The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [14]
I always imagined that the vision I saw was the spirit of the mother Ben had never met and, somewhere in my heart, I maintained the childish hope that, if one day I managed to fall into a deep sleep, a similar apparition would also take care of me. That was the only secret I did not share with anyone, not even Ben.
Calcutta, 25 May 1932
FOR OVER THIRTY-FIVE YEARS, AS HEAD OF ST Patrick’s, Thomas Carter had taught his pupils literature, history and arithmetic with the confidence of a jack of all trades and master of none. The only subject he was never able to deal with properly was the subject of their departure. Year after year, the boys and girls whom the law would soon place outside the influence and protection of his institution would file past him, their faces revealing a mixture of anticipation and fear. And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish.
Beneath the austere expression of a man not given to displays of emotion, nobody feared the date on which those blank books would leave his desk for ever more than Thomas Carter. They would pass into unknown hands, perhaps to more unscrupulous pens who would inscribe a sombre twist in the plot, a lifetime away from the dreams and the expectations with which his pupils undertook their solitary flight into the streets of Calcutta.
Experience had taught him to abandon any desire to find out how his students fared once he could no longer offer guidance and shelter. For Thomas Carter, saying goodbye usually went hand in hand with the bitter taste of disappointment – sooner or later he would discover that the young people who had been robbed of a past were also, it seemed, being robbed of a future.
That hot night in May, as he listened to the young people’s voices in the courtyard, where they were having a small farewell party, Thomas Carter stared at the city lights from the darkness of his office. Flocks of black clouds fled across a canopy of stars towards the horizon.
Once again he had refused the invitation to the party and instead had remained in his armchair, sitting quietly with no light other than the multicoloured reflections from the paper lanterns with which Vendela and the pupils had decorated the trees in the courtyard and the facade of St Patrick’s, as if it were a ship ready to be launched. There would be time enough to utter words of farewell in the few days remaining until he had to comply with the law and return the children to the streets from which he had rescued them.
As had become the custom in recent years, it wasn’t long before Vendela knocked on his door. For once, she came in without waiting for a reply and closed the door behind her. Carter noticed the nurse’s cheerful face and smiled in the dark.
‘We’re getting old, Vendela,’ said the headmaster.
‘You’re getting old, Thomas,’ she corrected him. ‘I’m maturing. Aren’t you coming down to the party? The kids would love to see you. I’ve reminded them you aren’t exactly the life and soul of a party … But if they haven’t listened to me for the past few years then they’re not going to start now.’
Carter lit a small lamp on his desk and gestured to Vendela to take a seat.
‘How long have we been together, Vendela?’ he asked.
‘Twenty-seven years and eight