The Visitors (61 page)
‘Look.’ Frances pointed to a band of hieroglyphs that ran down the front of the statues. I recognised some of them from the seals I’d seen on the Antechamber’s north wall; I could make out the oval cartouche with Tutankhamun’s throne name. I stared at the little figures in excitement and dismay.
‘Oh, Frances, have these come from the tomb?’
‘Of course. There are hundreds of
shabti
there – and these aren’t especially good ones, there are others much, much finer. But they’re lovely, aren’t they?’ She stroked the band of hieroglyphs. ‘Look, this is a spell from
The Book of the Dead…
Oh Lucy, such a face! You mustn’t be shocked. Everyone knows Lord Carnarvon’s taken a few things from the tomb, nothing too valuable, mostly little objects, choice items that caught his eye – it’s on account, as it were! Even if he’s denied his half-share of the tomb’s contents,
masses
of things will come his way sooner or later. Meanwhile, he’s picked out a few beauties. Daddy’s always said that Lordy keeps a “pocket collection”. And he has deep pockets in those jackets of his, as you’ve seen.’
Frances smiled. An archaeologist’s daughter, she was neither shocked, nor greatly concerned: such transgressions were commonplace in that era, of course. I
was
shocked.
I looked uncertainly at my
shabti
figure, remembering Mohammed’s accusations of theft and pilfering. I knew that if Miss Mack saw it, she would be appalled. She would regard it as plunder, as grave-robbing; she would insist on its immediate return. No doubt she was right, but the little figure was speaking to me; I felt it wanted to stay in my care.
‘Which part of the tomb do you think they came from, Frances?’ I asked.
‘Who knows? I told you – there are hundreds. These might be from the Antechamber or the Burial Chamber. Maybe Carnarvon picked them up the night they broke in there – and I hope they
are
from there, Lucy: that would make them super-powerful.’
She leaned forward, planted a kiss on my cheek and turned to go. ‘They’re twins – wasn’t that thoughtful of Carnarvon? I expect he knows how close we are, and now we’ll be closer still. These will bind us together. Whenever I look at mine, I shall think of you, Lucy – and you must do the same. Always remember:
where you go, I go
.’
She gave me one last quicksilver glance, thrust her
shabti
figure back in her pocket and ran for the shore. Halfway up the track to the American House, she turned and waved. I watched her small figure recede, then disappear. I returned to my cabin and looked at my answerer hard and long: it was stern-faced, compact; packed with three thousand years-plus of power. Covetousness gripped me: no matter how wrong it might be, I couldn’t bear to relinquish it. This wasn’t some tourist fake: it was unquestionably genuine –unlike the one I’d given my father, the one broken in circumstances that remained unexplained, the one whose shards and fragments Nicola had swept up and thrown away.
How do you tell the difference between the real and the fake, Lucy? Tell me, I want to know.
Now I shall show her,
I thought. When a king called upon one of his answerers in the afterlife, it at once rose up to do his bidding:
Here I am
, it would say. I wondered if this little figure would obey me in the same way. I wrapped it in layers of cotton wool and tissue paper. I hid it inside a petticoat and buried it in the folds of my birthday dress.
There it stayed, for the duration of my journey back to Europe, its existence concealed. Its powers were increased, I felt, by this secrecy.
The day I arrived in Paris I gave it to Nicola Dunsire. I’d attached a label to it by then, in the italic script I’d perfected; it read:
For Nicola, from Lucy, with love. The real thing! Egypt–Paris,
1923.
… the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half-owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot,
Middlemarch
‘Mary Cassatt,’ Dr Fong said, ‘Berthe Morisot… ’
He was moving slowly along the north wall of my Highgate sitting room, where most of my paintings hang – it’s the only space available to them, all the other walls being book-clad: a rainy day in July, the morning light silvery but thin – a heterogeneous art collection. Dr Fong was examining it minutely. He bent to examine the small Degas of a ballet dancer, lingered by Sargent’s portrait of my mother Marianne, attempted to read Helen Winlock’s signature on a still life, and failed. He briefly examined an unsigned pencil sketch of a small puppy lying on its back in the sun and returned to the Cassatt, which seemed to be his favourite. A lovely thing. It depicts a mother and child.
He had his back to me, and seeing that the paintings gripped his attention, I edged closer to my desk, picked up the small blue faience
shabti
figure that stood upon it and quickly slipped it inside a drawer. If Dr Fong was going to inspect my belongings, I did not want him inspecting that. From a distance yes; but not close up. I did not intend his expert eyes to read its king’s cartouche, and I had no intention of answering the awkward questions that would ensue if he did. Stolen goods. I eased the drawer inwards; it creaked as it shut.
Rose, seated across the room, here for lunch to celebrate my birthday, saw this manoeuvre and, sympathising with the motives that lay behind it, raised her eyebrows and smiled. Loyal friend that she is, she embarked on diversionary tactics, at which she is skilled. ‘Lucy’s spoils,’ she remarked. ‘All this – and she’s not even
alarmed
! Disgraceful, isn’t it, Dr Fang?’
Waving a vague hand at my paintings, she rose and crossed to Dr Fong, who, gracefully, did not correct her version of his name. He’d attempted to do so twice in the hour that had passed since he arrived (out of the blue; without so much as a phone call) and had perhaps decided Rose was stone deaf; now he had given up. Side by side, they both inspected my wall.
They made an unlikely pair, I thought, sinking down into my old chintzy chair by the front windows, and moving the piles of Egypt books that encircled it. Rose, a diminutive white-haired figure, wearing a red suit of light wool made for her by Norman Hartnell some thirty years before, scarcely reached to Fong’s shoulder. Fong, over six foot, lanky and laid-back, was wearing his usual hideous trainers, blue jeans and a T-shirt with the unlikely message:
Fond Greetings from Silicon Valley.
A large watch was strapped to his thin wrist, with a Mickey Mouse figure pointing the hours. He was wearing his wedding ring again – that had reappeared since a flying visit he’d made to Berkeley in June. I wondered what, if anything, this told me. Considering the nature of such clues – how
tiny
clues can be, how they flit past like pipistrelles on a summer evening – I turned my eyes to the window. In the square opposite my house, a young woman in a tracksuit was slumped on a bench, staring into space, rocking a baby-buggy back and forth. I could just hear the child’s wails; its mother looked exhausted, or possibly disconsolate.
‘Most of Lucy’s paintings came from her mother, who was American,’ Rose was saying. ‘And she was an Emerson – you know,
steel
, Dr Fang. Some of the others are Stockton leavings, because Lucy’s connected to
them
too, don’t ask how, it’s all far too complicated… They left her some of their loot. The Morisot came from them, I think, and the Degas ballet girl – she’s
so
lovely. Lucy and I took ballet classes together once, you know. In Cairo. A hundred years ago. That always reminds me of our lessons there. She looks like Frances, don’t you think, Lucy? You remember how exquisitely she danced?’
‘
Emerson?
’ Dr Fong said, before I could reply. He gave me a weighing glance. ‘I didn’t know about that connection. Stockton too… As in railroads?’
An expression of surprise and distaste crossed his face. Rose who did not like her riffs, or her chattering-on as she called it, to be interrupted, answered him before I could. ‘Yes, yes, railways – and later, planes and armaments and bombs and guns and heaven knows what. Lucy didn’t tell you? I’m not surprised.’
‘Me neither,’ said Dr Fong.
‘Which do you like the best?’ Rose continued, slipping her arm through his and giving him one of her little-old-lady smiles. ‘My favourite is this tiny sketch of a puppy – but that’s because she was
my
dog, and she died, poor thing. It’s valueless, of course, just a drawing some friend dashed off one summer’s day – but it’s charming, don’t you think?’
‘Apt,’ Fong ventured.
Since he did not know the identity of the artist, Howard Carter’s sketch did not engage him long. Rose whisked him back to the Berthe Morisot – an eternal summer’s day, two young girls in a sailing boat. She dallied by Sargent’s version of my mother, exclaimed over Helen Winlock’s still life – wild flowers and berries in a blue jar – threw up a great deal more flak and misinformation, and finally drew him to the last of the paintings, a portrait of Nicola Dunsire. It had been painted by Nicola’s friend, bicycle-thief Clair, the summer she moved into our house in Cambridge. Clair came to stay for a month and remained for seven years. My father, rarely there in any case, had never seemed to object to her presence; I had. I called her ‘the cuckoo in the nest’, usually behind her back, once to her face. This antipathy had failed to dislodge her.
It was entitled
Newnham Garden, Summer 1928
– the summer I turned eighteen and won a place at Nicola Dunsire’s former Cambridge college, Girton; the summer I moved out and Clair moved in. Most of Clair’s paintings had titles that were similarly opaque; they were informative, specific – and told you nothing at all. It was a large canvas: wearing a novitiate white dress, Nicola Dunsire stood next to our rose arch, her eyes appearing to rest on someone, or perhaps respond to someone, who was behind the artist’s shoulder, outside the frame.
‘It’s a Lennox,’ Rose was saying. ‘And Clair Lennox is
unbelievably
fashionable now. My granddaughter works at a gallery in Cork Street and she’s mad about Lennox’s paintings. I can’t see it, can you? I can see the colours are glorious – they do
sing
, don’t they? But I hate the way she stabs on the paint. That’s Lucy’s stepmother, Nicola Foxe-Payne. It’s a very good likeness. She and Lennox were bosom friends. They died in the Blitz together. Nicola was terribly beautiful, wasn’t she?’
‘Very,’ Fong replied. ‘Troubling, though. It’s unsettling – can’t put my finger on it.’
‘All Lennox’s paintings are like that,’ I said, interrupting before Rose could say more. ‘They point you in one direction – and then in its opposite. The more closely you look, the more that’s so.’
Taking pity on Fong, I gave him a glass of wine, poured Rose a gin-and-it. I made a face at her:
Cut it out, Rose:
no more biography
, it said
.
‘Fifteen minutes while I cook the chicken,’ I announced. ‘Then I’m going to shoo you out, Dr Fong.’
‘Happy days, chin-chin, Dr Fang,’ Rose said, raising her glass. ‘Isn’t this fun? Now you simply must tell me
all
about your book and your documentary – but you must speak up: I’m the tiniest bit deaf, or so Lucy complains. I can’t promise to read your book, because I’m not a great reader. But I can’t wait to see your telly programmes. I shall
record
them,’ she added, beaming. ‘I’ve just bought one of those DVD whatsits.’
I left them to it and escaped to the basement kitchen. I fiddled with the birthday lunch, a recipe by Elizabeth David: she found it simple and straightforward; I did not. I leaned against the ancient butler’s sink, washing lettuce leaves for a salad. I chopped herbs from my garden. The knife slipped in my old hands and I cut myself.
How copiously fingers bleed, from the smallest gash! I ran cold water until my hand felt numb, then dried it and slapped on an Elastoplast. A quiet day in London town. I could feel the ghosts gathering in the kitchen, murmuring by the fridge, protesting from the pantry region. They had been stirred up by that discussion of my paintings, and today, this happens, their mood was not benevolent.
Leave me alone, bugger off
, I told them – and that was a mistake. Spectres don’t like it when you take that tone with them. Trust me, this is true. And if you don’t believe me, if you think perhaps that I’m being fanciful, see how you feel when – if – you get to my age. Just you wait.
I poked at the chicken pieces in the pan, then gave them a pall of crème fraîche. I returned to the stairs – the arthritis was in summer abeyance, so I climbed them slowly but without any great pain. As I approached the hall, I could hear that Rose and Fong were now getting on like a house on fire. They were deep in the subject of Lord Carnarvon’s death, and its aftermath.
‘Two in the morning – at the Continental Hotel in Cairo,’ Fong was shouting. He had clearly not twigged that this small, deaf, inconsequential old woman had known Carnarvon and was familiar with all these events. ‘Bitten on the cheek by a mosquito while on a visit to Aswan with his daughter Lady Evelyn, that February. He nicked the bite with a razor, and blood-poisoning set in shortly after they reached Cairo. Followed by pneumonia, which spelled the end – but then he was a sick man, his immune system was shot, and this is pre-penicillin. It was 5 April 1923 – almost six weeks to the day from the opening of Tutankhamun’s Burial Chamber. As predicted, allegedly, by some hack from the
Mail
. I’ve checked, and there’s no record of that remark of his until
after
Carnarvon died. Which makes me just a
tad
suspicious.’
‘And when Carnarvon died – at that exact moment,’ Rose chimed in, ‘all the lights in Cairo went out. At least, I believe that’s what everyone
claims.
’
