Island of the Aunts (3 page)

“So why did you leave, Fabio?” she asked. The homesick child was still staring at the picture she had drawn; the river, the great tree with fruit hanging from its branches and the fishing boat drawn up on the shore.

“I don’t know
exactly,”
he said. But he told her what he knew and she pieced the rest together.

His father, Henry Mountjoy, had been an Englishman, rich, and the owner of a big house in the country; but he was a gambler. He got into debt and in the end he had gone off to South America to find gold.

Only of course he didn’t find gold. He fell ill and Fabio’s mother, who was a dancer in a nightclub, had found him half starving in Rio, and had nursed him, and after a while he married her.

But he’d ruined his health and he couldn’t get work and soon after Fabio was born he went back to England. Since then Fabio had lived first with his mother in Rio and then, when she moved in with another man, upriver in the forest with his grandparents and his uncle and his cousins. There were a lot of people in the three huts and very little money but Fabio had been perfectly happy. His grandfather was an Amorian Indian and knew everything, and his grandmother had worked as a cook for a Portuguese planter and had told the most marvellous stories.

Then just over a year ago his mother had come with an Englishman in a silly suit who kept mopping his face all the time and wrinkled up his nose when he passed the pig. It turned out that Fabio’s father had died and on his deathbed had begged his parents, the old Mountjoys, to bring Fabio to England and bring him up as an English gentleman.

That was the beginning of the nightmare. His mother had insisted that he went. Henry Mountjoy had talked so much about his grand house in England that she wanted her son to have his share. But the grand house had been sold to pay Henry’s debts, and Henry’s parents took one look at the wild little boy and shuddered.

Since the grandparents were too old to turn Fabio into an English gentleman, this odd thing was to be done in a boarding school. But boarding schools, according to the old Mountjoys, had gone soft. They had tried two from which Fabio had returned much as before, only speaking better English.

Greymarsh Towers, though, was different. The headmaster believed not just in cold baths and stiff upper lips but in all sorts of things that one would have thought didn’t happen any more, and the boys were vile.

“They call me ‘monkey’ or ‘chopsticks’ and try to tie me up. But I’m going to kill them this time. I’m going to kill them and I’m going to kill the headmaster and they can take me to prison and I don’t care!”

But before he could get round to killing the headmaster, Fabio started being sick.

He was sick outside Slough, and on the far side of Maidenhead and in the entrance of a house called The Laurels in Reading, and the closer they got to Greymarsh Towers, the sicker Fabio became.

And when she saw Greymarsh Towers, Coral thought that she too would be sick if she had to return there. It was a huge bleak house with iron bars across the windows, and the stone walls looked slimy and cold.

It was now time to act. The chauffeur was supposed to drop them at the school and she was to make her own way back by train.

“Will you please wait here, Fabio,” she said to the boy. “Keep an eye on him, Mr Fowler. Don’t let him run away.”

The boy, who had begun to trust her, cowered back in his seat and Coral marched up to the front door. The smell of Greymarsh would have been enough to put her off for life. Hospital disinfectant, tortured cabbage, lavatories…

As for Matron, as she came out of her office she would have made a very good camel: the nose was right, the sneering upper lip, and the distrustful muddy eyes. Except that camels can’t help their expressions and people can.

“I am afraid I have bad news about Hubert-Henry Mountjoy,” said Aunt Coral. “He has been laid low with a bad attack of Burry-Burry fever and can’t come back to school at present.”

Matron pursed her mouth.

“Well, of course, that is what you expect from foreign children—he probably picked it up in his hut in the jungle.”

Since Aunt Coral had just invented Burry-Burry fever she only nodded and said she would let Matron know as soon as the boy was better. She then returned to the car and said, “I am sorry to tell you that there has been an outbreak of meningitis in the school. Everyone is in quarantine and Hubert can’t go back at present.”

The little boy, who had been hunched against the cushions, now sat up and smiled. He had a very nice smile and Aunt Coral made up her mind.

“Well, I can’t take him back,” said the surly driver. “I’m going on to another job down in the West Country and I haven’t a minute to waste.”

“That’s all right,” said Coral. “Just take us to the station. We’ll make our own way back to London.”

Sitting on the station platform, Coral noticed the exact moment when Fabio’s happiness at the thought of escaping school changed to misery at the thought of going back to his grandparents’ dungeon of a house.

She hadn’t had any real doubts but now she was certain. Should she use chloroform? Or the sleeping powder that Etta used?

Either way, thought Coral, Fabio was the one.

Etta and Coral had been right. Aunt Myrtle should never have been allowed to come on the kidnapping job. Almost as soon as she arrived in London she was so homesick that she thought she would die. She missed the sound of the waves on the rocks and the scent of the clover and the way the clouds raced across the high clean sky. But most of all she missed Herbert. She was used to sitting on the point every day and playing the cello to him, and now she began to worry in case he was missing her too.

Or
not
missing her, which would have been even worse.

So by the time she was sent to take Lambert Sprott to the zoo because his father was doing business in New York and his mother was buying clothes in Paris, Aunt Myrtle was in a bad way. Her hair kept falling down, she had a headache, and the map of the zoo looked complicated.

As for Lambert, he was a boy it was not easy to take to. He had pale distrustful eyes, a tight mouth, and carried a wallet full of money, a pocket calculator and his own mobile telephone so that he looked like a shrunken bank manager, except that bank managers have learnt to be friendly and Lambert had not.

All the same she was determined to do her best, and to share with the boy the beauty of the animals they saw: the knock-kneed giraffes with their long black tongues, the dignified orangutans with the tufts of red hair under their armpits, the Mississippi alligator, smiling as he steamed in his pool.

“Oh how fascinating animals are, are they not, Lambert!” she cried, getting carried away. “Look at those bonteboks—the way they carry their heads. And over there, the dear dik-diks—so small but so fast when they run.”

Lambert yawned. “They smell,” he said.

Myrtle was shocked. “Well, they have their own scent, yes, but so do you. To a bontebok you would smell of human.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

Aunt Myrtle sighed, but she was determined not to give up. There must be a flicker of life somewhere in the boy. And there was: when something cost a lot of money Lambert became quite alert. He told Myrtle that you could get twenty thousand pounds for the horn of the white rhino, and that the Siberian tiger could fetch double that because it was so rare.

“And so beautiful,” cried Myrtle. “Look at the markings on its throat.”

Lambert yawned again—he was not at all interested in things being beautiful and he stopped to dial a friend on his mobile telephone, but the friend was out. “I wouldn’t mind going shopping,” he said. “I’ve got my own account at Harrods.”

But Myrtle had not been told to take him shopping and, ignoring his whining, she led the way across a little stone bridge and stopped dead.

They had come to the seals. The females lay about like old armchairs, coughing and grunting, but there was one, a young bull seal, who seemed to be staring directly at her.

Tears of homesickness came into Myrtle’s eyes; it could have been Herbert’s brother lying there! “Oh, Lambert,” she said making a last attempt, “look at the way his whiskers curve, and the shine on his skin. Did you ever see anything so lovely?”

“They aren’t worth anything,” said Lambert in a bored voice. “You can’t get any money for seals. They’re common.”

And then he opened his mouth and yawned once more. He yawned so that Myrtle saw his unhealthy tongue, his tonsils, even the little flap of skin at the back of the throat that stops the food going down the wrong way—and something snapped inside her.

She wouldn’t kidnap this loathsome child in a hundred years. The thought of waking up on the Island and knowing he was there made her blood run cold, and she could no more soil her cello case by stuffing the repulsive brat into it than she could fly. She would take Lambert back to his house and tell her sisters that she was a failure as a kidnapper, and she would go home.

Once she had decided this she felt better, but there was a long afternoon to get through still; one of the longest of her life, it seemed to Myrtle. Lambert lived in a large house bristling with burglar alarms and fitted with ankle-deep carpets, a private bar, a swimming pool, and a kitchen full of gadgets which hummed and pulsed and throbbed and which she had no idea how to use.

What Lambert’s house didn’t have in it was any people. His father was busy getting rich, and his mother was busy spending the money he made, so neither of them spent much time at home. Myrtle had been told to wait till the woman who gave Lambert his supper came, and hand him over.

Lambert sat down in front of an enormous telly and started zapping channels in a bored way, and Myrtle made her way to the bathroom to freshen up. She had decided to flush the chloroform down the loo; it bothered her having it when she had given up as a kidnapper, so she took the bottle and her bag of hairpins and made her way upstairs.

“What have you got there?” Lambert’s suspicious voice made her turn round. He had put his telephone in his pocket and was glaring at her, narrowing his eyes. “You’re stealing something. What’s in that bottle?”

He leant forward to try and snatch the bottle. Aunt Myrtle put it behind her back but Lambert kicked her hard in the shins, twisted her free arm and grabbed the bottle. Then he undid the stopper and put his nose to it.

“Don’t!” cried Myrtle. “Put it down, Lambert.”

But it was too late. The loathsome boy lay felled and quite unconscious on the floor.

Chapter 3

Minette woke up in a strange bed with a lumpy mattress and brass knobs. She was in a big room; shabby, with a threadbare carpet and faded wallpaper covered in a pattern of parrots and swirling leaves. The curtains breathed slightly in the open windows. A high mewing noise came from outside.

Then she remembered what had happened and at once she was very frightened indeed.

She had been eating a sandwich, sitting opposite a strange fierce aunt who was supposed to be taking her to her father; and suddenly the compartment started going round and round and the face of the aunt came closer and then further away…and then nothing more. Blackness.

She had been drugged and kidnapped, she was sure of that. She could remember the way the dreadful aunt had peered at her as if she was looking into her soul. Minette knew all about fear but now she was more afraid than she had ever been. What dreadful fate lay in wait for her? Would they cut off her ear and send it to her parents—or starve her till she did what they wanted?

And what
did
they want? Kidnapping was about getting money out of people and neither her mother nor her father was rich.

Moving in the bed, she found she was not tied up, but the windows would be barred and the door locked.

Pushing aside the bedclothes, she walked over to the window. She was wearing her own nightdress; the aunt must have kidnapped her suitcase as well. The window was open and as Minette looked out she gasped with surprise.

For she was looking at a most incredible view. Down below her was green, sheep-cropped turf studded with daisies and eyebright. A large goose with black legs walked across it, followed by six goslings with their necks stretched out. Beyond the turf the ground sloped to a bay of perfect white sand—and then came the sea.

Minette looked and looked and looked. The sea in the morning light was like a crystal mirror; she could hear the waves turning over quietly on the beach. There were three black rocks guarding the bay and on them she could make out the dark round heads of seals. White birds circled and mewed and the air smelled of seaweed and shellfish and wind. It smelled of the sea!

“Oh, it’s beautiful,” she whispered.

But of course she would not be allowed to go outside. Kidnapped children were kept in dark cupboards and blindfolded. Any minute now someone would come and deal with her. She looked round the room. Old furniture, patchwork rugs, and by the bed—and this was odd—a nightlight. She had begged and begged for one at home but neither her father nor her mother had ever let her have one.

A small snuffling sound made her turn quickly. It had come from behind a screen covered in cutouts of animals in the corner of the room.

A fierce dog to guard her? But the noise had not been at all a fierce one.

Her heart pounding, she tiptoed to the screen and looked round it. On a camp bed lay a boy of about her own age. He had very dark hair and sticking-out ears and he was just waking up.

“Who are you?” he asked, staring at her with big round eyes.

“I’m Minette. And I think I’ve been kidnapped by an aunt.”

The boy sat up. “Me too.” He blinked. “Yes, I’m sure. I was supposed to be going back to my grandparents. She gave me a hamburger.”

“Mine gave me a cheese and tomato sandwich.”

The boy got out of bed and stretched. He too was wearing his own pyjamas. “We’ll have to try and escape,” he said. “We’ll have to.”

“Yes. Only I think we’re on an island. Come and look.”

She didn’t know why, but she had had the feeling at once that the sea wasn’t just in front of them but all around.