The Visitors (45 page)

I turned my eyes back to the graveyard; the volunteers had taken a tea-break and were beginning work again. I watched them advance on an angel swathed in ivy and hemmed in with sycamore seedlings: the angel’s head, the arch of a wing, and a warning upraised hand were all that were visible; the chainsaw spluttered into life, and whined.

‘So – that famous telegram of Carter’s,’ Fong said, returning at last to the issue he’d been fretting over from the moment he arrived. ‘I can’t let go of that telegram, Miss Payne: it’s a foretaste of all the puzzles to come. Think about it: Carter sent it two days after they found that first step. At that point, they’d cleared the stairway, sixteen steps down – and they’d got as far as a wall at their foot. All he’d found at that point were the necropolis seals on that wall’s plaster: no identifying king’s cartouche, or so he claims – and worrying evidence of forced entry in antiquity too. So Carter couldn’t have been sure he’d made a “wonderful discovery” when he sent that cable. He couldn’t have known it was a tomb he’d found – let alone a “magnificent” one. It might easily have been a cache, or a minor burial. Even if it
did
prove to be a tomb, the probability was he’d find it rifled and emptied – and he, of all people,
must
have known that. Yet he sent that cable to Carnarvon at Highclere, in the certain knowledge that the earl would then hightail it out to Egypt on the next available boat… Then he filled in the staircase and halted excavation until his patron arrived. All very proper – but a risk, even so. Suppose Carnarvon arrived – and they found an empty hole in the ground?’

‘A risk Carter was prepared to take, I imagine,’ I said absently. Below us, the angel was slowly emerging from its cloak of ivy. ‘He was a showman. As you know.’

‘A showman – and a fabulist,’ Fong said, his tone bitter. I turned to look at him, surprised. ‘I’ve reached the point, Miss Payne, where I don’t trust a word that man wrote,’ he went on, his agitation now perceptible. ‘How he found the tomb, what he and Carnarvon did next… Looking into the tomb for the first time by candlelight… the “glint of gold”, the “wonderful things” he saw. Then, turn the page, and what do we find? Secrecy and deceit. A cover-up. You could say, a pack of lies.’

‘Effective lies, Dr Fong. It took decades for the truth to emerge.’

‘If it has emerged – even now. There are still unanswered questions. Too many of them.’

A silence fell. The sunlight glinted on the lenses of Dr Fong’s spectacles; a mauve petal from the wisteria fell onto his notebook and he brushed it aside. ‘Questions I’d like to answer,’ he went on. ‘I’d like to know whether the secrecy ever got too much for him. Did lying and subterfuge take its toll? Did he ever reveal the truth to anyone? Imagine it, Miss Payne: Carter makes the greatest archaeological discovery of all time – but he disguises the circumstances of that discovery. He lies – and he goes on lying. He pulls off an act of deception, aided and abetted by Lord Carnarvon and his daughter, by his Arab workforce and by a clutch of internationally distinguished scholars and archaeologists… And he does it in front of the world’s press. The assembled journalists never noticed a damn thing. They were taken in by an act of theatre.’ Dr Fong paused. ‘Were you?’

The question was as sharp as it was sudden; I was unprepared, and it disconcerted me. I looked away. Silence fell, broken only by the occasional whine of the chainsaw below. In the distance the towers of Docklands pierced the heat haze and the bluish pollution clouds; the lights at the summit of Canary Wharf winked and blinked, two ever-watchful eyes. Egypt, my Egypt, felt close yet impossibly distant, here inside me, vanishing fast.

I closed my eyes: clear on the evening air came the eddying wash of the Nile. For our second stay in Egypt, Miss Mack had hired a
dahabiyeh.
It was moored on the west bank of the river at Luxor, and at night the music in the Winter Palace ballroom drifted across the water from the opposite shore. Frances and I danced to that music one night, a Viennese waltz: we traversed the decks in a series of dizzying spins. ‘
Weren’t we just fine
,
Lucy?
’ Frances cried, clutching on to me for balance, as we hurtled to a stop and leaned against the boat’s rails. Catching our breath: there were two moons that night, one sailing the sky, and the other, a sister moon, in the river water below. An instant later, on a riffle of breeze, the sister moon shimmered, fragmented and was gone.

‘I can’t answer that question, Dr Fong,’ I replied, after a long pause. ‘I am old and you’re too sudden for me. My memories are too freighted… and with people who mean nothing to you. For your purposes, they’re marginal. They’re not marginal to me.’

‘I apologise.’ Dr Fong switched off his tape recorder. Below us, the party of volunteers were packing up their tools and departing. We both listened as their voices receded and silence fell; the excavated angel, freed from the undergrowth that had obscured it, now stood revealed. Blind eyes in a beautiful passionless face. She had a wise, if punitive, air.

‘I wish you would tell me – what you saw, what you learned, what you
felt
,’ Dr Fong said, on a sudden note of appeal, laying his notebook aside. ‘I’m in no hurry, you know. I have nowhere to go, no one to see. I can stay here and we can talk, Miss Payne, or I can go back to my room for yet another long evening and wrestle with all the questions I thought I’d answered when I started in on this project of mine. That’s what I did in Luxor. That’s what I do in London, these days. Stare at a wall, order a take-out, ask myself questions about a tomb – and watch the answers I thought I had slipping away from me.

‘You’re my only witness, Miss Payne. Everyone else is dead. But you were there. Those crucial three days when the tomb was found, when Carter breached the wall into its antechamber, looked through and saw his “wonderful things”… You were close by. You knew all the people involved. You witnessed the events after that, you watched the story unfold.’ He paused. ‘To me, your memories are like a treasure house. And you won’t admit me. You’re always blocking the entrance, standing on guard… A sort of watchdog – no, a Cerberus. Why is that? Don’t you trust me? All I want is the truth, you know.’

‘The truth? I certainly can’t give you that, Dr Fong.’

‘A variant would do. Your variant. Your version. I’d settle for that.’

He was looking at me in a sad, regretful way – and I took pity on him. The man had changed, as I had: we had something in common – we were both grappling with the past, if for different reasons and in differing ways. I too was facing the prospect of another evening alone. The light was fading, inside the house my ever-present ghosts would be circling; perhaps it would do no harm to talk, just a little, just for a while.

I hesitated, then sent Dr Fong into the house to find whisky, water and glasses. When he’d returned, poured drinks for us both and settled himself in his chair again, I said: ‘I tell this my way or not at all. Without interruptions and questions from you.’

‘I’ll be as silent as the grave.’

‘Very well.’ I paused, then began. ‘I was in Egypt with the friend I once mentioned to you, Miss Mack. She was a good woman – one of the few truly good women I’ve ever known. She had rented a houseboat for our stay. It was called the
Queen Hatshepsut.
It was moored at Luxor, on the west bank, just below the American House and within sight of Castle Carter. The track to the Valley of the Kings passed right by it – so as the story of the tomb unfolded we had what Miss Mack liked to call a ringside view.

‘We arrived there the day after Lord Carnarvon and Eve reached Luxor, when the excavation was about to begin. By then, over two weeks had passed since Carter sent his telegram, and the secret was out: everyone knew that Carter had found
something
, which might or might not prove to be a tomb. When Miss Mack and I were in Cairo, the city was ablaze with excitement; by the time we reached Luxor no one could talk of anything else. What would they discover when they breached the wall at the bottom of the staircase Carter had found? So we were in the right place, at the right time – and that wasn’t entirely accidental. My friend Miss Mack was writing a book, you see.’

‘A book?’ Dr Fong looked at me sharply.

‘Yes. A book. Within a very short time,
everyone
began writing books, Dr Fong. Howard Carter himself, several of the journalists who came out to cover the story – there was a positive
outbreak
of books. But Miss Mack was ahead of the game. She had been planning to write her memoirs for some while, you see, and once we were in Luxor, those memoirs – evolved. She was writing on a manual typewriter – an Oliver No. 9. I can still hear it, Dr Fong: she liked to write at night, so she’d be rattling the keys until midnight and well beyond. It kept me awake, but I didn’t mind that: I was twelve years old, I was in love with Egypt. I’d go out on deck, and sit there in the dark: star-gazing, thinking.’ I paused. ‘Why, sometimes I’d stay out there for hours at a time.’

‘Night vigils. A houseboat within sight of Castle Carter. Well, well, well. So you really were in the key place. At exactly the key moment. You’re full of surprises, Miss Payne.’ Fong gave a low laugh, but he was quick on the uptake, as I’d noticed before, and I could sense a new excitement in him. Reaching for the whisky bottle, he topped up my glass and then his own. ‘That won’t loosen my tongue,’ I told him.

‘I live in hope,’ he replied, reaching for his notebook. ‘Go on.’

A book
was not the term Miss Mack used, and in deference to her I didn’t use it either; it was The Book – and it had an imperialistic nature, I learned. As Miss Mack would explain our first evening on the
dahabiyeh,
The Book made constant demands.

‘It’s a most peculiar phenomenon,’ she said, leading me into her cabin, indicating a stack of onion-skin typing paper and carbons, stroking the Oliver No. 9’s round metal keys; it was painted olive green, weighed as much as a small child, and had terse instructions stamped on its front:
Keep machine cleaned and oiled at all times
. ‘The Book leads me into the most unexpected places,’ Miss Mack said with an authorial sigh. ‘It’s taken me over. And it’s most dictatorial, even tyrannical, Lucy. It has Napoleonic tendencies. I feel it’s changing my whole outlook, even my character. Truly, dear, I’m putty in its hands.’

I wondered if this could be so: it seemed unlikely – and unwise. Could a book, even The Book, have such an effect? But I had noticed changes in Miss Mack on our voyage out to Egypt, so perhaps it was true; these alterations in her outlook became more apparent that first evening by the Nile. Obtaining the use of this boat was a coup
of which Miss Mack was proud: she had pulled it off with the assistance of the Winlocks as well as every other contact ever made in Egypt and beyond. It belonged to some New Englanders, cousins of acquaintances, who had planned to use it this winter, but changed their minds.
Mounted above the upper deck was
a flagpole, from which the Stars and Stripes bravely fluttered in the breeze from the Nile.

There was a saloon, with books and an out-of-tune piano; there were two bedrooms, with dark panelling, awnings and louvre shutters; there was a bathroom of sorts, where we’d bathe in Nile water. It was romantic
and
economical, Miss Mack claimed. She went on an inspection tour of the galley areas within seconds of our arriving and pronounced herself fully satisfied: the kitchen was spotless, the Egyptians who’d be looking after us were most obliging, spoke excellent English and kept everything shipshape; the boat might be old, but it had immense charm. ‘One can’t
fuss
too much, Lucy,’ she said breezily. ‘If one’s going to have adventures – as I certainly hope we shall – then there’s no time to fret about the finer details of hygiene, don’t you agree?’

This startling emancipation extended to our meals, I discovered, when we sat down under the awning on the upper deck to eat supper. The cook, whose name was Mohammed Sayed, served us grilled fish freshly caught from the river,
shamsi
bread, a salad of onions, herbs and cucumbers… A feast, Miss Mack declared, tucking into everything with a keen appetite. She had brought her binoculars to the table, and at intervals, trained them on the desert beyond. ‘Birds, dear – maybe a
jackal
,’ she said; but I noticed it was the area around Castle Carter on which she focused her gaze. When the failing light made the binoculars useless, she abandoned them and, in her new spirit of adventurousness, poured us both a glass of wine – mine diluted with Evian. We sat back to admire the numberless stars and their reflections, leaping like silver fish in the wash of the Nile.

To crown my astonishment, Miss Mack lit a fat Egyptian cigarette, puffed at it in a professional way, and explained that tobacco helped to provide
inspiration.
‘Just the one after dinner, dear,’ she said. ‘I find it gets me in the writing mood. I like to write at night, you see. I hope you won’t mind.’

I assured her I wouldn’t. Her colour had deepened as she made this confession, and I wasn’t sure whether that implied that discussion of The Book was taboo. I finally risked a shy question – might she, perhaps, tell me what her book was about? Miss Mack, scarlet with emotion, was at once launched.

There was a lengthy preamble – how she’d been
deeply
affected by two sermons her minister had preached while she was home in Mercer Hill, Princeton: one relating to the parable of the
talents
, and the other to
hiding your light beneath a bushel.
‘I’ll be sixty in two years, Lucy, dear,’ she confided. ‘Of course, I shall never be able to leave my dear mother, but it’s time to grab life by the scruff of its neck even so. A bit late, you’ll say – but better late than never, don’t you agree? I always wanted to be a writer – I wrote poems as a girl, you know, and my, oh my, how I fussed over the scansion and the rhymes! Then, somehow, I lost the habit, and all my splendid ambitions went underground. Never,
never
let that happen to you, Lucy, dear… ’