The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  “It’s definitely by Hans,” my hostess told me. “He was a good artist when he could be bothered. He’d often make sketches of things if he wanted to remember them.”

  I looked again at the face in the picture.

  “You’ve no idea who she is?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t recognize her, if that’s what you mean. But then I wouldn’t really expect to. Don’t you think there’s something vaguely period about her? As if he’s copied an old painting or a picture in an old book?”

  “But who is she?” The question was more to myself than to her, but she turned from the picture and looked at me.

  “I rather think that is what you have to find out.”

  Shortly after that, she asked me to leave. She was getting tired and wanted to be alone. She wouldn’t let me take the picture away, and as I looked at it one final time, I realized how little I had to go on. And that was what started me thinking about my grandfather.

  When my grandfather was a schoolboy he was once given a piece of Latin to translate. A passage written by a Roman historian, it described a tribute sent to a Roman general in North Africa by one of the great kingdoms of the south. The list of gifts was a traditional one, almost routine for the time: gold, silver, spices, precious stones, ivory, swords, peacocks. It was an easy bit of translation, and my grandfather was about to move on when the last word made him pause. The word was an easy one—pavus, peacock. Quite simple. But my grandfather knew a great deal more about ornithology than he did about Latin, and he checked back again, for the first time taking an interest in the passage. There could be no doubt about it. The text said “peacocks.” The tribute was definitely from a great kingdom in the south. And it included peacocks. My grandfather read the passage again and wondered why no one else had noticed it. One thing he knew for certain, there was no such thing as an African peacock. There were blue peacocks from India and green peacocks from Java. But there were no peacocks in Africa.

  My grandfather never seemed to have considered that the writer may have got it wrong or that he was using lazy, sloppy shorthand to describe the trappings of wealth. Instead the thought stayed in the back of his mind as an unresolved puzzle, and when, as a postgraduate, he began collecting specimens in the field, he carried that puzzle with him. In his early twenties he was in the Caribbean and Central America, discovering some of the first physical remains of the Puerto Rican nighthawk. Two years later he was in Africa on the trail of a rare fish-eating owl. In all that time he never seems to have mentioned his childhood suspicion that somewhere in Africa there were undiscovered peacocks. But the idea was there, waiting, and when in 1913 an American called James Chapin emerged from the jungles of the Congo basin with a single feather that matched no known species, the suspicion bubbled over and an obsession was born.

  I didn’t go home until much later that day, and by then it was raining and already dark. I’d arranged for someone to come and secure the broken front door, and in my absence, three temporary boards had been nailed across the window, giving the place a more neglected appearance than usual. Nevertheless, there were lights in Katya’s room and, once inside, the hallway felt warm and lived in. I’d spent the whole afternoon in various libraries and I had a pile of books in my bag. The weight of them made me happy as I drew the curtains and shut out the night.

  Rather to my surprise, I was interrupted at about seven o’clock by a knock on my bedroom door. Katya and I rarely bothered each other in our rooms. I could tell she was on her way out for the evening: her face was made up to accentuate her pale skin, and her eyes were doubly dark. She didn’t step in, just put her head and shoulders around the door and smiled. It was the sort of smile that follows an evening of confidences.

  “There’s something I wanted to show you,” she said. “I went to the university library and got this.”

  From behind the door she produced a hardcover biography of Joseph Banks. It was the book I planned to read next.

  “I like your Joseph Banks,” she said. “He’s an interesting man. And I’ve always liked a mystery.”

  I held up the book I was reading and smiled. A different biography of the same man.

  “Perhaps tomorrow we should compare notes.”

  She gave me another little smile.

  “Yes, that would be good,” she said, already beginning to go. “I’m glad. I didn’t like to think that your friend Anderson was going to get everything his own way.”

  It was over an hour later when I was disturbed again, this time by the doorbell. I was slow in rousing myself, and before I reached the door the bell rang again, another long burst. The boarded-up window made it impossible to see who was outside, so it wasn’t until the door swung open and the light behind me touched the street that I realized it was Gabriella. Her eyes met mine and she smiled.

  HER DRAWINGS amazed him, and he marveled at his discovery. It had been the habit of Banks’s youth to sketch the samples he collected, part of the challenge of his calling. Yet he knew the drawings he had seen were far better than any he had ever achieved for himself. Not just artistically better—it was not a question of finer line or greater sensibility—but scientifically better, more closely observed and more scrupulous in their detail. Through each one he saw a flower or leaf anew, as if each had once been learned and then forgotten.

  Because of her, the days before his departure from Revesby were filled with botanical fervor. He felt the sun on his back and, inside him, something of his first, violent passion for living things. Even the most familiar specimen was fascinating, each one miraculous. Soon, he knew, he would be many thousands of miles away, under tropical skies. It felt right that he should take with him these fresh memories of his home woods.

  At first she had seemed reluctant for him to examine her work. When he glimpsed it, she pulled the book close to her, and when their eyes met he understood instantly that there was nothing coquettish in her refusal. Her eyes held his for a moment and he thought she was about to speak, and then quite suddenly she yielded and the book was given up.

  There in the woods, as the sun shone, she had watched him as he held her book for the first time, moving from one drawing to the next, his face full of wonder. It was then she felt the stirring wildness inside her that she didn’t at the beginning understand. She knew about caution and guardedness, and in the freedom of the woods had found her own joy. But she knew nothing of the thing she felt that day, and the shock of it made her silent. Remember this, she told herself. Let me always remember this. It was the first prayer she had uttered for a year that had not been for her father.

  On each subsequent afternoon they had returned without prior arrangement to the same clearing. They worked through her drawing book page by page, discussing the nature and characteristics of each plant. Banks’s pleasure in her company was instinctive and unthinking, and there was nothing in the calmness of the woods to make him pause and consider its implications. Even as she reveled in the sun full on her face, she marveled at his blindness.

  One afternoon he sat and watched her sketch. She had allowed it only after protest; she knew that he had no idea how much he asked of her. As she began to draw, it felt like an unveiling, and she was clumsy and tentative. But as she went on she felt a change inside her. As her concentration intensified, the turbulence within her calmed itself until soon she was unaware of his presence. He watched the familiar furrow appear and deepen in her brow and for a moment he wondered that he had ever considered her ordinary. When at last he disturbed her, the drawing was two-thirds complete.

  “You have a gift,” he told her. “A skill as great as any I know.”

  She turned to him. “When I draw, I feel that drawing is all I have.”

  “It is a special talent. I wish you could travel and paint the plants of the tropics. I can imagine you calm in the heat, drawing away, concentrating too hard to be concerned about the prowling tiger or the snake at your feet.”

  He laughed and she smiled, even though his words mad
e the walls that imprisoned her seem higher and closer.

  So the afternoons passed as bright colors flecked with sadness. A week before his departure for London she pointed to one of the woodland birds in the trees around them and told him that small brown birds such as those were insufficient for him; his voyage was necessary so he could seek out birds of brighter colors and stranger shapes to satisfy him. Her seriousness was such that at first he felt wounded. Then when he began to defend himself he sensed a meaning in her words that moved him to meet her eyes and smile. He was still smiling later as he said his farewell and left her to her drawing. As he approached the shadow of the trees, she called out to him.

  “Mr. Banks,” she called, so that he stopped and turned. “Mr. Banks, I’d like to thank you for the kindness you’ve shown me these few days.”

  He shook his head, serious again. “On the contrary, it is I who am in your debt. Your drawings have refreshed me in my calling. And the memory of these woodlands will sustain me when I am far at sea.”

  She considered him carefully, her face made soft by the early-evening sun. “I should like you to know I am grateful, all the same.”

  He bowed, and for a moment, as he turned to leave, he thought she would speak again. But when he paused she only nodded and with another smile he was gone.

  On his return the following day he found the clearing empty. It was a surprise. The weather was fine and there remained in her book a dozen drawings he had yet to study. He had intended to ask her for one of them: he had a friend, Daniel Solander, a botanist, who was an excellent judge of such things. It was a sad thing that she was not there to hear his request. As he lay back on the grass, the scent of fresh summer turf was strong and glorious.

  The afternoon was far advanced when he was awakened by the rustling of birds in the trees behind him. She had not come.

  The next morning, in his hurry to return to the clearing in the woods, he almost missed the letter. The handwriting was unfamiliar but he knew at once it was hers.

  Sir, she wrote, neatly and carefully. My father’s health is declining and I must spend the days between now and your departure at his side. It would be a favour to us both if you did not call.

  The letter was unsigned.

  FOR ALL his entreaties, she would not see him. The day he received her letter was a day of blue skies, and as he strode into Revesby, her letter in his hand, there was already a heat haze between him and the horizon. At first he was inclined to take her decision lightly, a piece of coquetry perhaps, or at worst a temporary sadness at her father’s health that would end when the crisis had passed. But at her door he was firmly turned back by the old woman who answered. The response was the same that afternoon: her mistress was indisposed and would not receive callers.

  For some days he had planned, on his departure, to present her with a book, a copy of Gerard’s Herbal. Now he decided that she should have it early, and he left it at her door with his compliments. Within an hour the gift had been returned. The next day he walked the woods restlessly, hurt by her coolness and angry at the hurt. Whatever direction he took, he found himself undecided at her door. On two or three occasions he advanced and was rebuffed; more often he cursed softly to himself and retreated to the Abbey deer park.

  If the randomness of her sudden retreat irked him in the beginning, later he began to wonder at it. Dr. Taylor insisted that her father’s condition, although very poor, was neither better nor worse than before. Was it then some action on his part that had provoked this withdrawal? He remembered her last words and the slightly sad smile as she watched him turn away, and he was sure it was not. He tried to condemn her for the inconsistency traditionally ascribed to her sex but found he could not. Even as he failed to understand what had passed, he could not prevent himself from acknowledging that he had never met a woman less coquettish.

  And yet in some way this knowledge increased his anger, as if the things that made her different also made her culpable. On the fourth day he did not call.

  In the darkened house she heard his footsteps come and go until they no longer came at all. Between his visits there was the steady breathing of her father and the creaking of the floorboards as they spread and contracted with the passage of the sun. The shutters let in little of the sunlight but trapped the heat at night so that her dampened handkerchief would sometimes dry before it had reached her father’s brow. She seldom tried to look out, but when she did she could glimpse the chestnut trees building like clouds above the meadow beyond the lane. And when a whisper of breeze slipped between the shutters and stirred up the dust, it smelled of fields and warm grass.

  The cessation of his visits was a sorrow and a vindication. In a few summer days she had learned to fear hope in the way she had once feared despair. And so she cut herself away from him and hoped that when he was gone the woods would be hers again, at least until the day that gentle breathing stopped and everything would change.

  In the evenings that followed she would take out her drawings and study each by lamplight. And at night, in the darkness, she held the thought of him so close that it seemed each new morning would not be enough to pry it from her grasp.

  On the first day that Banks stopped calling at the house in Revesby, he kept mostly to his room. The following morning he rose early and took a horse from the stables. He rode fast and dangerously to the house of Charles Cartwright, a neighboring landowner with three unmarried daughters. There he flirted recklessly with each of them in turn and, over dinner, took more wine than was usual. He took his leave almost abruptly and rode back again, forcing the pace with whip and heels. He reached Revesby Abbey under a moon that was three-fifths full. Still in riding dress, he marched directly to his study. There he took clean paper and began to write without hesitation.

  My dearest Harriet, he wrote. I return to London forthwith. Although I have been as always the worst of correspondents my time here has made many things clear to me. I would wish to be allowed to call on you on my return to speak of certain matters that are better said than written…

  I had met Gabriella over the remains of a dead macaw. I was younger then and still an optimist, and the Brazilian rain forest was uncharted in all sorts of ways. I’d gone there with De Havilland’s expedition, fresh from college and overconfident in my abilities. When De Havilland left I stayed on, intending to join a group from Oxford that was due to arrive later that month. In fact the Oxford team took months to arrive as vital personnel fell sick or changed their minds and the funding kept falling through. But I was happy to wait. I was young and confident and there didn’t seem to be any hurry. I had good contacts out there, and through them I found a clean room with a desk and an electric fan. More important, I had a chest full of jottings under my bed and an idea for a volume on lost avian species that would be my great work. It seemed a brilliant idea at the time.

  I spent most of the days sleeping or moving with a glass in my hand through consular garden parties, my nights scribbling away with undisguised passion on the fate of the passenger pigeon or the great auk. My brain was clear and focused, and I wrote page after page without crossing out. I can be sure of that because the pages are still in the same chest, still under my bed.

  It was one of the last days before the second expedition set out when Berkeley Harris, the quartermaster, came to find me.

  “You free, Fitz?”

  Harris never removed his pipe when he spoke. He was one of those men who wore long shorts all the time and did everything with a pipe in his mouth except eat, a breed that became extinct in Europe shortly after the war, but in those days still lingered in small populations on the postcolonial fringes.

  “I only ask because there’s rather a pretty girl over at the bungalow who wants some help with a parrot. I said you were the man.”

  Although he was never right about anything, he was right about Gabriella. She was leaning in the shade when Harris led me into the bungalow garden, and all I could make out was a slim figure in the shadow. Then
she stepped into the sunlight to meet us and I broke off from what I was saying and put out my hand. I’d met girls in the past who were considered beautiful and Gabriella was nothing like any of them. But there was something about her eyes and the way she held her head and crinkled her brow as she reached out her hand to shake mine.

  “Miss Martinez, this is John Fitzgerald. I’m sure he’ll be able to sort you out. Fitz, Miss Martinez works down at the zoo. Her parrot’s died and she wants it stuffed.”

  “Mounted. The term is mounted. We only say stuffed if we’re trying to be crude.”

  “I daresay. Anyway, I’ll leave you to it. Got an expedition to mount, don’t you know.”

  She waited until he’d gone inside before she spoke. Her voice was the opposite of the giggling at consular garden parties.

  “He’s quite wrong, Mr. Fitzgerald. It’s not a zoo and it’s not a parrot.”

  I laughed. “That’s about average for Harris. Just what is it that I can help you with, Miss Martinez?”

  She looked very earnestly into my eyes.

  “I’ve just lost one of the rarest birds in the world.”

  She could hardly have picked a better introduction.

  The Gabriella who faced me now across the kitchen table had the same earnest eyes. She watched me with the same half smile, studied my face with the same disarming care. As I opened a bottle of wine I felt that the kitchen was too small for her, as if a dark forest animal had stepped by accident into a holding pen.

  “To lost birds?” she suggested, raising her glass.

  It wasn’t my first choice, but it would do.