Journey to the River Sea, Page 22

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ‘Now, Beatrice!’ boomed Lady Parsons. ‘How often have I told you that Kiki’s jacket must be buttoned up right to his little neck? You don’t want the little doggy to catch a chill, do you?’

  Beatrice glared at the shivering animal, standing on the hall table getting ready for his afternoon walk.

  Beatrice did want him to catch a chill. She wanted him to catch a chill and then pneumonia and then die.

  But she said nothing, and did up the top button of the tartan waistcoat that he always wore for his afternoon walk, since he did not have enough hair, or enough sense, to keep warm.

  ‘Now the lead,’ ordered Lady Parsons, and Beatrice fetched the lead and clipped it on, while Kiki snapped at her fingers.

  ‘There you are, my little treasure,’ said Lady Parsons to the dog. And to Beatrice: ‘Now you’re to take him at least three times up and down the Promenade; I shall know if you’ve only taken him twice because Mrs Tandry will be looking out of the window. And he must not be allowed to sniff at other dogs.’

  It was a grey, windy day; the waves beat drearily on Littleford’s shingle beach. But there was nothing to be done. Since they had arrived in England, Beatrice had had to walk Kiki every afternoon and Gwendolyn had to walk him every morning.

  While Beatrice tugged the little dog sulkily along the windswept beach, Gwendolyn was in the pantry pouring boiling water into Lady Parsons’ stone hot-water bottle, ready for Lady Parsons’ afternoon sleep. When she had finished, she carried it upstairs to the big bedroom with its Turkey carpet and lace-covered tables, and the pictures of Sir Hector Parsons who had been shot by mistake in Kenya while trying to shoot lions. If she hurried downstairs now she could get half an hour to look at a comic she had found in the kitchen drawer before it was time to lay the tea.

  ‘Gwendolyn!’ came Lady Parsons’ angry voice from her bedroom. ‘Come back at once! How many times have I told you that the bottle must be wrapped in my shawl. Do you want me to burn my feet?’

  Gwendolyn did want it, she wanted it just as much as Beatrice had wanted the little dog to get pneumonia, but after nearly a month in Lady Parsons’ house she knew she was helpless. The Carters were penniless; there was nowhere else to go.

  ‘I hope I don’t have to tell you which of my shawls the bottle must be wrapped in?’

  ‘No, Lady Parsons. It’s the violet crochet one in the second drawer down.’

  ‘Well, if you know, why don’t you do it straight away?’ said Lady Parsons. ‘And tell your mother to hurry up with turning the collar on my blue velvet. I’m going to wear it for my bridge party tonight.’

  But as the girl left the room, Lady Parsons leant back on her pillows with a satisfied sigh. The girls were slow and they were stupid, but they could be trained and so could their mother. She had been right to take them in.

  Lady Parsons was a widow and rich. She was also quite amazingly mean. Saving money was a passion of hers and when she could see her bank balance swelling she felt a deep happiness that nothing else could give her.

  Her husband had left her Grey Gables, which was definitely the largest and showiest of all the houses on the Promenade. He had left her a big garden and a summer house and her private bathing hut on the Front. She was a healthy, middle-aged woman who could do anything she liked, and that was exactly what she did. She saved.

  When she first got the letter from Mrs Carter telling her that Clifford was in trouble again and that they were penniless, Lady Parsons had been annoyed. What did the Carters’ difficulties have to do with her? Mrs Carter might be her second cousin twice removed, but that didn’t give her the right to bother her.

  But then Lady Parsons had a brilliant idea. Her personal maid – the one who helped her to dress and did her hair and kept her clothes in order – was getting old. She would sack her, and she would also sack the paid companion who came to take the dog out and wind her knitting wool and read to her. And she would train the Carters to do their work! Not only would this save two whole wages, but there would be no need to give the Carters free time or Sundays off, which servants always seemed to want these days.

  (As for Mr Carter, who was on his way to prison in Brazil, he would of course never be mentioned nor allowed to darken her doors again.)

  So far the plan had worked well. She had made a sitting room in the basement where the family could sit when she didn’t want them, and sometimes, when she drove out, she took Beatrice and Gwendolyn, or their mother, up beside her in the carriage so that her friends could see how kind she had been to take them in.

  ‘Aren’t you grateful to dear Lady Parsons?’ the friends would say as she stopped the carriage to bow to them, and the twins would grit their teeth and say yes, indeed they were. But the moment they got home, they were set to work again.

  The jobs she found for them were endless. They had to match her embroidery wool, bring up her breakfast tray and feed Kiki on steak cut exactly into half-inch cubes. They were sent to the shops in all weathers, mostly to the chemists, to fetch medicines for whatever she thought might be wrong with her. They had to tidy her underclothes drawer and hook up her bust bodice, and Mrs Carter had to darn Lady Parsons’ stockings, and take up her hems and trim her hats.

  At night the Carters were so tired that when a black beetle walked across the floor of their basement sitting room, Mrs Carter did not even trouble to get the spray from the pantry.

  One of the jobs the twins hated most was reading aloud. They were poor readers, they read slowly and stumbled over words, but since Lady Parsons used being read aloud to as a way of getting to sleep she did not mind. Beatrice had to read the whole of Ivanhoe and Gwendolyn read a different Library Romance each week, without taking in a single word.

  And at breakfast they read aloud from the newspaper – which was how they found out what had happened to Maia and Miss Minton after they left.

  Beatrice was reading out the Society Pages and what King Edward was doing that evening, when she saw something on the opposite page which printed the foreign news.

  She stopped reading, gaped, then read with her finger under the lines to make sure she had read properly.

  ‘Well, has the cat got your tongue?’ asked Lady Parsons sharply, looking up from her coddled egg.

  But Beatrice was so startled that she just went on goggling at the entry. Then she said, ‘It says here that Maia and Miss Minton and that fat professor have vanished in the jungle. Maia went off with some boy or other in a boat and Miss Minton and the professor went after them to bring her back, and now everyone has disappeared. Please, Lady Parsons, I must show this to Mama and Gwendolyn.’

  Beatrice did not often run but she ran now, holding the newspaper and taking no notice of Lady Parsons’ bleats.

  Mrs Carter read the whole extract aloud. It seemed that Maia and Miss Minton had been missing for some weeks and a search party had been sent out to look for them.

  The part of the country in which they were last seen is still inhabited by savage tribes, some of them cannibals, not to mention jaguars, pit vipers, caymans and other dangerous predators. It is feared that some serious harm may have befallen the party.

  ‘So she did survive the fire,’ said Mrs Carter. They had left Manaus when Maia was still missing.

  ‘Well, it serves her right if she gets put in a cooking pot – she always liked the Indians better than anyone else.’

  ‘Now, Beatrice!’ said Mrs Carter. ‘You mustn’t say such things.’

  ‘Well, we won’t say them,’ said Gwendolyn. ‘But nothing can stop us thinking them.’

  And all that day, as they gave the dog his worm powders and ironed Lady Parsons’ handkerchiefs and sewed the pom-poms back on her bedroom slippers, their small, tight mouths would suddenly curve into a smile.

  ‘It may be awful here, but at least we won’t get eaten,’ said Beatrice.

  And Gwendolyn agreed.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Maia had never had any sisters
or cousins, but she had them now. Her day in the Xanti village began with the three girls who were closest to her in age, pulling her out of sleep and down to the river for a swim.

  The swim did not have much to do with striking out over the water, nor with serious washing. It was about splashing and ducking each other and pretending to have been attacked by electric eels – and afterwards it was about chasing each other through the trees and combing each other’s hair and persuading Maia that she needed a bead anklet.

  Then it was the turn of the babies, who were brought down to the edge of the stream and doused with water from hollowed-out calabash shells while they screamed at the top of their lungs. Maia had a pair of babies that were her special charge; tiny, big-eyed creatures who turned into thrashing demons when she tried to make them clean.

  When she got back with the babies, Miss Minton was usually at work on her English-Xanti dictionary, but today she was surrounded by a group of women begging her to do her imitation of a person with a stomach-ache.

  ‘STOMAK-AKE’, they chanted, because that was their favourite. When she needed a word for her dictionary and couldn’t make the Xanti understand, Miss Minton took to acting. They had enjoyed her horribly snapping teeth when she wanted the word for ‘alligator’, and they were impressed when she pricked herself with a needle to get the word for ‘blood’. But the one they liked best was definitely the one where she rubbed her stomach and doubled up with pain and groaned.

  Yet when Miss Minton, soon after she arrived, was struck by one of her blinding migraine headaches, there had been no need for her to act. The women found her leaning against a tree with her eyes shut and came back with a disgusting, dark-green brew of bitter leaves which she forced herself to drink – and in a few hours she was herself again.

  The Xanti village was not the dark huddle of huts in the gloom of the forest that Maia had expected. It was in a clearing open to the sky. At night they could see the Southern Cross, and stars so bright they seemed unreal, and by day the sun shone down on the compound where the children played and animals wandered.

  Nearly all the children had pets: a little boy with a crippled foot had a huge bird-eating spider with a liana tied round its middle, which he led along like a dog. One of the chief’s nephews owned a golden tamarind; a monkey so small that it could be covered by a human hand. Tame macaws and parrots and hoopoes flew onto people’s shoulders and off again, driving Finn’s dog to despair.

  By the time the sun was high and everyone was wandering about eating breakfast, Professor Glastonberry appeared. The Xanti had woven palm leaf shelters for their guests, but he preferred to sleep on the Carters’ boat with the Arabella moored beside him, so as to watch the boats and his collection, which was growing fast.

  After breakfast the women usually went to their work; weaving hammocks or pounding manioc roots into flour or making baskets – but Maia did not have to join them; she was allowed to go to the musicians. There was a man who played a tiny, three-holed flute made out of the bones of a deer; and another man who had a hollowed-out palm trunk which made a noise like a tuba . . .

  Maia was learning to play the little flute, and the men sang for her – all the Xanti did, she begged so hard. They sang their work songs and their feasting songs because they understood that Maia needed to know about songs like Miss Minton needed to know about words, and Finn needed to know about the plants they used for healing.

  And it was now that Maia saw what Haltmann meant when he said that she would find the purely Indian music very different, and not at all easy to write down. The songs were wild and strange, and often seemed to have no tune at all – and yet the more she heard them, the more she liked them.

  But they wanted a fair exchange. ‘SING, Maia’ was heard as often as ‘STOMAK-AKE’. Maia had begun by singing funny songs for the children because she knew how much the Xanti liked to laugh. But it was the old folk songs that they liked best: sad songs in the minor key in which lovers were separated, ships sank, and people wept by open graves.

  By midday the Xanti were usually asleep again in their hammocks or under the trees, and Maia and Finn would wander off to a cool part of the river bank, keeping a wary lookout for Miss Minton, who might suddenly decide they should do some mental arithmetic or Latin verbs.

  ‘You know I told you what my father said you had to do, “seize the day”,’ said Maia. ‘Well, it seems to me there’s no point in doing that here. You don’t have to seize it. They give you the day.’

  Finn spent much of his time with the old chief and the men who surrounded him. Because he had spoken a few words of Xanti before he came, Finn learnt quicker than the rest of them. The chief was not a fierce warrior with feathers, as Maia had expected; he was more like a headmaster, and from time to time he would come out of his hut and lecture the Xanti about what they should do – especially the women who were supposed to work harder and get up earlier to bathe. Often he came out with his arm round Finn’s shoulder. He had known Yara, and remembered her.

  Finn was quieter here, thought Maia, not always working out how to get to the next thing and the next, and he watched the women carefully as they prepared the food, or fetched water from the river, or hoed the little gardens they had made on the edge of the clearing.

  ‘My mother must have done all those things,’ he said. ‘I wonder if it was hard for her to leave her friends.’

  In the afternoons there was usually an expedition into the forest to collect plants and berries. Maia could never get over how quiet the Xanti were, how careful of the land. They treated every clump of trees or trickle of water as though they were old friends. They could walk barefoot over thorns and through swamps and piles of leaves which might easily have concealed a snake, but somehow they knew that it didn’t.

  ‘They have wise feet,’ the professor said.

  But the professor was not often able to come into the woods of an afternoon. When he first came he had drawn a giant sloth on the packed sand – a terrible creature with long hair and fearsome claws – and the Xanti said, yes, yes, they knew of such a beast. They had their own name for it, and soon everyone was roaring frightfully and lumbering about and waving their dangerous claws.

  They said it lived in caves on a ridge of high ground upriver, and after that the professor’s life was no longer his own. By midday, every man who could be spared, and some who could not, had piled the deck of the Carters’ boat with logs and was waiting on board to show him the way. To travel on the ‘fire boat’ after a lifetime of paddling canoes was the best thing they could think of.

  So far they had found no traces of a giant sloth or its bones. They had not even found the caves – but they had found other things: fossilized fishes and strange stones and the seeds of a flower that only blossomed every twenty years . . . all of which the professor stored away.

  And there was always tomorrow . . .

  But on the day which ended so strangely, the men had been out hunting. The Xanti were not warriors. They did not fight battles with other tribes and when danger threatened, they simply disappeared into the forest, often staying away for weeks. But when food was needed, they could use their bows and arrows with fearful skill – and now they returned with two wild pigs, a brocket deer and a pair of plump bush turkeys.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Minton. ‘I’m afraid that means a party.’

  She was right. The Xanti were very fond of parties. They liked everything about them. They liked painting their faces in interesting ways, they liked making ornaments to wear; they liked feasting and dancing . . . and they very much liked getting drunk on the beer that the women brewed from manioc roots.

  Miss Minton had at first tried not to come to the parties, and to keep Maia down by the boats. But the Xanti had been so surprised and hurt by this that she gave in, and now she and Maia sat on the edge of the circle of firelight and watched.

  Maia’s ‘sisters’ had implored her to smarten herself up a little; they brought bowls of red uruca dye and black ge
nista and she let them paint her face, and even Miss Minton agreed to a dab or two of red on her forehead and a coronet of toucan feathers. Not that Miss Minton needed dressing up. As soon as there was any sign of a party, the women fetched Miss Minton’s milk tooth necklace and hung it round her neck. She had tried very hard to give it as a present to the tribe, but they refused to take it. It was too valuable, they said.

  Finn was sitting with the old chief and his brothers. It was strange, thought Maia – in Manaus, Finn had looked Indian and exotic; here, as he looked thoughtfully into the fire, he looked European.

  Maia loved the beginning of the feasts before everyone got too drunk. The smell of roast pork mingled with the smell of the wild lilies that grew round the huts, the soft breeze fanning her hot cheeks, the firelight and above it, the brilliant stars.

  Soon the men began to dance, and presently the women joined in.

  But then came the words Maia dreaded.

  ‘SING, Maia,’ called the Xanti, and her ‘sisters’ came and pulled her to her feet.

  So she sang, and because feasting was a serious business, she sang a song that her mother had loved particularly: ‘The Ash Grove’.

  Her pure, clear voice, the English words, carried across the compound and down to the river . . .

  And:

  ‘My God!’ said Captain Pereia, aboard a gun boat of the Brazilian River Police. ‘Listen! We’ve found them! The girl must be a prisoner to sing for the little swine. Shut down the engines; we’ll take them by surprise. But don’t shoot till I give the word.’

  Maia had stopped singing. She was making her way back to Miss Minton when she saw them.

  A dozen men or more with blackened faces, carrying rifles, creeping up from the river.

  ‘Don’t try anything,’ the captain shouted. ‘We’re armed.’

  A single shot was fired over their heads.

  ‘Run!’ hissed Finn to his mother’s people.