… then something dark and painful begins to pull me back to earth. I close my eyes.
When I open them I am in the fearful place, the heart of the heart of the forest. It isn’t very good in the middle of the wood. Not very good at all. Twigs snap under the weight of unseen feet. Leaves rustle like predatory wings. Invisible claws flex, inches away from my skin. I can smell the mould of the forest floor and the blackness of night. I know I will never find my way out of the forest, never find the path that will take me back to the lit-up windows of the village; the friendly gossip of the Thursday marketplace; the village virgins in their tablecloth-checked dresses, gathered around the well; the handsome rustic youths in their leather jerkins; the brave woodcutter dressed for best in green velvet and silver buckles; the honking of the geese as the goosegirl harries them up the hill.
The only path I will find will be the one that leads deeper and deeper into the wilderness of fear. I lie down at the foot of a tree and close my eyes. Leaves drift down and cover my face. Small animals scrabble, digging up the soil and burying me, hiding me from the terror of the wood. I cannot open my eyes, my eyelids are the lead lids of coffins, soldered shut, I am buried in the deep in the cold ground, earth stops up my nostrils, gathers in my ears, my mouth is full of sour soil.
Something is pecking at my skin, someone is digging me up, pulling me up from my earth tomb, into the light. People loom in and out of focus, they seem to be aliens, white and fuzzy – spacemen without faces. They are experimenting on me, poking me with needles and sticking tubes in and out of me, probing me to discover my secrets. They are obsessed with my name, ‘Isobel, Isobel,’ they call out to me softly, urgently – stroking my cheek, pinching the skin on the back of my hand, ‘Isobel, Isobel,’ moving my toes and tapping my wrist, ‘Isobel, Isobel.’ They are trying to make me myself by naming me. But then I will disappear. I keep my eyes closed. Tightly.
One day, one of them acquires a face, a human face. Soon they all have faces and then they lose their alien nature and turn into nurses in blue-and-white stripes and frilled caps, serious doctors with coats and stethoscopes who swim in and out of focus.
My head hurts. My head feels as if someone’s blown it up with a bicycle pump. It throbs dangerously, someone has cut the top off my skull and scooped out my brains and replaced them with a bag of tangled and frayed nerves, but I can’t tell anyone because I have been robbed of the power of speech. I don’t want to be in this metallic world of pain, I want to go back to the cold Antarctic and play with the mermaid seals.
And here is Gordon, leaning over me, whispering in my ear, holding my hand, ‘Isobel, Isobel.’ And Vinny, poker-backed on a hospital chair, saying, ‘Better yet?’ impatiently. ‘Orite?’ Debbie asks, worry creasing her eyes so that they almost disappear. And Eunice and Mrs Primrose with grapes and white chrysanthemums – the flowers of death, Mrs Primrose saying anxiously. ‘Can she hear us, do you suppose?’ and Eunice saying, ‘Hearing’s the last sense to go.’ And Carmen munching her way through the box of Maltesers she’s brought with her. Mrs Baxter and Audrey, Mrs Baxter dabbing her eyes with a tissue from my locker and Audrey saying, ‘It’s all right, everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it, Izzie?’ and kissing my forehead, her breath smelling of the Parma violets she’s been eating and her rope of hair falling on the sheets. I want to ask about Mr Baxter, is he dead or alive? But my tongue is like a roll of carpet in my mouth and all I can move is an eyelid that flutters and shakes.
‘Izzie? Izzie?’ Charles says, his face oddly solemn so that I feel like cracking a joke to make him put on his clown-face.
‘There,’ Mrs Baxter beams, ‘you look so much better!’
‘Where is Mr Baxter?’ Mrs Baxter’s face clouds over and she gathers herself to say, ‘He’s no longer with us, I’m afraid, Isobel.’
But where is he?
Slowly, slowly, everything begins to fall back into shape, like a kaleidoscope at rest, a jigsaw finished. The lips that came and kissed me, that felt like the kiss of death, were really the kiss of life. The first time I was ever kissed by a man must have been by the resuscitating lips of an ambulanceman, fighting to keep me alive. The cosmic journey I took was the world of the comatose.
The pain is better now that I’m in the soft poppy world of morphia. Everything is very white, the sheets, the walls, the starched nurses’ aprons. There is another white bed in the white room, the sheets are fields of snow, the pillows crackling with ice. On the edge of my field of vision I can see that there is someone in the bed. Nurses come and go and talk to the other patient, their voices boom and fade. ‘Just a minor wee op,’ a nurse says smiling, as if the woman is being given a treat.
I know this other patient from somewhere. I hear her voice, strange and hypnotic, weaving its way through the white cotton wool that they’ve wrapped my glass body in. Her voice fills in the intervals between nurses and consultant’s rounds, visitors and sleep. After days, possibly weeks, maybe years, I realize that she’s telling me a story. She is my own Scheherazade, she knows everything, she must be the storyteller from the end of the world. But how does it begin? Why it begins, as it must, she says, with the arrival of the baby –
PAST
THE BONNY BONNY ROAD
The London house was a hive of activity as the staff got ready for the return of Sir Edward and Lady de Breville from abroad. Not alone, but with their new baby. Sir Edward de Breville had sent for his own nanny to come up from the family’s country residence. Although Nanny had been enjoying her retirement in the heart of the country – all that gossip and rhubarb wine – she responded well to the call of duty and hauled herself up to town from Suffolk, tempted by a second-class railway ticket and the opportunity to shape another generation of de Brevilles. What’s more, she had been promised a nursery staff of four – a dogsbody, two nursemaids and a second nanny – underneath her and was looking forward to throwing her weight around in her old age.
‘All those people for one little baby,’ the parlourmaid whispered to the footman, ‘and to think, my mother brought up six of us single-handed.’
‘Ah, but the rich are different,’ the footman said, ‘they take a lot more looking after.’
The de Brevilles had always been rich, ever since they came over with the Conquest and were handed lands left, right and centre by the Bastard (conqueror and king), for their zeal in subduing the stubborn English. Since then they had just got richer and richer, with their huge tracts of farmland in Wiltshire, their orchards in Kent, their fields of barley in Fife, their fields of coal in Yorkshire, a swathe of elegant buildings in Mayfair.
Edward de Breville, last of his line. Twenty-nine years old, tall and handsome, as was the birthright of all first-born de Breville sons. A responsible man, he didn’t leave those orchards and coal-fields unvisited, or fail to keep an eye on his overseers. The rich do not get richer by neglecting their money. A war-hero, a captain of men, with a distinguished scar running the length of one handsome cheek where a German bayonet caught him. A man who believed in King and Country, despite everything he’d witnessed in the fields of Flanders. A man who believed in cricket on the village green and humility in the company of men of the cloth, even lowly vicars.
And the most eligible of bachelors – well-behaved girls swooned for him, society girls pretended innocence for him, fast young things slowed down and boasted about their domestic skills. ‘Such a catch,’ the society matrons whispered furiously over the lobster in aspic and the claret jellies.
In the first season after the Great War Edward de Breville was the most competed-for man in London. Which of the lovely, and not so lovely, well-bred English roses would he choose for a consort? He would not, surely, look across the Atlantic to all those upstart daughters of press barons and bankers and vulgar shipping millionaires, all of them dying to be duchesses?
No indeed, for Sir Edward’s eye had roamed a little further south than New York or Boston – to somewhere more exotic, more outlandish – had been charmed by the lovely form of an Argentinian cattle heiress, Irene Otalora. ‘Beef?’ the society matrons gasped in horror.
Sir Edward didn’t have to travel as far as the pampas to find his Argentinian bride, for she had a French mother and was quite the European, summering in Deauville, where Sir Edward discovered her, daintily sipping a
citron pressé.
They married abroad, quietly, to avoid interest in her problematic Catholic religion.
Sir Edward watched his wife on the night of their wedding, dropping her silken clothes around her ankles like Botticelli’s Venus rising from the waves. She unwound the long black hair that curled to her waist and stepped out of her clothes and raised her arms above her head to display her body to her new husband and Sir Edward thought of Salome and Jezebel and the Queen of Sheba and thanked God for French mothers-in-law who educated their daughters so well.
For an untimely second, Sir Edward had a vision of a roomful of stone-cold English roses lying stiffly between the nuptial sheets like effigies, an entirely unwelcome vision immediately banished by the sight of his new wife gliding towards him. The grandee tilt of the head, the coquettish smile, the thrusting breasts with their darkbrown aureoles, the firm grasp of those brown fingers on his manhood … Sir Edward melted into his honeymoon bed and his honeymoon wife.
And now there was little Esme. ‘A very pretty child,’ was Nanny’s pleased verdict. ‘We’ll make a real de Breville out of her.’
Lady de Breville visited the nursery every day and cooed prettily over her lace-clad baby and spoke high-class nonsense in French while Nanny smiled patiently and waited for her to go so she could get on with giving the child oatmeal and Scotch broth. Lady de Breville had the baby’s ears pierced when she was only a few weeks old, so now she had tiny gold hoops in her little brown ears. Like a gypsy, Nanny thought, but managed to hold her disgust in. She was only a servant after all.
Every evening little Esme was brought down, long after Nanny would have had her in bed, and paraded in the drawing-room to be admired by Sir Edward and Lady Breville’s dinner guests as they glittered and fluttered in their sequins and feathers drinking ‘cocktails’. Being foreign, of course, Nanny thought, Lady Irene didn’t know how to treat servants. Nanny didn’t like the patrician line Lady Irene took with the nursery staff. Nanny didn’t like it at all. Nanny began to mutter under her breath.
Lady Irene had cut off all that sensual hair and now had a sleek androgynous bob that didn’t entirely go with her voluptuous Latin American figure. She showed more leg – and very good leg it was – than any other London hostess, and danced the Charleston as well as any chorus girl. Sir Edward had begun to notice the overbearing nature of his Buenos Airean brahmin, beginning to wonder if this marriage was such a good idea after all. He looked at girls like Lady Cecily Markham and Lady Diana de Vere with their pale well-fed skin and horse-riding hips and regretted rejecting them so peremptorily. They would have handled the servants so much better.
Nanny declared that she was very sorry but she was going to go back to Suffolk if Sir Edward didn’t mind, it wasn’t that she wanted to make trouble or anything but she didn’t really see eye to eye with Lady Irene – foreign ways and so on – she had known Sir Edward as man and boy but really—
‘Thank you, Nanny,’ Sir Edward interrupted kindly, ‘of course you may go.’
What a delight little Esme was. Sir Edward had started to visit the nursery almost every day. The second-in-command nanny – Margaret – was now in charge and doing a very good job. She was a very plain girl, very religious with lots of modern ideas about fresh air. The nursery dogsbody had broken an ankle, tripping in the muddy street, and was staying with her sister until she was better. There were two nursemaids, Mina and Agatha. Agatha was pretty in a very English way, blond curls, hazel eyes, snub nose. Edward’s mother, the dowager Lady de Breville, had always had very strict rules about interplay with the servants, it simply wasn’t done.
‘This simply isn’t done,’ Sir Edward murmured through the blond curls as he caught Agatha on the back stairs and sank his hands into her ripe flesh. Sir Edward didn’t mean to shout out quite so loudly as he shuddered to a climax somewhere inside the fustian petticoats of the nursemaid and Agatha certainly didn’t mean to squeal quite so much when the aristocratic member penetrated her plebeian hymen – certainly neither of them intended to draw the attention of the mistress of the house. But in no time at all there was a terrible commotion on the back stairs and a dark avenging angel had whisked Sir Edward upstairs out of the servants’ sight, but not their earshot, and was screaming in a polyglot language that pronounced Sir Edward a damned
cochon loco.
The town house was in a certain disarray. Lady Irene retired to Paris for a few weeks to think things over. Not that she had the slightest intention of ending her marriage but Sir Edward needed to suffer a little, show a little repentance – an emerald necklace perhaps, or a racehorse. Agatha was dismissed without references. The nanny, Margaret, came down with a dreadful dose of flu. Mina was put out by the amount of work she had to do. ‘When did I last have a day off?’ she asked Esme, who gurgled and waved her tiny fists around in the air.
Mina was in love with one of the footmen, a callous, callow youth called Bradley. Mina had lately been rejected by Bradley. Mina’s heart was breaking.
