The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  The question was as sharp as it was sudden; I was unprepared, and it disconcerted me. I looked away. Silence fell, broken only by the occasional whine of the chainsaw below. In the distance the towers of Docklands pierced the heat haze and the bluish pollution clouds; the lights at the summit of Canary Wharf winked and blinked, two ever-watchful eyes. Egypt, my Egypt, felt close yet impossibly distant, here inside me, vanishing fast.

  I closed my eyes: clear on the evening air came the eddying wash of the Nile. For our second stay in Egypt, Miss Mack had hired a dahabiyeh. It was moored on the west bank of the river at Luxor, and at night the music in the Winter Palace ballroom drifted across the water from the opposite shore. Frances and I danced to that music one night, a Viennese waltz: we traversed the decks in a series of dizzying spins. ‘Weren’t we just fine, Lucy?’ Frances cried, clutching on to me for balance, as we hurtled to a stop and leaned against the boat’s rails. Catching our breath: there were two moons that night, one sailing the sky, and the other, a sister moon, in the river water below. An instant later, on a riffle of breeze, the sister moon shimmered, fragmented and was gone.

  ‘I can’t answer that question, Dr Fong,’ I replied, after a long pause. ‘I am old and you’re too sudden for me. My memories are too freighted… and with people who mean nothing to you. For your purposes, they’re marginal. They’re not marginal to me.’

  ‘I apologise.’ Dr Fong switched off his tape recorder. Below us, the party of volunteers were packing up their tools and departing. We both listened as their voices receded and silence fell; the excavated angel, freed from the undergrowth that had obscured it, now stood revealed. Blind eyes in a beautiful passionless face. She had a wise, if punitive, air.

  ‘I wish you would tell me – what you saw, what you learned, what you felt,’ Dr Fong said, on a sudden note of appeal, laying his notebook aside. ‘I’m in no hurry, you know. I have nowhere to go, no one to see. I can stay here and we can talk, Miss Payne, or I can go back to my room for yet another long evening and wrestle with all the questions I thought I’d answered when I started in on this project of mine. That’s what I did in Luxor. That’s what I do in London, these days. Stare at a wall, order a take-out, ask myself questions about a tomb – and watch the answers I thought I had slipping away from me.

  ‘You’re my only witness, Miss Payne. Everyone else is dead. But you were there. Those crucial three days when the tomb was found, when Carter breached the wall into its antechamber, looked through and saw his “wonderful things”… You were close by. You knew all the people involved. You witnessed the events after that, you watched the story unfold.’ He paused. ‘To me, your memories are like a treasure house. And you won’t admit me. You’re always blocking the entrance, standing on guard… A sort of watchdog – no, a Cerberus. Why is that? Don’t you trust me? All I want is the truth, you know.’

  ‘The truth? I certainly can’t give you that, Dr Fong.’

  ‘A variant would do. Your variant. Your version. I’d settle for that.’

  He was looking at me in a sad, regretful way – and I took pity on him. The man had changed, as I had: we had something in common – we were both grappling with the past, if for different reasons and in differing ways. I too was facing the prospect of another evening alone. The light was fading, inside the house my ever-present ghosts would be circling; perhaps it would do no harm to talk, just a little, just for a while.

  I hesitated, then sent Dr Fong into the house to find whisky, water and glasses. When he’d returned, poured drinks for us both and settled himself in his chair again, I said: ‘I tell this my way or not at all. Without interruptions and questions from you.’

  ‘I’ll be as silent as the grave.’

  ‘Very well.’ I paused, then began. ‘I was in Egypt with the friend I once mentioned to you, Miss Mack. She was a good woman – one of the few truly good women I’ve ever known. She had rented a houseboat for our stay. It was called the Queen Hatshepsut. It was moored at Luxor, on the west bank, just below the American House and within sight of Castle Carter. The track to the Valley of the Kings passed right by it – so as the story of the tomb unfolded we had what Miss Mack liked to call a ringside view.

  ‘We arrived there the day after Lord Carnarvon and Eve reached Luxor, when the excavation was about to begin. By then, over two weeks had passed since Carter sent his telegram, and the secret was out: everyone knew that Carter had found something, which might or might not prove to be a tomb. When Miss Mack and I were in Cairo, the city was ablaze with excitement; by the time we reached Luxor no one could talk of anything else. What would they discover when they breached the wall at the bottom of the staircase Carter had found? So we were in the right place, at the right time – and that wasn’t entirely accidental. My friend Miss Mack was writing a book, you see.’

  ‘A book?’ Dr Fong looked at me sharply.

  ‘Yes. A book. Within a very short time, everyone began writing books, Dr Fong. Howard Carter himself, several of the journalists who came out to cover the story – there was a positive outbreak of books. But Miss Mack was ahead of the game. She had been planning to write her memoirs for some while, you see, and once we were in Luxor, those memoirs – evolved. She was writing on a manual typewriter – an Oliver No. 9. I can still hear it, Dr Fong: she liked to write at night, so she’d be rattling the keys until midnight and well beyond. It kept me awake, but I didn’t mind that: I was twelve years old, I was in love with Egypt. I’d go out on deck, and sit there in the dark: star-gazing, thinking.’ I paused. ‘Why, sometimes I’d stay out there for hours at a time.’

  ‘Night vigils. A houseboat within sight of Castle Carter. Well, well, well. So you really were in the key place. At exactly the key moment. You’re full of surprises, Miss Payne.’ Fong gave a low laugh, but he was quick on the uptake, as I’d noticed before, and I could sense a new excitement in him. Reaching for the whisky bottle, he topped up my glass and then his own. ‘That won’t loosen my tongue,’ I told him.

  ‘I live in hope,’ he replied, reaching for his notebook. ‘Go on.’

  A book was not the term Miss Mack used, and in deference to her I didn’t use it either; it was The Book – and it had an imperialistic nature, I learned. As Miss Mack would explain our first evening on the dahabiyeh, The Book made constant demands.

  ‘It’s a most peculiar phenomenon,’ she said, leading me into her cabin, indicating a stack of onion-skin typing paper and carbons, stroking the Oliver No. 9’s round metal keys; it was painted olive green, weighed as much as a small child, and had terse instructions stamped on its front: Keep machine cleaned and oiled at all times. ‘The Book leads me into the most unexpected places,’ Miss Mack said with an authorial sigh. ‘It’s taken me over. And it’s most dictatorial, even tyrannical, Lucy. It has Napoleonic tendencies. I feel it’s changing my whole outlook, even my character. Truly, dear, I’m putty in its hands.’

  I wondered if this could be so: it seemed unlikely – and unwise. Could a book, even The Book, have such an effect? But I had noticed changes in Miss Mack on our voyage out to Egypt, so perhaps it was true; these alterations in her outlook became more apparent that first evening by the Nile. Obtaining the use of this boat was a coup of which Miss Mack was proud: she had pulled it off with the assistance of the Winlocks as well as every other contact ever made in Egypt and beyond. It belonged to some New Englanders, cousins of acquaintances, who had planned to use it this winter, but changed their minds. Mounted above the upper deck was a flagpole, from which the Stars and Stripes bravely fluttered in the breeze from the Nile.

  There was a saloon, with books and an out-of-tune piano; there were two bedrooms, with dark panelling, awnings and louvre shutters; there was a bathroom of sorts, where we’d bathe in Nile water. It was romantic and economical, Miss Mack claimed. She went on an inspection tour of the galley areas within seconds of our arriving and pronounced herself fully satisfied: the kitchen was spotless, the Egyptians who’d be looking after us were most obli
ging, spoke excellent English and kept everything shipshape; the boat might be old, but it had immense charm. ‘One can’t fuss too much, Lucy,’ she said breezily. ‘If one’s going to have adventures – as I certainly hope we shall – then there’s no time to fret about the finer details of hygiene, don’t you agree?’

  This startling emancipation extended to our meals, I discovered, when we sat down under the awning on the upper deck to eat supper. The cook, whose name was Mohammed Sayed, served us grilled fish freshly caught from the river, shamsi bread, a salad of onions, herbs and cucumbers… A feast, Miss Mack declared, tucking into everything with a keen appetite. She had brought her binoculars to the table, and at intervals, trained them on the desert beyond. ‘Birds, dear – maybe a jackal,’ she said; but I noticed it was the area around Castle Carter on which she focused her gaze. When the failing light made the binoculars useless, she abandoned them and, in her new spirit of adventurousness, poured us both a glass of wine – mine diluted with Evian. We sat back to admire the numberless stars and their reflections, leaping like silver fish in the wash of the Nile.

  To crown my astonishment, Miss Mack lit a fat Egyptian cigarette, puffed at it in a professional way, and explained that tobacco helped to provide inspiration. ‘Just the one after dinner, dear,’ she said. ‘I find it gets me in the writing mood. I like to write at night, you see. I hope you won’t mind.’

  I assured her I wouldn’t. Her colour had deepened as she made this confession, and I wasn’t sure whether that implied that discussion of The Book was taboo. I finally risked a shy question – might she, perhaps, tell me what her book was about? Miss Mack, scarlet with emotion, was at once launched.

  There was a lengthy preamble – how she’d been deeply affected by two sermons her minister had preached while she was home in Mercer Hill, Princeton: one relating to the parable of the talents, and the other to hiding your light beneath a bushel. ‘I’ll be sixty in two years, Lucy, dear,’ she confided. ‘Of course, I shall never be able to leave my dear mother, but it’s time to grab life by the scruff of its neck even so. A bit late, you’ll say – but better late than never, don’t you agree? I always wanted to be a writer – I wrote poems as a girl, you know, and my, oh my, how I fussed over the scansion and the rhymes! Then, somehow, I lost the habit, and all my splendid ambitions went underground. Never, never let that happen to you, Lucy, dear… ’

  She paused. ‘Then, this summer, I decided to bite the bullet, stiffen the sinews, screw my courage to the sticking point and take the plunge! So I bought my beloved Oliver, and off I went. And once I started, I discovered it was surprisingly easy. I can’t think why I imagined writing would be hard, dear – it isn’t at all. You simply sit there and talk to the page. Sometimes you know what’s coming and sometimes you don’t, in fact, all sorts of things just pop up out of nowhere and astonish you.’

  I listened to this intently – it continued in similar vein for some while. When Miss Mack finally drew breath, I reminded her that she still hadn’t told me what her book was about. At this, she shifted in her seat and gave me a sibylline look that, over the next two months in Egypt, I would come to recognise.

  ‘Well, dear, it’s called An American Amidst the Tombs, but that will have to change. You see, Lucy, it started off as a family memoir: I wrote a great deal about my first visit to Egypt with my father, the pyramids, the pelicans, and so on. I did so want to do the flora and fauna justice… ’ She frowned. ‘But The Book soon began to make its wishes known. It reminded me of everything that happened to us on our last visit: meeting Mr Carter and Lord Carnarvon – that lunch in the tomb, the storm in the Valley, the political upheaval, a new nation in the throes of being born. And then I heard the rumours that Mr Carter had found a tomb. That’s when I realised I was an eyewitness, Lucy, right there on the spot when history was being made.

  ‘I can see now how slow I was,’ she continued, ‘but The Book knew which route I should take – and once I listened to it, all became clear. What I need to write, Lucy, isn’t some fusty memoir. I need to report what’s happening in the Valley right now. A detailed blow-by-blow account by one who was there. What do you think, dear?’

  I made encouraging noises. I asked her if she was writing to a plan, an authorial scheme.

  ‘No, no, no!’ she cried, throwing up her hands. ‘A scheme would have a very cramping effect! The Book itself will decide that – and where it leads, I’ll follow. A bit like Ruth and her mother-in-law in the Bible. You remember, Lucy? Whither thou goest, I will go.’ She paused. ‘However, I have given considerable attention to the far more important issue of style. I’ve never written reports, as such. They need to be crisp, concise and informed. But I’ve rewritten my first five chapters now, dear, and I’ve found my voice, I’m hitting my stride. I have a model in mind, obviously.’

  I could see she wanted me to press her, so I asked who this model could be.

  ‘Mark Twain, who else?’ she replied, on a triumphant note – and shortly afterwards we retired to our rooms. ‘Stout shoes and an early start tomorrow morning, Lucy,’ she announced from her bedroom doorway. ‘It’s time to explore the Theban hills. We’ll do some investigating; the view of the Valley from there is superb. If anything is happening at Mr Carter’s site, we’ll soon know. The Book needs material, dear. Mohammed will pack us a picnic. Some rugs – binoculars, obviously – and off we’ll go!’

  She gave me a speaking look, then firmly closed her door. From beyond it, within minutes, came the rattle of the Oliver No. 9 keyboard, the screech of the return carriage, the ratcheting sound as she inserted a fresh page. The Book must have had her in an iron grip: it was two in the morning before the Oliver fell silent at last.

  I’d gone to sit on the deck by then, to breathe the air, to drink in Egypt and remind myself that at last I was there. I gave silent thanks to my mother and to Miss Dunsire, the two women who had made my journey possible. The crew had left one kerosene lamp alight; I extinguished it and wandered the boat in the starlight, back and forth. At a distance, on the east bank of the river, the windows of the Winter Palace glowed. It was still early in the season, but even so I could hear hotel dance music, drifting its seductions across the water – blues, a tango, ragtime; another drift of blues. I lay down on the deck and gazed up at the heavens, the arching stars. I could hear the shift and lap of the Nile, a sussuration as it stroked the dahabiyeh’s hull. The boat’s timbers creaked and moaned as it moved on the water, tugged against its mooring ropes; the reeds whispered and rustled; from the desert came the hooting of an owl.

  Sitting up, and turning towards the hills that hid the Valley of the Kings, I could just make out the American House, its dark crouching bulk backed up against the rocks; the Winlocks were not due in Egypt for some weeks yet, so perhaps it was still closed up, awaiting their arrival; it was unlit, I saw. At Castle Carter, however, someone must have been keeping a vigil similar to mine: lights blazed from its windows – and I wondered if a wakeful Howard Carter was there, planning his next day’s work in the Valley; if so, was he alone, or were Lord Carnarvon and Eve with him? What would they find tomorrow?

  I returned to my cabin and, still wakeful, wanting to share the excitement I felt, I began on the first of my promised letters to Nicola Dunsire. I wrote: Luxor, aboard the good ship ‘Queen Hatshepsut’, Friday 24th November 1922. Dearest Nicola… My handwriting was improving: I had nearly mastered italic script, and, as a parting gift, Miss Dunsire had given me a fountain pen. It fitted my hand perfectly. Now Lord Carnarvon and Eve have arrived, I wrote, as I reached the letter’s end, Mr Carter can recommence excavations. They begin tomorrow, which is very exciting! Miss Mack and I are making an expedition to the hills in the morning, in the hope of watching them at work.

  Meanwhile, the great news is, Miss Mack has decided to become a reporter. She has begun a book about Mr Carter’s work. In the style of Mark Twain. If you’d been here, we might have laughed together about this – but you aren’t, so I did so alone.
Such a night, so many, many stars… I’ll send this letter to Athens, where you should have arrived by now.

  Pour mon père, félicitations. Pour toi – à bientôt et je t’embrasse, ma chère Nicole.

  ‘Can you see anything, Lucy?’ Miss Mack asked. She was pacing restlessly back and forth between the rocks high on the barren Theban hills. ‘Surely you can see something, dear?’

  I could see dust. My binoculars were focused on clouds of billowing white dust. Occasionally, when these dust clouds dissipated, I could see below us the figures of Carter’s workmen; some seemed to be resting, but a few were still plying their way back and forth from the dark square that must be the entrance to the putative tomb. Standing on a rise from which he could direct operations, was the thin bearded figure of Ahmed Girigar. It was ten minutes to four in the afternoon of Sunday 26 November – and this was the second of our reportorial expeditions to the hills.

  At the behest of The Book, we’d spent much of the previous day in the same way, exploring the hills, selecting a suitable vantage point, picnicking and reading, while watching the events in the Valley below – historic events, or so local rumours claimed. When Carter had removed the infill protecting the stairs, he had discovered seals on the wall at their base – and they bore a king’s name. The discovery, which suggested this was a royal tomb, even if it did not prove it, had given the excavators new heart. They’d pressed on at speed: the previous morning, they had demolished the wall and discovered behind it a tunnel of unknown length. That tunnel proved to be blocked off, packed to its roof with rocks and chippings.