Eva Ibbotson - Journey to the River Sea

It was a grey, windy day; the waves beat drearily on Littleford’s shingle beach. But there was nothing to be done. Since they had arrived in England, Beatrice had had to walk Kiki every afternoon and Gwendolyn had to walk him every morning.

While Beatrice tugged the little dog sulkily along the windswept beach, Gwendolyn was in the pantry pouring boiling water into Lady Parsons’ stone hot-water bottle, ready for Lady Parsons’ afternoon sleep. When she had finished, she carried it upstairs to the big bedroom with its Turkey carpet and lace-covered tables, and the pictures of Sir Hector Parsons who had been shot by mistake in Kenya while trying to shoot lions. If she hurried downstairs now she could get half an hour to look at a comic she had found in the kitchen drawer before it was time to lay the tea.

‘Gwendolyn!’ came Lady Parsons’ angry voice from her bedroom. ‘Come back at once! How many times have I told you that the bottle must be wrapped in my shawl. Do you want me to burn my feet?’

Gwendolyn did want it, she wanted it just as much as Beatrice had wanted the little dog to get pneumonia, but after nearly a month in Lady Parson’s house she knew she was helpless. The Carters were penniless; there was nowhere else to go.

‘I hope I don’t have to tell you which of my shawls the bottle must be wrapped in?’

‘No, Lady Parsons. It’s the violet crochet one in the second drawer down.’

‘Well, if you know, why don’t you do it straight away?’ said Lady Parsons. ‘And tell your mother to hurry up with turning the collar on my blue velvet. I’m going to wear it for my bridge party tonight.’

But as the girl left the room, Lady Parsons leant back on her pillows with a satisfied sigh. The girls were slow and they were stupid, but they could be trained and so could their mother. She had been right to take them in.

Lady Parsons was a widow and rich. She was also quite amazingly mean. Saving money was a passion of hers and when she could see her bank balance swelling she felt a deep happiness that nothing else could give her.

Her husband had left her Grey Gables, which was definitely the largest and showiest of all the houses on the Promenade. He had left her a big garden and a summer house and her private bathing hut on the Front. She was a healthy, middle-aged woman who could do anything she liked, and that was exactly what she did. She saved.

When she first got the letter from Mrs Carter telling her that Clifford was in trouble again and that they were penniless, Lady Parsons had been annoyed. What did the Carters’ difficulties have to do with her? Mrs Carter might be her second cousin twice removed, but that didn’t give her the right to bother her.

But then Lady Parsons had a brilliant idea. Her personal maid — the one who helped her to dress and did her hair and kept her clothes in order — was getting old. She would sack her, and she would also sack the paid companion who came to take the dog out and wind her knitting wool and read to her. And she would train the Carters to do their work! Not only would this save two whole wages, but there would be no need to give the Carters free time or Sundays off, which servants always seemed to want these days.

(As for Mr Carter, who was on his way to prison in Brazil, he would of course never be mentioned nor allowed to darken her doors again.)

So far the plan had worked well. She had made a sitting room in the basement where the family could sit when she didn’t want them, and sometimes, when she drove out, she took Beatrice and Gwendolyn, or their mother, up beside her in the carriage so that her friends could see how kind she had been to take them in.

‘Aren’t you grateful to dear Lady Parsons?’ the friends would say as she stopped the carriage to bow to them, and the twins would grit their teeth and say yes, indeed they were. But the moment they got home, they were set to work again.

The jobs she found for them were endless. They had to match her embroidery wool, bring up her breakfast tray and feed Kiki on steak cut exactly into half-inch cubes. They were sent to the shops in all weathers, mostly to the chemists, to fetch medicines for whatever she thought might be wrong with her. They had to tidy her underclothes drawer and hook up her bust bodice, and Mrs Carter had to darn Lady Parsons’ stockings, and take up her hems and trim her hats.

At night the Carters were so tired that when a black beetle walked across the floor of their basement sitting room, Mrs Carter did not even trouble to get the spray from the pantry.

One of the jobs the twins hated most was reading aloud. They were poor readers, they read slowly and stumbled over words, but since Lady Parsons used being read aloud to as a way of getting to sleep she did not mind. Beatrice had to read the whole of Ivanhoe and Gwendolyn read a different Library Romance each week, without taking in a single word.

And at breakfast they read aloud from the newspaper — which was how they found out what had happened to Maia and Miss Minton after they left.

Beatrice was reading out the Society Pages and what King Edward was doing that evening, when she saw something on the opposite page which printed the foreign news.

She stopped reading, gaped, then read with her finger under the lines to make sure she had read properly.

‘Well, has the cat got your tongue?’ asked Lady Parsons sharply, looking up from her coddled egg.

But Beatrice was so startled that she just went on goggling at the entry. Then she said, ‘It says here that Maia and Miss Minton and that fat professor have vanished in the jungle. Maia went off with some boy or other in a boat and Miss Minton and the professor went after them to bring her back, and now everyone has disappeared. Please, Lady Parsons, I must show this to Mama and Gwendolyn.’

Beatrice did not often run but she ran now, holding the newspaper and taking no notice of Lady Parsons’ bleats.

Mrs Carter read the whole extract aloud. It seemed that Maia and Miss Minton had been missing for some weeks and a search party had been sent out to look for them.

The part of the country in which they were last seen is still inhabited by savage tribes, some of them cannibals, not to mention jaguars, pit vipers, caymans and other dangerous predators. It is feared that some serious harm may have befallen the party.

‘So she did survive the fire,’ said Mrs Carter. They had left Manaus when Maia was still missing.

‘Well, it serves her right if she gets put in a cooking pot — she always liked the Indians better than anyone else.’

‘Now, Beatrice!’ said Mrs Carter. ‘You mustn’t say such things.’

‘Well, we won’t say them,’ said Gwendolyn. ‘But nothing can stop us thinking them.’

And all that day, as they gave the dog his worm powders and ironed Lady Parsons’ handkerchiefs and sewed the pom-poms back on her bedroom slippers, their small, tight mouths would suddenly curve into a smile.

‘It may be awful here, but at least we won’t get eaten,’ said Beatrice.

And Gwendolyn agreed.

Maia had never had any sisters or cousins, but she had them now. Her day in the Xanti village began with the three girls who were closest to her in age, pulling her out of sleep and down to the river for a swim.

The swim did not have much to do with striking out over the water, nor with serious washing. It was about splashing and ducking each other and pretending to have been attacked by electric eels — and afterwards it was about chasing each other through the trees and combing each other’s hair and persuading Maia that she needed a bead anklet.

Then it was the turn of the babies, who were brought down to the edge of the stream and doused with water from hollowed-out calabash shells while they screamed at the top of their lungs. Maia had a pair of babies that were her special charge; tiny, big-eyed creatures who turned into thrashing demons when she tried to make them clean.