The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  ‘This is the child?’ Cutting her short, Madame leaned forward to examine me. I felt the full glare of those predator eyes of hers. ‘I will question her myself. Vous permettez, mademoiselle?’

  Miss Mack and I, unsure whom she addressed, both nodded. The inquisition was brief and to the point. In rapid-fire time it elicited the information that, despite having reached the advanced age of eleven, I had never attended a ballet performance, a ballet class or indeed any other kind of dancing class in my entire life. Furthermore, I neither rode, nor played tennis, and my swimming was unreliable. I was not, Madame deduced, sportive.

  ‘Enfin – what can you do, child?’

  ‘Well, I read. I read a lot,’ I said desperately, casting around for an answer and giving her a Cambridge one.

  Madame raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘Do you wish to dance, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘No. Yes. That is, I didn’t, but––’

  ‘Incroyable… Still, I must not be hasty. You have been ill, I must make allowances. I shall be fair. Fair play, as the English never cease reminding us. We shall see with our own eyes. Child – remove your hat, please.’

  I did so. Miss Mack gave a small mew of distress and protest; no one else said a word.

  Madame recovered first. ‘Let us continue,’ she said. ‘Child – bend over and touch your toes… Now, stand straight, raise your arms above your head, and lower them slowly – slowly, Mademoiselle. Enfin, remove your shoes, hold on to the barre and raise yourself on your toes – comme ça, vous voyez?’ She demonstrated. I copied. She sighed. ‘Extend your left leg, point the toe and raise it as high as you can… Mon Dieu, but you’re stiff, I’ve seen a chair, a table, with more animation. Ça suffit.’ She began to turn away. ‘We will not waste each other’s time any longer.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Madame.’ To my astonishment, Frances Winlock pushed past me and spoke. ‘There are umpteen girls in our class who can’t dance very well and never will – and you didn’t turn them away. Lucy wants to learn, she told me so. And besides, you’re not giving her a chance. She’s – she’s – she’s very – acrobatic. She can do these amazing handsprings and cartwheels. Somersaults too… ’

  This lie was brazen: I blushed to the roots of my tragic hair. It was stated with wide-eyed innocence and in a tone of such heartfelt conviction that Miss Mack was completely taken in. ‘Why, Lucy, dear, I never realised––’ she began.

  Mrs Winlock gave her a sharp nudge, and said quickly, ‘Frances, that’s quite enough. But perhaps my daughter has a point, Madame? After all, Lucy will be moving on from Cairo to Luxor in a few weeks, just as we shall, so it’s only a short-term arrangement. Surely you could fit her in? Imagine how much she’d learn from a teacher such as you! And I know Frances would love it if you could… She and Lucy are such friends.’

  I said nothing. I could see Madame was not deceived for an instant. She knew that Frances was lying, and I could no more perform a cartwheel than I could read hieroglyphs. I was an impostor, a fake – and about to be exposed as one. All she had to do was ask me to demonstrate. I saw her eyes gleam with that malicious possibility, but then she seemed to change her mind. Possibly Frances and her mother weighed more with her than all the Stockton and Wiggins and Emerson tribes put together: maybe she felt like playing up to her own reputation for unpredictability; perhaps it was simply that the blatancy of the lie amused her.

  She looked intently at Frances and at me. A long fraught silence ensued, and then she laughed. ‘Well, well, well – you have talents I should never have suspected, Mademoiselle,’ she said in a dry tone. ‘Eh bien, you will be on trial, but since your friend vouches for you, you may attend my class next Tuesday. By then I shall expect you to have learned the first five ballet positions; if you haven’t – out on your ear. Mrs Winlock, Miss Mackenzie – you have exhausted me. I wish you good day.’

  She swept out of the room. When I was sure she was gone I thanked Frances for her generous lie, and her mother for intervening, and Miss Mack for pressing my case; but I was incoherent. I was experiencing fierce emotion, of a kind I’d almost forgotten, and had assumed long gone.

  ‘There, there,’ said Helen Winlock, ‘let’s say no more about it. I reckon we should celebrate, don’t you? Miss Mackenzie––’

  ‘Myrtle, my dear, please.’

  ‘Won’t you and Lucy join us for dinner tonight? I’m letting Frances stay up. If we dine quite early? My husband Herbert will be so pleased to meet you – he’s an archaeologist, out here working for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ll introduce you to a whole bunch of our archaeologist friends if you think you can bear that––’

  Miss Mack’s face lit up: as she was a devotee of tombs and temples, nothing could have delighted her more. She demurred, but was soon won round.

  Later that evening, wearing my best dress and with my patchy tufts of hair artistically concealed by a scarf, I found myself at a huge table in the very centre of the glittering Shepheard’s dining room, Frances seated next to me and explaining in a whisper who everyone was. That was the first time I met her father, Herbert Winlock, and the colleagues whose photographs now rest in my albums, forever frozen at that supreme moment of triumph that was almost a year away.

  ‘And who is that?’ I asked, indicating a man seated near her father, who seemed somewhat isolated and withdrawn, neither participating in the repartee nor sharing the easy manners and good humour of the other guests. So far, the only remark he’d made, was a curt, ‘Tommyrot’. It had come at the end of a long discussion between Frances’s father and the man she had pointed out as the senior curator of Egyptology at the Met, a small, quietly spoken Bostonian named Albert Lythgoe. Neither seemed to mind the brusque comment: Lythgoe raised an eyebrow, Winlock grinned, and they continued their discussion serenely.

  ‘That’s Howard Carter,’ Frances replied. ‘He’s an archaeologist too. He works for the Earl of Carnarvon, who has the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Mr Carter is an especial friend of mine. I’ll introduce you one day, but be warned, Lucy: he has one devil of a temper. Daddy says he’s the rudest man he’s ever known.’

  Howard Carter seemed to resent the lack of reaction to his ‘Tommyrot’ remark. He slopped some wine in his glass and slumped back in his chair, staring off into space. He was in his late forties, I judged, hawk-nosed, dark-haired, ill at ease, broodingly assertive even when silent. After a brief interval, he rose to his feet and, without a word to his companions, walked out.

  I watched him leave with interest. To me, Mr Carter looked like an outsider – it takes one to know one, of course.

  TWO

  The Opening of the Mouth

  The ‘Opening of the Mouth’ was an important Egyptian ritual in which an inanimate object, such as a statue or one who was no longer alive, like a mummy, was symbolically brought to life… different adzes were used for the symbolic cutting open… and several mummies have been found on which there are small cuts in the bandages in the region of the mouth.

  www.britishmuseum.org

  6

  Cairo was a relatively small city then, not the spreading metropolis it has become since. The haunts favoured by visiting Americans and Europeans were limited in number, so I saw Howard Carter often over the following days, though it was some time before I’d actually be introduced to him. He was not staying at Shepheard’s, I learned, but at the Continental Hotel across the Ezbekieh Gardens, where the Winlocks also had their base. Like them, he visited Shepheard’s daily, using it as an informal club.

  Frances gave me nuggets of information: she said his father had been an artist, who specialised in portraits of animals, that he was the youngest of eleven children and his family had been poor. He’d been farmed out as an infant to two spinster aunts and brought up by them in Norfolk – there his grandfather had been a gamekeeper on a large estate, and there both his parents had been born. That interested me: with my dual nationality, I had a good ear for accents, and the expert Miss Mack had s
harpened it. I was familiar with the unmistakable pronunciations of rural Norfolk from my visits there. Carter’s voice, with its clipped consonants and drawling upper-class vowels, sounded fake. Practised yet unnatural, it had an actorish ring, retaining no trace of his native county that I could hear.

  ‘Whereabouts in Norfolk?’ I asked.

  ‘Swaf-something? Swath-something? I forget.’

  ‘Swaffham? It’s a little town. Some cousins of my father’s live near there.’

  ‘Then you should tell Mr Carter – he’ll like that. But I don’t think he goes back there very often. He came to work in Egypt when he was seventeen. He didn’t have a degree or anything – not like Mr Lythgoe who lectured at Harvard or Mr Mace, our conservationist, who studied at Oxford – or Daddy, who is so brainy and has degrees from Harvard and Leipzig.’ She frowned. ‘He never talks about it, but I reckon Mr Carter scarcely went to school. He could paint well, though – his father taught him. So someone pulled strings and he was given a job in Egypt, copying tomb paintings… He’d never left home, and he’d had very little training, but within a few months he was digging at el-Amarna with the great Flinders Petrie, imagine that! He worked for a while as an inspector for the Department of Antiquities – they control archaeology in Egypt – and he’s been here ever since. Well, he leaves in the summer, we all do – you can’t stay in Egypt then, not when it’s one hundred and forty degrees, and you certainly can’t dig. But he has a house in the desert that’s known as “Castle Carter”, so his home is here. At least, that’s what he says.’

  My interest grew: a man who’d escaped schooling? A castle in the desert? Frances was so much better informed than I: I didn’t know where el-Amarna was or what it signified; I’d never heard of Flinders Petrie. Something about Howard Carter fascinated me – perhaps the fact that I could not decide which aspects of him were genuine, and which fakery or pretence. He had a piratical air, though he disguised it beneath a Homburg hat and gentlemanly, well-cut suits. He had a natty, substantial moustache, large white teeth that flashed in a threatening way when he smiled, a long chin, and sleek hair; he seemed given to mischievous satiric flourishes, raising his hat with great zeal to female guests, for instance, as they crossed paths in the lobby.

  ‘Good morning, my dear lady,’ I once heard him say to a bewildered English visitor who had recently arrived, and who – to judge from her perplexed expression – had not the least idea who he was. And then, on another occasion: ‘Frau von Essen! Guten Morgen, gnädige Frau… and still in occupation, I see. Is Berlin not calling to you?’

  This remark – made at a time when the Great War was fresh in everyone’s memories and when Germans experienced prejudice in British-ruled Egypt – might have been a barb, or mere politesse. Haughty Frau von Essen bridled and gave him a cold stare, to which he responded by baring his teeth in that alarming grin, clicking his heels, and sauntering out of the lobby whistling.

  Over the next few days, I became something of a Howard Carter sleuth; I found myself looking out for him and, more often than not, I’d be rewarded. I’d see him strolling across the Ezbekieh Gardens, carrying a silver-topped cane, the professional beggars giving him, I noticed, a wide berth. Or he’d be taking tea on the terrace at Shepheard’s, sometimes in the company of Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn – the elegant young woman I’d glimpsed at Madame’s dancing class; more often in the company of the rich older women who were its habitués, and with whom he seemed a great favourite: they were always gushing compliments, hanging on his every word.

  ‘So I shinned down the rope to the cave,’ I overheard him say one afternoon, ‘a two-hundred-foot drop below. It was the middle of the night and pitch dark, but I caught the thieves red-handed… Yes, a tomb built for Queen Hatshepsut, so my hopes were high… A sixty-foot passageway into the rock, two hundred tons of rubble to clear, and all we found was an empty unused sarcophagus. The tomb was so well hidden Hatshepsut could have lain there unmolested for millennia. But she ruled as a king, and was determined to be buried as one. So she constructed a new tomb for herself in the Valley, where it was plundered in antiquity like all the others. A king’s status she aped, and a king’s fate she shared.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Carter, too exciting, how marvellously brave,’ one of the admirers sighed – and I silently agreed.

  What I thought of as my best Carter sighting came at the celebrated Mena House Hotel in the desert outside Cairo. It was a place where the rich – British, American, Egyptian and European – went to swim, play tennis or golf, to admire the antiques, to sample the delicious food – or simply to see and be seen. It had originally been built by the Khedive, the then-monarch of Egypt, as a sporting lodge for desert shooting parties; and such shoots, organised by British officers, were still popular. They’d massacre ducks at dawn on the Nile marshes, then assemble at the Mena House for hearty breakfasts of porridge, bacon and eggs.

  The interior was that peculiar marriage I’d begun to recognise as Anglo-Oriental: you’d be served Earl Grey tea while lounging on divans; your scones or Victoria sponge cake would be served by a man in Bedouin robes. You could stroll outside to admire the famous herbaceous borders, where Egyptian gardeners in djellabas kept up a constant watering regime. You’d discover that, thanks to determination, an inexhaustible supply of money and dirt-cheap labour, the lavender, delphiniums and roses of an English manor house garden could be made to thrive in the desert, within yards of the pyramids.

  Carter was alone that evening at Mena House – and he showed no wish to greet or even acknowledge the numerous friends and acquaintances of his who were present. In misfit-mode, scowling and abstracted, he made his way across the terrace, ignoring those who called his name or rose to waylay him. From the windows of the crowded hotel dining room, I watched him stroll outside, and then make his way across the lush lawns, from which the view of the nearby pyramids was justly famous.

  Carter lingered there, in the lurid after-glow that follows an Egyptian sunset, framed by palms, oleanders, roses and dahlias; he was staring in the direction of the desert and the darkening blood-red sky. After a while, he took out a silver cigarette box and a gold holder, lit a cigarette and stood smoking it contemplatively. Outlined against the violent mauve of the oleanders, with the vast black shape of a pyramid looming over him, he remained there for some time. I watched the pyramid creep up on him – a celebrated and eerie effect, caused by some trickery of the light. This uncanny advance continued; then, when the pyramid had crept so close it seemed about to crush the garden and Carter with it, he extracted the cigarette from its glittering holder, threw a precautionary glance over his shoulder, tossed the stub into the flower borders and turned to go.

  I expected him to return to the hotel and was sure he would come across to our table: we were with the Winlocks; Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn, had just joined us, and she had known Carter from her childhood, as Frances had explained. Surely they would catch his eye and, seeing such old friends, he’d gladly join us? I nerved myself for a meeting, but Mr Carter never materialised; when I next looked out to the gardens, darkness had fallen and he had vanished into thin air.

  By then, and just as Miss Mack had hoped, I was discovering what fun was. The days of dutiful perambulations from one must-see tourist site to another, and of religious readings from the guidebooks, were over. We’d dispensed with the regulation afternoon rest period, and abandoned the practice of early, melancholy suppers in our rooms. Now, as Miss Mack liked to say, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to fit in the delights Cairo offered: every morning, Frances and I practised ballet steps; in the afternoons, we explored the city, with her mother as our guide. As each day passed, I learned more about Frances herself – that she had been born in Cairo, which made her an honorary Egyptian, she said; that she had a younger sister, just a shrimp of two-and-a-bit, who was too young to come to Egypt; that she loved the desert and the Valley of the Kings – but also the wild places of America, in particular Maine
, where her family spent summers by the sea, in a house on a remote island.

  With Frances at my side, Cairo opened up to me. I explored the Mousky bazaar with her, wandering the labyrinth of dark lanes and getting lost in the section where they sold antiquities. There, Frances and her mother showed me how to bargain, and tried to train my eye: could I not see? This antika was an obvious fake, but that one, ah, that was the real thing. We made a visit to the famous Gezira Sporting Club to watch a polo match, and there, after a long and incomprehensible series of chukkas, the two teams of sweating British officers lined up, and Lady Evelyn presented the captain of the winning team with a silver cup. It was on that occasion that I met for the first time, and was fleetingly introduced to, Lady Evelyn’s friend, Mrs d’Erlanger, the woman I’d heard her mention that first day at Madame’s dancing class.

  I’d glimpsed the astonishing Mrs d’Erlanger before, speeding through the lobby at Shepheard’s, circling its dance floor in a dress that seemed to be made of liquid silver. I’d watched her run down the steps of the hotel and jump into a car driven by a dashing English lieutenant. I’d seen her in the Sudan courtyard at the bazaar, rifling through a heap of ivory tusks, bargaining for a leopard skin and tossing aside ostrich plumes. I’d watched her decide to buy all of the furs, and then, a second later, none of them… I knew she had travelled out from England with Lady Evelyn and would be continuing on to Luxor with her once Lord Carnarvon arrived, but I couldn’t believe she could be pinned down in such a way. She fascinated Frances, and she fascinated me: I thought of her as an exotic and beautiful bird of passage – an impression Helen Winlock confirmed that day at the polo match. Following my gaze across the gardens to the clubhouse terrace, where the vivid figure of Poppy d’Erlanger could be seen, first at Evelyn’s side, then separated off by an eager phalanx of polo players, she sighed.