Ned was having another ugly day. For a start he had an awful cold, a real stinker. He felt rotten. He felt depressed; but worst of all he felt a fool.
It had been obvious that Meriel expected him to propose, that day up at the Bury-house. But instead of acting on his instincts, instead of taking her into his arms to tell her how he felt about her and beg her to become his wife, he’d been as cautious and circumspect as even Grannie could have wished! He’d stopped to think of his youth and inexperience, his final terms at university – and then pathetically had seized on Helly’s interruption as an excuse for putting off his own decision for another year. He was a dunderhead, an idiot, a dolt!
Looking out of Simmie’s window, he could see the grimy frontages of the houses across the road; the prim repetitive pattern of iron railings and triangular pediments and panelled doors. At the end of the street, the traffic of Theobald’s Road ground past in a monotonous stream. Grey vehicles, grey horses, grey faces; London at its most oppressive – and all because she’d gone. Her letters to him were written in a boldly sloping scrawl with frequent underlinings and exclamation marks. They overflowed with her amazing personality, burst through the seams of the romantic image of herself that she was trying to create. He saw through her, saw though her letters to the selfish core of her true character. The thing he loved. Yes it was true; he was in love with Meriel Llewellen. She was the only girl that Ned could think of marrying, and he’d let her go!
| Hotel Central, | |
| Ibagué, | |
| Rep. of Colombia | |
| March 4th 1906 |
My dear Ned,
You must forgive me for writing with this fiendish pencil, but Garry and Mother are scrapping over the inkpot!
Well, Ibagué at last – and what a journey! We finally arrived here yesterday at four o’clock in the afternoon to find your letters waiting for us at the hôtel and one from Da – the greatest treat, I assure you! And today being Sunday, we have put Mother into dock for repairs before our ascent of the Quindío range of the Andes first thing in the morning.
I have so often wondered what you did when you and Simmie left the quay, at Southampton, and now I know! But fancy you being so down in the dumps? I really had no idea that Mother and I meant so much to you. Mother was most gratified to hear it!
Garry sends ‘chin-chin’; and tell Simmie that I’m disgusted not to have heard from her yet. I know that she abominates letter-writing, but I simply won’t have her forget me. Besides, I’ve quite set my heart on having her come out to look after Mother in a month or two, so that I can come back and see what you’ve been getting up to!!
Ibagué is quite a large modern place (but a Spaniards’ town you know, and the Spaniards will never be wholly civilised I think). And the crowds! We haven’t seen so many people since leaving Cartagena, and most of them seem quite determined to follow us wherever we go. We Llewellens seem to raise as big a crowd in Ibagué as the suffragettes and Hyde Park orators do in London (as some of the photographs I’ve taken with my little Kodak will show you). When we went down to see our horses and mules corralled last night, why half the town came with us; men, women, children, dogs, and even one or two bristly little pigs! This morning I caused another sensation by attending mass in the Cathedral in a borrowed lace mantilla. I’m not a Roman Catholic as you know, and I can’t say that I enjoyed it much. The whole place absolutely reeked of tallow and raw onions. But I do think the mantilla suited me most awfully!
The Mater’s spending the entire day today resting and writing letters. She’s quite fagged out. I don’t know what sort of a person I might be though, for after three days in the saddle I seem to be less tired than anyone, even Garry. I don’t believe that I found any part of the journey particularly taxing, except perhaps the final hour or two when I had to hold Mother onto her mule. But even then I soon recovered.
I will tell you all about our adventures on the Plain of Tolima in my next letter, when we’ve completed our journey through the mountains. There will be time then for a really full account, and perhaps even to get the daylight-developer going (I wonder what you will make of my photofying?). But just now we have to negotiate for another six mules, and a third muleteer to cope with our cabin trunks (which we had sent on ahead of us to Ibagué by bullock cart). And can you believe it – we are also having to have a special litter made for the Mater!!! We’ve heard that the road into the mountains is in an almost impassible state, due to heavy rains. And we really can’t risk her falling off her mule nine thousand feet up in the Andes, now can we?!! The litter is to be a kind of gimcrack sedan-chair affair on two long poles, and with a waterproof roof. We will have to engage eight peons, we think, to carry it in two shifts of four (poor fellows!). And I simply can’t wait to see the Mater in it!! It promises to be the funniest thing imaginable…
The people of Ibagué were up early the next morning while the mules were loaded in the hôtel courtyard, and had lined the roadside six or seven deep to wave los Inglesos on their way. Riding near the head of the cavalcade, Meriel reacted to admiration in the rows of upraised faces by straightening her back and lifting her chin, imagining herself in shining armour, Joan of Arc or Elizabeth at Tilbury. Or Queen Isabella riding out against the Moors. If only… if ONLY Ned could see her now!
She hadn’t looked back down the long procession of men and animals behind her; it didn’t seem the thing to do. But if she had, she would have seen her mother clutching at the supports of her covered chair some seventeen mules down the line, and coming in for even more attention than she was herself. The hat with the melted cherries had been reinstated, the sealskin handbag dusted off; and hoisted on the shoulders of her bearers in her black silk and onyx beads, Harriet had lent an almost religious significance to the cortège – like the effigy of some inflated Virgin of the Andes. The extra bearers, shambling self-consciously behind her, increased her likeness to a goddess with attendants; whilst at the end of the procession, the cook and Indian maids had risen to the dignity of the occasion, marching proudly – with the cigar this time in the mouth of the haughty Maria.
‘Whoop-ah! Whoop-ah!’ The old Spanish road out of the town was steep enough to justify some shouted exhortations from the muleteers, and rough enough to have the Virgin of the Andes squealing in her litter, as it pitched about and threatened to run her aground on one or two large boulders. The road grew steeper as it climbed, looping through the foothills until they could look down on the spire of Ibagué Cathedral five hundred feet or more below them. Meriel and Garry were soon forced to dismount and change their horses for surer-footed riding mules, and the Mater’s bearers showed signs of exhaustion. At the first hairpin bend their passenger sat white and rigid, peering owlishly from beneath the gabled hood of her conveyance. At the second, she’d merely closed her eyes. But at the third she’d lost her nerve completely, heaving her whole weight back from the precipice with a suddenness that buckled the knees of both the offside bearers, and very nearly sent all five of them over the edge. After that it was decided that all the bearers would be needed to keep the thing afloat – between the shafts to fore and aft and on both sides as well – jostling shoulders, treading on each other’s heels, and steadily dropping back behind the others until the leaders of the convoy were several loops above them.
‘It’s no-go, Garry,’ Meriel decided at a point where the road dropped down again into a mountain valley. ‘One of us will have to stay behind keep an eye on the Mater and the peons. They’re bound to dish her over otherwise. I’m sure that I would in their place!’
It was Garry naturally who stayed, and without too much unpleasantness on his part either. As Meriel and Avriliano rode on into the valley, she tried to imagine how the Mater must have been when she was young. In a photo taken at the time she married Da way back in the year dot, she’d really looked quite pretty – plump as a partridge with round dark eyes and plaited hair wound up into a bun on top. Yet even then there had been something helpless, something feeble about her mother’s face that made one wonder how Da had failed to see how little character there was beneath the prettiness.
‘He’s going to feel as old as Methuselah when he sees her on Wednesday,’ Meriel thought. ‘He’s probably forgotten what a perfect fright she can look these days when she tries!’ She took advantage of a level stretch of path to kick her mule into a sitting trot. ‘It won’t be like that for me and Ned. I’ll never let myself grow fat,’ she told herself, ‘or wispy-haired like Simmie; and my Ned will still be beautiful the day he dies!’
‘Aguardase! Aguardase, Señorita!’ Avriliano’s voice entreating her to wait called her back to the present, and Meriel checked her pace to let the others catch up.
The road up out of the valley was spectacular; a rocky ledge that spiralled up the green face of the mountain, affording glimpses through the leaves of orchids and hibiscus and lupins the size of trees. As they gained altitude a magnificent panorama of Andean peaks and ranges opened up before them to the south – although with altitude there came a change of climate. An icy wind blew off the snowfields of the Nevada del Tolima. Clouds closed in around them to obscure the way ahead and muffle the voices of the muleteers behind from the slopes below; until as they drew level with a solitary Indian hut high in the mountains, it began to rain.
‘Blast it,’ said Meriel, ‘damn and blast it! We’ll have to stop and camp.’
It rained all night, in buckets, baths and tanks-full like Queensland in the Wet. They struck camp next morning in the aftermath, a dismal English drizzle, to find their road had been all but obliterated in the night. In places landslides had reduced its width to half or less. Waterfalls gushed over it, eroding what was left, and everywhere great heaps of mud and loose shale blocked the way. Garry and Avriliano with the servants were forced to walk ahead with shovels to clear the path as best they might, followed by the muleteers, the horses and pack mules in single file, with Meriel, her mother and the bearers bringing up the rear.
The climb from Ibagué had broken the Mater’s bearers in body and in spirit, all eight of them. So now she had to ride, with nothing more substantial than her handbag to be carried in the litter. ‘You’ll just have to manage like the rest of us, Mother,’ Meriel said bluntly. ‘The path’s not wide enough for two of us. So there won’t be anyone to catch you if you fall.’
‘There’s no need to take that tone with me, Meriel. I’m sure that I can ride as well as the next woman if I have to.’ And Harriet, astonishingly, had gone on to just that, while Meriel behind her rolled her eyes to heaven in silent gratitude. ‘Hallelujah!’
With one problem solved, a yell from somewhere near the head of the procession announced the next: ‘Sacio la mula! Sacio la mula! The mule is down!’
Thrusting her reins at the nearest bearer, Meriel dismounted to edge her way past fifteen stationary beasts – to find Antonia, the largest and slowest-witted of the pack mules, lying in a stream bed on her back, with all four feet up in the air and her precious cargo underneath her. The animal had lost her footing on the primitive plank bridge which crossed the stream; and with Meriel to oversee them from the bank, it had taken Garry and three muleteers a good half hour to separate the foolish creature from her pack and coax her back onto the muddy track. But Antonia, it seemed, was constitutionally unstable; and Meriel was only half way back to her own riding mule when once again the cry went up:
‘Aguardase – aguardase! Sacio la mula!’
This time Antonia had contrived to fall across an earth-slide of sticky yellow clay, and now sprawled with her hind quarters dangling over a short drop to a steeply sloping scree which ended in a sheer cliff and something like a thousand feet of unobstructed air.
Perhaps realising that the slightest move would send her over, the animal lay motionless with a look of resignation on her long face.
‘Crikey!’ Meriel stared blankly at her brother. ‘What’s she carrying, Garry, do you know?’ She thought she recognised the rectangular black package that counterbalanced the poor beast and held her to the road. But she had to be quite sure.
‘We gave her one of the cabin trunks… what’s the number? I say, Meri, here’s a go, it’s yours!’
Inside the trunk amongst other things was Ned’s photograph, the only one she had. There was also the new pink coutil corset she’d bought in D.H. Evans the week before they sailed – she couldn’t possibly lose that. Mules were two a penny in Colombia, but corsets with bust-bodices were scarce as hen’s teeth anywhere!
‘So you grab that end, Garry,’ his sister told him, taking out her pocket knife. ‘I’m going to cut her loose.’ Any kind of an exertion was harder at eight thousand feet. But puffing like a grampus and concentrating fiercely on the straps that held the pack in place, Meriel closed her mind to everything but what she had to do. Later she’d tell herself that she had tried to save them both, the trunk and the mule. Later but not now!
Deprived of her counterweight, the mule lay for a moment held only by the mud between her forelegs. Then, very slowly, she began to slide. For as long as they could manage Meriel and Gareth hauled on her bridle; and the image of Antonia’s straining neck muscles and starting eyes had stayed with Meriel for weeks. But in the end they had to save themselves and let her go – to watch her while she fell and scrabbled for a purchase, sliding backwards though undergrowth and thorns, fast gathering momentum until suddenly, with one terrified guttural bray, she was gone.
‘But it could have been one of us,’ thought Meriel as she left her brother with the mud-stained pack and made her way back down the line. ‘It might have happened to any of us up here, even me!’
Garry had told her that she could expect her first view of the hacienda through the valleys in an hour or two, but wouldn’t reach it ’til tomorrow. ‘Well now I will,’ she told herself with sudden resolution. She had been sensible and brave for long enough and felt an almost desperate need for reassurance. She needed someone stronger than herself to lean on. She needed Da!
‘But Meri you can’t go on your own.’ Garry had actually put out a hand to hold her when she told him what she planned ‘You could fall or anything and there’d be no one to help you. Besides which, Da isn’t expecting us until tomorrow.’
‘I CAN GO AND I WILL!’ Meriel’s voice rose stridently. In their contests as children it had always been her best weapon. ‘So just don’t try to stop me!’
‘Well what about the Mater? How’s she going to take it when I tell her that you’ve done a bunk?’
‘I have already told her, for your information; and after what happened to Antonia, she’s far too busy sticking to her mule to care two straws what I do.
‘ So long then Garry, and chin-chin,’ she called back cheerily from further down the track. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
From the next ridge she could see the hacienda clearly as a collection of grey roofs perched on a distant hillside, looking absurdly close despite their tiny size. But once she’d negotiated the first of the steep little valleys in between, Meriel began to understand what she had taken on. Often no wider than a man’s shoulders, the mule track dipped and climbed on a constant incline – down into dark pools of jungle foliage reverberating with the cries of unfamiliar birds. Down slithering and squelching through the mud, to cross the inevitable stream at the bottom. Then up again through tangled vines and over fallen logs, thrown back into the saddle as the mule laboured to the top, to view the distant hacienda looking hardly any closer than it had an hour, two hours before. Occasionally stones shifted on the slopes above her. Leaves rustled and twigs snapped in the undergrowth. She’d heard that there were pumas in these mountains and wild boar, and wondered if there were banditi too. She never would admit to feeling nervous, not even to herself – but was never sorry either to regain the open mountainside, and rode with one hand resting on the handle of her revolver.
‘A droopy moustache on legs.’ That’s how she would describe her bandit in the gripping account of their ride across the plain that she intended to compose for Ned tomorrow. But nonetheless the incident had shaken her, and whenever she glimpsed a native hut or something moving in the trees, she spurred her weary mule to move a little faster.
‘Because I have to get to Da by nightfall,’ Meriel decided, ‘I’ll never find my way there in the dark.’ And to keep her courage up, she sang the first thing she could think of, repeatedly and very loudly:
‘Such a stylish girl you see –
Just out in Society –
Everything I ought to be –
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!’
The path occasionally branched down in the valleys, on one side other of the streams. But by taking bearings from the hacienda on each rise, she’d so far managed the descents without losing her way.
‘Three more valleys, two more valleys – just one more!’ She pretended she was talking to her mule, urging him on to a final effort. ‘Then we’ll see Da, Señor Mula, and give him the surprise of his life!’
As they began their last descent, the sun sank with them down into the mountains. ‘The Valley of Anaime’. It was comforting somehow to know its name. As the shadows deepened round them, the candelelias sparked between the trees. At the foot of the last incline, the mule floundered through what amounted almost to a river in place of the usual stream, wetting the soiled skirts of Meriel’s riding habit. But she didn’t care. Because on the further bank, on a little isolated hill, there stood the hacienda!
A track like an English driveway wound past a line of poplars to the buildings clustered at the summit. On an impulse, Meriel dismounted to lead her mule for the last yards, no longer feeling nervous and wanting suddenly to walk. The moon had risen dramatically to illuminate huge mountain peaks on every side. There were potreros, paddocks with rail fences, and a garden crammed with citrus trees and cypresses and palms; and there behind them, just as she’d pictured it, the verandah, with wooden uprights and bamboo rails and yellow lamplight streaming out into the garden. It was so silly, so ridiculous, but Meriel felt tears pricking her eyelids.
She tied the mule to a fence post a few yards from the house, and stepped onto the verandah with the shrill of the cicadas beating the air around her like a fanfare. A wooden bead curtain hung over the first door that she came to, with beyond it, as she lifted it aside, a degree of comfort that amazed her. It was a kind of salon with real carpets on the floor and unbleached canvas stretched across the rafters. A shaded lamp alive with flying insects stood on a table covered by a paisley cloth. At the windows hung the lace curtains Meriel remembered from the dining room in Ipswich. On one wall was a framed oleograph of the King, and on another a cabinet of family photographs, including the study of herself and Vicky with their arms around each other that she had always hated. Da’s military chest secretaire was there as well, heaped with papers just as she imagined. Except that Meriel had expected to find Da sitting at it with his dark hair ruffled and his long legs folded underneath.
‘Aah! Ah-aah!’ A sudden violent cry rang out from behind the cedar wall to send a shock through Meriel like an electric current.
‘Ginger!’ she thought, ‘he must be ill!’
Without a moment’s hesitation she dashed back onto the verandah, then off into the lamplit room next door, to yank back the mosquito netting from her father’s bed; to stand there with it draped around her – rooted to the floor while she stared at his writhing body!
Da’s face on the pillow was feverish and wet with perspiration. His eyes were open and astonished – black as the hair of the very energetic Indian girl astride his naked body.
‘It’s Meriel! It is by jove – my own brave little Meriellie!’ He didn’t say it.