‘You’ve heard that from Jane Marple, I suppose,’ said Miss Cram, looking quite put out. ‘She oughtn’t to be gossiping like that. Doesn’t she know it’s one of the seven deadly sins?’
4
Every story has a backstory. Backstories are stories in disguise. Sleeping Beauty has a backstory, Jane Eyre too, but I should tell you about Sleeping Beauty, because she came first.
Beauty is born to a king and queen who can never have children. For years the royal cot in the palace hallway sits empty. Finally, after ten years, the queen loses hope. She pushes the cot behind the hallway curtains and tells her staff never to touch it again.
Then out of the blue, as if by magic, the queen produces a child, a child so beautiful that anyone who sees him can’t help exclaim, ‘What a beauty! What a delight! How lucky you are! May God bless you and your child! May he grow fair and tall!’
An old fairy living on the fringes of the palace hears news of the child and she is filled with jealousy. She cannot bear that a child so beautiful and so loved should live. Her heart begins to fill with wicked thoughts.
Every day at noon the child sleeps beneath a rosebush in the garden. One day, the fairy takes a stroll to the rosebush where the child is sleeping. She bends down towards the cot and lifts the white muslin veil that protects him from the sun. Her knobbly fingers are cold and bent and the child, feeling something, stirs. His eyes open and he screams. The fairy pinches the small rosebud mouth between her fingers.
After that, there is only the sound of tweeting.
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When people die before their time they turn into ghosts. Ghosts are what the people left behind have to puzzle over. When Miss Marple meets Miss Temple, the schoolteacher, she knows she must help her draw out her ghost. Luckily, ghosts can come out of hiding with the mere mention of a name.
‘We had been talking,’ said Miss Marple, ‘about a young girl called Verity.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘I did not know her surname. Miss Temple, I think, mentioned her only as Verity.’
‘Verity Hunt disappeared years ago,’ said the Archdeacon.
‘Yes,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Miss Temple and I were talking about her. Miss Temple told me something I did not know.’
Most ghosts are familiar; you know who they are when you see them. Mum looks like a ghost when she passes down the hallway in her nightie; she’s pale all over, grey as congealed porridge. The bottom of her nightie is ripped and torn as if a wild cat has got at it. Sometimes, when the hall light is off, I don’t see her coming and I scream. Then Mum gets cross and goes back into her room and slams the door. We don’t see her for hours.
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Women waft about in their nighties when things are going wrong. Clotilde Bradbury-Scott walks into Miss Marple’s room in a purple nightie in the middle of the night because she’s afraid. She’s had a bad dream about nasty secrets hidden beneath pink polygonum flowers.
‘Polygonum baldschuanicum. Very quick-growing, I think, isn’t it? Very useful really if one wants to hide any tumbledown building or anything ugly of that kind,’ says Clotilde.
‘Ah, yes, but it’s a menace if you want to grow anything else alongside it. Before you can say Jack Robinson your polygonum cover everything.’ Clotilde Bradbury-Scott takes a long look at this old woman. Clearly, she knows her plants. Before long she will be volunteering her services in the garden; she must be gone before that happens.
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People prefer to cover up ghosts, but no matter what you do, ghosts will always go wandering. I met with my first real ghost when I was ten. Her name was Jane Eyre and I found her sitting on the library shelves wearing a tatty brown dress. By then I had run out of Agatha Christie and I was looking for something else. I needed a new friend.
‘Adult Fiction,’ the librarian said. ‘Jane Eyre is Adult Fiction. Does your mum know you’re here?’
‘Yes, she knows. She sent me here!’
‘Mmm. Well …’ The librarian lifted her glasses and peered down her long, thin nose.
‘She says I can’t keep reading all that murder mystery rubbish. It’s high time I took on the classics! Agatha Christie isn’t literature and no one is going to take me seriously unless I start reading something more sophisticated.’
‘Mmm. Precocious … I see. Well, she’s in Adult Fiction. Over there. Now go quietly. You’re really too young to be in there messing about.’
So I crossed the wide, squeaky floor and there, on the other side of that broad wooden stretch I found her in an old brown dress: Jane Eyre, dusty and faded around the edges. Jane Eyre, who is looking for Verity.
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You won’t believe me, but one evening while I was reading something floated down from the glass panels above my head and landed on my page. Whoosh! I turned and there she was. I knew it was her immediately. Who else could it be?
I could see her from the corner of my eye, a small pale face staring right at me. She was wearing the same brown dress and a small velvet scarf around her head. Red velvet was blocking my view of the page; red velvet was speaking; red velvet was speaking the words I was reading:
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.
I heard the words enter my brain, and they felt strange. I’d never heard words like this before. Nobody I knew uses words like this. Nobody says drapery when they mean curtains. Drapery is something you hang over something in order to disguise it. Drapery hides things – bodies and knives. Drapery is Jane Eyre behind the red curtains hiding from John Reed (her nasty cousin), who would like to kill her, because John Reed is not a good reader. He’s jealous of curious Jane, his clever cousin. John Reed has no curiosity. He can’t think of anything but his own nasty self! ‘No imagination,’ Mum says. ‘Too caught up in himself. It’ll end badly!’
Jane Eyre is a big reader. She knows that when you read, time just passes. I read and read and time passed, but when I looked up from my book, the strange little person was still there. I wondered where she’d come from. Her face said nothing at all. Her body was thin and her face pale and her hair fell over her face.
‘Slides,’ said Mum. ‘What she needs is some nice tortoiseshell slides. Clip it back, for goodness’ sake, Maze. She looks like a wild thing running about with all that hair blowing about. For goodness’ sake, get it off her face!’
I hated my slides. They pulled my hair so tight I got a headache. But I couldn’t see slides anywhere on Jane Eyre’s forehead, only tiny, furrowed lines. Jane Eyre was too focused on reading to think about her hair.
‘You’re a very serious person, Jane Eyre,’ I said out loud. ‘Maze says it’s good to keep a sense of fun. You mustn’t be too serious before your time. I don’t know how old you are, but you can’t be much older than me, and I’m eleven at the end of the summer as a matter of fact. And Maze says you can’t afford to be too serious too soon. If you’re too serious then no one will want you around. For one thing, you won’t get invited to any parties and no one will want to dance with you at the school