Along the Endless River

by Rose Alexander

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Norwood, March 1910

  On the banks of the river, two small girls played in the sand, one dark-skinned with black curly hair, one fair and blonde, with searing blue eyes. The older girl led the game, the younger following. Both seemed delighted with their play and with each other. They barely registered the arrival of a large launch; boats came often, now that Norwood was truly on the map as one of the Amazon’s biggest rubber suppliers.

  The boatman called out to them, and smiled and laughed at their slow reaction, their unwillingness to leave what was obviously an important part of their game. He knew their names, and shouted them out, ‘Lily! Elspeth! Come to take the mail.’

  The bigger girl dusted down her hands on her dress and the littler one copied, and then they both ran to him, giggling. First, he gave them each a small banana, the variety that tastes of apples, and then the post. They took their treat and the letters, racing up the beach on plump, unsteady legs to the house where their mother was sitting at a table in the shade, finishing writing her own missives. Swapping the two bundles of paper, they immediately gambolled back down to the dock, handing the letters over for delivery to Manaus and onwards, down the river all the way to the sea and then across the wide ocean to Europe and to London.

  Their mother had told them about London, about the dank weather and the smog, the grey days and winter snows, though she knew they were too little to understand and anyway had no concept of what it was to be cold.

  She had also told them about Elspeth’s miraculous recovery, knowing her words meant nothing to such mites, how she had been placed on the floor straight after her birth because they had all believed her to be dead but how, ten or fifteen minutes later, she had begun to cry, a mewling little wail that stopped the women keening over her mother and drew all the attention to her.

  Against all the odds, she had survived, and was now nearly one year old.

  Katharine watched as the mail boat pulled away again and the girls resumed their playing. She had named her Elspeth after a favourite doll of Mabel’s, and she had made sure that the child knew she had another mother who had died and gone to join the angels. She wanted her to grow up knowing about Mabel so that it would not come as a shock to her to find out that Katharine and Thomas were not her real mother and father. What she would tell Elspeth about Mac, Katharine had not worked out yet. In the meantime, it was a joy to see how Elspeth and Lily got along. The two girls, less than two years apart in age, were as close as twins, not just sisters.

  Katharine leafed through the bundle of letters that had just arrived, stopping at one with large, scrawling handwriting. She considered it for a moment before opening it.

  Once read, she let it fall onto the table. A few minutes later, Thomas found her there, staring into space with unseeing eyes.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, his gaze immediately roving the compound, searching for the girls. Once he’d located them, safe and sound, he turned back to his wife. ‘You seem preoccupied with something.’

  ‘Antonio is coming.’

  Thomas nodded, clicking his tongue between his teeth.

  ‘I see.’

  Katharine rose from her chair and went to his side. Together they surveyed the view, the river, wide and green today, with little choppy waves caused by a lively breeze.

  ‘It’s been so long,’ Katharine said. ‘I feel so – so guilty.’

  The arrival of first Lily and then Elspeth in such rapid succession had precluded any further talk of Katharine travelling to England to visit her son for the foreseeable future. The rejoicing in Elspeth’s survival had been short-lived; she was a sickly baby and it had taken all of Katharine’s unremitting love and care to put her on the road to health. She could not have stood the journey and Katharine would not leave her behind. If anything good had come out of Mabel’s death, it was Elspeth’s life. It could not be risked for anything.

  And anyway, immediately on finishing at Winchester, instead of pursuing a career in London, Antonio had chosen to go to Ceylon to take up a job there. At the time it had seemed like a great opportunity. Now, Katharine found it horrifying. It was Mac who had provided the contacts and the opening.

  But the real reason Antonio’s impending arrival filled Katharine with trepidation was that she was scared. She was scared of seeing her own son, was the honest truth. He had shown her no love over all the years they had been apart and she knew it was her fault. She had sent him away. She had done it with all good intentions, she reminded herself constantly, because he needed an education, because she had wanted the best for him, had wanted him away from the diseases and scourges of the Amazon. But these seemed scant reasons now.

  In her heart of hearts, she knew she had failed him.

  ‘We had better tell him about Elspeth,’ Thomas suggested, gently. ‘He should know.’

  Mabel had made sure to keep her pregnancy a secret from everyone, even their mother and father. She wouldn’t have started to show until she was on the boat to the Amazon. Katharine, for her part, hadn’t told anyone about her sister’s baby. She didn’t know why. Life was running away with her; she doubted her own decision making. The two little girls had changed everything; she and Thomas were blessed to have them. But was the forest the place for their future? Katharine wasn’t sure she knew any more. She was sure, though, that she’d never send them away as she had Antonio. That was a deed that would dog her for the rest of her life.

  Thomas shrugged and added, ‘I’m sure Mayhew will spill the beans when Antonio reaches Manaus. If he hasn’t already.’

  He called to Lily and Elspeth and they set off on a fishing expedition, looking for piranha. The girls loved to see the fish gnashing their teeth or snapping at sticks, how their jaws chattered even after they were dead. And they all thought piranha soup delicious.

  Katharine went to her study.

  The rubber boom had made her a millionaire. She’d repaid her father’s money in triplicate, and, just this year, given all her siblings cash to spend as they pleased. Mabel had always refused Katharine’s money, wanted to be independent like Katharine was. She had been determined to make her own way in the world. Look how her ambitions had ended, Katharine chastised herself now. In misery and death.

  It wasn’t just Katharine who had made it in this toughest of environments. Many others were millionaires too, or multi-millionaires – like Mac, that so-called friend she now knew to be a tyrant of the most despicable kind. But more and more the reality was being made public, of the enslavement and subjugation of the Indians, the terrible cruelty, the beatings and the torture. Once, it had just been hearsay – and Katharine’s isolation at Norwood, so far from anywhere, had meant that whispers from far-flung stretches of the river only rarely trickled through to her. Now, everyone had heard the rumours – and knew them to be true.

  It was always going to be only a matter of time before the world heard of the atrocities. And then all of them, even those who were fair and true employers, would be tainted. They would all have to share the blame, and the responsibility, for what had been done in the name of greed. Katharine had stuck to her earliest convictions and never knowingly exploited anyone. She had kept her supply bases well stocked with food for her tappers, and as places where they could gather together to combat the isolation of the forest. The building of a school and health centre at Norwood, begun six months ago, was nearly completed, and Katharine had employed a physician as well as a pharmacist, and teachers with the best of qualifications. But was it enough? Could it ever be enough? The Amazon had lost countless numbers of its children. And she had lost her son.

  Unable to concentrate on work, Katharine wandered up to her bedroom. In the corner of the wardrobe lay a trunk. She knelt down, pulled it out and sat looking at it for a long time before her hands reached out to open it. She ran her fingers across the metal and down the leather straps which were green with mould, rotting away, the jungle devouring them as it wished to swallow everything.
If they walked away from Norwood, within a matter of months the forest would have reclaimed it, their existence forgotten. Human beings were insignificant nothings in the face of the rampant nature all around them.

  Carefully, Katharine undid the straps. One of the buckles fell onto the floor with a dull clang. She lifted the creaking lid and sifted through the sparse contents. Most of Mabel’s things were gone, crumbled away, destroyed by the damp, eaten by beetles and ants. What was left was mouldy, emitting a fetid smell as Katharine delved amongst it.

  I should get rid of it, she thought. There’s nothing here worth keeping. Nothing for Elspeth to remember her mother by.

  Except for the diary.

  It was in a tin box with asbestos to absorb the moisture. Katharine knew it was there, had often thought about reading it. But until now, she hadn’t. She wasn’t sure if it was because it felt disrespectful, or because she was a coward. Maybe she didn’t want to revisit all the hideous details of what Mac had done to her sister. After all, it was her letters extolling the virtues of her friend Mac and his daughter that had made Mabel believe, unbeknownst to Katharine, they would be a good family to work for.

  But despite her reluctance, Katharine knew she had to do it. She pulled out the tin, opening it to reveal a leather-bound book. Its pages were yellowing and heavy with moisture. Even asbestos could hardly cope with the Amazonian climate. She didn’t know what secrets the journal contained, but she had to find out.

  The leather covers cracked as she started to read. At first, she was only half paying attention, her mind still on Antonio’s visit, her failings as a mother, the life she wasn’t sure she had lived as well as she should have. But as she read, she became gradually more and more intent. The clock ticked on the landing, a grandfather she had brought from Manaus on a whim and regretted ever since because it was far too loud, its constant reminder of time passing too melancholy. The quarter hour sounded, then the half, then the next quarter and the hour itself. She read on.

  Eventually, after two hours in which she hardly moved, she reached the last word. She shut the book and sat back on her heels. Her legs had gone to sleep and she was lightheaded with hunger.

  She went in search of Thomas. He and the girls were playing catch with homemade rubber balls. Beside them, the captured piranhas in their bucket were still snapping at each other. They never gave up fighting.

  Lily was prattling away, partly in English and partly in the Indian language of the compound, Elspeth babbling in reply. What they were saying was anyone’s guess; they were so tiny, still learning to communicate with words.

  ‘We need to talk,’ Katharine said to Thomas.

  He left the girls helping Rosabel to make the piranha soup and followed her to the office.

  ‘We have to go to Manaus,’ she told him, her voice calm but still managing to convey her urgency. ‘We must leave immediately, get there before Antonio has arrived from Europe. We can meet him there – it will be a surprise. And after that, we’ll travel on to London. I want the girls to meet their grandparents.’

  Thomas nodded. He opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, shut it again. Finally, he made his statement.

  ‘You know when we get to England that they’ll never be equal.’

  Katharine made a moue of disinterestedness. ‘One’s a bastard orphan and one’s a half-caste. Sounds pretty even to me.’

  Thomas raised his eyebrows in patient resignation. There was no point arguing with his wife when she was in this mood.

  ‘As soon as we get to Manaus,’ continued Katharine, in the same quietly urgent voice, ‘I need to visit the bank.’

  Now Thomas looked at her sharply. He knew her inside out, could read her like a book. He was not fooled.

  ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’ he said. ‘And you’re not going to tell me what it is, are you?’

  Katharine broke into a sad, reluctant smile. She was, as always, grateful for his discretion, his quiet acceptance. ‘You’ll have to trust me,’ she said.

  ‘I do,’ he replied. ‘I always will.’

  Katharine barely slept, all the things she had read whirling around her mind like a swarm of mosquitoes around a hurricane lamp. Most of it was what Mabel had divulged in those precious, fraught days between her arrival in Norwood and her death. Reading it in black and white brought all the revelations, of Mac’s depravity, his callousness and his crimes, into the light once more. But it wasn’t just Mac. Katharine had been horrified to discover that the abuse had started not with Mac, but before that, at Mabel’s first job, when the master had crept up on her and forced himself upon her with an attitude of total entitlement. It made Katharine’s blood boil and her skin crawl to think of her sister – any woman, for that matter – being mauled at like an object.

  And on top of this, there was yet one more disclosure in the diary that Mabel had not made to Katharine during their chats, had presumably forgotten in her muddled, confused, alcohol-drenched state. Mabel had died before being able to take revenge, but in her writing she had given Katharine the information she needed. Katharine had the power to act – and act she would – to avenge her sister’s death. Nothing, she thought to herself grimly, would give her greater pleasure.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The Amazon, April 1910

  At first light they left, Lily and Elspeth bundled up on a pile of blankets under the boat’s awning. Katharine remembered travelling with Antonio like this, together with a precious bolacha of rubber to show Mac, the proof that she could make it, that she could survive as a woman in a man’s world. The rainforest had fascinated her then and it still did so now. It seemed to prove, without equivocation, all of Charles Darwin’s radical theories of evolution. But at the same time, it could also provide evidence that there must be a God. Every animal, bird and insect had a perfect purpose. For so many diseases, the rainforest provided a cure. For mankind’s needs, it offered up the raw materials necessary. It was a miracle that pointed to a benign divinity of some kind.

  But alongside that was the terror that some humans meted out to those in their power, from innocent Indians to her own sister. When Katharine remembered that, she could not believe that God, if he did indeed exist, could know and see and yet turn a blind eye.

  At first, the girls were sleepy, dozing in their nest, and Katharine amused herself watching the gambolling families of capybaras upon the banks. But once the children awoke properly she pointed out to them all the wonders of the jungle that passed them by – the monkeys and the palms, the towering trees, the hyacinth macaws and the nests of the oropendola birds that had so entranced her on her first journey on the river sea. The girls humoured her and pretended to look until Katharine laughed at herself and gave up. They were no more interested than she would have been if someone had drawn her attention to every smoke-blackened brick house in London. The majestic, miraculous forest was not new and stupendous to these children.

  It was their home; all they had ever known.

  ‘Thomas,’ blurted Katharine, suddenly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What will we do if Mac lays claim to Elspeth? We can’t let him take her. I’d never let him take her.’

  The current had picked up and they were bowling downriver. ‘We won’t let that happen,’ Thomas said, determinedly. ‘I won’t let that happen.’

  The two of them sat silently for a while, each involved in their own private thoughts.

  ‘When I look at her blue eyes,’ said Katharine, ‘I make myself think of the Amazonian sky at midday, or of hyacinths in my mother’s garden. I have to work really hard not to see Mac. There was something in his eyes which I always read as loneliness – but now I see was his depravity.’

  Thomas took her hands and squeezed them. ‘Don’t let hatred eat you up, my love,’ he cautioned. ‘You are so brave. You were so young when you came to the Amazon and you had to go through so much. Everything Mac threw at you, every time he tried to destroy you, you fought back. Most peopl
e would have given up at the first hurdle, but you never did. You should be so proud.’ He smiled and lifted her hands to his mouth and kissed her fingers. ‘But you’ll never be as proud of yourself as I am of you.’

  The girls had fallen silent, their innocent faces creased in concentration as they listened to the adults’ avid conversation and watched their every move.

  ‘Mama, Mama, water,’ said Lily, and Elspeth mimicked her. Scooping the girls up, Katharine handed them the water gourd and hugged them tight as they took it in turns to drink. Freshwater dolphins came alongside the boat to play, just as they had on Katharine’s first canoe journey. The girls climbed down off her lap and leant over the side to watch them, laughing and screaming in delight.

  A canoe filled with Peruvian traders and Panama hats passed them. They had travelled all the way from the high Andes and were headed for the coast to sell their wares. Thomas bought a hat from them and put it on, pulling funny faces for the girls, whose expressions turned from mystified to gleeful as they chuckled and giggled. He put the hat on each of them in turn and they mimicked their father’s expressions and laughed until they were breathless. Katharine smiled at their delight, their ability to find fun in any silly thing. She envied their simple lives, their easy happiness.

  She wasn’t sure she would ever feel like that again.

  * * *

  In Manaus, Mayhew’s house was more lavish than ever. He had had it decorated like a Rococo palace and fitted it out entirely with furniture imported from France.

  ‘Wonderful isn’t it?’ he asked, proudly surveying his absurd extravagance, taking it for granted that Katharine and Thomas would agree. He was sweating profusely; he had gained more weight since Katharine had last been in the city and was clearly suffering for it in the drenching heat. ‘Now you see what you’re missing, holed up in that jungle hideout.’

  All he has ever cared about is money, reflected Katharine, scrutinising her surroundings. It was impossible to imagine that he had once, a long, long time ago, had a charming side; all he exuded now was boorish conceit.