‘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.
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.
9
Frozen Flame
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.