The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  ‘She’s exquisite, isn’t she, Lucy?’ Helen said. ‘Those eyes! But she isn’t a woman you can rely on, you know – not like Evelyn… dear Eve’s only twenty, and Poppy d’Erlanger must be, oh, twenty-eight, at least, and she has children too – but Eve is so sensible, whereas Poppy is – well, thoughtless. Lord only knows what goes on in that beautiful head of hers… She’s always agreeing to do this or that, she was supposed to lunch with us last week – but then she simply doesn’t turn up, and forgets to send word, or she stays five minutes and then disappears without explanation. She’s famous for bolting… ’ She laughed. ‘And famous for her charm too, so she’s always forgiven.’

  Poppy d’Erlanger bolted on the occasion of that polo match: one minute she was there, and I was being introduced and shaking her thin, cool hand, and we were making our way into the clubhouse for the post-match tea; the next, there was a vacant chair, and emissaries were being dispatched in quest of her. After a long delay, we learned Mrs d’Erlanger had left the club a few minutes before.

  ‘She drove off with Jarvis, I think,’ said the young captain who’d gone in search of her. He had returned out of breath, hot, disgruntled and possibly envious. ‘At least, I think it was Jarvis. But someone said it might have been that swine Carew.’

  Evelyn seemed disconcerted by this news, but, covering up for her friend, she said lightly: ‘Of course – I remember now. She mentioned that to me. And please be kind about that swine, Carew. He’s the sweetest man, a very old friend of Poppy’s – and he’s a second cousin of mine, you know. Now, there’s Indian tea and China – and, oh how divine, they’ve made us one of those Gezira ginger cakes… ’

  Frances and I were pressed into service, handing plates around. The moment passed, but I noted how gracefully Evelyn had handled it, and how effective her gentle reproof had been. I returned to my chair at the edge of the group and listened distantly to the ex-pat gossip with which I was becoming familiar: the horse races, the duck shooting, the latest doings at the Residency… The young officers moved on to discuss the rise of the nationalist Wafd Party, the current political unrest and the need to ‘nip it in the bud fast’ before ‘things got out of hand’.

  ‘The thing is, Lady E, one can’t trust Egyptians an inch – they’re devious,’ said the most voluble of them, an earnest, fresh-faced young lieutenant by the name of Ronnie Urquhart. He fixed Evelyn with his frank blue gaze: ‘The sooner we abandon all this defeatist talk of “independence” the better. Give up the Suez Canal – when it’s our passage to India? The very idea! No: what works in Delhi will work in Cairo – we need to crack down hard. Did you hear about the demonstration last week? Right outside the Residency, a bunch of nationalist ruffians, waving flags and shouting slogans. On Lord Allenby’s doorstep! Infernal cheek. We put a stop to that little game pretty fast. What we need to do now is pull in the agitators, get them off the streets and… ’

  I think Helen Winlock was bored and disagreed with the views being expressed, though she said little. Miss Mack took on these young men once or twice, and challenged them in a sprightly way: she was listened to with grave courtesy, and then ignored. I was imagining the vitriol the officer’s remarks would have provoked in my father – not a man who tolerated fools. I was glad when Miss Mack cut short this tirade, which had now moved on to ‘Gyppo troublemakers’, and rose to her feet.

  ‘When Egypt gains independence, Lieutenant Urquhart,’ she said, fixing him with her keen republican eye, ‘which it will very soon, that much is obvious, then many of your so-called agitators will be elected members of a democratic Egyptian parliament. Are they to be deprived of freedom of speech then as they are now? No, don’t answer me, Lieutenant, I must go.’

  We left the clubhouse, with its leather armchairs, its faint cooking smells of roast beef and over-boiled cabbage, its atmosphere that was part gentlemen’s club, part English prep school. We passed through the gardens and came out into the street; two armed sentries smartly saluted at the gates, and beyond them the clamour of Cairo reclaimed us. Frances seemed used to such contrasts, but my head was aching, my hat itched and I felt that familiar smoky dislocation as we set off along the dusty road. We threaded our way past Arabs riding side-saddle, past a pungent camel train; we negotiated a route through the crush of hawkers and beggars. It was time for evening prayers: the cries of the muezzin came from the minarets of the mosques, rising like discordant music above the din of the streets. At last we reached the corner where the loyal Hassan was waiting for us; climbing into the carriage, I touched his Eye of Horus amulet.

  ‘What a collection of young hotheads,’ Helen said, glancing back at the club. ‘Aren’t they insufferable, Myrtle?’

  ‘Well, my dear, I do try to make allowances. Most of them are so very young, and they’ve been taught those opinions from the cradle. But the days of their precious Protectorate are numbered. So one has to ask – are they blind? Do they think?’

  ‘Are they even capable of thought? I often doubt it. My, but King and Empire can get mighty tedious… ’

  ‘Helen, it can. I get this irresistible urge to mention the Boston tea-party… ’

  Helen laughed, and linked her arm in Miss Mack’s. ‘Save your breath, Myrtle,’ she replied. ‘They just might not have heard of it. History isn’t their strong point.’

  Those episodes of confusion and smoky uncertainty continued, and would still afflict me at unpredictable moments. But they became more infrequent – the influence of Frances seemed to drive them away. How different it was to tour the Coptic churches or Saladin’s citadel in her unpredictable company. How much more rewarding to explore the hot vast Egyptian Museum with her and with her father, who’d sometimes take time off to give us expert guidance. With a genial Herbert Winlock at my side, I could patch up some of the gaps in my understanding. I learned that el-Amarna, where Mr Carter had first dug as a young man, had been a magnificent city, built by the heretic king Akhenaten, who had abandoned the royal city of Thebes and cast aside the old gods, imposing a single deity, the Aten, or sun god. Peering into the museum’s dusty display cases, I could examine the broken statues of this king, and admire the reliefs that showed him with his six daughters and his wife, Nefertiti: the queen whose name meant ‘The beautiful one is come’.

  ‘Did one of Akhenaten’s daughters inherit his throne?’ I asked Herbert Winlock. I was drawn to these long-dead daughters, who were depicted very small.

  ‘Not so far as we know,’ he replied; he was always tender with my ignorance. ‘It wasn’t impossible for a woman to rule, Lucy: Hatshepsut, for instance. She seized the throne after her husband the king died, and ruled her empire for thirty years with great success and great ruthlessness – and when you come to Luxor, I’ll take you and Miss Mack around her mortuary temple. But in that era, she was an exception.’

  He leaned forward and we both examined the carved relief that held pride of place in this cabinet: Akhenaten with Nefertiti, en famille. The tiny daughters were at play: the stone was cracked and chipped, and sections were missing, but if you examined it closely, you could see that the rays of the sun touched each member of the family, and that the rays ended in hands, which appeared to caress, or to bless them.

  ‘So, to answer your question, Lucy, we’re not sure who ruled after Akhenaten,’ Herbert Winlock continued. ‘It’s an era that’s virtually undocumented. But it wasn’t one of his daughters. We believe there were two short reigns after his death: a king called Smenkhkare of whom we know nothing beyond a name, and then another, Tutankhaten, later known as Tutankhamun – but we know next to nothing of him either.’ He sighed. ‘That’s the fascination of Egyptology, Lucy: how much we know – and how little. It’s like flashes of intense light – and then a great impenetrable darkness.’

  He broke off and glanced around. We could now hear the sound of footsteps and quiet voices. Two men had just entered the far end of that gallery: one, a familiar bulky figure in a Homburg hat, was Howard Carter; the other a distinguished-l
ooking man who was unknown to me.

  ‘Isn’t that Howard?’ Helen said. ‘Who is he taking on the grand tour this time, Herbert? Someone important – someone useful?’

  ‘Lord Northcliffe – owner of The Times. He’s over here for the latest conference. Howard said he’d wangled a meeting with him,’ Winlock replied. They exchanged a wry glance.

  ‘I daren’t look. Is Howard being very charming?’ Helen smiled.

  ‘Sure is. And won’t thank us for interrupting him,’ Winlock answered, and led us quickly into a side gallery.

  It was filled with mummies – I remember that, for they haunted my dreams for months afterwards: case after case of them, in a silent space a hundred yards long. There they lay, bandaged, shrouded, white, peaceable and threatening. At the very end of the gallery, in a special case of their own, were the smaller mummies: children, infants and tiny babies. Frances, whose face had set in an obstinate mask of indifference, reached for my hand, and I clasped it. When we reached the case containing the babies, Helen came to a halt. She had paled, and was fighting back tears.

  ‘Get me out of here, darling,’ she said quietly to her husband. ‘Please – surely you know a way out.’

  Winlock did. All the corridors in that labyrinth of a museum were familiar ground to him; within minutes we had left the stifling hush of the galleries and were outside in the shocking heat of the sun. Across the street, an altercation was taking place, of a kind we often glimpsed: two Arabs were being lazily beaten by Egyptian policemen; a British officer stood watching, aloof and indifferent, his revolver drawn. After a while, in a bored way, he raised the gun skywards and loosed off a shot. The shouts and cries instantly stopped, and everyone scattered. One of the policemen shouted an insult in Arabic as the offenders fled; the officer holstered his gun and strolled off. The museum-pitch beggars who had held back to watch this sideshow then spotted Miss Mack, by now a well-known mark throughout Cairo; without hesitation, they and the antika hawkers moved in.

  Miss Mack scattered baksheesh with her usual abandon, but recoiled when she saw the souvenirs on sale. A mummified hand? A collection of crumbling, evil-smelling mummified toes? No, she would not buy such horrors… I could see this refusal pained her, for the toe-hawker was a small boy of great beauty, perhaps five years old, barefoot, wearing clothes that were in rags. His eager face clouded – but disaster was avoided: he just happened to have two scarabs in his pocket and they also were for sale. Miss Mack bought both with alacrity.

  ‘Miss Mackenzie, those are both very bad fakes,’ Frances said, in her direct way. ‘And you paid twenty times too much for them.’

  ‘I know, dear,’ Miss Mack replied humbly. ‘Now I look at them, I can see – they’re even worse than the last lot I bought. They really are hideous. Still,’ her face brightened, ‘the money will buy that sweet child a meal or a pair of shoes, so it won’t be wasted.’

  She set off with a new spring in her step. The little boy was already being roughly robbed of his spoils by the man who controlled that particular band of infants – but this exchange took place behind her back, and she walked on, oblivious.

  When we’d returned to the hotel, I asked Miss Mack why Helen Winlock should have been so distressed by the museum’s mummified babies. The question had been puzzling me: surely she must have seen them many times before?

  Miss Mack knew the answer, I suspected: she and Helen had become very close by then. With a stern glance, she informed me that Mrs Winlock was a grown woman, who, like all grown women, had experienced sadnesses. ‘What a child you are for questions! Curiosity killed the cat, Lucy,’ she said tartly, turning away.

  7

  We had then been in Cairo almost two weeks, and my entry test for Madame’s dancing class was coming closer by the day. Miss Mack had decreed that we’d need two further weeks to exhaust the delights of the city; for the final stage of our journey, we’d then travel up the Nile to the Valley of the Kings and the temples of Luxor – though Miss Mack, disdaining the modern name, would insist that our destination was Homer’s ‘hundred-gated Thebes’. Once there, our itinerary was formidable; when drawing up her lists, Miss Mack’s eyes would gleam at the wealth of mind-improving, life-changing spectacles that lay in wait for me. That smoke would begin to drift behind my eyes again as she quoted guidebooks and flourished photographs. I was trying not to see the prospect that lay in wait beyond those marvels – my return to England, and the uncertainties that awaited me there. I clung to one sure comforting fact: we had an open invitation to visit the Winlocks and their fellow archaeologists at the American House. They promised that, when we went to the Valley of the Kings, they would accompany us and Frances would be my personal guide. If Mr Carter was in the right receptive frame of mind – and who could tell if he would be? – we might also visit him at Lord Carnarvon’s dig.

  ‘Carter has a plan,’ Herbert Winlock explained to us one day, when he joined us in the cool marble halls of Groppi’s café for ices and mint tea. ‘For decades now, everyone’s been saying the Valley’s exhausted and there are no more royal tombs to be found. Carter won’t accept that. He hasn’t just dug in the Valley, he’s spent years analysing the known tomb locations, the water courses, the rock formations – and he believes there is at least one last tomb to be found. He’s narrowed his search down to a triangular area – Carter’s golden triangle, we call it. The plan is to work through that, section by section, removing all the old spoil from previous digs, and going right back to the bedrock.’

  ‘Heavens!’ Miss Mack cried. ‘How arduous, Mr Winlock.’

  ‘Arduous, expensive – and so far unrewarding,’ Winlock said. ‘He and Carnarvon have been working their way through that darn triangle of his ever since the end of the war. This will be their fifth year in the Valley, and they’ve virtually exhausted it. So far, they’ve found a cache of thirteen calcite jars – interesting but not very… They were dug out of the ground by Lady Carnarvon herself two years ago. An act that was more surprising than the find. Almina Carnarvon is a remarkable woman, but––’

  ‘She certainly is,’ Helen put in. ‘Whether she’s staying somewhere two days or a month, she never travels with fewer than seventy-two pairs of shoes. If that isn’t remarkable, I don’t know what is.’

  ‘But her interest in archaeology is less warm than her interest in footwear, certainly these days. It’s lost its charm for her, I hear – though people say that it’s her money that funds the Carnarvon digs. And it’s Rothschild money, of course, so I guess it’s pretty inexhaustible.’

  Winlock exchanged a narrow glance with his wife, who then gave Miss Mack a similar glance, equally veiled. ‘Alfred de Rothschild’s natural daughter,’ she said, leaning towards Miss Mack and lowering her voice to a whisper, though both Frances and I caught the words. Miss Mack blushed and dropped her spoon. A peculiar reaction, as Frances and I later agreed: surely all daughters were natural? Was there such a thing as an unnatural daughter? Such episodes – and they were frequent – made understanding anything very difficult, as Frances often complained.

  ‘They’re hiding something,’ she’d say to me, ‘and I intend to find out what it is. I shall dig and dig until I get to the bottom of it.’ I was recruited to assist with this task, which by its very nature seemed to me archaeological. Frances disagreed: no, she said – it was espionage.

  On that occasion, Miss Mack jumped in fast. Consigning Lady Carnarvon to the region of the unmentionable, she reverted to the safer subject of the Valley of the Kings. ‘How fascinating, Mr Winlock!’ she cried. ‘Poor Mr Carter, poor Lord Carnarvon – all that hard work. Those piles of spoil are mountainous. Five years of toil! Down to the bedrock! And have they found nothing beyond those vases?’

  ‘Virtually nothing,’ Winlock replied. ‘And don’t forget partage, Miss Mackenzie. By rule of the Antiquities Service, administered, as we all know, by our great friends, the French, any finds are divided fifty-fifty between the permit holder and Egypt. So seven of those calc
ite vases went straight to the Egyptian Museum here, and the remaining six winged their way home to Lord Carnarvon’s country seat… I guess they’re now part of his collection at Highclere Castle. That’s a poor reward for the kind of money he’s been spending. Carnarvon wants a royal tomb, even dreams of an intact one, I suspect – and so does Carter. So, as you can see, they’re both optimists and romantics – because if they should find such a thing, it would be a first. Every single tomb ever discovered in the Valley has been robbed – very thoroughly robbed – in antiquity.’

  ‘Well, that is true, of course,’ said Miss Mack, nodding sagely. ‘But perhaps they’ll make a breakthrough even so,’ she added: she too was an optimist and a romantic. ‘After all, the Valley is a mysterious place. It may yet have more secrets to reveal!’

  ‘Let us hope so,’ Winlock replied in a dry tone. It was difficult to tell whether he thought Carter deluded, or a man who was on to something. ‘Anyway, last year Carter was clearing the ground by the tomb of Ramesses VI, but that area’s infested with tourists and it’s now the height of the season. So he’s switched locations, and when we make our trip, we’ll find him slaving away in a different part of the Valley altogether. Eve will be there – she never leaves her father’s side, so, if Carter’s in one of his foul moods, we can always talk to her… Or to Lordy.’

  ‘Lordy?’ Miss Mack’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘Lord Carnarvon has a surfeit of names, Miss Mackenzie.’ Winlock smiled. ‘No less than five birth names, plus his title, plus “Pups”, as Eve calls him; plus “Porchy”, which is what his family calls him – his courtesy title was Viscount Porchester before he inherited the earldom, you know. That makes a grand total of eight names. That’s more than the pharaohs: even they stuck at a modest five. So we Met renegades call him “Lordy”.’ Winlock’s smile widened. ‘Not to his face, naturally. He’s an interesting guy, and I have a lot of time for him – but, put it this way, I wouldn’t want to risk lèse-majesté.’