by Eva Ibbotson
But Marie-Claude now detached herself from the besotted gentlemen surrounding her and said something to Dubrov, who turned to his host.
‘Marie-Claude is a little concerned about our newest member of the corps. Apparently she decided to walk up from the jetty, but that was quite a time ago and she isn’t here yet.’
‘She is English,’ explained Marie-Claude, turning her incredible eyes on Rom and repressing a sigh. If things had been different . . . even without moustaches . . . But they were not and resolutely she continued, ‘And it is impossible to keep her inside. You know how it is: the fresh air, et tout ça. And naturally one would not wish her to be eaten by a boa constrictor.’
‘English!’ said Rom, amazed. ‘You have an English dancer?’ No wonder he had been unable to visualise her in St Petersburg or Kiev.
Dubrov nodded. ‘She only joined us just before we left, without any stage experience; she’s done very well. Last night was her debut.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Rom. ‘I’m sure she’s perfectly all right. But I shall send someone to fetch her.’
This, however, he did not do. Briefing Lorenzo and his assistants, he slipped silently away and made his way down the steps.
She was not on the main avenue, not on any of the terraces, not in the arboretum, not by the pond . . .
He continued to search, not anxious but a little puzzled. Then from behind the patch of native forest he heard the great Caruso’s voice.
‘Your tiny hand is frozen . . . is frozen . . . is frozen . . .’ sang the incomparable tenor, for the record – the first he had ever bought his Indians – was badly cracked.
Che gelida manina . . . a record valued even above the ‘Bell Song’ from Lakmé, but seldom played now owing to its fragile state. They had a visitor, then, and one they wanted to honour. With an eagerness which surprised him, Rom made his way between the trees.
The village was bathed in the last rays of the afternoon sun. Hammocks were strung between the dappled trees; a monkey scratched himself on a thatched roof. . . a small armadillo they had tamed rooted in a patch of canna lillies.
In the circle around the horn of the gramophone sat the women with their children, together with the few men too old to be busy in the plantations or helping at the house. Someone knowing them less well would have assumed that this was just the usual evening concert, but Rom – seeing the fruit set out on painted plates and the cassia juice in gourds on the low carved stool – knew they were welcoming a valued guest.
Only what guest? And where?
At first he could see no one unusual. Then, searching the listening faces, he saw a girl he had at first taken to be one of the tribe, for she wore a dress such as the missionaries forced on their converts and she was holding a baby, cupping a hand round its head – Manuelo’s three-day-old baby whom they were taking to Father Antonio at dawn to be baptised.
Then they saw him; someone took off the needle from the record and as they came towards him, chattering in welcome, she lifted her head and looked directly at him . . . and over her face there spread a sudden shock of surprise, almost of recognition, as though he was someone she knew from another life.
‘You must be the last of the Company’s swans?’ he said, coming forward. ‘I’m Romain Verney, your host.’
‘Yes,’ she replied, getting to her feet. ‘I’m Harriet Morton.’ The voice was low; scholarly. Old Iquita took the baby from her and he saw how hard it was for her to part with its soft warmth; how she drew her fingertips across the round dark head until the last possible moment, just as Simonova had drawn her fingertips down the arm of her lover before she bourréed backwards into the lake. ‘God must be very brave,’ she said, ‘making babies with fontanelles like that. What if their souls should escape before they’ve joined? What then?’
‘Oh, God is brave all right,’ said Rom lightly. ‘You see Him all the time, chancing His arm.’ But he was startled, for she had smiled as she spoke and everything he had thought about her gravity and seriousness was suddenly set at nought. There was nothing wistful or tentative about that smile. It came slowly, but ended in a total crunching up of her features as though a winged cherub had just flown by and whispered a marvellously funny joke into her ear.
They made their farewells and he began to lead her back.
‘They’ve been so kind to me,’ she said, still not quite in the real world after her hour in the garden and the conviction which had burst from her as he stepped from the trees that this was Henry’s ‘secret boy’. ‘Look what they gave me!’ She took out of her pocket a small carving of a margay and held it out to him.
‘They like to give presents.’ But Rom was surprised, for the carving was one of old José’s, their best craftsman; it was a lovely thing. ‘How did you make yourself understood?’ he asked curiously.
‘I think if you want to, you can always understand people, don’t you? And the ones who had grown up in the mission could follow a little Latin.’
‘Ah, yes; Latin,’ he murmured. ‘A usual accomplishment in ballet dancers?’
‘My father taught me,’ she said briefly and a shadow passed over her face. But the next moment she was entranced again: ‘Oh, that tree! That colour. . . and the way the flowers grow right on the trunk like that!’
‘Yes, that’s Aspidosperma silenium – pollinated by opossums, believe it or not!’
She liked that, wrinkling her nose. ‘It’s lovely that you know the names. I kept asking and asking, but nobody did.’
‘Is it important that you know the names of things?’
‘Yes. I feel . . . discourteous if I don’t know. As though I’ve failed them somehow. Is that stupid?’
‘No, I understand. But it’s the devil naming things out here. There are literally hundreds of species of trees and only a handful have been classified. I was like a child in a sweet-shop when I first came out, not knowing where to begin.’ He described briefly his discovery of Follina and her eyes grew wide at the wonder of it.
They had reached the edge of the arboretum and a great urn in which there grew a magical orchid – delicate, yet abundant with an overpowering scent.
‘That’s the Queen’s Orchid. The caracara, the Indians call it. Some people find it a bit overwhelming.’
‘Oh no, not against those dark bushes; they cool it.’ She was running her fingers softly along the edge of the petals, tracing lightly the intricate shape of the stamens. He had never seen in a European such a physical response to things that grew. ‘And over there, in the pool? That blue? That’s not a water hyacinth, is it? They grow in drifts?’
‘No – it’s a kind of lobelia. An incredible colour, isn’t it? The water gardens are a perpetual headache; you have to keep the water running all the time, otherwise the mosquitos breed, and that’s the devil. I’ve installed a kind of cataract there . . .’
He explained, led her here and there. She was utterly enthralled and both of them had completely forgotten the time.
‘I thought it would be all dark,’ she said wonderingly. ‘A dark forest and rows and rows of rubber trees.’
‘There are rubber trees – thousands of them, mostly wild. I’ve made plantations too, but this garden is my folly.’ And as she stood waiting for him to continue, he said, ‘I fight a battle like some idiot crusader against the Amazon disease – the disease of all South America, if it comes to that. I call it the Eldorado illness.’
She turned to him, her eyes alert. ‘The belief that there is a promised land?’
‘Yes. Partly. Everyone here searches . . . the Indians, the Portuguese settlers, the people who came later. For gold, for coffee, for the green stones that the Amazon women gave their lovers . . . for groves of cinnamon trees – and now for rubber. They search and they find because the country is so abundant. But then someone comes along from some other country who is not content just to search. Someone who plants coffee or hardwoods, who mines gold systematically instead of picking the nuggets off the ground. And then the se
archers are bankrupt, the villages become derelict and the people starve. It will be the same with rubber; you’ll see. I’ve diversified; I run a gold mine at Serra Deloso, I export bauxite and manganese, I’ve organised a timber business. I shall be all right, but if the price of rubber really drops – and it is dropping as they bring it in from the East – then God knows how many of my friends I shall be able to save. Not enough.’
‘It’s always been so, hasn’t it?’ she said quietly. ‘All through history. Solon trying to warn Croesus . . . don’t lean back on your riches, he said, but no one listened. People don’t.’
You do, Rom wanted to say. You listen as I have never known anyone listen. And he remembered how as a small boy at Stavely walking along the gravel paths absently scuffing the stones, he would suddenly – for no reason that he knew of – bend down to pick up one pebble, just one, and keep it in his pocket. He had never found it hard to share his toys, but no one had been allowed to touch such a pebble; it became his treasure and his talisman.
It had been like that, he now admitted, when he ran his opera glasses down the line of swans. ‘This one,’ a voice had said inside him. ‘This one is for me.’
As they passed a clump of bamboo they heard a rustling and Rom stopped and gave a low whistle. The rustling ceased, began again . . . An inquisitive snout appeared, a pair of bright eyes . . . then the coati’s gleaming chestnut body and stripy tail.
‘He’s offended,’ said Rom. ‘I give orders to have him kept out of the house when I have guests. You watch him deciding whether or not he will speak to us.’
The performance which followed would have done credit to a venerable Rotarian whom nobody had invited to make an after-dinner speech. The coati moved forward, thought better of it, sat up on his haunches and pretended to investigate a non-existent nut with busy forepaws . . . Once more he approached, once more he sat down – and at last, but with evident condescension, came to rub himself against Rom’s legs.
‘How tame he is!’
‘Most things can be tamed if you take the time,’ he said, sending the little creature off again with a pat on its rump. ‘I found him when he was a few days old. Come, if you like animals I’ll show you one more thing and then we really must get back.’
But as she followed him Harriet, in her mind, had left this magical garden and was back at Stavely while Henry told her what the family’s disagreeable butler had said about the ‘secret boy’: ‘Grunthorpe didn’t like him . . . he said he was a changeling . . . because he could talk to animals, Grunthorpe said . . .’
She was sure, really – and had been from the moment she saw him step out from the trees. A straight line ran from the boy who had built a tree-house in the Wellingtonia and owned a dog who was his shadow, to this man, but oh, for proof!
They had reached the igarape and he led her on to the bridge which crossed it.
‘I’ve told you how important it is to keep the water moving. Well, here is one of the methods I use.’ He leaned over and slapped the surface of the water with his hand. ‘Agatha!’ he called. ‘Come here. I’ve brought you a visitor!’
Harriet looked down into the water. At first she could make out nothing. Then slowly from under a patch of weed there appeared a mass of mottled grey and white whiskers, a snout . . . A soft blowing and snuffling noise followed; the almond-shaped nostrils twitched and opened . . . Then the head lifted and Harriet found herself looking into a pair of round, liquid, unutterably soulful eyes.
‘Oh, what is it? What is it?’ Harriet, who had taught herself never to touch anyone for fear of rebuff, had taken this stranger’s arm. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not a seal?’
‘It’s a manatee,’ said Verney softly. ‘A kind of sea cow. The sailors say that this is the basis for the stories of mermaids. Have you ever seen a more human face? More human than most humans, I always think.’
Harriet could not take her eyes from the trusting beast which was now looking at her unperturbed, a bunch of water hyacinths dangling like a dotty bouquet from her mouth. ‘They’re sacred to some of the Indian tribes,’ said Rom, ‘and anyone who tries to poach them on my land is in trouble. They keep the channels running clear, you see, by eating the water-weed.’
‘A manatee!’ said Harriet raptly. ‘I’ve seen a manatee!’ She turned away to trace the pattern of the creeper which had laid its stippled leaves along the hand-rail of the bridge, but not before he had seen the glint of tears on her lashes.
‘What is it?’ he asked gently. ‘Is anything the matter?’
She gave a small shake of the head. ‘It’s just that everything is so beautiful . . . so right . . . And it was here all the time, this rightness . . . While I was in Scroope Terrace in that cold dark house. If only I’d known how to come out – if only I’d known that a place like this existed.’
‘You know now,’ said Verney lightly. ‘And I have to tell you that there is absolutely nothing right about Agatha’s husband; he’s an entirely different kettle of fish – a nasty servile beast perpetually on the lookout for gratuities. In fact, I doubt if he’ll come at all since I haven’t brought any biscuits. No . . . wait; I’ve maligned him. Here he is!’
The animal which now surfaced did indeed look quite different from the gentle domestic-looking creature still staring lovingly out of the water. The male manatee’s eyes seemed incorrigibly greedy; the short snorts he gave had a vaguely petulant air and the round head which imparted to Agatha such a benign and soothing look was covered, in his case, by large liver-coloured spots.
And as Rom had intended, Harriet laughed and said, ‘I see what you mean.’
Furious at the lack of largesse, the male manatee nudged his wife a couple of times, gave a snort of disgust . . . and sank.
‘Does he have a name?’ asked Harriet.
‘I call him Grunthorpe,’ said Rom – and led her back to the house.
The party was in full swing. Sitting at damask-covered tables decked with exquisite silver, the guests ate roast tapir more delicate than pork, forest grouse wrapped in plantain leaves, a fricassee of turtle meat served in the upturned shell. . . Only where wine was concerned did Verney turn to Europe, serving a Chateauneuf du Pape which had Dubrov and Count Sternov exchanging a glance of solemnity and awe.
So now I know, thought Harriet, sitting with the girls of the corps at a long table. I have proof. He is Henry’s ‘secret boy’ and that means I must speak to him, even though I don’t know why he left Stavely or what scandal or grief may be hidden in his past. I must tell him how bad things are there and I must plead for Henry even if I am rebuffed and snubbed, because that was what I promised I would do.
She looked at the top table where Verney was sitting, saying something to Simonova which made her throw back her head and laugh, and a stab of pity ran through her for the red-haired child who had turned to her with such trust. ‘If you find him, Harriet, ask him to come back,’ Henry had said, but this man would never return to England. She had never seen anyone who belonged to a place so utterly as he did here.
She accepted a second helping of an unknown but delicious fish. Beside her, the indomitable Olga was crunching to smithereens a leg of roasted guinea-fowl. Tatiana, who spoke no word of English, was bent over her plate.
Only when? thought Harriet, thus left free to pursue her thoughts. When do I speak to him? After tonight I won’t see him again, not ever, she thought – wondering why the exotic fish she was consuming seemed, after all, not to be in the least delicious. Verney might go to the other performances at the Opera House, but he would hardly trouble to seek out a humble member of the corps.
The entrée was cleared; bowls of pomegranates, paw-paws and pineapples were set out. Sorbets arrived in tall glasses and a concoction of meringue and passion fruit . . . The wine changed to the lightest of Muscadels . . .
But Harriet’s appetite had suddenly deserted her, for the result of her deliberations had become inescapable. If she wanted to plead for the child who had
so inexplicably wound himself round her heart, there was only one way to do it – alone. And only one time – tonight.
As a host Verney might appear relaxed to the point of being casual, but the ingredients which made up his famous parties – the food, the wine, the lights, the music – were most precisely calculated. So after the formality of the dinner he loosed his guests into the flower-filled enfilade of rooms which ran along the terrace and replaced the Viennese trio who had played earlier by a group of Brazilian musicians, knowing that guests too shy to waltz or polka in the presence of these professionals would soon be caught by the syncopated rhythm of Los Olvideros. And soon Maximov was dancing with young Mrs Bennett, the sharp-faced Harry Parker beat all other contestants for the hand of Marie-Claude and Simonova herself had led the enraptured Count on to the floor.
But a man who knows exactly when to welcome and feed and amuse his guests, knows also when to send them back. At midnight his servants came with jugs of steaming coffee, and with a flourish the curtains were drawn aside – to reveal a shining avenue of light from lamps strung between the jacaranda trees and at its end the Amethyst glowing with welcome, waiting to take them home.
‘That went off very well, Lorenzo,’ said Rom. ‘You can clear up in the morning. I’m going to bed.’
But he lingered for a while, enjoying the silent house; relishing that moment of well-being which attacks even the most hospitable of men when their guests have gone. He opened a French window to let in the coati. The night was clear – the Milky Way spectacularly bright and Pegasus, up-ended and undignified to someone from another hemisphere, pointing to the north and what had once been home.
He was just about to make his way upstairs when he caught a movement in the doorway leading to the adjoining room. He turned – and a girl stepped forward into the light.