The thirteenth tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

narrowed at each of the three stories of
books. As I went, turning out lights behind me, I began to prepare phrases for
a polite letter refusal. I was, I could tell Miss Winter, the wrong kind of
biographer. I had no interest in contemporary writing. I had read none of Miss
Winter’s books. I was at home in libraries and archives and had never
interviewed a living writer in my life. I was more at ease with dead people and
was, if the truth be told, nervous of the living.
     
    It probably wasn’t necessary to put that last bit in the letter.
     
    I couldn’t be bothered to make a meal. A cup of cocoa would do.
     
    Waiting for the milk to heat, I looked out of the window. In the
night glass was a face so pale you could see the blackness of the sky through
it. We pressed cheek to cold, glassy cheek. If you had seen us, you would have
known that were it not for this glass, there was really nothing to tell us
apart.
     

 

     

     
    THIRTEEN TALES
     
    Tell me the truth. The words from the letter were trapped in my
head, trapped, it seemed, beneath the sloping ceiling of my attic flat, like a
bird that has got in down the chimney. It was natural that the boy’s plea
should have affected me; I who had never been told the truth, but left to
discover it alone and in secret. Tell me the truth. Quite. But I resolved to
put the words and the letter out of my head. It was nearly time. I moved
swiftly. In the bathroom I soaped my face and brushed my teeth. By three
minutes to eight I was in my nightdress and slippers, waiting for the kettle to
boil. Quickly, quickly. A minute to eight. My hot-water bottle was ready, and I
filled a glass with water from the tap. Time was of the essence. For at eight
o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.
     
    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. But that night the magic failed. The threads of plot
that had been left in suspense overnight had somehow gone flaccid during the
day, and I found that I could not care about how they would eventually weave
together. I made an effort to secure myself to a strand of the plot, but as
soon as I had managed it, a voice intervened—Tell me the truth—that unpicked
the knot and left it flopping loose again.
     
    My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in
White, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre…
     
    But it was no good. Tell me the truth…
     
    Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one
sure thing. Turning out the light, I rested my head on the pillow and tried to
sleep.
     
    Echoes of a voice. Fragments of a story. In the dark I heard
them louder. Tell me the truth…
     
    At two in the morning I got out of bed, pulled on some socks,
unlocked the flat door and, wrapped in my dressing gown, crept down the narrow
staircase and into the shop.
     
    At the back there is a tiny room, not much bigger than a
cupboard, that we use when we need to pack a book for the post. It contains a
table and, on a shelf, sheets of brown paper, scissors and a ball of string. As
well as these items there is also a plain wooden cabinet that holds a dozen or
so books.
     
    The contents of the cabinet rarely change. If you were to look
into it today you would see what I saw that night: a book without a cover
resting on its side, and next to it an ugly tooled leather volume. A pair of books
in Latin standing upright. An old Bible. Three volumes of botany, two of
history and a single tatty book of astronomy. A book in Japanese, another in
Polish and some poems in Old English. Why do we keep these books apart? Why are
they not kept with their natural companions on our neatly labeled shelves? The
cabinet is where we keep the esoteric, the valuable, the rare. These volumes
are worth as