Journey to the River Sea

  Maia looked at him in dismay. ‘They’ll find you. Stowaways are always found. Haven’t you got an understudy?’

  Clovis shook his head. ‘There was a boy in the last place but he got typhoid.’ He got up and really seemed to see Maia for the first time. ‘You’ve got blood on your hand, did you know?’

  She shook her head impatiently. ‘It doesn’t matter. Clovis, you’ve got to pull yourself together. It’s such a little thing.’

  ‘It is to you because you’re not on the stage – and you don’t know the Goodleys.’ He looked at her and there were still tears in his eyes. ‘Maia, I’ve got to get home. Can’t you help me? I’ll do anything to get away.’

  ‘I’ll try, Clovis. I’ll really try.’

  She broke off as a furious voice out in the corridor was heard calling her name. Mrs Carter had tracked her down!

  ‘I have to go! Look, Clovis, let me think. Just give me time. And don’t be so sad. I’ll help you somehow. There has to be something we can do!’

  Chapter Seven

  For two days after the matinee, Maia was in disgrace.

  ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ said Mrs Carter, glaring at her over a dollop of macaroni cheese so solid that she was cutting it with a knife. ‘A girl in my care creeping out secretly, going backstage and looking like a ragamuffin. The girls told me they thought they’d seen you on the way out but I didn’t believe it.’

  ‘We told you, Mama,’ said Beatrice, smirking.

  ‘She’s stuck on that actor boy with the bass voice.’

  Then they both started doing imitations of Clovis saying Will I have to stop being your little boy? in a deep, growly voice, and laughing. ‘Oh, it was so funny, I thought I was going to die!’

  At first Maia had tried to defend Clovis and make them see what the mishap had meant to him. But soon she gave up. Making the twins imagine the feelings of anybody except themselves was a waste of time. Instead, Maia had to put up with Mrs Carter’s threats to send her back to England.

  Maia had told her that she had gone to Manaus on a boat ferrying rubber down river and Mrs Carter did not understand why she had not been murdered and thrown overboard. ‘As for Miss Minton, I’m afraid she is really not fit to have charge of young girls. I shall have to replace her as soon as I can find someone suitable.’

  In the evening, when Miss Minton came to ‘hear her read’, Maia said, ‘I’m not staying here without you. I shall write to Mr Murray.’

  ‘I think you will find that at the salary the Carters are paying me, it might take a little while to find someone else,’ said Miss Minton drily. She picked up Maia’s hairbrush. ‘Don’t tell me you’re doing a hundred strokes a night because I don’t believe it. I’ve told you again and again that you must look after your hair.’ She picked up the brush and brushed fiercely for a while. And then: ‘Do you want to go back, Maia? Back to England?’

  ‘I did,’ she said, thinking about it. ‘The twins are so awful and there seemed no point in being here, shut up in this house. But not now. I don’t want to go now because I’ve seen that it is there. What I thought was there.’

  Miss Minton waited.

  ‘I mean . . . the forest . . . the river . . . the Amazon . . . everything I thought of before I came. And the people who live in it and know about it.’

  Then she told Miss Minton about the boy who had taken her into Manaus.

  ‘He didn’t speak English, but he had such a listening face; I couldn’t believe he didn’t understand everything I said. Oh, Minty, it was such a wonderful journey, like floating through a drowned forest. You can’t believe it’s the same world as the Carters live in.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Miss Minton. ‘People make their own worlds.’

  ‘I wish I could find him again.’ And then: ‘I will find him again. If they don’t send me away.’

  ‘They won’t send you away,’ said Miss Minton. Mrs Carter was already waiting greedily for the next month’s allowance for Maia from the bank in Manaus. ‘However, it seems to me we must find a way of getting you out of doors.’ She wrinkled her formidable forehead. ‘I think a disease might be best. Yes. Something that makes it necessary for you to go out and breathe fresh air. Even damp air. Let me think. What about pulmonary spasms?’

  Maia stared at her. ‘I’ve never heard of them.’

  ‘Well no. I’ve just made them up. We’ll tell Mrs Carter that if your lungs get dry from the disinfectant indoors you have spasms. You know what they are, don’t you?’

  ‘Sort of twitchings and convulsions?’

  ‘Yes. Convulsions will do. Mrs Carter won’t like them. But I may not always be able to go with you, so please understand that I am trusting you to stay close to the house and to be sensible. Which you do not seem to have been.’

  ‘Yes. I will, honestly.’ But she could try to make friends with the Indians in the huts. She could find out who sang that lullaby – and ask them about the person who had whistled Blow the Wind Southerly on her first night. They might even know who her rescuer had been so that she could at least thank him properly.

  But Maia had not forgotten her promise to help Clovis.

  ‘He wants to stow away on a boat to England, but he’s sure to be caught, don’t you think?’ she asked Miss Minton.

  ‘Certain to,’ said the governess. ‘Fortunately, the next boat to England doesn’t go for two weeks.’

  ‘Do you think Mr Murray would be willing to pay his passage? He could take it out of my pocket money.’

  ‘I doubt if you’d see any pocket money for the rest of your life if you did that.’

  ‘But he might,’ persisted Maia. ‘Could I send him a cable? They don’t take very long, do they – they sort of snake along the sea. He could arrange with the shipping company in Manaus for Clovis to pick up a ticket, couldn’t he? My father was always doing things like that.’

  ‘He could,’ said Miss Minton, but she doubted very much whether Maia’s guardian would trouble himself about a stranded actor.

  But she did not stand in Maia’s way. Maia copied out a message to Mr Murray and gave it to Mr Carter to take to the post office with enough money to send it. Then she settled down to wait for a reply.

  Mrs Carter was not pleased about the pulmonary spasms. She had never heard of them and said so, and she did not want Maia wandering about outside by herself. ‘I shall expect you to accompany her whenever possible,’ she said to Miss Minton. ‘And to make up the lesson time with the twins out of your free periods.’

  Miss Minton could have said, ‘What free periods?’ but she did not. But she was quite right in thinking that while she could not bring herself to be nice to Maia, Mrs Carter dreaded losing her. Since Maia came they had been able to pay the bill for the dressmaker, the piano lessons and the dancing class. Next month they might even be able to pay some of the rubber-gatherers – not their full wages, but enough to stop them running back into the forest.

  So Maia was allowed to go outside for her midday break and again after tea. She was not allowed to go out in the evening but she went. Once she had pushed back the heavy bolt on her door, she left it open.

  She was careful not to go too near the huts of the Indians without being asked, but when she met anyone she smiled and greeted them.

  Then, on the third night, she was walking along the river beside a grove of dyewood trees, when she saw a small shape run out of the darkness towards her. In the dusk she had no idea what it was and for a moment she was frightened. There were so many animals, still, that she knew nothing about.

  Maia looked down . . . and laughed. The strange animal was a baby – the baby she had seen carried by the Portuguese girl. It had only just escaped and was enjoying its freedom, but the river was nearby.

  Maia picked it up. The baby kicked and struggled, but she held it firmly and began to make her way back towards the huts.

  ‘Oh hush,’ she said. ‘Don’t make such a fuss –’ and she began to hum the lullaby she had heard the Indians singi
ng. She didn’t know the words but the tune quietened the baby, and he stopped wriggling and let his head fall against her shoulder.

  As she neared the middle hut she saw three people standing outside the door, staring at her: Tapi, Furo and the old woman with long, grey hair. Then Tapi ran into the next hut and the Portuguese girl, Conchita, came out and rushed up to Maia, seizing the baby and letting off a torrent of words. She had left him asleep on his mat and he must have woken when she was out at the back getting water.

  ‘He is a terror; he is wickedness beyond belief . . .’

  Now that she had handed over the baby, Maia turned to go – but this was not allowed. The silent sulkiness of the Carter servants had vanished. Tapi led her into the hut, the old lady brought coffee and nuts; fruit was offered, and little cakes . . . a party was brewing up.

  ‘You sang ’im good,’ said the baby’s mother, and nodded. ‘Where you learn our song?’

  ‘From my window,’ said Maia, pointing back to the house. ‘But I don’t know the words.’

  It was the old woman, Lila, who was the singer and she sang it again now for Maia.

  ‘Is it a lullaby?’ she asked, pretending to go to sleep, and Lila said it was a song about love and pain like so many songs, but she always sang babies to sleep with it. She had been a nurse to many children, European ones also, she told her.

  They knew and understood far more English than they admitted to the Carters – and they spoke with their hands, their eyes. Maia met the little white dog; the parrot sat on her shoulder; they had a tame gecko who lived on a potted palm in the window – and every time her cup was empty, or her plate, it was filled again. She had never met such friendliness. These Indians lived the kind of life she had imagined for the twins before she came.

  After that she slipped in to see them whenever she could. The old lady, who was Furo’s aunt, taught her other songs: songs that the African slaves had brought over when they came to work in the sugar plantations; songs she had learnt from her Portuguese employers when she was a nursemaid in Manaus. They showed her the end hut, the one where the rubber-gatherers had slept, but which was now empty, because the men had slipped back into the forest when Mr Carter hadn’t paid them for three whole months.

  But nobody knew the North Country tune she had heard whistled on the first day, nor could they tell her anything about the Indian boy who had taken her to Manaus. There were many such boys on the river, they said, and Maia began to feel that she would never see her rescuer again.

  Several days had passed since the disaster of the matinée and in the Hotel Paradiso things were going badly. The Goodleys had called a meeting in their bedroom to decide what to do, but as usual they started by nagging Clovis.

  ‘You’d think you could have waited another week before you started honking like an old grandfather,’ said Mrs Goodley.

  ‘You realize you’ve turned us into a laughing stock,’ said Nancy Goodley. ‘After all we’ve done for you, making you into a star.’

  Clovis hung his head. He was crouched on a dirty footstool, clutching his stomach which was heaving after the Paradiso breakfast of bean stew and fish bones, and he was covered in bites because the hotel sheets were crawling with bedbugs.

  It was all his fault, he knew that – and now even more things were going wrong. A banana boat had come in from Belem the night before and the captain had told the manager of the Paradiso that the company had left there without paying their hotel bill. Since then the manager shot out of his office whenever any of the actors came past, asking for money and threatening to take their clothes and belongings if they didn’t pay.

  They had tried to put on a funny play that Mr Goodley had written instead of Fauntleroy, but it wasn’t funny and had to be pulled out, and now not only the hotel but the theatre was losing money, and the management was threatening to cancel the second week of their booking.

  They were due to go on to Columbia and Peru – but how?

  ‘Perhaps we could steal out of the hotel one by one at night, and hire a lorry?’ suggested the old actor with the flashing teeth.

  ‘Hire a lorry with what?’ sneered Mr Goodley. ‘Pebbles? Coconut shells?’

  Clovis stopped listening. He felt as wretched as he had ever done, and frightened too. What was going to happen to him and to everyone? He could see himself staring into the dark pit of the theatre and listening to that awful tittering that had started everyone off. Two girls, high-pitched and cruel. One thing was certain, no one was going to get him onto a stage again.

  Only Maia was still his friend. She’d promised to help him; she’d said there was something they could do – and he trusted Maia as he trusted no one else. The loud, angry voices crashed over his head. The room was sweltering; a centipede fell from the ceiling at his feet. Downstairs, someone opened a door and the smell of the dreaded bean stew came up and hit him. He couldn’t face it again. He couldn’t face any of it . . .

  Then suddenly he sat up very straight. He didn’t have to face it, now that he wasn’t acting any more. He knew where Maia lived, and Miss Minton – a few miles up the river to the north. The twins would like to see him, Maia had said on the boat; and Clovis saw them now, welcoming and kind.

  Yes, that’s what he’d do. He’d go and find Maia. He had a few coins still, someone would take him up the river. And once he was with Maia and Miss Minton everything would be all right. They would help him to get home. Maia and Miss Minton together could do anything.

  Miss Minton’s afternoon off fell two days later. She was going into Manaus and Maia hoped she would ask her to go with her, but she didn’t. She was going to see if there was a reply yet from Mr Murray, but after that she had business to attend to, she said. Since the Carters were going into the town to visit the only family in Manaus with whom they were still on speaking terms, they could hardly help offering her a place in the launch.

  ‘Where is Furo?’ asked Mrs Carter, as one of the other Indians waited by the boat.

  ‘Sick,’ said the man, letting his knees go soft and miming a fever.

  ‘Oh, really they are impossible, these people,’ said Mrs Carter angrily. ‘The slightest thing and they stay off work.’

  Maia waved them off. Then she went into the sitting room and opened the piano. It was almost impossible to practise when the Carters were at home. She started on her scales, her arpeggios, but sooner than she should have done she began to play the Chopin Ballade she had been learning in London. She was so absorbed that at first she did not see Furo beckoning to her outside the window.

  He did not seem to be in the least sick. He looked in fact rather pleased and excited.

  ‘Come,’ he said, making signs that she was to be quiet.

  Maia followed him. She was puzzled – during the day the Indians always ignored her; it was only at night that they showed her their true selves. Tapi and old Lila were standing at the door of their hut, smiling, but they said nothing, and Maia followed Furo to the creek she had found on the day she tried to go to Manaus.

  By the wooden bridge, a shabby dugout was moored. It was the one Furo used to go fishing in the evening.

  ‘In,’ he said, holding out a hand.

  She hesitated only for a moment, then obeyed him.

  They travelled down a number of twisting rivers. Sometimes Maia thought she had been there before; sometimes everything looked different. Whenever she tried to question Furo he shook his head, but he went on looking pleased. No one could have been more different from the surly boatman who had brought them to the Carters in the first place.

  They paddled down a side stream, and now Maia did feel uneasy because Furo took out a square piece of cloth, put it over his own eyes to show her what she was to do, then over Maia’s.

  ‘Put on,’ he said, and when she shook her head, repeated it, leaning forward to tie the blindfold over her eyes.

  She began to be frightened. The boat eased slowly forward; she heard rushes making a dry sound against the side of the canoe, felt
branches brushing her arm. Then the boat surged forward, and Furo leant forward to unbind her eyes.

  They were in a still lagoon of clear, blue water, shielded from the outside by a ring of great trees. The only entrance, the passage through the rushes, seemed to have closed behind them. They might have been alone in the world.

  But it was not the secrecy of the lake that held Maia spellbound, it was its beauty. The sheltering trees leant over the water; there was a bank of golden sand on which a turtle slept, untroubled by the boat. Clumps of yellow and pink lotus flowers swayed in the water, their buds open to the sun. Humming birds clustered in an ever-changing whirl of colour round a feeding bottle nailed to a branch . . .

  On the far side of the lagoon, in the shade of two big cottonwoods, was a neatly built wooden hut and in front of it, a narrow wooden jetty built out over the lake. A small launch with a raked smoke stack and the letters Arabella painted on the side rode at anchor near by, and made fast alongside was a canoe which Maia recognized.

  But she did not at first recognize the boy who stood outside the hut, quietly waiting. He seemed to be the Indian boy who had taken her to Manaus, but his jet-black hair had gone, and so had the headband and the red paint. With his own fine, brown hair, he looked like any European boy who has lived a long time in the sun.

  Except that he didn’t. He looked like no boy Maia had ever seen, standing so still, not waving or shouting instructions, just being there. And the dog who stood beside him was unlike other dogs also. A thin dog, the colour of dark sand, he knew when to bark and when to be silent, and as the punt drew up alongside the wooden platform, he permitted himself only a half wave of his tail.

  The boy stretched out his hand and Maia jumped out.

  ‘I’ve decided to trust you,’ he said in English.

  She had known really before he spoke. Now she was sure.

  Maia looked into his eyes. ‘You can do that,’ she said seriously. ‘I wouldn’t betray you to the crows – not for the world.’

  ‘The crows . . . yes, that’s the right name for them. So you know who I am?’