Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale

After the publication of Betwixt and Between, she was the secret daughter of a priest and a schoolmistress; a year later in the same newspaper she got publicity for Hauntings by telling how she was the runaway child of a Parisian courtesan. For The Puppet Show, she was, in various newspapers, an orphan raised in a Swiss convent, a street child from the backstreets of the East End and the stifled only girl in a family of ten boisterous boys. I particularly liked the one in which, becoming accidentally separated in India from her Scottish missionary parents, she scraped out an existence for herself in the streets of Bombay, making a living as a storyteller. She told stories about pine trees that smelled like the freshest coriander, mountains as beautiful as the Taj Mahal, haggis more delicious than any street-corner pakora and bagpipes. Oh, the sound of the bagpipes! So beautiful it defied description. When many years later she was able to return to Scotland-a country she had left as a tiny baby-she was gravely disappointed. The pine trees smelled nothing like coriander. Snow was cold. Haggis tasted flat. As for the bagpipes…

Wry and sentimental, tragic and astringent, comic and sly, each and every one of these stories was a masterpiece in miniature. For a different kind of writer, they might be the pinnacle of her achievement; for Vida Winter they were mere throwaways. No one, I think, would have mistaken them for the truth.

The day before my departure was Sunday and I spent the afternoon at my parents' house. It never changes;a single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble.

My mother smiled a small, taut smile and talked brightly while we had tea. The neighbor's garden, roadworks in town, a new perfume that had brought her up in a rash. Light, empty chat, produced to keep silence at bay, silence in which her demons lived. It was a good performance: nothing to reveal that she could hardly bear to leave the house, that the most minor unexpected event gave her a migraine, that she could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.

Father and I waited until Mother went to make fresh tea before talking about Miss Winter.

"It's not her real name," I told him. "If it was her real name, it would be easy to trace her. And everyone who has tried has given up for want of information. No one knows even the simplest fact about her."

"How curious."

"It's as if she came from nowhere. As if before being a writer she didn't exist at all. As if she invented herself at the same time as her book." "We know what she chose for a pen name. That must reveal some thing, surely," my father suggested. "Vida. From vita, Latin, meaning life. Though I can't help thinking of French, too." Vide in French means empty. The void. Nothingness. But we don't use words like this in my parents' house, so I left it for him to infer.

"Quite." He nodded. "And what about Winter?"

Winter. I looked out of the window for inspiration. Behind my sister's ghost, dark branches stretched naked across the darkening sky, and the flower beds were bare black soil. The glass was no protection against the chill; despite the gas fire, the room seemed filled with bleak despair. What did winter mean to me? One thing only: death.

There was a silence. When it became necessary to say something so as not to burden the previous exchange with an intolerable weight, I said, "It's a spiky name. V and W. Vida Winter. Very spiky."

My mother came back. Placing cups on saucers, pouring tea, she talked on, her voice moving as freely in her tightly policed plot of life as though it were seven acres.

My attention wandered. On the mantel over the fireplace was the one object in the room that might be considered decorative. A photograph. Every so often my mother talks about putting it away in a drawer, where it will be safe from dust. But my father likes to see it, and since he so rarely opposes her, on this she cedes to him. In the picture are a youthful bride and groom. Father looks the same as ever: quietly handsome, with dark, thoughtful eyes; the years do not change him. The woman is scarcely recognizable. A spontaneous smile, laughter in her eyes, warmth in her gaze as she looks at my father. She looks happy.

Tragedy alters everything.

I was born, and the woman in the wedding photo disappeared.

I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

I left home on an ordinary winter day, and for miles my train ran under a gauzy white sky. Then I changed trains, and the clouds massed. They grew thicker and darker, more and more bloated, as I traveled north. At any moment I expected to hear the first scattering of drops on the windowpane. Yet the rain did not come.

At Harrogate, Miss Winter's driver, a dark-haired, bearded man, was disinclined to talk. I was glad, for his lack of conversation left me free to study the unfamiliar views that unfolded as soon as we left the town behind. I had never been north before. My researches had taken me to London and, once or twice, across the channel to libraries and archives in Paris. Yorkshire was a county I knew only from novels, and novels from another century at that. Once we left the town behind, there were few signs of the contemporary world, and it was possible to believe I was traveling into the past at the same time as into the countryside. The villages were quaint, with their churches and pubs and stone cottages; then, the farther we went, the smaller the villages became and the greater the distance between them until isolated farmhouses were the only interruptions to the naked winter fields. At last we left even the farmhouses behind and it grew dark. The car's headlamps showed me swathes of a colorless, undefined landscape: no fences, no walls, no hedges, no buildings. Just a vergeless road and each side of it, vague undulations of darkness.

"Is this the moors?" I asked.

"It is," the driver said, and I leaned closer to the window, but all I could make out was the waterlogged sky that pressed down claustrophobically on the land, on the road, on the car. Beyond a certain distance even the light from our headlamps was extinguished.

At an unmarked junction we turned off the road and bumped along for a couple of miles on a stony track. We stopped twice for the driver to open a gate and close it behind us, then on we went, jolting and shaking for another mile.

Miss Winter's house lay between two slow rises in the darkness, almost-hills that seemed to merge into each other and that revealed the presence of a valley and a house only at the last turn of the drive. The sky by now was blooming shades of purple, indigo and gunpowder, and the house beneath it crouched long and low and very dark. The driver opened the car door for me, and I stepped out to see that he had already unloaded my case and was ready to pull away, leaving me alone in front of an unlit porch. Barred shutters blacked out the windows and there was not a single sign of human habitation. Closed in upon itself, the place seemed to shun visitors.

I rang the bell. Its clang was oddly muted in the damp air. While I waited I watched the sky. Cold crept through the soles of my shoes, and I rang the bell again. Still no one came to the door.

About to ring for a third time, I was caught by surprise when with no sound at all the door was opened.

The woman in the doorway smiled professionally and apologized for keeping me waiting. At first sight she seemed very ordinary. Her short, neat hair was the same palish shade as her skin, and her eyes were neither blue nor gray nor green. Yet it was less the absence of color than a lack of expression that made her plain. With some warmth of emotion in them, her eyes could, I suspected, have gleamed with life; and it seemed to me, as she matched my scrutiny glance for glance, that she maintained her inexpressivity only by deliberate effort.