Monster Mission Read Free Page B

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