‘I have heard of the existence of the astrarium before,’ Wollington went on. ‘It has become something of a holy grail amongst certain archaeologists, not only for your wife.’
He walked over to a filing cabinet and after rummaging around finally pulled out a facsimile document. ‘This letter, dated 1799, was sent from Alexandria by Sonnini de Manoncour to Napoleon. It details how although he failed to find the Ramses/Nectanebo skybox, he had the good fortune to find a section of an inscribed stone tablet which he was convinced was of great religious and magical value. As you can see, the letter was bequeathed to the British Museum by the Coptic Egyptologist and mystic Ahmos Khafre.’
I realised this had to be a copy of the very letter that Isabella had seen all those years ago in Goa. Fascinated, I tried to make out the ornate archaic French script, but Hugh Wollington all too quickly put it back into the cabinet.
‘So Ahmos Khafre was reputable?’ I asked, trying to sound casually interested.
‘As an Egyptologist, his reputation was impeccable. As for his other beliefs, I’m not one to pass judgement. But the letter has been proved authentic.’
‘How did the museum get hold of it?’
‘Khafre bequeathed all his possessions and writings to us - some were more useful than others. Interestingly, he told the museum exactly when to expect them.’ He paused, perhaps for effect. ‘He predicted the date of his own death, you see - to the hour. Amazing.’
I frowned, as much because of the smug glee in Wollington’s voice as the actual morbidity of the matter.
Wollington pulled on white cotton gloves and lifted the astrarium to examine the underside. ‘It’s always amusing to see how these fakes work.’
I was startled back to reality. ‘Fake?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry to tell you this is probably a forgery - possibly seventeenth century. Most likely constructed for an alchemist as part of his collection of tricks to convince prospective clients. Any object that could be associated with Nectanebo II, the great Egyptian magician Pharaoh, would be marvellous for setting the scene.’
I stared at him. I knew he was lying. The question was why.
‘I tell you, I was there when my wife excavated it from the sea floor.’ It was hard to disguise my anger at Wollington’s superciliousness. Through the glass partition I could see other museum officials looking up from their desks at the sharpness in my tone.
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you. I didn’t say it wasn’t an expensive forgery. Besides, as I said before, it is ridiculous to think that something of the Pharaonic period, and as complex as this, would be in such pristine condition.’
His tone of voice had become distinctly patronising, and only served to convince me further that the artefact was genuine. So he wanted the astrarium as well. But why the clumsy attempt at deception? Even if he managed to persuade me of its worthlessness, surely he couldn’t believe I’d leave it with him?
‘As a geophysicist, I can tell you such preservation is rare but not unheard of,’ I said. ‘Sometimes the mud on the ocean floor is so dense that oxygen can’t permeate it. It also appears that the mechanism might have originally been preserved in oil, which would have created a watertight seal.’
‘Mr Warnock, you are clutching at straws,’ Wollington said, his smile a grimace. ‘Naturally I understand you are upset, given the circumstances of its discovery.’
His earlier wry humour appeared extremely disingenuous now, a fake benevolence designed to both make me trust him and lower my guard. Instead, a steely and thinly disguised aggression now ran under his voice and I noticed that his whole body had tensed up as if he were preparing to fight. I moved back behind the chair, my mind switching to an animal instinct, the prey preparing to run from the hunter.
‘Well, if it’s a worthless fake, I’ll just take it home,’ I said in a deliberately casual manner, stretching out my hand to take the artefact. Unexpectedly, his own hand shot out and closed around my wrist. I yanked it back but Wollington was surprisingly agile for a man of his bulk.
‘Actually, as I warned you earlier, there are protocols to be observed, even for fakes.’
Wollington’s whole tone had changed and I caught a glimpse of the soldier beneath the academic - a quiet but palpable violence. I felt momentarily intimidated and my anxiety mounted. For a moment we struggled. Then, just as quickly, he reverted to a neutral friendliness, releasing my arm.
‘Look, it won’t take long. If you don’t mind waiting here?’
He smiled, an open, reassuring smile now. Reluctantly, I sat down. Perhaps I was being paranoid. I watched through the glass partition as he entered the adjoining office and approached an officious-looking colleague. They exchanged a few words, then looked at the partition. Their gazes didn’t connect with mine and I guessed it must be one-way glass. They appeared to be arguing. The older man reached for the phone but Wollington grabbed his arm, preventing him from picking up the receiver.
Wollington’s shirt sleeve rode up, revealing a tattoo. Then, just as quickly, he gestured and the tattoo disappeared. Although it was hard to be sure from that distance I thought I recognised the distinctive shape of a Ba, a tattoo similar to Isabella’s. The unexpected congruence of images hit me with a jolt.
The sound of a door slamming nearby galvanised me into action. I put the astrarium back into my rucksack and left the office as fast as I could without attracting attention.
The museum’s entrance hall was milling with tourists. I stood at the foot of the broad marble stairs. On the far side of the hall I noticed a museum official scanning the crowd. I ducked behind a pillar. Just then a lift door opened and five security guards, serious in their intent, stepped out. At the orders of their superior they separated and began pushing their way through the tourists and museum visitors. I could see they were looking for someone. I glanced around wildly; nearby a heavily pregnant young mother with a small child was struggling with a stroller. The child had just begun bawling. Lowering my head I made my way across and offered to help. Without waiting for a reply I soothed the child, strapped her into the stroller and escorted both mother and child towards the exit. Pushing the stroller, I walked right past the guards as I smiled and chatted to the thankful woman - we must have looked like the epitome of a young family. No one gave me even a second glance. But as we walked past the reception desk a phone rang. A young girl answered, then looked over in my direction. Mustering all my acting abilities I ignored her. I must have been a foot from the revolving glass doors when she called the guards over. Without a word, I handed the stroller back to the mother and exited as fast as I could without panicking. Outside I broke into a run, flagged down a taxi and jumped inside.
As the cab swung around the corner I caught sight of the security guards racing out of the building. I ducked down in my seat.
20
That night I lay in bed torn between exhaustion and the fear of having another nightmare about Isabella. My body was rigid with tension. Eyes wide open, I watched the shadows on the ceiling. It was impossible to relax. I’d bolted the front door and actually pushed a cupboard against it but it had felt like a ridiculous attempt to keep out the inevitable raid I was expecting. Surely Hugh Wollington could trace me to the apartment if he really wanted to. Suddenly an unearthly howl sounded outside. I jumped, terrified, steeling myself for some supernatural visitation. The howl was followed by a low growling and a miaow - cats fornicating. Relieved, I laughed at myself, then glanced at the alarm clock. I was amazed to see it was already five in the morning. Abandoning the bed, I decided to distract myself. I needed to find out if Isabella had left any clues amongst her London papers. Knowing how extensive her research had been, I was hoping she might have jotted down some notes indicating to whom and where the astrarium belonged, if found. I couldn’t carry the device around for ever. I needed to get rid of it as soon as possible. While I was reaching up to a top shelf for a box file, a book became dislodged from a lower shelf and fell onto the carpet. It was a collection of English p
oetry. As I picked it up, an inscription on the inside cover caught my eye: For Isabella - all my love, Enrico Silvio, Oxford 1970.
Slipped between the pages was an old black-and-white photograph. A group of people stood poised in front of an archaeological dig, a strange formality to the composition as if they were members of a travelling group or club. In the front row, crouching down and smiling into the camera, was a very young Isabella. Her hand rested on the knee of the woman seated behind her - Amelia Lynhurst. To my surprise Amelia had once been quite attractive. Seated next to her was Giovanni Brambilla, Isabella’s grandfather - I recognised him from the family photographs. He wore a safari suit and an embroidered fez, and looked authoritarian even in his eighties, his deep-set eyes and heavy eyebrows scowling at the camera. Standing behind him was an effeminate-looking man with long hair who stood in profile - a younger Hermes Hemiedes. On his other side stood a strangely familiar figure, a man in his late thirties with a mop of unruly hair and a piercing gaze. He wore a British army uniform and the facial features stood out immediately despite the unfamiliar framing of hair - Hugh Wollington. So he had known Isabella, but not from some conference. I paused. I felt somehow like a voyeur, reaching back into Isabella’s past, more so here, surrounded by the objects she’d lived with. I glanced up. The room was beginning to fill with the bluish light of dawn. Again, the unsettling feeling that I was being directed, that I was only part of a puzzle, the shape of which remained obscure. I shivered, filled with a sense of foreboding. I’d escaped the threat in Egypt, or at least I thought I had, but now, after the incident at the museum and while I stared down at the photograph of Hugh Wollington’s face, the net felt as if it was once more closing in.
On the back of the photograph were inscribed the words:Behbeit el-Hagar, 1965.
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The lines of poetry resonated. I glanced at the book in which the photograph had been hidden - was there any connection? I searched through it and found the three lines in Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What had the group been excavating? I remembered Hermes telling me about Behbeit el-Hagar, an important site in relation to the last days of the Pharaohs. Was it linked to the astrarium in some way? And why had Hugh Wollington lied to me?
I touched the inscription on the inside cover, the slight indentation unfurling a whole scenario in my imagination. An affair, lovemaking, that lay embedded in my wife’s past, secret, unshared; the shadowy figure of a man she’d never told me about. Each new disclosure about Isabella’s past separated us further. How well had I really known her? Was the woman I’d loved an artifice? A composite of all that I’d wanted her to be rather than what she actually was? The idea was too distressing to dwell on. I needed to believe in us, in the authenticity of the marriage - there was little else left.
I glanced back at the name, racking my memory. Enrico Silvio. I’d never heard it before. I knew the Yeats poem was about the end of Christianity - my mother had made me memorise it as a child - but the imagery reverberated in different ways: the circling falcon that had lost its master, the sphinx galvanised into a slow awakening by the possibility of the end of the known world, the crowing of the desert birds flying wildly around the blinking eyes of the colossus; it was an allegory that felt uncomfortably relevant to my own disintegrating world.
I looked around the room, thinking. Isabella had a collection of old address books that she had never thrown away. They had to be somewhere. I searched the room several times. Eventually my gaze fell on a collection of old bags hanging from the back of the door. I went through each of them carefully. Finally I got lucky. It was the beaded shoulder bag I remembered her wearing when we were courting - I knew she’d had it since her student days. The inside smelled musty and the torn silk lining was stained with perfume, lipstick and crumbs of what I suspected might have been hashish. I turned the bag inside out. Slipped between the lining and the bag itself was an address book. I opened it; the handwriting - a simpler, more looped version of the script I’d known - made my heart lurch. I sat down and turned tentatively to the letter ‘S’. It was just a hunch, an instinct I wasn’t sure I wanted to play out. But there it was: ‘ES’ followed by an Oxford phone number.
I knew it was a long shot - the number must have been over five years old - but it was worth a gamble. I glanced at my watch - it was already nine in the morning and light now flooded the living room. I reached for the phone and dialled the number. It rang for ages. I was just about to give up when a woman answered: older, foreign. In a curt voice she told me that Enrico was currently in hospital but was due home later that day.
I gave her my name and number and asked her to tell him I was the widower of Isabella Brambilla. Widower. The word felt like a tragedy that had befallen someone else. The woman’s voice tightened at the mention of Isabella’s name, but perhaps I was imagining it.
I put down the receiver, wanting now to escape the history of my marriage, the claustrophobic flat, London itself and my growing sense of being watched.
Outside I heard the sudden noise of someone on the landing. I froze, ready for the pounding on my front door. I sat there calculating how long it would take for me to grab the astrarium and climb out onto the roof. A second later the steps continued down to the ground floor, followed by the slam of the front door - just my neighbour going to work. After my run-in with Hugh Wollington, I was finally completely convinced of the astrarium’s value and authenticity. And there was no doubt that Hugh Wollington had shown an unhealthy interest in it, that he had played an odd game by pretending it was a fake. There was a violence about the man that worried me. Who knew what he might do next? I had to get out of London, I needed to assess my position and work out my next move. But the question was whether I had inadvertently drawn Gareth into this dangerous and possibly fatal web.
The ringing of the phone startled me.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Oliver. Gareth here . . . just checking in like I promised. ’
My brother sounded totally exhausted, but I was relieved to hear his voice.
‘How are you?’ I asked, trying not to sound anxious. ‘Have you been home yet?’
‘Well, I am now. Did you get back to West Hampstead okay?’
‘Kind of. Listen, Gareth, have you noticed anything strange - people following you, weird things like that?’ Again, I attempted to sound calm and rational, although I was starting to wonder whether I wasn’t just a touch paranoid.
‘Just the usual groupies. Why, are you paying someone to spy on me?’ he joked.
I didn’t laugh. ‘Just watch your back, okay?’
‘Jawohl, Herr Kommandant.’
&nb
sp; ‘And take care of yourself.’ He knew I was referring to the drug abuse.
‘Didn’t I say I would?’
His voice was sullen now, hostile; I had to win his trust back.
‘I’m going home later, to see Da. Any messages?’
‘Yeah, tell him I’m not dying. Then the old bastard might get off my back.’
There was a click, then the dial tone. Gareth had put the phone down but the genetic thread between us was still there, vibrating like a lightly plucked guitar string.
That morning I left via the lane behind the building and walked to the tube station. I had decided it would be easier to lose a tail by immersing myself in the anonymity of King’s Cross station and getting a train to go up north. After mingling in with the commuters, I caught a train to my father’s village, the astrarium carefully stowed in my rucksack.
The station was exactly as I’d remembered it - the painted sign hanging over the platform, the wooden tubs of roses at each end. A familiar sight that made me relax instantly. The only new additions were a Cadbury’s chocolate vending machine placed discreetly next to the ticket office and a brand-new telephone booth installed next to the toilets. Mr Wilcott, the stationmaster, whom I’d known all my life, stood at one end of the platform, a tall, hunched-over individual with a limp from a wound he’d received in the Second World War - a story he used to regale us schoolboys with. After whistling to signal the train’s departure, he limped down the platform towards me.
‘Oliver, is that you?’
‘The one and same, Mr Wilcott.’
‘I’m sorry about your wife, lad. I only met her the once but she were a lovely lass.’
The familiarity of his voice hauled me back into safer times, to the never-changing landscape of my childhood. As I listened to his thick northern accent and the small talk about nothing and everything, I suddenly realised how much I missed the unquestioning acceptance, the anchoring, of village life.
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