The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield Page A

lie to you? People don’t like to accuse
each other of lying. And for heaven’s sake, sit down.“
     
    I sat down. “I don’t accuse you of anything,” I began mildly,
but immediately she interrupted me.
     
    ‘Don’t be so polite. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s
politeness.“
     
    Her forehead twitched, and an eyebrow rose over the top of the
sunglasses. A strong black arch that bore no relation to any natural brow.
     
    ‘Politeness. Now, there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was
one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After
all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the
contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People
with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly
suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But
then he was a genius.“
     
    Her voice flowed relentlessly on, recalling instance after
instance of genius and its bedfellow selfishness, and the folds of her shawl
never moved as she spoke. She must be made of steel, I thought.
     
    Eventually she drew her lecture to a close with the words:
“Politeness is a virtue I neither possess nor esteem in others. We need not
concern ourselves with it.” And with the air of having had the final word on
the subject, she stopped.
     
    ‘You raised the topic of lying,“ I said. ”That is something we
might concern ourselves with.“
     
    ‘In what respect?“ Through the dark lenses, I could just see the
movements of Miss Winter’s lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye,
like the long legs of a spider around its body.
     
    ‘You have given nineteen different versions of your life story
to journalists in the last two years alone. That’s just the ones I found on a
lick search. There are many more. Hundreds, probably.“
     
    She shrugged. “It’s my profession. I’m a storyteller.”
     
    ‘I am a biographer. I work with facts.“
     
    She tossed her head and her stiff curls moved as one. “How
horribly ill. I could never have been a biographer. Don’t you think one can
tell’s truth much better with a story?”
     
    ‘Not in the stories you have told the world so far.“
     
    Miss Winter conceded a nod. “Miss Lea,” she began. Her voice was
lower. “I had my reasons for creating a smoke screen around my past, lose
reasons, I assure you, are no longer valid.”
     
    ‘What reasons?“
     
    ‘Life is compost.“
     
    I blinked.
     
    ‘You think that a strange thing to say, but it’s true. All my
life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have
own, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of
that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down
to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it
unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a
compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait.
It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its
own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until
one fine day I have a story, or a novel.“
     
    I nodded, liking the analogy.
     
    ‘Readers,“ continued Miss Winter, ”are fools. They believe all
writ-; is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The
writer’s life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of
fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That’s why I couldn’t have journalists
and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it,
preserving it in their words. To write my books I needed my past left in peace,
for time to do its work.“
     
    I considered her answer, then asked, “And what has happened to
change things now?”
     
    ‘I am old. I am ill. Put those two