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 his 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…
And then something penetrated through my reading and drew me out of the book. A prickling sensation at the back of the neck.
Someone was watching me.
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 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 on. Now, someone was watching me, and not only that but they 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.
Then I realized.
I had felt it even before I picked up the book.
Needing a moment to recover myself, I turned the page, continuing the pretence of reading.
‘You can’t fool me.’
Imperious, declamatory, magisterial.
There was nothing to be done but turn and face her.
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 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 and square like my own, struck an incongruous note.
What unnerved me more than all the rest was her sunglasses. I could not see her eyes but, as I remembered the inhuman green irises from the poster, her dark lenses seemed to develop the force of a searchlight: I had the impression that from behind them she was looking through my skin and into my very soul.
I drew a veil over myself, masked myself in neutrality, hid behind my appearance.
For an instant I think she was surprised that I was not transparent, that she could not see straight through me, but she recovered quickly, more quickly than I had.
‘Very well,’ she said tartly, and her smile was for herself more than for me. ‘To business. Your letter gives me to understand that you have reservations about the commission I am offering you.’
‘Well, yes, that is—’
The voice ran on as if it had not registered the interruption. ‘I could suggest increasing the monthly stipend and the final fee.’
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 fringe, 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 written about people who don’t care for money, but I never expected to meet one.’ She leant 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.’
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 opened my mouth to protest, but found nothing to say. She was right.
‘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.’
I sat down. ‘I don’t accuse you of anything—’ I began mildly, but immediately she interrupted me.
‘Don’t be so polite. If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s politeness.’
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.
‘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.’
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.
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.
‘You raised the topic of lying,’ I said. ‘That is something we might concern ourselves with.’
‘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.
‘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 quick search. There are many more. Hundreds, probably.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s my profession. I’m a storyteller.’
‘I am a biographer. I work with facts.’
She tossed her head and her stiff curls moved as one. ‘How horribly dull. I could never have been a biographer. Don’t you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?’
‘Not in the stories you have told the world so far.’
Miss Winter conceded a nod. ‘Miss Lea,’ she began. Her voice was slower. ‘I had my reasons for creating a smokescreen around my past. Those reasons, I assure you, are no longer valid.’
‘What reasons?’
‘Life is compost.’
I blinked.
‘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 known, 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 nodded, liking the analogy.
‘Readers,’ con
tinued Miss Winter, ‘are fools. They believe all writing 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 considered her answer, then asked, ‘And what has happened to change things now?’
‘I am old. I am ill. Put those two facts together, biographer, and what do you get? The end of the story, I think.’
I bit my lip. ‘And why not write the book yourself?’
‘I have left it too late. Besides, who would believe me? I have cried wolf too often.’
‘Do you intend to tell me the truth?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, but I had heard the hesitation even though it only lasted a fraction of a second.
‘And why do you want to tell it to me?’
She paused. ‘Do you know, I have been asking myself the very same question for the last quarter of an hour. Just what kind of a person are you, Miss Lea?’
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?’
‘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 favourite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?’
On the instant I was too affronted to reply.
‘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?’
Governed by something stronger than reason, I rose from my chair.
‘Whatever are you doing? Where are you going? Wait!’
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.
‘Come back!’ she cried. ‘I am going to tell you a story – a marvellous story!’
I did not stop.
‘Once upon a time there was a haunted house…’
I reached the door. My fingers closed on the handle.
‘Once upon a time there was a library…’
I opened the door and was about to step into its emptiness when in a voice hoarse with something like fear, she launched the words that stopped me in my tracks.
‘Once upon a time there were twins—’
I waited until the words stopped their ringing in the air and then, despite myself, I looked back. I saw the back of a head, and hands that rose, trembling, to the averted face.
Tentatively I took a step back into the room. At the sound of my feet, the copper curls turned.
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 voice shakily, a voice which was and was not Vida Winter’s.
Drawn by something beyond my control, I moved towards the chair and sat down.
‘I’m not making any promises,’ I said, wearily.
‘I’m not in a position to exact any,’ came the answer, in a small voice.
Truce.
‘Why did you choose me?’ I asked again, and this time she answered. ‘Because of your work on the Landier brothers. Because you know about siblings.’
‘And will you tell me the truth?’
‘I will tell you the truth.’
The words were unambiguous enough, but I heard the tremor that undermined 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.
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.’
‘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…’
I slid my pencil from the ringbinding of my pad and opened the cover.
‘What is your real name?’
She swallowed. ‘Are you quite sure this 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—’
I shook my head. ‘Tell me your name.’
The jumble of knuckles and rubies shifted in her lap; the stones glowed in the firelight.
‘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…’
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.’
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 where it is de rigueur to have forgotten it.’
‘I can manage without, if you give me your place of birth.’
She released an irritated sigh. ‘I could tell you much better, if you would only allow me to tell it my way.’
‘This is what we have agreed. Three facts on public record.’
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.’
I noted it down.
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. Knowing 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 make-up, 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 information 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.
‘Tell me,’ I began slowly, carefully. In the stories with the wizards it 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.
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, marvelled at the impossibility of knowing what was going on beneath th
e surface.
And then she emerged.
‘Do you know why my books are so successful?’
‘For a great many reasons, I believe.’
‘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.’
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.’
‘The end of your story? How can that be, if it happened before you started writing?’
‘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.’
I waited, and she drew in her breath like a chess player who finds his key piece cornered.
‘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.’