The train stopped at York and the aunt bought sandwiches off a trolley. ‘Now I suggest you go and wash your hands and freshen up,’ she said, ‘because it’s time we had our lunch. Which of these sandwiches would you like — egg and cress or cheese and tomato?’
‘Cheese and tomato, please.’
If Minette had known what was going to happen as soon as she had gone she would have been very scared indeed. For out of the pocket of her long navy-blue knickers the aunt took a little box with a brownish powder which she sprinkled carefully into the centre of the cheese and tomato sandwich. Then she unzipped the holdall and sat back in her seat with a very contented smile.
‘My first one,’ she murmured to herself. ‘My very first one. Oh really, this is most exciting!’ And then: ‘I wonder how Coral is getting on?’
It had been much harder to get Coral to look like an Agency Aunt. She was the plump one who had been to art school when she was young, and she liked to stand out from the crowd, but she had done her best to look sensible. She only wore two necklaces and one pair of dangly earrings and the hand-painted squiggles on her robe and matching turban were peaceful squiggles, so that when she rang the bell of the big house in Mayfair she felt that she looked as aunt-like as she ever would.
The idea of fetching Hubert-Henry Mountjoy from his grandparents’ London house and taking him back to his boarding school in Berkshire made Aunt Coral feel extremely glum.
Her first batch of children had been as bad as Etta’s: a poisonous, podgy child who had tried to kick her shins, and a little boy who jumped on a beetle in the park. She was sure that Hubert-Henry Mountjoy would not be her cup of tea — a cold-eyed, snotty little aristo too big for his boots — and she had decided that if she caught him jumping on beetles she would wallop him hard and give up being an aunt and go home.
As she was shown into the Mountjoys’ hall by a toffee-nosed maid, she felt worse than ever. The house was huge and dark and cold; there was a big brass gong in one corner; paintings of dead Mountjoys with handlebar moustaches hung on the walls. She waited for her first sight of Hubert-Henry in his school uniform with the deepest gloom.
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.