The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  The inquest had been held in Cairo the previous morning. Interest in this sensational death of a society beauty was so great that it had been standing-room only in court. I bent over the close columns of print, and that was how I finally learned the truth as to the death of Mrs d’Erlanger.

  She had been discovered among the rushes and papyrus of the Nile marshes three days before El-Deeb’s arrival in Luxor. It was an English subaltern who happened upon her body. Newly posted to Egypt, he had joined one of those pre-dawn, duck-shooting parties favoured by members of the Gezira Sporting Club. The shoot was over by then, the catch had been good; he and his fellow officers were about to leave for the traditional hearty English breakfast at the Mena House Hotel, when the hum of flies, a sweet stench in the air and a patch of vivid colour amidst the reeds caught his attention.

  ‘Flamingo pink’ was how he described it. Intrigued by its brilliance, ignoring his friends who were urging him to hurry up, he waded towards it along the marshy foreshore. The reeds were alive with birds, dragonflies darted across the water. He found Poppy d’Erlanger lying at the edge of the river, concealed by rushes, beside a patch of blue lotus flowers. She was still wearing the remnants of her shocking-pink dress. It was dawn when he found her, and in the warmth of the rising sun the blue lotus flowers were unfurling.

  An iridescence of insects had obscured Poppy’s face; the young subaltern, overcome and turning aside to vomit, was uncertain who or what he had found, but he could see this broken creature was female, was dead – and, judging by her clothes, was a white European; the Residency was contacted, the police were summoned. It was quickly established that it was murder: the woman’s throat had been savagely cut. It took longer to establish that the dead woman was Mrs d’Erlanger. How she came to be there by the river, what had become of her jewellery and fur, and what had happened to her after she left Shepheard’s remained a mystery.

  Poppy’s husband Jacob d’Erlanger and a British officer named Carew, the two men who had quarrelled over her that night at Shepheard’s, had been interviewed at length: both had British friends who provided unshakeable alibis. An Egyptian taxi driver alleged to have driven Mrs d’Erlanger that night was then charged with her killing. He too had an alibi, but it had been provided by ‘natives’ and could thus be dismissed by the British authorities as a tissue of lies – a verdict with which the British-owned newspaper I was reading concurred. A few years, it trumpeted, even a few months previously, and this man would have faced the death penalty; but his arrest occurred on the eve of independence, at a time of great political sensitivity. When it provoked nationalist outrage and violent street protests, the man had been quietly released.

  The verdict of the inquest was ‘murder by persons unknown’ and the newspaper saw this as an injustice with the very gravest implications. SAVED BY HISTORY! declared its headline – and, since there was no risk of being sued for libel by an Egyptian too poor to afford lawyers, it devoted many column inches to proclaiming the taxi driver’s evident guilt, the breakdown of law and order these events presaged, the glimpse they gave of the corruption that would inevitably follow independence, and the proof they provided that Egyptians were manifestly unfit to govern their own country.

  I read this account from beginning to end. Then I tore it up. I found a pen and Berenice writing paper, and, as the ship rose and fell, at once and according to our pact, wrote to Frances. When the letter was complete, I sealed it in an envelope, and then carried it around with me for days.

  Perhaps I had a superstitious fear it would go astray if I consigned it to the ship’s mail. Perhaps I felt that, if the letter remained unposted and its news unshared, its contents would prove untrue. I’m not sure what my reasoning was, or even if there was any reasoning: I was numb at that time. I put the letter aside and throughout the voyage spent my days on deck with Peter and Rose. A rough crossing: I was unable to tell them the truth; I was forced into comforting evasions and shaming lies. I’d decided to send the letter when we reached Dover, but the parting there with Peter, who clung to me, whose small hands, clinging desperately to my coat, had to be prised loose by Wheeler, drove all thought of it from my mind. Still I delayed: I finally relinquished my letter when, having said my farewells to Miss Mack in London, I was back in Cambridge at last.

  Escaping for half an hour from the rigid programme of lessons that had been lined up for me, a regime that had begun within a day of my return, I stuffed the letter in the pocket of my warmest coat, and trudged into the town from our tall grey house in Newnham, on the city’s outskirts. I walked across the Backs, crossed the swollen muddy-brown river, and inspected the few wan daffodils poking through the wet earth; they were being battered by that vicious east wind I remembered of old – the one my mother Marianne used laughingly to claim came straight in from the Urals, from Siberia.

  It was early March. In Egypt, Howard Carter and Herbert Winlock would soon be closing down their digs for the season; the remorseless heat would be intensifying. In Cambridge, the temperature was one degree below zero. Pacing my way past the colleges, I felt I’d imagined Egypt, had never truly been there – and would certainly never return.

  The letter in my pocket felt like a last, precious link with Frances: I was still reluctant to let it go. I counted to ten, then consigned it to a red pillar box in King’s Parade. I stared numbly at the fantastic roof of King’s College Chapel. Two gowned male undergraduates passed by me, arguing loudly about Nietzsche. My heart hurt. I began the walk home. Mal de mer: two days since I’d been on a boat, and the pavements still felt unsteady.

  Grey buildings, grey skies, grey rain: I was late for my next lesson (Literature: Miss Dunsire) and an explanation, an alibi, would be required. By the time I crossed the Cam on my return journey, I had a lie in place. It was an intricate lie, one even Frances might have admired, but on reaching home, I found I was too angry to employ it. ‘Posting a letter,’ I replied to the quiet insistent questions.

  Miss Dunsire sighed. ‘I see.’

  Across the room, her level gaze met mine; the clock ticked, the fire crackled, and a secret intense rebellion, sparked during my months in Egypt, stoked and fed ever since, blazed up in my mind. I had no doubt then, and have none now, that Nicola Dunsire noted that emotion, recognised it, and filed it away as information to be used another day. On that occasion she said nothing beyond the fact that our lesson would be extended to compensate for the missing forty minutes. She folded her long-fingered hands and waited for the mounting hostility in the room to reach the precise pitch she desired.

  ‘Open your Shakespeare, Lucy,’ she said, when the atmosphere between us was sharp as knives. I obeyed her, without comment. I’d learned from my sojourn in Egypt. We had the measure of each other by then, Dunsire and I.

  ‘Twelfth Night. Act I, Scene II,’ she prompted, as I riffled the wafer-thin pages of my mother’s Complete Works. ‘We shall pick up where we were interrupted. As you will learn, or may already know, there has been a shipwreck. Viola has survived it. She has been washed ashore in an unknown land. Such incidents, sea voyages, storms, wreckage and its consequences, recur in Shakespeare. His imagination dwelled upon them, as we will discuss in due course. I shall read Viola. You will take the other parts.’

  She waited in silence until I found the correct page. I stared at the swimming words.

  ‘What country, friends, is this?’ she enquired.

  ‘This is Illyria, lady,’ I answered, after a long pause.

  FOUR

  Antique Land

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

  And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fe
d.

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

  P. B. Shelley, 1818

  The sonnet was inspired by a colossal statue of Ramesses II, removed from Egypt by Giovanni Belzoni two years earlier. Belzoni gave it to the British Museum, where it remains.

  18

  ‘How you’ve grown, Lucy! Your father won’t recognise you – two inches taller, I could swear,’ Miss Mack had said, as the boat-train drew away from the station at Dover. She’d settled herself into her seat opposite and was inspecting me with worried eyes. The prospect of meeting my father was making her anxious; I sympathised.

  Miss Mack felt that once we reached London, there would be ample time for a leisurely farewell: perhaps my father would take us out to lunch? And then we’d discover what arrangements he’d made for my new Cambridge life. All I knew was that I’d be returning to the house in Newnham, purchased at the time of my parents’ marriage, the house in which, two years later, I’d been born. I’d never lived anywhere else, but I associated it solely with my mother: since returning from the war, my father had chosen to live in college, coming home only at weekends.

  ‘He’s said nothing of his plans in his letters,’ Miss Mack confided fretfully, as the boat-train puffed through the bleak landscape, while I stared out at leafless trees, at black, freshly ploughed fields. ‘Your father writes in such a terse way – well, men do, I suppose. But I feel sure he will have thought the matter over very carefully, and your welfare, Lucy, will be uppermost in his mind. He’ll need a woman’s assistance. Perhaps one of his Norfolk cousins might help out, or your Aunt Foxe? Your dear mother was fond of her.’

  Aunt Foxe was my father’s elder sister, from whom he was estranged. My mother had indeed liked her and had attempted to heal the breach; it was on a visit to Aunt Foxe in Norfolk that my mother and I had taken that last walk together. I stared fixedly out of the train window. ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘He doesn’t speak to his cousins. Or his brother. And he detests Aunt Foxe – he never sees any of his family if he can help it.’

  Miss Mack, still recovering from the pain of our parting with Wheeler, Rose and Peter at Dover, and increasingly nervous at the prospect of meeting my father, said nothing further. I knew she cherished a lingering hope that she’d be invited to delay her return to America, come to stay in Cambridge and – at least for a while – take care of me. I’d tried to dissuade her; I knew it would never happen, not while my father lived and breathed.

  And, as things turned out, the lunch we’d imagined never happened either: there was no lingering farewell, no discussion as to past travels or future plans. My father, spruce and businesslike, was waiting for us on the platform at Victoria. Miss Mack was courteously met, courteously thanked, courteously escorted to a taxicab, beseeched to write once she’d returned to America – and courteously dispatched to the London hotel room booked for her. The entire transaction took fifteen minutes. One second I was clinging to her in a final embrace; the next she had gone.

  ‘Better hurry. We’ll just make the two o’clock train from Liverpool Street. What a mountain of luggage, Lucy.’ My father regarded my cases and trunk narrowly.

  ‘I have been away for months, Daddy,’ I said, ‘the whole of January and February.’

  ‘Have you really? How time flies!’ He gave me a cool, satiric glance, weighing my cases, weighing me. He tipped the porter sixpence, then climbed into the waiting cab.

  ‘One suitcase is full of books.’ I climbed in after him. ‘And I’ve brought presents too. For Mrs Grimshaw, and Aunt Foxe, and for you, of course… ’

  ‘Dear God. Not one of those appalling scarabs, I hope. If you inflict one of those on me, I can assure you it will go straight in the rubbish bin.’

  I blushed. A scarab was precisely what I’d bought for him, bargaining for it in the souk at Luxor with Frances and her mother. I’d thought it a beautiful thing, carved from golden-veined lapis lazuli – it was genuine and not a tourist fake, Helen had been sure. That present-buying expedition had been an ordeal: Frances had scores of gifts to buy for her large family, for their numerous friends. I’d been able to drum up only four candidates: my father; Aunt Foxe, whom I rarely saw; Dr Gerhardt, an elderly don and friend of my father who’d taught me German and French in the past; and Mrs Grimshaw, who was our charwoman in Cambridge.

  I was fond of garrulous Mrs Grimshaw, a fixture throughout my childhood; I liked my Aunt Foxe, and Dr Gerhardt, who dozed in a companionable way through my lessons with him, but I now saw these gifts would have to be re-allocated. I’d bought a small shabti figure, of dubious provenance but the best I could afford, for Dr Gerhardt: perhaps I could give him the scarab instead and present the shabti to my father. Would that be destined for the rubbish too – or might it pass?

  I worried about this all the way across the din of London from Victoria to Liverpool Street station. I was still worrying about it – shabti or scarab, scarab or shabti – when we boarded the Cambridge train. The entanglement of gifts, once bright with promise, now dulled and stupid-seeming, would probably have preoccupied me for the rest of the journey; I was extricated from its coils only when my father, leaning forward to examine me, suddenly said, ‘Lucy, you’ve grown.’ It was the first remark he’d made since we’d boarded the train: it might have been a compliment or an accusation. With my father, there was often this uncertainty.

  I fixed my eyes on the strings of the luggage rack opposite, on the framed sepia photographs of Cambridge colleges. The seats were scratchy red moquette: there were white starched antimacassars on each headrest. We had the compartment to ourselves. I suffered his scrutiny.

  ‘Yes, definitely taller.’ He frowned. ‘And you’ve filled out, less scrawny than you were, your hair has grown a little… you look reasonably well. The Orient must have agreed with you.’

  ‘You look well too, Daddy,’ I replied timorously. He was wearing a new overcoat and a well-cut grey suit I’d never seen before. He’d abandoned the black tie he’d worn in mourning for my mother for one made of patterned silk foulard. He looked handsome and youthful – even pleased with the world; less thin and strained than I remembered. ‘Yes, well, time passes,’ he remarked, and opened his newspaper.

  With this broadsheet wall between us, it felt safe to look at him. All I could see was his thick springy dark hair above the opened pages, and the quizzical arch of his eyebrows. His eyes, of a light hazel colour, their habitual expression one of disdainful mockery, were mercifully hidden. I tried to reacquaint myself with him, this man who was my father, but it was difficult – I knew so little about him; I could see him only through my mother’s stories, through her eyes. He was a handsome man, I thought. My mother always claimed that she had loved him from the first instant she set eyes on him at a party in London: Robert Foxe-Payne, an Englishman unlike anyone she’d ever met in America: vigorous, incisive and iconoclastic; a young Cambridge classicist who’d taken a double first, a golden boy of twenty-two, predicted to do great things.

  And so he had – at first: a smooth progression to his doctorate, to a fellowship at Trinity College, to his first publication, a translation of Books 1–6 of Homer’s Iliad. That had caused a great stir: ‘In academic circles and beyond, Lucy,’ my mother would say with pride. He had his detractors, of course, she’d add, but with such a brilliant man, that was inevitable. There were those who took exception to his politics, those who mocked his decision to remove the ‘Foxe’ element of his surname; some even suggested that, had he been the heir instead of the younger son, he might have been pleased to retain both the full name and the ancient, if reduced, Norfolk estate that went with it. Certain astringent critics claimed that a private income, even a relatively small one, was
a pleasant cushion for a man of such advanced left-wing views – one Dr Robert Payne had no inclination to forgo, despite his preachings on equality for all.

  Those factions, my mother said, spread malicious untruths about my father: they suggested he’d married her because she was an Emerson and an heiress, that he hadn’t foreseen the severance with her family the marriage would cause, that he’d believed her family would come round, if not when the marriage took place, then surely when the first child was born? The Emerson clan’s stony-faced refusal to do so, these factions claimed, caused difficulties between husband and wife, who were incompatible from the first, one a gifted scholar, the other an impetuous, ill-educated society girl.

  ‘And that is a lie, Lucy,’ my mother would say. ‘It’s so hurtful. Robert and I married for love. Neither of us cared a straw about money. It’s just envy that makes them say these wicked things.’

  Envy was rife among Cambridge academics, so perhaps that was true, I thought, as my father turned a page of The Times and, attacking the crossword with a silver propelling pencil, began filling in the answers at speed. Perhaps that explained why my father had so few friends among his fellow dons… On the other hand, were there really so many reasons to envy him? His much anticipated translation of the next six books of the Iliad had never appeared; interrupted by the advent of war, it had since been abandoned. He had published nothing in the past decade. His health had been impaired by his time in the trenches. His marriage to an American heiress had not brought him a fortune, but had brought him a child. Now my mother Marianne was dead – and what was he left with? A daughter whom he scarcely knew, one who required housing and teaching: I must be a burden, I thought. My father entered another answer to a clue; the flat fields passed; the train wheels revolved.