The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around 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.

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.

people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity. I like to disinter lives that have been buried in unopened diaries on archive shelves for a hundred years or more. Rekindling breath from memoirs that have been out of print for decades pleases me more than almost anything else.

Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they’re not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.

For there had always been a feeling. The knowledge, too familiar to have ever needed words, that there was something. An altered quality in the air to my right. A coagulation of light. Something peculiar to me that set empty space vibrating. My pale shadow.

So that’s it. Loss. Sorrow. Loneliness. There was a feeling that had kept me apart from other people…and kept me company…all my life,

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in White, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre . . .

Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness. The tales were brutal and sharp and heartbreaking. I loved them.

He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance. He has spoken of endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements. He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that I prefer.

Of course one always hopes for something special when one reads an author one hasn’t read before,

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.

restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air.

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.”

“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.

Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

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.

So they became friends, the way old married couples often do, and enjoyed the tender loyalty that awaits the lucky on the other side of passion, without ever living the passion itself.

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.

The doctor knew his wife was beautiful, but they had been married too long for it to make any difference to him.

Miss Winter was like the light that illuminates everything but itself. She was the disappearing point at the heart of the narrative. She spoke of they; more recently she had spoken of we; the absence that perplexed me was I. What could it be that had caused her to distance herself from her story in this way?

Despite its distinctively feminine pitch it had more than a little masculine authority about it. She was articulate. She had an amusing habit of expressing views of her own with the same measured command as when she was explaining a theory by some authority she had read.

“Is it because of Emmeline that Adeline represses the girl in the mist? I think the answer to that question lies outside the bounds of current knowledge.”

Did the scientists doubt themselves? Stop and wonder whether they were doing the right thing? Did the lolling, unconscious figures of the twins cast a shadow over their beautiful project? They were not willfully cruel, you know. Only foolish. Misguided by their learning, their ambition, their own self-deceiving blindness.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

Unhappy birthday. From the day I was born, grief was always present. It settled like dust upon the household. It covered everyone and everything; it invaded us with every breath we took. It shrouded us in our own separate miseries.

Why couldn’t she love me? Why did my life mean less to her than my sister’s death? Did she blame me for it? Perhaps she was right to. I was alive now only because my sister had died. Every sight of me was a reminder of her loss.

For during my sleep, an obscure sentiment had formed within me—trepidation? nostalgia? excitement?—and it had given rise to a sense of expectation. The past was returning! My sister was near. There was no doubting it. I couldn’t see her, couldn’t smell her, but my inner ear, attuned always and only to her, had caught her vibration, and it filled me with a dark and soporific joy.

“You are suffering from an ailment that afflicts ladies of romantic imagination. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by the privations of life in earlier, harsher centuries. No tuberculosis, no childhood polio, no unhygienic living conditions. You’ll survive.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course.

Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn’t matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

What satisfaction is there, for a governess, in being given the direction of minds that already run in smooth and untrammeled lines? What challenge in maintaining ordered thinking in children whose minds are already neat and tidy? I am not only ready for this job, I have spent years longing for it. Here, I shall finally find out what my methods are worth!

My fidgeting and the slight sharpness of one or two of my answers entirely escaped his notice, and I fear that his energy and his analytical skills are not matched by his powers of observation. I do not criticize him unduly for expecting everyone he meets to be less able than himself. For he is a clever man, and more than that, he is a big fish in a small pond. He has adopted an air of quiet modesty, but I see through that easily enough, for I have disguised myself in exactly the same manner. However, I shall need his support in the project I have taken on, and shall work at making him my ally despite his shortcomings.

No one can think clearly and make progress if she is not surrounded by hygiene and order.

For the book is a rather silly story about a governess and two haunted children. I am afraid that in it Mr. James exposes the extent of his ignorance. He knows little about children and nothing at all about governesses.

Reading over this last paragraph I am struck by the most uncharacteristic lack of confidence in my tone. It is surely only tiredness that makes me think thus. An unrested mind is prone to wander into unfruitful avenues;

But perhaps the answer is to stop writing altogether, for when I do write, even now as I write this very sentence, this very word, I am aware of a ghost reader who leans over my shoulder watching my pen, who twists my words and perverts my meaning, and makes me uncomfortable in the privacy of my own thoughts.

My neat little volumes, suddenly a paper mountain. To think a book could have so much paper in it! I wanted to cry out, but what? All the words, the beautiful words, pulled apart and crumpled up, and I, in the shadows, speechless.

We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. “I know,” he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.