by Jessica Mann
Assailed by the smell, Tamara pressed one hand over her nose. With the other she aimed the shaft of light around. Somewhere there must be at least the notebook without which a professional journalist would not travel. It was impossible to search without leaving obvious signs that somebody had done so. The image of the mess that she would have to disturb must be imprinted on other memories too. Nor was there time. How long could she plausibly seem to be in the lavatory?
Tamara’s toe stubbed against something hard. It was a small tape-recorder. That was it. Of course a woman of the spoken word like Vanessa would dictate, not write, her notes. Tamara scooped it quickly up. No time to hunt for the spares.
It was a relief to get out of the room. The image of that dead face, masked, momentarily highlit by the beam of the flashlight, was a memory that Tamara wished she did not have to store.
She pulled the plug loudly and tapped her way back to her own privacy.
Tamara’s earphones fitted into Vanessa’s tape-recorder but her batteries did not. Those already in it lasted long enough to make the tape rewind, and to let Tamara hear a description of herself, characteristically acid. Was she a Petra Pan, clinging to an appearance of juvenility? Did she contrive to appear uncontrived? The criticism was irrelevant, untimely, and should be as quickly forgotten as heard; but lying back on her bed, frustrated of more interesting eavesdroppings, Tamara found herself reflecting more on herself than on Vanessa and whoever might have killed her.
But after all, she thought, what does it matter to me? What matters is that I manage to get Janet, and at least one other of the people at Qasr Samaan, safely home.
Chapter Eleven
There seemed no reason to delay the scheduled departure in the morning. None of the party would be sorry to leave Vanessa behind—to leave the problems to Giles.
Ann Benson punctually complained that she could not get her belongings into the case that had accommodated them on the way down; it was business—or pleasure—as usual. Giles was dressed in a linen suit, with a striped tie. Tamara wondered whether any of the officials he needed to impress would recognise the message of the narrow blue stripes across the black background. He looked very much the English milord; which might have quite the opposite, nowadays, of the desired effect.
Everybody was to go to Abu Simbel together. Giles Needham would do whatever was necessary about the late Vanessa. The Camisis party would return, one short, to Aswan, and fly from there as planned, to Cairo and on to London.
The tug could not be made to start.
The Nubians had been working on it since dawn. Their energy and excitement was admirable but ineffective. The patriarchal captain remained impassive on the deck, watching his men as they toiled over the engine.
Giles asked him a question and the patriarch threw his hands upwards and looked at the sky. ‘Inshallah,’ Giles reported to the waiting Britons. ‘As God wills.’
‘But that simply is not good enough,’ John Benson said. ‘You can hardly expect us to wait here in such circumstances.’
‘He’s doing his best, you must admit,’ Ann Benson murmured.
‘Where is Max Solomon? It’s for him to do something about this. Our contract with Camisis . . .’
Max Solomon was still in his cabin. Hugo Bloom had looked in on him, and said he seemed to be on his third notebook. ‘Might as well leave him to get on with it, don’t you think?’
‘When an artist is inspired, you know what I mean,’ Ann Benson began.
‘Inspired. Nonsense. It’s his job to get us away from here. He must do something,’ her brother said.
‘About the body, do you mean?’ Hugo Bloom asked.
The body; that was really the problem.
All the British people present had enough knowledge of their own country’s police procedure, whether from books, or television programmes, or even from experience, to have been sure that they weren’t supposed to touch anything in that ghastly chamber until the proper authorities had had the chance to examine it. They had been only too glad to assume that the same rules applied in the furthest reaches of Upper Egypt. Nobody had the least inclination to interfere with the hideous remains.
If it had been possible to fetch help as quickly as the tug could travel, it would have been almost too late, in this climate, for the authorities to see, or those who cleared up after them to cope.
Stuck at Qasr Samaan themselves, marooned, they could hardly leave the body or the mess surrounding it, untouched for even half a day. Something was going to have to be done. Someone was going to have to do it.
John Benson predictably asserted that the native servants should clear up this, as they did other messes.
‘I hardly think we can expect that of them,’ Hugo Bloom said. ‘There must be one of us who has some experience of illness.’
Timothy Knipe was behaving as though the whole thing was nothing to do with him. He talked to Polly about sex while she sorted out potsherds, arranging them as though they were jig-saw pieces.
Ann Benson said, ‘I couldn’t. I am sorry but I simply couldn’t. Hugo, you know that I am not . . .’
‘My dear girl. Of course not.’
‘We couldn’t expect such a thing of you,’ Giles Needham said. ‘Not of any of you. But something will have to be done if we are stuck here.’
John Benson had stalked away to stand glowering across at the tug, where the work looked increasingly frenzied. Ann went to stand beside him, talking anxiously. The others could hear her protests of self-abnegation. She knew that she should be strong enough to cope with such things. She was ashamed of her own weakness. ‘But I simply can’t see it, her, again, I’d die. I would really die. Johnny, you do understand why I . . .’
On and on.
Hugo, Janet, Tamara and Giles found themselves like grownups left to make the necessary arrangements while the children went off to sulk, argue or play.
‘A sleeping bag,’ Tamara said. ‘Are there any?’
‘Hardly, in this climate.’
‘We need a kind of body-bag. Or shroud.’
‘There are plenty of sheets. The ancients used winding sheets,’ Giles said.
‘Several layers, anyway,’ Tamara agreed.
‘That’s the first thing.’
The local servants insisted on doing the cleaning up in the end, which was one small relief. Another was that the excavation equipment included a supply of rubber gloves.
The limbs were mobile. Rigor mortis must have come and gone in the lonely night. When Tamara tried to close the staring eyes they sprang open again in a parody of the live Vanessa’s topaz gaze. Hugo Bloom produced a pair of coins and put them archaically on the eyelids. Janet tied up the jaw with a bedouin scarf Vanessa had bought in Luxor. Between them the four survivors wrapped the body in the rough cotton sheets, and then tore more of them into strips to wind around the white bundle. It reminded Tamara of the swaddling of a baby she had once watched on a television anthropology programme.
‘I saw a local funeral when we were moored at Esna,’ Hugo Bloom said. ‘They were carrying the body high in the air, wailing.’
‘Is this how it had been wrapped?’
‘As far as one could see. It could do with some of the sweet-smelling herbs though.’ That was the first reference to the smell.
Tamara wiped her arm across her wet forehead. She said, ‘Would some Diorissimo do?’
‘It would be too small a drop in this ocean. Anyway, you will need it yourself, later.’
It was amazing what one could do if one had to. Janet seemed dispassionate and business-like. She pulled and tugged at the strips of fabric as though they were ingredients of an experiment. Giles and Hugo too worked like surgeons, subduing easy emotion to the necessary task. Tamara would not allow herself to flinch. With four pairs of hands the work was done not quickly, for it felt like an eternity, but properly, so that it was possible to feel that the oval white package was no more terrible than a closed coffin.
Giles summo
ned Abdullah and Hassan to help the men carry it out, and after animated, but, on the servants’ side, sympathetic conversation, he said, ‘They say they will clean up the room. They don’t seem to mind.’
The shrouded body was laid on the bed in Giles’s own cabin.
‘You aren’t superstitious about it?’ Hugo said.
‘Only to the extent that I’ll want clean sheets tonight.’ And to the extent that he pulled the small curtain across the porthole and spoke in a whisper. ‘We had better get cleaned up. And then I’ll see how they are getting on with the tug.’
Washed, changed, and sprayed with a good deal of the Diorissimo, Tamara could begin to feel that she might forget the unspeakable smell. She did not expect ever to forget the feeling, the unmitigated sight, of Vanessa’s remains. As Giles had remarked the previous evening, any archaeologist lives with the material traces of death. Tamara, more than any archaeologist, she supposed, also had some knowledge of causing it. But she had never wondered before about the purely practical nature of the event. Somebody always had to clear up the messes. She hoped that it would not again be her.
Back in her room she inserted the small batteries she had found in Vanessa’s drawer into Vanessa’s recorder. She had found three of the tiny tape cassettes too, all of which she had been able to pocket. It would be a long and weary chore to listen to it all, unable to wind fast forward for fear of missing a vital phrase. It was another confirmation of Tamara’s preference for the written page. She could read in thirty seconds what it would take ten times as many to hear.
By the time of the midday meal Tamara had managed to play only one side of the tape that had been in the machine, presumably the most recently recorded.
The adjectives Vanessa had dictated as an aide memoire for her own future use would not have enticed her hearers to go to Qasr Samaan. Dusty, hot, bored, imprisoned, uncomfortable and ill fed, her death came at what sounded like a low point in her life. She had decided that Giles was not as attractive as he had seemed on the screen. ‘Pompous, boringly obsessed by his petty scholarship and positively rude,’ the rich voice murmured into Tamara’s ear. ‘Not the man for a woman like me. He would do for one of the blue stockings. Hoyland is the one he looks at. I can’t be sure whether she has noticed, under that cool, cagey stare of hers. Nuisance that I didn’t have time to get more research done on her. There was something fishy about that last-minute change of lecturer. Or on Polly. No, not a nuisance. I would not want anyone else to know that she’s here. Not yet. What a scoop. I knew there would be a good story for me here, I just didn’t know what it would be. I shall corner her later. I wonder whether she knows what is going on back home. Could she be such a twit that she never thought what would happen if she just took off to Egypt? Wait a minute. She can’t have travelled in her own name. That passport never went through a British port. Come to think of it, she probably doesn’t even have a passport. How did she get here then?’
The famous voice, thinking aloud for its speaker’s ears only, was beautiful. Tamara had never fully understood before that there could be music in spoken words and suddenly, for the first time, and perhaps alone of those at Qasr Samaan, she mourned for Vanessa.
Lunchtime. Hassan seemed to be swinging the hand bell with respectful restraint, and had even muffled the clapper in the presence of death.
There was no hurry to hear more of Vanessa’s perceptions. But Tamara was interested that the first had confirmed her own.
*
At lunch, a meal for which the four people who had undertaken the task of shrouding the corpse felt little enthusiasm, there was still some hope that the party would get away from Qasr Samaan that day.
Subdued attempts to converse broke long silences. It was the most ill-assorted party Tamara could imagine. Echoing her thought, Hugo Bloom remarked that it was probably like this in prison, shut up with other people; he did not need to add, that one would be shut up with people not of one’s own choice.
‘I wonder what is happening at home,’ Ann Benson said.
‘One quite misses the bore with his World Service,’ her brother admitted.
‘A cold and muddy February,’ Hugo Bloom said.
‘I am missing the English weather. Do you know what I mean?’ Ann Benson said. ‘I have seen enough of the sun to last me a lifetime. I really wish we had never come here in the first place.’
‘Oh come on, Ann. Football riots, the balance of payments, a railway strike—we are well out of it,’ Hugo said cheerfully.
‘I must admit I would like to know what’s going on. For instance, do you think they have found the Princess yet?’
‘Sorry, careless of me,’ Polly said, picking up her knife from the floor.
‘Found who?’ Giles asked.
‘Princess Mary. Didn’t you hear the news?’
‘Of course not. The world could come to an end without our knowing about it when we are here. What news?’
Ann Benson seemed to relish telling of the young Princess’s abduction.
‘I cannot bear the way you all speak as though this young woman matters so much more than anyone else,’ John said.
‘Because she’s over-privileged, you mean?’ Tim asked.
‘She may be suffering. She’s a victim,’ Hugo said.
Ann said, ‘It seems funny, do you know what I mean, that we’re so close to the people who must have done it.’
‘What do you mean?’ Giles said sharply.
‘If the motive was to get food for the Sudanese . . . you said yourself we were very close to the border. Would we have heard the aeroplanes of supplies going over, do you think?’
‘Did you say . . .’ Polly paused to clear her throat. ‘What did you say had happened exactly? Didn’t she . . . wasn’t there a message or something?’
‘That’s the point. She’s been kidnapped by a group of people who don’t want any ransom. They are demanding food for the starving people in the Sudan. Crime in a good cause, you might say,’ Tamara said. ‘Perhaps the girl even arranged it herself. One would rather admire her if she had.’
‘How silly.’ Polly flounced to her feet. ‘Oh look. Here’s the captain coming.’
The patriarch came onto the barge miming apology in every inch of his body. The barge could not, would not be made to start. There could be no question of leaving for Abu Simbel before dusk.
*
By the middle of the afternoon it was clear that they would not be able to set off then either. Clothes and belongings were taken from their cases again. Those who could, slept. Others moped or read. Tamara asked Polly to show her the excavation’s technical equipment.
A lean-to shed made of corrugated iron housed the makeshift laboratories at the stern end of the upper deck. Its metal casing acted as an oven in the tropical sun.
‘It really is the black hole of Calcutta,’ Tamara gasped.
‘I don’t know how the photographer stands it. I only come and help him very early in the morning,’ Polly said. She pointed out the neatly labelled jars of chemicals. ‘Better not touch. There are some things here that you wouldn’t be allowed to have around back home.’ Hand-drawn skulls and crossbones were stuck to the dangerous substances. Nothing but that warning seemed to protect them.
‘For goodness sake, let’s get out into the shade,’ Tamara said. Under the awning, the breeze made the temperature of the afternoon tolerable. Polly loosened her hair ribbon and pulled at the tendrils that had fallen onto her face, tucking them back to tie out of the way.
‘It makes you want to cut it all short,’ she complained.
‘Why don’t you?’
‘But who could do it here? Anyway I’d look horrid with short hair.’
Tamara’s hair was held back in a pair of combs. Her colouring was much fairer than Polly’s, but she seemed less affected by the heat. ‘How long have you been out here?’ she said.
‘Long enough. Since just after Christmas.’
‘You joined Giles after the beginning of the
season then? I thought he had begun work in November.’
‘Yes. It was arranged by a professor at Buriton University. She’s a friend of Giles’s, so he agreed to do it as a favour.’
‘Really? I wonder—’
‘A favour to my father actually,’ Polly said. ‘He’s a professor at Buriton himself.’
‘I know the Professor of Archaeology at Buriton. Thea Crawford was my tutor when I was doing research at London,’ Tamara said. ‘Nice place to live, I should think, so pretty in that part of Cornwall.’
‘Is that Giles calling me?’ Polly stood up.
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘I’d better go and see.’ Polly was wearing a green dress made in crinkled, patterned cotton that dangled sadly around her ankles. Its limp folds kept catching on the furniture, and there were little triangular tears in the fabric. She twitched her hips so that the material swirled behind her as she clattered down the stairs.
Tamara pulled her chair out into the sunshine and lay back in it, her eyes closed. She felt sorry for Polly; but did she have to feel responsible for her too?
What a fool the girl was, silly and self-willed, influenced, probably, by the catch phrase that journalists used of her ever since an early, public tantrum; ‘What Polly wants, Polly gets.’ It was a joke at first, printed when Polly was a child, round, rosy and self-confident, very appealing. The adjectives changed as she grew older; determined, strong-minded, bossy, a person who knew her own mind.
Those were, perhaps, other words for irresponsibility. Why should anyone protect the girl from the consequences of her own stupidity? And, indeed, it would not have been possible to do so, with Vanessa on the trail of a story that no journalist could leave untold. Polly must have known that Vanessa would tell the world where she had found the Princess Mary.
*
‘Deep in thought, I see,’ Ann Benson said. ‘Oh, I am sorry. I startled you, didn’t I?’
‘I am afraid I was half-asleep.’
‘I am going to sleep too. I just came up to fetch my reading glasses, I think I must have left them here. John always says that I scatter my belongings like autumn leaves. He can’t bear it. Oh yes, here they are. I see you have your cassette player. What are you listening to?’