Read The thirteenth tale for Free Online Page B

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 y parents’ house. It never changes; a single lupine exhalation could re-ice
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 since 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, at the most minor unexpected
event gave her a migraine, that she mid 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
talk-g 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 ant
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
something, surely,“ my father suggested.
     
    ‘Vida. From vita, Latin, meaning life. Though I can’t help
thinking : French, too.“
     
    Vide in French means empty. The void. Nothingness. But we don’t
;e 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
writer’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?
     

 

     

     
    ARRIVAL
     
    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 assed. They
grew thicker and darker, more and more bloated, as I traveled north. At any
moment I expected to hear the first scattering