Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp

by Odo Hirsch

  ‘That wasn’t the Princess’s fault. She was just a child.’

  ‘I’m not saying it was her fault. But the only reason she could live in luxury was because of that.’

  ‘So you’re saying they had the right to take everything she had? To take her palace? Even her lamp?’

  ‘I’m saying the people had a right to something.’

  ‘The lamp was hers, Kevin.’

  ‘Yeah, but look at it another way, and the lamp was really theirs.’

  ‘The lamp’s mine now,’ said Amelia. ‘That’s the funny thing.’

  There was silence for a moment.

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ said Eugenie to Kevin.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of everything the Princess had. You don’t like the idea she had it all because you could never have anything like it yourself.’

  ‘That’s not true. I’m just saying, you can understand why the people would have been angry.’

  Eugenie smiled smugly, as if she knew what was really going on in Kevin’s mind.

  ‘Why do you want to defend her?’ demanded Kevin in exasperation. ‘Why do you take her side? Eugenie, she was horrible. She didn’t say a word to you the other day.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘She didn’t.’

  ‘She did!’

  ‘She didn’t. For all she cared, you weren’t so much as a speck of dust.’

  ‘That’s not true!’

  ‘Amelia? Did the Princess say a word to Eugenie?’

  Amelia shook her head. The Princess hadn’t said a word to Eugenie, as they all knew.

  ‘Well, what do you expect?’ demanded Eugenie. ‘She’s had such a terrible life. Everything was taken away from her. How old was she? No older than we are. Just imagine it, suddenly you have to leave, and you can’t take anything with you.’

  ‘She obviously managed to keep something,’ said Kevin.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, look at her. She’s got that big car. She must have had the money to buy that. And there’s the old guy who drives her around. He was her servant all the way back then. I bet he’s stayed with her all his life.’

  ‘Yeah, and I bet it’s nothing compared with the life they left behind. One old car. One old servant. Imagine how many servants she must have had in the Grand Palace!’

  Kevin shook his head. ‘Maybe they only managed to take what they could carry, but they had money somewhere, didn’t they? Isn’t that what you said, Amelia? In a bank or something? And where did that money come from? It was illegally put there by the Shan. So whose was it really?’

  ‘See!’ cried Eugenie. ‘You are jealous. Look at him, Amelia. He’s as jealous as anything.’

  ‘I’m not jealous! I just don’t think the Princess has had such a terrible life. She could have gone back if she wanted.’

  ‘There was a revolution!’

  ‘After the revolution. She could go back now, the old guy said so. But she won’t, will she? Why? Because she won’t be a princess any more, and that’s all she cares about. Having people call her Your Serenity. I bet no one will call her Your Serenity in Irafia. Right, Amelia?’

  Amelia nodded. It was true. All the Princess cared about was being treated according to her rank, and treating other people according to theirs. And Kevin hadn’t seen how horrible she could really be in the way she treated people, not as Amelia had seen it that day in Mr Vishwanath’s studio.

  ‘She could still say hello to us, couldn’t she?’ said Kevin. ‘She could still be civil. I bet she’d have a lot more friends if she did.’

  ‘A princess doesn’t want friends,’ retorted Eugenie. ‘If you knew anything about princesses, you’d realise that. But you don’t know the first thing about them. How can you possibly know what it is to be a princess and then to have all of it, everything, taken away?’

  True as well, thought Amelia. None of them could really know what that would be like.

  Kevin and Eugenie glared at each other.

  Amelia frowned. In a way, they each had a point.

  She looked around. The café was empty. The film must have started. Everyone had gone in.

  CHAPTER 15

  The lamp hung motionless above the stairs. Amelia switched it on, and it glowed. She switched it off. She switched it on and off again a couple of times, quickly.

  She traced the metalwork with her eyes, as she had traced it hundreds of times before. Each swirl and curve seemed to flow into another, but Amelia knew how to find the shapes within them. Focus on the mass of detail, and everything dissolved into endless intricacy, but focus on the individual shapes, and the detail around them slipped away. You could see nothing in the fine metalwork of the lamp, or all kinds of things, depending on how you looked at it.

  Her lamp. That was how she had always thought of it. It was because of this lamp that she had started writing stories. And whenever she felt that maybe that was a silly thing to do, and people would laugh if they knew, she only had to gaze at the lamp, lose herself amongst the familiar shapes hidden in the bronze, and she knew there was nothing silly about it at all.

  But it wasn’t just her lamp. It was something else now. It was someone else’s as well. Or had been. Amelia saw it in a way she had never seen it before. Not just the metalwork itself, but everything the lamp represented. Where it had come from. What it had been.

  What if the Princess wanted it back? What if she could prove that it had been hers, and that she had a right to it?

  Amelia switched it on again, and the lamp glowed.

  There had been six in the palace, the Princess had said. Amelia tried to imagine the lamp hanging in the palace. A lamp of that size must have hung high, she thought, right in the centre of a room. She tried to imagine what the room looked like. What were its walls made of? Marble? Wood? What kind of windows? Square ones? Arched ones? She didn’t know. The book about Irafia didn’t have any pictures of the Grand Palace of Ervahan. It had a picture of the Shan, who had been overthrown, and of a man who had replaced him as president of the new republic. The Shan had a long face with a deep crease in each cheek. The man who replaced him was plumper, almost a jolly-looking man. But his looks deceived. According to the book, he was brutal, as brutal as the Shan himself, and had ordered hundreds of the Shan’s supporters to be executed. He himself had ruled for only three years before being overthrown.

  Amelia tried to imagine what the palace must have been like. It must have been very grand, to judge by the lamp. Amelia smiled. That’s what people would say about her house, if the only thing left from it was the lamp that was hanging in front of her. ‘It must have been a very grand house,’ they would say, ‘if it had lamps like that!’ But that was wrong because the lamp didn’t really belong in her house. It hadn’t been made for it. Yet the lamp had belonged in the palace at Ervahan. And if a lamp like that belonged there – and not just one lamp, but six of them – what other things there must have been!

  Amelia gazed at the lamp. What other things there must have been, she thought.

  Eugenie was right, it would have been terrible to lose all of that. Imagine growing up in a such a place, and suddenly, one night, having to run away and get on a boat to save your life from a mob, taking nothing but what you could carry. Even if your family still had some wealth afterwards, it would never be the same. You would never have that kind of luxury again. Not only a palace, but a whole country you could call your own.

  But that didn’t necessarily make it fair for the Princess to have had all those things in the first place. Maybe it was Kevin who was right. The things the Princess and her family had – the luxury, the palaces, the lamps, everything – maybe they should never have had them in the first place. When the people took those things away, they were just taking back what was actually theirs.

  Amelia sighed. She put her elbows on the banister and looked up at the lamp, picking out the two fan-tailed peacocks on the bottom. Eugenie and Kevin were both right. That w
as the problem. It depended on how you looked at it. From the perspective of the Princess, it was terribly sad. And yet if you looked at it from the perspective of the people of Irafia, it wasn’t sad at all. Quite the opposite.

  It was confusing. No matter how much she thought about it – and she had thought about it a lot – Amelia didn’t quite feel that she completely understood it, that she could make one perspective fit with the other. She didn’t think she had come across a problem before in which the opposite sides of the argument both seemed to be right. At least she couldn’t remember one. And she was pretty sure she would have, considering how much trouble this one was giving her!

  It didn’t seem to surprise Mr Vishwanath. He listened as she explained the conundrum, sitting in his chair under the back verandah, gazing at the garden. There were no sculptures in the garden now. Amelia’s father had removed the white ones, and Amelia’s mother hadn’t yet revealed anything new. She was working furiously, though, enclosed behind the door of her sculpture room, from which came a steady stream of bangs and crashes. But the shouts of frustration had more or less stopped. Amelia’s father said that meant she had finally worked out what her new phase was going to be about, and at last she was actually creating something.

  Mr Vishwanath nodded when Amelia finished telling him how confusing it was.

  Amelia waited for him to respond. But he didn’t.

  ‘You must have something to say, Mr Vishwanath,’ said Amelia at last.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But it’s so confusing!’

  ‘It is what it is,’ said Mr Vishwanath.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Everything in life is like this,’ murmured Mr Vishwanath.

  ‘No it isn’t!’ replied Amelia. ‘Nothing in life is like this. I’ve never come across anything like it before.’

  ‘Then you haven’t thought enough about the things you have come across.’

  ‘Well, if everything in life’s like this, how do you ever know what’s right?’ demanded Amelia.

  Mr Vishwanath glanced at her. He smiled that gentle, questioning smile of his. Amelia knew what was coming next. Something she wouldn’t understand, probably.

  ‘When you know you are right, that is the time you can be sure you are wrong,’ said Mr Vishwanath quietly.

  ‘Mr Vishwanath,’ demanded Amelia, ‘how can that be right? If you know you’re right . . .’

  Something in Mr Vishwanath’s gaze made Amelia stop. He looked at her for a moment longer, then turned back to the garden.

  Amelia frowned. It didn’t seem to make sense, and yet there was something in Mr Vishwanath’s remark that seemed to say: ‘Think about me a little longer, I’m not nonsense’. If a remark could talk, of course.

  There was silence.

  ‘She came to visit us,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Who came to visit you?’ asked Mr Vishwanath.

  ‘The Princess.’

  Mr Vishwanath turned. Amelia had never seen Mr Vishwanath look surprised. He didn’t look surprised now, but he nearly did, and for Mr Vishwanath, that probably meant he had just had the shock of his life.

  Amelia smiled. That was something, shocking Mr Vishwanath.

  ‘A couple of days ago,’ said Amelia. ‘Didn’t you see her?’

  Mr Vishwanath shook his head.

  ‘She wanted to see the lamp. The lamp I mentioned in the story I wrote for her. Turns out . . .’ Amelia paused, wanting to see if she could surprise Mr Vishwanath even more. ‘It used to hang in her palace!’

  Amelia watched him closely, trying to see what effect she had had.

  Mr Vishwanath turned back to the garden. ‘In the palace where she was born?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Not much. She just looked at it. The palace doesn’t exist any more, Mr Vishwanath. They destroyed it in the revolution. I read about it in a book. Did you know about that?’

  Mr Vishwanath nodded.

  ‘Did you know about the lamp?’ asked Amelia, hoping strongly that he hadn’t.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Vishwanath. ‘I didn’t know about the lamp.’

  Amelia smiled.

  ‘The palace is not destroyed,’ murmured Mr Vishwanath.

  ‘Yes it is,’ said Amelia. ‘I read about it, Mr Vish-wanath. And the Princess’s driver, Asha, he said so as well.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Vishwanath. ‘It is destroyed materially, but nonetheless it still exists.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Amelia.

  Mr Vishwanath turned to her. Suddenly the answer came into Amelia’s mind, and it seemed as if it arrived directly out of Mr Vishwanath’s soft, dark eyes, as if he had somehow sent it into her head.

  ‘In the Princess’s mind,’ whispered Amelia. ‘That’s where it still exists, isn’t it?’

  Mr Vishwanath turned away and gazed at the garden again.

  Amelia frowned. She wasn’t sure she understood herself what she had just said. The thought had suddenly been there and the words just came out of her mouth. In fact, she wasn’t sure that she understood anything more now than she had before she sat down to speak with Mr Vishwanath, and possibly less.

  ‘I think I’m still confused, Mr Vishwanath.’

  Mr Vishwanath nodded.

  ‘Is that a bad thing?’

  Mr Vishwanath shrugged. ‘It is what it is.’

  Somehow, Amelia knew he was going to say that.

  After a while, it began to make sense. Sort of. Amelia remembered something else Mr Vishwanath had told her. It was the Princess’s tragedy that she lived her life worrying about whether people were treating her with enough importance. The two things fitted together. It was as if the Princess still lived in the palace, in her mind, and in her mind she was still as important a person as she had been when she really did live there. In her mind, that life, which had come to an end with the revolution fifty-nine years ago, had never finished. And that would be a tragedy, wouldn’t it, just as Mr Vishwanath said? It would be a tragedy if you were living a life in your mind that no longer existed. It would be like believing you were locked in a prison, and living your life as if you were – never stepping beyond the door of your cell, never gazing upwards to see the sky – except that there actually was no prison, and no cell in which you were locked, and no roof to block out the sky, but only imaginary bars and locks and walls which penned you in when all you had to do was step beyond them to be free.

  And yet once you realised that, once you knew this imprisonment existed only in your mind . . . at that very moment, you would be released!

  ‘It’s so simple,’ murmured Amelia to the sculpted lady as she stared out the window over Marburg Street. It was exactly as she had said to Mr Vish-wanath when he first told her about the Princess’s view of her life. ‘The problem starts when you think it’s complicated. But it’s not. She just has to see how things look from the other side. Someone just has to tell her.’

  Amelia glanced at the carved lady outside her window, and from the expression on the lady’s face it definitely looked as if she agreed.

  But what to do about it? Amelia didn’t like the Princess, and the Princess had done nothing to make Amelia want to help her. And yet, when she had watched the Princess gazing at the lamp, when she had seen the tears glistening in her eyes, Amelia had got a glimpse of the part of the Princess that might not be so horrible, but might be tender, might be warm, like any other person. Maybe that would be the princess who would walk out of the prison once the Princess realised the prison was purely in her mind. And Amelia couldn’t not try to help that princess, the tender one, the warm one, who had been imprisoned for fifty-nine years. She couldn’t leave her there when it was such a simple thing to set her free. Because if not Amelia, who else would help her?

  She glanced at the sculpted lady, and the sculpted lady was almost smiling in encouragement.

  The next time the cream-coloured car came down the street, Amelia was ready. She knew exactly what she w
as going to say. She ran down the stairs. She was outside even before Asha had opened the door for the Princess. She waited excitedly for the Princess to get out.

  ‘Princess!’ she cried. ‘Prince—’

  Amelia stopped. The Princess had turned her gaze on her.

  ‘You must say Your Serenity,’ whispered Asha.

  But Amelia didn’t say anything. The gaze in the eyes of the Princess was one of pure ice. It gripped Amelia in its cold, bitter harshness, froze her blood. She felt as if, to the Princess, she was some kind of thing – not a person, not even an animal, but even less than that, some kind of fungus, perhaps – that was getting in the way.

  The words she had prepared – the things she was going to say to show the Princess how simple the problem was – choked in Amelia’s throat. Suddenly she felt ridiculously foolish, as she had felt when the Princess had called her story a fancy, a stupid, stupid thing. Worse, much worse. With that one freezing look, more powerful than a thousand words, the Princess had brought her back to reality. How could she, Amelia Dee, persuade someone like the Princess Parvin Kha-Douri to think about her life differently? It was absurd. What could she possibly say that the Princess hadn’t heard before? How could she possibly imagine that the Princess would ever listen to her? The Princess would never change, nothing could ever make her see things afresh.

  Everything that had seemed so simple in Amelia’s room above the street now seemed impossibly complicated. Amelia felt as small as a bug, as if the Princess, if she chose to, could have taken two steps across and squashed her with her toe.

  The Princess held her with her gaze a moment longer, then, as if knowing she had utterly crushed her, turned and went into Mr Vishwanath’s studio.

  Amelia was still frozen in her wake.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ said the driver tentatively.

  Amelia looked around. Still in a daze.

  ‘Mademoiselle, you must understand—’ But Amelia couldn’t bear to stay there a moment longer. Suddenly she just wanted to get away. She turned and ran inside.

  So Amelia didn’t hear what Asha was about to say. And Asha himself – who normally spoke not one word about his mistress, as a faithful servant mustn’t – didn’t know how much he might have revealed to the girl who had stared at him with such an injured, confused gaze on that pavement, had she not run off.