Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp (12 page)

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 was 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.

Because there was much that he could have said to Amelia. That already she had had an effect on his mistress, the Princess. That even the Princess Parvin Kha-Douri, who seemed outwardly so cold and severe, sometimes felt doubt. That she was at her most harsh with others when she doubted herself most deeply. And that he had never, in all the years he had spent with her, known her to be more harsh than in the days that had passed since she went into in the green house and saw the peacock lamp of her childhood hanging above the stairs.

CHAPTER 16

Amelia was angrier than she had ever been in her life. She sat in her room, almost trembling with rage. What right did the Princess have to treat her like that, to look at her as if she were no better than a dog? Not once, but twice. This was the second time! And why hadn’t she said anything in response? She hated herself for that. Why had she stood there, dumb, shocked, instead of fighting back? She didn’t know who she was angrier at, the Princess, or herself.

Why had Mr Vishwanath introduced her to the Princess in the first place? Why did he agree to teach yoga to such a cold, cruel woman? Wasn’t he always saying he would rather have one true student than a hundred followers? He sent other people away but let the Princess keep coming. What kind of a true student was a person like that?

Amelia didn’t know
what
to do, she was so angry and confused. If she didn’t do something, it felt as if something inside her was going to snap.

She got up. She looked down at the street. There, directly below her, that was where it had happened. The car was still there. Right now, the Princess would be in the studio on the ground floor, in her green leotard, with one foot hooked around her neck, probably. Amelia thought of going down and bursting in and knocking her off her one foot while the other was still hooked there.

A pigeon flew past. It looped up and landed on the head of the carved lady. It looked at Amelia. Its eye was red. It had an angry, aggressive look. Amelia watched it. The pigeon kept sitting there. Suddenly it took off and flapped away. Amelia could feel the wind from its wings as it went past.

‘How can you bear that?’ she demanded. ‘The way they come and sit on you? Don’t you hate it?’

The carved lady kept staring down at the street with her pupil-less eyes. Her face looked blank, silly, weak. Perfectly unperturbed.

‘You should!’ said Amelia. What was wrong with the carved lady? She ought to hate the way the pigeons came and sat on her. They’d been doing it for a hundred years. She ought to be angry. She ought to be as angry as anything.

Amelia looked down at the people on the street. She felt impatient with everyone. She could see the roofs of all the houses and shops on Marburg Street and of the houses in the streets beyond. You could see over everything from the top of the green house. If the Princess lived in Marburg Street, thought Amelia, this was certainly where she’d want to live. But even this wouldn’t be good enough for her. Nothing was good enough for her.

Amelia wondered how she could ever have imagined there was some good, gentle part of the Princess waiting to be released. What an idiot she had been! It was Mr Vishwanath’s fault. He had put the idea in her head. Inside everyone, he had said, there is beauty. Wrong! Inside the Princess there was nothing but more of what there was on the outside. Self-importance and bitterness. Bitterness, especially bitterness.

Amelia had never met anyone else as bitter. Not even close. Compare the Princess with Mr Chan, Kevin’s cousin, who had lost a leg in some kind of accident in the factory where he worked. Amelia couldn’t quite understand how Mr Chan could be Kevin’s cousin, because he was about fifty years old, but apparently he was, and ever since the accident he had had to walk with an artificial leg. The artificial leg had a brown shoe on its artificial foot, and Mr Chan couldn’t wear anything but brown shoes on his real foot so they’d match. He couldn’t work any more because of his accident. But he wasn’t bitter. In fact, he was one of the most cheerful people Amelia knew, always laughing. He grew vegetables in his backyard, but he didn’t call it his backyard, he called it his farm, and chuckled when he said it. His farm was about five metres long! And every little patch of vegetables – carrots, broccoli, whatever – wasn’t a patch, it was a field.

Mr Chan wasn’t bitter, and he had more of a right to be bitter than the Princess. Surely it was worse to lose your leg than your palace.

‘At least you can still walk after you’ve lost your palace,’ muttered Amelia. ‘At least you can wear any shoe you like, and it doesn’t have to be brown!’

Amelia looked at the carved lady to see what she had to say to that. But the carved lady looked back at her blankly, as if she wouldn’t even know how to begin. Amelia rolled her eyes. ‘Put a pigeon on your head!’ she said, and she turned away from the window.

She threw herself down in her chair. Her pen was on the desk in front of her. She hadn’t written a thing since the Princess told her how stupid her story was.

She picked up the pen now, absent-mindedly, still fuming.

Bitter, she thought. Bitter bitter bitter.

She grabbed a piece of paper. She wrote.

The Bitter Princess

She looked at the words. Impulsively, she put her pen to the paper again.

There was once a princess who was extremely bitter. She wasn’t a young, beautiful princess, like you read about in fairy tales, she was old and wrinkled. This wasn’t because of a spell that some horrible witch had cast on her, like you would find in a fairy tale. It was because of a spell she had cast on herself.

That was right. A spell she had cast on herself! It was her own fault she was bitter. It was her own fault she couldn’t think about anything but the things she had lost.

It wasn’t an old-fashioned magic spell like the kind you would find in a fairy tale. It was a modern kind of spell, and it meant the Princess could only think of everything she had lost. Every day, that’s what she thought about, everything she had lost. She never thought about all the things she still had.

Amelia paused. She was starting to get interested in the story now, where it would go, how it would develop. How had the spell come to be cast? After all, why would anyone cast a spell over herself? Amelia thought about it. Maybe it had happened without her knowing.

The spell was cast when the Princess was only a little girl. One night, very late, when she was asleep in her grand palace, her servant came running in and woke her up. There was an angry crowd outside, and they only had minutes to escape.

And? Amelia considered. What now? Maybe, if you were a certain age, if were woken at a certain time, when the moon was full and the night was black, then you would be bitter for the rest of your life. Maybe in everyone’s life there was one particular moment like that, and if you happened to be woken at that moment – and it happened very rarely, because the chances were low – then you would be bitter for as long as you lived. And maybe the opposite was true as well, there was a moment which would make you cheerful for the rest of your life, like Mr Chan, even if terrible things happened to you.

Now, it just so happened that at the moment the Princess was woken the moon was full and the night was black. There is a moment like this in everybody’s life. Most of us sleep through it, and wake up safely the next morning. But if you are woken up at that exact moment, as the Princess was that night when the crowd had come to burn the palace