‘Michael, you’re in this room at the top of the stairs. There’s a brand new duvet with footballers on it, just like your tie!’
The words ‘but I don’t like football’ are just a swallow away, but she’s still talking.
‘And in case you like reading, Uncle Edmund dug out a couple of old books he had when he was a boy.’
Robinson Crusoe. Mikey doesn’t open it because but he doesn’t want his mum to be sad that they don’t have many books any longer. The social worker only had room in her car for the things that really mattered, and when he puts it down Diana reaches her own conclusions about the literacy skills of state-educated children. Perhaps she can help him, when she gets to know him better, pay for a private tutor, take him to libraries.
‘What’s up there?’ Valerie peers up a much narrower staircase.
‘What Edmund calls the nursery, although, as you say, not much use for that. Don’t worry, no mad women in the attic, but we do have our very own gothic tower.’ Imitating a trumpet, Diana strides in front of them. ‘In Victorian times, Edmund’s relations made a lot of money and didn’t know what to do with it. So what’s new!’ She shrugs. ‘They built the tower as a sort of joke. You can get in through the door you can see from the drive, and eventually that will be the way down to the pool, but if you follow me’ – she speaks in what she hopes is a conspiratorial whisper which might appeal to a child – ‘there’s a secret entrance!’
At the end of the landing, at what looks like a wood-panelled wall, Diana slides one section to the side and behind it there is another door with an ornate key. A light reveals a short stone passageway and, beyond that, a spiral staircase.
‘Jesus, Di!’ says Valerie. ‘I’ve had enough of visiting prisons.’
‘Trust me,’ says Diana.
‘Can Monty come?’ Mikey asks his mother.
‘Monty stays here, on guard,’ says Diana. ‘Sit, Monty, stay.’
The boy whispers in the dog’s ear, ‘Bye bye, Monty.’
The sound of chattering fades as the grown-ups disappear from view. He is small for nine years old, the steps are steep, and he struggles to keep up. The staircase goes round and round, like a helter skelter, except he is trying to go up it, not down, and his socks keep slipping on the stone. He can touch both sides of the staircase at the same time. Every now and again there are little candles on ledges, but almost no windows, and he only passes one door which turns out to be a bathroom, so he has to go on up. Above his head, the underneath of the steps look like they might go on for ever and take him somewhere he has never been before. It isn’t like Lockdown, though, he won’t be able to cheat to get out. He half expects to climb until he reaches the sky and be rescued by an army helicopter, but, no, here he is at the top with a door to a bedroom with a massive four-poster bed on one side of him and on the other, a wall. Just a wall. It seems wrong that the spiral ever has to end.
‘Now, Val, I simply insist.’ Diana is moving round the hexagonal room, putting on the lamps and drawing their attention to one fabulous feature after another: the rich red velvet curtains with gold cords matching the swags which drape the bed; a great tapestry hanging from the ceiling – can you see the hunters on their horses, Michael, and the hounds at their heels, and there’s the deer ahead, they’re going to catch him, don’t you think?
‘And here,’ says Diana, pointing to a framed piece of embroidery hanging on the opposite wall, ‘they call this a sampler. A little girl in Victorian times did it. Look closely, at the bottom it says “Edith Carlton, eighteen twenty-four, aged ten”.’
All three of them study the picture, a river flowing through an idyllic parkland with a house much like Wynhope in the background, harps hung in the weeping willow trees in each corner and lines in green thread beneath.
‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof,’ Diana reads out loud.
To Valerie, there is something indescribably moving about the sampler; there has been so much weeping recently, she can feel the water running like tears and the little girl, only the same age as Mikey, seated on her own in a dim light, stitching sadness into the cloth.
‘It goes on a bit,’ Diana is saying. ‘It used to hang in the drawing room. Can you imagine something so gloomy when I’m trying to brighten the place up? Edmund likes it, though, something to do with the ancestors and Antigua. He calls it the Wynhope Psalm, so this is our compromise, to hang it in the tower.’
‘Was she a little slave girl, this Edith? Or was she the child of one of the plantation owners?’
‘I’ve no idea, Val, I’ve never thought about it,’ Diana replies. ‘Does it matter?’
His mother starts to sing one of her old reggae songs, ‘By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down,’ and his aunt is joining in, ‘and there we wept’, and they dance in a silly way and they laugh when they run out of words. At one of the leaded windows which ring the room, Mikey opens the latch, letting in the evening air, and the song is blown away behind him. He can see out and hear different things. Over the giant Christmas trees which fringe the edge of the park, great black birds are ganging up, swirling and screeching in circles, waiting for everyone to go to bed in this vast, half-empty house before they attack. Taking refuge on the high bed next to his mother, he picks at a loose thread on the bedspread. He can tell she doesn’t want to sleep there and feels within himself the tight tummy of responsibility.
‘I like Mum to sleep closer to me,’ he mumbles, all in a hurry.
‘What did you say, Michael?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You let your mother enjoy a bit of the luxury she deserves.’
So she heard him the first time.
‘Don’t you worry about Mummy. We’ll leave the door open at the end of the passageway onto the landing and she’ll be fine, I promise,’ she says. ‘Now, I’ll just check the bathroom.’
They are alone together at last. His mother looks so lovely there, on the great bed in her little black dress, her toes curled up under her and her eyes huge and smudgy black. He can tell she’s crying, so he lays his head on her lap, he tells her he can sneak up there and sleep with her when Diana has gone to bed, but she sniffs and wipes her nose on the clean towel and says she’s just being a silly billy, it’s the funeral and seeing Diana and she’s just so sad about Nanna, but it’ll be fine, he’s not to worry. He doesn’t believe her. On top of the chest of drawers there is a large blue-and-white china bowl with a jug in it and a potty by the side. This will make her laugh. Mikey picks up the potty, puts it on the floor and makes a big thing of pretending to unzip his trousers. It works. His mum hides her face in the pillow, sobs turning to laughter; only he can do that, she always says to him, only he can make everything better.
‘Oh, Mikey,’ she gasps, ‘Stop it! She’ll find out!’
And there she is, at the door, believing for one hideous moment that the boy is actually going to pee in her porcelain and the sheer physicality of him fiddling with himself appals her.
‘That’s worth a lot of money,’ she cries.
‘It’s just a potty,’ says the boy. ‘For pissing in.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that. If you’re not careful you’ll grow up as crude as your grandfather.’
‘What does she mean?’
Taking the potty, Valerie thumps it back on the chest of drawers. ‘Don’t you dare, ever, speak to my son like that.’
Truth hurts, that’s what Diana wants to say, but looking at them wound round each other like ivy, she sees they are insuperable,