Journey to the River Sea - 10th Anniversary Edition (6 page)

‘Now, Gwendolyn. Look at the first exercise. Where does the comma go in that sentence?’

Gwendolyn’s round blue eyes looked puzzled. ‘After ... after station ...’

‘No. Have another look.’

The morning dragged on. Dr Bullman’s exercises were the most boring Maia had ever seen and the girls worked so slowly that she had to look away so as to hide her expression. But when Miss Minton asked Maia to read a paragraph, she stopped her almost at once. ‘All right, Maia, that will do,’ she said crossly, and Maia looked up, puzzled. It was a ridiculously easy passage, surely she had not read it wrong? But Miss Minton did not ask her to read again.

After English Grammar came English Composition. Dr Bullman did not believe that children should write stories using their imaginations. He gave set subjects, examples of how to begin, how to end, and the number of words they were to use. Then came French – and Maia had to sit in silence while the twins stumbled over phrases she had learnt in her first year.

But the boredom was not as bad as knowing she had upset Miss Minton. The governess gave her no chance to read or take part – she did not even look at her. Maia had begun to think of Miss Minton as her friend, but clearly she was wrong.

At eleven Mrs Carter came back with the flit gun, followed by the sullen maid with a jug of tinned orange juice and four of the dry biscuits they had had the day before.

‘Would you like to take your elevenses in the garden?’ suggested Miss Minton.

The twins looked at her in amazement.

‘We never go out into the garden,’ said Beatrice, looking at the raked square of gravel which an Indian was spraying with something.

‘You get stung,’ offered Gwendolyn.

So they stayed in the hot room with the loudly ticking clock. After break came arithmetic. The twins were better at that, and as it was Maia’s weakest subject she was able to work out the sums without too much boredom. But history, which for Dr Bullman was the History of England and nowhere else, was deadly: the repeal of the Corn Laws and a list of pointless dates. There was not one lesson which touched the lives of the twins in Brazil; Geography was about coach-building in Birmingham, and RI was about a girl who would not read her bible and was struck down by a terrible disease.

After lunch the twins did needlework in the drawing room, watched by their mother, who kept the flit gun by her chair as other women might keep a pet dog – a Dachshund or a Pekinese. Beatrice was embroidering a table mat with primroses, Gwendolyn’s was covered in violets. Maia was given a square of linen and a skein of embroidery thread.

‘What are you going to put on yours?’ asked Beatrice.

‘I thought I’d like to do those big red lilies that grow everywhere here. Canna lilies I think they’re called.’

Beatrice made a face. ‘Oh, you don’t want to do them. They’re native flowers and they’re nasty.’

‘Mother says they’re a Breeding Ground.’

Maia looked up, surprised. ‘What are they a Breeding Ground for?’

‘Horrid things. Things that bite you and make you ill. They crawl out of the inside.’

Another hour of lessons followed. Then Miss Minton suggested they might like to read some poetry, and Maia’s face lit up.

‘Must we?’ asked Beatrice. ‘Can’t we just go on with the exercises?’

‘Very well,’ said Miss Minton, ignoring Maia’s disappointed face.

The afternoon ended with the twins’ piano practice. They did exactly half an hour each, with the metronome set. Scales, arpeggios,
The Dance of the Butterflies
,
The Merry Peasant
. . . And after half an hour exactly they stopped, even if they were in the middle of a bar.

‘And you, Maia?’ asked Mrs Carter. ‘Did you have piano lessons in England?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Maia, looking longingly at the piano.

‘Well tomorrow you shall have your turn to practise. I have rather a headache coming on now.’

As she sat at supper, to which Miss Minton was not allowed to come, it occurred to Maia that the twins had not once been out of doors; not for five minutes to look at the river or take a stroll.

How am I going to stand it? thought Maia, shut up like a prisoner.

Back in her room she turned out the lamp and pushed the chair under the window as she had done the night before. She was beginning to make out the people who lived there. In the middle hut lived Furo the boatman, and Tapi, the sullen maid to whom he was married – but it was from there that the singing had come so there had to be other people living there: so sulky a woman could not have sung such a song.

The girl with the baby lived in the hut on the left: she was the wife of the gardener who sprayed Mrs Carter’s gravel and was half Portuguese, which was why her baby sometimes wore nappies instead of running naked as the Indian babies did. The little dog belonged to her. There was a chicken run behind the huts – an old woman with long grey hair came out sometimes to feed them – and she had heard the grunting of a pig, but all the animal noises were quickly hushed – for fear of the Carters she guessed.

The next three days were exactly the same. The sound of squirting and stamping at dawn, Doctor Bullman’s boring lessons, unspeakable meals – tinned fish in a bluish sauce, endless beetroot, and a cornflour ‘shape’ that seemed to quiver with fear as Tapi brought it to the table. The twins, who always looked so clean and fresh in the morning, were flushed and grumpy by the end of the day. Mr Carter scarcely spoke and disappeared into his study, and whenever it was Maia’s turn at the piano, Mrs Carter had a headache.

But Maia could have coped with it all. What really upset her was Miss Minton. Her governess went on ignoring her in lessons, and never let her read or answer questions, while Beatrice and Gwendolyn became more and more smug as they saw Maia being shown up as a fool. I must have made her angry, thought Maia, but try as she would she could not think what she had done.

Then on the fourth night there was a knock at the door and Miss Minton entered.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Come down off that chair. I think we are ready for the next step.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I am going to see Mrs Carter tomorrow. I shall tell her that you are not able to keep up with the twins in lessons.’

‘But—’

Miss Minton held up her hand. ‘Don’t interrupt, please. I shall tell her that I will set you to work separately because you are holding the twins back. That means I am trusting you to work on your own. I shall of course help you whenever I can but you must keep up the deception.’ She gave one of her tight smiles. ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t have an interesting time. I have a book about the history of Brazil, and one by Bates, the explorer who first described this part of the Amazon. And another by Humboldt – a very great scientist. The twins may live as though they are still in Littleford-on-Sea, but there is no need for us to do so.’

Maia jumped from the chair. ‘Oh, Minty,’ she said, and threw her arms around her governess. ‘Thank you. I’m sorry . . . I thought—’

‘Well don’t,’ said Miss Minton briskly. And then: ‘Come along, it’s time we opened my trunk.’

Miss Minton had been poor all her life. She had no trinkets, no personal possessions; her employers underpaid her when they paid her at all – but her trunk was an Aladdin’s cave. There were travel books and fairy tales, novels and dictionaries and collections of poetry ...

‘How did you get them all?’ Maia asked wonderingly. ‘How did you manage?’

Miss Minton shrugged.

‘If you want something enough you usually get it. But you have to take what goes with it,’ – and she pointed to her shabby blouse and mended skirt. ‘Now, let’s see – what shall we start with? Ah yes, here is Bates – he must have sailed down this very river not sixty years ago. Look at that drawing of a sloth ...’

Mrs Carter was delighted to hear that Maia could not keep up with the twins. The first real smile they had seen on her lit up her flabby face and she gave permission readily enough for Maia to work on her own.

‘Of course, Beatrice and Gwendolyn are very intelligent, I’ve always known that.’ She gave Maia quite a kind look. ‘I daresay you’ll catch up soon enough if you apply yourself.’

So each morning Maia was set to work on the veranda at a small wicker table. Miss Minton gave her exercises and projects and occasionally she left Dr Bullman and the twins to see if she needed help, but mostly Maia worked on her own and she loved it.

She learnt about the explorers who had braved incredible hardship to map the rivers and mountains of Brazil, she copied the drawings made by the early naturalists: drawings of marmosets and tapirs and anacondas ... and of the great trees which supplied the world with precious woods and rare medicines, and it was as though Miss Minton’s books gave her back the mysterious country she had longed to see, and which the Carters had shut out. She was told to write stories about whatever interested her; she learnt poetry by heart, and she wrote it.

From time to time she would knock on the door of the dining room, where the twins were doing their lessons, and ask how to spell a word, choosing an easy one so that the girls could despise her ...

‘How do you spell
table
?’ Maia would say, trying to sound worried, and Beatrice would tell her how to spell it, and say, ‘Goodness, can’t you even spell that?’

But mostly no one took any notice of what Maia was doing. The teaching had been good at the Academy but Miss Minton was a born teacher. Not that Maia enjoyed all her lessons. Minty insisted on an hour of maths each day. She also made her go on learning Portuguese, and Maia was about to complain when she tried out a few words on the sullen maid, Tapi, and found that Tapi understood her, and almost smiled!

It was because Miss Minton was determined that she should learn about the country that she lived in, that Maia had her first meeting with Mr Carter in his study.

The girls were drawing a teapot according to the instructions of Dr Bullman, narrowing their round blue eyes as they measured the exact distance from the handle to the spout, when Miss Minton came to Maia and said, ‘It’s time you learnt to draw proper maps. Go and ask Mr Carter if there’s a chart or a map of the country surrounding his house.’

Maia looked up, alarmed. She had scarcely spoken to Mr Carter who mostly sat silent and gloomy at meals and vanished as soon as he could.

‘Must I?’ asked Maia.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Minton, and returned to the twins.

Mr Carter’s room was the end one in the main part of the house. As Maia knocked on the door she heard a shuffling and a rustling, as though papers were being quickly put away. Then he called, ‘Come in.’

The room was dismal and dark like all the rooms in the house and the air was full of smoke from the cigarettes which hung from Mr Carter’s lower lip whenever he was alone. It was also dusty because he did not allow the maids to come in and clean. The charts and sales figures tacked to the wall had curling edges and looked as though they had been there for years; piles of paper lay in untidy heaps on the drawers and filing cabinets.

But in the centre of Mr Carter’s desk was a cleared space covered in a white cloth, and on it were small, round objects which he was examining carefully through a lens. At first Maia thought they might be samples of rubber or specimens of soil, or seeds. But when she came closer she gave a little gasp.

They were eyes.

Glass eyes, but still definitely eyes. And not the eyes of dolls or teddy bears. No, these were human eyes – and so carefully made that it was hard to believe they were not real.

The back of the eyes were hollowed like seashells to fit over the muscles of the person who had worn them, but the front was a perfectly copied ball. There were blue eyes and brown eyes and hazel eyes, and in the centre of the coloured part, a black pupil which looked as though it really must let in the light.

‘As you see, I am sorting my collection,’ said Mr Carter. He picked up one of the largest of the balls, criss-crossed with tiny scarlet veins, and held it to the light. ‘This is the left eye of the Duke of Wainford. He lost the real one in the Battle of Waterloo. It’s worth a pretty penny, I can tell you.’

Maia swallowed. ‘How do you get hold of them?’

‘Oh, I have a man who sends them out from England. There’s quite a few dealers in the business. They get them from the undertakers as often as not – most people don’t mind too much what happens ... afterwards.’ He put down the duke’s eye and picked up another one. ‘Now this one’s really special. It’s the right eye of a famous actress who was burnt in a fire in the theatre. Tilly Tyndall she was called. Look at the colour – it’s as blue as the sky, isn’t it? You wouldn’t believe what that would fetch. Of course the really valuable ones are the doubles, but they’re rare.’

‘You mean two eyes from the same person? From someone who’s lost both eyes?’

Mr Carter nodded. ‘I’ve got three sets and they’re worth more than the rest put together.’ He put out a hand towards a blue velvet box, then changed his mind. The doubles were too valuable to show a child. ‘I tell you,’ said Mr Carter, ‘if this house went up in flames, it’s my collection I’d save.’

‘After you’d saved your wife and the twins,’ said Maia.