The Visitors (20 page)

‘Beyond my powers. I know my limitations.’

‘You’re too modest. I don’t mean a full-scale portrait, nothing ambitious, dear.’

‘Minnie, I’d never do you justice. The result would be unflattering. You must excuse me – I need to get the girls organised. Now, where did I leave my spectacles?’

Helen extricated herself, and, once Frances and I were engaged on our paintings, retreated to the far end of the veranda to sit in peace with Miss Mack. Minnie Burton, watched carefully by Frances and me, settled herself in a planter’s chair and opened her book. She studied it minutely, turning its pages back and forth, while Frances and I concentrated hard on being invisible. I painted a tight circle of toothed rocks, but my sky-paint ran down and ruined them. Frances painted a route through the rocks that was purely imagined: no such view was visible from this vantage point. Then, bored with the inanimate, she added a figure in an unlikely hat, which she claimed was Jones, the sad tubercular Welsh archaeologist, gazing at the Theban hills and seeing his homeland. When the luncheon gong sounded from the depths of the house our opportunity finally came. The adults were scarcely through the doors before Frances was on the veranda, the suspicious book in her hand.

‘KV,’ she said, as I reached her side. ‘Quick. She’s forgotten it at last. Sit on it. If she comes looking for it, say you haven’t seen it. Give me two seconds, Lucy. Don’t move.’

The weighty book, its leather cover stamped with the Met’s insignia and, as suspected, borrowed from the American House library, proved to be
Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage
. I sat on it. Minnie Burton, fond of food, always punctual for meals, querulously eager to find fault with Mrs Lythgoe’s menus, must have been distracted. She did not return in quest of the book – but a few minutes later an excited Frances reappeared; she had a cut-throat razor in her hand.

‘I knew it!’ she said, snatching
Burke’s
from me. ‘It’s Mrs Lythgoe’s copy. She keeps tons of this stuff, umpteen volumes of the Social Register, and the
Almanach de Gotha
as well – they help with all the precedence and placement nonsense when she gives a big dinner here. And we’re in luck – just in time! Queen Min’s reached page 250 – she’s halfway through the “G” section. She’s working her way through it alphabetically, because she doesn’t know the exact name to look up. But I do. Thank goodness she hadn’t got as far as “H”, then we’d have been in trouble… Wait a second, let me find it – now hold the book steady. Oh, perfect, I can cut it here, and here, and the whole section will come out cleanly. Unless she looks at the page numbers,
which
she won’t, she’ll never know.’

With an unwavering hand, Frances flicked the razor open and sliced through the paper. She handed me the two-page section she’d removed, inverted the book, shook it to ensure no other pages had come loose, and replaced it on the table. This surgical operation took less than a minute. We raced back inside the house, and were chattering in the hall, when Frances hissed ‘KV’
again as Mrs Burton emerged from the dining room.

‘Did I leave my book outside?’ She glared at us as she passed. ‘What a mess you’re in. Paint all over your faces – you look like two little savages.’

‘I didn’t notice your book, sorry, Mrs Burton. Just going to wash,’ Frances called over her shoulder, and dragged me down the corridor. She nipped into her parents’ bedroom, replaced her father’s razor on the washstand, then pulled me into the American House’s bathroom, bolting the door.

‘Old witch,’ she said, leaning against the doors. ‘I knew she was looking for something – and that’s it, near the beginning of the “H” section, right there.’

She jabbed a finger at the second page she’d extracted. I peered at the small print, trying to make sense of the peculiar abbreviations
Burke’s
employed. The meaty section Frances was indicating spelled out the lineage of a family of Hampshire baronets named ‘Hallowes’. At the end of the long list, I came to the last of their line, a Captain Sir Roland Hallowes, MC, DSO. No issue; he had died five years previously, unmarried, aged twenty-one, in 1917 at the Battle of Arras.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Who are these Hallowes people? Why would Mrs Burton be trying to look them up?’

‘Go up a line.’

I did as she bid. I saw that Captain Sir Roland had two sisters, named Octavia and Poppea; all three were the children of one Sir Quentin Hallowes, deceased 1912. I stared at these sisters’ names, dates of birth and marriage details: a familiar sick, smoky unease began to swirl around in my mind.

‘Tell me it isn’t. Frances, it can’t be… ’

‘Of course it is. This edition is out of date, so it only cites Poppea’s first marriage – but that would have been enough: as soon as Mrs Burton saw that, she’d know she was on track. Poppea is Poppy, of course – and Roland was her brother. Poppy told me about him once, he nearly got a posthumous VC. He was stupendously brave – well, Poppy’s brave too, in her way. He was in a cavalry regiment. They charged their horses straight at a German machine-gun emplacement and every single man was––’

‘That can’t be right. Frances, look – this Poppea’s father is dead. He died ten years ago.’

‘I know. Poppy adored him. She talks about him all the time.’

‘But he
can’t
be dead. He’s at his villa in France, he fell ill very suddenly, the doctors thought it was pneumonia, Poppy’s with him now.’

‘Oh, Lucy – don’t tell me you believed that!’

‘Of course I believed it. Lord Carnarvon explained it. He was as clear as could be.’

‘I know – wasn’t he brilliant? I wish I could tell lies that well. But it was a white lie, and told for honourable reasons to protect Poppy, so it’s just a fib, anyway. Queen Min must have suspected and she was trying to make sure – well, she won’t now!’

I turned away to the washbasin. The tap gushed rusty water. I washed all the yellows and scarlets and blues from my hands. My watercolour had been a runny mess: I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t detect lies, I was useless as an observer, truth eluded me. I thought of Rose and Peter; of a small boy waving from the hotel balcony. After a long pause, I looked up. Frances was drying her hands. ‘So if none of that was true,’ I asked carefully, ‘if Poppy isn’t in France with her father, where is she?’

For the first time I saw doubt and anxiety betray themselves in Frances’s eyes. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think
anyone
knows. No one will tell me anything, Lucy – I’m as much in the dark as you are.’

‘But Rose and Peter think she’s on her way back now. What lies have
they
been told? Rose must know their grandfather’s dead, even if Peter doesn’t understand.’

‘I don’t
know
what they were told. Maybe that Poppy is with friends. No one wants them to worry. You mustn’t tell them, Lucy – promise me.’

‘I won’t say a word – of course I won’t. But it’s so cruel and wrong to let them think she’s coming back any moment – Frances, anything could have happened, Poppy could have gone anywhere, it might be
months
before she deigns to show up again. Oh, this is horrible! I can’t think why I liked her, why I was taken in by her. I don’t believe she cares for them at all – if she loved Rose and Peter, she’d never put them through this. No mother would. She’s nothing but a selfish, vain, stupid woman.’

‘She isn’t. She isn’t. Don’t
say
that.’

Frances, bright-eyed, flushed, was angry, defensive and close to tears. I forgot sometimes that she was younger than I was. Not that those years made any difference: I felt hot and choked and close to tears too. I knew we’d quarrel if I pursued this, so I bit back my words and said nothing more. We went into lunch, and all through the meal these well-intentioned deceptions swirled around in my mind. Frances and I were caught up in them, and no doubt they’d prove harmless, but they left me with a sense of guilt and creeping unease. Frances, as always, recovered more successfully. Her quick inventive mind was already jumping ahead; by the time the meal was over and we’d been allowed to leave the table, she was already planning what to do with the purloined pages of
Burke’s
. Our next task was vital, she said: we had to get rid of the evidence.

On the way back to our room, I suggested umpteen, simple, practical methods of achieving just that, but Frances, in a lordly way, dismissed them all. I began to suspect that, liking ceremonies as she did, she already had some solemn ritual, some hocus-pocus, in mind.

Before we left for the Valley, we just had time for the initial preparations. As soon as we were safe in our room, we tore up the stolen pages of
Burke’s
: Frances would not rest until we’d reduced ancient lineage to unreadable confetti. She produced a small leather doll’s purse, and all the confetti was stuffed inside. I could tell it hurt her to part with this, for Frances loved gaudy things – always plainly dressed by her mother, she could not resist anything brightly coloured. The purse, heart-shaped, rose-pink, fashioned from soft glove leather, was clearly much cherished; even I could see it was an appropriate container for Poppy’s secrets, so it was agreed the little purse would be hidden and ‘sacrificed’. I think Frances, with her queer imagination, felt that if sacrifice were involved, Poppy would quickly return and all would be well. She was, to her fingertips, her father’s child, an archaeologist’s daughter: she had reason to know how capricious the gods could be, and how essential it was to propitiate them.

Frances secreted the purse, and took it to the Valley that afternoon, but if she had some specific ritual or hiding place in mind, she refused to divulge it. The site of Carter’s dig proved to be deep in a remote arm of the Valley; it was near the tomb of a pharaoh called Siptah, first discovered about seventeen years before. I’d seen Siptah’s broken body at the Egyptian Museum: he had a pitifully deformed, withered foot, perhaps the result of polio, Frances’s father had suggested. When we arrived at the site of this crippled king’s tomb, the scene was so bewildering that I soon forgot Frances’s secret plans. True to his scheme, Carter was removing the tons of spoil in front of Siptah’s burial place; until I actually witnessed it, I’d not realised how gargantuan a task that was. The floor of the Valley resembled the interior of a vast quarry – indeed, much of it
was
a quarry, a place where thousands upon thousands of tons of limestone and flint chippings had been dug out of the hills for centuries, to be discarded at random.

Tall plumes of white dust billowed up from the site, gusting and swirling in the burning air; they were visible from afar and chokingly thick when close. Carter himself was white as a ghost, smeared in dust from head to foot, as were his Arab basket boys and workmen. There must have been forty men on the site, digging, hoeing, sifting and shovelling, and there were even more boys, perhaps a hundred of them, some of them my own age and many much younger, fleet of foot, nimble and acrobatic, dodging among the rocks, removing the spoil in rush baskets. It was being sieved, inspected, then loaded into open crates on a manually operated railway system – a Decauville track, Carter explained, jumping down from the heaps of spoil, and striding forward to greet us.

‘Cost Carnarvon a pretty packet,’ he announced with a wide grin. ‘Worth its weight in gold. Can’t think how we ever managed without it – cuts the labour time in half, means we can shift the spoil well away from the Valley floor, and dump it where it can’t do any harm. The men fill the crates, push them the length of the line, then lift the rails at the back, refix them at the front, and off we go again! Clicks together like a Meccano set – best toy I ever had! We can shift the stuff half a mile, more, in next to no time – Helen, Miss Mackenzie – you don’t mind the dust? Come and see the progress we’re making. Frances, introduce Lucy to Girigar, he’s looking forward to seeing you.’

I’d never seen Carter in such ebullient spirits; he seemed immune to the dust, and unaffected by the cacophony of noise, the clamour of voices. Miss Mack and Helen lowered the veils they’d pinned to their hats, and began to pick their way gingerly through the treacherous spoil. Carter strode ahead of them, laughing and gesturing. No reference to the ugly scene after lunch the previous day, no trace of the man I’d glimpsed, alone in the Valley, hurling stones at the rock face.

‘This way, Lucy,’ Frances said, ‘follow me.’ She led me up a narrow path, skirting the area where the men were labouring. We mounted a small rise some distance away, where the dust was a little less choking. There we discovered a peculiar structure that resembled a cage; its roof was shaded with canvas, its sides constructed of finely pierced metal, like a fly screen in a pantry. It had muslin curtains and contained a single chair, well padded. The cage was unoccupied.

‘Lord Carnarvon’s,’ Frances said. ‘Protects him from the flies. And the dust. He’s stayed at the hotel today: some people are arriving from Cairo, officials, I think – bigwigs, anyway, and Eve said they had to see them. But when Carnarvon is at the dig, which is most days, that’s where he sits.’

‘In that?’ I stared at the cage. ‘But what does he do?’

‘Well, he can keep an eye on things, of course – it’s a good vantage point. And then he reads, I guess. Dozes off, I expect. Thinks about his ancestral acres and his stud and his racehorses. Dreams of discovering treasure, maybe.’ She grinned. ‘Who knows? You don’t expect an English lord to get his hands dirty, do you? If they find anything – which mostly they don’t – Mr Carter sends an emissary, and Lordy ventures out, and then they examine it together, and Carnarvon looks at some bit of old pottery, or an ostraca if they’re lucky, and he says, “Oh I say, well
done,
my dear fellow, jolly interesting.” And then he goes back to his cage again.’

The imitation of Carnarvon’s drawling tones was exact: Frances was a pitiless mimic.

‘But doesn’t he get bored?’ I asked.

‘Bored to tears, I should think – wouldn’t you? Eve’s always here with him, and she tries to keep him entertained – she’s so saintly and sweet-tempered, she really
works
at it. I guess it was all right in the early days, before the war, when he and Mr Carter first excavated together. They weren’t in the Valley then, and they made lots of good finds. But since they came here – years of work, and almost nothing to show for it, think of it, Lucy! Lordy must be losing heart. He enjoys the Winter Palace, I think, the dinners and parties and his friends visiting – and he enjoys
buying
things, of course… ’