Journey to the River Sea - 10th Anniversary Edition (13 page)

‘Bad place,’ he said.

And he made Clovis get out onto an old jetty higher up and walk back along the bank, so that by the time he reached the bungalow he was scratched and tired and very hot.

But now as he made his way up the gravel path to the house, his spirits rose. It was so neat and tidy and quiet. No chickens to give you fleas, no barking dogs running the length of their chains.

Dusk had fallen and two of the windows were lit up. Clovis walked quietly towards them and looked in.

He saw a most comforting sight. The Carters were having supper, sitting around a large table spread with a clean white cloth. He could see Mrs Carter – a kind-looking plump woman in a blue dress with frilly sleeves, serving something onto pudding plates. A pink blancmange; Clovis could see it shaking a little on the dish and his mouth watered.
Shape
his foster mother had called it. She made it with strawberries and cornflour and milk fresh from the cow. Opposite Mrs Carter was her husband, a thin man in gold rimmed spectacles – and facing him the twins.

They looked just the way Maia had described them on the boat: pretty and dressed in white, with ribbons in their hair. And beside them, Maia... The twins were pretty, but Maia was special with her serious face and kind eyes; he could see her pigtail looped over her shoulder. Just looking at it made him feel safe, as if he could hold on to it and be all right.

Miss Minton didn’t seem to be there. Perhaps it was her day off and she had gone to visit friends.

He stood and looked a little longer, unseen by the people in the room. It was a good name for this house:
Tapherini
– A Place of Rest. Then he went round to the side of the house and knocked on the door.

It took only a few moments to shatter Clovis’ dream. First came the violent shrilling of an alarm bell. Then a maid with a sullen face led him to the dining room and opened the door – and the twins looked up, stared at him – and exploded. It wasn’t laughter that came from them, not really. It was that awful giggling; that high-pitched, merciless titter that had spread across the footlights in the theatre and set the other children off. Clovis recognized it at once. So it was the twins’ laughter which had hounded him!

‘Oh!’ gasped Beatrice. ‘It’s Little Lord Fauntleroy,’ and then both girls said, ‘
Will I have to stop being your little boy
?’ in a deep and growly voice and repeated it, their voices getting lower and lower... and in between they choked and spluttered and patted each other on the back, and started taunting him again.

Clovis stood perfectly still by the door. He looked at Maia to see if she too was going to join in, but she looked horrified and now she jumped up and came to stand beside him.

‘Don’t!’ she said passionately to the twins. ‘Please don’t; can’t you see—’

Mrs Carter now took charge. ‘All right, girls,’ she said to her daughters, ‘that will do’, and to Maia, ‘Sit down, please. We have not finished our meal.’

But it took some time for the twins to quieten down. They still growled and gulped, and then Beatrice said, ‘Look at Maia, protecting her boyfriend!’

‘Enough,’ said Mr Carter, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. It was the first word he had spoken at table, and was to be the last, but the twins now managed to control themselves.

‘Now,’ said Mrs Carter, staring at Clovis, ‘might I ask what brings you here?’

Clovis looked at the soft, rounded face. Close to, it did not look kind and motherly as it had done through the window. He felt that under the puffy cheeks one would find stone.

‘I wondered if I could stay with you for a few days. We have to leave the hotel – all of us, and I thought...’ His words died away.

Maia now turned to Mrs Carter and stretched out her hands to her as if she was begging for her life. ‘Oh please, please, Mrs Carter, couldn’t he stay? He could have my room and I’d go and sleep with Miss Minton. I’m sure Mr Murray will help him to—’

‘
Stay
?’ Mrs Carter interrupted in a horrified voice.

‘Stay with
us
?’ said Beatrice. ‘We don’t have actors to stay, do we, Gwendolyn?’

Both twins shook their heads slowly, left to right and right to left. They reminded Maia of the women knitting by the guillotine during the French Revolution, while heads rolled into baskets.

‘Heaven knows what he might have picked up in the Paradiso,’ said Mrs Carter. And to Clovis, ‘What are those bites on your leg? Fleas or bedbugs?’

Clovis flushed. There
were
bedbugs at the Paradiso; he minded it just as much as Mrs Carter. But it was true that he no longer looked like a boy wonder on the stage. It had been impossible to get hot water at the hotel. His long hair was unwashed; his clothes were too small for him, and stained.

‘We can’t just turn him out,’ said Maia desperately.

‘I hope you don’t think we can take in every verminous stray that comes to the door. The boy must go back. Beatrice, go and fetch Miss Minton.’

‘I’ll go,’ said Maia quickly.

‘No. I asked Beatrice.’

But Gwendolyn, who wouldn’t even go to the bathroom by herself, had slipped out after her sister.

Maia had not sat down again; she stood beside Clovis as though she could come between him and his misery. In its bowl in the centre of the table, the pink ‘shape’, which had looked so good through the window, had sunk into a watery mush.

Miss Minton appeared in the doorway.

‘Good evening, Clovis,’ she said.

Clovis took a step towards her. ‘Good evening, Miss Minton.’ She looked just as she had looked on the boat, sharp-faced and strong. He’d liked her from the start; she was fierce but she was straight, and for a moment he was sure she would be able to help him.

‘Please take the boy out and order Furo to take him back to Manaus at once,’ ordered Mrs Carter.

‘Oh, not tonight,’ begged Maia. ‘Surely—’

‘Tonight. I hope you are satisfied, making us use the boat and wasting fuel on a runaway boy.’

Miss Minton gave Maia a quelling look. ‘That will do, Maia. Come along, Clovis. I’m really ashamed of you, putting the Carters to so much trouble.’

Clovis shook off her arm, and gave up hope.

‘I’ll come by myself,’ he said.

If Miss Minton too was his enemy, there was nothing to be done.

The two Englishmen had returned from upriver in a very nasty temper. They had spent two days on a boat with piglets and chickens and an old woman who was seasick even though the river hardly moved in the still heat. There were no bunks, only hammocks strung on deck, and Mr Trapwood fell out of his in the middle of the night onto an Inspector of Schools from Rio who was not pleased.

Even worse had befallen Mr Low who had decided to have a swim when the boat stopped to take on more wood, and came out of the water to find a dozen blood-sucking leeches feasting on his behind.

And when they got to the Ombuda there was no sign of Bernard Taverner’s son.

The interpreter whom Colonel da Silva had sent with them was very helpful. He went ahead to the chief of the Ombuda and greeted him in his own language and said that Mr Low and Mr Trapwood were important people who had come from Great Britain to search for a missing boy. But what he also said in a low voice, was that these two gentlemen were being a great trouble to the Colonel, who begged the chief and his friends to tell them some story about a lost boy which would keep them quiet and make them go away again.

The Ombuda chief and his friends were only too pleased to do this. They did not like Mr Low and Mr Trapwood, who had not brought any of the presents one usually brings when visiting a tribe – fishhooks, and knives and cooking pots – and they loved making up stories.

So they told them about an English boy, fair-haired and beautiful as the sun, who had been here, but had wandered away again.

‘Where to?’ asked the crows eagerly. ‘Where did he go?’

‘In the direction of the Sacred Mountain,’ said the chief, pointing to the north.

‘No, no, in the direction of the Mambuto forest,’ said his second in command, pointing in the opposite direction.

‘Forgive me, father,’ said the chief’s young son, ‘but the boy went to the river.’ And he pointed somewhere different again.

‘Ask them when this was,’ said Mr Trapwood excitedly.

So the Indians and the interpreter talked among themselves and then they went to a hut on the edge of the clearing and fetched out an old woman.

The old woman wasn’t just old; she was ancient, with arms and legs like sticks and not a tooth in her head, but when the chief explained what he wanted, she grinned happily and said yes, yes, she remembered the boy very well.

‘His eyes were as blue as the blossom of the jacaranda tree, and his hair glistened like the belly of the golden toad that squats on the lily leaves of the Mamari river,’ said the old woman, who was having a good time. ‘His skin was as white as the moon in the season of—’

‘Yes, but when? When?’ interrupted the crows rudely. ‘When was he here?’

The old woman sat down on a tree stump and began to count. She used her fingers and her toes and then some pebbles on the ground, and the chief and his friends helped her.

Then she winked at the interpreter and said it had been fifty years ago.

‘What!’ shouted Mr Trapwood. ‘Fifty years!’

She nodded and said, yes she was sure because it was when she was a very small girl and still had all her milk teeth in her head, and the Indians nodded also and said yes, she had often told them of the lost boy who came when she was no higher than the tail of a swamp deer – and they led her back into the hut, patting her on the back while she giggled with glee.

So the crows had to give up, but they could not leave because the boat back to Manaus was not due for another two days and they had a very uncomfortable time staying with the Ombuda, who drummed a lot and seemed to live mostly on nuts. That the tribe were sharing their food and shelter very generously did not of course occur to the crows, who had been brought up to think of the Indians as savages.

By the time they returned to Manaus, the Englishmen were not in very good shape.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Mr Trapwood as they sat in their room in the Pension Maria overlooking the docks.

‘So have I,’ croaked Mr Low. ‘This business has got to be settled. The
Bishop
goes back in ten days’ time and the Taverner boy is going to be on it.’

‘If he exists,’ said Mr Trapwood gloomily.

‘Of course he exists. You saw the letter.’

‘Well why doesn’t he come forward, or anyone else?’

‘Do you think we ought to put up the reward? The old chap said we were to use our judgement.’

‘I suppose we might as well. After all, it’s not us that’s paying it. What we need now is a thorough house-to-house search of the buildings outside the city. If Taverner was a naturalist, he probably wouldn’t live in the middle of town. And they may not have seen the notices out there.’

‘I’m sure that chap at the museum knows something,’ said Mr Low moodily. ‘The one who said that Taverner didn’t have a son.’

Then the little Brazilian maid brought in their supper which was the same as lunch and the same as breakfast – brown beans stewed with pigs’ trotters. Mr Low dug about in it gloomily looking for bits of gristle and Mr Trapwood found a dead ant on his plate. It seemed to be a perfectly clean ant, but he gagged and pushed his plate away.

‘This place is closer to hell on earth than anywhere I’ve been,’ he said.

On the morning after Clovis had been turned away from the house, the hairdresser came out from Manaus to do Mrs Carter’s hair. At first he was silent and surly, but when he found that Mrs Carter meant to pay him at last, he cheered up and gave them all the news. The actors had all been thrown out of the Paradiso and had got hold of a lorry and were trying to get out of Brazil through Venezuela where the British Consul was supposed to be good-natured and inclined to turn a blind eye.

‘But everyone thinks they’ll be stopped at the border,’ said Monsieur Claude.

‘Poor Clovis,’ said Maia when she heard this.

The twins shrugged. ‘He’s only an actor,’ said Beatrice. ‘A vagabond. They’re used to wandering about.’

‘Clovis isn’t,’ said Maia, but she said no more about him. Since Clovis had been taken away by Miss Minton she had been quiet and subdued, scarcely speaking to anyone.

But the piece of news that interested the Carters most was that the reward for the discovery of Taverner’s son had been doubled.

‘It’s forty thousand
milreis
now,’ said the hairdresser, crimping Mrs Carter’s curls. ‘They’ve put up notices everywhere.’

‘Imagine the dresses one could buy with that,’ said Beatrice.

‘And the hats,’ said Gwendolyn.

‘And the shoes.’

‘And the chocolates. Boxes and boxes of chocolates.’

‘You could buy something a great deal more useful than that,’ said Mr Carter. The full set of glass eyes from Queen Victoria’s piano tuner for example; he had seen it in the catalogue. Or he could pay off that shark Gonzales from whom he’d borrowed money and who was always pestering him.