‘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 is Forever, by Vida Winter; Hauntings, by Vida Winter; Out of the Arc, by Vida Winter; Rules of Affliction, 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 Tales of 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, those days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counter-pane 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 that 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 for ever 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 all the national newspapers for the days immediately following the publication of 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 back streets 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 neighbour’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 first book.’
‘We know what she chose for a pen name. That must reveal something, 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?
Arrival
I left home on an ordinary winter day and for miles my train ran under a gauzy white sky. Then I changed trains, and the clouds massed. They grew thicker and darker, more and more bloated, as I travelled north. At any moment I expected to hear the first scattering of drops on the windowpane. Yet the rain did not come.
At Harrogate, Miss Winter’s driver, a dark-haired, bearded man, was disinclined to talk. I was glad, for his lack of conversation left me free to study the unfamiliar views that unfolded as soon as we left the town behind. I had never been north before. My researches had taken me to London and, once or twice, across the channel to libraries and archives in Paris. Yorkshire was a county I knew only from novels, and novels from another century at that. Once we left the town behind there were few signs of the contemporary world, and it was possible to believe I was travelling into the past at the same time as into the countryside. The villages were quaint with their churches and pubs and stone cottages; then, the further we went, the smaller the villages became and the greater the distance between them until isolated farmhouses were the only interruptions to the naked winter fields. At last we left even the farmhouses behind and it grew dark. The car’s headlamps showed me swathes of a colourless, undefined landscape: no fences, no walls, no hedges, no buildings. Just a vergeless road and each side of it, vague undulations of darkness.
‘Is this the moors?’ I asked.
‘It is,’ the driver said, and I leant closer to the window, but all I could make out was the waterlogged sky that pressed down claustrophobically on the land, on the road, on the car. Beyond a certain distance even the light from our headlamps was extinguished.
At an unmarked junction we turned off the road and bumped along for a couple of miles on a stony track. We stopped twice for the driver to open a gate and close it behind us, then on we went, jolting and shaking for another mile.
Miss Winter’s house lay between two slow rises in the darkness, almost-hills that seemed to merge into each other and which revealed the presence of a valley and a house only at the last turn of the drive. The sky by now was blooming shades of purple, indigo and gunpowder, and the house beneath it crouched long and low and very dark. The driver opened the car door for me, and I stepped out to see that he had already unloaded my case, and was ready to pull away, leaving me alone in front of an unlit porch. Barred shutters blacked out the windows and there was not a single sign of human habitation. Closed in upon itself, the place seemed to shun visitors.
I rang the bell. Its clang was oddly muted in the damp air. While I waited I watched the sky. Cold crept through the soles of my shoes, and I rang the bell again. Still no one came to the door.
About to ring for a third time, I was caught by surprise when with no sound at all the door was opened.
The woman in the doorway smiled professionally and apologized for keeping me waiting. At first sight she seemed very ordinary. Her short, neat hair was the same palish shade as her skin, and her eyes were neither blue nor grey nor green. Yet it was less the absence of colour than a lack of expression that made her plain. With some warmth of emotion in them her eyes could, I suspected, have gleamed with life; and it seemed to me, as she matched my scrutiny glance for glance, that she maintained her inexpressivity only by deliberate effort.
‘Good evening,’ I said, ‘I am Margaret Lea.’
‘The biographer. We’ve been expecting you.’
What is it that allows human beings to see through each other’s pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.
She ushered me in and closed the door behind me. The key turned in the lock without a sound and there was not a squeak as the well-oiled bolts were slid noiselessly into place.
Standing there in my coat in the hallway I experienced for the first time the most profound oddity of the place. Miss Winter’s house was entirely silent.
The woman told me her name was Judith and that she was the housekeeper. She asked about my journey and mentioned the hours of meals and the best times to get hot water. Her mouth opened and closed; as soon as her words fell from her lips they were smothered by the blanket of silence that descended and extinguished them. The same silence swallowed our footfall and muffled the opening and closing of doors, as she showed me, one after another, the dining room, the drawing room, the music room.
There was no magic behind the silence: it was the soft furnishings that did it. Overstuffed sofas were piled with velvet cushions; there were upholstered footstools, chaises longues and armchairs; tapestries hung on the walls and were used as throws over upholstered furniture. Every floor was carpeted, every carpet overlaid with rugs. The damask that draped the windows also baffled the walls. Just as blotting paper absorbs ink, so all this wool and velvet absorbed sound, with one difference: where blotting paper takes up only excess ink, the fabric of the house seemed to suck in the very essence of the words we spoke.
I followed the housekeeper. We turned left and right, and right and left, went up and down stairs until I was thoroughly confused. I quickly lost all sense of how the convoluted interior of the house corresponded with its outer plainness. The house had been altered over time, I supposed, added to here and there; probably we were in some wing or extension invisible from the front. ‘You’ll get the hang of it,’ the housekeeper mouthed, seeing my face, and I understood her as if I was lip-reading. Finally we turned from a half-landing and came to a halt. She unlocked a door, which opened into a sitting room. There were three more doors leading off it. ‘Bathroom,’ she said, opening one of the doors, ‘bedroom,’ opening another, ‘and study.’ The rooms were as padded with cushions and curtains and hangings as the rest of the house.
‘Will you take your meals in the dining room, or here?’ she asked, indicating the small table and a single chair by the window.
I did not know whether meals in the dining room meant eating with my hostess, and unsure of my status in the house (was I a guest or an employee?) I hesitated, wondering whether it was politer to accept or to refuse. Divining the cause of my uncertainty the housekeeper added, as though having to overcome a habit of reticence, ‘Miss Winter always eats alone.’
‘Then if it’s all the same to you, I’ll eat here.’
‘I’ll bring you soup and sandwiches straight away, shall I? You must be hungry after the train. You’ve things to make your tea and coffee just here.’ She opened a cupboard in the corner of the bedroom to reveal a kettle, the other paraphernalia for drinks-making and even a tiny fridge. ‘It will save you from running up and down to the kitchen,’ she added, and threw in an abashed smile, by way of apology I thought for not wanting me in her kitchen.
She left me to my unpacking.
In the bedroom it was the work of a minute to unpack my few clothes, my books and my toiletries. I pushed the tea and coffee things to one side and replaced them with the packet of cocoa I had brought from home. Then I had just enough time to test the high, antique bed – it was so lavishly covered with cushions that there could be any number of peas under the mattress and I would not know it – before the housekeeper returned with a tray.
‘Miss Winter invites you to meet her in the library at eight o’clock.’
She did her best to make it sound like an invitation, but I understood, as I was no doubt meant to, that it was a command.
Meeting Miss Winter
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 their choice and treatment of books?
My first impression was of the room a
s 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 the 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.
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.
Slowly I made my way down the centre of the room, taking a look into 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 favourites 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 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde so rare that my father had given up believing in its existence.
Marvelling at the rich selection of volumes on Miss Winter’s shelves, I browsed my way towards the fireplace at the far end of the room. In the final bay on the right, one particular set of shelves stood out even from some distance: instead of the mellow, predominantly brown stripes that were the spines of the older books, this stack showed the silvery blues, sage greens and pink-beige of more recent 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 recent 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.