Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

Only of course he would rather not be forgotten than have marzipan…

I’ll count up to a hundred, thought Henry, and then another hundred and another and then she’ll come. Sinclair of the Scouts, in the Boy’s Own Paper — he wouldn’t have made a fuss because he had to stand and wait for his mother in the street… and anyway they were going to the dentist. She might forget him but she would not forget the dentist…

Inside the shop Isobel had made an entirely hypothetical enquiry about laundering the damask for Stavely, receiving from the grey-haired and serious Mr Truscott a courteous and considered reply, and taken down some notes. If Mr Truscott was surprised that a woman of quality should attend to these matters herself rather than send her housekeeper, he kept this to himself. Then, as she was putting on her gloves, she said almost casually, ‘I noticed your men bringing in a basket just now and it seemed to me that I knew the name. Verney was a family name of my husband’s and he had a distant cousin named Paul.’

‘It might well be, Mrs Brandon. I have never met Mr Verney myself, but we have dealt with his linen for eight years now. An excellent customer, always very prompt with his payment.’

‘He lives in London, then?’

‘London? Oh dear me, no! Far from it.’ Mr Truscott smiled, for the legend of Mr Verney’s washing did much to brighten the monotony of life in the shop. He paused, enjoying himself, and said, ‘He lives in Brazil. In Manaus, one thousand miles up the River Amazon.’

‘The Amazon!’ Isobel’s heart began to pound, but the implications of what she had just heard were too extraordinary. ‘But he cannot send his washing home from the Amazon! He cannot!’

‘Well, that’s exactly what he does do, Madam. Beautiful linen, quite outstanding workmanship. Every three weeks when the liner docks at Manaus, his servants put a basket on the ship. Then at Liverpool they put it on the train and we send our cart to Euston and return the clean linen. Oh yes, it’s quite an event when Mr Verney’s linen basket comes!’

‘But it must cost a fortune!’

‘Well, not a fortune, Madam, but certainly a fair sum. However, I imagine Mr Verney would have no regard to that. All the gentlemen out there live like princes and he is one of the richest, they say. It’s the rubber, you see.’

He launched into a description of the rubber trade to which Isobel listened absently, her mind racing.

‘And Mrs Verney — does she send her washing home too?’

‘I have not heard of there being a Mrs Verney, Madam. Certainly we don’t get her linen. But of course, we are more of a gentlemen’s service on the whole.’

Isobel thanked him and promised to let him know about the Stavely damask. Enquiries would have to be made, of course, but that should not be difficult; Bertie Freeman worked in the Consulate at Rio and a cable to him should elicit the necessary facts. But if it was Rom — and really she had no doubt of it — then all her troubles were over. If Rom lived and was rich, her future glittered as brightly as a star. Rom would save Stavely — she had never seen in anyone such a feeling for a piece of land — and he would save her! Even if there was a dreary wife somewhere, she would not be able to prevent it. And as she made her way out of the shop, Isobel’s lips curved into the special smile which belonged to her time with that extraordinary and brilliant boy.

Henry was standing obediently where she had left him and when he saw her his face lit up in a way which tugged at her consciousness, absorbed as she was. There was something not unpleasing about Henry — something a little wistful. A man with Rom’s protective instincts might well be moved by the plight of such a fatherless young child.

‘Would you like to go on a journey, Henry?’ she asked now. ‘A long one?’

And Henry said, ‘Yes.’

‘Thank you,’ said Harriet tenderly to the waiter, who was placing before her a fried egg swimming in grease and a mound of peppery beans. ‘Obrigado. Gosto muito!’

Breakfast at the Hotel Metropole was not normally a beautiful experience; the same food appeared at all meals, the sluggish fan scarcely stirred the fetid air, swollen black flies buzzed on the overcrowded flypapers. But the morning after the party at Follina the world, for Harriet, was bathed in an all-embracing golden light.

She had returned unnoticed the night before; both Kirstin and Marie-Claude had been fast asleep — her adventure was unknown to anyone but herself. And Mr Verney had said that today he would come to find her. She must not depend on it… but he had said it.

‘It is not necessary to give thanks for such a breakfast,’ said Marie-Claude, shuddering. But she herself was in a good mood, for her encounter with Harry Parker, the secretary of the Sports Club, had turned out to be extremely fortunate. She had been offered, and at very little personal inconvenience, a chance to augment by an appreciable sum the savings she and Vincent were amassing for the purchase of the restaurant.

‘In two weeks’ time,’ she said now, lowering her voice, for the rest of the Company was sitting at tables close by, ‘I am going to burst at the Sports Club! From a cake! For seven hundred and fifty milreis in cash.’ And as Kirstin and Harriet looked at her with raised eyebrows, she added, ‘Mr Parker invited me: it is a thing that is very much done in gentlemen’s clubs when there is a special dinner of some kind. This one is for the Minister for Amazonia, who is coming from Rio to discuss the organisation of river transport or some such thing. The cake is wheeled in for dessert and — hoop la!’ She put down her fork to sketch in the air the deliciously titillating eruption which would follow.

Harriet was impressed. ‘From a real cake, Marie-Claude?’

‘No, idiot! It’s an enormous wooden affair — generally pink and decorated with candles. Sometimes they release white doves at the same time, though then of course there are problems with the feathers and the excretion and so on. Sometimes there are men with trumpets who accompany the cake and a chef who plunges in the knife… and of course always balloons and streamers and a great deal of champagne.’

‘Will Vincent like it?’ enquired Kirstin.

‘It is precisely for Vincent that I am doing it,’ flashed Marie-Claude. But a pensive look spread for a moment over her heart-shaped face, for it was true that she had not precisely explained to Vincent the means she employed to increase their joint savings. Vincent himself was strait-laced and his family — notably his cousin Pierre under whom Vincent had trained — was positively gothic. Still, what could one do? It was necessary to be practical. ‘You won’t mention it to anyone?’ she pleaded. ‘The dinner begins very late; after the curtain goes down. No one at the theatre need know.’

‘Of course not.’ Harriet was overawed. Thus, she was sure, had Messalina erupted in the last days of Imperial Rome. ‘Only, Marie-Claude, when you come out of the cake won’t the gentlemen become overexcited and — you know?’

‘Over-excitement is something I do not permit,’ said Marie-Claude, pushing away her egg with a moue of disgust. ‘I made this absolutely clear to Mr Parker. I burst; I dance a little on the table; I sit for a moment in the lap of the Minister — and that is all.’

‘What will you wear?’ asked Kirstin.

‘Not very much,’ Marie-Claude admitted. ‘Mr Parker insisted on this. But there is always my hair which covers most things, and I have a special garter with a large rosette in which my Tante Berthe’s hat-pin can be concealed. Not that it will be necessary, I assure you. The whole affair is strictly a matter of art — a kind of tableau vivant — and anyway, the Minister is old.’ She paused and fixed her enormous eyes on Harriet. ‘There is, however, a problem,’ she said, lowering her voice still further and glancing over her shoulder at the alcove where Dubrov and those of the principals who could face the Metropole dining-room at breakfast were sitting. ‘I have to see Mr Parker at eleven thirty this morning to make the arrangements.’