Sphinx

by T. S. Learner

  ‘Oliver?’

  The voice was feminine, lilting and Italian in its accent. I looked up: Cecilia, Isabella’s mother, stood at the head of the grave, her expensive Chanel suit looking ridiculously out of place. In one hand she held a small bunch of chrysanthemums; the other was trying to stop the breeze ruining her coiffured hair.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I have disturbed you in a private moment.’

  Realising she’d assumed I was in the middle of a prayer, I stood swiftly, dusted my knees and, worried that she might notice the chiselled hole in the tomb, stepped quickly back onto the pathway.

  Cecilia reached out and took my hand between her gloved fingers, her gaze travelling over my tired face, new beard and crumpled clothing. ‘You poor man. We never think of the young and the talented dying. Such deaths are an obscenity, a joke against God, don’t you think?’

  Unlike her daughter, Cecilia was tall and had a Tuscan blonde beauty honed by the polish of Rome. Slender and green-eyed, she seemed entirely aware of the power of her own attractiveness. She was only eight years older than me, which made her a very youthful forty-six. To my great chagrin, a spasm of involuntary desire shot through me like electricity. To make matters worse, I had the impression that Cecilia sensed my dilemma. I pulled my hand away.

  Smiling faintly, she crouched down to place her bouquet next to the lilies. My words spilled out nervously as I tried to distract myself from the sight of her skirt riding up her thighs.

  ‘I couldn’t stop her making that dive. God knows I tried, but she was insistent. Still, I can’t help thinking that if I had . . .’

  ‘Oliver, it was an accident, the consequence of a chain of events that led to a moment you had no control over. Who is to say whether that moment might or might not otherwise have happened?’

  She glanced apprehensively around the cemetery, then stepped closer. ‘I know Isabella would have told you terrible things about me.’ Cecilia’s voice was little more than a whisper. She paused, as if waiting for me to protest. I did not.

  ‘You have to understand,’ she continued, ‘I was bullied into letting Isabella go. I knew very quickly that I had made a grave mistake. But I was only twenty-five when I was widowed, and Giovanni Brambilla was a very frightening man. He was immoral, desperate to influence events beyond his control and he channelled a lot of that through Isabella. He even began to involve her in his activities - activities that were not appropriate for a child. He is powerful even now, even beyond the grave.’

  ‘What kind of activities?’ I asked, intrigued. I wasn’t convinced by her casting herself in the role of victim but there was something about Giovanni that I found immensely fascinating.

  ‘Once, when Isabella was about nine, Francesca wrote to tell me that she was worried about the way Giovanni had started to involve Isabella in some strange “performances”, rituals, with a group of followers. I immediately bought a plane ticket, but when I tried to get back into the country they refused me a visa. There was no reason for it and I couldn’t help but think that Giovanni had somehow used his influence to bar me. After that, whenever I confronted Francesca about it she denied she’d written to me at all.’

  ‘Isabella had nightmares,’ I told her. ‘The same one again and again. A gathering of people performing a ritual - one of the Ancient Egyptian rituals she’d studied . . .’

  Cecilia’s face fell in horror. ‘Mia povera figlia!’ she murmured, near to tears. Her anguish was so real that I felt more sympathetic towards her. I was just about to speak when behind us a twig snapped and we both turned. I glimpsed a movement between the trees, the flash of a figure now hidden.

  Cecilia’s expression changed instantly to one of fear. ‘We should go. People here will go to any lengths to reinvent their history, even their recent history,’ she whispered.

  We started walking back to the entrance. The cemetery appeared empty but the strong sense of being observed remained. I shivered. Above us, the cawing of ravens filled the blank sky. I grasped Cecilia’s hand briefly. For the second time that afternoon she smiled.

  ‘You know, Isabella did finally contact me, about a month before her death. No letter, just a box of photographs from our early days, from when her father was alive. I cried when I opened it. But don’t you think it is strange? Not to hear from your daughter for so long, then out of the blue she sends you old photographs a month before she dies?’

  As I waved Cecilia’s Mercedes off, my heart heavy with memories of Isabella and fear about her past, I suddenly remembered where I’d seen the miniature door before: it was like the portal engraved into the wall of an Ancient Egyptian tomb; the symbolic door that allowed the deceased’s Ba to fly in and out.

  Who would have carved such a thing into Isabella’s gravestone? And who would have watched me make that discovery? I looked around one last time. But the cemetery lay deserted in the fading light of the afternoon.

  When I arrived back at the villa I discovered that Mr Fartime, on behalf of the Alexandrian Oil Company, had engaged an extra guard at the gate for additional security. He’d told Ibrihim he’d been concerned by my interrogation after Isabella’s drowning. But also, with the growing food shortages and rationing, there had already been a few attacks on Westerners and I knew that Fartime felt responsible for my safety.

  Although it was reassuring to see the burly but friendly guard, smiling in his makeshift uniform and waving from the gate, I still didn’t trust the security of the villa. Later that night, knowing that Ibrihim was away making his annual visit to his mother in Ar-Rashid, I waited until I noticed the guard dozing on his stool by the iron gate. Then, as quietly as possible, I made my way into the garden. I wrapped the astrarium in canvas and buried it in a wooden box beneath one of the magnolia trees - a temporary hiding place should anyone break into the villa. As I paused, spade in hand, I glanced up at the waxing moon. The Egyptians thought the moon was a resting place of ascending souls and, staring up at the luminous pock-marked surface of the orb, it seemed a strangely reasonable concept. Just then there was a rustling of wings and something flew across my gaze, too fast for a bird. Startled, I dropped the spade, then cursed myself for taking fright. Half an hour later I finished planting a small pomegranate bush with shallow roots over the top of the astrarium, smoothing down the soil so the earth didn’t look disturbed. It was only after I went back inside that I remembered how Persephone had been tricked by Hades into eating seven pomegranate seeds, condemning her to stay with him in the underworld for seven months of each year. It was a disturbing association.

  It was past midnight. I sat on the edge of the bed clutching the Valium that the company doctor had prescribed for me, wondering if I could, again, face that wave of treacly darkness, the loss of sensory control that now allowed me to sleep.

  I decided against taking the pill and climbed into bed. Staring at the ceiling and the shifting shadows of the tree branches thrown by the street lamp outside, my eyes closed finally, and I drifted off.

  I dreamed I was in sunshine. Bright light, a beach perhaps, the sense of a soft grainy surface beneath my sun-warmed skin, then the soft weight of another body curling around me. I recognised the shape and scent instantly. I didn’t dare open my eyes in case I frightened her away, but the urge to see her overwhelmed me.

  I opened my eyes and found, to my relief, that I’d stayed dreaming. Isabella stared back at me, her eyes filled with that dark violet I had lost myself in so many times. Smiling, she lowered herself down onto me. The touch of her skin almost threw me into consciousness. It felt indisputably real - the warmth, the velvet moisture, the intimacy of her scent.

  In wonder, I reached up, threading my fingers through that thick veil of hair, the familiarity of touch quickening. Her lips caught my lower lip, the promise of other caresses silently mirrored in the lovemaking of our mouths; a kiss that sprung open all the memories of our earlier embraces. The first weeks of our courtship, when we would make love all night, then stumble around the mark
ets of Calcutta drunk with exhaustion; when just the smell of her hair would make me hard, her voice whispering out all our future plans, spinning patterns against those tropical nights. This and every other moment ran through my mind like the patterns of a kaleidoscope, but by now her mouth had started to travel down my chest, her long cool fingers as real as the taste of her, her lips a tight band of heat throwing tremors down my thighs.

  Suddenly the memory of her death reverberated through me like one of the subterranean explosions I’d choreographed.

  15

  It was well after midday when I woke. The sun was a crimson prickling against my eyeballs, forcing the lids open. I lay there in that delicious non-state like an amoeba, happy for a time, until a burning sensation across my shoulders threw me into full consciousness. I sat up and reached behind me to touch my smarting skin. My fingers were sticky with blood.

  I got up and walked over to the mirror: four deep scratches ran across my shoulders. I touched them - it felt as if I’d caught my back on a row of pins or nails. Then I remembered the dream, the lovemaking with Isabella. I studied the marks again, but they seemed too closely spaced for fingernails.

  I flung back the covers on the bed; the bottom sheet was spotted with blood. Several long black hairs lay on the pillow. I picked one up and wound it around my finger. Isabella’s? It was a crazy thought. But part of me wanted it to have belonged to her, for the dream to have been real. Just then I noticed a tiny brown feather halfway down the mattress. I lifted it and blew it across the bed. Could it have come from one of the pillows?

  The miniature doorway chiselled into Isabella’s gravestone came to my mind. I went to the library and looked up Nectanebo II in one of Isabella’s reference books. Some of the information I’d gleaned from Hermes and from Amelia Lynhurst’s thesis was there, along with a photograph of the Pharaoh’s empty sarcophagus and a sidebar with information about it. It was now housed in the British Museum. I studied the photograph again, looking vainly for new clues. I noticed the sidebar was credited to Hugh Wollington of the British Museum. Hugh Wollington. Presumably the man was an Egyptologist but I couldn’t remember Isabella ever mentioning him. Perhaps he’d be able to give me more information about the astrarium. Moses, Ramses III, Nectanebo, Banafrit and Cleopatra were all linked to the astrarium. Maybe Hugh Wollington had more information about how they were connected and maybe he knew whether there was any correlation between the hieroglyphs inscribed on the astrarium and those on Nectanebo’s sarcophagus. I didn’t yet know quite how to ask without showing him the astrarium itself but maybe I could work out a way en route. I was gripped with a growing excitement. I hadn’t been home in a long time. This might be what I needed to gain some perspective alongside new information, and a trip to England might get me away from the clutches of those looking for the astrarium. An image of a helmeted face on a motorcycle suddenly sprang up in my mind, followed quickly by those of Omar and his sinister sidekick. It would be good to be free of this constant paranoia of being followed. But, almost as importantly, going to England would allow me to see my father and Gareth for the first time since Isabella’s drowning. At the thought, a wave of desire to be with family and in familiar surroundings engulfed me.

  I was interrupted by a knocking at the front door. Carefully, I looked through the peephole: a youth of about sixteen waited on the other side. I recognised him from the offices of the Alexandrian Oil Company.

  ‘From Mr Fartime,’ he told me, handing me a note as I opened the door.

  The garish modern decor of the Alexandrian Oil Company’s headquarters on Sherif Street reflected Mr Fartime’s personal dilemma. He regarded himself as a twentieth-century entrepreneur trapped in a nineteenth-century paradigm that barely creaked along. He’d done his utmost to defuse the classical proportions of the office with oddly inappropriate modern furniture, but he hadn’t been able to apply the same modernisation to the organisation of the company and was constantly bombarding me with long anecdotes about the antiquated bureaucracy he was forced to work within.

  As I entered his office, Mr Fartime struggled out of the white leather chair he’d been sitting in, a copy of Time magazine still in his hand. I noticed the cover featured a smiling Noam Chomsky. Before I had a chance to wonder what Mr Fartime made of the American activist, he’d tossed the magazine onto his desk and was reaching out to shake my hand.

  ‘Thank you for coming so quickly, Oliver. Again, my condolences on your terrible loss . . .’

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied, reflecting that the last time Mr Fartime had seen Isabella had been at a dinner party during which they’d argued over the ecological merits of the Aswan dam. Fortunately the dispute had been interrupted when the hostess - a well-to-do Syrian-Egyptian socialite with many connections to the European community - had lost a microphone concealed in her low-cut evening dress. She was leaning across the table to make a point when the device fell out and landed in the soup tureen. The American ambassador had fished the microphone out and remarked, ‘If you must spy, Madame Abdallah, allow us the honour of supplying you with the latest technology. Our Soviet friends tend to be a little clunky in the design department.’ At which the whole table had burst into laughter. But although the evening had ended up on a light note, I remember being acutely aware of the fact that every guest must have left wondering whether their safety in Egypt had been compromised by some unfavourable remark they’d let slip about the regime.

  I sat down opposite Mr Fartime, wondering if he too was recalling the occasion.

  He indicated my beard. ‘My friend, have you joined my more religious brothers?’ he joked - a reference to the bearded Muslims who had started to appear more often in the Westernised city recently.

  I smiled. ‘No, no new-found faith. I’ve just been too busy to shave.’

  ‘I understand. I trust the additional security at the villa is to your liking?’ he went on. ‘I was concerned by the unduly rough treatment you received at the hands of our esteemed police force after your wife’s demise. The Alexandrian Oil Company may be a government institution but we like to look after our consultants, especially our “Diviner”. I promise that from now on we will be better hosts.’

  Mr Fartime’s English was a quaint mixture of Victorian phrasing and Arabic proverbs. Despite Isabella’s reservations about his politics, I had always liked the man. Nevertheless, I watched his face carefully now. Were his comments a way of assessing my response to the police interrogation? Perhaps even an attempt to find out whether Isabella had discovered anything during that final dive?

  ‘The extra guard does make the place feel more secure,’ I replied carefully, ‘so thank you. But I’m sure this isn’t the reason you called me in so urgently. Is everything all right at the field?’

  ‘More than all right. The drilling rates are holding up nicely. Diviner indeed. No, this is a personal matter.’

  I shifted in my seat, a little nervous now, racking my mind for memories of any transgression I might have committed.

  ‘I have received some news of your younger sibling Gareth,’ he said quickly.

  I sat up. The last phone conversation I’d had with my brother came back to me: the broken words, his sudden weeping at the end. Ever since my mother’s death, my brother had become more isolated, despite the entourage that hung around him. Then there was his addiction - the self-aggrandising that came with amphetamine use, the manic phone calls. And, in the throes of these depressions, Gareth had always turned to Isabella for emotional guidance, a lifeline now cut off.

  ‘He hasn’t—’

  ‘He is alive, fear not,’ Mr Fartime cut in. ‘His female friend rang the office this morning looking for you. Your brother has taken a turn for the worse, as they would say in England. His friend seems to think you should return to England as soon as possible to provide some guidance. She was most insistent - a rather strong-willed young woman.’

  Mr Fartime’s smile was entirely without irony and I sensed that his concern was genuine.
Gareth had mentioned a girlfriend on the phone, Zoë, but I’d never met her. At least she sounded responsible, I thought. I’d been concerned that Isabella’s death would cause Gareth to relapse and the promise I’d made to her to look after him reverberated now in my mind.

  As if reading my thoughts, Mr Fartime leaned across the desk. ‘I had a brother too, once. He was ten years younger. I lost him in the 1973 war. There are many things I would have done differently if I had been given the chance, and knowing my brother better would have been one.’ He paused, a little embarrassed at venturing into such intimate terrain. ‘Go to him, Oliver. The company is happy to give you four weeks. The field can spare you and, given your own personal circumstances, it is the least we can do.’

  There was another awkward pause as he stared down at his shoes. ‘I knew your wife’s father, you know. My father worked as his manager at the cotton mill - before 1956, naturally. ’

  ‘Naturally,’ I repeated, surprised once again by how entangled Alexandrian society was.

  ‘We trust that you will return at the end of those four weeks, Oliver. There is more work to be done at Abu Rudeis, and after that minor earthquake . . .’

  He coughed politely, embarrassed that he’d had to refer to the tremor that had killed Isabella. The memory of the sphinx tumbling down to the sea floor flooded my mind. I quickly shut it out, not wanting to think about it here.