The Visitors (51 page)

‘Tommyrot,’ Carter replied, refilling his whisky glass. ‘The truth of the matter, Winlock, is that it’s put your nose out of joint, our discovery. You’ll pooh-pooh any arrangement we make. It’s sour grapes. You can’t deal with us stealing your thunder.’

‘Well, you’re certainly stealing my
team
,’
Winlock replied, lightly but with edge. ‘You’ve already snaffled Burton and Mace. You have the loan of Hauser and Hall, as well.’ He glanced across the room at these two men, both architectural draughtsmen previously working for him, now redeployed to map and record the artefacts in the Antechamber. ‘However, needs must. No doubt I’ll learn to live with it.’

‘Not much choice in the matter, old sport,’ Carter replied, with a sneer. ‘Like it or lump it. Your boss Lythgoe’s orders.
I
found the tomb – and
I
take priority.’

‘And
I
wish you all joy of it,’ Winlock replied, in a tone that silenced even Carter.

The party broke up shortly afterwards. Frances’s face was flushed with indignation; her love for her father was intense, and her loyalty to him absolute. I think her hero-worship of Howard Carter began to diminish from that day onwards.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Miss Mack said, when we’d returned to our
dahabiyeh
, ‘Mr Carter can be so
graceless
, don’t you find, Lucy?’

‘Not always. But he is when he’s been drinking,’ I replied. ‘And he was knocking it back today.’

‘Knocking it back?’ Miss Mack gave me a reproving glance. ‘Lucy, really! Where do you pick up these phrases? Though I fear it is accurate. On his third stiff whisky, dear – I’m afraid I counted. He was not sober – and he was unpardonably rude to Mr Winlock. It soured the whole atmosphere. Should I mention all that, Lucy – in my current chapter? The Book feels I should, but I’m not sure. It
is
Christmas. I don’t want to be uncharitable.’

‘Charity has nothing to do with it. You should write the truth,’ I flashed back, flinging myself down on a bench on the upper deck.

Miss Mack’s moral haverings often made me impatient; I could imagine how mercilessly Nicola Dunsire would have dealt with them. In honour of the Christmas lunch, I was wearing the dress she’d given me, and although it still fitted, the bodice felt tight and restricting. I’d had two long letters from her by then, letters I knew by heart, and she’d sent a Christmas present from my father and her: a single string of seed pearls. I knew it was she who had chosen them. I fingered them now, milky, glistening pearls.

Miss Mack gave me a long, silent look. ‘Well, no doubt you are right, my dear,’ she said at last, in a quiet tone. ‘I shall bear your views in mind. I am sorry to have inflicted my uncertainties on you.’

I could see that she was hurt. She retreated to her cabin, but inspiration could not have come, for the Oliver No. 9’s keys remained silent. I repented almost at once. I changed out of Miss Dunsire’s frock, and after half an hour’s deliberations, wondering why these sudden moods and rebellions seized me without warning, I knocked at Miss Mack’s cabin door. When I entered, I saw that she had been crying. Flinging my arms around her, I apologised for being rude; I said I didn’t know what had come over me.

‘Say no more about it, Lucy dear. I’ve already forgotten it,’ Miss Mack said, wiping her eyes and returning my embrace. She hesitated, and then, blushing painfully, continued: ‘I’m very fond of you, Lucy; deeply so, as I hope you know – you’ve become like a daughter to me, and, and – the truth of the matter is this: it must often be tedious for you, spending so much time with a fussy old woman. You’re a bright girl – coming on in leaps and bounds, whereas I can be slow and indecisive. Of course that makes you impatient. I’m no longer young, but I haven’t forgotten what it
is
to be young, dear. You’re growing up fast, Lucy – changing before my very eyes. So the fault is mine. You are no longer a child, and I must remember that.’

I did not deserve this generosity and I knew it: it filled me with shame. I kissed Miss Mack and brought her some tea, persuaded her to go for an evening stroll along the river – she loved these gentle forays, and only too often over the past days I’d churlishly and moodily refused to accompany her. As we walked, I silently resolved to make it up to Miss Mack and decided the best way to do that would be to help her with The Book. I’d say nothing of this plan until I had results to show for it – and it was easy to remain silent on the subject for, that evening, our walk was interrupted by an unforeseen meeting.

‘Why, it’s
you
, Mr Callender,’ Miss Mack said, with surprise, as we drew level with a great bear of a man mooching along by the water’s edge; he was wearing a pith helmet and his once-handsome, now-ruined face was hidden until we came close. She held out her hand to him. ‘Merry Christmas! But I thought you were at your farm with your sons?’

‘Bit of a mix-up.’ Callender turned his sad, bloodshot eyes towards us, then back to the reed beds. ‘They’d made other plans. Sent a cable cancelling. Got the dates confused. Young men do that, you know. So I celebrated Christmas on my ownio up at the Castle. Pulled a cracker. Toasted the King. At a loose end after a bit. No sign of Carter. So I thought a nice stroll along the river might be just what the doctor ordered.’

‘My own feelings exactly!’ Miss Mack was struggling to conceal her consternation. ‘But Mr Callender, you should have said – you’d have been very welcome to join us at the American House, I’m sure. One more wouldn’t have made any difference, you know.’

‘Carter said if I went, there’d be thirteen at table. Can’t have that at Christmas, can we?’

I was about to correct him – sixteen at lunch, as Carter knew full well. Miss Mack gave me a warning glance and I stayed silent.

‘What a great shame,’ she said gently. ‘We’d have been so pleased to see you… What a beautiful evening it is, Mr Callender. So lovely and peaceful here by the river. Are you on your way back to the Castle? I think Mr Carter must be home by now.’

‘No hurry. Just between you and me and the gatepost, Mrs Macpherson, it can be a bit iffy up there. I’m living at the Castle for the duration, you see. Well, I’m short of the readies, so there’s not a lot of choice. And I don’t know if you’ve spotted it, but Carter’s a nervy sort of chap. Highly strung. Gets het up. Used to living alone. Used to working alone. Sometimes he likes company. Sometimes he can’t stomach it. Under a hell of a strain at the moment, too. So I try to stay out of his hair. Don’t want to irritate him.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you don’t do that, Mr Callender.’

‘Expect I do. I irritate a lot of people. Never have understood why. I tend to the doleful – that might be it. I try to hide it. Yes, indeedy. But I don’t always succeed. The tomb gets me down – I think it’s that. It gives me the willies. Can’t say so, of course; wouldn’t dream of it. I’m lucky to get the work. Jolly generous of old Carter to rope me in, Mrs Macpherson. I do know that.’

‘
Miss
. Miss
Mackenzie
.’ She drew in a deep breath.

I knew what was coming, for she could never resist extending a helping hand to lame dogs; sure enough, the shy and awkward Mr Callender was quickly invited back to our
dahabiyeh.
There, as dusk fell, he sat for an hour with us on the upper deck, sipping a beer Mohammed produced, nibbling dates and pistachio nuts, his mild eyes resting on the river. He told us about sheep ranches in Australia and prospecting in South Africa. A lesser woman than Miss Mack might have seized this moment to pump him for information about the tomb and any further secrets that might lie behind its north wall; but that action she’d have viewed as immoral, as taking unfair advantage of a vulnerable man. I knew she would not countenance questioning him – and so, having fewer scruples than she, even then, I did.

‘Why does the tomb give you the willies, Mr Callender?’ I asked him, shortly before he left. I thought this a cunning gambit, one that might provoke revelations as to night-time expeditions, their purpose and outcome.

It did no such thing. Callender turned his kindly eyes to me, gave me a puzzled look and with transparent honesty replied: ‘Well, it’s all about the afterlife, that tomb, isn’t it? That’s why it’s there, Miss Payne. And I don’t believe in afterlives. When you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it, over and out, farewell, my hearties. So I look at all that stuff they left there for that poor boy, the boats he could sail, the food he could eat, the clothes he could wear – and it gives me a pain round the heart, just here.’ He rested his big mottled hand on his chest. ‘Because he hasn’t used them, has he, not once in three thousand years? Never did, never will. Dead as the proverbial doornail.’

Miss Mack, whose views on an afterlife were very different, gave a pious intake of breath. She opened her mouth to speak.

‘Someone loved him, though,’ Callender went on, before she could interrupt. He stood up and looked about him, perhaps admiring the rose sky, the tranquil air, the river’s eternal flow. ‘They’d kept his things. A glove he’d worn as a child – it’s a tiny thing: he can’t have been more than four when he wore it. Toys he’d played with. A reed he’d cut as a walking stick when he was a little kid – someone went to the trouble to keep that, even labelled it, recorded when he cut it and where. That’s what we all do when we love someone, isn’t it, keep mementoes? I keep all my boys’ bits and bobs. So they speak, those little things of Tut’s – loud and clear, right across the centuries. Or
I
think they do.’

He turned and, having thanked us, ambled away towards the gangplank. Miss Mack, who had taken a liking to him, I could see, followed him to say her goodbyes; I did too.

‘Crikey, jolly good view of the Castle from here,’ Callender said, on reaching the bank. ‘Lights on, I see, so Carter must be back now. Better head home, I suppose. Can’t put it off for ever. In for a penny, in for a pound. Yes indeedy.’

‘You must call in and see us whenever you’re passing, Mr Callender,’ Miss Mack said.

‘Pecky, Miss Mackenzie, please. Pecky… ’

‘Myrtle,’ she replied, to my surprise. ‘Myrtle. I insist.’

They shook hands; Miss Mack’s was bruised for days afterwards. ‘A very sound man,’ she announced, as we watched him make his way up the track. ‘A rough diamond, perhaps. But a good heart. One can always tell, can’t one, Lucy?’

She sounded very sure of herself: I didn’t reply.

How do you weigh a heart?
I asked Nicola Dunsire later that night, as I wrote to her in the quiet of my cabin, her fountain pen snug in my hand. Had she met Mr Callender, whom I’d been trying to describe, I felt she might have found him absurd. But then such issues as good-heartedness made her impatient: what mattered, she always said, was the possession of a good mind.

Events in the Valley moved very swiftly once Christmas was past; I soon found there was no shortage of information for Miss Mack. News winged its way to the American House, and there it was instantly discussed, in fine detail. The best time to harvest it was over tea, when Frances’s father returned from his work at Hatshepsut’s temple, and his fellow archaeologists returned from Carter’s tomb in the Valley. Before they bathed and changed for dinner, they would all stretch out in the common room, unwind and discuss the events of the day. An hour later I’d be dispatched back to the houseboat, but at teatime the presence of children was tolerated – and quickly forgotten, so Frances and I could sit quietly, be invisible and listen.

I couldn’t reveal to Frances or anyone else that Miss Mack was writing a book – I was sworn to secrecy on that topic. But Frances was as absorbed by the tomb as I was, so no explanations were required. Pent up with excitement as to whether Tutankhamun’s Burial Chamber would eventually be uncovered, whether it might have been robbed or whether it remained intact, she was irritated by the discovery’s numerous, and increasingly apparent, side effects. ‘Well, I can tell you one thing about it, Lucy,’ she’d said. ‘It doesn’t improve anyone’s temper. All they do is squabble, morning, noon and night. That tomb is having a really
evil
effect.’

She made that remark to me one day in the Valley, to which we’d begun to make frequent expeditions. Miss Mack, ever alert, notebook and camera at the ready, made visits there almost daily, noting the increasing numbers of tourists and journalists, often sitting encamped among them, recording the procession of marvellous objects now being removed from the Antechamber for conservation and packing. The escape techniques I’d perfected in Cambridge the previous summer stood me in good stead: Miss Mack was so absorbed in her task, her attention so riveted by the glories on display, that it was easy for Frances and me to slip away. First it was for fifteen minutes, then an hour, then, gloriously, an entire morning. Frances and I could walk and talk to our hearts’ content – it was as if we had never been parted, never endured those long months of separation. There we were, just as we’d always been: attuned, knowing each other’s thoughts before they were spoken.

‘Like sisters,’ I said to her one morning.

‘No, like
twins
,’ Frances countered.

We’d creep back from these expeditions reluctantly, expecting remonstrations. They never came: Miss Mack seemed unaware of passing time; her watchdog instincts were blunted. Besides, as she’d said, I was no longer a child. This new status bought Frances and me the freedom of the Valley.

So intense was the interest in Tutankhamun’s new-found tomb, and the secrets it might yet prove to contain, that the other tombs in the Valley were now neglected; few tourists and no newspaper men ventured beyond the new site, now christened ‘KV62’, and marked by a stone painted with Carnarvon’s monogram, a curious device of two interlocked initials that resembled a skull and crossbones. Pushing our way through the crowds clustered at the mouth of the tomb, Frances and I could, in minutes, escape to the Valley’s further reaches, and find ourselves alone in its heat and its silence. We re-explored the sites we’d visited the previous year and one day, it must have been early in the new year, we returned to the site of Siptah’s tomb, where we’d watched Carter’s excavations, on the day the storm struck the Valley.