Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale

"Good evening," I said. "I am Margaret Lea."

"The biographer. We've been expecting you."

What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.

She ushered me in and closed the door behind me. The key turned in the lock without a sound and there was not a squeak as the well-oiled bolts were slid noiselessly into place.

Standing there in my coat in the hallway, I experienced for the first time the most profound oddity of the place. Miss Winter's house was entirely silent.

The woman told me her name was Judith, and that she was the housekeeper. She asked about my journey and mentioned the hours of meals and the best times to get hot water. Her mouth opened and closed; as soon as her words fell from her lips they were smothered by the blanket of silence that descended and extinguished them. The same silence swallowed our footfalls, and muffled the opening and closing of doors as she showed me, one after another, the dining room, the drawing room, the music room.

There was no magic behind the silence-it was the soft-furnishings that did it. Overstuffed sofas were piled with velvet cushions; there were upholstered footstools, chaise longues and armchairs; tapestries hung on the walls and were used as throws over upholstered furniture. Every floor was carpeted, every carpet overlaid with rugs. The damask that draped the windows also baffled the walls. Just as blotting paper absorbs ink, so all this wool and velvet absorbed sound, with one difference: Where blotting paper takes up only excess ink, the fabric of the house seemed to suck in the very essence of the words we spoke.

I followed the housekeeper. We turned left and right, and right and left, went up and down stairs until I was thoroughly confused. I quickly lost all sense of how the convoluted interior of the house corresponded with its outer plainness. The house had been altered over time, I supposed, added to here and there; probably we were in some wing or extension invisible from the front. "You'll get the hang of it," the housekeeper mouthed, seeing my face, and I understood her as if I were lip-reading. Finally we turned from a half-landing and came to a halt. She unlocked a door that opened into a sitting room. There were three more doors leading off it. "Bathroom," she said, opening one of the doors, "bedroom," opening another, "and study." The rooms were as padded with cushions and curtains and hangings as the rest of the house.

"Will you take your meals in the dining room, or here?" she asked, indicating the small table and a single chair by the window.

I did not know whether meals in the dining room meant eating with my hostess, and unsure of my status in the house (was I a guest or an employee?), I hesitated, wondering whether it was politer to accept or to refuse. Divining the cause of my uncertainty, the housekeeper added, as though having to overcome a habit of reticence, "Miss Winter always eats alone."

"Then if it's all the same to you, I'll eat here."

"I'll bring you soup and sandwiches straightaway, shall I? You must be hungry after the train. You've things to make your tea and coffee just here." She opened a cupboard in the corner of the bedroom to reveal a kettle, the other paraphernalia for drinks making and even a tiny fridge. "It will save you from running up and down to the kitchen," she added, and threw in an abashed smile, by way of apology, I thought, for not wanting me in her kitchen.

She left me to my unpacking.

In the bedroom it was the work of a minute to unpack my few clothes, my books and my toiletries. I pushed the tea and coffee things to one side and replaced them with the packet of cocoa I had brought from home. Then I had just enough time to test the high antique bed- it was so lavishly covered with cushions that there could be any number of peas under the mattress and I would not know it-before the housekeeper returned with a tray.

"Miss Winter invites you to meet her in the library at eight o'clock." She did her best to make it sound like an invitation, but I understood, as I was no doubt meant to, that it was a command.

Whether by luck or accident I cannot say, but I found my way to the library a full twenty minutes earlier than I had been commanded to attend. It was not a problem. What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, what better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

My first impression was of the room as a whole, and it struck me by its marked difference from the rest of the house. The other rooms were thick with the corpses of suffocated words; here in the library you could breathe. Instead of being shrouded in fabric, it was a room made of wood. There were floorboards underfoot, shutters at the tall windows and the walls were lined with solid oak shelves.

It was a high room, much longer than it was wide. On one side five arched windows reached from ceiling almost to floor; at their base window seats had been installed. Facing them were five similarly shaped mirrors, positioned to reflect the view outside, but tonight echoing the carved panels of the shutters. The bookshelves extended from the walls into the rooms, forming bays; in each recess an amber-shaded lamp was placed on a small table. Apart from the fire at the far end of the room, this was the only lighting, and it created soft, warm pools of illumination at the edge of which rows of books melted into darkness.

Slowly I made my way down the center of the room, taking a look into the bays on my right and left. After my first glancesI found myself nodding. It was a proper, well-maintained library. Categorized, alphabetized and clean, it was just as I would have done it myself. All my favorites were there, with a great number of rare and valuable volumes as well as more ordinary, well-thumbed copies. Not only Jane Eyre,

Wuthering Heights, The Woman in White, but The Castle of Otranto, Lady Audley's Secret, The Spectre Bride. I was thrilled to come acrossa Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so rare that my father had given up believing in its existence.

Marveling at the rich selection of volumes on Miss Winter's shelves, I browsed my way toward the fireplace at the far end of the room. In the final bay on the right, one particular set of shelves stood out even from some distance: Instead of displaying the mellow, predominantly brown stripes that were the spines of the older books, this stack showed the silvery blues, sage greens and pink-beiges of more recent decades. They were the only modern books in the room. Miss Winter's own works. With her earliest titles at the top of the stack and recent novels at the bottom, each work was represented in its many different editions and even in different languages. I saw no Thirteen Tales, the mistitled book I had read at the bookshop, but in its other guise as Tales of Change and Desperation there were more than a dozen different editions.

I selected a copy of Miss Winter's most recent book. On page one an elderly nun arrives at a small house in the backstreets of an unnamed town that seems to be in Italy; she is shown into a room where a pompous young man, whom we take to be English or American, greets her in some surprise. (I turned the page. The first paragraphs had drawn me in, just as I had been drawn in every time I had opened one of her books, and without meaning to, I began to read in earnest.) The young man does not at first appreciate what the reader already understands: that his visitor has come on a grave mission, one that will alter his life in ways he cannot be expected to foresee. She begins her expianation and bears it patiently (I turned the page; I had forgotten the library, forgotten Miss Winter, forgotten myself) when he treats her with the levity of indulged youth…