Eva Ibbotson - A Company of Swans

But Marie-Claude was entirely uninterested in metaphysical theories about time. ‘It is only necessary to do the steps,’ she snapped.

And after all Marie-Claude was right, for when Harriet came on that night she was just a distant, half-lit figure, vanishing in an instant — and the only man who might have known that it was Harriet and not Olga who trembled and beckoned at the window was a hundred miles away.

‘Eat, Coronel ,’ begged Furo, pushing the tin plate towards his master.

The brightly patterned fish, salted and grilled on a driftwood fire, smelled delicious but Rom shook his head. He sat leaning against the twisted trunk of a mango, letting the fine sand of the praia on which they had made camp run through his fingers. Nearby the Daisy May floated quietly at anchor. A cormorant turned a yellow-ringed and disbelieving eye on the intruders and flapped off across the river. In the still water, the colours of the sunset changed from flame to primrose and a last glimmer of unearthly green.

Rom, usually aware of every stirring leaf, noticed nothing; he was lost in the horror of what he had just seen.

He had meant simply to spend a few days on the river, wanting to shake off the memory of that ill-fated lunch with Harriet. Taking only the silent and devoted Furo — loading the boat with the usual gifts of fish-hooks and beads and medical supplies — he had travelled up the Negro, bound for an island where tree orchids grew in incredible profusion and the snowy egrets made their nests.

Then something — he had no idea what it was — made him turn up the Ombidos river. There had long been rumours of gross ill-treatment of the Indians by the men who ran the Ombidos Rubber Company, and the report de Silva had sent down had made disquieting reading, but Rom had seen too many do-gooders and journalists make capital out of the rubber barons’ wicked treatment of the natives to be seriously disturbed. Moreover the company was entirely Brazilian-owned. Rom might fight exploitation ruthlessly where it was inflicted by Europeans, but he did not meddle in the affairs of his hosts.

Yet at the end of the second day, the Daisy May was chugging at a steady seven knots up the Ombidos. Perhaps it was hindsight, but it seemed to Rom a frightful place; the ‘green hell’ so beloved of the fiction writers come hideously to life. Oppressive, dark, ominously silent: only the mosquitos, incessant and insatiable even in the hissing rain, seemed to be alive on that Stygian stretch of water.

That night they had tied up in a creek, concealed by overhanging trees. The next morning Rom put on a battered sombrero, slung a rifle over his shoulder and, with his pockets full of trinkets, disappeared along a jungle track in the direction of the village. With his two-day stubble, his shirt stained by grease from the Daisy May’s engine, he passed easily enough for a poor-white trader come to cheat the natives out of basket-work or cured skins for a handful of beads.

He was away for twenty-four hours. Since then he had spoken only to give Furo orders which would take them away fast, and faster, from that accursed place. Even now, fifty miles down-river in as halcyon a spot as anyone could hope for, he sat like a man in a trance and in that steaming jungle, looked cold.

‘It was very bad, then?’ enquired Furo at last.

Rom stirred and turned.

‘Yes.’

He took the bottle of brandy that Furo had pushed towards him and tilted it to his mouth, but nothing could blot out what he had seen at Ombidos. He had believed that he knew of all the cruelties which men had inflicted on the Indians in their insane greed for rubber… Workers flayed into insensibility with tapir-hide whips for bringing in less cahuchu than their master craved; hirelings with Winchesters dragging into slavery every able-bodied man in a village… He himself had been offered — by a drunken overseer on the Madeira — one of the man’s native concubines, a girl just nine years old…

But he had seen nothing. Until he had been to Ombidos, he had not known what cruelty was. And with the men who had done… those things… he had smiled and joked. He had not killed one of them; had not throttled with his bare hands a single one of the torturers, because he had to return and bear witness.

‘Is it true that messages have gone to the Minister in Rio to tell of the bad things at Ombidos?’ asked Furo, staring trustingly at his master.

‘Yes, it is true. To Antonio Alvarez, the Minister for Amazonia.’

‘And he is coming to Manaus. So he will go to Ombidos and see for himself? He will make it right?’

Rom shook his head. ‘He will come, Furo. He will dine at the Sports Club and go to Madame Anita’s brothel with the Mayor and attend some meetings at the Town Hall in his tight suit and pointed shoes. But he will not go to Ombidos.’

Antonio Alvarez, a man approaching sixty… A gourmet who travelled with a French chef; a dandy who kept a retinue of hairdressers, valets and masseurs in his mansion in Rio… Nothing on God’s earth, thought Rom, would get Alvarez to that hell-hole. It was said that once he had been different — an idealist and a patriot — but that had been decades ago. Some personal tragedy was supposed to have turned him into the man he now was, the man Rom knew: wily, powerful, idle…

Yet it was only Alvarez and the government he served that could clean up the cess-pit that was the Ombidos Rubber Company. The company had no foreign shareholders: impossible to evoke, as Casement had done on the Putumayo the conscience of Great Britain or the United States.

‘Shall I sling the hammocks now, Coronel?’

Rom nodded. Yet long after his servant slept, he still sat and watched beside the moonlit river.

‘But he shall go,’ he said aloud. ‘He shall go to Ombidos.’

The first week’s run of Swan Lake ended as it began with fifteen curtain calls for Simonova, though the last of these needed a little assistance from Dubrov, who seized the winch-handle from the stage hand who had been turning it and had been about to pack up and go home. The following week was to open with La Fille Mal Gardée , a relatively undemanding ballet in which the ballerina is merely required to be enchanting, innocent and tender, qualities which Simonova believed herself to possess in abundance. With the dreaded Nutcracker in which Masha Repin was to star still a week away, and Olga signalling her recovery by biting the thermometer in half and demanding borscht , the Company settled down to their well-earned Sunday rest.

At least… most of the Company. In the bedroom which Harriet shared with Kirstin and Marie-Claude, a rehearsal was in progress.

Marie-Claude’s star was rising high. Her meeting with Mr Parker had been wholly successful. He had given her a substantial sum for her costume and expenses, and promised that her sizeable fee would be waiting for her, in cash, on the evening of her appearance. With her usual efficiency, Marie-Claude had left instructions about the music with which she was to be accompanied, the topography of the cake, the arrangement of the concealed footstool which would enable her to leap effortlessly on to the banqueting table. She had even agreed to a brief run-through on the actual morning of the dinner — but to polish up the finer points of her routine she preferred the privacy of the Hotel Metropole.

‘I wish my Aunt Louisa could see you,’ said Harriet, grinning at her friend.

Marie-Claude was in costume: a pair of black fishnet stockings, an inch-wide band of black froth which apparently constituted knickers and two minuscule black and crimson rosettes which adhered by some mysterious process to her breasts. They had put their three chairs together in a circle to constitute a ‘cake’; the beds, pushed into the shape of a horseshoe, stood in for the banqueting tables and in the middle of the centre one, an upright bolster impersonated the Minister for Amazonia.