Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

Only what guest? And where?

At first he could see no one unusual. Then, searching the listening faces, he saw a girl he had at first taken to be one of the tribe, for she wore a dress such as the missionaries forced on their converts and she was holding a baby, cupping a hand round its head — Manuelo’s three-day-old baby whom they were taking to Father Antonio at dawn to be baptised.

Then they saw him; someone took off the needle from the record and as they came towards him, chattering in welcome, she lifted her head and looked directly at him… and over her face there spread a sudden shock of surprise, almost of recognition, as though he was someone she knew from another life.

‘You must be the last of the Company’s swans?’ he said, coming forward. ‘I’m Romain Verney, your host.’

‘Yes,’ she replied, getting to her feet. ‘I’m Harriet Morton.’ The voice was low; scholarly. Old Iquita took the baby from her and he saw how hard it was for her to part with its soft warmth; how she drew her fingertips across the round dark head until the last possible moment, just as Simonova had drawn her fingertips down the arm of her lover before she bourréed backwards into the lake. ‘God must be very brave,’ she said, ‘making babies with fontanelles like that. What if their souls should escape before they’ve joined? What then?’

‘Oh, God is brave all right,’ said Rom lightly. ‘You see Him all the time, chancing His arm.’ But he was startled, for she had smiled as she spoke and everything he had thought about her gravity and seriousness was suddenly set at nought. There was nothing wistful or tentative about that smile. It came slowly, but ended in a total crunching up of her features as though a winged cherub had just flown by and whispered a marvellously funny joke into her ear.

They made their farewells and he began to lead her back.

‘They’ve been so kind to me,’ she said, still not quite in the real world after her hour in the garden and the conviction which had burst from her as he stepped from the trees that this was Henry’s ‘secret boy’. ‘Look what they gave me!’ She took out of her pocket a small carving of a margay and held it out to him.

‘They like to give presents.’ But Rom was surprised, for the carving was one of old José’s, their best craftsman; it was a lovely thing. ‘How did you make yourself understood?’ he asked curiously.

‘I think if you want to, you can always understand people, don’t you? And the ones who had grown up in the mission could follow a little Latin.’

‘Ah, yes; Latin,’ he murmured. ‘A usual accomplishment in ballet dancers?’

‘My father taught me,’ she said briefly and a shadow passed over her face. But the next moment she was entranced again: ‘Oh, that tree! That colour … and the way the flowers grow right on the trunk like that!’

‘Yes, that’s Aspidosperma silenium — pollinated by opossums, believe it or not!’

She liked that, wrinkling her nose. ‘It’s lovely that you know the names. I kept asking and asking, but nobody did.’

‘Is it important that you know the names of things?’

‘Yes. I feel… discourteous if I don’t know. As though I’ve failed them somehow. Is that stupid?’

‘No, I understand. But it’s the devil naming things out here. There are literally hundreds of species of trees and only a handful have been classified. I was like a child in a sweet-shop when I first came out, not knowing where to begin.’ He described briefly his discovery of Follina and her eyes grew wide at the wonder of it.

They had reached the edge of the arboretum and a great urn in which there grew a magical orchid — delicate, yet abundant with an overpowering scent.

‘That’s the Queen’s Orchid. The caracara , the Indians call it. Some people find it a bit overwhelming.’

‘Oh no, not against those dark bushes; they cool it.’ She was running her fingers softly along the edge of the petals, tracing lightly the intricate shape of the stamens. He had never seen in a European such a physical response to things that grew. ‘And over there, in the pool? That blue? That’s not a water hyacinth, is it? They grow in drifts?’

‘No — it’s a kind of lobelia. An incredible colour, isn’t it? The water gardens are a perpetual headache; you have to keep the water running all the time, otherwise the mosquitos breed, and that’s the devil. I’ve installed a kind of cataract there…’

He explained, led her here and there. She was utterly enthralled and both of them had completely forgotten the time.

‘I thought it would be all dark,’ she said wonderingly. ‘A dark forest and rows and rows of rubber trees.’

‘There are rubber trees — thousands of them, mostly wild. I’ve made plantations too, but this garden is my folly.’ And as she stood waiting for him to continue, he said, ‘I fight a battle like some idiot crusader against the Amazon disease — the disease of all South America, if it comes to that. I call it the Eldorado illness.’

She turned to him, her eyes alert. ‘The belief that there is a promised land?’

‘Yes. Partly. Everyone here searches… the Indians, the Portuguese settlers, the people who came later. For gold, for coffee, for the green stones that the Amazon women gave their lovers… for groves of cinnamon trees — and now for rubber. They search and they find because the country is so abundant. But then someone comes along from some other country who is not content just to search. Someone who plants coffee or hardwoods, who mines gold systematically instead of picking the nuggets off the ground. And then the searchers are bankrupt, the villages become derelict and the people starve. It will be the same with rubber; you’ll see. I’ve diversified; I run a gold mine at Serra Deloso, I export bauxite and manganese, I’ve organised a timber business. I shall be all right, but if the price of rubber really drops — and it is dropping as they bring it in from the East — then God knows how many of my friends I shall be able to save. Not enough.’

‘It’s always been so, hasn’t it?’ she said quietly. ‘All through history. Solon trying to warn Croesus… don’t lean back on your riches, he said, but no one listened. People don’t.’

You do, Rom wanted to say. You listen as I have never known anyone listen. And he remembered how as a small boy at Stavely walking along the gravel paths absently scuffing the stones, he would suddenly — for no reason that he knew of — bend down to pick up one pebble, just one, and keep it in his pocket. He had never found it hard to share his toys, but no one had been allowed to touch such a pebble; it became his treasure and his talisman.

It had been like that, he now admitted, when he ran his opera glasses down the line of swans. ‘This one,’ a voice had said inside him. ‘This one is for me.’

As they passed a clump of bamboo they heard a rustling and Rom stopped and gave a low whistle. The rustling ceased, began again… An inquisitive snout appeared, a pair of bright eyes… then the coati’s gleaming chestnut body and stripy tail.

‘He’s offended,’ said Rom. ‘I give orders to have him kept out of the house when I have guests. You watch him deciding whether or not he will speak to us.’

The performance which followed would have done credit to a venerable Rotarian whom nobody had invited to make an after-dinner speech. The coati moved forward, thought better of it, sat up on his haunches and pretended to investigate a non-existent nut with busy forepaws… Once more he approached, once more he sat down — and at last, but with evident condescension, came to rub himself against Rom’s legs.