by Jessica Mann
‘I could not bear to be regarded as a tourist.’
‘One hardly would be, in so small a party. Oh, John, couldn’t we—’
Hugo Bloom said, ‘This is a particularly expensive package, Ann.’
‘I cannot bear people who imply that we are paupers,’ John Benson said.
‘My dear chap, I had no such—’
‘Now that I read the brochure in detail, I must admit that it sounds quite attractive.’
‘Yes, doesn’t it,’ Ann burst out. ‘It even has Max Solomon as its courier.’
‘If he speaks as obscenely as he writes you wouldn’t care for him, Ann,’ John said.
‘I have seen him on television. He sounds wonderful,’ Ann said mutinously.
‘I can’t imagine that it would really suit you. It will be quite arduous, especially this extra excursion to see Giles Needham’s excavations in Lake Nasser,’ Hugo said.
‘Nasser!’ John Benson might have been mentioning Hitler. He picked up the pamphlet again, turning the pages in his long, slightly dirty fingers. It was printed on cream paper, matt not shiny, in thermographically raised, elegantly classical type. It was illustrated with a Roberts print of Karnak. It was not designed to appeal to the mass market.
‘I don’t see why you and I shouldn’t have the same little excitements in our lives as Hugo.’
‘But John, it’s so dear!’
‘I cannot bear it when you always talk about money. Whatever Hugo may suppose, we are not completely destitute.’
‘But John,’ Ann began, before he went on:
‘Our grandmother spent a winter at Aswan for her health.’
The discouraged hissing of damp logs in a stove designed for dry pinewood was all that could be heard as Ann Benson and Hugo Bloom waited for John to pronounce.
Chapter Five
I must repeatedly remind myself that all humans are unique. Behaviour on holiday is so predictable as to make me doubt it. I deal with the usual demands and queries. I express gratification at the usual compliments. I feel the usual sentiments myself, at the sight of the sun setting behind the rosy Theban Mountain across the metallic, implacable flow of the Nile. Dancers are rehearsing a modern ballet in the ancient Temple of Luxor beside which we are moored. Most of the passengers complain of the loud, discordant music. I observe that Mr Knipe stands entranced by glimpses of leg and leotard between the massive columns.
Another early start, because privacy is what Osmond’s customers are paying for.
At the Colossi of Memnon several people are moved to quote Shelley. ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair.’
Mr Benson cannot bear people who utter incomplete tags. He declaims, ‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’
But the Colossi are not standing on lone and level sands. When I first saw them they rose as portents from fields of emerald alfalfa. Now there is a levelled patch of ground trodden naked around them. The doctor’s wife has climbed the plinth to stand and be photographed where Ruth once stood.
On the Ramasseum, the Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Hatshepsut. At the Tombs of the Nobles we must await our turn to enter. The desert valley is like a furnace, and we wonder how anyone can bear to live in such heat. Sayeed tells us that the government has tried to rehouse the residents in a village with all modern conveniences but they are hereditary tomb robbers and must stay near the source of their wealth.
‘What can there be left to steal?’ he is asked.
‘When they can’t find antiquities they fake them. Statuettes, scarabs . . .’ Any antiquities we are offered for sale will be forgeries, Sayeed asserts, not for the first time.
‘We all know that there is money in faking, don’t we?’ Vanessa Papillon says. ‘I am sure John Benson can confirm it.’
‘I have no sympathy with anyone who buys art for investment,’ Timothy Knipe says. ‘Serve them right if they are caught out by fakes.’
‘The peasants make scarabs and feed them to turkeys. When the animal excretes them they look ancient,’ Sayeed says.
He leads the way down into the tomb, where he shines his flashlight onto the brilliant frescoes. Purple grapes, thousands of years old, bloom on the ceiling. Sayeed speaks of the daily life and the eternal longings of the civil servant whose remains were interred here. The ladies in our party are enchanted by the pretty details. ‘What wonderful colours, so well preserved.’ One of them vows to redecorate her house on its design.
‘The terracotta, the ochre,’ she exclaims. ‘With touches of turquoise. It will be empire style.’
‘Pharaonic?’ Vanessa asks, and is told Napoleonic. This country gives the least likely of us delusions of grandeur.
*
Max Solomon wrote of Tamara again at Kom Ombo, where the river steamer had moored in a beautiful place beside what smelt like a sewage farm. He described the Ptolemaic temple, and likened it to a post-reformation cathedral in England; he quoted without comment John Benson’s praise of the beauty of Liverpool and Truro cathedrals, and Timothy Knipe’s deprecation of their self-conscious archaism. Our new lecturer is a success, he added. She speaks clearly and uses witty contemporary analogies to enlighten the past of which she tells us. She makes the notes that Professor Thomas lent her sound like her own words.
‘It was not as easy as all that,’ Tamara said. ‘I really had to slave at the Egyptology in private without letting the pax see me.’
‘Pax?’
‘It’s what people in the holiday trade call passengers. Didn’t you know?’
‘You have learnt a good deal on this assignment that I am never likely to know,’ Mr Black said. ‘My only sight of the Nile was during the war. Not the best circumstances.’
‘I can’t believe it has changed.’
What Tamara had seen was like a vision of the past she had studied and tried to imagine. As the steamer moved southwards from Cairo it seemed to move backwards from the twentieth century. Laid out on either side was the immemorial pattern of riparian life. Women in orange, magenta, lime-green or vermilion robes clustered with their flat copper bowls to wash their clothes, crocks and children. Blindfold donkeys turned water-wheels. Small girls herded goats, boys drove donkeys, biblical patriarchs directed agrarian operations unsullied by machinery.
Wherever the boat was moored, its party of Europeans would set off to see temples or the traces of early habitations.
‘I was nervous after that fright I had at Dendera,’ Tamara said. ‘I thought that Janet might escape while I was droning about dynasties.’
Janet had signed on for a day trip by bus across the eastern desert to the Red Sea—four hours’ bumpy drive in each direction. But she had an acute attack of diarrhoea and was unable to join the twenty energetic characters who chose the discomfort.
‘Lucky,’ Tamara said. ‘I was stuck with a scheduled lecture to the rest of them. I had visions of her hitching away on a boat or something.’
‘What did you use? Ipecacuanha or something?’
‘I’d found some castor oil in the doctor’s bag. The salads of cooked vegetables tasted pretty odd anyway, and of course we were all being careful to keep off the raw stuff.’
‘A risk?’
‘What would you have done? Though you’re right, of course, and I doubt whether the anxiety was justified at the time.’
*
Janet Macmillan had calmly followed the guides, listening to what they said with apparent attention. Her former lover seemed unembarrassed by her presence. It may be that Janet had hoped to upset Vanessa who, however, thrived on competitions that she won, and was ostentatiously possessive of the man who had once been the other woman’s.
‘Would you have sent me if you had thought she was in the role of the woman scorned rather than the scientist muzzled?’ Tamara said.
‘Possibly not,’ Mr Black said. ‘But we did not have enough information at
the time. It seemed on the cards that Janet Macmillan was planning to get herself and her information away from us. It seemed to my masters that you could be relied on to prevent it, at a cheaper price than putting her under any other restraint. In any currency.’
Tamara said, ‘By the time we got to Aswan I’d become convinced that her reason for coming on the trip had simply been to follow Timothy Knipe and make him suffer a bit. But she was beginning not to care. The sun and the beauty were calming her down.’
‘Perhaps she had simply realised what a light-minded fellow he was,’ Mr Black suggested. ‘Max Solomon noticed it at once.’
*
February 7.
Our poet is beginning to make eyes at the other dottoressa, Tamara Hoyland. Indeed, were it not for my own age, I would do so too. The butterfly’s undeniable beauty is of the type to shine in electric light in sophisticated surroundings. It does not suit her to be casual or wind-swept. Her clothes look as though she were modelling them for a magazine feature on suitable attire for the tropics. They seem faintly absurd, but she wears them with supreme self-confidence, despising other women’s attempts at elegance. Miss Benson spends hours up on deck in what was once called a sun-suit. It is sleeveless and low cut, with a short skirt like a skater’s, from which her mottled legs, dimpled like an orange skin, extend. Vanessa watches her with a kind of greedy disgust. Tamara Hoyland’s clothes contain expensive labels. I have seen them on the garments flung on the ground when she bathes in the sun. But she wears them as though they were work gear. She puts on nothingness (but for three triangles of fabric) like a coronation robe. Even the crew, inured in spite of their religious prohibitions to the immodesty of European women, look at her as they pad across the deck. I have acquired a galabieh like theirs. It is comfortable and cool. It conceals my ageing flesh.
The butterfly is ailing. She has contracted a throat ailment and, mirabile dictu, is silent. Her voice is insured for six figures, she has whispered, a final statement. Her man is not assiduous in his attentions to her. He pads around the deck with a camera, telefoto lens attached, protruding like a phallus below his waist. A name, not his, is woven into the fabric of its long strap, like a dog’s.
*
In the afternoon we arrive at the southernmost point of our boat’s journey. The valley closes in upon the river. Here was the farthest corner of the Roman Empire. Here the poet Juvenal was posted to guard the boundaries of the regime he had mocked. We have seen enough, today and in the preceding days, to exhaust anyone other than an English country woman, but several of my party sally forth as soon as they have found their rooms in the hotel to look at Aswan’s curiously municipal flowers. Some of the women have gone out with bare arms and shoulders and low-cut dresses, and the women in the Nubian village spit at them.
Hugo Bloom is seen coming out of a house in the town. ‘Dr Hoyland and I saw you,’ Lady Gentle insists. ‘I am sure it was you. In Sharia el Suq, just beside the shop where they sell ebony models of feluccas. Do you have friends here, of all places?’ He says he has been shopping, and displays a trophy, a brass tray. ‘You weren’t carrying a parcel,’ Lady Gentle says. ‘Perhaps you have found a lady friend. This is a man’s country.’
After midnight I am woken by Mr Benson. He has ignored the warning (in words and drawings) about mosquitoes and opened his window onto the Nile. Now he is being dive-bombed by vicious insects. He expects the courier to change rooms with him.
I am dive-bombed by mosquitoes. Wakeful, I find the books Benson has left by his bed untempting. They are a monograph on Victorian watercolours and a directory of painters. The names of some of the more obscure are underlined.
I turn on the television and watch The Red Shoes, dubbed into Arabic.
*
February 8.
Topics of conversation: electric hair-dryers, diarrhoea and its reverse which is always more worrying for the British; the birds of the Nile.
Miss Benson finally expresses what her speaking glances have implied. ‘Oh, Mr Solomon, we are so lucky to have someone of your eminence to travel with us.’
Miss Papillon has saved up less emollient remarks. She said, ‘You are Jonty’s father, aren’t you?’
I had supposed that she had not made the connection. She goes on, ‘He stood in for me once. It didn’t work.’
Television and literature appeal alike to a fickle public. Both depend on luck.
Jonty has not been as lucky as Vanessa Papillon.
All the same, there is something fascinating about the woman. In her company, other people seem less interesting. She does not converse, she interrogates. Bemused by the magic of her attention, her victims reply. She has found out everything about her travelling companions though none of us can really interest her. The need to know is her professional deformity.
Jonty could do what she does and do it without making himself hateful. He would still be a human being. She is not.
I am sitting on the verandah with the doctor’s wife and Miss Benson when a skeletal horse is whipped past us. They cry out in chorus: one ‘ooh’ in pity and anguish, the other ‘oi’ in an angry bark. They suffer more at the sight of the animals here than from the thin children with flies on their sticky eyelids.
My charges, like the human race, are divided into performers and watchers. I wonder whether the watchers are aware that they are not themselves the stars in their own stories.
My own habit, naturally and professionally, is to observe. Our butterfly is a good example of the centre-of-attraction type. She knows it. All she says and does is for show. She is an artefact.
Is that what I want for Jonty? He told me once that he would sell his soul for his own programme. He has little hope of achieving one so long as he remains in Vanessa’s shadow.
I move to sit under a jacaranda tree. She comes to sit beside me. She is cute and canny, on the ball, streetwise; superficial, contemporary qualities. She is admirable in a way.
She says, ‘It must be five years since you published anything. Why?’ I do not reply, and she continues, ‘Pining for your wife, I suppose. Work is the best remedy, you know.’
Work is the best remedy. I know. If I were a navvy or a doctor I would work. But I cannot work unless I feel. I dare not feel. When I work, I dream. I dare not dream.
She says, ‘I don’t know why you aren’t better known.’
I think of the American research students who study my use of the semi-colon, of the libraries that compete for my archives.
She says, ‘It isn’t as though you haven’t tried. Your agent wanted me to have you on the show.’
I had said at the time that it was ill-advised. Neither my work nor my personality lend themselves to being pushed by glossy young ladies in slick city suits, nor do I require synthetic fame derived from appearing on chat shows and attending literary lunches. I was a disappointment to the public relations person.
Vanessa takes a bottle of crimson varnish from her bag and begins to paint her nails. They are long, pointed, curved slightly inwards; predatory claws. I turn my eyes to the feluccas that sweep across the blue water. Between them are miniature craft made by the small boys who crouch in them and paddle with their hands. Well prepared tourists, like those who travel with Camisis, have come supplied with ball-point pens to give them.
‘Jonty is rather like you,’ Vanessa said.
‘He is usually thought to resemble his mother.’
‘I meant in character. Not enough get-up-and-go.’ She means that my boy does not trample aside anyone who stands in his path. She means that he will get on in his chosen profession against her opposition; over her dead body. That is what she means.
Chapter Six
Tamara had put on what seemed to be a convincing pretence of taking for granted the sites that struck the other first-time visitors with awe; and her careful plan-reading and preparation had enabled her to walk around even the stupendous Karnak with every appearance of already knowing her way. This enforced, hasty familiarisation
with the archaeology of ancient Egypt had given her an affection for a period which had never seemed appealing before. ‘They were really just like us,’ Miss Benson insisted, and it did not seem quite as silly a remark as it would once have done. The surviving evidence of domestic life was endearing; and the monuments no more megalomaniac than the Louvre or Whitehall would seem when their ruins represented our times to future generations.
She wondered whether it would be apparent to the archaeologists who one day studied the twentieth century that the Temple of Abu Simbel, still staggering in its complex immensity, was a reconstruction. The reports and pictures of the work that had been done to save the monument were of an endeavour as intemperate, as ambitious, as the original building of all these reminders of slavery. She left the hotel at Aswan not expecting to like what she was to see.
*
February 10.
We wake to high wind (though I think that it is never calm here) and a haze over the sun. The hotel staff speak of dust storms and the khamsin. The hot wind from the south may ground flights. The creation of the lake has changed the climate.
All but three of the party have signed on for the day trip to Abu Simbel. Eight of us are to go on from there to Qasr Samaan.
We are driven to the unpleasant airport in Aswan. The doctor plays his radio so that we can all hear the World Service news. He tells us to make the most of it, before the eight of us set off into the middle of nowhere.
The princess is still missing, the famine still rages in Africa only a small distance, on the continental scale, from where we are now.
‘Why can’t they just send the food and get her back?’ one of the women asks.
‘A very sentimental solution,’ John Benson says.
‘It’s such a good cause. Like Robin Hood.’
‘Famine is nature’s way of limiting the world’s population,’ Benson replies, through a mouth full of the sandwiches with which our hotel has supplied us.
‘You often hear well-fed people say that,’ remarks Vanessa. ‘Just as you hear healthy young people say that it’s a good thing if we don’t all live to clutter up the geriatric wards.’