Port Mungo Read Free Page B

have been a sustained allergic reaction to his own tissue, which was ironic, to say the least. Curiously his old malaria medicine from Port Mungo would control the inflammation when it got too bad.
    I have perfectly healthy hands, in fact my hands are my best thing. I used to say to Jack that if there were some way of making a hand exchange, I would do it at once.

Chapter Two
    It is probably true of most children that they are not aware of the character of their upbringing until much later, when they can look back and regard it with some objectivity. This was never the case with Jack and me. We were born into an old family, and we knew at the time that our childhood was privileged, also that it was eccentric in its lack of structure, largely because our father, emotionally speaking, was almost entirely absent. Our mother died when I was three years old, and Jack just an infant, so neither of us had any real memory of her. My father did not remarry, nor could he ever speak of that “perfect woman” without becoming maudlin and tearful, which Jack and I found embarrassing and faintly ridiculous. Gerald was five years my senior, but we never saw much of him as he always seemed to be away at school or off on a trip.
    When I think of my father now I am ashamed how little I appreciated him when I was a child. He may have been distant but he was kind and gentle and tolerant, and I was surprised after his death to discover how well loved he was by those who knew him. He had a special affection for me, I suppose because I was his only daughter, but I don’t remember that I returned it until much later, being in thrall as I was to Jack, who had nothing but scorn for the old man. I think children are uncomfortable with sadness, Jack certainly was.
    It was a foible of my father’s not to send Jack and me away to school but rather to employ a series of private tutors, the most memorable of whom was a young woman with the improbable name of Helen Splendour. Miss Splendour taught us German literature and Irish history, though her real achievement was to awaken in us a passion for art. She was a small, slim woman who dressed in brown worsted stockings and neat earth-colored tweeds and brought an intense earnestness to every activity she instigated. She was interested in the history of our family, and it became great sport with us, as we hiked along deserted Suffolk beaches on blustery autumn days, and then sat shivering in the dunes making watercolour studies of the sky, to see who could invent the most outlandish tale to tell her about our ancestors, many of whose portraits hung in dusty galleries back at the house.
    It was Jack who invented the Curse of the Rathbones. This was an ancient malediction which he claimed had afflicted successive generations of our family for several hundred years. Jack had a precocious sexual imagination when he was a boy, and he could always bring a blush to Miss Splendour’s soft cheek with stories of rapacious Rathbones of unbridled appetite and an utter dearth of moral fibre. He would describe some brutal deflowering in a barn, or in the woods, and the catastrophic consequences which ensued; all of which would have Miss Splendour shuddering with delight, to think of such ravages being perpetrated on the local women.
    At night we lay in front of the fire on the schoolroom floor with books of reproductions from my father’s library spread out on the carpet. I remember we loved Hogarth for his grotesques and Blake for his flea. For a short period we venerated the Pre-Raphaelites above all others. Then we discovered the German Expressionists—a painting of Kokoschka’s gave us special delight,
Murderer, Hope of Women
—and we decided that this was it, this was our calling, one day we would attend art school in London and live unorthodox lives and become real painters. And as the years of our childhood passed the dream did not fade, but grew stronger, driven as it was by Jack’s determination and the