The thirteenth tale Read Online Free

Winter, but its presence in the lection is quite misleading. It sits
surrounded by the work of academics and professional writers, just as though I
were a proper biographer, when in fact I am only a dilettante, a talented
amateur.
     
    Lives—dead ones—are just a hobby of mine. My real work is in the
bookshop. My job is not to sell the books—my father does that—but to look after
them. Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all,
reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they’re not old enough
to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by
collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as
dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there
is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these
words significant enough to write them down.
     
    People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the
warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory
of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an
exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to
exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods.
Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort
you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are
dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to
the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper,
preserved. It is a kind of magic.
     
    As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I
clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a
volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten
dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when
their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is
their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do
hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.
     
    Although I have touched here on my very private preoccupations,
I can see nonetheless that I have been putting off the essential. I am not
given to acts of self-revelation; it rather looks as though in forcing myself
to overcome my habitual reticence, I have written anything and everything in
order to avoid writing the one thing that matters.
     
    And yet I will write it. “Silence is not a natural environment
for stories,” Miss Winter told me once. “They need words. Without them they
grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.” Quite right, too. So here
is my story.
     
    I was ten when I discovered the secret my mother was keeping.
The reason it matters is that it wasn’t her secret to keep. It was mine.
     
    My parents were out that evening. They didn’t go out often, and
when they did, I was sent next door to sit in Mrs. Robb’s kitchen. The
next-door house was exactly like ours but reversed, and the backward-less of it
all made me feel seasick, so when parents’ evening out rolled around, I argued
once again that I was old enough and sensible enough to be left at home without
a babysitter. I had no great hope of success, yet this time my father agreed.
Mother allowed herself to be persuaded with only the proviso that Mrs. Robb
would look in at half past eight.
     
    They left the house at seven o’clock, and I celebrated by
pouring a lass of milk and drinking it on the sofa, full of admiration at my
own grandness. Margaret Lea, old enough to stay home without a sitter, after
the milk I felt unexpectedly bored. What to do with this freedom? set off on a
wander, marking the territory of my new freedom: the dining room, the hall, the
downstairs toilet. Everything was just as it had ways been. For no particular
reason, I was reminded of one of my baby fears, about the wolf and