Anila's Journey (5 page)

When she was sitting perfectly, just like a rani on her throne, he told her not to move
.

I was little then so I had to stay beside her or him and not wander out of sight. If it was a tamarind tree I walked round it and stared up, looking for the ghosts. I could see ants and beetles walking up the trunk. I could see leaves shaking in the breeze, turning their backs and dancing. Once I saw a small spotted owl, asleep on a branch, close to the top of a tall tree beside the tamarind. But I saw no ghosts
.

“Stay still, Anila,” my father said. “You're distracting me. When you're a big girl I'll paint your picture too.”

So I came and sat on the ground beside him on his picnic stool. He had sheets of light-blue paper, held together by a pin that rested on a stiff square of leather. His pencil strokes were very fast. I watched my mother appear, always her body first, turned just the way he had placed her. The folds of her dress he drew like folds in cream when it's whipped. Then her neck, slender as a stem. He left her feet and her arms until last. On the page they grew on her and held her together. But her lovely face, that was the difficult part
.

I looked at my mother, who was only feet away, and at my paper mother. The face I touched every day was soft and full and its eyes were merry, sad, dreamy, different things that I could see with my own baby eyes. The mother on the page had a thin face that would not fatten or, some days, a fuller face that, no matter what my father did with the little cross-strokes of his pencil, he could not slim down into the face that we were looking at. Her paper eyes remained dark, with no lights in them
.

“I can draw anything, any palace, any shopfront, any redcoat with his sabre and pistol,” he said to me one day, “but your mother escapes me.”

He sighed. “Maybe the tamarind ghost takes your mother's soul away from me while she sits under his tree,” he said. That frightened me, and my mother scolded him
.

He told us that these were only sketches and that what he planned was a big – he made a shape in the air – painting in oils of my mother. These oils were not mustard cooking oils he told us, but oils that you mixed with earth or ground-up stones to make bright colours. He would show his painting of my mother to a gentlemen who knew about paintings. If he liked it they might show it in the Company Hall, along with paintings of English ladies, and soldiers on horses, and palaces from faraway parts of India, and even paintings of the Company's fierce Indiamen ships with all their guns blazing
.

I wondered how the painters made the ships stay still while they sketched them, and where they sat to make their drawings while the guns fired. Even ships that were moored at the ghats moved all the time, not like my good obedient mother who stayed absolutely still
.

My father never made the oil painting or, if he did, he never showed it to us. But he saw that I liked to pick up his pencil and make shapes on his papers
.

“Look at Anila,” he said to my mother. “She can draw a perfect leaf. She's even put the sawteeth in.”

I never tried to draw my mother, or my father. I don't know why. Perhaps I was afraid that it was not the tamarind but the paper and pencil that had the power to take a soul away. Perhaps I was afraid that I would fail, as my father did, so often that there were some afternoons he became so cross with my mother and me that he left us without his usual warm hug. Perhaps it was just that I could see my mother's face every day around me, and that when I wanted to see my father I could close my eyes and there he was in my head, with his crooked smile and his dancing eyes
.

What I wanted to draw was what I knew I would not remember unless I put its shape and colours down onto paper. I began with leaves and trees but my mother told me that, from the beginning, every one of my trees had a bird in it, and not just a pretended bird like her lovely purple quilt dove, but a bird that really belonged to that tree. Possibly that owl was the first, but then owls are quite easy to draw. Not their feathers though. If you want to have a proper owl on a page to remember it, then you must be able to show all the different shades of brown in one long wing feather, the light bands running across the feathers, the swell of its chest and the soft wisps round its legs
.

My father could do this, only he didn't draw birds. But when he drew a building, a real one or one that he was inventing, he made you see hundreds of shades in the stones. You could see sharpness and even softness, because my father's buildings looked almost alive. If he showed glass it shone like eyes. Besides this, somewhere in every drawing there was a door that was not quite closed or a window flung open, even in the palaces, like an invitation to enter. You had to look. There would always be a way in
.

So, that is the gift my father left me. Drawing. But somebody else painted my mother
.

I WENT UP THE STAIRS
. The testimonial in my hands seemed to get lighter, as if it wished to take off and leave me with nothing to say for myself. I patted my bag, to feel the sturdy form of my work inside. But this Mr Walker would surely laugh at the crazy notion of employing me and never ask to see my drawings at all.

He was standing at the beginning of a long passageway. Doors led off this on both sides but only one of them stood open, and now he stepped back inside it.

“Come along in and tell me who you are and why you have been sent to me,” he said. He truly had an extraordinarily deep voice, but it was not unfriendly or frightening. It was almost musical. He rolled his
r
s.

I followed him into his room.

“Leave the door open for Mr Minch,” he said. “I hope he has the redeeming grace to bring two cups.”

Now I could see that the man talking to me was perhaps about thirty. Older, anyway, than my father the last time I saw him.

He was tall and thin, and though he seemed poised he was edgy too. He reminded me of a hunting dog, the still, clever kind who find things. Deep lines ran between his nose and his wide mouth and his forehead had four wavy furrows like the sea in a sea-picture. His sandy hair was bound into a pigtail, but everywhere there were bits escaping. At least it was not a wig. So many English gentlemen wore those hanks of dead hair on their heads.

He was standing on a rug in front of a desk piled with papers and books. A silver elephant sat on the tallest pile of documents, pressing them down. The room was quite in shade because drapes covered its one large window but I could make out shelves of dark wood. Their feet stood in troughs of water to protect them from insects. There were more books stuffed together on the shelves, but also, like creatures in a dream, there were birds.

Large and small birds were piled up on these shelves. The big ones stood on their own. The little ones perched on twigs inside small cages. All the birds were staring out with glassy eyes. They were dead birds, sad birds.

“Now,” he said, “you must tell me who you are, young lady, and what your business is with me.”

I had not yet spoken one word to this man but somehow I knew that he was not busy making judgement on me. Suddenly I wanted him to see me in a whole and proper way, the way Miss Hickey did.

“Sir, I have come because of the notice in
The Gazette,”
I said. “I can draw birds and animals and plants. I have a testimonial here, and also samples of my work.”

He let out a slow breath, almost like a whistle. But before he could speak there was a clatter outside and Mr Minch made his way into the room bearing a large tin platter. On it were two white china cups, a beautiful pale green teapot and cream-jug and a tiny silver bowl filled with dark sugar crystals.

“Thank you, Mr Minch. A proper wake-up for duty is needed, after all.”

“Can I get you something to eat, sir?”

Mr Minch seemed to have put himself back in good humour, I noticed. Perhaps the sentry would escape his tongue-lashing.

“No, thank you. My stomach has still to custom itself back to Calcutta after its visit to the south. Unless Miss…?”

They both looked at me.

“No thank you, sir,” I said.

Mr Minch put the platter on the desk and went out, closing the door behind him.

“Now, you could show me your drawing-room skills and pour, or I could play host and pour – which is it to be?”

He smiled, so I pointed a finger at him.

“You pour, sir. It's a very pretty pot. I would hate to break it.”

“It's a very ancient pot indeed. That's well observed of you. It's pure China porcelain, with a celadon glaze. My late aunt's bequest to me. Mr Minch is under pain of death not to break it and certainly not to lend it to any of the other saints or scholars who work here. And above all never to a gentleman of the law, not even a judge.”

He poured tea into the cups and we sat down, he behind his desk, I on a leather stool in front of it. He shot me a glance.

“There's a common bird in these parts that has just such a rare green in its feathers. I wonder if you know the one I mean.”

Well, but of course I did. If this was a test I could pass myself off reasonably.

“I don't always know the English words for all birds,” I said. “But it's a kind of duck. A small duck that we call the whistler.”

“Very good. But now, to first details. What is your name?”

I told him.

“And – I am estimating here – you have an English father and an Indian mother?”

I nodded. Then I shook my head.

“My father is Irish.”

Sing it loud, sing it proud, the princess Anila of Calcutta has not a drop of English blood!

“Is it either of those who have supplied this testimonial?”

He had the thick envelope in his hand but had not attempted to open it.

I almost laughed. What an idea!

“No, sir, of course not. It was written by Miss Helena Hickey on behalf of her father, the artist, Mr Thomas Hickey. I have been boarding with them for these few years past. I was an assistant to Mr Hickey. But indeed it was my father who taught me how to draw.”

He looked at me with some respect, I thought.

“I understand that Mr Hickey is celebrated in Calcutta for his portraits,” he said. “But it is quite another skill that I am looking for, you understand.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “And I can show you my work that suits your requirements. I have it right here with me.”

He told me to take out my drawings while he read the testimonial. I turned away, and struggled to get the leather case out of my bag. I knew what Miss Hickey had written because she had shown me the two closely written pages yesterday and I had read them while she was out of the room. That had been extraordinary. There were my circumstances laid out as if they belonged to a character in a story. And then at the end:

“You are quite a paragon, it seems,” said Mr Walker. But he said it slowly and without any trace of mockery. “I must admit that I would give a lot to have met with the writer of this missive. Though I would naturally fear for her opinion of me.”

He reached across for my notebooks. He turned the pages, slowly, without looking up at me. Sometimes he turned back and looked over a particular one again. I wondered if I should explain the order I had made, and the names I had given the birds. But I knew that the drawings had to speak for themselves, and that they must speak louder than all Miss Hickey's kind words.

Mr Walker got up and went over to a shelf by the wall. He took down one of his dead birds and brought it back to the desk. It was an oriole, a black-headed one, and its legs were nailed onto a small log. My notebook was open at a painted sketch of an oriole I had made last year, on a picnic with Miss Hickey and her friend Mrs Hadley. A storm had appeared like bad magic, with rains that soaked us through while we ran back to the carriage, laughing and spattered with mud. I had finished the oriole from memory back in the house. It was a good likeness.

“You have caught the curve of the bill perfectly,” he said. “And goodness, what sharp eyes they have!”

I did not point out to him that the poor bird on the desk had only brown buttons for eyes and that insects had gnawed its bill to dust.

He left the oriole back and returned to the desk with a little garden bulbul. It had only one leg; the other was supplied by a twig.

“Your bulbul has just the outraged look that I have observed in every one of these creatures,” he said. “Look at this fellow. He has it too. They remind me of farmers' wives asked to give the parish a few eggs and cabbages at Christmas-time. But perhaps you have painted your one a little more of a red rump than he deserves.”

“But that was exactly why I chose that bulbul,” I said. “You see, I knew him.”

Anila, he's back again, the little red bottom bird. Our own dancing bulbul!

“I liked him because he was much more garish than most. He lived down the lane where my mother and I had our house. He used to take baths in a dish of water we kept outside the door for him. That is one of my oldest drawings. I like it for all those reasons, but it is not as finished as one I would make now.”

He gave me a sentry's look.

“Miss Tandy, your correspondent here has not sold you short, not by any means, but she has not explained how you acquired your affinity for nature and that I really look forward to hearing about you from yourself.”