The Thirteenth Tale (2006) by Diane Setterfield

Author:Diane Setterfield
Format: epub
Published: 2006-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

GONE!

Only Charlie was unaffected. There were changes, of course. The proper meals that under Hester’s regime had been placed outside the door at breakfast, lunch and dinner became occasional sandwiches, a cold chop and a tomato, a bowl of congealed scrambled egg, appearing at unpredictable intervals, whenever the Missus remembered. It didn’t make any difference to Charlie. If he felt hungry and it was there, he might eat a mouthful of yesterday’s chop, or a dry end of bread, but if it isn’t there he wouldn’t, and his hunger didn’t bother him. He had a more powerful hunger to worry about. It was the essence of his life and something that Hester, in her arrival and in her departure, had not changed.

Yet change did come for Charlie, though it had nothing to do with Hester.

From time to time a letter would come to the house, and from time to time someone would open it. A few days after John-the-dig’s comment about there having been no letter from Hester, the Missus, finding herself in the hall, noticed a small pile of letters gathering dust on the that under the letter box. She opened them.

One from Charlie’s banker: was he interested in an investment opportunity…?

The second was an invoice from the builders for the work done on the roof.

Was the third from Hester?

No. The third was from the asylum. Isabelle was dead.

The Missus stared at the letter. Dead! Isabelle! Could it be true? Influenza, the letter said.

Charlie would have to be told, but the Missus quailed at the prospect. Better talk to Dig first, she resolved, putting the letters aside. But later, when John was sitting at his place at the kitchen table and she was topping up his cup with fresh tea, there remained no trace of the letter in her mind. It had joined those other, increasingly frequent, lost moments, lived and felt but unrecorded and then lost. Nevertheless, a few days later, passing through the hall with a tray of burnt toast and bacon, she mechanically put the letters on the tray with the food, though she had no memory at all of their contents.

And then the days passed and nothing seemed to happen at all, except that the dust got thicker, and the grime accumulated on the windowpanes, and the playing cards crept farther and farther from their box in the drawing room, and it became easier and easier to forget that there had ever been a Hester.

It was John-the-dig who realized in the silence of the days that something had happened.

He was an outdoors man and not domesticated. Nevertheless he knew that there comes a time when cups cannot be made to do for one more cup of tea without being first washed, and he knew moreover that a plate that has held raw meat cannot be used straight after for cooked. He saw how things were going with the Missus; he was no fool. So when the pile of dirty plates and cups piled up, he would set to and do the washing up.

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