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pile of brand-new, glossy
paperbacks, purchased from a regular bookshop. Betwixt and Between by Vida
Winter; Twice Is Forever by Vida Winter; Hauntings by Vida Winter; Out of the
Arc by Vida Winter; Rules of Affliction 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 Tales of Change and Desperation; 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
:he 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.
     
    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