
Miss Winter closed her fingers into her damaged palm, swiveled her wrist and drew the jewel-encrusted fist back into her lap. In a protective gesture she curled the fingers of her other hand around it.
‘The local newspaper. The Banbury Herald.“
She waved a hand, dismissing my words before they were out of my mouth. “You are afraid of undertaking an authorized biography in case your independence is compromised. You suspect that I want to exert control over the content of the finished book. You know that I have resisted biographers in the past and are wondering what my agenda is in changing my mind now. Above all”—that dark gaze of her sunglasses again—“you are afraid I mean to lie to you.”
I felt as though I had worked for hours. I emerged to make myself a cup of cocoa, but it was time suspended and did not disturb the flow of my recreation; I returned to my work and picked up the thread as though there had been no interruption.
‘Yes,“ she said, but I had heard the hesitation even though it lasted only a fraction of a second.
But there was no gift. The surprise was the hand itself.
‘I am a biographer. I work with facts.“
I opened my mouth to protest but found nothing to say. She was right.
Tentatively I took a step back into the room. At the sound of my feet, the copper curls turned.
For an instant I think she was surprised that I was not transparent,‘t she could not see straight through me, but she recovered quickly, re quickly than I had.
She sighed and fidgeted with her hands. “I am going to answer your question. I am going to tell you something about myself, which happened before I became a writer and changed my name, and it is something for which there exists a public record. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. But I did not expect to find myself telling it to you so soon. I shall have to break one of my rules to do it. I shall have to tell you the end of my story before I tell you the beginning.”
I nodded, liking the analogy.
‘Do you know why my books are so successful?“
‘You raised the topic of lying,“ I said. ”That is something we might concern ourselves with.“
“Well, yes, that is—”
I have no shorthand. During the interview I had simply jotted down lists of keywords, and my hope was that if I wrote up our interviews immediately afterward, these words would be enough to jog my memory. And from that first meeting, it worked well. Glancing at my notebook from time to time, I filled the center of my sheets of foolscap with Miss Winter’s words, conjuring her image in my mind, hearing her voice, seeing her mannerisms. Soon I was hardly aware of my notebook but was taking dictation from the Miss Winter in my head.
But it was not the work of death. It was only rain. The long-awaited rain.
‘For a great many reasons, I believe.“
‘Ah, the rule of three… The magic number. Three trials before the prince wins the hand of the fair princess. Three wishes granted to the fisherman by the magic talking fish. Three bears for Goldilocks and Three Billy Goats Gruff. Miss Lea, if you had asked me two questions or four I might have been able to lie, but three…“
It was a high room, much longer than it was wide. On one side five arched windows reached from ceiling almost to floor; at their base window seats had been installed. Facing them were five similarly shaped mirrors, positioned to reflect the view outside, but tonight echoing the carved panels of the shutters. The bookshelves extended from the walls into the rooms, forming bays; in each recess an amber-shaded lamp was placed on a small table. Apart from the fire at the far end of the room, this was the only lighting, and it created soft, warm pools of illumination at the edge of which rows of books melted into darkness.
Did she have the right to place conditions on our deal, having already accepted it? Not really. Still, I nodded.
I shook my head. “Tell me your name.”
‘What reasons?“
‘I agree.“
‘Once upon a time there was a haunted house—“
‘Whatever are you doing? Where are you going? Wait!“
She tossed her head and her stiff curls moved as one. “How horribly ill. I could never have been a biographer. Don’t you think one can tell’s truth much better with a story?”
‘Possibly. Largely it is because they have a beginning, a middle and an end. In the right order. Of course all stories have beginnings, middles and endings; it is having them in the right order that matters. That is why people like my books.“
Slowly I made my way down the center of the room, taking a look to the bays on my right and left. After my first glances I found myself nodding. It was a proper, well-maintained library. Categorized, alphabetized and clean, it was just as I would have done it myself. All my favorites were there, with a great number of rare and valuable volumes as well as more ordinary, well-thumbed copies. Not only Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Woman in White, but The Castle of Otranto, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Spectre Bride. I was thrilled to come across a Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so rare that my father had given up believing in its existence.
The window was a large expanse of dark glass, and in the center of it, my ghost, darkly transparent, was staring in at me. Her world was not unlike my own: the pale outline of a desk on the other side of the glass, and farther back a deeply buttoned armchair placed inside the circle of light cast by a standard lamp. But where my chair was red, hers was gray; and where my chair stood on an Indian rug, surrounded by light gold walls, her chair hovered spectrally in an undefined, endless plane of darkness in which vague forms, like waves, seemed to shift and breathe.
‘Although,“ she added, ”there is a record of a different kind that I can show you now.“
The words were unambiguous enough, but I heard the tremor that determined them. She meant to tell me the truth, I did not doubt it. She had decided to tell. Perhaps she even wanted to tell. Only she did not quite believe that she would. Her promise of honesty was spoken as much to convince herself as to persuade me, and she heard the lack of conviction at its heart as clearly as I did.
The words were expelled from her throat hard and dry, like stones.
‘Not in the stories you have told the world so far.“
‘What?“
In the hush that followed, Miss Winter seemed to draw all of her external self into her core; under my very eyes she managed to absent herself from herself, and I began to understand how it was that earlier I had failed to see her. I watched the shell of her, marveled at the impossibility of knowing what was going on beneath the surface.
‘This is what we have agreed. Three facts on public record.“
I opened the window, let my hand be drenched, then wiped the water over my eyes and face. I shivered. Time for bed.
My first impression was of the room as a whole, and it struck me by its marked difference from the rest of the house. The other rooms were thick with the corpses of suffocated words; here in the library you could breathe. Instead of being shrouded in fabric, it was a room made of wood. There were floorboards underfoot, shutters at the tall windows and the walls were lined with solid oak shelves.
Her voice trembled over the place name, and she scratched nervously at her palm in an unconscious gesture.
Our interview was over.
The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions.
I drew a double line under the last line of script, and stretched. In the window the other me stretched as well. She took the pencils whose points she had worn and sharpened them one by one.
‘I’m sorry,“ I heard her say. ”One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.“
And then she emerged.
A sudden vertigo took hold of me and I reached behind me for my air.
And then something penetrated through my reading and drew me out of the book. A prickling sensation at the back of the neck.
On impulse I climbed onto the desk and reached behind the elaborate valance to the curtain pole. My fingers groped for the tops of the curtains, and I felt for the hooks and stitches that attached them. It was hardly a job for one person; the curtains were floor length, lined and interlined, and their weight, flung over my shoulder, was crushing. But after a few minutes, first one then the other curtain was folded and in a cupboard. I stood in the center of the floor and surveyed the result of my work.
‘I lived at Angelfield.“
‘Come back!“ she cried. ”I am going to tell you a story—a marvelous story!“
Her voice grew stilted; fluency deserted her.
Whether by luck or accident I cannot say, but I found my way to the library a full twenty minutes earlier than I had been commanded to attend. It was not a problem. What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, what better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
‘And will you tell me the truth?“
I rose from my chair and took a step, halving the distance between us.
There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a person’s mystical power. That a name should be known only to God d to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name, either one’s own or someone else’s, is to invite jeopardy. This, it seemed, was such a name.
‘Come nearer.“
I know the back-of-the-neck experience is not an uncommon phenomenon; it was, however, the first time it had happened to me. Like those of a great many solitary people, my senses are acutely attuned to the presence of others, and I am more used to being the invisible spy in a room than to being spied upon. Now someone was watching me, and not only that, but whoever it was had been watching me for some time. How long had that unmistakable sensation been tickling me? I thought back over the past minutes, trying to retrace the memory of the body behind my memory of the book. Was it since the nun began to speak to the young man? Since she was shown into the house? Or earlier? Without moving a muscle, head bent over the page as though I had noticed nothing, I tried to remember.
She paused, needing to overcome some obstacle within herself, and when she pronounced the name it was with a noticeable neutrality, an utter absence of intonation, as though it were a word in some foreign language she had never applied herself to learning: “That name was Adeline March.”
‘What is your real name?“
“Why did you choose me?” I asked again, and this time she answered.
‘I will tell you the truth.“
We were both lone twins. With this realization, the leash of the story tightened around my wrists, and my excitement was suddenly cut through with fear.
Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this unexpected and painful act of revealment, it had no such clarity, and it disturbed me by the appearance on a page of English of an unfamiliar symbol from a lost and unreadable language.
I sat down. “I don’t accuse you of anything,” I began mildly, but immediately she interrupted me.
‘I can manage without, if you give me your place of birth.“
I reached the door. My fingers closed on the handle.
‘I have left it too late. Besides, who would believe me? I have cried wolf too often.“
On my way back to my quarters I thought of the letter she had sent me. The strained and painstaking hand that I had never seen the like of before. I had put it down to illness. Arthritis perhaps. Now I understood. From the very first book and through her entire career, Miss Winter had written her masterpieces with her left hand.
I did not stop.
Then I realized.
‘Tell me,“ I began slowly, carefully. In the stories with the wizards, is always with the third wish that everything so dangerously won is disastrously snatched away. ”Tell me something that happened to you in the days before you changed your name, for which there exists a public record.“ Educational successes, I was thinking. School sporting achievements. Those minor triumphs that are recorded for proud parents and for posterity.
She shrugged. “It’s my profession. I’m a storyteller.”
‘You see, you don’t know what to say, do you? Are you embarrassed to accuse me of wanting to lie to you? People don’t like to accuse each other of lying. And for heaven’s sake, sit down.“
Governed by something stronger than reason, I rose from my chair.
I left the window ajar so that I could listen to the rain as it continued to fall with an even, muffled softness. I heard it while I was undressing, while I was reading and while I slept. It accompanied my dreams like a poorly tuned radio left on through the night, broadcasting a fuzzy white noise beneath which were the barely audible whispers of foreign languages and snatches of unfamiliar tunes.
I took one step after another, trying not to run, conscious of the rhythm of my feet rapping out on the wooden boards, while she called to me in a voice that contained an edge of panic.
She pursed her lips. “You will find it is a matter of record that Adeline March was born in Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. I can hardly be expected to offer any personal guarantee of the veracity of that detail. Though I am an exceptional person, I am not so exceptional that I can remember my own birth.”
‘There was a fire.“
‘It’s not much to go on, is it? If we are to work together, I shall need to know a little more about who you are. I can hardly spill the secrets of a lifetime to a person of whom I know nothing. So, tell me about yourself. What are your favorite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?“
On the instant I was too affronted to reply.
‘I lost everything.“
She was mid-yawn when something began to happen to her face. First it was a sudden blurring in the center of her forehead, like a blister. Another mark appeared on her cheek, then beneath her eye, on her nose, on her lips. Each new blemish was accompanied by a dull thud, a percussion that grew faster and faster. In a few seconds her entire face, it seemed, had decomposed.
I considered her answer, then asked, “And what has happened to change things now?”
‘After this, no more jumping about in the story. From tomorrow, I’ll tell you my story, beginning at the beginning, continuing with the middle, and with the end at the end. Everything in its proper place. No eating. No looking ahead. No questions. No sneaky glances at the last page.
‘And why do you want to tell it to me?“
‘The end of your story? How can that be, if it happened before you started writing? “
I raised an eyebrow.
Truce.
Marveling at the rich selection of volumes on Miss Winter’s shelves, I browsed my way toward the fireplace at the far end of the room. In the final bay on the right, one particular set of shelves stood it even from some distance: Instead of displaying the mellow, preeminently brown stripes that were the spines of the older books, this stack showed the silvery blues, sage greens and pink-beiges of more :cent decades. They were the only modern books in the room. Miss Winter’s own works. With her earliest titles at the top of the stack and ;cent novels at the bottom, each work was represented in its many different editions and even in different languages. I saw no Thirteen Tales, the mistitled book I had read at the bookshop, but in its other guise as Tales of Change and Desperation there were more than a dozen different editions.
‘Where can I find a public record of this fire?“ I asked, trying not to let my perturbed feelings show in my voice.
‘You can’t fool me.“
I fixed my mask in place before replying. “I am a shop assistant. I work in an antiquarian bookshop. I am an amateur biographer. Presumably you have read my work on the Landier brothers? ”
The voice ran on as if it had not registered the interruption. “I could suggest increasing the monthly stipend and the final fee.”
‘I would sooner not tell you. But I have promised, haven’t I? The rule of three. It’s unavoidable. The wizard might beg the boy not to make a third wish, because he knows it will end in disaster, but the boy will make a third wish and the wizard is bound to grant it because it is in the rules of the story. You asked me to tell you the truth about three things, and I must, because of the rule of three. But let me first ask you something in return.“
‘Quite simply because my story—my own personal story—ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished.“
‘You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone. That’s just the ones I found on a lick search. There are many more. Hundreds, probably.“
I waited until the words stopped their ringing in the air and then, despite herself, I looked back. I saw the back of a head, and hands that rose, trembling, to the averted face.
She released an irritated sigh. “I could tell you much better, if you would only allow me to tell it my way…”
Drawn by something beyond my control, I moved toward the chair and sat down.
‘Do you intend to tell me the truth?“ I asked.
Together we began the little ritual of preparing our desks. We divided a ream of paper into smaller piles and flicked through each one, to let the air in. One by one we sharpened our pencils, turning the handle and watching the long shavings curl and dangle their way to the paper bin below. When the last pencil had been shaved to a fine point, we did not put it down with the others, but kept hold of it.
I drew a veil over myself, masked myself in neutrality, hid behind appearance.
I selected a copy of Miss Winter’s most recent book. On page one an elderly nun arrives at a small house in the backstreets of an unnamed town that seems to be in Italy; she is shown into a room where a pompous young man, whom we take to be English or American, greets her in some surprise. (I turned the page. The first paragraphs had drawn me in, just as I had been drawn in every time I had opened one of her books, and without meaning to, I began to read in earnest.) The young man does not at first appreciate what the reader already understands: that his visitor has come on a grave mission, one that will alter is life in ways he cannot be expected to foresee. She begins her explanation and bears it patiently (I turned the page; I had forgotten the library, forgotten Miss Winter, forgotten myself) when he treats her with the levity of indulged youth…
She paused. “Do you know, I havebeen asking myself the very same question for the last quarter of an hour. Just what kind of a person are you, Miss Lea?”
‘My name is Vida Winter. I went through the necessary legal procedures in order to be able to call myself by that name legally and honestly. What you want to know is the name by which I was known prior to the change. That name was—“
And then, the cry breaking from her lips before she could stop it, “Oh, Emmeline!”
‘Readers,“ continued Miss Winter, ”are fools. They believe all writ-; is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer’s life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That’s why I couldn’t have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.“
‘I am old. I am ill. Put those two facts together, biographer, and what do you get? The end of the story, I think.“
‘Well, answer me! For goodness’ sake! Am I to have a stranger living under my roof? A stranger working for me? It is not reasonable. Tell me this, do you believe in ghosts?“
I slid my pencil from the ring binding of my pad and opened the cover.
‘I was sixteen.“
‘Because of your work on the Landier brothers. Because you know about siblings.“
She swallowed. “Are you quite surethis is the best way to proceed? I could tell you a ghost story—a rather good one, even if I do say so myself. It might be a better way of getting to the heart of things…”
Vida Winter’s appearance was not calculated for concealment. She was an ancient queen, sorceress or goddess. Her stiff figure rose regally out of a profusion of fat purple and red cushions. Draped around her shoulders, the folds of the turquoise-and-green cloth that cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into an elaborate confection of twists, curls and coils. Her face, as intricately lined as a map, was powdered white and finished with bold scarlet lipstick. In her lap, her hands were a cluster of rubies, emeralds and white, bony knuckles; only her nails, unvarnished, cut short, square like my own, struck an incongruous note. What unnerved me more than all the rest were her sunglasses. I lid not see her eyes but, as I remembered the inhuman green irises in the poster, her dark lenses seemed to develop the force of a search-it; I had the impression that from behind them she was looking through my skin and into my very soul.
I was stunned. The glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as glass and as real, looked to me with something like a plea. For a moment I simply stared back. Then, “Miss Lea, won’t you please sit down,” said a ice shakily, a voice that was and was not Vida Winter’s.
‘Life is compost.“
‘One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people,“ I wrote at last in the middle column, and in the left I added a note describing the way she closed the fingers of her good hand over the closed fist of the damaged one.
‘Don’t be so polite. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s politeness.“
‘Politeness. Now, there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But then he was a genius.“
I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her meaning.
I had felt it even before I picked up the book.
In my study the velvet curtains were green, and a pale gold watermark tin covered the walls. Despite the woolly hush, I was pleased with the room, for the overall effect was relieved by the broad wooden desk and e plain upright chair that stood under the window. I switched on the desk lamp and laid out the ream of paper I had brought with me, and my twelve pencils. They were brand-new: unsharpened columns of red, just what I like to start a new project with. The last thing I took from my bag was my pencil sharpener. I screwed it like a vise to the edge of the desk and set the paper basket directly underneath.
She opened her mouth, seemed to speak to me. I couldn’t hear what she was saying.
Miss Winter conceded a nod. “Miss Lea,” she began. Her voice was lower. “I had my reasons for creating a smoke screen around my past, lose reasons, I assure you, are no longer valid.”
I sat down and gradually the blackness at the edge of my vision receded.
I noted it down.
Imperious, declamatory, magisterial.
As though to cut short even the minimal vibration the name carried in the air, she continued rather tartly, “I hope you’re not going to ask my date of birth. I am of an age at which it is de rigueur to have forgotten it.”
And so I made a suggestion. “I will ask you three things. Things that are a matter of public record. When I leave here, I will be able to check what you tell me. If I find you have told me the truth about them, I will accept the commission.”
Now the third question. I had, it must be admitted, no particular third question prepared. She did not want to tell me her age, and I hardly needed her date of birth. With her long publishing history and the date of her first book, she could not be less than seventy-three or four, and to judge by her appearance, altered though it was by illness and makeup, she could be no more than eighty. But the uncertainty didn’t matter; with her name and her place of birth, I could find the date out for myself anyway. From my first two questions, I already had the formation I needed in order to ascertain that a person by the name of Adeline March actually existed. What to ask, then? Perhaps it was my desire to hear Miss Winter tell a story, but when the occasion arose to play my third question as a wild card, I seized it.
‘You think that a strange thing to say, but it’s true. All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have own, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel.“
‘I’m not making any promises,“ I said wearily.
‘In what respect?“ Through the dark lenses, I could just see the movements of Miss Winter’s lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye, like the long legs of a spider around its body.
There was nothing to be done but turn and face her.
‘Once upon a time there were twins—“
I waited, and she drew in her breath like a chess player who finds his key piece cornered.
She could not quite look at me as she spoke.
‘I’m sorry you didn’t want to hear my ghost story, Miss Lea.“
Slowly she raised her right arm, and held out to me a closed fist that seemed three-quarters precious stones in their clawlike settings. In a movement that spoke of great effort, she turned her hand and opened it, as though she had some surprise gift concealed and was about to offer it tome.
Her forehead twitched, and an eyebrow rose over the top of the sunglasses. A strong black arch that bore no relation to any natural brow.
Someone was watching me.
‘I’ll hear it another time.“
Now I knew I was tied to the story. I had stumbled upon the heart the tale that I had been commissioned to tell. It was love. And loss. For what else could the sorrow of that exclamation be but bereavement? In a flash I saw beyond the mask of white makeup and the exotic aperies. For a few seconds it seemed to me that I could see right into Miss Winter’s heart, right into her thoughts. I recognized the very essence of her—how could I fail to, for was it not the essence of me?
I licked my lips, sought the right words. Before I could speak, Miss Winter’s dark shades had bobbed up and down, taking in my flat brown bags, my straight skirt and navy cardigan. She smiled a small, pitying smile and overrode my intention to speak. “But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint.” Her tone was dry. “I have forgotten about people who don’t care for money, but I never expected to meet one.” She leaned back against the cushions. “Therefore I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.”
Needing a moment to recover myself, I turned the page, continuing the pretense of reading.
Eventually she drew her lecture to a close with the words: “Politeness is a virtue I neither possess nor esteem in others. We need not concern ourselves with it.” And with the air of having had the final word on the subject, she stopped.
I opened the door and was about to step into its emptiness when, in a ice hoarse with something like fear, she launched the words that stopped me in my tracks.
‘I’m not in a position to exact any,“ came the answer in a small ice.
