Rooms Built for Forty

Her mother left her three things: a house the river came into twice a day, a surname that meant nothing in any language, and a mantis in the glasshouse the height of a grown woman, pink as the inside of a shell. Isotta Arepo was twenty-three. She had kept all three alive for seven years, which was seven years longer than anyone had kept her.

Tonight the tide was due at eleven minutes past one. She dressed for it.

·   ·   ·

The ballroom had been built for forty couples and a small orchestra, in the years when her family could still afford both. Its windows were taller than the trees. Its floor had been laid by men who believed, as men do, that what they built would outlast the water.

The river wall gave way in her grandmother's time. Nobody mended it. Mending costs money, and the Arepos had always preferred to spend theirs on things that could be worn.

So the river came in. It came under the long doors without knocking, unhurried, like a guest who had never once been asked to leave. It crossed the parquet to the depth of a wrist and lay there for an hour, thinking. Then it went home. It brought leaves and feathers. Once it brought a swan, which sat in the middle of the floor until dawn and looked at Isotta as if she were the one who did not belong.

She did not mind the river. The river was the only visitor who had never asked her what she was going to do with her life.

·   ·   ·

She dressed in the gown because it was the only thing left to dress in.

Ivory silk, cut close, with roses in a pink that had been daring once, scattered down one side as though someone had thrown them at her and missed. The hem was the colour of weak tea. The river had been taking it back an inch a year, and she had let it. Nobody in London would buy a dress that had been underwater.

That was its value, as far as she was concerned. Nobody wants what has been through something. That is how you know it is yours.

She cut her own fringe with her mother's dressmaking shears, in the long glass in the hall, which meant she cut it backwards. It always came out straight. Her mother had said that everything in that house was easier backwards, and her mother had been right about a great many things she should not have been right about.

The hair was black and fell straight to her shoulder blades, the kind of black that takes the flash of a camera and gives none of it back. She had her mother's mouth. She had her mother's way of looking at a person as if she had already been told the price.

·   ·   ·

The house had thirty-one rooms, and she lived in four of them.

The chairs went first, then the dining table that seated twenty-two, to a man who called her "my love" eleven times in one afternoon and still paid less than it was worth. After that she learned to sit on the floor. It was not a hardship. You see more of a room from the floor. You see where the money went.

People think loneliness is silence. It is not. It is a voice, and it is your own, and it agrees with everything you say.

Isotta's had been agreeing with her for seven years. You don't need anyone, it said, while she ate toast standing up at the kitchen window. You were right about that girl from school, and that boy, and all of them. It never wanted to leave.

That should have been the first thing that worried her.

·   ·   ·

The chandelier in the ballroom had once held two thousand four hundred crystals. It now held three hundred and twelve. She knew because she counted them, the way other women count calories, or the men they have kissed.

One crystal a month went to London. One crystal paid the gas.

That afternoon she took the train in with the crystal in the pocket of a man's overcoat she wore over the gown, and walked up Regent Street with the whole city looking at her. She let it. There is a way of being looked at that takes something from you and a way that gives you something, and the difference is entirely in whether you look back. She looked back. A boy outside a shop raised his phone, and she turned her head and gave him her profile and nothing else, the way you give a dog the crust.

Halfway up the street, high on a building front above the traffic, a lion kept its paw on an open book. PAX TIBI MARCE EVANGELISTA MEVS. Peace to you, Mark, my evangelist. The lion of Venice, a long way from home. Her family had come from Venice too, a long way back, with nothing in their luggage but glass and a high opinion of themselves, and the same lion sat over her own front door, short of a nose. She always nodded to this one. It was the only relation she had left in town.

Her mother used to say those words to men as they left the house. Peace to you. They always took it as a blessing.

·   ·   ·

Mr Quaife kept a shop off Regent Street that smelled of old brass and other people's grandmothers. He was not a bad man. He was a man who had decided long ago that a girl in a wet dress could be talked down to any number he liked, and that the decision did him credit.

"Forty," he said, turning the crystal to the light. "And that's me being sentimental, sweetheart."

"It's Georgian," said Isotta.

"They all say that."

"Then they're all right. It hung over a room where a duchess fainted and a bishop told a lie. It's been in my family since before yours had a shop."

He smiled the way you smile at a child who has used a long word. "Forty-five."

There was someone else in the shop. Isotta had felt it the way you feel a draught. A woman of her own age stood by the rings in a camel coat that had never been rained on, fair hair pinned up in the careless way that takes forty minutes. She was not looking at the rings. She was looking at Isotta's hem.

In her left ear she wore a single crystal drop on a brass hook.

Isotta knew that hook. Her grandmother had changed the silver ones for brass the winter the silver went, and done it badly: every loop bent slightly left, like a head tilted to listen.

The woman was wearing Isotta's chandelier in her ear.

"That's a beautiful dress," the woman said. "Is it vintage?"

"It's mine."

The woman's eyes went down again to the tidemark and came back up with something new in them. Not pity. Interest, which is more dangerous. "It's wet."

"It usually is."

"Honor," the woman said, and held out a hand with one plain ring on it that had cost more than the roof. "Honor Strand."

Isotta knew the name. It was painted four feet high on the hoardings along the towpath.

She did not take the hand. She did not refuse it either. She simply let it stay there, in the air between them, until Honor Strand understood that it was going to stay there on its own, and took it back. A small thing. Neither of them would forget it.

"Is there a pair?" Honor asked, nodding at the crystal on the counter.

"There were two thousand four hundred."

"Then I'll start a collection. Whatever he's offering, I'll double it."

"Six hundred," said Isotta.

The shop went quiet. Mr Quaife made a sound like a kettle taken off just before it boils.

Honor looked at her for a long moment. Women know how to look at each other. Men never learn it, because they think it is about the clothes. It was two people measuring exactly how far the other would go, and liking the answer less than they had expected to.

Then Honor laughed, properly, and took a fold of notes from her coat, because rich women carry cash the way other people carry umbrellas: just in case. She counted six hundred pounds onto Mr Quaife's glass counter and slid it across.

"We're building on your stretch of the river," she said, hooking the new crystal into her other ear, so that now she wore two. "You'll be able to see us from your windows." She let the pause do its work. "For a while."

"Then I'll know where to find you," said Isotta.

They left the shop together and went in opposite directions. Each of them was certain she had won. Only one of them had to walk.

·   ·   ·

She walked the last mile home along the towpath in the blue end of the afternoon. The hoardings began where the old boatyard had been. STRAND, they said, in gold on black, and under it, THE RIVER, REIMAGINED. A painting showed the reach as it would be when they had finished with it: glass towers, pale people with paler dogs, a sky that had never rained.

Her house was not in it.

Where her house stood they had painted the river running smooth and clean, and on the water, just where her ballroom should have been, a little red rowing boat with nobody in it. As if she might be persuaded to simply float away.

She took the stub of a lipstick from her coat pocket and drew, very small, on the empty seat of the rowing boat, a broad arrow. Three strokes. The old mark the Crown once put on anything it meant to keep.

It was the most expensive lipstick she owned. It was also the only thing that afternoon that made her smile.

·   ·   ·

The glasshouse was built onto the back of the house on the river side, a long iron cage of glass with a dome at the end like a held breath. Half the panes were cracked. Inside, the orchids her great-grandmother had brought from somewhere hot had given up on being kept and taken over, and the light came through them pink.

The mantis stood where it always stood, at the far end under the dome, among the orchids, which was the point.

It was the height of a grown woman. It was white at the edges and pink towards the heart, the colour of the inside of a shell, the colour of a mouth. Its four walking legs were flattened into broad curved petals, so that it seemed to be standing on flowers and also to be one. Its forelegs were folded beneath its chin like a woman holding a prayer book she did not believe in. Its eyes looked at nothing and missed nothing.

It had been in the glasshouse for as long as Isotta could remember.

It had only been this size for seven years.

The glasshouse door was locked from the inside. It had been locked from the inside since the morning Isotta turned sixteen. She fed the mantis through a broken pane, on Thursdays, the way her mother had. She fed it the post.

It ate letters. Not all of them. It would not touch a gas bill; gas bills are honest. It ignored bank statements, which only tell the truth in a smaller font. But a letter from a man who meant something other than what he wrote, it took from her fingers faster than she ever saw, like a page turning in another room. Promises went. Apologies went. Offers went.

The Strands had written to her nine times about the house. The mantis had eaten every one.

Men saw an orchid. The gas man had stood in the doorway once and said, "That's a lovely orchid, that," and Isotta had said yes, it was, and watched him go a little pale without knowing why. Her father had seen an orchid too, her mother said. It was the only thing her mother would ever say about him.

Men saw a flower. That was the whole trick, and most of history.

"I met a woman today," Isotta told it, sitting on the cold tiles with her back against the iron, the six hundred pounds folded inside her shoe. "She's going to take the house. She's wearing the chandelier."

The mantis said nothing. It had never said anything. That was why she told it things.

"I liked her," Isotta said, and was surprised, and did not say anything else for some time.

·   ·   ·

Her mother told her the story of the bottles when she was nine, the way other mothers tell the princess and the pea.

There was a woman in Rome, long ago, called Giulia, who sold a clear water in little glass bottles to women who were married to men they could not leave. It had no colour and no taste. A few drops at a time, in the wine. The bottles had a saint painted on them, so that anyone who found one would take it for holy oil, which, her mother said, in a way it was. Six hundred husbands, the story went, and not one of them ever had a bad word to say about her.

The Arepos never claimed to be descended from Giulia. They were glassmakers. They only said, with a particular smile, that someone had to make the bottles.

"Venenum," her mother said. That was the Latin. It meant poison. It also meant a love potion. The Romans were not sentimental, and had noticed that the two were very often the same bottle, given to a different person.

"Love is the same word as poison if you say it in Latin," her mother said. "And Rome is only love, spelled by someone walking away."

ROMA. AMOR. Isotta wrote it on the steamed-up bathroom mirror at nine and watched one turn into the other, and felt the floor of the world tip slightly, and never got it level again.

Her mother told her one more thing, the night before she went. "A name is the last thing a family owns. Never spend it." She was brushing Isotta's hair, and crying so neatly that it took Isotta a while to notice.

The next morning the front door was locked. Not bolted: locked, from the outside, with the old lock under the lion, which did not take a key. It took a word. Five brass rings of five letters, from the old square carved in the lintel, the one that reads the same in every direction.

SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS

The sower Arepo holds the wheels with care. That is the usual translation, and it is a guess, because nobody knows what Arepo means. It is the only word in the square that means nothing at all. It appears nowhere else in Latin. Her family had simply taken it, the way you pick up a good coat that nobody has come back for.

She went in and out by the river stairs at low tide, like a smuggler. She tried SATOR and ROTAS. She tried AMOR. She tried her mother's name. She tried words that were not in the square at all, out of spite.

At sixteen she stopped waiting for the door to open and learned the lock.

It took her forty-one days to try her own name.

·   ·   ·

Nobody was coming. That was the first useful thing anyone ever taught her, and nobody had meant to teach it. She had built a whole life on it, the way the house was built on the river: beautifully, and on a mistake.

There was one bottle on the windowsill of her bedroom, the room that looked down the river towards the city. It was small enough to close a hand around. A cage of old silver went over the glass, studded with crystals that threw the light about like gossip, and on top sat a stopper shaped like a crown. It had no label. It had never needed one.

She had never told anyone what was in it. She is not going to tell you either. Not yet.

·   ·   ·

The spring tide was the highest of the year, and it came in that night in no hurry at all.

There was no electricity. The electricity had gone in August, in a dispute that had been entirely the electricity's fault. She lit candles on the windowsills, on the chimneypiece, in a line along the bottom stair. The three hundred and twelve crystals broke the light up and sent it round the walls in small, nervous pieces.

At one o'clock the water came under the doors. By eleven minutes past it was over her ankles. By half past it was at her calves, cold as a hand you were not expecting, and the hem of the gown lifted and floated round her like something that had not yet decided whether to stay.

She stood in the middle of the floor and let it rise.

She did this every spring tide. Nobody had ever asked her why. Perhaps because it was the only time the house was full.

The water went still. The whole ballroom became a black mirror, and in it, perfectly, upside down, lay the ceiling.

She knew that ceiling by heart. Gods lolling on clouds; a woman in pink with one shoulder bare and an expression of total boredom; a winged child aiming a bow at nobody.

She had never seen it like this. Never this still, never this dark, never with the light coming only from below.

There was writing in the clouds.

It had been painted into the shadows of the plaster, small and pale, in letters that ran from right to left: backwards, the way Leonardo wrote his secrets so that only a mirror could read them. On the ceiling it had only ever been a smudge in the shading, a cloud with a bad complexion. The water turned it the right way round.

She knew the hand. She would have known it in the dark. She was, more or less, in the dark.

HE WILL SAY HE HAS MONEY, it said.

And under it, smaller, as if it had been added later by someone in a hurry:

LET HIM.

Isotta stood very still in the water, and her reflection stood very still beneath her, and for a while neither of them knew what to do with their hands.

She had not taken an instruction from her mother in seven years. She was not about to start with the ceiling.

You don't need anyone, said the voice, very reasonably. It's a painting. It's damp. It's nothing.

For the first time in seven years, it did not sound like her.

·   ·   ·

The light came up the river a little before two.

She saw it first in the water at her feet: a small gold point sliding across the painted sky. Then in the windows, low and swinging, the lamp of a boat. Someone was rowing the last of the way, badly, and swearing in a well-brought-up voice.

Hers was the only lit building for a mile. She had never once thought of that as an invitation.

The boat knocked against the river doors. Then a hand did.

"Hello?" A man's voice, young and warm, the voice of someone who had been forgiven a great deal very early on. "I'm so sorry. I know it's late. I saw your light, it's the only one for miles, and I've done something quite stupid to the engine." A pause, and a laugh at himself, offered up like a gift. "I can pay. For the trouble. Honestly. I have money."

Isotta closed her eyes.

Then she opened them, and walked out of the water, and went up the stairs past the line of candles without hurrying, and took the bottle from her windowsill, and held it for a moment in the hollow of her hand with the little crown pressing into her palm.

On the way back down she passed the end of the corridor, where the glass door to the glasshouse had been locked from the inside for seven years.

It stood open.

The orchids at the far end, under the dome, were still moving, though there was no wind. The place among them where something the height of a woman had stood every day of her life was empty.

Below, the man knocked again, politely.

Isotta Arepo straightened the roses on her shoulder, and went down to let him in.