Along the Endless River

by Rose Alexander

  The only thing that really mattered was the talk about rubber. Could it really be true that the Amazon was over? She must write urgently to Katharine and warn her.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Manaus, 1907

  The baby was due at the beginning of July. Katharine hoped and prayed that it would come early so that she could have the best of both worlds – give birth in Manaus and then jump on the Booth Line steamer to Liverpool. No matter the rigours of the journey, the rough seas, the sickness – she would be able to spend August in England with her new baby and her son, and of course all the rest of the family. The post had been even more abysmal than usual of late, and she had had no news from home in months. She was desperate to get to London and catch up with all of those she had not seen in so many years.

  In the throes of delight about the forthcoming arrival and the journey, she set off to the city with her head held high, Thomas equally stalwart and proud by her side. She had nothing to be ashamed of. Love was free and she had made her choice. Other people could judge as they pleased.

  And judge they did, of course – starting with Mayhew. Katharine had not even considered staying anywhere else but at the establishment that Mayhew had set up from where he could run Norwood Enterprises’ Manaus operation. Apart from anything else, news of their arrival would be out within twenty-four hours. There was no way they could avoid Mayhew so they might as well meet him straight on.

  ‘So, you’re having a Black man’s spawn,’ he said disdainfully, taking exactly the standpoint that Katharine had anticipated. ‘I suppose we see the results of miscegenation all around us in this god-forsaken place. But my own sister. Giving birth to a half-caste.’

  ‘If you wish to think of it like that,’ retorted Katharine. She knew that Mayhew was taunting her, wanting a reaction. ‘I prefer to call it a baby. A baby I will love beyond measure.’ She was determined not to rise to Mayhew’s bait.

  ‘No, I’ve got a better word for it, actually,’ continued Mayhew, ignoring her. ‘A disgrace. An embarrassment.’

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that way. Thomas and I do not.’

  Mayhew took a slug from the glass of whisky he was holding. It was only five o’clock. Katharine had noticed how his nose had become red and bulbous, and his cheeks flecked with purple veins, both signs of long years of excessive drinking. He seemed coarser than ever, the last vestiges of the good looks and charm that had always been there to serve him – when he had felt like it – eradicated.

  ‘Does the boy know?’

  Katharine assumed he was referring to Antonio.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You think he’ll be happy to share his inheritance with a—?’

  Katharine clicked her tongue against her teeth in irritation. ‘Why do you assume the worst? Let him decide how he feels about his sibling.’

  ‘It’s a black and white case, dear sister, plain and simple.’

  A slow count to ten inside her head prevented Katharine from exploding.

  ‘Just my little joke,’ mumbled Mayhew, as if sensing her unspoken outrage. He poured himself more whisky. ‘I’d forgotten your lack of a sense of humour,’ he added, unable to resist another jibe.

  Though Katharine knew he was talking nonsense, Mayhew’s words still touched a nerve. She had spoken with a confidence she didn’t feel – earlier in the pregnancy she had convinced herself that Antonio would be happy to have a sibling. But she’d had no reply to her letter telling him about forthcoming arrival and she felt that she no longer knew how Antonio would react to anything. She hardly knew her teenage son. The sadness this brought to her was constant and profound.

  To take her mind off it, and despite the suffocating heat made worse by being heavily pregnant, she and Thomas went out to see what had changed. The Manaus that Katharine remembered from her solitary walks all those years ago was almost unrecognisable. Then, it had been big, but now it was a megalopolis of paved roads, gigantic banks and office blocks, hospitals, schools and universities.

  In the day time, the blue and gold roof tiles of the now completed opera house gleamed under the equatorial sun, and by night the city blazed with the brightness and brilliance of full electrification, installed here long before it had reached the greatest cities of North America and Europe. Parisian stores lined the streets – Au Bon Marché, La Ville de Paris, Parc Royal. Motor cars cruised up and down the avenues and boulevards, their Goodyear tyres made of Amazonian rubber. Rubber barons, always competitive, rivalled each other for the most ostentatious purchases – yachts, tame lions, swimming pools. Horse races were now held at the Derby Club in the Prado Amazonense and theatres had sprung up everywhere.

  But, amidst the glamour and the luxury, the talk, in hushed murmurs and secretive asides, was of the Peruvian Amazon Company run by Julio César Arana in the no-man’s land between Brazil, Peru and Colombia. Gossip abounded of terrible deeds in Arana’s empire on the river Putumayo; La Sanción newspaper in Iquitos had openly accused him of using any means possible to extort more work from the Indian tappers: torture, rape, murder.

  ‘Do you think it’s true?’ Katharine asked Thomas, after being part of a whispered conversation at a soirée held by one of Mayhew’s rubber baron friends. ‘And supposing it is – can we justify being part of such a deplorable industry?’

  ‘You’ve put everything into this. It’s your life,’ replied Thomas. ‘You’ve never hurt anyone and your employees depend on you. If you left – where would they go? What would they do? They might end up working for a boss as bad as Arana, or even Arana himself – and then how would you feel?’

  ‘Yes.’ Katharine tried to sound – and feel – convinced. ‘Perhaps you are right.’

  ‘I think your focus should be on the baby just now,’ Thomas suggested gently. ‘You can put the world to rights once you’re back from England.’

  ‘All right,’ she agreed reluctantly, squeezing Thomas’ arm in thanks. He didn’t want her to go, Katharine knew. But he was far too good and true a man to deprive her of seeing her beloved son.

  They went to the opera house to see Lucília Peres, the building’s Renaissance magnificence as out of the place in the jungle as an Indian hut would be in the centre of Rome. On the way out, they promenaded with the hordes in the Praça do Comércio, both feeling underdressed. All around them, men wore suits and ties and bowler hats, their wives boasting elaborately feathered headpieces and gloves.

  ‘I’ve forgotten how to dress for society,’ Katharine said to Thomas. ‘In a way it’s wonderful to live somewhere where fashions and frippery count for nothing. But then again…’ Her words tapered off as her gaze followed a particularly striking woman in an eye-catching blue striped dress. ‘Sometimes it would be nice to wear beautiful clothes and to – well, to feel beautiful, I suppose.’

  Thomas rolled his eyes. ‘For a start, how many times do I have to tell you that you are beautiful to me in every way?’

  Katharine pulled a face of exaggerated gratefulness. ‘I wasn’t fishing for compliments,’ she protested.

  ‘Of course not,’ agreed Thomas, indulgently. ‘But if you feel so strongly about it – why don’t you buy yourself something special? You can wear it to impress the potoos and the puffbirds when we get back to Norwood.’

  Katharine thumped him in mock protest. ‘All right. You win. I’m being ridiculous.’

  Over the next few weeks, thoughts of the baby put everything else out of Katharine’s mind. She tried every old wife’s tale she’d ever heard to bring on labour – exercise, sexual intercourse, gin – desperate for it to come in time for her to get to England as planned. But nothing worked. The month turned and there was no indication that the baby was about to put in an appearance. Early July had become mid-July by the time her labour started, at which stage she was not only fed up but enormous.

  In the hospital room, as the contractions built up – slowly at first – Katharine chatted and laughed with the nurses, whose many nationalities reflected the city outside
the white walls. But hours into the labour, amid the fug of pain, she began to notice the looks on her attendants’ faces turn anxious. They gave her chloroform and it helped a bit, but like the herbal tea the Indian women had plied her with when having Antonio, it also caused her to drift in and out of consciousness, and to have hideous dreams in which she gave birth to a monster.

  ‘This is what happens when you lie with a Black man,’ she was sure she heard someone say, the words thumping into her dream as if they had been kicked there. ‘White women are not designed to give birth to baby savages.’

  Eventually, after how many hours Katharine had no idea, a doctor came. Immediately assessing the seriousness of the situation, he whisked her away on her wheeled bed into the operating theatre.

  When she regained consciousness, Katharine felt like she was returning from a very long journey, but without having any idea where she had been or why. Looking around at the bare white room with bars on the windows, her first thought was that she was in a mental hospital or a prison. Did they think she was mad because her husband was not white? Had they incarcerated her because it was against the law to have a relationship with a Black man?

  But then she felt her breasts tingling, and glanced down to see them full and heavy with milk, and remembered that she had been pregnant, that she had come to a hospital for her confinement, that presumably she was still there. Panic subsumed her.

  ‘Where’s my baby?’ she called. There was no one to hear. She tried to sit up and fell back down onto the bed, broadsided with pain. Sweat broke out, prickling on her skin, soaking her back.

  She shouted, but nobody came. Sobbing, she clawed at her hair and flailed around in the bed, but every movement was torture. She didn’t know how long she waited, just that she was frantic with distress by the time the door finally opened. She held her breath.

  It was Thomas.

  ‘My baby,’ she cried. ‘Where is it? Where, Thomas?’

  He bent towards her and only then did she notice that he was carrying something, a white bundle from which a wisp of black hair protruded. It was not moving.

  ‘What’s happened, what’s going on?’ Her panic was uncontrolled, desperate.

  Thomas smiled and sat down on the wooden chair beside her bed. ‘Be quiet, my love. You must lie still.’

  He lifted the bundle and pulled back the shawl so that she could see the baby inside, its little, shrivelled face and scrunched up eyes, tightly closed.

  ‘Is it – is it…’ she blinked and tried again, unable to make her words any more than a whisper, ‘alive?’

  She could not look at the baby, in fear of the answer. Instead, she stared at Thomas, trying to read his face.

  A huge smile broke out across it. ‘She is most certainly alive. And she is beautiful.’

  At that moment, the baby’s mouth opened and she let out a huge, tremulous scream, that soon turned into rhythmic, insistent crying.

  ‘I think she’s hungry,’ said Thomas. ‘And a little cross.’

  Katharine smiled and laughed, tears of joy and gratitude flooding her face and falling onto the white bed sheets. A nurse came and propped her up as much as the pain allowed. Katharine took her baby in her arms and fed her, instantly experiencing a rush of pure, wonderful love.

  ‘I shall call her Lily,’ she murmured, letting the infant’s tiny hand wrap around her finger. ‘Because the lily flower is a symbol of innocence, purity and beauty, and she will be all those things.’

  Thomas nodded. ‘As you wish, my love.’

  Over the next few hours, he told Katharine about the terrible birth and the emergency caesarean section that the doctor had performed. They were lucky that he’d had the training and the expertise. Without the operation, she and the baby would almost certainly have died. But it was a major procedure and it meant that Katharine would have to stay in hospital for at least three or four weeks and then recuperate for another few months before she could think of travelling anywhere.

  ‘Senhor Garcia was right to send us to Manaus,’ Thomas concluded, ‘even though he did it for the wrong reasons. She most certainly is not too small – on the contrary she weighed nearly 9lbs!’

  They both laughed, slightly hysterical with relief. When the night nurse took the baby away so that Katharine could sleep, she cried again. But this time it was partly in happiness for Lily’s life – and her own – and partly in searing sadness.

  There was no possibility of making the journey to England to see Antonio now.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  England and Scotland, 1907

  Watching Anthony exit the historic gates of Winchester school always gave Mayhew a profound sense of satisfaction. Though it had to be said that his nephew was not exactly wowing the world with his academic prowess, the fact remained that he was moving in the highest echelons of British society and making connections that would last for the rest of his life. It wasn’t as if any other members of the Bird family were going to raise the family’s status; this task was clearly down to Mayhew and Anthony alone. What did grades and exam results matter, compared to that?

  Always happy to take control where Anthony was concerned, Mayhew had gallantly offered to step into the breach when Katharine had found herself unable to travel to England for the summer. He hadn’t even made too much of a fuss about it. He didn’t mind the sea voyage, and much as he liked Manaus and had everything arranged there to his satisfaction, a change of scene was welcome every now and again. It was good to go back to England with money in his pocket and status on his side.

  It was, after all, exactly what he had left for all those years ago.

  ‘Good afternoon, Uncle,’ said Anthony, politely shaking Mayhew’s hand. He was always a little stiff on first release, Mayhew found, always needed a little time to unwind. A plan formulated in his mind at that very moment.

  During dinner at his club in Piccadilly, he ordered a bottle of very good claret. Plying Anthony with alcohol usually worked to loosen him up a bit. At first the chat was desultory, bits and pieces about events at school, rubber news.

  But then Anthony asked about the baby.

  Mayhew shrugged. ‘A little girl,’ he replied. ‘You have a sister.’

  Anthony nodded.

  They both concentrated on the food for a few minutes. Anthony pushed a roast potato to the side of his plate, and half of his chop.

  ‘I’ve hardly written to Mother lately,’ he said. He was at the age now that letter writing in school was no longer compulsory. ‘Not since she told me about the baby.’

  ‘That’s understandable.’ Mayhew was eyeing up the potato, wondering if Anthony was going to eat it or whether perhaps he could have it. They were so incomparably better here than in Brazil, light and fluffy inside, with properly crispy outsides.

  ‘This summer,’ continued Anthony, ‘when she came here, I thought we could have it all out.’

  ‘I see.’ Mayhew lost all hope of the potato as Anthony started mashing it into the remaining gravy with the tines of his fork.

  ‘And now she’s not coming anyway,’ concluded Anthony, as if he hadn’t heard what Mayhew had said.

  ‘She had better things to do,’ Mayhew agreed.

  The man and the boy sat in silence for a while, watching the waiter clear their plates and bring them the cheese selection. If Anthony felt betrayed by his mother deserting him for her manager, transferring her affections from her son to her new lover, how was he, Mayhew, supposed to feel? His sister had betrayed him, getting together with the man he’d brought to be a lowly employee.

  Mayhew had heard on the grapevine that Mac’s wife was in very poor health, not only an invalid but by all accounts also a lunatic. She was surely not long for this world. Mac and Katharine got on so well. They could have married and then – well, then just think how rich they’d all be. Mayhew had spent some time mulling on this; the prospect of such a beneficial union, although entirely a figment of his imagination, had excited him enormously and the decimation
of it incensed him to the same degree.

  He asked the waiter to call a cab for when they’d finished their dessert. It was time for the next step in his nephew’s education.

  At the brothel, Mayhew almost had to push Anthony through the door. His face was sheet white, his fists clenched, knuckles like pale pebbles in his olive skin. Mayhew had the fleeting thought that he hoped, if Kitty had had a boy, that he was more of a man in such matters than his nephew appeared to be. Was it a shame that he would never know? He mentally slapped himself in the face. Of course not. Kitty had betrayed him by allowing a pregnancy to happen; the consequences were hers, and hers alone, to deal with.

  ‘Go on, boy,’ he commanded Anthony, unequivocally. ‘You’re old enough now.’

  Afterwards, Anthony sat in stony silence in the carriage back to their rooms at Mayhew’s club.

  ‘So how was it?’ Mayhew questioned, irritated by Anthony’s withdrawn state.

  Anthony shrugged. ‘How the other boys told me it would be.’

  Mayhew waited, expectantly, but Anthony said nothing further. With a sigh, he dismissed the whole episode, remembering the shock of his first time. The crucial thing was to keep at it, in his experience. Get back on the horse and have another go, so to speak. But maybe, in Anthony’s case, not for a while.

  ‘Let’s go to Scotland,’ he said, jovially, as he bid Anthony good night. ‘Mac’s invited us to his grouse shoot.’

  Before catching the train, Mayhew took Anthony to the London rubber market in Mincing Lane. The clamour inside the dark, cramped building was deafening, the atmosphere fervid and tense. Rubber samples from all around the world – Brazil, Borneo, Madagascar, the Congo – were laid out on long, rickety trestle tables for inspection by potential buyers. As traders competed to get hold of the material upon which whole industries depended, the hysteria became palpable. The prize amongst prizes was dry, fine Pará and that, Mayhew congratulated himself, was what Norwood Enterprises produced in abundance.