Sphinx

by T. S. Learner

  ‘The fault line reached as far as the oilfield?’ I asked instead, genuinely surprised. ‘I thought it was an underwater tremor. Why wasn’t I told?’

  ‘The well was undamaged, and you had enough trouble to deal with at that time.’ Mr Fartime coughed again.

  ‘I’ll be back by early June, I promise. The reservoir is my project too, don’t forget.’

  ‘I will keep the villa vacant for you,’ he said, with a nod. Pushing back his chair, he hauled his large frame upright and shook my hand again. ‘Tell me, what was your wife really looking for during that dive?’

  The question came so out of left field that I struggled to retain my composure. I thought quickly. ‘A rare fish,’ I said. ‘You must remember what an ecologist she was?’

  Mr Fartime chuckled. ‘Alas, I’m afraid I do.’

  When I returned to the villa I found Ibrihim waving an ancient pistol around wildly as he berated the new guard in loud and abusive Arabic. Behind them a broken kitchen window was visible. As soon as Ibrihim saw me his face fell.

  ‘Monsieur Oliver, you must tell this lazy dog of a guard that he cannot fall asleep on the job! Otherwise we will all be murdered in our sleep! Praise Allah, nothing has been stolen from the villa this time. Next time we might not be so lucky. Please, you have authority.’ He dragged me over to the sheepish guard. Questioning the man, I found out that the villa had been broken into while Ibrihim was visiting the mosque. The guard, who had indeed fallen asleep, had been woken up by the sound of breaking glass and had managed to chase off a youth. I tried to get a further description of the youth, but it was already evening and the guard hadn’t got a clear view of the intruder’s face. But he was sure he’d been wearing a gun. No ordinary thief, then. As I stared up at the high iron gates I wondered how the intruder had managed to scale them and climb over the spikes at the top. Certainly the surrounding brick walls were too high to climb. The irrational idea that he might have flown over flickered through my mind. I dismissed it instantly, horrified at my own mental fragility. Undeniably, though, any sense of safety within those four walls was gone and I was determined to get out of Egypt before my pursuers caught up with me - or before I lost my mind completely.

  As soon as the others had gone back into the house, I walked around to the back and checked on the astrarium. Its burial site appeared undisturbed, the soil untouched, but now there was no way I could leave it buried there.

  I spent the next day organising my trip back to London. Throwing myself into packing was a way of distracting myself from my growing anxiety about leaving Isabella’s grave behind. I couldn’t help feeling that I was abandoning her, but I needed to see Gareth. I was worried about the call that had been made to Mr Fartime and the uneasy feeling that Gareth’s addiction had begun to consume him played on my conscience. Suddenly, an idea occurred to me. Perhaps Isabella had told Gareth a little more about the astrarium when she’d asked him to produce the drawing? I crossed the room to the shelf and pulled out the paper hidden at the back. If anything, he might be able to solve the cipher. He’d always been brilliant at puzzles. I pushed the paper deep into the inside pocket of my backpack.

  That evening I sat on the bed, Isabella’s letter in my hand. Her distinctive handwriting pulled images of her like threads from my memory - Isabella cheering with my brother during a Carlisle United match; Isabella giving a paper at the Royal Archaeological Society in London; Isabella dancing wildly in the flat to the Rolling Stones.

  I looked back at the short note.

  Oliver, forgive me, I’ve never been completely honest with you. All those years ago, Ahmos Khafre did not only tell me my death date; he also told me I might have been able to save my own life if I discovered the astrarium in time.

  The fact that Isabella had really believed the mystic, to the point of changing wills and building bridges with Cecilia, made me realise how profoundly our cultural and philosophical outlooks differed. If I’d had the courage to confront those differences when she’d been alive, instead of hoping that she’d grow out of them, could I have saved her? A sickening sense of guilt swept through me: I should have stopped her from diving that day. We should never have come back to Egypt.

  I walked over to the balcony and glanced down at the garden. The buds on the pomegranate bush that I’d planted above the astrarium were beginning to unfurl. It was as if I could feel the presence of the astrarium through the thick canvas in which I’d wrapped it, through the wooden box, through the foot of soil above it. And as I kept staring, I had the distinct impression it was staring back. I shook my head as if to rid myself from its influence. It wasn’t real, simply the power of suggestion. But Hermes’s words kept coming back to me. Do not underestimate the astrarium.

  But how was I going to get it to England? If I took it in my luggage there was the chance I’d be arrested at the airport for attempting to smuggle an antiquity out of the country. I couldn’t afford another interrogation. Perhaps I could just take the pages with the transcribed hieroglyphics that Hermes had given me - would they be enough information for Hugh Wollington? But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to leave the astrarium behind. I was bound to it now, committed. It was part of Isabella and so part of me too. And if whoever wanted it was prepared to kill Barry, I knew it was only a matter of time before they got past the security here. I had to take it with me.

  Then I remembered Bill Anderson’s boast days earlier.

  I met the Texan at the Alexandria Sporting Club. Once a prestigious country club where only the privileged few could be members, it had its own racetrack, croquet and lawn-bowls lawns and an eighteen-hole golf course. The large reception room with its Tudor-style wooden beams and hunting trophies reminded me of an English country house. After the incident at the villa I’d been alternately favouring as somewhere to meet public places or the maze of the back alleys where it was impossible to be followed. The two of us sat sipping mint juleps on a terrace looking over the immaculately mown lawns and ornamental topiary, the gentle thud of tennis balls echoing in the distance. In one corner of the room sat a dignified older gentleman wearing a red pasha hat and a red carnation in his blazer. He was holding court with a group of women who must have been well into their seventies, dressed in faded but elegant day dresses and hats. We watched as he kissed the hand of one of the women, who laughed coquettishly.

  ‘Who’s that? Methuselah?’ Anderson asked, grinning.

  ‘That, my friend, is Fargally Pasha, once known as the King of Cotton and past friend to kings, film stars and dictators, ’ I answered. ‘Now condemned to his memories.’

  ‘We all end up like that sooner or later,’ Anderson quipped and raised his glass to the old man.

  Smiling, Fargally Pasha toasted us back.

  Anderson turned to me. ‘So what’s this mysterious favour I can do for you?’

  I leaned forward. ‘In the Sinai you said you could get anything through Customs under the guise of emergency equipment.’

  ‘Wasn’t I under the influence of an illegal substance at the time?’

  ‘Come on, Bill, I’m serious. There’s something I need to get back to London; something Isabella cared about very deeply.’

  He stared at me, then thoughtfully stirred his cocktail with the sprig of mint that decorated it. ‘How big is it?’

  ‘It’s stored in a box about eighteen inches by twelve. If it were opened, no one except a very experienced archaeologist would recognise it.’

  ‘Jesus, Oliver, you’re not getting into that game?’

  ‘If you think I intend to flog the damn thing to the highest bidder, you’re wrong. It’ll end up back in Egypt sooner or later. I’m just carrying out Isabella’s last wishes - and trust me, it’s not what I want to be doing.’

  Anderson’s eyebrows shot up in disbelief. ‘The best I can do is fly it direct to Aberdeen on the company’s private plane, then have it couriered down to London. If it’s marked with the company’s insignia, no one’s going to open it.’ />
  ‘That’s good enough. How quickly?’

  ‘I can organise for you to put it on the plane yourself, and it should get to London a couple of days after you. My equipment flies on ahead of me.’

  I lifted my cocktail glass in a toast. ‘Anderson, I owe you.’

  ‘And I intend to collect.’ He clinked his glass against mine.

  16

  On the afternoon of my departure I visited the Brambillas’ villa. When I arrived, Francesca was sitting in a reclining chair, her eyes shut, in the walled courtyard in a small circle of sunlight beside the pond. Several carp, hopeful for food, weaved over each other in a blur of pale gold, gathering under her shadow where it fell across the water.

  The garden was still beautiful despite its neglect. Frangipani branches cut a pattern across the sky and vines trailed across some of the paths. Someone - probably the teenage son of the lodgers - had spray-painted a rough facsimile of football goalposts on the stone back wall and scrawled Viva Al Olympi! It was peaceful, safe.

  I sat down in an empty chair beside Francesca, wondering whether to wake her or not.

  ‘So you have come to evict me?’ she said abruptly, her eyes still closed, her voice resounding through the courtyard like the cry of a tragedienne.

  I stayed silent, and after a moment she opened her eyes and gazed at the weaving mess of fish.

  ‘I just want some answers, Francesca.’

  ‘What kind of answers?’

  ‘Why was Isabella’s body violated?’

  ‘If my granddaughter’s body was violated I know nothing about it.’

  I tried to read her face but it was as tightly closed as her knotted hands.

  ‘I would love to believe you, but I don’t,’ I replied carefully.

  She sighed, still staring down at the fish. ‘Do you have any idea how terrible it is to be born on the wrong side of history? ’ Only now did she look at me, her gaze bitter. ‘Of course you don’t; you’re English.’

  ‘I was born on the wrong side of class.’

  ‘That’s different. You can buy yourself out of that situation, as you yourself, Oliver, have done,’ she replied harshly. Then she reached into a pocket and pulled out a cigarillo.

  Reaching into my own pocket, I offered her the gold Gucci lighter that a Saudi client had once given me. Francesca lowered her face towards the flame and the tip of the cigarillo burst into a glowing ember. She exhaled; a great curl of white smoke hung on the still air.

  ‘No,’ she continued. ‘To be born on the wrong side of history is to be trapped in great sweeping circumstances over which one has absolutely no control. This was our country. Mohammed Ali personally invited my grandfather, a civil engineer, to Egypt, placed him into his cabinet. And my grandfather built roads, waterways, great architectural feats. But even if my family’s hearts were Egyptian, their souls were Italian. This was what I was taught, and it was not a contradiction.’

  She was becoming hysterical. Aadeel emerged from the villa - I guessed he had been listening - and hurried over to the elderly woman.

  ‘Madame, the lodgers,’ he murmured, pressing a blue pill into her hand.

  ‘A curse on them,’ she muttered, but took the pill with a sip of water from a glass that Aadeel held out. Then she waited, ostentatiously disregarding the servant until he slipped back into the house.

  ‘My son was also an idealist,’ she said, more calmly. ‘We all thought that Mussolini, like Julius Caesar, would unite Alexandria with the Mediterranean world. We were not alone in this delusion: the Greeks thought the same, only their great dream was the old Ptolemaic order - Athens and Alexandria. Dreams like that have their own fuel - economic polarity, the ambition of a new order where everyone knows their natural place.’

  Francesca’s philosophising riled the humanist in me. ‘There is no such thing as people having a natural place,’ I interjected.

  But the old matriarch was determined to finish her tirade. ‘Those soldiers marched into that desert knowing they were going to die, and many did. The rest were herded together and interned, like animals. That was the first time this family was on the wrong side of history. The second time was Nasser and the revolution. Even then my son stood firm. “Times will change, Mama, you’ll see. Our time will come, we just have to wait,” he told me - the fool. The third time was the Suez Crisis; again, it was the English who let us down. Do you know what they call that incident here in Egypt? The triad of cowardice - the French, the British and the Israelis. We Italians, along with every other European, lost everything overnight. The Jews were the first to leave, or disappear mysteriously in the night. Others followed. But not this family. Paolo was determined. “So now I am the manager of my own company, but I will own it again, you will see, Mama.” The wrong side of history, Oliver - it killed him, thirty-seven years old. And we, his parents, had to watch him die of humiliation!’

  Again, I could see Aadeel hovering in the gathering twilight. Indifferent to his anxiety, Francesca continued. ‘Paolo’s death turned Giovanni into a desperate fool. And desperate men reach out for all kinds of false hopes. He thought he could use the old ways, the ancient ways, to change things back. I had no choice - I had to pretend I didn’t know what was happening. In the end, it was all Giovanni had left.’ I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t.

  ‘Is this to do with the “performances” you wrote to Cecilia about?’ I prompted finally.

  ‘You have been talking to Cecilia?’

  ‘She mentioned a few things . . .’

  ‘She is a liar! Giovanni worshipped Isabella. We were parents to her, not grandparents!’ Francesca fell back into her chair, exhausted by her fury. ‘I have said enough. Throw me out of my own house, but I refuse to divulge my husband’s secrets.’

  ‘What about your granddaughter? Doesn’t she deserve respect?’ I grabbed her hand; the wrinkled liver-spotted skin was as thin as rice paper. ‘Francesca, they stole her heart.’

  She snatched her hand away, her face closing over like stone. ‘You should have protected Isabella. Isn’t that what husbands are for?’ she said with quiet spite.

  In the branches above us, a dove began to coo, an ironically peaceful sound considering the tension between us. Enraged, I battled the impulse to hit out at the old woman.

  ‘I told you, I know nothing.’ She tried to stand, her elbows shaking wildly as she grasped the sides of the chair. ‘Aadeel, begin packing our things! We are to be evicted!’

  Her shouting startled the dove, which flew noisily out of the tree, dislodging leaves that showered down over the old woman’s shoulders. She did not brush them off.

  Aadeel glanced at me.

  I stood. ‘It’s all right. No one is going to be evicted. I just came to say goodbye. I’m going away for a few weeks.’

  Francesca sank back into her chair. I waited, unable to pull myself away without a final goodbye from her.

  ‘Of course you’re going. The English always do,’ she muttered into the descending dusk.

  I sat back against the leather upholstery of the oil company’s ancient Bentley, the rich smell of the interior mixed with the driver’s cigarette smoke. After taking a deliberately meandering route to the little airstrip I’d placed the astrarium into the cargo hold of Anderson’s jet earlier that day and the thought of it flying on ahead of me was consoling; as if something of Isabella would be waiting for me upon my arrival in London. Cocooned in the car, the painful events of the last month seemed to stream behind us like the wake of a ship.

  I wound down the window and the music of the city - honking vehicles, the cries of the street vendors, the bells on the horses’ harnesses - rushed in. Old Ramadan decorations stretched gaudily between two buildings, tired tinsel and paper ribbons waving palely. Twilight. Already the streets were bustling with night shoppers; street pedlars selling figs, dates, peanuts, fresh fish caught that day - their wares carefully spread out on sheets of canvas; young women with extravagant hairstyles and Western clothes hurryin
g home from offices and shops; the old men holding court at the café tables.

  The memory of Isabella’s childlike pride at showing me her city, her hand holding mine in this very seat, sputtered on and off like a faulty fluorescent light.

  ‘The airport?’ the driver shouted over the traffic noise. ‘We go to airport, right?’

  ‘Shukran - thank you.’

  I turned back to the window, trying to suppress an unexpected wave of sadness. Leaving is not losing her, and memory is a kind of afterlife, I told myself, but I found no consolation in the observation.

  The car headed out towards the airport, past the sewage works and the satellite towns beginning to spring up around the outskirts of Alexandria, and into the cool desert. The oil refinery’s flaming towers roared up against the darkening horizon like great primordial torches and finally my panic began to flatten out. With the blind sky yawning above the speeding car, I thought how Isabella would have loved this night.

  17

  London, June 1977

  The hazy English sunlight was a shock after the glare of Egypt. The drive from Heathrow took me through the factorylands, into the outer London suburbs, then on to Chiswick with its large Victorian houses and gardens, into denser Shepherds Bush, past the terraced boarding houses of Notting Hill and finally into West Hampstead. The suburban landscape dragged me back into the smells, sights and sounds of England.

  I stepped out of the taxi. There was the faint sound of reggae music, birdsong, and the feel of that particular humidity that always laced the early summer air - a languid sensuality that invariably surprised even the Londoners. I glanced at the Victorian terrace; our flat was located on the top floor. The curtains were pulled across. Staring up it was as if I saw Isabella parting them and peering down, her anxious face searching the street for me in that way she always did when she was expecting me back from a trip. But the curtains stayed closed and my legs almost buckled underneath me from grief.