by L. C. Tyler
‘Shukran,’ she said. Then to the two Americans she added: ‘I think we met in Cairo.’
‘So we did,’ said Tom. ‘You were with an Egyptian gentleman.’
‘Unsurprisingly since it was Cairo.’ She seemed in no hurry to explain who it was. She took a grape out of her bowl and held it for a moment between finger and thumb before popping it into her mouth, unpeeled.
‘Weren’t those mummies scary?’ said Tom. ‘Didn’t you think they were about to burst out of their glass cases and grab you?’
‘No,’ said Miss Watson. ‘That’s not what they do. Except possibly in American films. I think yoghurt might go well with this, don’t you? In a moment, I’ll get one of the waiters to carry over a pot from the buffet. They seem to enjoy carrying things.’
Our watching the various parties from last night’s conversations proved inconclusive. Campion eventually entered clutching a book neatly covered in brown paper but of a similar size and shape to my own Egyptology Made Easy. He nodded at us all briefly and went to the other table with his bowl of cereal, where his reading was interrupted by Purbright a few moments later. Purbright seemed chirpy but Campion was keen to read his book, whatever it was, so the conversation at that table was intermittent at best. Sky Benson glanced briefly at our table and then at Campion and Purbright, both silently munching cornflakes, before electing to join us.
Eventually all were present and accounted for except Elsie’s ‘policemen’. I still needed to correct Purbright on the Fielder/Fielding business but it seemed unlikely that I would now be able to mention it casually over an omelette, he being at one table and I at the other. Perhaps there would be a chance at the temple this morning. There was no urgency. I could experience being a famous author for a little longer.
It was as Elsie and I were finishing our breakfasts that the purser appeared. He glanced from one table to the other and then coughed. Everyone turned and looked at him, including the small queue that had built up (precisely as I had predicted) in front of the omelette chef.
‘Ladies and gentlemen. You will be aware that your trip is to be accompanied by a guide. Unfortunately he failed to join us at Luxor. I had hoped that he might still travel down by train overnight, but regrettably that will not be possible. I now hope that our usual guide will be able to join us tomorrow. We are trying to contact him. In the meantime, you will of course be issued with tickets for each of the temples, and a member of the crew will accompany you, but your visits will be without an expert.’
‘That is really too bad,’ said Miss Watson, looking up from her yoghurt. ‘We have paid for a proper guide.’
‘I am sure there will be a refund . . .’
‘That is scarcely the point.’
I wasn’t sure that the purser appreciated being addressed like a naughty third-former. I felt sorry for him, though it has to be said that Miss Watson was speaking for most of us. We had all paid for a guide, even if one of us was hoping to recharge everything to their elusive client.
‘We shall manage,’ I said, with what I hoped was good grace. ‘We do have Professor Campion with us. You won’t mind giving us the benefit of your knowledge, Professor?’
It was clear that some of the party had not known we had an Egyptologist amongst the passengers, and several heads turned curiously in Campion’s direction.
For a moment he said nothing, then he exclaimed indignantly: ‘I am supposed to be on holiday, you know!’
‘We wouldn’t expect very much,’ I said quickly, remembering his reaction when he thought I was suggesting he should run a course. ‘You need only to point us all in the right direction and tell us what to look out for.’
‘The problem . . .’ he said, uncertainly. He was not happy.
Sky Benson conversely seemed quite perky and on the ball. ‘Professor Campion,’ she said, ‘as an internationally renowned expert in Egyptology, it would be only natural for you to offer to help us, surely?’
‘Would it?’ he asked.
‘I think so.’
Miss Benson, perhaps because of the previous evening’s conversation, rather seemed to be enjoying putting Campion on the spot – at least, from the safety of our table.
‘That would appear to be settled, then,’ said Miss Watson, mainly I think because that was so far from being the case. ‘I am so much looking forward to being guided by Professor Campion.’
‘Then if I must . . .’ Campion was both on the spot and backed into a corner and didn’t seem to like being either.
‘Excellent,’ said the purser. He had wisely remained silent during this conversation, but now decided it was time to close the deal. ‘Ali will accompany you to the temple and purchase tickets. The very distinguished Professor Campion will most kindly guide you round. For sure, I wish you all a very fine day.’
Campion rose, sighed and dropped his napkin tetchily on the table. ‘So be it. I shall see you all in half an hour, when it will be my pleasure, for sure, to escort you round the temple of Edfu,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, please do enjoy your breakfasts, while I prepare for the visit.’
As he left the room, clutching his book, he flashed a look at me that was malevolent in the extreme, though all I had done was to try to help the other passengers. He clearly would have also liked to put the evil eye on Sky Benson, but she was already in conversation with the two Americans and so missed Campion’s petulant exit and his final blameful gaze in her direction.
‘Odd,’ said Miss Watson, as she folded her napkin.
‘Odd?’ I asked. ‘You mean Professor Campion’s evident reluctance to guide us round the temple?’
‘No – if Egyptology is his job, I can see why he might object to having his services commandeered in this way. It’s a bit like getting a professional opera singer to entertain us with a bit of karaoke or getting a brain surgeon to check out your piles over coffee. If your day job is teaching hieroglyphics to people who are beginning to wonder why they didn’t apply to read media studies or sociology, then you’d probably resent having to do the same to a group of people who are thinking mainly about what to have for lunch. I meant it’s odd that they have sent for the usual guide as a replacement. Because the question is: Why didn’t we have the usual guide in the first place rather than this thoroughly unreliable person who has failed to appear?’
‘The boat is half empty,’ said Purbright, turning to us from his seat at the next table. ‘They’ve probably given their usual guide the week off and employed some first-year archaeology student from Ain Shams, who has now had a better offer at the last minute.’
‘That is a remarkably confident assertion coming from somebody who clearly knows nothing about it,’ said Miss Watson in the sweetest possible tones.
‘I am only speculating,’ said Purbright, with practised patience.
‘I’ll ask the purser,’ said Miss Watson with a sniff. ‘He’s more likely to know than you are.’
Since Miss Watson had made her views of the purser known only minutes before, this was not a comparison intended to flatter.
‘Do, by all means,’ said Purbright. He stood up and made his exit, thus ensuring that he had at least had the last word.
Miss Watson watched him leave. ‘I shall,’ she said, as the door closed behind him. ‘I most certainly shall.’
I’m not sure – returning to Miss Watson’s analogy – how I would have felt if I had been asked to read from my novels to amuse the passengers. I suppose I would have done it. There was a time – I have to say a much better time in my view – when writers were simply required to write. Now your publisher, and indeed your agent, expects you to keep up your website, to blog and to appear regularly in order to read, sign and generally be pleasant. Elsie constantly reminded me that my natural modesty was quite charming but unfortunately sold no books. I did not doubt that, had she thought it would shift even a single copy, Elsie would have had me reading to the passengers every evening, pointing out (no doubt) that this was after all supposed to be a working
visit.
As, of course, it was.
Campion’s annoyance was, in that context, perhaps quite understandable. Miss Watson’s comment to him,by extension, seemed tactless – but perhaps no more so than her remarks to Purbright, who had done nothing to offend her. Like Elsie, she apparently felt that people were entitled to know her views in full. Hopefully, like Elsie, she also had a finely tuned sense of what she could get away with – I was completely with Agatha Christie on the issue of whether you could murder somebody on a Nile paddle steamer. You can murder somebody anywhere. It’s getting away with it that is always the tricky bit.
In the end, Campion’s lecture to us on the main features of an Egyptian temple was informative, but our questions to him were almost invariably dismissed with every sign of wearied irritation.
‘It’s just a list of the pharaoh’s titles, one after the other,’ he said curtly, in reply to a question from Jane Watson about the meaning of the hieroglyphs on the face of the vast pylon in front of us. Even first-year students, he implied, would have known that.
‘Such as?’ asked Herbie Proctor. At breakfast Proctor had dismissed any idea of joining our excursion, but had eventually trailed along – mainly to be unkind to Campion, as far as I could tell. He had displayed no real interest in anything he had been shown, but had occasionally tried fiddling with his phone to see whether he could get a signal.
‘Well,’ said Professor Campion, peering at the carved characters, ‘this one says, “He of the Sedge and Bee”.’
‘And that one?’ asked Proctor, pointing randomly.
‘That says “King of Upper and Lower Egypt”.’
‘And the one up there?’
‘That’s the Golden Horus.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Proctor. ‘That’s really interesting.’
Proctor’s little world was, it seemed to me, a curious one. He shared Elsie’s view that the majority of his fellow men were idiots, placed on earth primarily for his own personal doubt about how she felt about them, Proctor limited himself to snide ambiguities, which might later be disowned if they proved inconvenient. Scratch Elsie, however deeply, and you would just find more of the same. Proctor’s bravado was no more than a thin veneer, easily damaged but perhaps too cheap to cause him concern if it was.
Campion looked uncertainly at Proctor. Somebody who was sufficiently vain might have taken Proctor’s words as a compliment. Somebody who was sufficiently thin-skinned would almost certainly have bridled at Proctor’s tone. Campion was possibly both, and therefore unable to decide what the appropriate response might be. In the end, he shook his head as if he had never come across anything quite like Proctor before, and then led us through the door in the pylon and into the peristyle courtyard, where the impromptu lecture continued.
‘The prof seems to know his stuff,’ said Purbright later, as we stood in the shade just outside the hypostyle hall, its towering columns and stone ceiling creating a welcoming gloom for those inside and a narrow line of shadow for us outside. Purbright wiped his neck with an old-fashioned spotted handkerchief and stuffed it back in his pocket. The sun was now higher in the sky, and Egypt was starting to feel a whole lot warmer. Our little group had dispersed after viewing the sanctuary, and was now wandering round the temple in ones and twos, each at his or her own pace and in the shade as much as possible. The boat was not due to sail for another hour. Elsie and I had re-examined the great pylon – a solid, almost modernist slab with its vast figures striding stiffly across its face to some never-fulfilled meeting in the middle. We had plunged into the twilight of the temple to view the sacred barque in the narrow inner sanctum. We had glanced briefly up a steep staircase that apparently led to the roof. Had I been tempted to venture up there I would have been quickly dissuaded by a sign that read: ‘CLOSED – REPAIR WORK IN PROGRESS’. Nothing prevented us physically from ascending, other than an old piece of rope tied crookedly across the passage. My natural inclination to follow official instructions might still have been countermanded by Elsie, who has a theory that you are only ever banned from doing good stuff. Before she could drag me over the rope and up the stairs, however, she had spotted somebody with an ice cream and decided that locating the shop that sold them was a higher priority than subverting petty bureaucracy.
Thus I found myself talking to Purbright in the growing mid-morning heat. I was beginning to wish that I had joined Elsie, but told myself that there would be plenty of time for keeping cool once we returned to the Khedive.
‘Yes,’ I said to Purbright. ‘Professor Campion was very informative. I think he blames me for landing him in it, though.’
‘I got that impression too,’ said Purbright. ‘I don’t think you’ve made a friend there somehow. Still, it has been very useful for the rest of us.’
I nodded. Though the Ptolemy business still worried me, I could not fault Campion’s role as a guide. At the back of my mind both now and earlier that morning, however, had been the strange overheard conversation between Campion and Miss Benson. It was true that, when Campion had been leading the group, Miss Benson had been no more and no less attentive than the others in the party. Had it not been for the words I had heard pass between them, they might genuinely have met on the journey out but found each other neither sufficiently interesting to desire further company nor sufficiently dull to avoid it altogether. As it was, while Campion had described the layout of the temple, I had not been contemplating the glories of the ancient pharaohs but had been wondering exactly what sort of hold Campion had over Sky Benson. As he explained the development of the pylon, I had speculated on whether he had actually meant that a murder was planned or just that Miss Benson was acting in a way that would arouse such a suspicion. Nor were those my only thoughts; the relaxed-looking MI6 man in front of me had also been having an odd discussion with somebody who was also probably present in the group.
‘I guess we’ll be pretty expert on all of this by the end of the trip,’ Purbright continued, fortunately unable to read my mind. ‘Amazing stuff. Look at those paintings on the ceiling – over two thousand years old. You’d scarcely think it, would you?’
I looked up at the large stone slabs that formed the ceiling. Some were well preserved. Others were cracked or decaying – explaining perhaps why the steps to the roof were temporarily out of bounds. But, where the old surface remained, the reds, blues and yellows were still surprisingly fresh, as though just decorated using a giant paintbox with just a few blocks of primary colour.
‘You can get up onto the roof, I think,’ said Purbright, following my gaze, ‘if you pay some baksheesh to one of the temple guards.’
‘It’s closed off,’ I said. ‘There’s a notice on the staircase, anyway. It all looks a bit precarious. I’m not sure I’d risk it.’
‘Might be worth checking out,’ he said. Purbright was clearly somebody who preferred doing to merely looking and shared Elsie’s scepticism regarding health and safety warnings.
He had already departed, for the roof or elsewhere, when Herbie Proctor appeared from the entrance to the hall and joined me on the outside, in my small strip of shade by the columns. I pretended to be examining the hieroglyphs intently, in the hope he would pass me by without comment.
‘You’ll be able to read that stuff now, having listened to Campion,’ said Proctor with a sneer.
‘Not really,’ I said, giving up the charade of doing so.
‘Exactly,’ said Proctor, leaning against the pillar. He was using a thumbnail to extract the last remains of his breakfast from between his front teeth. He held up the modest fruits of his labours to the light and squinted at it before adding: ‘That man’s a complete fraud.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far . . .’
‘Oh, I would. “He of the Sedge and the Bee”. What sort of title is that? He hadn’t got the first idea what those cartouches said.’
‘I did wonder the same thing,’ I said. I couldn’t vouch for the hieroglyphs, but the Ptolemy numbering thing continued
to niggle me. It felt odd siding with Proctor, but his suspicions echoed my own. I glanced round the courtyard to see whether any of our party was within earshot. I could see nobody, but of course anyone could have been concealed behind one of the numerous columns. ‘Yes, he is acting oddly,’ I agreed. ‘He said something last night that I’m sure was wrong. He said this temple was constructed by Ptolemy II.’
Proctor nodded. ‘They can’t fool you, eh Ethelred? Ptolemy II my arse.’
For a moment I thought that, like Elsie, he was not taking my concerns seriously. I pressed on anyway.
‘So, why should he be pretending to be an Egyptologist?’ I asked.
‘Why indeed, Ethelred? Why indeed? You see, I’m trained to pick up these things – in real life, where it counts. Of course, if this was one of your little books, he might just be a red herring – he might have some entirely innocent reason for playing at being a professor. But not in real life, Ethelred. When that sort of thing happens in real life, there’s a reason for it. What you need in this business is cold logic and an instinct for danger. You have to be two steps ahead . . .’
The slab of sandstone, as I was later informed, was halfway to the ground before anyone spotted it. At that point two or three people had screamed helpfully, but it took far longer for us to react than for the rock to complete its descent and shatter against the flagstone floor. It was fortunate that standing still was a relatively safe option. I was aware only of something large hitting the deck not far from us. Whereupon a whole lot more people screamed. As the dust cleared I saw Proctor staring at me open-mouthed; then everyone within the courtyard and some from the hall beyond converged on us asking us if we were all right. My arm, I discovered, had been grazed by a fragment of stone, thrown up when the slab flew apart. Proctor appeared shocked and dusty, but unhurt. It was only once I had reassured everyone that I was fine that I thought to look up.