Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

‘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.