The Thirteenth Tale

  The Missus knew how children ought to be brought up: regular mealtimes, regular bedtimes, regular baths. Isabelle and Charlie had grown up over-indulged and neglected at the same time, and it broke her heart to see how they turned out. Their neglect of the twins was her chance, she hoped, to break the pattern. She had a plan. Under their noses, in the heart of all their chaos, she meant to raise two normal, ordinary little girls. Three square meals a day, bedtime at six, church on Sunday.

  But it was harder than she thought.

  For a start there was the fighting. Adeline would fly at her sister, fists and feet flailing, yanking at hair and landing blows wherever she could. She chased her sister wielding red-hot coals in the fire tongs, and when she caught her she singed her hair. The Missus hardly knew what worried her more: was it Adeline’s persistent and merciless aggression, or Emmeline’s constant, ungrudging acceptance of it? For Emmeline, though she pleaded with her sister to stop tormenting her, never once retaliated. Instead she bowed her head passively and waited for the blows that rained down on her shoulders and back to stop. The Missus had never once known Emmeline raise a hand against Adeline. She had the goodness of two children in her, and Adeline the wickedness of two. In a way, the Missus worked out in her own head, it made sense.

  Then there was the vexed issue of food. At mealtimes, more often than not, the children simply could not be found. Emmeline adored eating, but her love of food never translated itself into the discipline of meals. Her hunger could not be accommodated by three meals a day; it was a ravenous, capricious thing. Ten, twenty, fifty times a day, it struck, making urgent demands for food, and when it had been satisfied with a few mouthfuls of something, it departed and food became an irrelevance again. Emmeline’s plumpness was maintained by a pocket constantly full of bread and raisins, a portable feast that she would take a bite from whenever and wherever she fancied. She came to the table only to replenish these pockets before wandering off to loll by the fire or lie in a field somewhere.

  Her sister was quite different. Adeline was made like a piece of wire with knots for knees and elbows. Her fuel was not the same as that of other mortals. Meals were not for her. No one ever saw her eat: like the wheel of perpetual motion she was a closed circuit, running on energy provided from some miraculous inner source. But the wheel that spins eternally is a myth, and when the Missus noticed in the morning an empty plate where there had been a slice of gammon the night before, or a loaf of bread with a chunk missing, she guessed where they had gone and sighed. Why wouldn’t her girls eat food off a plate, like normal children?

  Perhaps she might have managed better if she’d been younger. Or if the girls had been one instead of two. But the Angelfield blood carried a code that no amount of nursery food and strict routine could rewrite. She didn’t want to see it; she tried not to see it for a long time, but in the end she realized. The twins were odd, there were no two ways about it. They were strange all through, right into their very hearts.

  The way they talked, for instance. She would see them through the kitchen window, a blurred pair of forms whose mouths appeared to be moving nineteen to the dozen. As they approached the house, she caught fragments of the buzz of speech. And then they came in. Silent. ‘Speak up!’ she was always telling them. But she was going deaf and they were shy; their chat was for themselves, not for others. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she told Dig when he told her the girls couldn’t speak properly. ‘There’s no stopping them, when they get going.’

  The realization came to her one day in winter. For once both girls were indoors; Adeline had been induced by Emmeline to stay in the warmth, by the fire, out of the rain. Ordinarily the Missus lived in a blur of fog; on this day she was blessed by an unexpected clearing in her vision, a new sharpness of hearing, and as she passed the door of the drawing room she caught a fragment of their noise and stopped. Sounds flew backwards and forwards between them, like tennis balls in some game; sounds that made them smile or laugh or send each other malicious glances. Their voices rose in squeals and swooped down in whispers. From any distance you’d have thought it the lively, free-flowing chatter of ordinary children. But her heart sank. It was no language she had ever heard. Not English, and not the French that she had got used to when George’s Mathilde was alive and that Charlie still used with Isabelle. John was right. They didn’t talk properly.

  The shock of understanding froze her there in the doorway. And as sometimes happens, one illumination opened the door to another. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed and, as always, the mechanism under glass sent a little bird out of a cage to flap a mechanical circuit before re-entering the cage on the other side. As soon as the girls heard the first chime, they looked up at the clock. Two pairs of wide green eyes watched, unblinking as the bird laboured around the inside of the bell, wings up, wings down, wings up, wings down.

  There was nothing particularly cold, particularly inhuman about their gaze. It was just the way children look at inanimate, moving objects. But it froze the Missus to the core. For it was exactly the same as the way they looked at her, when she scolded, chided or exhorted.

  They don’t realize that I am alive, she thought. They don’t know that anyone is alive but themselves.

  It is a tribute to her goodness that she didn’t find them monstrous. Instead she felt sorry for them.

  How lonely they must be. How very lonely.

  And she turned from the doorway and shuffled away.

  From that day on the Missus revised her expectations. Regular mealtimes and bathtimes, church on Sunday, two nice, normal children: all these dreams went out of the window. She had just one job now. To keep the girls safe.

  Turning it over in her head, she thought she understood why it was. Twins, always together, always two. If it was normal in their world to be two, what would other people, who came not in twos but ones, seem like to them? We must seem like halves, the Missus mused. And she remembered a word, a strange word it had seemed at the time, that meant people who had lost parts of themselves. Amputees. That’s what we are to them. Amputees.

  Normal? No. The girls were not and would never be normal. But, she reassured herself, things being as they were, the twins being twins, perhaps their strangeness was only natural.

  Of course all amputees hanker after the state of twinness. Ordinary people, untwins, seek their soulmate, take lovers, marry. Tormented by their incompleteness they strive to be part of a pair. The Missus was no different from anyone else in this respect. And she had her other half: John-the-dig.

  They were not a couple in the traditional sense. They were not married; they were not even lovers. A dozen or fifteen years older than he, she was not old enough to be his mother, quite, but was older than he would have expected for a wife. At the time they met, she was of an age where she no longer expected to marry anyone. Whilst he, a man in his prime, expected to marry, but somehow never did. Besides, once he was working with the Missus, drinking tea with her every morning and sitting at the kitchen table to eat her food every evening, he fell out of the habit of seeking the company of young women. With a bit more imagination they might have been able to leap the bounds of their own expectations; they might have recognized their feelings for what they were: love of the deepest and most respectful kind. In another day, another culture, he might have asked her to be his wife and she might have said yes. At the very least, one can imagine that some Friday night after their fish and mash, after their fruit pie and custard, he might have taken her hand – or she his – and they might have led each other in bashful silence to one or other of their beds. But the thought never entered their heads. So they became friends, the way old married couples often do, and enjoyed the tender loyalty that awaits the lucky the other side of passion, without ever living the passion itself.

  His name was John-the-dig, John Digence to those that didn’t know him. Never a great one for writing, once the school years were past (and they were soon past for there were not many of them), he took to leaving off the last
letters of his surname to save time. The first three letters seemed more than adequate: did they not say who he was, what he did, more succinctly, more accurately even than his full name? And so he used to sign himself John Dig, and to the children he became John-the-dig.

  He was a colourful man. Blue eyes like pieces of blue glass with the sun behind. White hair that grew straight up on top of his head, like plants reaching for the sun. And cheeks that went bright pink with exertion when he was digging. No one could dig like him. He had a special way of gardening, with the phases of the moon: planting when the moon was waxing, measuring time by its cycles. In the evening, he pored over tables of figures, calculating the best time for everything. His great-grandfather gardened like that, and his grandfather and his father. They maintained the knowledge.

  John-the-dig’s family had always been gardeners at Angelfield. In the old days when the house had a head gardener and seven hands, his great-grandfather had rooted out a box hedge under a window and, so as not to be wasteful, he’d taken hundreds of cuttings a few inches long. He grew them on in a nursery bed, and when they reached ten inches, he planted them in the garden. He clipped some into low, sharp-edged hedges, let others grow shaggy and when they were broad enough, took his shears to them and made spheres. Some, he could see, wanted to be pyramids, cones, top hats. To shape his green material, this man with the large, rough hands learned the patient, meticulous delicacy of a lacemaker. He created no animals, no human figures. Not for him the peacocks, lions, life-size men on bicycles that you saw in other gardens. The shapes that pleased him were either strictly geometric or bafflingly, bulgingly abstract.

  By the time of his last years, the topiary garden was the only thing that mattered. He was always eager to be finished with his other work of the day; all he wanted was to be in ‘his’ garden, running his hands over the surfaces of the shapes he had made, as he imagined the time, fifty, a hundred years hence, when his garden would have grown to maturity.

  At his death, his shears passed into the hands of his son and, decades later, his grandson. Then, when this grandson died, it was John-the-dig, who had finished his apprenticeship at a large garden some thirty miles away, who came home to take on the job that had to be his. Although he was only undergardener the topiary had been his responsibility from the very beginning. How could it be otherwise? He picked up the shears, their wooden handles worn to shape by his father’s hand, and felt his fingers fit the grooves. He was home.

  In the years after George Angelfield lost his wife, when the number of staff diminished so dramatically, John-the-dig stayed on. Gardeners left and were not replaced. When he was still a young man he became, by default, head gardener, though he was also the only gardener. The workload was enormous; his employer took no interest; he worked without thanks. There were other jobs, other gardens. He would have been offered any job he had applied for: you only had to see him to trust him. But he never left Angelfield. How could he? Working in the topiary garden, putting his shears into their leather sheath when the light began to fade, he didn’t need to reflect that the trees he was pruning were the very same trees that his great-grandfather had planted, that the routines and motions of his work were the same ones that three generations of his family had done before him. All this was too deeply known to require thought. He could take it for granted. Like his trees, he was rooted to Angelfield.

  What were his feelings that day, when he went into his garden and found it ravaged? Great gashes in the sides of the yews, exposing the brown wood of their hearts. The mop-heads decapitated, their spherical tops lying at their feet. The perfect balance of the pyramids now lopsided, the cones hacked about, the top hats chopped into and left in tatters. He stared at the long branches, still green, still fresh, that were strewn on the lawn. Their slow shrivelling, their curling desiccation, their dying was yet to come.

  Stunned, with a trembling that seemed to pass from his heart to his legs and into the ground beneath his feet, he tried to understand what had happened. Was it some bolt from the sky that had picked out his garden for destruction? But what freak storm is it that strikes in silence?

  No. Someone had done this.

  Turning a corner he found the proof: abandoned on the dewy grass, blades agape, the large shears and next to them the saw.

  When he didn’t come in for lunch, the Missus, worried, went to find him. Reaching the topiary garden she raised a hand to her mouth in horror then, gripping her apron, walked on with a new urgency.

  When she found him, she raised him from the ground. He leant heavily on her as she led him with tender care to the kitchen and sat him in a chair. She made tea, sweet and hot, and he stared, unseeing, into space. Without a word, holding the cup to his lips, she tilted sips of the scalding liquid into his mouth. At last his eyes sought hers, and when she saw the loss in them, she felt her own tears spring up.

  ‘Oh Dig! I know. I know.’

  His hands grasped her shoulders and the shaking of his body was the shaking of her body.

  The twins did not appear that afternoon, and the Missus did not go to find them. When they turned up in the evening, John was still in his chair, white and haggard. He flinched at the sight of them. Curious and indifferent, their green eyes passed over his face just as they had passed over the drawing room clock.

  Before she put the twins to bed the Missus dressed the cuts on their hands from the saw and the shears. ‘Don’t touch the things in John’s shed,’ she grumbled. ‘They’re sharp; they’ll hurt you.’

  And then, still not expecting to be heeded, ‘Why did you do it? Oh, why did you do it? You have broken his heart.’

  She felt the touch of a child’s hand on hers. ‘Missus sad,’ the girl said. It was Emmeline.

  Startled, the Missus blinked away the fog of her tears and stared.

  The child spoke again. ‘John-the-dig sad.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Missus whispered. ‘We are sad.’

  The girl smiled. It was a smile without malice. Without guilt. It was simply a smile of satisfaction at having noted something and correctly identified it. She had seen tears. She had been puzzled. But now she had found the answer to the puzzle. It was sadness.

  The Missus closed the door and went downstairs. This was a breakthrough. It was communication, and it was the beginning, perhaps, of something greater than that. Was it possible that one day the girl might understand?

  She opened the door to the kitchen and went in to rejoin John in his despair.

  That night I had a dream.

  Walking in Miss Winter’s garden, I met my sister.

  Radiant, she unfolded her vast, golden wings, as though to embrace me, and I was filled with joy. But when I approached I saw her eyes were blind and she could not see me. Then despair filled my heart.

  Waking, I curled into a ball until the stinging heat on my torso had subsided.

  Merrily and the Perambulator

  Miss Winter’s house was so isolated, and the life of its inhabitants so solitary, that I was surprised during my first week there to hear a vehicle arriving on the gravel at the front of the house. Peering from the library window, I saw the door of a large black car swing open and caught a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired man. He disappeared into the porch and I heard the brief ring of the bell.

  I saw him again the next day. I was in the garden, perhaps ten feet from the front porch, when I heard the crackle of tyres on gravel. I stood still, retreated inside myself. To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see. The man did not see me.

  His face was grave. The heavy line of his brow cast his eyes into shadow, whilst the rest of his face was distinguished by a numb stillness. He reached into his car for his case, slammed the door and went up the steps to ring the bell.

  I heard the door open. Neither he nor Judith spoke a word, and he disappeared inside the house.

  Later that day, Miss Winter told me the story of Merrily and the
perambulator.

  As the twins grew older they explored further and further afield, and soon knew all the farms and all the gardens on the estate. They had no sense of boundaries, no understanding of property, and so they went where they wished. They opened gates and didn’t always close them. They climbed over fences when they got in their way. They tried kitchen doors and when they opened – usually they did, people didn’t lock doors much in Angelfield – they went inside. They helped themselves to anything tasty in the pantry, slept for an hour on the beds upstairs if they felt weary, took saucepans and spoons away with them to scare birds in the fields.

  The local families got upset about it. For every accusation made, there was someone who had seen the twins at the relevant time in another distant place; at least they had seen one of them; at least, they thought they had. And then it came about that all the old ghost stories were remembered. No old house is without its stories; no old house is without its ghosts. And the very twinness of the girls had a spookiness about it. There was something not right about them, everyone agreed, and whether it was because of the girls themselves or for some other reason, there came to be a disinclination to approach the old house, as much among the adults as the children, for fear of what might be seen there.

  But eventually the inconvenience of the incursions won ground over the thrill of ghost talk, and the women grew angry. On several occasions they cornered the girls red-handed, and shouted. Anger pulled their faces all out of shape, and their mouths opened and closed so quickly it made the girls laugh. The women didn’t understand why the girls were laughing. They didn’t know it was the speed and jumble of the words pouring from their own mouths that had bewildered the twins. They thought it was pure devilment and shouted even more. For a time the twins stayed to watch the spectacle of the villagers’ anger, then they turned their backs and walked off.