Eva Ibbotson - Island of the Aunts

The door of the drawing room opened. A small boy came out, pushed forward by a tall, white-haired man who looked exactly like the men in the portraits except that he wasn’t dead — and her mouth dropped very slightly open.

Hubert-Henry was small and lightly built with jet-black hair, olive skin and huge, very dark eyes. Something about the graceful way he moved and the wary look on his face reminded her of pictures she had seen of the children of South America who made their home among the vines and orchids and broad-leaved trees of the tropical forest.

The old man with the handlebar moustache now spoke. “This is Hubert-Henry,” he said in a braying voice. “As you see he was not born an English gentleman — but we mean to see that he becomes one, eh, Hubert?”

And as he dug the silent little boy in the ribs, Aunt Coral saw a look of such hatred pass over the child’s face that she took a step backwards and hit her backside on the big brass gong. At which point Hubert-Henry threw back his head and laughed.

Half an hour later, they sat side by side in a large black car on the way to Hubert’s school. The car was a closed limo and was the kind you hire for weddings and funerals, with a glass partition sealing off the chauffeur. It was a three-hour journey to Berkshire but the driver had refused to take Hubert-Henry by himself, so Aunt Coral was to deliver him to Greymarsh Towers and hand him over to the matron. The little boy, it seemed, had tried to jump from the train and run away the last time they took him back to his boarding school.

“Are you really called Hubert-Henry?” asked Aunt Coral as they began to leave London behind.

“No.”

“What are you called?”

“Fabio.”

He had a slight accent. Spanish, perhaps? Or Portuguese?

She hoped he would say more but he sat silent and sulky. Then: “I said I’d bash the next aunt they fobbed me off with. Bash her really hard.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” said Coral. “I’ve got a kick like a mule. It’s the hair, you see?”

“What hair?”

“The hair on my legs. We’ve all got hairy legs, me and my sisters. Hair gives you strength; it says so in the Bible. Samson and all that.”

But she wasn’t really thinking about what she was saying. Aunt Coral was a little bit psychic, as artistic people so often are — which means that she sometimes knew things without knowing how she knew them — and now she dug into her basket, took out a pad and a piece or charcoal and began to draw.

Fabio, still sulky, turned his head away. When she had finished, she put the picture down on the seat between them. Presently she heard a little gasp. The boy had seized the paper and was devouring it with his eyes, and she saw a single tear run down his cheek.

“Is that what your home was like?” she asked gently.

Fabio nodded. “The tree’s right; it was a papaya, and the monkey…he was a capuchin and I tamed him. But there were three huts joined together, not just one — we lived in the end one closest to the river. The chickens were ours but the goat belonged to my uncle in the middle house. You’ve got the pig right, but his stomach was even bigger — it touched the ground.”

“So why did you leave, Fabio?” she asked. The homesick child was still staring at the picture she had drawn; the river, the great tree with fruit hanging from its branches and the fishing boat drawn up on the shore.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. But he told her what he knew and she pieced the rest together.

His father, Henry Mountjoy, had been an Englishman, rich, and the owner of a big house in the country; but he was a gambler. He got into debt and in the end he had gone off to South America to find gold.

Only of course he didn’t find gold. He fell ill and Fabio’s mother, who was a dancer in a nightclub, had found him half starving in Rio, and had nursed him, and after a while he married her.

But he’d ruined his health and he couldn’t get work and soon after Fabio was born he went back to England. Since then Fabio had lived first with his mother in Rio and then, when she moved in with another man, upriver in the forest with his grandparents and his uncle and his cousins. There were a lot of people in the three huts and very little money but Fabio had been perfectly happy. His grandfather was an Amorian Indian and knew everything, and his grandmother had worked as a cook for a Portuguese planter and had told the most marvellous stories.

Then just over a year ago his mother had come with an Englishman in a silly suit who kept mopping his face all the time and wrinkled up his nose when he passed the pig. It turned out that Fabio’s father had died and on his deathbed had begged his parents, the old Mountjoys, to bring Fabio to England and bring him up as an English gentleman.

That was the beginning of the nightmare. His mother had insisted that he went. Henry Mountjoy had talked so much about his grand house in England that she wanted her son to have his share. But the grand house had been sold to pay Henry’s debts, and Henry’s parents took one look at the wild little boy and shuddered.

Since the grandparents were too old to turn Fabio into an English gentleman, this odd thing was to be done in a boarding school. But boarding schools, according to the old Mountjoys, had gone soft. They had tried two from which Fabio had returned much as before, only speaking better English.

Greymarsh Towers, though, was different. The headmaster believed not just in cold baths and stiff upper lips but in all sorts of things that one would have thought didn’t happen any more, and the boys were vile.

“They call me ‘monkey’ or ‘chopsticks’ and try to tie me up. But I’m going to kill them this time. I’m going to kill them and I’m going to kill the headmaster and they can take me to prison and I don’t care!”

But before he could get round to killing the headmaster, Fabio started being sick.

He was sick outside Slough, and on the far side of Maidenhead and in the entrance of a house called The Laurels in Reading, and the closer they got to Greymarsh Towers, the sicker Fabio became.

And when she saw Greymarsh Towers, Coral thought that she too would be sick if she had to return there. It was a huge bleak house with iron bars across the windows, and the stone walls looked slimy and cold.

It was now time to act. The chauffeur was supposed to drop them at the school and she was to make her own way back by train.

“Will you please wait here, Fabio,” she said to the boy. “Keep an eye on him, Mr Fowler. Don’t let him run away.”

The boy, who had begun to trust her, cowered back in his seat and Coral marched up to the front door. The smell of Greymarsh would have been enough to put her off for life. Hospital disinfectant, tortured cabbage, lavatories…

As for Matron, as she came out of her office she would have made a very good camel: the nose was right, the sneering upper lip, and the distrustful muddy eyes. Except that camels can’t help their expressions and people can.

“I am afraid I have bad news about Hubert-Henry Mountjoy,” said Aunt Coral. “He has been laid low with a bad attack of Burry-Burry fever and can’t come back to school at present.”

Matron pursed her mouth.

“Well, of course, that is what you expect from foreign children — he probably picked it up in his hut in the jungle.”

Since Aunt Coral had just invented Burry-Burry fever she only nodded and said she would let Matron know as soon as the boy was better. She then returned to the car and said, “I am sorry to tell you that there has been an outbreak of meningitis in the school. Everyone is in quarantine and Hubert can’t go back at present.”

The little boy, who had been hunched against the cushions, now sat up and smiled. He had a very nice smile and Aunt Coral made up her mind.