Blueeyedboy by Joanne Harris Page B

wonderful. There was a piano in the hall, and a big piece of stained glass above the front door, which on sunny days would cast reflections of red and gold on to the polished floorboards. When his mother was working, Mrs White would show Ben her studio, with its stacked canvases and its rolls of drawing paper, and teach him how to draw horses and dogs, and show him the tubes and palettes of paint, and read out their names, like incantations.
    Viridian. Celadon. Chromium. Sometimes they had French or Spanish or Italian names, which made them even more magical. Violetto . Escarlata . Pardo de turba . Outremer .
    ‘That’s the language of art, sweetheart,’ Mrs White would sometimes exclaim. She painted big, sloshy canvases in sugary pinks and ominous purples, upon which she would then superimpose pictures cut out of magazines – mostly heads of little girls – which she would then varnish heavily on to the canvas and adorn with ruffs of antique lace.
    Benjamin didn’t like them much, and yet it was from Mrs White that he learnt to distinguish between the colours; to understand that his own colour came in a legion of shades; to span the depths between sapphire and ultramarine, to see their textures, know their scents.
    ‘That one’s chocolate,’ he would say, pointing out a fat scarlet tube with a picture of strawberries on the side.
    Escarlata , the label said, and the scent was overwhelming, especially when placed in sunlight, filling his head with happiness and with motes that shone and floated like magic Maltesers up and away into the air.
    ‘How can red be chocolate?’
    By then he was nearly seven years old, and still he couldn’t really explain. It just was, he told her stoutly, just as Nut Brown ( avellana ) was tomato soup, which often made him feel anxious, somehow, and verde Veronese was liquorice, and amarillo naranja was the smell of boiled cabbage, which always made him feel sick. Sometimes just hearing their names would do it, as if the sounds contained some kind of alchemy, teasing from the volatile words a joyous explosion of colours and scents.
    At first he’d assumed that everyone had this ability; but when he mentioned it to his brothers, Nigel punched him and called him freak ; and Brendan just looked confused and said, You can smell the words, Ben? After which he would often grin and scrunch up his nose whenever Benjamin was around, as if he could sense things the way Ben could, copying him, the way he often did, though never really in mockery. In fact, poor Brendan envied Ben; slow, tubby, frightened Bren, always lagging behind, always doing something wrong.
    Ben’s gift didn’t make any sense to Ma, but it did to Mrs White, who knew all about the language of colours, and who liked scented candles – expensive ones from France – which Ma said was like burning money, but which smelt wonderful, all the same; in violet and smoky sage and boudoir patchouli and cedar and rose.
    Mrs White knew someone – a friend of her husband’s, in fact – someone who understood these things, and she explained to Ben’s mother that Ben might be special, which his Ma had believed all along, of course, but that secretly he had doubted. Mrs White promised to put them in touch with this man, whose name was Dr Peacock, and who lived in one of the big old houses behind St Oswald’s playing fields, on the street Ma always called Millionaires’ Row.
    Dr Peacock was sixty-one, an ex-governor of St Oswald’s, the author of a number of books. We sometimes saw him in the Village, a bearded man in a tweed jacket and a floppy old hat, walking his dog. He was rather eccentric, said Mrs White with a rueful smile, and, thanks to some clever investments, was blessed with rather more money than sense –
    Certainly Ma didn’t hesitate. Being practically tone-deaf herself, she had never paid much attention to the way her son understood sounds and words, which, when she noticed it at all, she attributed to his being