The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  A problem with the valves to her heart, they said. They operated. And I did hold her; I nursed her, for a week or so. I named her. Then, one evening, my child gave a small sigh, and her tiny face puckered in brief distress. Her eyes opened with that wide unfocused gaze of babies; she made a snuffling sound and waved her tiny starfish hand. The next second, between one breath and the next, she slipped away from me. I still think of her. I still think of her father – though many years lost, their sharp presence, and their terrible absence, remain with me.

  For some reason – and I think I know exactly what that reason is – this concatenation of absence and presence has been particularly testing this past winter in Highgate. There have been days and nights when it came close to breaking me. I hadn’t expected or foreseen that. I’d believed that passing years, age and resignation had put a barrier between me and grieving. How wrong. Grief’s talons are never sheathed, and its patient capacity to wound is unremitting – but then, it has been a long harsh winter and so, by extension, solitary.

  38

  When the year turned and January came, the weather suddenly, capriciously, became gentler. I told myself that I’d endured these wintry siege conditions for long enough. So I telephoned Rose, and she arrived last night. I was inspecting the little blue answerer Frances gave me at Saranac Lake when I heard the baby-Mercedes draw up outside in the square. Carefully, I replaced my shabti on my desk and examined him. Where I go, you go. His smile has never seemed in the least enigmatic to me: the three thousand-year effect – a smile of absolute and unshakeable serenity, I’d say.

  I went to the front door to greet Rose. ‘I come bearing gifts,’ she said.

  For an instant I thought she was bringing me letters – my letters to Peter, the ones she had claimed she’d carefully fed to her ceremonial clearing-out bonfire. Then I realised my mistake: Rose was waving a pack of DVDs at me: Dr Fong’s documentary; a photograph of a world-famous gold face mask and large title letters – Tutankhamun: The Untold Story.

  ‘I’d better get on home now,’ Rose said, this morning, rising from the battered sofa in my Highgate sitting room. ‘Wheelie will be here soon to collect me. Wasn’t that marvellous? I’m so glad we watched it together. I think your Dr Fang did a thoroughly good job. A truly excellent meaty documentary. Very sound on Carter, I thought – and Carnarvon. The Tutankhamun things were even more beautiful than I’d remembered – that gold face mask! The politics were a little muddling, but I expect that’s just me, I always find politics boring… And, goodness, the mistakes everyone made… Why couldn’t they see what was coming? The great thing was, one could hear every single word your Dr Fang said – I can’t stand those presenter people who mumble. He made it all so tremendously clear! Don’t you agree, Lucy?’

  ‘Crystal clear. Admirable.’

  I switched off the television set. I had watched these programmes, alone, when they were first broadcast a few weeks before, so this had been my second viewing. Two DVDs yesterday, two more this morning; Rose and I, bingeing on Egyptology. KV62 – the history. Magnificent swooping helicopter shots of the Valley of the Kings and the Nile; a dizzying panorama, all the bells and whistles of the latest technology. Computer imaging, volumetric reconstructions, nifty intercutting, sly and judicious editing. The talking heads the producers had feared were, to a man, succinct and erudite. The lighting for the sequences in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was a marvel – for that place is murky. The past spoke… It’s a year now since Ben Fong first came here, I thought: full circle.

  I turned to the window as Rose began to gather up her belongings. A fine day outside, deceptively springlike: a blue sky, a high sun, frostbitten roses in my garden, but signs of life even so, bulbs coming up, et cetera.

  I went out into the hall with Rose, helped her on with her coat, helped her find her gloves, handbag, overnight case. It was chilly, and in the hall’s silvery wavering light I could sense my familiar ghosts; they love to cluster there, whispering as one departs and another enters. They seem drawn to stairs, and the recesses under them. I wondered if Rose ever noticed them, these companions of mine; she seemed not to sense them or, if she did, ignored them.

  ‘Of course,’ she was saying now, pulling on her gloves, ‘you and I could read between the lines, couldn’t we, Lucy? We knew those people. So when we’re watching your Dr Fang’s version, we can remember what it was really like. He had to concentrate on the main players – but we remember all those on the fringes – don’t we? They couldn’t matter to him, why should they – but they matter to us, and always will.’

  She wrapped a red scarf about her throat and sighed. ‘It was so cleverly filmed, wasn’t it, Lucy? It reminded me of how utterly beautiful it was, the Nile then, the water, the palms, the astonishing green fertility of it – and then beyond that, bare desert… Peter and I used to stand on our balcony at the Winter Palace every evening, you know, watching the sailing boats. He loved the feluccas. He loved watching the ferry. And he’d ask if you’d be on the next one, or if the next boat would bring our mother back – and I used to say, Maybe not this one, but perhaps the next… Ah, Lucy. What lies one tells!’

  ‘Don’t, Rose.’

  ‘No, you’re right. I’ll only get upset.’ She paused and adjusted her scarf. Averting her eyes, she said: ‘Goodness, I almost forgot. I meant to ask you, before I go: you did see that doctor? The specialist I recommended?’

  ‘Yes, I saw him.’

  ‘What did he say? Did he run tests?’

  ‘Innumerable tests. The diagnosis was old age. As I could have told him.’

  ‘Nothing else? Still ticking over, then? Oh I’m so glad!’ She reached up and kissed my cheek. ‘I’d been worrying about you, Lucy, you know – all this winter. That’s a great relief. Now I want you to promise me something. When the spring comes––’

  ‘Yes, Rose?’

  ‘When spring is here, you will come and stay with me, won’t you? As you always do?’

  ‘Of course, Rose.’

  I opened my front door for her and there, punctual to the minute as always, was the baby-Mercedes. Wheeler climbed out and came round to help Rose into the car. I watched her negotiate the path with care – she was frailer this year than last, as I was. As the car drew away, she lifted her hand. I lifted mine in a mirroring farewell, then closed the door, and leaned against it. I closed my eyes and waited for my pulse to slow to normal.

  Too much past. So many lost people. I returned to my sitting room, where Nicola watched me from the corner of the room; where berries, flowers and ferns I’d once picked at Saranac Lake still bloomed in the blue jar in which Frances and her mother had arranged them; where a small dog still stretched out in the sleepy abandon of a lost past, an instant captured in pencil and charcoal.

  Not long now, I thought, later this afternoon… It will be spring before one knows it. I pulled on a coat and went outside, shuffling along the paths in my back garden. From three houses away, where a new family has just moved in, came the bright upraised voices of children, playing outside. I stood quietly, listening to their cries and laughter. I turned to the flower beds and inspected the bulbs, green and determined, blunt noses coming up from the hard black soil. Here crocuses, there daffodils, and over there snowdrops – these were well advanced, almost in flower, incipient white petals still shrouded in their green calyx.

  To tell the truth, which on the whole I’ve tried to do here, I’m none too sure I’ll see these crocuses in bloom, let alone the daffodils. But let’s not dwell on that. Far more interesting, and far more significant, is what happened next, when I’d completed my bulb inspection. One moment, there I was in my chilly garden, the towers of the new London in the distance against the unclouded blue of the January sky, and my wintry view of Highgate and its graves unimpeded by foliage. I was standing at the end of the lawn, close to the boundary wall. Below it, the ground falls away sharply to the beautiful wilderness of the western section of Highgate’s cemetery. I was admiring the ang
el I like best, the one with spread wings, a blind passionless face and an uplifted, pointing hand, when I realised that this area, empty of people a moment before, was now occupied. Standing near the angel, between it and a pyramid, her attitude contemplative, her head bent, was a woman.

  There was a transparency to her, you could almost see through her, and at first I assumed I’d imagined her. But then I realised, no; it was my own vision, my eyes that were at fault; they had made this figure blurry and uncertain. Once I concentrated, I could see that she was real. She began to walk towards me, threading her way rapidly between the stones; on her face was an eager look of expectation that I recognised. Why, she was young, I realised – a young woman poised on the very cusp of adult life, her eyes brimming with the future, everything ahead of her, all life’s infinite possibilities, there for the grasping. My heart lifted. I moved forward to greet her. As she came close, I recognised her.

  Coming to a halt below my boundary wall, she looked up at me with laughter in her eyes and lifted her hand to me. I knew that wall was insurmountable. I feared I’d be unable to reach her. But she raised herself on her toes and with a smile caught my cold hand in her warm one. She began speaking, and an impulsive, eloquent speaker she was too. She showed no reserve. I replied with equal openness. When we had finished this rapid, heartfelt communication, she gave me a quicksilver glance, pressed my hand, turned and swiftly returned the way she had come. I lost sight of her among the crosses, obelisks and angels.

  It was three o’clock. The light was fast fading. I went indoors. I closed the shutters, opened the hall door so my ghosts might have ease of access, encouraged the fire, settled myself in my familiar chair. I thought of Dr Fong’s Egypt and my own, and the places to which my Egypt had taken me. I thought of voyages made, of the Valley I’d known in my childhood, and the way it had lain hidden behind the hills on the horizon.

  I closed my eyes. In an hour or so, I’d resume those ordinary tasks, those little rituals of every day that serve to punctuate the passing hours for all of us. I’d make tea, switch on the lamps, banish the evening’s encroaching dark. Meanwhile, in the silent dusk of the long afternoon, I waited in patient expectation. I knew it would come, must come; and at last I discerned it. Difficult to identify; hard to put a name to it, but from the shadows, the shadows by the bookshelves I supposed, came the faintest of sounds, a gentle exhalation, a plaintive stirring, a sigh and an appeal.

  PEOPLE, PLACES, PROVENANCE

  Howard Carter

  Carter’s account of Tutankhamun’s tomb was published in three volumes: the first, co-written with Arthur Mace, came out in 1923; the final volume in 1933. He never progressed beyond notes for the proposed six-volume definitive account of his work on the tomb, and never pursued the burial place of Alexander the Great, although he spoke of this project to numerous people in his final years. Once the excavation in the Valley was over, he wrote a series of autobiographical sketches about his life in Egypt; these remain unpublished.

  On his death in 1939, the bulk of Carter’s estate went to his niece, Phyllis Walker; it included the contents of his London flat, where artefacts were found that without question came from the tomb of Tutankhamun. They included a headrest carved from lapis lazuli bearing the king’s cartouche, and a shabti figure that Carter had always kept on his desk. His niece at once attempted to return these to Egypt, but the process was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Deposited at the Egyptian Embassy in London in 1940, they finally reached Egypt under the auspices of King Farouk in 1946. The King then presented them to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. ‘Nobody will dare to make inappropriate insinuations in… a matter in which His Majesty himself is interested,’ wrote the then Director of the Antiquities Service.

  Some commentators believe these London-apartment artefacts were taken from the tomb by Carter for himself; others that they were part of Lord Carnarvon’s collection, removed from it by Carter when he supervised its sale, since he knew them to be identifiable. There is no definite proof either way. Other artefacts found in his house in Egypt after his death and bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York did come from the tomb, however, so the sad fact that Carter removed artefacts and and kept them seems irrefutable.

  Lord Carnarvon

  Carnarvon, together with his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert and Howard Carter (with the assistance of ‘Pecky’ Callender), broke into Tutankhamun’s Burial Chamber on either Sunday 26 or Monday 27 November, 1922. That they did so remained a secret for decades – in fact, it was one of the best-kept secrets in archaeological history. The true story began to leak out among Egyptologists in the late 1940s; it was subsequently confirmed by an entry in the journals of Carnarvon’s half-brother the Hon. Mervyn Herbert, in whom Lady Evelyn and her father had confided. Those journals have been held by the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford, since 1966 and the secret came to light when they were examined in the 1970s.

  The revelations reached a wider public with the publication in 1978 of Thomas Hoving’s book Tutankhamun: The Untold Story. Hoving was Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 1967–77; there – in forgotten archives that included papers originating from Carter’s home in Egypt – he found further evidence of the secret entry to the Burial Chamber, the cover-up afterwards and the illicit removal of artefacts. Hoving’s account is flamboyant and much of it is persuasive, but it is marred by innumerable factual errors.

  Lord Carnarvon’s collection of Egyptian art, later sold by his widow to the Met, included a number of exquisite objects that, while unstamped, almost certainly came from Tutankhamun’s tomb; presumably they had formed part of what Herbert Winlock, who coined the term, wryly called the earl’s ‘pocket collection’.

  Highclere Castle is now owned by the eighth earl (great-grandson of the Lord Carnarvon in this book); in its cellars there is currently an exhibition that details the work of Carter and the fifth earl in the Valley. The final gallery, ‘Wonderful Things’, contains examples of Tutankhamun’s greatest treasures – in replica form.

  Almina, Lady Carnarvon

  In 1926, Lady Carnarvon bypassed the British Museum and, with the assistance of Carter, sold her late husband’s collection of Egyptian art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the sum of $145,000 (the equivalent of some $1.5 million today). In 1930, after years of litigation and vituperative argument, the Egyptian government awarded her and Carnarvon’s trustees the sum of £35,867 (around £1.1 million today) partly in lieu of any artefacts and partly in recognition of expenses incurred in the excavation and clearing of Tutankhamun’s tomb. In later life, Almina Carnarvon continued to spend money as swiftly as she had when chatelaine of Highclere; she was declared bankrupt in 1951. Her last home was a small terraced house in Bristol. She died there, aged ninety-two, in 1969.

  Lady Evelyn Herbert

  The evidence of an attachment between Lady Evelyn and Howard Carter rests in the main upon two letters and one note from her to him, and one letter from her father to Carter. Carter’s diaries detail nothing beyond the dates of her comings and goings, though he does record her bringing him the second, replacement canary. In the first of these letters, written from Highclere at Christmas 1922 to Carter in Luxor, Lady Evelyn speaks of entering the ‘Holy of Holies’, and describes it as the ‘Great Moment of my life’. She also says that she is ‘panting’ to return to Carter; she was twenty-one and (as Arthur Mace wrote of her) ‘slangy’. He also noted, however, that she and Carter were ‘very thick together’, and he was not alone in such observations.

  It is possible, but not certain on existing evidence, that Lady Evelyn’s feelings for Carter contributed to the quarrel between him and her father in February 1923. If there was an infatuation on her part, it seems to have been short-lived: she married Brograve Beauchamp (later Sir Brograve Beauchamp, MP) in October 1923, some seven months after her father’s death. She never returned to Egypt. In 1972, when the celebrated touring exhibition of the Tutankhamun treasures
came to the British Museum, Lady Evelyn attended and was photographed with them. She suffered a stroke on the steps of the Museum when leaving. She died in 1980.

  Herbert Winlock

  Winlock was the author of many books; they remain the best accounts of excavating in Egypt in the period 1910–1930; he wears his erudition lightly. His sharp, witty correspondence gives an insider account of the circumstances surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and its aftermath. Insofar as Howard Carter had friends, Winlock was one of the closest, and most loyal. His account of Tutankhamun’s funeral, published in 1941, nineteen years after he made the discovery that confirmed Tutankhamun’s near-certain burial in the Valley, repays rereading, not least for its tone of abiding melancholy. Winlock kept a close tally of those associated with the tomb who had died and those who survived; he frequently attempted to demolish journalists’ claims of a ‘Curse’.

  In January 1934, following the deaths of Arthur Weigall and Albert Lythgoe, when speculation as to the ‘Curse’ broke out anew, Winlock wrote to The New York Times in yet another attempt to disprove such claims – and when the ‘Curse’ is discussed, as it still often is, this letter’s tally is almost always cited. When it was written, his daughter Frances had been seven months at Saranac Lake, which perhaps explains why he pursued the subject with such determination and seriousness. Winlock remained Director of the Met until 1939. He died, aged sixty-five, of a heart attack while on holiday in Florida in 1950 and, as a veteran of the First World War, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC.

  Helen Winlock