Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

‘You’re home early, sweetheart,’ murmured Chris sleepily as Darius climbed into the warm space beside her.

‘Yeah, a bit tired. Thought I’d call it a night.’

‘Nice evening?’

‘Oh, you know, bit samey, but they’re good blokes, every one of them. Hearts in the right place and all of that.’

‘You are tired aren’t you, poor pet,’ she said, cuddling up against him in the darkness.

It was a long time before he slept. He lay with his eyes open for an hour or more, while the wind blew across the chimneys and rattled the front gate, thinking about all the places he could once have gone, that were now beyond his reach.

Two days later, Darius came back to an empty house. Chris was a teaching assistant in a local school and was normally home before he was, but he remembered now that she’d had some sort of social event to go to after work. One of the teachers was retiring, she’d said, or something like that.

‘I won’t be very late,’ she’d said, ‘but I will have eaten. I’ll leave you to fix something for yourself.’

It always unsettled him, coming home to an empty house, and he could never quite help himself from feeling a certain childish resentment towards Chris for not being there, and towards whoever she was with for keeping her from him. Of course he knew quite well that this was silly and unfair.

He took a bottle of beer from the fridge and went to sit by the fishpond in his garden. The windy weather had passed. It was a calm evening and, as the light faded, the dragonflies came like they sometimes did, dry and papery, buzzing and droning around the water on some mysterious business of their own.

What were they doing, he wondered, these strange archaic creatures that had been here before the dinosaurs, here when the first fish wriggled out onto the land?

He dozed off for a bit. When he woke it was dark, and the doorbell was ringing inside the house.

Cycling home from the retirement do at work, Chris had been hit by a car. She lost consciousness instantly.

People gathered round her. Somebody made a call. The police arrived and an ambulance came whooping through the streets. She was taken to the hospital and laid out on a bed in a special room of her own, surrounded by humming machines. The room had a view of those chestnut trees on the far side of the park. They were hardly moving at all.

When Darius arrived, her doctor told him that they wanted to disconnect her from life support.

‘I’m so sorry but I’m afraid she’s gone,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s absolutely no brain activity at all.’

Darius, with his lion’s mane, began to rage and roar.

‘No way!’ he bellowed. ‘You’ll have to kill me first!’ He shoved doctors and nurses away from where his wife lay like Sleeping Beauty, her chest peacefully rising and falling. He stood guard in front of her, daring them to come near. ‘Look at her, for Christ’s sake! Just bloody look at her! She’s obviously alive!’

It was his three daughters, all of them in their twenties, who finally persuaded him that Chris was no longer present. Her body was just ticking over by itself, they explained to him over and over. It was like an idling vehicle with no one behind the wheel. The driver would never return.

In the early hours of morning, Darius’s girls walked their father home across the park. Fresh air will be good for us, they said, trying their best to be grown-up. Two of them supported Darius, as if he was an old man who couldn’t stand by himself. And actually he couldn’t. It was as if some kind of malignant leech had sucked all the life and blood from him, all the muscle, all the roar.

As they passed under the chestnut trees, the clumps of foliage rustled slightly and sighed above their heads. Entangled among them was the bright blue kite. It had pulled so hard and long towards the sky that its string had finally snapped. And without the tension that had held it firm against the wind, it no longer knew how to fly.

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.’