A Company of Swans (10 page)

By the aviary which his Indians, somewhat to his dismay, had built for him when he was absent on a journey, Manuelo was already sweeping the paths. Two other Indians worked by the pool with its golden water-lilies, scraping derris root into the water against mosquitoes. Old Iquita, Manuelo's mother-in-law, wearing a frilled petticoat left behind by an opera singer whose favors he had enjoyed, and a boa of anaconda skins, was poking her forked stick into a flower bed, busy with her self-appointed task of keeping his garden free from snakes. From the patch of forest behind the house, deliberately left untouched, where his Indians built their village, came the faint, disembodied sound of Dame Nellie Melba singing the "Bell Song" from Lakmé. However many records he bought them, this remained their favorite.

He showered, slipped on a khaki shirt and trousers and made his way downstairs—a most un-English-looking Englishman, lithe and dark-skinned, his black hair (though he was not yet thirty) exotically streaked with silver—to be waylaid as he crossed the terrace by the first of the many animals to whom he offered the hospitality of his home: a coatimundi with a great bushy tail who jumped off a chair and demanded to be stroked.

Moving on down the steps, Verney made his way between banks of glossy-leaved gardenias, through a trellised arcade of jasmine and passion flowers, toward the orchard where he grew mangoes and plantains and avocados to feed his workers. He missed nothing—a new patch of fungus, an infinitesimal split in the stem of a pineapple, a procession of ants endeavoring to set up a colony in his coffee bushes—all were instantly observed and silently assessed. And the little nose bear trotted along behind him, for this morning inspection of the estate was something which the coati regarded as very much his affair.

As he came to the bridge over one of the many igarapes that flowed through his land, an aged blue and yellow macaw flopped from an acacia branch on to his shoulder and screamed at the coati in jealous rage. The river was close by now, with his boats: the schooner Amethyst, which he used to convey guests to and from Manaus; the Daisy May, a converted gun-boat he had stripped almost to the hull to carry his botanical specimens… And the first boat he had ever owned, the little Firefly, rakish and indestructible, beside the dugouts of his Indians.

It was in the Firefly on a morning such as this that he had found Follina.

He had been beating his way up the mazed waterways of the Negro during his second year on the Amazon when he found, between two floating islands, the hidden entrance to a river. A light, clear river down which he traveled for perhaps a mile, entranced by the skimming kingfishers, the otters playing around his boat—and pulling into a sand-bank, he tied up to a cassia entirely covered in rich gold blossoms.

At first there was just the feeling that the jungle here was less dark, less pressing than elsewhere. Then, wandering along the edge of a sand-bar, he had come across a ruined jetty and in growing excitement found as he edged along it a clearing on which the sun shone as benignly as if it were England—and in the clearing, half-ruined but with its walls still standing, a house. Only not a house, really: a small, Italianate, pink-washed palazzo with a colonnaded terrace running its length; the remnants of carved pillars and stone statues still lying where they had fallen.

It had taken Verney nearly a year to trace anyone who could authorize a sale, but at last he found the descendants of Antonio Rinaldi, the visionary or madman who had come to Brazil at the beginning of the previous century, struck gold in Ouro Preto and come north to the Amazon to build—six thousand miles from Italy—the palazzo of his native village, Follina.

Rinaldi had planted the avenue of jacarandas, the grove of hardwood trees. Verney—excavating, replanting, clearing—had achieved in eight years what in a temperate climate would have taken him eighty.

Before ever he came to Brazil, Verney had read the great Cervantes' description of the New World and what it stood for to those settlers who came there first from Europe. "The refuge of all the poor devils of Spain, the sanctuary of the bankrupt, the safeguard of murderers, the promised land for ladies of easy virtue… a lure and disillusionment for the many—and an incomparable remedy for the jew."

Verney had been one of the few. Fleeing his homeland, heartsick and savage, he had indeed found this country an "incomparable remedy." He had succeeded beyond his childish dreams; neither the heat nor the danger from disease nor the enmity of those whose policies he opposed troubled him, and the jungle which others feared or loathed had showered him with benisons. Yet now, passing the creeper-dad huts which housed his generators and ice-machine, he put up a hand to pull down the heavy yellow pod of a cacao tree—and in an instant everything before him vanished and he was back in the orchard at Stavely. It was late October, the frost had turned the long grass into silvered spears and he was reaching out for one last apple hanging on the bare bough: an Orange Pippin with its flushed and lightly-wrinkled skin.

Once they came, these images of England, it was best to let them have their way… to let himself walk through the beech copse where the pheasants strutted on the russet leaves… to ride out between Stavely's April hedges or climb, wind-buffeted, up the steep turf path to the Barrows while the black dog played God among the scuttling rabbits.

And soon it was over—this sudden burst of longing, not for England's customs and manners, but for the physical look of her countryside—and he was aware again of the heat on his back, the whirr of the cicadas and the coati peering at him expectantly from a dump of osiers.

"Yes, you're quite right; it's time for breakfast," said Rom, and turning away from the river he made his way back to the house.

He had been christened Romain Paul Verney Brandon, but the Frenchified Christian name had been too much for the locals. He was known always as Rom—and for the first nineteen years of his life the woods and fields of Stavely were his heritage and his delight.

He was the son of General Brandon by the General's late second marriage to the beautiful foreign singer, Toussia Kandinsky: a most unnecessary marriage, the County thought it, having planned for the General—who was already well into middle age—a decorous widowerhood. He was, after all, not alone—there was his five-year-old son, young Henry Alexander, a sensible child who would make Stavely an excellent heir.

But the General, a distinguished soldier who had shown enormous personal courage during the bitter Afghanistan Wars and risked his life even more spectacularly during his leaves while pursuing rare plants in the cracks and crevices of the Karakorum mountains, failed to oblige them.

Eighteen months after the death of his wife, he went to a flower show in London and afterward allowed a musical acquaintance to take him to a concert where a half-French, half-Russian singer was giving a recital of Lieder. The General did not care greatly for the Lieder, but for the woman who sang them he conceived a romantic passion which ended only with her death.

Toussia Kandinsky was in her thirties—a mature, warm woman with sad dark eyes, an extraordinarily beautiful mouth and one feature which made her face spectacular: hair which since the age of twenty had been as white as snow.

They married—the cosmopolitan woman with a tragic past (her father had died in a Tsarist jail) and the seemingly conventional British soldier, and he took her back to Stavely, where the County did their best with a woman who did not hunt but could be seen speaking to the horses tenderly in French, who used the Music Room for music and filled the Gallery with paintings by those mad and immoral Impressionists.

Gossip about the new Mrs. Brandon inevitably abounded, but even the most virulent of her detractors had to admit that she was exceptionally good to her stepson. She spent hours with young Henry Alexander, read to him, played with him, took him about with her and celebrated his seventh birthday with a party that was talked about for years. When her own son was born the following year, both she and the General redoubled their attentions to Stavely's heir. The day after Rom's birth, there appeared in the stables a white pony for Henry that a prince of the blood would have been proud to own.

No, it was Rom himself who did the damage, who ate into poor Henry's soul. A dark-skinned, quicksilver child with high cheekbones and the flared nostrils that are supposed to denote genius or temper (and generally both), he had inherited also the thick, ink-black hair which had been his mother's in her girlhood and her passionate mouth. Had it not been for the General's wide gray eyes looking out of the child's intense, exotic face, the County would have been inclined to wonder.

For it was not only Rom's appearance that was dramatic. The child, brought down by his nurse to the drawing room at teatime, would throw his arms round his parents—round both of them—and speak to them of love. "I love you as much as the sun and the moon and the stars," the three-year-old Rom said to his mother in the presence of Mrs. Farquharson who had come about the Red Cross Fęte; and Henry, a decent, well-brought-up British boy, had to stand by and endure the shame.

Again and again, Henry's despised half-brother revealed his "foreignness." Rom chattered in French as easily as in English; he asked—he actually asked—to play the violin, and though Henry knew that forestry was respectable and that his father's plant-hunting trips were nothing to hide, to see Rom helping the gardeners to plant flowers was almost more than he could bear.

And then, just when Henry had consoled himself by utterly despising the outlandish half-brother who seemed to have no idea how to conduct himself, Rom would confound him by some spectacular act of courage, climbing fearlessly to the top of a tree so slender that even under Rom's light weight it bent and swayed as if it must break. It was Rom, not Henry (though he too was present) who jumped into the river by the mill-race to try to rescue a little village girl who had played too near the water's edge—and even then Rom couldn't behave like other children, for when he would have been a hero he lay down in front of the church door refusing to go inside because "God shouldn't have let Dorcas drown." It was Rom who found the black dog, snarling and wild, with his leg in a trap and who risked rabies and heaven-knows-what to free him—and soon Henry, dutifully walking his hound puppies, had the mortification of hearing Rom's wonder dog—with his intelligence and fidelity—spoken of wherever he went. It was Rom—not Henry, the eldest son, the heir—who smelled burning one wild night in October and led the white Arab—Henry's own horse, rearing and terrified—to safety.

No wonder Henry hated his younger brother, but there was nothing anyone could do. Mrs. Brandon's efforts to shower her stepson with attentions began to border on the ludicrous; the General never betrayed by one flicker of his wise gray eyes that his younger son held his heart. Rom himself, at the beginning, looked up to Henry and longed for his companionship. It was useless. The jealousy that enslaved Henry was the stuff of myth and legend, and it grew stronger every year.

Then, when Rom was almost eleven, fate stepped in on Henry's side. Mrs. Brandon felt ill; leukemia was diagnosed and six months later she was dead.

"Hadn't you better pull yourself together?" said Henry (recalled from his last term at Eton for the funeral) to Rom, sobbing wildly in his mother's empty room—and stepped back hastily, for he thought that Rom was about to spring at him and take him by the throat.

Instead Rom vanished with his dog, managing to go to ground in the Suffolk countryside as though it was indeed the Amazon in whose imagined jungles he had so often played.

When he came back he was different—quieter, less "excessive." He had learned to consume his own smoke, but for the rest of his life he responded to loss not with grief but with a fierce and inward anger.

It was now that Henry was able to express a little of his hatred. The General, unable to bear Stavely without his wife, left for the Himalayas on an extended botanical expedition and Henry the heir—now home from school for good—began to issue orders that were obeyed. Rom's dog was forbidden the house; his unsuitable friends—children of the village whose games he had led—were banished. Most of the servants were loyal to the younger child and Nannie, now retired and living in the Lodge, had never been able to conceal her love for the "little foreigner," but there were others—notably Grunthorpe the first footman, whom Rom had surprised in the gun room stealing boxes of cartridges to sell in the local town—who were only too glad to ingratiate themselves with the heir.

Henry's triumph, however, was short-lived. The General returned; Rom was restored to his rightful place and presently he followed his brother to Eton, where he was safe from Henry's tricks.

And then, in the year when Rom became eighteen, Isobel Hope and her widowed mother came to live in the village next to Stavely.

Isobel's connections were aristocratic—her mother was the youngest daughter of the Earl of Lexbury; her father, who had died in the hunting field, had belonged to an ancient West Country family—but she was poor. As a small child Isobel had seen the great Lexbury estate go under the hammer, and her handsome father had lived on his Army pay and promises. Even before she met Henry, this lovely girl had decided that Stavely's heir would make her a suitable husband.

She met him first at a ball in a neighboring house, but standing beside Henry on the grand staircase, relaxed and at ease, was his younger brother… and that was that.

The love that blazed between Rom and Isobel was violent, passionate and total. They met to ride at dawn, Isobel eluding all attempts at chaperonage, and were together again by noon to play tennis, wander through the gardens or chase each other through the maze. To watch them together was almost to gasp at their happiness; no one who saw them that summer ever quite forgot them. "A striking couple," "a handsome pair," "meant for each other"—none of the phrases that people used came anywhere near the image of those two: the slender girl with her shower of dark red hair, her deep blue eyes; the incorrigibly graceful, brilliant boy.