Spring Tide

⁸ The Steps

1.

‘He is your father, Isola,’ says Nanny B. ‘He is your own papa. We know you haven’t seen much of him. But men have business to attend to. He has ten thousand Africans working for him, or so they say.’

‘I know he’s my father,’ scoffs Lady Isola. ‘I’ve seen him lots of times.’

2.

His Lordship sits enthroned in the nursery armchair to receive his kiss. He is grinning like a schoolboy. In a semicircle round him stand the nursery staff, wringing their hands. Isola edges towards the stranger.

‘My, but she’s a pretty thing, eh?’ says Lord Robert. ‘We’ll have to fight the men off this one.’

There are black pits all over his nose and his eyes have yellow bits in them. His hands clamp tightly onto her legs.

‘I have a surprise for you, Isola, but you must come with me to find it.’

3.

Up the stairs, across the landing, along a corridor. They pass faded tapestries of hunters, wild beasts, a screaming horse being savaged by a lion. There is a brown smell of mould and honey.

‘Well, we’ve never been here before, have we, Isola!’ cries Nanny B.

Up more stairs, across another landing with glass cases packed with tiny iridescent birds which perch on branches, sing, stretch out their wings and fly, though all of them are completely dead.

They come to a little pointed door. It looks like the entrance to a cupboard, but inside is a spiral staircase.

‘What funny little steps, Isola!’ exclaims Nanny B. ‘How many are there, I wonder? Why don’t we count them? One, two, three…’

His Lordship opens the door at the top.

‘Thirty-three!’ cries Nanny B.

4.

They’re in a small octagonal room inside a tower, with seven windows and one door.

Through the windows Isola can see other towers, empty as this one, a square kilometre of leaded roofs, and the four gold balls above the façade in the distance.

Inside the room there is a small round table with two chairs. There is also a leather armchair, with an ashtray beside it on a column of brass.

‘My late wife called this the Dolorous Tower,’ his Lordship tells Nanny B, referring to Isola’s mother. ‘Ha, ha. Always the romantic.’

On the table are a glass of lemonade and a plate of chocolates, each decorated with a crystallised fruit. Also a box tied up with ribbon.

5.

His Lordship dismisses Nanny B.

‘Why don’t you sit down and eat the chocolates, Isola?’

The chocolates taste stale.

‘Come on then, drink! Drink the lemonade!’

Lord Robert lights a cigar. He is restless. He feels in his pockets for his watch and then for a silver hip flask. He takes a swig and his eyes go red and watery.

‘Open your present, Isola. I brought it for you all the way from Africa.’

She pulls the box towards her and starts to pull and tug at the ribbon.

‘You’ll never do it at that rate.’

Irritably, Lord Robert tosses his cigar into the ashtray, takes out a pocket knife with an ivory handle, and rips through the ribbon with a single upward jerk.

6.

Inside is the most hideous object Isola has ever seen. It is a golden goblet with a golden base, but its pedestal is a wrist and a hand. Not a pretend hand of gold or ivory, but an actual hand, the hand of an enormous hairy man, with real skin and real nails, its thumb and fingers reaching up almost to the rim.

She is only six. She gives a small, appalled gasp.

Her father laughs.

‘You think it’s a human hand, don’t you, you silly child? Of course it isn’t. It’s the hand of a wild beast. A fierce gorilla. Your brave Papa shot it himself from a river steamer.’

‘Thank you, Papa,’ Isola manages at last to say.

‘You don’t think your papa would chop off the hands of a person, do you, Isola? That would be a very bad thing to do.’

7.

‘Now then, Isola,’ says his Lordship sternly, looking at his watch, ‘I must be going soon.’

He leans toward her, though he looks not at her eyes, but at the top of her head.

‘Let’s make this our special room, eh, Isola? Our secret room. You can leave that funny old gorilla cup up here if you want. It will be here for you when we come up again.’

He sits back in his armchair.

‘One more kiss for your dear papa who buys you expensive presents.’

He looks at Isola’s chin.

‘That’s real gold, you know,’ he says. ‘Real African gold. You must kiss me on the mouth.’

Isola does not like the steely way his hands clamp onto her so that only he can choose the time for her to move away. But even less she likes how his cigar-tasting tongue comes suddenly pushing and poking between her lips.

But then he goes back to Africa, disappearing into the map on the nursery wall.

8.

Isola is at her dolls’ house. The dolls have been having a banquet, a wonderful feast, with plaster chicken, and plaster roast beef, and three different colours of plaster blancmange. But now they fall silent so that Isola can listen to the nursery maids.

‘Yes. Late last night,’ says one. ‘Karl said he was in one of his moods and hit poor Claude with a riding crop.’

‘Up drinking till the early hours I heard,’ the other says. ‘Moaning and groaning away about interfering do-gooders and no gratitude and all his good work undone.’

‘Things have gone bad for him over there, apparently,’ the first one says. ‘He’s lost his position or something like that. That’s why he’s back so soon.’

9.

Isola pretends to nibble at the English biscuits which her father has laid out next to the severed hand.

She finds it hard to understand his mood. His speech is slurred and his eyes red. He looks at her chin rather than her eyes, and talks about do-gooders and bleeding hearts. He says he is misunderstood and all alone in the world. At one point it seems to Isola he might be crying, though it is so unlike her own crying that she can’t be sure. She is only seven.

Then he says, ‘Come and kiss me, my dear little Isola. You are all I have in the world.’

10.

Isola kisses her Papa.

Still he doesn’t look her in the face. She can tell that there is something about her that interests him but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what looks out of her eyes.

‘Don’t try to close your mouth,’ he snaps. ‘No one wants a girl who won’t open up.’

11.

His Lordship’s face is red and agitated.

‘Each other is all we have left in the world, Isola. All we have in the world.’

His gaze moves from her chin to the top of her head, and then away, across the room. He seems to disintegrate in some way. And she does too. She turns herself into a cloud of little specks of dust that have no feelings and mean nothing to anyone at all. So thoroughly does she disassemble herself, in fact, that it comes as a shock to notice that her father is once more speaking to her, as if she were present and real.

‘Did you notice that funny lumpy thing I’ve got in my trousers?’ he murmurs, speaking so stealthily that it is as if he himself is trying to avoid hearing it. ‘I bet you wondered what it was.’

He pulls her hand across. But as soon as she touches it he jumps up from his chair, as if the touch was an unwelcome and intrusive act initiated by her.

‘You must never, never, ever tell anyone what happens in this tower, do you understand?’ he thunders. ‘Never.’

12.

She is back in the Tower again. The table is bare. Lord Robert locks the door with a shaky hand then pulls her over to the chair.

‘Did you keep your promise? Did you tell no one?’

‘Yes, Papa, no one.’

‘Good girl, good girl,’ he whispers, looking away from her, as if he himself doesn’t wish to hear what he’s about to say. ‘Well now, I’m going to let you see it!’

Nothing has prepared Isola for what now comes springing out of his unbuttoned fly. It is gnarled and wrinkly like a tree, with blue tubes in it, and an ugly, blind little mouth.

His Lordship’s hand shoots out and clamps around her wrist.

‘It wants you to stroke it.’

She has hardly touched it before it spits over the front of her dress.

‘Damn!’ shouts her father, leaping up. ‘God damn it!’

13.

Small Isola alone in the high dark corridors, with their smell of mould and honey. Behind her an embroidered jaguar sinks its teeth into the neck of a tapir, while at the same time a giant snake coils round the jaguar, so as to crush it to death. But she isn’t looking at the tapestries or the dead animals’ heads. She’s keeping her mind as empty as she can.

14.

‘You are not to tell anyone. Not anyone, do you understand, or Papa will be very very cross.’

His gaze has been roving round the room. Suddenly he picks up the gorilla goblet and a gleam comes into his eyes.

‘You know I told you your Papa would never cut off a person’s hand? Well, I’ll tell you the truth now, Isola. It’s different in Africa. We cut people’s hands off all the time. It’s the only language those darkies understand. Oh yes, Isola, me and my men have cut off many hands, even from little girls like you.’

15.

Isola is at her dolls’ house in the nursery. The dolls are burying a child. She mutters and whispers to them crossly while her ears strain to hear what Nanny is saying to a maid. Four years have passed since she first visited the Tower and she is ten years old.

‘We can all see it, Francine, not just you, and we are all distressed. But remember we’re only servants. There is nothing we can do.’

Nanny B comes over to Isola.

‘Isola, your father has sent us word…’

Still facing her dolls, Isola flinches. Then she turns a blank face to her nanny and awaits instruction.

16.

Isola in the corridor of silent humming birds, wearing a red dress.

‘Nothing happened,’ she is telling herself, ‘nothing important. I can’t even remember. No, no, I really can’t remember a thing.’

There is a painting above her of an eagle devouring a dove.

17.

Back in the nursery, the servants rush forward, but she turns away from them.

‘I think I’d like to play with my dolls.’

18.

Isola in a blue dress with ribbons in her hair, passing the dead humming birds in their glass case.

19.

Isola at the bottom of the thirty-three steps. She opens the lower door and steps out into the corridor. As always, there’s no one there. Only dead animals, and pictures of animals dying.

20.

Isola in white at fourteen years, passing a suit of armour on an upper landing.

‘I really don’t remember,’ says the pale girl to herself, ‘I really don’t remember at all.’

21.

From out of the ornamental pool at the front of the palace, six stone horses draw a marble charioteer.

Regiments of poplar trees frame the grassy avenue that leads from the chariot to a column on the ridge of the hill. On top of the column is a human form made of stone. It is the dead wife of the first Duke, set high above the Earth against the sky.

The poplar trees are pale yellow, like white wine.

The leaves slowly fall.

22.

In mirrored alcoves, young women giggle with bewhiskered gentlemen. A violinist plays a sentimental tune. Outside it is autumn again and, far away in her palace, Isola has just turned sixteen.

Two gentlemen sit at the bar.

‘You’re just like I used to be,’ Lord Robert is telling his new friend.

How old he looks with his lank grey hair, his cheeks puffy and purple and hatched with broken veins. His companion is only just twenty, with a moustache so thin that it’s barely worth the name. His blue eyes are full of resentment and doubt.

‘You should have seen me when I was your age, Henri,’ says Lord Robert. ‘Full of energy! Full of fire! I was running a concession half the size of this whole damn country, would you believe, getting useful work out of ten thousand good-for-nothing darkies. And then the busy-bodies came and ruined it all, God damn it. But, my dear young friend – and I do mean friend, though we have only just met – my dear, dear friend, I implore you, don’t be like me. Don’t ever let them take away your dreams!’

‘But no one buys my paintings,’ complains Henri. ‘No one offers me commissions. No one appreciates my art.’

‘I will commission you,’ says Lord Robert grandly.

He rises unsteadily to his feet, warily watched by the young women in the mirrors.

‘You shall come to my palace,’ he proclaims, so loudly that all the room can hear him, ‘and you will paint the world a masterpiece. I’ll provide you with everything you need. You’ll paint my lake and my house and my fine park. And when you’ve done that, you’ll paint me. Yes, me, in the medal awarded me by the King himself.’

He draws on his cigar while tears well up in his eyes. Then he sinks back down onto his seat, picks up his brandy and adds with a grudging little shrug:

‘You can even paint my daughter, I suppose, but you’ll have to add a little flesh to her bones.’

23.

Isola watches Henri as he begins to make sketches. She sees him glance uneasily at the immaculate finish of the oil paintings on the walls. She can see he’s frightened. She can tell he’s completely out of his depth.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘by the time Papa gets back from Africa, he’ll have forgotten he even asked you.’

She doesn’t pity Henri exactly, or find him attractive, but she is oddly fascinated by his fear.

‘I’m not really a landscape painter,’ he says, ‘but I would love to draw pictures of you.’

Soon he’s given up painting altogether and is pouring his energies instead, at every opportunity, into Isola’s listless but pliant body.

When she tells him she’s pregnant, he disappears.

24.

Lady Isola, in her four-poster bed, cradles the new baby.

Her eyes see nothing but the small and squirming thing. Her ears hear nothing but its snorting and snuffling. And indeed she sniffs and snuffles herself, for her nose can’t ever seem to get enough of its warm and biscuity smell.

‘Amanda, I will call her,’ she tells Nanny B. ‘It means lovable, you know.’

25.

It is Amanda’s seventh birthday, and here is Isola in the nursery armchair with her daughter’s present in her lap.

She’s found that she can’t cope for more than a very short time with the unruly demands of a child, but she still visits her nearly every week. Officially, of course, Amanda is an orphan, and Isola is the little girl’s guardian.

Amanda approaches the armchair to collect the small parcel. She is quite fond of her mother, but a little shy. Nanny B and her staff stand watching, wringing their hands in unison, as they will the little girl to be pleased.

Amanda unwraps the parcel. Her mother has bought her a beautiful little hairpin, ornamented with a heart picked out in tiny rubies and diamonds. Amanda smiles and shows it to her staff, though she would have preferred a toy.

26.

Isola waits at the nursery door, while Amanda is being wrapped up for a walk.

‘But where is the hairpin?’ she asks. ‘She hasn’t worn it the last two times I saw her. Does she not like it any more?’

‘Oh no, your Ladyship, she loves the pin. It’s just that she might lose it in the park.’

‘Oh nonsense, I can keep an eye on it. Fetch it for her now. I’d like to see it again.’

Nanny B draws breath.

‘Your Ladyship, please don’t be distressed, but I have to confess it’s gone astray. We were hoping to find it quickly and spare your Ladyship the upset.’

‘Spare me the upset? You’ve lied to me and you’ve lost my gift, and yet you speak of sparing me? It was a heart! Did you notice that? It was in the shape of a heart! What are you going to do next? Rip me open and tear the real heart from my body? Probably you’d love to. You’ve never cared for me one bit.’

27.

Fat and middle-aged at twenty-four, Isola trudges heavily along the corridor of silent birds. She has set every servant searching for the hairpin, and now she’s scouring the palace herself, looking for hiding places that the servants might have missed.

And here, unexpectedly, is the door to the Tower. She stands and looks at it, not consciously recognising it, but puzzled by a sudden absence in her mind. Like a page missing in

28.

The smell of cigar smoke, the table, the armchair, the hideous goblet. It all comes back to her – it always did, every time she came here – and she wonders, as always, how she could ever have forgotten something so large and so terrible.

But this is the first time she’s ever been here alone. She can smell the lingering remnants of her father’s cigar smoke but Lord Robert himself has gone to the capital, and isn’t expected to return for several weeks. This means that, unlike every previous time she came through this door, Isola faces no new onslaught, nothing to pull her attention away from the memories stored here in this octagonal room with its seven windows, the memories that —

But then suddenly she sees it! The missing hairpin! It’s lying beside the armchair on the floor!

Everything becomes clear in a single moment. He has been bringing Amanda here. He has been bringing her here for the past year. That’s why he leaves Isola alone.

With a cry, she runs to the stairs.

29.

Less than half a minute later she emerges from the lower door into the corridor of dead birds. She is confused. In thirty-three steps she has completely forgotten what it was that so agitated her, but her heart is still pounding, and her palms are still clammy with sweat.

‘Why am I in such a state?’ she wonders.

Then she looks down at her hand.

‘I suppose I must be excited I’ve found this,’ she thinks, seeing the little jewelled pin.

30.

The whole palace is a dolls’ house like the one in the nursery. It has tiny rooms and tiny corridors, and miniature people are distributed among them, performing their various tasks.

At the top, in the Dolorous Tower, are the tiny figures of Amanda and her grandfather, his hand under her skirt.

Far below them is Amanda’s mother, Isola, by herself, plodding heavily through the dim brown corridors.

The stairs between Isola and the Tower are mostly empty. Here and there the occasional tiny servant hurries on some errand this way or that, but none of them are carrying messages between Isola and her child.

31.

But here at last is Isola back in the corridor of birds. A year has gone by since she was last here and she has no idea why she’s come, or what has made her wanderings through the palace become so much more extreme and agitated as time has passed.

She finds herself in front of the door to the Tower. Again she notices her own startling lack of any feeling, as one might notice a sentence which

32.

Back in the Tower itself, she recalls everything, and this time she understands something new.

‘If I leave the Tower,’ she realises, ‘I will instantly forget again.’

It is like an enchantment that she put upon herself long ago when she was a little child, to protect the rest of her life, as best she could, from being swallowed up by the Dolorous Tower.

She goes to the windows. Most of them look out over empty rooftops but on one side, to the left of the door, one of them looks down into a small stone courtyard adjoining some pantries. It is a bright winter day, but the courtyard is in shadow, as it almost always is. And down there, far below her, as if at the bottom of a well, two servants are beating a carpet.

The window doesn’t open, so Isola bangs as hard as she can on the thick glass. But she’s too far up. They wouldn’t be able to hear her, even if they weren’t hitting that carpet so energetically.

She turns back into the room, her eyes darting round that small, accursed space, until they alight on the gorilla goblet that still sits there on the table. At once Isola snatches it up, grasping the hairy skin which has always revolted her, as if it were the hand of a friend.

She strikes it against the glass with all her strength.

The window smashes and her whole arm goes through, while the gorilla goblet, flying from her plump fingers, falls down the middle of that stony well to smash into three pieces at the feet of the astonished servants.

Isola sticks her head out of the broken window.

‘You! Come at once! Bring whoever you can!’

33.

Mouths wide open, the servants look down at the strange objects scattered on the flagstones: a golden disk, a golden cup and a single huge black hand.

Then they look up, squinting into the small square of blue above them. They are amazed to see Lady Isola up there, bellowing like a bull into the bright, cold air. She is normally so fat and so sleepy.

‘You! Come here!’ commands Isola. ‘Bring paper and something to write with.’

They assume she’s gone mad, of course, but she is the daughter of the Duke. Dropping their beaters, they run to obey.