The thirteenth tale (2 page)

I never saw him again.

That feeling I had, the current in my stomach, my temples, my
fingertips—it remained with me for quite a while. It rose and fell, with the
memory of the boy’s words. Tell me the truth. “No, ” I said. Over and over
again. “No.” But it wouldn’t be still. It was a distraction. More than that, it
was a danger. In the end I did a deal. “Not yet.” It sighed, it fidgeted, but
eventually it fell quiet. So quiet that I as good as forgot about it.

What a long time ago that was. Thirty years? Forty? More,
perhaps. Time passes more quickly than you think.

The boy has been on my mind lately. Tell me the truth. And
lately I have felt again that strange inner stirring. There is something
growing inside me, dividing and multiplying. I can feel it, in my stomach,
round and hard, about the life of a grapefruit. It sucks the air out of my
lungs and gnaws the marrow from my bones. The long dormancy has changed it.
From being a meek and biddable thing, it has become a bully. It refuses all
negotiation, blocks discussion, insists on its rights. It won’t take no for an
answer. The truth, it echoes, calling after the boy, watching his departing
back. And then it turns to me, tightens its grip on my innards, gives a twist.
We made a deal, remember?

It is time.

Come on Monday. I will send a car to meet you from the half past
four arrival at Harrogate Station.

Vida Winter

How long did I sit on the stairs after reading the letter? I
don’t know. For I was spellbound. There is something about words. In expert
words, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves round your
limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they
pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work
their magic. When I at last woke up to myself, I could only guess what had been
going on in the darkness of my unconsciousness. What had the letter done to me?

I knew very little about Vida Winter. I was aware naturally of
the various epithets that usually came attached to her name: England’s
best-loved writer; our century’s Dickens; the world’s most famous living author;
and so on. I knew of course that she was popular, though the figures, when I
later researched them, still came as a surprise. Fifty-six books published in
fifty-six years; they are translated into forty-nine languages; Miss Winter has
been named twenty-seven times the most borrowed author from English libraries;
nineteen feature films have been based on her novels. In terms of statistics,
the most disputed question is this: Has she or has she not sold more books than
the Bible? The difficulty comes less from working out how many books she has
sold (an ever-changing figure in the millions) than in obtaining solid figures
for the Bible—whatever one thinks of the word of God, his sales data are
notoriously unreliable. The figure that might have interested me the most, as I
sat there at the bottom of the stairs, was twenty-two. This was the number of
biographers who, for want of information, or lack of encouragement, or after
inducements or threats from Miss Winter herself, had been persuaded to give up
trying to discover the truth about her. But I knew none of this then. I knew
only one statistic, and it was one that seemed relevant: How many books by Vida
Winter had I, Margaret Lea, read? None.

I shivered on the stairs, yawned and stretched. Returning to myself,
I found that my thoughts had been rearranged in my absence. Two items in
particular had been selected out of the unheeded detritus that is my memory and
placed for my attention.

The first was a little scene involving my father. A box of books
we are unpacking from a private library clearance includes a number of Vida
Winters. At the shop we don’t deal in contemporary fiction. “I’ll take them to
the charity shop in my lunch hour,” I say, and leave them on the side of the
desk. But before the morning is out, three of the four books are gone. Sold.
One to a priest, one to a cartographer, one to a military historian. Our
clients’ faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book
lover, seem to light up when they spot the rich colors of the paperback covers.
After lunch, when we have finished the unpacking and the cataloging and the
shelving and we have no customers, we sit reading as usual. It is late autumn,
it is raining and the windows have misted up. In the background is the hiss of
the gas heater; we hear the sound without hearing it for, side by side,
together and miles apart, we are deep in our books. “Shall I make tea?” I ask,
surfacing. No answer.

I make tea all the same and put a cup next to him on the desk.
An hour later the untouched tea is cold. I make a fresh pot and put mother
steaming cup beside him on the desk. He is oblivious to my ;very movement.

Gently I tilt the volume in his hands so that I can see the
cover. It is the fourth Vida Winter. I return the book to its original position
and study my father’s face. He cannot hear me. He cannot see me. He is in
another world, and I am a ghost.

That was the first memory.

The second is an image. In three-quarter profile, carved
massively out of light and shade, a face towers over the commuters who wait,
stunted, beneath. It is only an advertising photograph pasted on a bill-board
in a railway station, but to my mind’s eye it has the impassive grandeur of
long-forgotten queens and deities carved into rock faces by ancient
civilizations. To contemplate the exquisite arc of the eye; the road, smooth
sweep of the cheekbones; the impeccable line and proportions of the nose, is to
marvel that the randomness of human variation can produce something so
supernaturally perfect as this. Such bones, discovered by the archaeologists of
the future, would seem an artifact, a product not of blunt-tooled nature but of
the very peak of artistic endeavor. The skin that embellishes these remarkable
bones has the opaque luminosity of alabaster; it appears paler still by
contrast with the elaborate twists and coils of copper hair that are arranged
with such precision about the fine temples and down the strong, elegant neck.

As if this extravagant beauty were not enough, there are the
eyes. Intensified by some photographic sleight of hand to an inhuman green, the
green of glass in a church window, or of emeralds or of boiled sweets, they
gaze out over the heads of the commuters with perfect in-expression. I can’t
say whether the other travelers that day felt the same way as I about the
picture; they had read the books, so they may have had a different perspective
on things. But for me, looking into the large green eyes, I could not help
being reminded of that commonplace expression about the eyes being the gateway
to the soul. This woman, I remember thinking, as I gazed at her green, unseeing
eyes, does not have a soul.

Such was, on the night of the letter, the extent of my knowledge
about Vida Winter. It was not much. Though on reflection perhaps it was as much
as anyone else might know. For although everyone knew Vida Winter—knew her
name, knew her face, knew her books—at the same time nobody knew her. As famous
for her secrets as for her stories, she was a perfect mystery.

Now, if the letter was to be believed, Vida Winter wanted to
tell the truth about herself. This was curious enough in itself, but curiouser
still was my next thought: Why should she want to tell it to me?

MARGARET’S STORY

Rising from the stairs, I stepped into the darkness of the shop.
I didn’t need the light switch to find my way. I know the shop the way you know
the places of your childhood. Instantly the smell of leather and old paper was
soothing. I ran my fingertips along the spines, like a pianist along his keyboard.
Each book has its own individual note: the grainy, linen-covered spine of
Daniels’s History of Map Making, the racked leather of Lakunin’s minutes from
the meetings of the St. Petersburg Cartographic Academy; a well-worn folder
that contains his maps, and-drawn, hand-colored. You could blindfold me and
position me anywhere on the three floors of this shop, and I could tell you
from the books under my fingertips where I was.

We see few customers in Lea’s Antiquarian Booksellers, a scant
half-dozen a day on average. There is a flurry of activity in September when le
students come to buy copies of the new year’s set texts; another in ay when
they bring them back after the exams. These books my father ills migratory. At
other times of the year we can go days without see-g a client. Every summer
brings the odd tourist who, having wan-Ted off the beaten track, is prompted by
curiosity to step out of the sunshine and into the shop, where he pauses for an
instant, blinking as his eyes adjust. Depending on how weary he is of eating
ice cream and watching the punts on the river, he might stay for a bit of shade
and tranquility or he might not. More commonly visitors to the shop are people
who, having heard about us from a friend of a friend, and finding themselves
near Cambridge, have made a special detour. They have anticipation on their
faces as they step into the shop, and not infrequently apologize for disturbing
us. They are nice people, as quiet and as amiable as the books themselves. But
mostly it is just Father, me and the books.

How do they make ends meet? you might think, if you saw how few
customers come and go. But you see, the shop is, in financial terms, just a
sideline. The proper business takes place elsewhere. We make our living on the
basis of perhaps half a dozen transactions a year. This is how it works: Father
knows all the world’s great collectors, and he knows the world’s great
collections. If you were to watch him at the auctions or book fairs that he
attends frequently, you would notice how often he is approached by quietly
spoken, quietly dressed individuals, who draw him aside for a quiet word. Their
eyes are anything but quiet. Does he know of… they ask him, and Has he ever
heard whether… A book will be mentioned. Father answers vaguely. It doesn’t do
to build up hope. These things usually lead nowhere. But on the other hand, if
he were to hear anything… And if he doesn’t already have it, he makes a note of
the person’s address in a little green notebook. Then nothing happens for quite
some time. But later—a few months or many months, there is no knowing—at
another auction or book fair, seeing a certain other person, he will inquire,
very tentatively, whether… and again the book is mentioned. More often than
not, it ends there. But sometimes, following the conversations, there may be an
exchange of letters. Father spends a great deal of time composing letters. In
French, German, Italian, even occasionally Latin. Nine times out of ten the
answer is a courteous two-line refusal. But sometimes—half a dozen times a
year—the reply is the prelude to a journey. A journey in which Father collects
a book here, and delivers it there. He is rarely gone for more than forty-eight
hours. Six times a year. This is our livelihood.

The shop itself makes next to no money. It is a place to write
and receive letters. A place to while away the hours waiting for the next
international bookfair. In the opinion of our bank manager, it is an
indulgence, one that my father’s success entitles him to. Yet in reality— my
father’s reality and mine; I don’t pretend reality is the same for everyone—the
shop is the very heart of the affair. It is a repository of books, a place of
safety for all the volumes, once so lovingly written, that at present no one
seems to want. And it is a place to read.

A is for Austen, B is for Bronte, C is for Charles and D is for
Dickens. I learned my alphabet in this shop. My father walking along the
shelves, me in his arms, explaining alphabetization at the same time as he
taught me to spell. I learned to write there, too: copying out names and titles
onto index cards that are still there in our filing box, thirty years later.
The shop was both my home and my job. It was a better school for me than school
ever was, and afterward it was my own private university. It was my life.

My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a
look. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more and less
appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic heroism that
nineteenth-century parents thought were suitable for children, and gothic host
stories that were surely not; I read accounts of arduous travel through
treacherous lands undertaken by spinsters in crinolines, and I ;ad handbooks on
decorum and etiquette intended for young ladies of good family; I read books
with pictures and books without; books in English, books in French, books in
languages I didn’t understand, here I could make up stories in my head on the
basis of a handful of guessed-at words. Books. Books. And books.

At school I kept all this shop reading to myself. The bits of
archaic French I knew from old grammars found their way into my essays, but my
teachers took them for spelling mistakes, though they were never able to eradicate
them. Sometimes a history lesson would touch upon me of the deep but random
seams of knowledge I had accumulated by my haphazard reading in the shop.
Charlemagne? I would think. What, my Charlemagne? From the shop? At these times
I stayed mum, dumbstruck by the momentary collision of two worlds that were
otherwise so entirely apart.

In between reading, I helped my father in his work. At nine I
was allowed to wrap books in brown paper and address them to our more distant
clients. At ten I was permitted to walk these parcels to the post office. At
eleven I relieved my mother of her only job in the shop: the cleaning. Armored
in a headscarf and housecoat against the grime, germs and general malignity
inherent in “old books,” she used to walk the shelves with her fastidious
feather duster, her lips pressed tight and trying not to inhale. From time to
time the feathers would stir up a cloud of imaginary dust, and she recoiled,
coughing. Inevitably she snagged her stockings on the crate that, with the predictable
malevolence of books, would just happen to be positioned behind her. I offered
to do the dusting. It was a job she was glad to be rid of; she didn’t need to
come out to the bookshop after that.