Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

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.