Journey to the River Sea

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.