Prodigies Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  Contents

  Francis King

  Dedication

  Book 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Book 2

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Book 3

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Book 4

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Epilogue

  Francis King

  Prodigies

  Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.

  ‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge

  Dedication

  For

  Abdel-Karim Deham

  fellow explorer

  Book 1

  Chapter One

  AS A CHILD she would often think about her father’s distant plantations. Halting in the corridor to the nursery, overlarge head tilted upwards on its long, thin neck, she would peer up at the coloured engraving, foxed with damp and fretted at the edges by the jaws of white ants, with its wide, chlorotic expanse of sugar-cane and, dotted here and there about it, half-naked, black figures – savages, Nanny Rose had told her. The women stood erect under bundles that looked like towering head-dresses, the men were armed with machetes. From those spears of vegetation a viscous liquid was extracted; and eventually that liquid was transformed into gold.

  ‘What’s that place?’

  ‘Demerara,’ Nanny Rose said.

  ‘Is that where Daddy is now?’

  ‘No. Was. He’s not there now.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In Liverpool. I think. Yes, that’s what your mother said. With your brothers. Half-brothers,’ she corrected herself. She herself came from a village in the Wirral. It was the wife of one of the two half-brothers, a haughty, long-faced woman with a nervous habit of constantly licking her lips, who had recruited her, after the death from diphtheria of the child – such an adorable boy and so unlike this sharp, capricious, disobedient, spoiled little madam – who had been her previous charge.

  ‘Where is Demarara?’

  ‘Oh, a long, long way away. In the West Indies.’ Nanny Rose put up a hand and fidgeted with the widow’s lace-fringed cap surmounting a plain, square face scarred from small-pox. She often fidgeted with the cap, as though uneasy with the premature widowhood it represented.

  ‘Too far for us to go there?’

  ‘Oh, yes, dear, far too far. What an idea! In any case, it wouldn’t be the right sort of place for a little girl like you.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Well, you can pick up all sorts of diseases. And it’s very hot. And you wouldn’t be able to lead the sort of life you lead here.’

  ‘When is Daddy coming back?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know, do we? We never know. He has so much to occupy him. I heard your mother say he might have to go to Jamaica. There’s been some sort of problem there.’

  ‘What problem?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I really don’t.’ But she knew perfectly well. She had overheard a conversation between madam and madam’s sister, the one who was lady-in-waiting to the Queen, when they had spoken of some sort of rebellion of the coffee-plantation workers, so recently awarded the gift of their freedom but not in the least grateful for it.

  ‘There are always problems for Daddy.’

  ‘Well, every important man has problems. Problems are an important man’s meat and drink.’

  It was after that conversation that Alexine began her habit of stationing herself in front of the engraving and, on tiptoe, staring up at it. She would try to imagine that she was one of those women with the towering headdresses that were in fact their burdens. The air would be hot and damp, wrapping itself around their half-naked bodies, like the towels that were wrapped around her to make her sweat out a fever at that time when, on holiday in Naples, she had fallen so suddenly ill; and everywhere there would be a scent of caramel, like that scent of burned sugar that arose when her mother, helped by Liliane, made toffee on the wide verandah overlooking the garden at the back of the house. Demerara. She repeated the word to herself. Demerara. It sounded strange, frightening, seductive, a magic password.

  Her father also owned coffee plantations, rubber plantations, ships and factories; but when she thought of his money, it was always as sugar, piled high, mountain after mountain of immaculate snow, in warehouses in The Hague, in Paris, in Liverpool, in Milan, in all of those mysterious, far-distant places to which he was constantly travelling. Why could she and her mother never travel with him? ‘ Oh, I’ll be far too busy to have any time to spare for you,’ he would reply when, as so often and so pressingly, she put that question to him. Only six though she was, she could already bend her mother, Aunt Addy and Nanny Rose to her will, but never him.

  ‘Why are those people black?’ she asked Aunt Addy, pointing at the engraving.

  ‘Why are you white?’ Aunt Addy countered. Then she said: ‘ They – or their parents or their grandparents or their great-grandparents – were brought from Africa.’ She almost added ‘As slaves’, but instead said ‘To work.’

  Pale and extremely thin, the rusty shadows under her eyes suggesting either extreme fatigue or ill-health, she smoothed down the grey taffeta over her thighs with long, narrow hands as she said: ‘Without all those black people we shouldn’t be living in this beautiful house – or making journeys – or having Nanny Rose and Mademoiselle and Daan and Liliane and all the others to look after us.’

  At six, Alexine was already fluent in three languages: her native Dutch, English, and French. She had i
nherited that gift from her father, everyone was always saying. How many languages did he speak? Sometimes he said six, sometimes seven, sometimes even eight, when people asked him. Alexine used to wonder: How could he be so vague? Didn’t he remember?

  When he returned to The Hague, after many weeks of absence, from his estates in Sumatra, Alexine urged him: ‘Papa, say something to me in the language that they speak out there.’

  He stroked his forked beard with that mischievously enigmatic smile of his, tilted his head to one side, tongue between teeth, in deliberation, and then brought out something that sounded so odd – did those people really speak like that or was he making it up? – that Alexine burst into delighted laughter. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked.

  ‘It means ‘‘I love you’‘.’

  ‘Am I the first person you’ve ever said that to? I mean – in that language of theirs?’

  Again he gave that mischievously enigmatic smile, head tilted to one side. ‘What do you think?’ Thirty-three years older than her mother, his second wife, he was a powerfully built man with wide shoulders, an out-jutting paunch and a head that, like a battering ram, he held thrust forward as though to demolish any barrier that might obstruct him from achieving his visionary ambitions. The veins stuck out like grey-blue caterpillars on the backs of his huge hands and at his temples. Early every morning, when he was at home, a perky young barber would arrive, worn leather bag in hand, in order to shave him and to clip and comb his grey forked beard. Sometimes, if she pleaded for long enough, Alexine would be allowed to watch this event. As a beard clipping slithered down and off the sheet wrapped around him to the floor, she would often stoop to retrieve it. It felt dry and sharp in her palm, like a pine-needle.

  ‘Now, pussycat, you must let me get on with my work.’ He sighed, pushed at the armrests, decorated with an elaborate scrollwork of flowers and foliage, of the chair that he had brought back from one of his English visits – ‘school of Grinling Gibbons’ he would tell people invited to admire it, adding, in case they were ignorant of it, that Gibbons had been born in Rotterdam – and then rose to his feet.

  ‘Oh, do let’s talk a little longer!’

  ‘Sorry, pussycat. But work is work – and must be done, if Mama expects to go to Paris next month to buy even more of those expensive dresses.’

  ‘Why can’t I just sit in your study while you’re working? I won’t make any noise.’

  ‘Because other people come and go. And because, if you – or anyone else – is watching me, then I can’t concentrate. I’ve told you that. Many times.’

  She had learned the futility of arguing with him, just as, in the years ahead, people would learn the futility of arguing with her.

  With his slight limp, the result of being thrown from a horse startled by the sudden emergence of some black, overawed children out of a thicket in Demerara many years before, he hurried off through a succession of doors, opening and then decisively shutting them behind him, towards the study. Its entrance flanked by Corinthian columns wrapped in palm fronds, this room was the termination of a tunnel-like, vaulted corridor.

  Sometimes, after he had disappeared into the study, Alexine would follow, careful to make no sound. She would reach up for the first of a succession of door-handles and then, with an effort, turn it. She would slip through and gently, oh so gently, close that door behind her. Then no less silently she would move on to the next. From time to time she would glance up at a portrait. Few of them were of his family, most of them were of Mama’s and Aunt Addy’s. When she had once asked Mademoiselle why this should be, she had replied in an indignant, even angry tone of voice, ‘Historiquement la famille de votre mère est beaucoup plus importante.’ It had always been clear to Alexine that Mademoiselle did not like Papa, and she had often wondered why this should be.

  Stationing herself on the thick Aubusson carpet with its pattern of birds of paradise perched on the grey-green branches of olive trees, Alexine would peer through the keyhole into the study. But it was only rarely, as he stooped forward to take something out of a drawer of his large bureau à cylindre, did she glimpse Papa’s face. For the most part she would see only an expanse of his waistcoat, the watch-chain glittering across it, the taut protuberance of his belly, or one of his large, amazingly white hands, far whiter even than Aunt Addy’s, which contrasted so oddly with the hectic flush of his cheekbones and forehead. She found an excitement in observing and not being observed. That excitement was to remain with her for the whole of her life.

  Sometimes, Papa would not be alone. Mysteriously, most of his visitors did not come up the imposing main staircase with its Venetian windows and Ionic pilasters, but up a small, corkscrew one, with direct access to the study, which had been added only a few years earlier to the house. No member of the family other than Papa ever used that small staircase. When, exploring the house, Alexine had attempted to do so, she had found the entrance to it barred by a locked iron grill.

  It was as rare for her to be able to catch a glimpse of the visitors’ faces as it was for her to be able to catch a glimpse of Papa’s. But, if they spoke in one of the three languages known to her, she could sometimes make out, here, and there, something of what they were saying. But since most of their talk was about business and money, it was so tedious to her that she never strained to listen. The other voices were often raised in excitement, disagreement, pleasure or dismay; but Papa‘s always maintained the same even, strong tenor. That tenor never left any doubt of his superiority to all those who called to see him.

  Once, suddenly jumping up from his chair, striding to the door and flinging it open, as he went to protest about a bell too long left unanswered, he caught her scuttling away down the passage, like some small animal surprised when foraging for food.

  ‘Hey! What have you been up to? What? Hey!’

  She halted, turned. She put a hand up to a cheek as though anticipating a slap. The slag came, to the other cheek. ‘I don’t like eavesdroppers,’ he said. ‘Go back to the nursery! Go! Go!’ He marvelled that, when he slapped her, she never cried. His boys, now grown up and far away in England, would at that same age begin to blub even before palm met cheek with stinging force.

  Later, after they had eaten their midday dinner together – now that his English first wife was dead, he refused to follow the English custom of banishing children to the nursery for meals – he called her over to him. Defiant but pale, she scrambled out of her chair, crossed the floor between them and stood before him. She thought that he was about to punish her again. But he extended his arms and then, placing his hands on either side of her narrow waist, jerked her up on to his knee. ‘You are my Benjamin,’ he said. ‘Except that Benjamin was a boy and you’re a little girl.’ He kissed the top of her head and then the side of her neck. She did not know what he meant by ‘ Benjamin’, and she did not like the touch of his full, damp lips on her flesh. But Harriet, her beloved Mama, looked across at them through her lorgnette and smiled indulgently, and Daan, the gnarled, wheezing manservant, stationed behind Mama’s chair, also smiled.

  It was this Benjamin who was to inherit most of Papa’s money.

  Papa had once said that the proof of whether you were truly rich or not was whether you could make a reality of every one of your dreams. She was to be rich in that way.

  Chapter Two

  PAPA HAD BEEN AWAY for such a long time that sometimes, lying in bed, she would have to make an effort to recollect what he looked like and what his voice sounded like. She could visualize the grey forked beard, the whimsical, mocking, sometimes even cruel smile on the moist, full lips, the aggressively out-thrust head and the small, brown mole on one side of his nose; but somehow, as though she were attempting an insoluble jigsaw puzzle, she could rarely fit all these features satisfactorily together. With her amazingly retentive memory for a foreign language, she could even remember that way in which the Sumatrans said ‘I love you’ – unless, of course, he had invented those weird sounds. But, that apart
, it was hard to hear in recollection that firm, low, vibrant voice of his.

  She would repeatedly, with a growing impatience, ask Mama, Aunt Addy, Mademoiselle and Nanny Rose when Papa would return. But none of them could say with certainty – answering ‘Soon, dear, very soon,’ or ‘You know what it’s like when your father goes away on business’ or ‘ He said he’d be back at the end of the month at the latest.’ Strangely, whereas she felt his absence like a constant, dull ache, often distracting her from paying attention to Mademoiselle’s explanation of the French subjunctive, from eating up the food placed by Daan or Beatrice before her, and even from playing with her lead soldiers, her mother, aunt, Nanny Rose and Mademoiselle, like the servants, seemed far more carefree, even far more happy for it.

  When he did return, it was wholly unexpectedly – so that Harriet chided him, in incredulous anger, ‘But why on earth didn’t you tell us that you were on the way?’, only to receive the off-hand, smiling answer: ‘Oh, I wanted to surprise you. Surprises are good for the health.’ ‘Not for mine,’ Harriet retorted. But he was right. Her life, she secretly acknowledged, was so dull because nothing surprising ever happened in it. A surprise of any kind stirred her sluggish blood with the sharpness of its challenge.

  It was already growing dark on that autumn evening when the barouche first clattered over the cobbles and then, having squeaked through the high, narrow gates, each bearing the crest of this newly rich and newly famous family, crunched up the semi-circle of the drive. Alexine was playing cards with Mama and Aunt Addy on the glazed front veranda that extended along the rusticated ground floor of the house, under an upper floor of seven broad bays. Nanny Rose had twice come to fetch her charge for bed and on each occasion Alexine had protested ‘No, no! We must finish the game.’ Nanny Rose knew that Madam and Miss Addy would give in to the child, as they always did. On each occasion she marched off, brows drawn together and chapped lips moving soundlessly as she repeated to herself; ‘Spoiled. Utterly spoiled.’ They were words that she was often silently to utter in the years ahead.