The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  He described again that seance at Highclere – Coptic! Recognised it at once! More than my life’s worth to tell you what was said – and, his manner briefly bewildered, then becoming firm, he spoke of Carnarvon’s death. ‘I was there at the end. At Carnarvon’s bedside. And the next day, every single one of the Cairo newspapers, even the Arab ones, were printed with a black border, in honour of him. What d’you think of that?’

  The fact was clearly of importance to him. I murmured some reply, though I could see it was unnecessary.

  ‘Never happened before, hasn’t happened since, will never happen again,’ he said. ‘Carnarvon was the last of his kind. And I’ve looked after his interests ever since, made a point of it, will continue to do so. My duty. Oh yes.’

  This statement, fiercely made, seemed to be a prompt, and so, rising to leave, I asked Carter whether he still visited Highclere Castle every year as he’d formerly done, if he’d be going back there this coming summer to mark the fact that his decade of work on Tutankhamun’s tomb had ended. Eve had never returned to Egypt, I knew, but I thought she and the Carnarvon family would be certain to celebrate this occasion.

  A closed expression came upon his face. ‘Don’t visit regularly, no – not now,’ he replied in a brusque, dismissive tone. ‘I simply don’t have the time. Infernally busy, tied up, constant demands to lecture, write. Not a moment to call my own. It never lets up. And once I’m finished here, I’ll be starting on the definitive account of the tomb and its contents. Beyond that, I have plans.’

  He gave me a sidelong look. ‘Can’t reveal them. Like to keep my cards close to my chest. But watch the newspapers, because I have a few surprises in store, and our journalist friends would give their right hands to find out more. I knew where Tutankhamun’s body was buried and I know where some other bodies are buried too. Illustrious ones. Ones that will make this discovery pale in comparison. I’ll give you a little clue… Alexander the Great.’ He bared his teeth. ‘Believe me, there’s a few tricks in the old dog yet.’

  I could hear his voice, as I turned out of the cemetery gates today, re-entered the park, and began the long, slow and increasingly painful ascent to the sanctuary of my home. The arthritis was back with a vengeance: I’d stayed too long, come too far, and the spooks were now in full clamour – they always know when you’re weakening. I set my face towards the wavering outline of my house, which I could just see in the distance beyond the thick dull July green of the trees ahead. As I’d learned on the journey that gave me my Deserts book, and had relearned on subsequent ones, the secret to walking distances over difficult terrain, in circumstances that are less than ideal, imperfect health, for example, is – don’t stop. Don’t pause. Don’t allow yourself to rest.

  So I pressed on, and Carter came with me and I saw him as I had the last time we met. That final meeting took place in the winter of 1937; it was some five years after the encounter in the Valley that I’ve described, and two years before Carter’s death. My own life had changed in the interim: I had married. On the occasion of that last meeting, I was in flight from my first husband and taking refuge in Egypt. The Carter sighting took place at the Winter Palace Hotel, where I was staying for a few nights. I was sitting on the hotel terrace one morning, contemplating the Nile, thinking of the time I’d spent here as a child with Frances, with Rose and Peter… If I thought about them hard enough, it might block other memories of Egypt and this hotel: my honeymoon here, for instance.

  I’d brought with me the bound typescript of Miss Mack’s book that she’d given me the week before she died, and I’d determined that, while I was here, I’d at last make myself read it. To the Lucy I once knew: that dedication, written in a wavering hand, distressed me. I sipped coffee and turned the onion-skin pages; I could quickly see that Miss Mack’s years of rewriting had effected an act of censorship. Entire episodes, lengthy conversations that I knew she’d recorded, had disappeared; Pecky Callender, her hero, had been virtually erased. I had once featured in The Book as a fellow bystander – now I found I too had been cut, cut comprehensively; there was nothing left of me.

  Into the gap had sprung a new character, I saw. Her name was Tragedy. Hitting the Oliver No. 9’s keys too hard, Miss Mack had punched the ‘e’ key with such violent authorial emotion that it had punctured the paper whenever this new protagonist appeared. Closing my ears to the voices on the terrace, I read: ‘The discovery of the hidden tomb was attended by Tragedy, as the world now knows. Tragedy stood, waiting in the shadows, a veiled and unseen spectator to the events in the Valley of the Kings. I will not stoop to speak of a Curse, but… ’

  My vision misted: the sun made reading painful. I closed The Book, replaced it in its envelope and turned my eyes to the river below. Past visits made to this hotel sprang into my mind, a flutter of snapshots: waving to the small figures of Rose and Peter from the ferry; the interview Frances and I had with the police officer, El-Deeb. I was remembering the zeal with which Miss Mack had inspected the Combine on this very terrace, when, drifting across the tables, I heard the boom of a familiar voice. Turning, I realised with shock that the speaker was Howard Carter, that he was the elderly, besuited and behatted invalid whom I’d glimpsed in the distance several times, a fixture of the hotel, visiting it every day, planted at a far table by the balustrade. Most visitors gave this elderly man a wide berth, for he was known as the hotel bore – though whenever I’d seen him he’d been alone, and, judging from his demeanour, uncommunicative.

  He’d been accosted by a group of tourists, to whom he’d been identified by one of the hotel’s safragis; having introduced them, the man scurried away. None of the hotel staff had given me this intelligence, but then I’d scarcely spoken to them; I hadn’t spoken to anyone. As I turned to look at Carter, he was in the act of signing a book – his own ‘popular’ account of finding Tutankhamun’s tomb, I saw, as I rose and moved closer. In the past five years, there had been no sign of the long-awaited scholarly account of this work. Carter had been haranguing the tourists for some minutes.

  ‘Yes, I still return here every winter,’ I heard him say, as they glanced furtively at each other and began to edge away. ‘I have plans, you see. Plenty of people only too ready to write me off – but there’s a few tricks in the old dog yet. The burial place of Alexander the Great: one of the enduring mysteries of archaeology… starting work any day now. Alexander the Great! What d’you think of that? Quite a prize! Can’t say any more… Mum’s the word, eh?’

  The tourists extricated themselves and left. Speak, or not speak? Carter had sunk back in his chair, and at ten yards I could see he was a sick man – almost unrecognisable. His formal clothes were those of a City banker, and old-fashioned – no one visiting Luxor dressed in that way any more. His figure was bloated by ill-health and perhaps by medication; his face bore a stricken expression. His eyes were fixed on the Theban hills opposite and his hands, which were trembling, constantly fiddled with the objects in front of him – as old men’s hands do. He picked up a teaspoon; fumbled with his coffee cup. Remembering his former deftness and vigour, I pitied him. Crossing to his table, I quietly told him my name. I knew it would mean little; that he would no more remember me now than he had on many past occasions, and so – as he stared up at me uncomprehendingly – I tried to explain who I was.

  ‘Who? Who?’ He glared up at me. ‘I’d remind you, madam, that I must have shown ten thousand people around that tomb – twenty! And I can’t recall one of them, not their names or their faces.’ He paused and bared his teeth in that smile I remembered. ‘No disrespect, dear lady,’ he added, with aggression.

  I should have left it there. ‘Lucy. Frances Winlock’s friend,’ I said. That form of identification had worked in the past with Carter, and I said it by rote.

  ‘Frances?’ Recognition sparked somewhere in his eyes, and his expression grew gentler. ‘Oh, I remember Frances. Smart girl. Always liked her.’ His gaze clouded and again became suspicious, as if I might be lying, mi
ght be an imposter. I’d begun to retreat, murmuring excuses, when in a stronger tone, he said: ‘Years since I’ve seen her. She’ll be grown up now. In her – let me see – in her twenties? How is she?’

  ‘Frances is dead, Mr Carter.’

  I spoke quietly, with reluctance, and for a moment thought he hadn’t heard me. Then, as an expression of confusion and ire etched itself upon his face, I saw that he had. He fumbled with his coffee spoon again, and shook his head.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said, gazing past me, into the distance. ‘Winlock didn’t let me know. A bit out of touch recently. Haven’t kept up as I should have done… ’ His gaze hardened and he turned to peer at me closely. ‘Should I believe you, that’s the thing? Who in hell are you?’

  I did not reply and the suspicion vanished from his eyes as swiftly as it came. He reached for his Homburg and jammed it on, picked up his cane, pushed back his chair, his manner suddenly impatient. ‘I must write to Winlock,’ he said. ‘Without delay. That’s what one does. Those are the formalities. One needs to observe them – that’s what my dear friend Lord Carnarvon always said. A condolence letter. I shall send it at once. I shall go home now and write it. I shall tell Winlock my plans too – Alexander the Great, I know he’ll be interested to hear about that. Envious, I expect… Frances. Sweet child. Smart. Didn’t make old bones, then.’

  He tossed some coins onto the table, walked past me as if I were invisible – which, indeed, I’d become, and for him perhaps always had been. He set off at surprising speed in the direction of the ferry. I watched him bustle aboard, watched the beggars who haunted that area shrink back and avoid him.

  It was the last sighting I ever had of him. A whistle blew, the Nile eddied, the ferry eased away from the shore – and in London, I finally reached the northern gates that led out of the green park, into the green lane, and into the green sanctuary of my garden.

  The pain in my hip was acute by then. All my old bones ached. My breathing was fitful, my heart was rattling and my vision was smudgy. I dragged myself inside the house, into the sitting room, and sank down in the nearest chair. It was early evening, and the light had thinned to late-summer silver, making the room, its furniture, its paintings, its books and its many accumulations, insubstantial. They were as transparent as air – as familiar to me as my own skin, yet frail as a dreamscape. Why, I’ve imagined you, I thought, and, closing my eyes, waited for these trappings softly and silently to vanish away. After an interval, opening my eyes, I saw they were still obstinately there. They asserted themselves. The room steadied.

  I picked up the small shabti figure, and held it tight in my palm. Where you go, I go, Frances said from the room’s airy recesses – and I understood that the surest of my spirits was here and had been faithfully waiting for me.

  34

  Saranac Lake, and the small town of the same name that grew up around it, is situated in the mountains and forests of upper New York State, not far south of the Canadian border. Frances lived there from June 1933 onwards.

  In the March of that same year, I’d stayed with Frances and her parents in New York. During that visit, she had taken me to the Metropolitan Museum. ‘Something I want to show you, Lucy,’ she’d said, coming to a halt at a group of glass cases, filled with exquisite Egyptian jewellery. ‘Remember these?’ I shook my head: I’d never entered this gallery before; I was wondering why she’d chosen to bring me here. ‘Read the labels,’ Frances said, turning away. I did so, and found these jewels were – The Treasure of Three Princesses.

  ‘The princesses’ names were Menhet, Menwi and Merti,’ Frances said. ‘They’ve disappeared from history. This jewellery is all that’s left of them, and I wanted you to see it. Just think: it took Mr Carter six long years to acquire their treasures, and then, just when he’d finally secured the very last pieces, I spoke out of turn. You remember: that day you and I and Rose and Peter had tea with him at Shepheard’s?’

  I remembered. ‘I’ve learned to guard my tongue since then,’ Frances said. ‘You always knew how to do that. Now I’ve caught up with you.’

  After that March visit, I was constantly travelling, and it seemed that Frances and I could never contrive to meet. We wrote as we’d always done, and meetings were planned, but Frances would always pull out of them. I wrote to her New York address, or to her family home in Boston. Throughout that time, Frances was in neither of those places: she was at Saranac Lake, but the fact that she was there, and the reason she was there, were kept secret. Frances hid her whereabouts from me – and from many of her friends, I suspect; as did her parents. Perhaps they hoped the reason for this secrecy could, in time, be put behind them and erased, so there need never be cause to discuss it. Perhaps it was simply too painful to discuss. I can’t answer those questions.

  It was Frances herself who finally explained where she was and why and asked me to visit her, but it was October 1935 before she did so. I was still unmarried then, and was returning from the protracted journeys undertaken for my second book, Islands. En route to England, I’d washed ashore in Manhattan. I was given her letter late one afternoon, on my return to the hotel where I’d told Frances I’d be staying. Shock slows the mind: I was trying to understand why Frances had kept this from me so long; the address on her letter was 153 Park Avenue, and it took me a while to realise that this was not the opulent Park Avenue of New York City, where her parents then had an apartment, but a different one: a Park Avenue in a remote town I’d never heard of. There was a one-word postscript: Come. A bright, fall day. By that evening, I was at Grand Central station.

  There was a queue at the ticket booth: I asked for a return to Saranac Lake, and the man waiting in line behind me laughed. He was thin, ill-kempt, threadbare. I’d seen many men like him, haunting Grand Central’s levels – it was then the depths of the Depression and such sad figures haunted many parts of the city. This man had a half-bottle of bourbon in a brown paper sack and he’d already been hassling me.

  ‘No returns. One way only,’ he said. ‘You don’t know that? You wanna single, honey. Hey, you, buddy.’ Shouldering me aside on a sickly waft of alcohol, he leaned in close to the grille and addressed the ticket clerk. ‘Do the Limey kid a favour – switch that to a single, pal. Plenty of folks going to Saranac Lake. Ain’t none of them coming back. Leastways, not outside a box, they ain’t.’

  I elbowed the man aside: after some of the journeys I’d been on, and some of the situations I’d encountered, I wasn’t going to argue with a New York bum who was half-seas over. I bought a return. It was a long slow journey on a stopping train. A glorious warm evening when I left the city; by the time darkness fell, we were still rattling northwards and I could see no lights or signs of habitation. My watch stopped and refused to restart, so I don’t know what time it was when, somewhere en route, the train came to a halt at some tiny remote station.

  I had to change trains at the Lake Clear junction and take the branch line to Saranac Lake itself, but we surely could not have reached that yet? ‘Do you know where we are?’ I asked the woman who shared my compartment – she had brightly dyed hair, a raddled, rouged face, tangerine lipstick and looked a bit of a floozie; she was pleasant and kindly, if talkative. She lit a cigarette, inhaled and blew a smoke ring. She gave me a gaudy smile. ‘Search me, kid,’ she said amiably. ‘Kind of beyond the back of beyond. But it won’t be Lake Clear – no way, honey, not for hours yet.’

  I went out into the corridor and pressed my face against the glass. Somewhere further down the train they were loading freight: I could hear the shouts of the porters. Doors slammed, the train shuddered and the voices receded, becoming faint, then inaudible. I hadn’t seen the name of the tiny station and it wouldn’t have told me much anyway – I’d left in a hurry, had little idea of the route and had no map with me.

  What country, friends, is this? I peered out at the blackness beyond the glass: acre upon acre of Hansel and Gretel forest closing in on a small wooden station building, its platform and
its single lamp; a huge sky, smeared with stars; a sickle moon hanging crookedly over the trees. From further down the train came the sound of a fretful child, sobbing. Something was wrong with the sky, I thought – and then realised it was snowing.

  It was still snowing when I reached Saranac Lake early the following morning. I’d sent Frances a cable, telling her I’d be arriving – but perhaps it hadn’t reached her or had gone astray: there was no one to meet me. I lifted out my small case and set off along the platform, shivering. The air was ice. The town was set down in the shallow bowl of a valley, ringed with snow-capped hills. I could see clusters of wooden buildings with gables, turrets and flourishes, many of them surprisingly large for such a remote town. Beyond them, more forests, black pine forests, the steel glint of water, and a blind white sky. Reaching the station building, I halted: there was a freight yard next to it, stacked with wooden boxes under a thin pall of snow. I’d been staring at them for some minutes before I understood they were coffins.

  The station clock informed me that it was six in the morning – too early to turn up at Park Avenue, especially if my cable had not arrived and no one was expecting me. I needed to kill time. The ticket clerk suggested I leave my case at the station and make for the hotel that, he assured me, would serve breakfast even at this hour; it would also sell me a map – and a guidebook, he added. ‘Not taking the cure? Visiting? Grandpa – Ma, maybe? You fixed up yet, ma’am – where you staying?’

  I told him the Park Avenue address and he whistled. Looking me up and down, he said: ‘That’s Highland Park – swell area – plenty of swells living there.’ He reeled off some names and, disappointed that they meant little to me, elaborated; one was a baseball star, another a famous magazine editor; there was a composer, a newspaper magnate, Wall Street bankers and numerous millionaires. I wasn’t thinking too clearly: I became afraid that he’d go on to list some of the Emerson or Stockton clan – but he didn’t.