‘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!’