Kevin frowned, toying with the straw in the milkshake he had just finished. ‘That’s amazing,’ he murmured.
Eugenie nodded. ‘Poor Princess.’
Yes, thought Amelia. Poor Princess. She was just a child when she was driven from the palace, chased out by an angry mob. Probably no older than Amelia herself.
‘And the lamp in your house was from the palace,’ said Kevin.
‘I didn’t know that before,’ said Amelia.
‘Then why did you tell her about it?’
‘I just mentioned it when I met her.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does,’ said Eugenie.
Amelia glanced at her. Eugenie had that look in her eyes again. She knew Amelia was hiding something.
‘Tell us exactly what you said.’
‘It was nothing.’ Amelia turned back to Kevin. ‘They must have looted it before the palace burned down. The book said there was looting.’
‘But how does it get here? All the way from Irafia to your house?’
Amelia shrugged. ‘No one knows who installed it.’ ‘It’s amazing.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Eugenie impatiently. ‘Someone loots it. Then they sell it. Then they sell it to someone else.’
‘All the way from Irafia?’
‘What’s so surprising?’ Eugenie’s uncle had an antiques shop which was full of things from other countries. ‘People bring my uncle all kinds of stuff.’
‘How does he knew it isn’t stolen?’
‘When someone brings him something he always asks for proof they bought it or inherited it. I’ve asked him. He won’t take it if they can’t show him. But he admits there’s no way of knowing whether whoever they bought it or inherited it from didn’t steal it themselves. According to Uncle Randolph, somewhere along the line, maybe even hundreds of years ago, a lot of stuff in antiques shops has been stolen, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it.’
‘I suppose that explains how the lamp got to my house,’ said Amelia.
‘But it still doesn’t explain how you came to mention it to the Princess,’ said Eugenie, which was what she was really interested in.
Amelia sighed. ‘It’s not important, Eugenie.’
Eugenie looked at her knowingly, then stuck her nose in the air.
Behind them, people were coming out of the cinema into the lobby. The first session was finished. Kids around them in the café were already getting up to go in for the next session.
Eugenie frowned. ‘Imagine losing everything like that. One minute you’re living in the lap of luxury, the next minute you’re running away with nothing but what you can carry.’
‘True,’ said Kevin, ‘but look at it from the other perspective. One minute you’re a poor person with some Shan and Shanna controlling you’re life, the next minute you’re free.’
Eugenie shook her head.
‘Eugenie, think about it. If the people revolted, they couldn’t have been happy. I bet the Shan and Shanna made life pretty hard for everyone.’
‘That wasn’t the Princess’s fault. She was just a child.’
‘I’m not saying it was her fault. But the only reason she could live in luxury was because of that.’
‘So you’re saying they had the right to take everything she had? To take her palace? Even her lamp?’
‘I’m saying the people had a right to something.’
‘The lamp was hers, Kevin.’
‘Yeah, but look at it another way, and the lamp was really theirs.’
‘The lamp’s mine now,’ said Amelia. ‘That’s the funny thing.’
There was silence for a moment.
‘You’re just jealous,’ said Eugenie to Kevin.
‘Of what?’
‘Of everything the Princess had. You don’t like the idea she had it all because you could never have anything like it yourself.’
‘That’s not true. I’m just saying, you can understand why the people would have been angry.’
Eugenie smiled smugly, as if she knew what was
really
going on in Kevin’s mind.
‘Why do you want to defend her?’ demanded Kevin in exasperation. ‘Why do you take her side? Eugenie, she was horrible. She didn’t say a word to you the other day.’
‘She did.’
‘She didn’t.’
‘She did!’
‘She didn’t. For all she cared, you weren’t so much as a speck of dust.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘Amelia? Did the Princess say a word to Eugenie?’
Amelia shook her head. The Princess hadn’t said a word to Eugenie, as they all knew.
‘Well, what do you expect?’ demanded Eugenie. ‘She’s had such a terrible life. Everything was taken away from her. How old was she? No older than we are. Just imagine it, suddenly you have to leave, and you can’t take anything with you.’
‘She obviously managed to keep something,’ said Kevin.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, look at her. She’s got that big car. She must have had the money to buy that. And there’s the old guy who drives her around. He was her servant all the way back then. I bet he’s stayed with her all his life.’
‘Yeah, and I bet it’s nothing compared with the life they left behind. One old car. One old servant. Imagine how many servants she must have had in the Grand Palace!’
Kevin shook his head. ‘Maybe they only managed to take what they could carry, but they had money somewhere, didn’t they? Isn’t that what you said, Amelia? In a bank or something? And where did that money come from? It was illegally put there by the Shan. So whose was it really?’
‘See!’ cried Eugenie. ‘You
are
jealous. Look at him, Amelia. He’s as jealous as anything.’
‘I’m not jealous! I just don’t think the Princess has had such a terrible life. She could have gone back if she wanted.’
‘There was a revolution!’
‘After the revolution. She could go back now, the old guy said so. But she won’t, will she? Why? Because she won’t be a princess any more, and that’s all she cares about. Having people call her Your Serenity. I bet no one will call her Your Serenity in Irafia. Right, Amelia?’
Amelia nodded. It was true. All the Princess cared about was being treated according to her rank, and treating other people according to theirs. And Kevin hadn’t seen how horrible she could really be in the way she treated people, not as Amelia had seen it that day in Mr Vishwanath’s studio.
‘She could still say hello to us, couldn’t she?’ said Kevin. ‘She could still be civil. I bet she’d have a lot more friends if she did.’
‘A princess doesn’t want friends,’ retorted Eugenie. ‘If you knew anything about princesses, you’d realise that. But you don’t know the first thing about them. How can you possibly know what it is to be a princess and then to have all of it, everything, taken away?’
True as well, thought Amelia. None of them could really know what that would be like.
Kevin and Eugenie glared at each other.
Amelia frowned. In a way, they each had a point.
She looked around. The café was empty. The film must have started. Everyone had gone in.
The lamp hung motionless above the stairs. Amelia switched it on, and it glowed. She switched it off. She switched it on and off again a couple of times, quickly.
She traced the metalwork with her eyes, as she had traced it hundreds of times before. Each swirl and curve seemed to flow into another, but Amelia knew how to find the shapes within them. Focus on the mass of detail, and everything dissolved into endless intricacy, but focus on the individual shapes, and the detail around them slipped away. You could see nothing in the fine metalwork of the lamp, or all kinds of things, depending on how you looked at it.
Her lamp. That was how she had always thought of it. It was because of this lamp that she had started writing stories. And whenever she felt that maybe that was a silly thing to do, and people would laugh if they knew, she only had to gaze at the lamp, lose herself amongst the familiar shapes hidden in the bronze, and she knew there was nothing silly about it at all.
But it wasn’t just her lamp. It was something else now. It was someone else’s as well. Or had been. Amelia saw it in a way she had never seen it before. Not just the metalwork itself, but everything the lamp represented. Where it had come from. What it had been.
What if the Princess wanted it back? What if she could prove that it had been hers, and that she had a right to it?
Amelia switched it on again, and the lamp glowed.
There had been six in the palace, the Princess had said. Amelia tried to imagine the lamp hanging in the palace. A lamp of that size must have hung high, she thought, right in the centre of a room. She tried to imagine what the room looked like. What were its walls made of? Marble? Wood? What kind of windows? Square ones? Arched ones? She didn’t know. The book about Irafia didn’t have any pictures of the Grand Palace of Ervahan. It had a picture of the Shan, who had been overthrown, and of a man who had replaced him as president of the new republic. The Shan had a long face with a deep crease in each cheek. The man who replaced him was plumper, almost a jolly-looking man. But his looks deceived. According to the book, he was brutal, as brutal as the Shan himself, and had ordered hundreds of the Shan’s supporters to be executed. He himself had ruled for only three years before being overthrown.
Amelia tried to imagine what the palace must have been like. It must have been very grand, to judge by the lamp. Amelia smiled. That’s what people would say about her house, if the only thing left from it was the lamp that was hanging in front of her. ‘It must have been a
very
grand house,’ they would say, ‘if it had lamps like that!’ But that was wrong because the lamp didn’t really belong in her house. It hadn’t been made for it. Yet the lamp had belonged in the palace at Ervahan. And if a lamp like that belonged there – and not just one lamp, but six of them – what other things there must have been!
Amelia gazed at the lamp. What other things there must have been, she thought.
Eugenie was right, it would have been terrible to lose all of that. Imagine growing up in a such a place, and suddenly, one night, having to run away and get on a boat to save your life from a mob, taking nothing but what you could carry. Even if your family still had some wealth afterwards, it would never be the same. You would never have that kind of luxury again. Not only a palace, but a whole country you could call your own.
But that didn’t necessarily make it fair for the Princess to have had all those things in the first place. Maybe it was Kevin who was right. The things the Princess and her family had – the luxury, the palaces, the lamps, everything – maybe they should never have had them in the first place. When the people took those things away, they were just taking back what was actually theirs.
Amelia sighed. She put her elbows on the banister and looked up at the lamp, picking out the two fan-tailed peacocks on the bottom. Eugenie and Kevin were both right. That was the problem. It depended on how you looked at it. From the perspective of the Princess, it was terribly sad. And yet if you looked at it from the perspective of the people of Irafia, it wasn’t sad at all. Quite the opposite.
It was confusing. No matter how much she thought about it – and she had thought about it a lot – Amelia didn’t quite feel that she completely understood it, that she could make one perspective fit with the other. She didn’t think she had come across a problem before in which the opposite sides of the argument both seemed to be right. At least she couldn’t remember one. And she was pretty sure she would have, considering how much trouble this one was giving her!
It didn’t seem to surprise Mr Vishwanath. He listened as she explained the conundrum, sitting in his chair under the back verandah, gazing at the garden. There were no sculptures in the garden now. Amelia’s father had removed the white ones, and Amelia’s mother hadn’t yet revealed anything new. She was working furiously, though, enclosed behind the door of her sculpture room, from which came a steady stream of bangs and crashes. But the shouts of frustration had more or less stopped. Amelia’s father said that meant she had finally worked out what her new phase was going to be about, and at last she was actually creating something.
Mr Vishwanath nodded when Amelia finished telling him how confusing it was.
Amelia waited for him to respond. But he didn’t.
‘You must have something to say, Mr Vishwanath,’ said Amelia at last.
‘No.’
‘But it’s so confusing!’
‘It is what it is,’ said Mr Vishwanath.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Everything in life is like this,’ murmured Mr Vishwanath.
‘No it isn’t!’ replied Amelia. ‘Nothing in life is like this. I’ve never come across anything like it before.’
‘Then you haven’t thought enough about the things you have come across.’
‘Well, if everything in life’s like this, how do you ever know what’s right?’ demanded Amelia.
Mr Vishwanath glanced at her. He smiled that gentle, questioning smile of his. Amelia knew what was coming next. Something she wouldn’t understand, probably.
‘When you
know
you are right, that is the time you can be sure you are wrong,’ said Mr Vishwanath quietly.
‘Mr Vishwanath,’ demanded Amelia, ‘how can that be right? If you
know
you’re right . . .’
Something in Mr Vishwanath’s gaze made Amelia stop. He looked at her for a moment longer, then turned back to the garden.
Amelia frowned. It didn’t seem to make sense, and yet there was something in Mr Vishwanath’s remark that seemed to say: ‘Think about me a little longer, I’m not nonsense’. If a remark could talk, of course.
There was silence.
‘She came to visit us,’ said Amelia.
‘Who came to visit you?’ asked Mr Vishwanath.
‘The Princess.’
Mr Vishwanath turned. Amelia had never seen Mr Vishwanath look surprised. He didn’t look surprised now, but he nearly did, and for Mr Vishwanath, that probably meant he had just had the shock of his life.
Amelia smiled. That was something, shocking Mr Vishwanath.
‘A couple of days ago,’ said Amelia. ‘Didn’t you see her?’
Mr Vishwanath shook his head.
‘She wanted to see the lamp. The lamp I mentioned in the story I wrote for her. Turns out . . .’ Amelia paused, wanting to see if she could surprise Mr Vishwanath even more. ‘It used to hang in her palace!’