The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.

“Shall I make tea?” I ask, surfacing.

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.

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

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.

“Life is compost.”

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a person’s mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name, either one’s own or someone else’s, is to invite jeopardy.

I left the window ajar so that I could listen to the rain as it continued to fall with an even, muffled softness. I heard it while I was undressing, while I was reading and while I slept. It accompanied my dreams like a poorly tuned radio left on through the night, broadcasting a fuzzy white noise beneath which were the barely audible whispers of foreign languages and snatches of unfamiliar tunes.

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.

“A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else’s story.

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.

“My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, ‘Me next! Go on! My turn!’ I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.

She was a woman; her babies were girls; her husband (not a lord) was dead; her father (not a lord) was dead. The almanac cut her and her babies adrift; she and they fell into the vast ocean of ordinary people, whose births and deaths and marriages are, like their loves and fears and breakfast preferences, too insignificant to be worth recording for posterity.

And while Women give birth to boys/men they are treated with such indifference. It’s abhorrent.

She was a spinner of yarns, wasn’t she? A storyteller. A fabulist. A liar.

I know one too.

I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness of my disappointment.

Not even a ghost could survive here.

Water, like God, moves in mysterious ways.

If you dazzle a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him.

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.

On the edge of inaudibility, the rub of breath over vocal cords made ripples in the air. Soft plosives that were gone before you could hear them, muffled sibilants that you might mistake for the sound of your own blood in your ears.

there was an ocean in her eyes, vast enough to drown all my fury.

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.