by Jessica Mann
‘She fell for you?’
Polly had insisted on dancing with Giles most of the night. He was not allowed to leave before she did and she would not leave so long as he was there. ‘And after that, she kept inviting me to things.’ Polly had asked him to parties, shoots and to stay. Giles had resisted the palatial lures. She attended his lectures, causing inconvenience to the learned societies that had invited him, since wherever Polly went, so did sniffers and searchers.
As far as a man can deter a girl and a commoner can deter royalty, Giles had tried to deter Polly. ‘Look, I am twelve years older than she is, I am completely uninterested in social life, she is completely uninterested in academic research.’
But Polly had fallen for the glamorous idea implied by those deceptive television programmes. She had seen herself pushing barrows, heaving shovels, even learning to balance a basket of soil on her head like the native workmen. She could see herself standing in a trench with the sun behind her, trowel in hand, helping the buried past to emerge. She would wear loose cotton trousers and a wide-brimmed hat. Her hands would grow hard and capable, her skin be gilded by the sun. ‘Today,’ she would telegraph to the leaders of the world, ‘today I have gazed upon the face of . . .’ Whose face? It did not matter. Some lost hero, another Agamemnon or Tutankhamun, who, buried for millennia, would be brought to light by Polly and by Giles Needham.
Polly had worked out her scheme for getting to Qasr Samaan.
‘I had this arrangement to take on a girl to oblige Thea Crawford. Someone whose father is a professor at Buriton. Undergraduate, reading history at Oxford, plenty of digging experience. We met in London and she seemed okay. She was going to take charge of the finds register, help Barry with the photography. Paula Crosse, she’s called. I even met her father, terribly Blimpish bloke, but he approved of me, I approved of her, fixed up for her to turn up after Christmas. And what happens?’
Tamara could easily guess. Travelling on Paula Crosse’s passport, Polly had turned up.
‘They were at school together, you see,’ Giles explained. ‘Polly was spending the New Year with the Crosses, and the two girls did some childish substitution trick that diddled the detectives for a while. She got clean away. Left a note of course; they’ll know they don’t have to worry about her, but she didn’t tell them exactly where she was going and she says that Paula would never admit she knew either. So here she is.’
Giles’s first reaction had been to send her straight back. ‘Quite apart from the scandal—I mean, I wouldn’t ever live it down. Can you see any university taking me seriously again? And she is no use here. She’s bored already and the routine chores are beyond her. She must be bored with me too by now. I’m a dull dog, only interested in the dusty past.’
‘So all the drama back home is a nasty surprise for you both,’ Tamara said.
Obviously Paula Crosse had failed to deliver the letter that Polly left, and had taken the opportunity to try extortion for a good cause. ‘I suppose that by the time Polly gets home safe and sound the food and clothes will have been delivered to the Sudan or wherever they specified,’ Giles said.
Tamara very much doubted that the government would have delivered such a ransom even for a more important public figure than Polly. But the cause was good.
‘Quite a neat trick, actually,’ Tamara said.
Giles was in no mood to admire a contemporary Robin Hood. He sat with his head sunk into his hands.
‘The problem is insoluble,’ he groaned.
‘Not really. Well, it may be for Polly, but that will serve her right. If I get her back with my lot, you will be here for months after that. By the time you are home it will all have blown over.’
‘How could it?’
‘Easily, if nobody knows where she has been.’
‘But what will Polly say?’
‘So long as she doesn’t say she was at Qasr Samaan,’ Tamara said, ‘I don’t think you need care what she says. Unless, that is, you do care what happens to her.’
‘She may have a hard time,’ Giles said.
‘She won’t if everyone thinks that it is the great romance of the century.’
The expression on Giles’s face was answer enough. His unusual handsomeness belied his nature, Tamara thought; he was a monomaniac scholar, uninterested in anything that did not have a bearing on his work. He’s probably bored by the way women react to him, if he has even noticed it before. It would have been hard not to realise what Polly was up to; but more subtle allurements were probably quite outside his range of awareness. What a waste.
What Polly wants, Polly gets, Tamara thought. The girl had been watched with the acute attention paid to some rare breed of bird. Binoculars and cameras were trained on her as on more natural phenomena, and as they were on those of her relations whose doings were of more justifiable interest. It was as though she existed as fodder for the insatiable appetite of the various news media.
No amount of formality or dissimulation had hidden her essentially implacable nature, even though nurture had provided so unusual a set of values and certainties. The assumption of the public gaze was bred in the bone. She knew, without any twinge of doubt, that she was interesting, that other people were pleased and flattered by her attention, that what she really wanted she could have.
Was Giles Needham still what she wanted? It could not be wondered at if he was. Handsome, clever, with that aura of glamour that had nothing to do with his words or actions, but that had come over so clearly on his television series, he would be Prince Charming even to a girl who didn’t need a prince. But he had no sense of what mattered to girls like Polly, nor, probably, that she mattered. It was bad luck on a princess to have fallen for one of the few men who seemed indifferent to her status; indeed, more than indifferent—inimical.
‘Anyone who married Polly would have lots of money for his own work,’ Tamara suggested.
‘But hard earned. Can you see me in that role?’ Giles had not been offended by the remark, or even surprised. Had Polly proposed to him as had Queen Victoria to her true love? But Prince Albert’s whole upbringing had been designed to make him a suitable consort. It would be hard to imagine a less amenable one than Giles Needham.
Chapter Thirteen
Tamara forced herself to listen to most of the remaining cassettes before going to bed. To hear every word would have been unbearable. Vanessa’s verbosity was unexpected, considering how sharp and apt she had been professionally. Several times Tamara wound the tape on quickly and listened to sample snatches to find out whether the adjectival accounts of sightseeing, or the memos about future work, were interspersed with useful remarks about her travelling companions.
Vanessa had done, or had ordered to be done for her, a quick search of files on everybody on the Camisis list of fellow passengers. Her sources were probably no superior to those available to Tamara but she had had more time to consult them, and had discovered enough to produce, if she had wanted to, a snappy, catty profile of everybody there except Tamara herself. And as the voyage up the Nile had progressed she had added to her information. By the time the party reached Aswan, each member of the party would have had good grounds for being pleased that Vanessa was no longer being able to broadcast it.
She had lost interest in Timothy very early on. He disappointed her in bed and bored her in conversation. But she had enjoyed teasing or tormenting Janet. ‘If looks could kill! Miss Clever Clogs would strike me dead at her feet. I had better make sure not to go near the edge of a precipice with her anywhere near me.’ The voice was not that of a woman who genuinely feared an attack. But had she spoken more truthfully than she knew herself?
Whatever would Mr Black say if his precious inventor got incarcerated in a country that would give good money, or perhaps free pardons, to someone who provided such a weapon? A rapid series of possibilities flashed through Tamara’s film-trained imagination. Arabs decimating Israelis with a secret death-ray; turning it on each other, on the arrogant West, on
. . . enough. For the first time, Tamara could fully understand why she had been assigned the responsibility of getting Janet safely back home. I hope they lock her up, she thought; or no, I suppose I don’t. Unless she really did poison Vanessa. It might be a good justification for keeping her out of circulation.
Now was not the time for ethical uncertainty about a secret-bearer’s right to liberty. In the limbo that Qasr Samaan had become, it seemed necessary to exert a strict discipline over her thoughts.
Back to Vanessa.
Ironically, it was only because Janet was watching that Vanessa continued to treat Tim as her lover. If Janet had not been there trying to spoil things for Vanessa and Timothy, there would have been nothing left to spoil by the time they got back to London. Vanessa had not been philosophical about her disappointment, and on the second tape a quarrel was recorded. Vanessa sounded so unlike the person she liked the world to see, that it must have been by mistake that she left the tape turning. Tim had come into the room just as Vanessa was reminding herself where she had seen John Benson before.
‘It suddenly occurs to me that I saw him at Plinlimmons. It was the sale when Olly wanted to buy that dreadful sentimental pastel of kids around a maypole. The Shadwells were setting up as art lovers, and they bid idiotic figures for some of those oily looking pictures of sailing boats and sunsets. Olly said they were just right for the Shadwells. John Benson was at the back of the sale room looking as pleased as if he had painted them himself. And I asked Olly, how could anyone be sure whether pictures like that were by Park, or Forbes, or whatever the signature was, and he said that there’d be good money in forging second-rate art because not enough care was taken in authenticating it and that’s why he was always so careful about provenance. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if John Benson forges the pictures he deals in.’
Vanessa had made more than one barbed remark about painting and art dealing during the course of the voyage. She must have been shooting blind but her instinct for a target was highly developed. Had she hit the bull’s-eye?
It was at that point that the tape recorded Tim’s coming into Vanessa’s room. Their conversation seemed to be the continuation of one already started, a series of accusations and complaints. It ended with Vanessa warning Tim that their association would be over as soon as they reached London. He could get his stuff out of her apartment. ‘But not the things I’ve paid for. They stay behind.’ She listed them in mercenary recollection of what must originally have seemed like generosity. She had lavished consumer durables on Timothy Knipe, from silver fountain pens to a soft-topped car.
‘But where shall I go?’ he had asked, and later on he had insisted that he still adored her and pleaded with her to start again. He had thought they were on their honeymoon. ‘You didn’t think I’d spend my life with a loser like you?’ she had asked. ‘Janet can have you back. You’ll do fine for her.’
Tamara pressed the fast forward button. She was not a detective, to eavesdrop on personal grief. In fact she was disgusted by her self-imposed work.
Tamara had long since cast off the inhibitions of a good upbringing. She was prepared to tell lies, to overhear other people’s conversations and read their private writings; she had learnt to be devious and cunning. She had used her body as a weapon and as a persuader. She had screwed—one could hardly call it making love—a man whose death she later brought about. She had stolen, cheated and deceived. She would have argued that the ends validated the means she had been forced to use. But there were occasions when the means were more than she could find the heart to undertake and when the end less than justified them.
‘I am not a detective,’ she muttered. All she must do was complete the assignment that Mr Black had set her, as well as the one that he would have set if he had known of it. And to get Janet and Polly safely home she did not need to know the distasteful details of Vanessa’s bitchiness; or which of them, if either, had put a stop to it.
*
Another morning. Another awakening under a glaring sky to the sound of imprecations. The tug had not been mended yet.
‘This is getting ridiculous,’ Timothy Knipe announced. ‘You seem to want to keep us here for ever.’
Giles Needham bunched his fists and stepped abruptly towards Timothy, who cowered back. Giles halted, and breathed in and out twice, nostrils flared. He said, ‘Can you possibly imagine that I am stopping you leaving? I long for you to go.’
Pat on its cue came the sound of shouts from the men on the island. A ship had been sighted in the distance and no shipwrecked mariners ever greeted a sail with more fervour than the well-fed and comfortably housed members of what had been a party of pleasure.
The view was obscured today by a hot haze. Giles said that the khamsin that he had been expecting for several days looked as though it was upon them.
‘They were talking about it when we were in Aswan, but then nothing came of it,’ Tamara said.
‘I don’t think we shall escape this time,’ Giles said.
‘At least we shall be away from here,’ Ann Benson said.
Giles was not so sure. ‘If that’s the steamer from Aswan to Wadi Halfa there is no guarantee that it will stop. Anyway, it’s going in the wrong direction.’ Wadi Halfa was to the south, on the border with the Sudan. ‘It is what you might call a nowheresville,’ he said.
‘What happens there?’ Hugo asked.
‘Nothing. There is a non-functioning fish-processing plant, that’s all. And a bad road southwards.’
‘So what are all those people doing?’
‘Some are Sudanese traders bringing goods back from Egypt. There are a few Europeans driving from Alexandria down through Africa. I can see a couple of blonde women on the deck.’
‘Could one telephone from Wadi Halfa?’ Tamara said.
‘If the phones work. They don’t usually.’
The ship was a small paddle steamer, onto whose side a barge like their own was tied, and behind which trailed a string of small, bobbing dinghies. The deck of both the steamer and the barge was crammed with people in what looked like standing room only.
The passengers waved and so did the islanders. Their sign language was mutually incomprehensible. Ann Benson rushed down to fetch a sheet and stood waving her white flag. One of the deck cargo found a similar swathe of fabric and waved it back. They shouted. The other shouted.
‘Not waving but drowning,’ Timothy Knipe said.
Giles spoke urgently to the captain of his own barge. Before the steamer had drawn level with Qasr Samaan, two of the marooned workmen had reached it in the expedition’s dinghy, and stood precariously rocking in the disturbed water as they called up to the captain. Gestures and shouts conveyed urgent appeals. But the steamer did not slow down, and just as it was passing out of sight southwards behind the island, one of the messengers was pulled aboard. The other cast off the dinghy, which tossed violently in the steamer’s wake until he was able to row it back to base.
Giles tried to cheer his guests up. At least somebody would soon know of their plight.
‘Surely there is some alternative. I mean, one could walk along the shore if it came to it,’ Timothy Knipe said.
‘Where to?’ said Giles.
‘It’s your job to know that.’
‘I do know. There is nowhere that you could reach on that terrain in this climate.’
‘I am going to have a look at the tug myself,’ Hugo said. They watched him cross the two gangplanks, his step jaunty.
‘Does he know anything about engines?’ Giles said.
‘Not that I know of,’ Ann Benson told him, but Janet said:
‘I wouldn’t put it past him. He seems to know an awful lot about an awful lot of things.’
‘Why didn’t he say so before then?’ Timothy muttered. ‘He is probably just showing off.’
‘I suppose he can’t do any harm,’ Giles said. He lit his pipe slowly, lowering his eyelids against the puffs of smoke.
‘How you can, when it�
�s so hot already,’ Polly said fretfully. She waved her hand up and down in front of her face. ‘It smells horrid. I would rather you didn’t smoke.’
Giles reply was oblique. ‘We are all going to find it hard to keep calm if there’s a proper khamsin. Makes one irritable.’
Polly looked surprised, as though even now she expected others to do as she bade them
‘How long, oh Lord, how long?’ Tim said.
Giles said, ‘I am hoping that the other members of my party will have guessed what has happened and will hire another transport at Abu Simbel. But if they don’t turn up today I intend to row to Qasr Ibrim.’
‘Where is that? And why wait for tomorrow if it’s accessible at all?’ Tim demanded.
‘Qasr Ibrim is about thirty miles north of us. It is where the American expedition is at work. I spent a season there myself when I was a student. But it will take hours to get there. All day at least. Rowing on Lake Nasser is slow work. And it might not help if I do. Like us, they don’t normally have transport available, their tug comes from Abu Simbel at pre-arranged dates, as ours does. I don’t want to leave you all here, and be marooned on another island instead myself.’
‘Send the men, then. Surely Abdullah could row thirty miles? Or one of the others?’
‘Perhaps you would like to come with me?’ Giles said.
‘I!’ Timothy Knipe’s jutting beard, modelled on a pirate’s, his bright blue eyes, made him look illogically nautical.
‘Tim couldn’t row three miles, let alone thirty.’ Janet was normally so silent that everybody was surprised to hear her speak. Her pale eyes glanced at her former lover. She said, ‘He isn’t as butch as he looks.’
Timothy Knipe clenched his fists. Giles half-rose. But then Timothy sighed, and smiled with a charm that made two women’s passion for him less incomprehensible.
‘Janet is right as usual,’ he agreed. ‘Never known her wrong as a matter of fact. Gets it right every time, this girl does. Private life, work, you name it she hits the spot. Look at her latest project.’