Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale

I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new ones, so I read old novels.

Contemporary literature is a world I know little of. My father had taken me to task on this topic many times during our daily talks about books. He reads as much as I do, but more widely, and I have great respect for his opinions. 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.

During these talks, I listen with the gravest attention and nod my head, but I always end up continuing in my old habits. Not that he blames me for it. There is one thing on which we are agreed: There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

Once Father even told me about Vida Winter. "Now, there's a living writer who would suit you."

But I had never read any Vida Winter. Why should I when there were so many dead writers I had still not discovered?

Except that now I had come down in the middle of the night to take the Thirteen Tales from the cabinet. My father, with good reason, was wondering why.

"I got a letter yesterday," I began.

He nodded.

"It was from Vida Winter."

Father raised his eyebrows but waited for me to go on.

"It seems to be an invitation for me to visit her. With a view to writing her biography."

His eyebrows lifted by another few millimeters.

"I couldn't sleep, so I came down to get the book."

I waited for Father to speak, but he didn't. He was thinking, a small frown creasing his brow. After a time I spoke again. "Why is it kept in the cabinet? What makes it so valuable?"

Father pulled himself away from his train of thought to answer. "Partly because it's the first edition of the first book by the most famous living writer in the English language. But mostly because it's flawed. Every following edition is called Tales of Change and Desperation. No mention of thirteen. You'll have noticed there are only twelve stories?"

I nodded.

"Presumably there were originally supposed to be thirteen, then only twelve were submitted. But there was a mixup with the jacket design and the book was printed with the original title and only twelve stories. They had to be recalled."

"But your copy…"

"Slipped through the net. One of a batch sent out by mistake to a shop in Dorset, where one customer bought a copy before the shop got the message to pack them up and send them back. Thirty years ago he realized what the value might be and sold it to a collector. The collector's estate was auctioned in September and I bought it. With the proceeds from the Avignon deal."

"The Avignon deal?" It had taken two years to negotiate the Avignon deal. It was one of Father's most lucrative successes.

"You wore the gloves, of course?" he asked sheepishly.

"Who do you take me for?"

He smiled before continuing. "All that effort for nothing."

"What do you mean?"

"Recalling all those books because the title was wrong. Yet people still call it the Thirteen Tales, even though it's been published as Tales of

Changeand Desperation for half a century." "Why is that?" "It's what a combination of fame and secrecy does. With real knowledge about her so scant, fragments of information like the story of the recalled first edition take on an importance beyond their weight. It has become part of her mythology. The mystery of the thirteenth tale. It gives people something to speculate about."

There is a short silence. Then, directing his gaze vaguely into the middle distance, and speaking lightly so that I could pick up his words or let them go, as I chose, he murmured, "And now a biography… How unexpected."

I remembered the letter, my fear that its writer was not to be trusted. I remembered the insistence of the young man's words, "Tell me the truth." I remembered the Thirteen Tales that took possession of me with its first words and held me captive all night. I wanted to be held hostage again.

"I don't know what to do," I told my father. "It is different from what you have done before. Vida Winter is a living subject. Interviews instead of archives." I nodded. "But you want to know the person who wrote the Thirteen Tales." I nodded again. My father put his hands on his knees and sighed. He knows what reading is. How it takes you. "When does she want you to go?" "Monday," I told him. "I'll run you to the station, shall I?" "Thank you. And-" "Yes?" "Can I have some time off? I ought to do some more reading before

I go up there." "Yes," he said, with a smile that didn't hide his worry. "Yes, of course."

There followed one of the most glorious times of my adult life. For the first time ever I had on my bedside table a pile of brand-new, glossy paperbacks, purchased from a regular bookshop. Betwixt and Between by Vida Winter; Twice IsForever by Vida Winter; Hauntings by Vida Winter; Out of the Arc by Vida Winter; Rules ofAffliction by Vida Winter; The Birthday Girl by Vida Winter; The Puppet Show by Vida Winter. The covers, all by the same artist, glowed with heat and power: amber and scarlet, gold and deep purple. I even bought a copy of Talesof Change and Des peration; its title looked bare without the Thirteen that makes my father's copy so valuable. His own copy I had returned to the cabinet.

Of course one always hopes for something special when one reads an author one hasn't read before, and Miss Winter's books gave me the same thrill I had when I discovered the Landier diaries, for instance. But it was more than that. I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. 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. And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again-the lost joys of reading returned to me. Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

From time to time my father would knock at the door at the top of the stairs. He stared at me. I must have had that dazed look intense reading gives you. "You won't forget to eat, will you?" he said, as he handed me a bag of groceries or a pint of milk.

I would have liked to stay in my flat forever with those books. But if I was to go to Yorkshire to meet Miss Winter, then there was other work to be done. I took a day off from reading and went to the library. In the newspaper room, I looked at the books pages of the national newspapers for pieces on Miss Winter's recent novels. For every new book that came out, she summoned a number of journalists to a hotel in Harrogate, where she met them one by one and gave them, separately, what she termed her life story. There must have been dozens of these stories in existence, hundreds perhaps. I found almost twenty without looking very hard.