Journey to the River Sea

Chapter Sixteen

Finn had been gone three days and life in the bungalow seemed even more dismal than when Maia first came.

Miss Minton saw that lessons went on, but though Maia worked as hard as she had done before, she did so without joy. She didn’t want to read about plants and animals any longer, she wanted to find them. She wanted to be out there in the forest starting a real life, and much as Miss Minton loved books, she understood her.

The weather, as the dry season got under way, became even hotter. In her room, Miss Minton took off her corset and put it on again. Not because she was afraid of Mrs Carter, but because she knew that British women did not throw off their underclothes — and because she had told Maia not to make a fuss when Finn went away. If Maia could behave well over the parting, she could behave well about the heat rash spreading up her back.

Meanwhile she watched Maia carefully, because there was no doubt that the Carters were becoming very strange indeed. As Mr Carter’s business went from bad to worse, he spent more and more time in his study, peering at his glass eyes — and since his own family would not look at them, he called in Maia.

‘Look at that one,’ he said to her. ‘It’s the left eye of a tramp found dead in a ditch on Wimbledon Common. Look at the way those blood vessels are painted! You wouldn’t imagine a tramp could afford an eye like that.’

‘Perhaps he was a very important person before he became a tramp,’ suggested Maia — but the eyes were beginning to get into her dreams.

Mrs Carter had set up what she called her ‘larder’ in a cupboard in the hall, but it was not a larder to store food. Instead of bottles of plums or pats of butter, the shelves held flasks labelled POISON, and masks for protecting the face, and rubber gloves. There were glass jars of chloral hydrate, and spray cans with nozzles, and a new very large bottle labelled COCKROACH KILLER — KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE.

‘We’ll be safe now,’ she told the girls. ‘No creepy-crawlies will get past us now.’

She had also started to talk to the picture of Lady Parsons on the wall of the drawing room.

‘You were right,’ Maia heard her say to the lady’s fierce, red face. ‘I should have let Clifford go to prison instead of bringing him out here. Look what we have come to!’

And one morning Maia came into the drawing room and found the portrait wreathed in red ribbon.

‘I hope you haven’t forgotten that today is Lady Parsons’ birthday,’ Mrs Carter said to the twins. ‘Do you remember when she allowed you to share her cake?’

‘Yes, Mama, we wouldn’t forget.’

‘What kind of cake was it?’ asked Maia. She had spoken without thinking, wanting to be polite. There was certainly nothing she was less interested in than the cake which Lady Parsons had shared with Beatrice and Gwendolyn when they were still in England.

The twins glared at her. Lady Parsons was theirs; Maia had no business even to ask.

‘It was a sponge cake with pink icing,’ said Mrs Carter.

‘No, it wasn’t, Mother. It had white icing,’ corrected Beatrice.

‘No, it didn’t; it was covered with marzipan and grated chocolate,’ said Gwendolyn.

They went on arguing, but Maia had forgotten them again, following Finn in her mind.

Where was he? Did he have enough wood for the firebox, were his maps accurate? Did he miss her at all?

Finn did miss her — she would have been surprised to know how much. He had never sailed the Arabella alone for any distance and it wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped. While she was under way he managed well, but when it came to anchoring in the evening or setting off at dawn, he would have given anything for another pair of hands. Not any pair of hands — Maia’s. She had obeyed his orders quickly but not blindly; he had learnt to trust her completely.

And she was nice. Fun. Quick to catch a joke and so interested in everything — asking about the birds, the plants. This morning he had found himself starting to say, ‘Look, Maia!’ when he saw an umbrella bird strutting along a branch, and when he realized that she wasn’t there, the exotic creature, with its sunshade of feathers, had seemed somehow less exciting. After all, sharing was something everyone wanted to do. He could hear his father’s voice calling, ‘Look, Finn, over there!’ a dozen times a day.

But his father was dead and he had left Maia, and suddenly being alone, which he had always enjoyed, turned into loneliness, which was a very different thing.

He had anchored close to a sandbank, a beautiful place sheltered by large-fronded palms, and found a nest of turtle eggs. A shoal of black-banded fishes glided past the boat; he had caught some earlier, using pieces of banana to bait his line, and they made a delicious supper. He had hardly touched his stores — and the Arabella was going steadily.

‘What’s the matter with me?’ said Finn.

He was doing what his father had suggested. He was going to see the Xanti — but now he wondered what it was all about. They were just as likely to put an arrow through him as to welcome him with open arms.

The dog, who had been curled up on the foredeck, thumped once with his tail, then got to his feet and offered him a wet nose for comfort.

‘It’s all right,’ said Finn to his dog. ‘It’s all right, Rob.’

But there was more to his unease than loneliness. He knew he could not have taken Maia — he had no idea how the journey was going to end, and in any case Miss Minton would never have allowed her to come.

All the same, he felt he should not have left her. He remembered Clovis saying, ‘But Maia shouldn’t live in a house that’s been cursed.’

Only that was silly. He had told Furo and the others to look after her and they had promised.

It was that other side of him, the Indian side, which went in for rubbish like premonitions and inklings, and things you felt without knowing why. Suddenly furious with himself, Finn crawled to his haversack, turned up the lamp, and took out Caesar’s Gallic Wars.

‘After marching from the country of the Menapii…’ he translated. And became an ordinary English schoolboy doing his homework.

When Finn had been gone for nearly a week, the Great Event which the twins had been expecting actually happened. Colonel da Silva arrived in the police launch, bringing the reward for the capture of Bernard Taverner’s son.

He brought it as he had promised, in Brazilian notes so that it could be divided into two equal parts, but he warned the twins to get it into a bank as soon as possible.

‘If you don’t have an account your parents could bank it for you.’

But the twins did not mean to do that. As da Silva left, they were already counting out their separate heaps on the dining room table.

Twenty thousand milreis… each.

For a short time, Beatrice and Gwendolyn were perfectly happy.

Miss Minton and the professor had become friends. He had taken the butterfly she had found to the collector in Manaus who had paid her. He had also lent her a collecting tin and some preservative, and though so far she had not found anything else worth selling, she was secretly proud of having become a naturalist.

Because Maia now had lunch with the Haltmanns after her music lesson, Miss Minton lunched with the professor in the little café he had shown her. But being friends did not mean blabbing out one’s troubles and Miss Minton was slow to share with the professor her anxieties about Maia. It was only when he particularly asked about her that she said, ‘I’m not happy about the way things are going at the Carters. The twins are bullying Maia more openly now and their mother seems to live in a fantasy world. She talks to the portrait of Lady Parsons and sometimes I’m afraid she—’

But Miss Minton stopped there, not liking to admit that her employer was possibly losing her mind.

‘They will have anxieties about Mr Carter’s business,’ said the professor. ‘I understand that Gonzales is baying for Carter’s blood. He certainly seems to owe enormous sums of money. Isn’t there anywhere else that you can take Maia?’

Miss Minton hesitated. Even to the professor she preferred not to reveal her plan before she was sure it could be carried out. ‘I’ve written to Mr Murray,’ was all she said.

She then asked about his work and he sighed deeply. ‘Carruthers is dead,’ he said, and his large, pink forehead creased into lines like a mournful pug’s.

Miss Minton waited. She didn’t think she had heard about Carruthers.

‘He was a brilliant man; knew more about extinct animals than anyone I know, but they hounded him.’

‘Who hounded him?’

‘The “proper” scientists. You should have seen what they wrote about him in the papers. “An unrealistic dreamer, a man who let himself be led away by myths and stories — always searching for the impossible…” ’

‘What was he searching for?’

The professor put down his fork. He seemed to be looking into the distance. Then he said, ‘The giant sloth.’

‘The bones, you mean? The skeleton? Like your rib?’

‘No, the beast itself. He was convinced it wasn’t extinct. The natives have always had stories about it — they call it the Maupugari, a great creature with reddish hair which walks on its curved claws. You get sightings of it every so often.’ He sighed. ‘It was Carruthers who got me interested in sloths — we were friends in Cambridge. And now…’

‘How did he die?’

The professor shrugged. ‘He was searching somewhere in the Matto Grosso and got a fever. It’s not so difficult to die out here. Personally I think they broke his heart.’

Miss Minton waited while he dabbed his eyes with his handkerchief. Then she said, ‘Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad way to go. Still working, still searching… Better than dying in hospital with strangers.’

‘Yes. Yes, you’re right. But I wish…’

Something now occurred to Miss Minton. ‘You don’t think he was right, do you? That the sloth is not extinct. You don’t agree with him?’

The professor blushed. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s most unlikely.’

But he didn’t meet her eyes.

Miss Minton now gathered up her belongings. ‘I have to fetch Maia from her piano lesson,’ she said.

But when she left the restaurant, she did not go straight to the Haltmanns. She crossed the square, turned down the street to the Keminskys’ mansion, and asked to speak to the countess.

The professor was right about Gonzales. He arrived at the Carters the next day, along with two unpleasant-looking henchmen.

Gonzales was a Brazilian who had traded in the Amazon for many years. He was not a nice man, but he dealt fairly in business and Mr Carter had now exhausted his patience.

Mr Carter took him into the study, but the walls were thin and it was almost impossible not to hear what Gonzales was saying.

‘I’ve had enough,’ he said in Portuguese. ‘Either you let me have what you owe me in full, or I will take legal action.’

Then Carter’s voice, low, whining. ‘I only need a few more weeks. They’re bringing in a big batch of rubber from the north of the estate. It will fetch a good price.’

‘That is not what I have heard,’ said Gonzales.

The voices went on for a while longer: Gonzales’ loud, Carter’s a low mumble. Then Gonzales threw open the door, bowed to Mrs Carter, gathered his henchmen — and was gone.

For two days after Gonzales had come, Mr Carter tried to sort out his papers and his bills. He even went out into the forest, a thing he did not often do, to encourage those workers who were still with him.

But then a little packet came from England, with the greatest prize he had yet seen; a double set of navy blue eyes.

‘They’re from a captain in the French Army. He was blown up in a battle. Look how they match; it’s incredible!’

And he disappeared again into his study and wasn’t seen except for meals.

Mrs Carter had started to write to Lady Parsons in England, covering the paper with her hand when anyone came into the room. She wrote several of these letters and tore them up. But in the end she was satisfied with what she had written, and posted the letter herself in Manaus.

As for the twins, their happiness did not last long. At first they made lists of what they would buy: the dresses, the shoes, the hats, the boxes of chocolate. If Beatrice decided to order a flounced party dress in pink organdie, Gwendolyn decided to order one in blue. When Beatrice thought she would buy some proper scent, Gwendolyn said she was sick of boring lavender water and said she would have some too.

‘You don’t have to copy me,’ said Beatrice crossly, and Gwendolyn looked at her blankly. The twins had always copied each other.

Mrs Carter had asked them to share some of the money with their parents.

‘Your father is having a hard time, girls. I think it would be kind to let the whole family join in your good fortune,’ she said.

But the twins absolutely refused.

‘It’s ours. We need it. We don’t want Maia to have money and not us. We want her to go.’

So now the twins became suspicious, first of their mother, then of the servants.

‘They’re always hanging about,’ they said fretfully.

This was true. Tapi and the others, remembering their promise to Finn, took every chance they could to see that Maia was all right.

Hiding their money became the most important thing to the twins. At night, Beatrice hid her bank-notes in an old doll’s pram which she kept by her bed. Gwendolyn slept with hers under her mattress.

They took the money with them to the lavatory, they brought it into the dining room when they were doing their lessons.

By now they had stopped planning how to spend the money. They just wanted to look at it and count it and gloat over it.

From being suspicious of everyone else, the twins became suspicious of each other. They suspended a piece of cotton between their beds so that one of them couldn’t creep out at night without waking the other. Then Beatrice developed a septic throat and couldn’t go to the dancing class, and Gwendolyn wouldn’t go without her in case her sister stole the money while she was away.

But what worried Maia was not the way the twins behaved. The twins had always been odd. What worried her was the feeling that Minty was hiding something from her. That her governess had a secret.

A few days after Gonzales had come, she knocked on Miss Minton’s door and opened it, to find her kneeling on the floor putting books into her tin trunk.

She looked up quickly and shut the lid, but for the first time Maia felt she was interrupting something private.

‘I’m putting some of these away. I’ve found some ants in the Shakespeare.’

‘They must be really tough ants,’ said Maia, ‘to hold out against Mrs Carter’s sprays.’

‘Ants are tough,’ said Miss Minton, and changed the subject.

But Maia continued to feel uneasy, for she had the feeling that what Miss Minton had been doing was packing.

Oh, Finn, thought Maia, I know I should be glad you’re free and happy, and I am glad. Only I really don’t know what to do here any more.

But Finn wasn’t happy. Both he and the boat seemed somehow sluggish — and he couldn’t quite get rid of the knot in his stomach.

He had moored by a huge dyewood tree. The water flowed quietly in a deep channel; nowhere better could be found.

So why? He’d had his supper of beans and roasted maize; the deck was piled with chopped wood; the dog had gone ashore to find his own supper and came back with a smug expression and blood on his jaws.

Everything was fine.

A group of howler monkeys came swinging through the trees, making their evening racket, half-screech, half-laughter, and stopped when they saw the Arabella.

‘Perhaps I should have gone to Westwood,’ thought Finn. ‘They’d have knocked all this rubbish out of me. Foreseeing disasters…’

What did he think could happen to Maia in the Carters’ bungalow? The whole point about the Carters’ bungalow was that nothing happened in it. It was the most boring house in the world — and the Indians had promised to look after her. ‘No harm will come to your friend,’ Furo had said.

So why did the unease get worse all the time?

He remembered saying goodbye to Maia. She had come out of the house in her dressing gown; she ran so lightly, but when he’d hugged her she felt wonderfully solid.

No, Maia would be all right.

‘I’m not going back,’ said Finn aloud — and in the trees, the monkeys threw back their heads and roared with laughter.