Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp Read Online Free PDF Page B

the fact that she loved to write, or maybe was even responsible for it, and if the lamp was ever taken away from her, she imagined that she might never write another story again.
    But Amelia didn’t imagine that the most amazing stories don’t necessarily start in a faraway palace, like the ones she made up about the lamp – or that if they do, they don’t necessarily end there. She didn’t suspect that the most extraordinary tales can end up in the most ordinary places, where you’d least expect them. Like Mr Vishwanath’s studio on the ground floor of the green house that Solomon Weiszacker built. Or that they can come into your life without you even realising that it’s happening, in the shape of something you’ve seen hundreds of times before, like a big cream-coloured car, for instance, coming down the street.

CHAPTER 5
    Amelia saw the car from her window. It moved slowly along the street towards her. As it drew near to the green house the car veered gently towards the kerb, like a big stately ship coming into port, and then it came to a stop, directly in front of the sheet-covered window on the ground floor.
    Amelia put down the book she had been reading and looked at the pavement below her. She knew what was about to happen next. It was always the same. Out of the front seat would get the driver, a small man in a blue suit. He would put a blue cap carefully on his head, and then he would go around the car to the passenger door and open it, and out would get the old lady, wearing a long fur coat that came right down to her ankles, whatever the weather.
    The man went around the car and opened the door for the lady.
    ‘Now he’ll have to run after her,’ murmured Amelia to the sculpted lady with the coffee and the coral outside her window. When the old lady got out of the car, she never said a word to the driver, but always walked straight past him, and the man would close the car door and run so he could get to the door of Mr Vishwanath’s studio and open it before she got there. ‘See?’ murmured Amelia, as the driver scurried to the door.
    The lady went inside. The man went back to the car, took off his cap, got back into the driver’s seat, closed the door and waited. He would wait there like that, Amelia knew, for an hour. Then he would get out, put on his cap, walk around the car, open the passenger door and stand beside it, and invariably, a minute or so later, the old lady would come out of the green house, walk past him without a word and get into the car again.
    From this height, the cream-coloured car looked very grand. But Amelia had seen it up close, on the street. It was old, the paintwork had lost its gleam, and the leather of the seats was cracked. The driver’s uniform, which looked so smart from a distance, was worn and frayed, and the stitching on his cap was coming loose. The man himself was old and hunched, with thinning silver hair, and looked as if he should have retired long ago. Amelia felt sorry for him. He would sit in the car, without saying a word or even seeming to look at anything in particular, as people went past him. Even if a bunch of kids jumped around outside his window and made faces at him, as they sometimes did, he didn’t respond, didn’t do anything, until it was time to get out and open the door for the lady again.
    Amelia had seen the old lady up close as well, a few times, when she happened to be outside as the old lady was arriving or leaving. The old lady was tall, quite thin, with knobbly fingers and lots of rings. Amelia wondered whether the lady could get the rings off over the knobbles in her fingers, and if not, how long the rings had been there. The lady’s hair, which was pulled tightly back, was almost white, but her eyebrows were black. And she always had a very severe, hawk-like expression on her face, and she always looked straight ahead, as if nothing to either side of her was worthy of attention, not even her driver as he opened the car door.