Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

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.

Only recently has it occurred to me that Nicola was also young. She was nine years older than me, and at the time she seemed wonderfully knowing and grown-up, with a husband and kids and everything, but she was only twenty-eight.

She was a mature student on the same course as me at Bristol Poly. We got talking one day, in the little café attached to the library, about a coursework project we’d been set, and we agreed to meet again from time to time to support each other. I assumed she’d latched onto me because she thought I’d be useful to her. I was a very bright student and, though she was very able herself, she’d left school at sixteen and hadn’t played the academic game for a long time. So I guessed it was me that was going to help her, and not the other way round, but I was perfectly happy to play along, just for the pleasure of her company. She was lively, full of irreverent energy, and very quick to laugh and smile. She also swore a lot and, in seminars, she and another mature student, her terrifyingly beautiful friend Fay, spoke about sex in a frank and matter-of-fact way which I found fascinating and disturbing in equal measure, a window into a world which I longed to inhabit but had no idea how to reach.

It was the third time I met with Nicola, this time in a little hippie place a mile or so from the campus, that I first realised there was more to this than just helping her with her coursework. We’d met at 11, and, after two cups of coffee, had got to 12 o’clock without even mentioning the project. I was a creature of doubt, but even I had to admit to myself that there was really no doubt about it: an attractive, properly grown-up woman was enjoying my company for its own sake. She even laughed at my jokes.

Nicola seemed to notice some change in my face as I registered this, for she smiled, reached over and lightly cupped her hand over mine.

‘We’re two of a kind in some ways, aren’t we?’ she said.

Two of a kind! Spoken to this very shy young man who had spent years worrying if he’d ever manage to negotiate a relationship with any woman at all, that phrase was like a shot of heroin into a main artery! Up to that point, I’d known that I liked Nicola and of course I’d known that I found her very attractive too (although this was true of several other women on the course, including Nicola’s friend Fay), but from that moment onwards, I was utterly and desperately in love.

When you look out into the world you can’t see your own face. All you see is a kind of frame round the edge of your field of vision, with, somewhere towards the bottom of it, a shadowy out-of-focus blob that’s the tip of your nose. I often had the feeling back then that this absence of a face wasn’t just the result of my particular perspective, but was the actual case. I really didn’t have a face, in other words. Other people could look straight in, much as you might look in through the window of some psychic washing machine, and see the tangle of anxiety and shame and frustrated desire that was whirling round inside. So I felt this burst of gratitude and love, but then I panicked. Fearing that Nicola could see straight into my head, I looked quickly away from her to avoid her gaze, and realised to my dismay that I was blushing violently.

‘Oh Rick, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to embarrass you!’ Her hand was still resting on mine, and she gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘It’s just that it’s a very long time since I laughed so much, or felt so comfortable in anyone else’s company.’

I made myself look at her again. Her brown eyes were warm and kind. She wasn’t mocking me, I could see. She didn’t think any less of me for having blushed. Incredible as it might seem, Nicola didn’t just see tangled wet stuff churning round when she looked at me, but an actual face with eyes and nose and mouth, which for some strange reason she’d grown to like. She’d always looked pretty to me, but now she had suddenly become quite extraordinarily beautiful, and I saw that what she had to give, in every single respect, was exactly what I’d always wanted.

‘Me neither,’ I said, quite truthfully. ‘We seem to find the same things funny, don’t we?’

‘We really do,’ she said, and then: ‘It’s getting stuffy in here, isn’t it? Have you got time for a bit of a walk? I could use some fresh air before I put my nose back to the grindstone.’

The hippie café was in the suburb of Clifton, which was a slightly more bohemian place then than it is now. We walked up to the green and then to the famous bridge across the Gorge. Neither of us had set a time limit on this little outing, but at about the point we paid our five pence toll and set out across the bridge, we must both have realised that we’d crossed some kind of line. But we pretended not to notice, continuing to talk animatedly about the course and our lives and the world in general as we headed, without actually discussing where we were going, towards the woods on the far side of the Gorge.

‘I love Leigh Woods,’ Nicola said, ‘don’t you? Have you got time to walk into them just a little bit?’

So then we were under the green leaves together, just me, and this dazzlingly beautiful grown-up who’d sought out my company, walking to a particular spot that Nicola knew, where we could stand and look down into the Gorge. The tide was in, I remember, and some sort of tugboat was coming up the river.