Anila's Journey (23 page)

I hadn't meant to say this to anyone but it was impossible to keep silent now. I pushed past Madan and his neatly wound ropes, jumped up on the rim of the boat and ran to Mr Walker.

“Mr Walker, Carlen has gone to kill that man. You must know that if I do. But I need to talk to him! We must go after him, please, please. Or I'll go myself.”

I started away then for he was not answering me. He was too shocked. But he reached out as I tried to run and grabbed my wrist, so tightly round the bones that it hurt and he pulled me back until he could hold me there in front of him. Then he crouched down so that his face was on a level with my own. His eyes looked sore, like green fruits cut open too early. Or else they were angry. I wasn't sure which.

“Anila, you will get back on that boat now. With me. We are leaving directly. Carlen knows we are starting back downriver today. He's clever enough to be able to find us when he gets this madness out of his mind. If he does, that is.”

He marched me over to where Madan was waiting to take me back though I was crying out all manner of things that nobody could understand. But when Benu swung the tiller and brought us out into the centre of the river and we felt the strength of the current now bearing us back the way we had come, I stopped babbling.

All of us are borne along on the great river, Anila, even the birds that fly above it and never touch it
.

I sat there hunched on a coil of ropes, looking in no direction. Nobody paid me any heed either, though I was certain that Madan had passed on my desperate words to Mr Walker as they sat closeted in the cabin, leaving Hari to tend the ropes.

I felt a touch on my arm, the slightest touch, as if a feather had fallen out of the sky. Manik was kneeling beside me. He had placed one hand on my arm and he was stroking it there, forward and back, forward and back.

“Anila,” he said. And then, “Manik takes away the hurt. Like you did.”

I put my hand on top of his and we stayed like that for a little while. Behind us Benu began a song and the day filled with one thing after another, with heat and light and the noises of the river and her boats, with smells of morning cooking carried on the breeze, with the jewel colours of saris stretched out to dry by the banks. Women were walking the river paths with damp washing piled up on their heads and at times you could see their water bodies marching along underneath them where the water was still.

Some called out to us and one bold girl shook her bangles at Benu. I could hear his blush in the way he sang his next words. This made me smile, despite every bad thing.

“Will you get my bag, Manik?” I asked, for I would not go inside the cabin.

He came back clutching my flat drawings case looking like a tiny runner, like one of the fleet-footed boys and men who carry mails and messages around the city. I showed him some of my birds and his eyes grew larger. When he saw the owl he laid a finger on the paper and then put it to his mouth as reverently as if it were an image of the goddess Kali herself he had touched.

“You must tell me if you see a bird you don't know, Manik. Do you understand? Any strange bird at all, so that I may put it down on the paper here.”

Manik nodded solemnly though I had no notion whether he understood me or not.

And then, just to make it more confusing for him, I started to draw, not any bird at all, but the otters of yesterday morning.

In truth I found this work much more difficult than drawing a bird and I didn't know why. Feathers are just as dainty and intricate as fur, and probably more so. I think perhaps it may be that birds make shapes that are complicated but they all come from the same Book of Shapes. So, if you learn that, as my father did with his buildings, you can draw them all, with practice. But an animal is like a human. There are too many surprises under its skin and all over its face. Mr Hickey said that humans were a never-ending Book of Surprises when you came to draw them. But he had trained with that Book and I had not. I felt my otters lacked life.

At last Mr Walker and Madan came out of the cabin.

“Anila, will you come inside with me, please?”

Madan laid a huge hand on Manik's head as he passed us.

“There's a lad whose fingers will tie the neatest knots,” he said. “Come and learn to be a boatman, Manik.”

I put my otters into the case and followed Mr Walker into the cabin. The air was fusty but neither of us was inclined to open the Venetians and Mr Walker had closed the door firmly behind me.

“First this, Anila. We are stopping at the next big ghat, which is quite close now. Madan will send some men he knows there back to that cursed village to find out what they may. So, what we will do there is wait. Now you must tell me what on earth it was that disturbed you in such a shocking manner this morning.”

I told him then, and it was the greatest relief to tell him everything, right down to the loss of my tiny ring, which no longer felt important.

“I believed him, Mr Walker, because how else could he know such a detail as that about my father? But then he closed down his whole person, his mouth, his ears, his eyes. It was as if he wanted me to suffer more. And I would have given him all my money, my paints, everything, to find out where he saw my father, and when. For he may still be in that place.”

Mr Walker had put his head in his hands very soon after I began my story. When I finished he stayed like that for a few moments and then stood up and began to pace the floor just as he had paced the riverbank, though here his head was skimming the roof of the cabin. He looked as white as his very own Mr Minch.

“I cannot explain what exactly was in Carlen's mind when he was treating you in such a vile fashion. My best estimate is that he was very jealous of your position here, of your talent, of your very appealing spirit, so that he wanted to fashion his little power of exposition into a kind of torture. There is nothing to be said by way of excuse. Nothing. But let me tell you everything I know about the man himself so that you may understand his nature a little better.”

Carlen was a foundling child, Mr Walker told me, who had been abandoned by the gates of a stables in the eastern side of England.

“He showed me the country there one time. It was as flat and full of rivers and creeks as Bengal itself, Anila.”

The stable people had raised him, but very roughly. They'd given him only the one name, Carlen, to do service for everybody else's two names. I remembered then how yesterday Carlen had had freely betrayed one of his own secrets, the good knowledge he had of Bangla, in order to bestow a fitting name on little Manik.

“They beat him, they did worse. When he was eleven or so he ran away and learned to live on his wits.”

Carlen was a young horse thief when Mr Walker met him first, a most dangerous trade because such thieves were always hanged when caught.

“I was spending my grandmother's good money in inns and on horses when I came down to Cambridge but I had no sense of what I was doing, and certainly had no skill for it. For some reason Carlen took pity on me when one of his own gang of scalpers was about to despatch me after robbing me. That was our introduction and it has always given me a duty towards him. In many ways he is a remarkable person though you will hardly credit that, Anila.”

Certainly I would refuse to do that! But at that moment I was trying to picture serious, kindly Mr Walker in the alehouses and cockpits that he described and that was an impossible thing. He seemed to know what I was thinking.

“I was full of hatred then myself, for the loss of my sister and my part in that, for my father and his unyielding nature. It took me quite a while to settle, to become a lover of books, of knowledge.”

“And birds?”

He smiled sadly.

“I had that always, you see, from my sister Eveline.”

Outside Madan roared and we felt the clunk of the tiller behind and the shift underneath us as the boat tilted for the bank.

Mr Walker sat down, as abruptly as a child.

“Here we shall wait, Anila. Let us pray that the news they bear is good.”

“
A CAPITAL JOB, HICKEY!
”

Those were the words Mr Bristol used when the big day came and he was invited to have first sight of my mother's finished portrait. They were the same words he used with his gentlemen friends when their deals worked out, or their law cases were won
.

For weeks, Mr Hickey had become coy about his work, as we had been warned he would
.

“He'll turn it to the wall so you cannot peek, and he will become very short if you ask him anything about it,” Miss Hickey told me. “You must humour him, for that is his way always, to wish to surprise the patron above all. And to be honest, Anila, quite apart from that, I think you make him nervous with the questions you ask.”

That was true. He had taken to calling me “that little peppercorn”, though he was just as generous as before with paper and pens for me, and he would always ask to see what I had been drawing, after my mother stood up from her sofa and stretched her arms. But now these conversations came only after he had carefully turned the painting away from our view
.

So, of the three of us who were not Hickeys, I don't know which one was the most curious on the day of the unveiling. That was what such an event was called, Mr Hickey told me, and he had gone so far as to hang his best black cloak over the painting
.

“Patrons. They do like a bit of drama, a fuss,” he said. But I could see he liked the same himself
.

We were gathered in the painting room. Miss Hickey had called for lime juice and whisky and cakes with cream but they were to stand ready on the long sideboard until the unveiling ceremony was over. Mr Bristol was twittering like a brain fever bird but my mother held herself serene
.

Mr Hickey began a little speech
.

“Good afternoon to all of you,” he said, although he had greeted us already
.

“You will think that I state the obvious when I say that the subject of my painting,” he bowed to my mother, “is a most beautiful lady. But I have discovered during these past few weeks that she is as delightful in her manner as in her face. That is not always the case.”

I wondered if everyone had noticed that Mr Hickey was finishing his sentences. That in itself was surely a tribute to my mother
.

“I have learned much from her, for she is a lady imbued with the stories and traditions of her country.”

He fixed Mr Bristol with a keen look
.

“I hope such things have been expressed in my work as well as every other quality that you might expect to find, sir. I might even remark that my subject's daughter has done excellent duty as a painter's apprentice and you may find some recording of that too.”

Mr Hickey cleared his throat. Now that he had launched himself on a sea of fine phrases, it seemed he had more to add. But Mr Bristol had had enough
.

“Remove the cloth, Hickey!” he called out. “Don't hide your talent from us under that black bushel any longer.”

He laughed but Mr Hickey did not. He stepped up behind the painting and very neatly lifted his cloak, putting it down on the worktable I had cleared for him
.

We all stared at my mother in the picture
.

Every part of her was there now, face, hands and feet, all her jewellery on and the little Lord Ganesha in her grip. There was no surprise any more for me to see that Mr Hickey had made her cheeks glow and her huge black eyes drink up the misty world beyond the marble columns
.

What did make me gasp now was that Mr Hickey had painted something that was new in my mother, something I recognized now that I saw it underneath the fresh varnish. For I knew my dreams had been painting the same thing for me for some time now, over and over, in dark shades
.

My mother's gaze was fixed on another world, one where her gentleness and all her hopes would be rewarded at last. This terrified me because I saw that the painting told the truth. She was drawn towards a departure as some birds are, come their time, to find again the lake where they were born. It was no matter that I jumped up and down in front of her and with all my loudness tried to hold her back
.

She was staring at the picture herself now with interest
.

“Look, Anila,” she whispered to me. “Mr Hickey has painted your face in the little mirror. How clever he is to get us both into the picture.”

I went closer to look, though Mr Bristol clucked at me for standing in front of him
.

She was right. The tiny hand mirror on the table by the couch was placed at an angle so that it might have caught my mother's face. Instead my face was what you saw, young and bold-eyed, anything but faraway. What I thought was just as clever was that Mr Hickey had copied the design of my mother's foot painting and used it to decorate the casing of the little mirror
.

We were admiring these things when Mr Bristol spoke his opinion
.

“A capital job, Hickey! You have outdone your last work in this line, no question of that.”

I could see Miss Hickey flinch at his words. Mr Hickey merely bowed his head but I could see that his eyes were cold. Mr Bristol's praise was hardly praise at all. He saw little of the craft, or the many choices Mr Hickey had made to compose his picture. I was certain he could not see my mother's soul beating on that canvas like wings
.

Miss Hickey clapped her hands and called for the drinks to be handed round, and the plates of cakes and nuts. She herself served my mother to a glass of lime juice and bid her sit down to chat
.

Mr Bristol had wandered away into the hall to see what he might see. I went to stand by Mr Hickey and the painting
.