The Visitors (3 page)
The heat of the morning was pleasant, still bearable, and just sufficient to make the light bend, waver and deceive. In the distance, Miss Mack was supervising the unloading of baskets, a small folding table and snow-white napery. I took another swallow of water and forced it down. I turned my gaze towards the Great Pyramid, where the man called Bertie had finally reached the summit. He removed his tweed cap and shouted, ‘Huzzah!’ Loud cheers came from the spectators below. Bertie, it seemed, had come prepared: from inside his Norfolk jacket he produced a small flag and waved it victoriously. I raised the field glasses and focused them. The flag was a Union Jack. Bertie fixed it between the stones at the pyramid’s summit where it fluttered briefly. There were more cheers, then groans as the flag blew away.
Behind this group, I saw, a large car was approaching, bumping its way across the sand. It described a circle, made for the Sphinx, reconsidered, and finally came to a halt in the shade of some palm trees about fifty yards away. I watched as its occupants climbed from the car: first, a young but portly man, balding and with a markedly high, prominent forehead, wearing a flamboyant bow tie; then a woman, festooned with scarves; and finally a girl of around my own age, who jumped from the car, ran a few yards, and then performed a cartwheel. I watched as she followed it up with a somersault, and then reached into the car and fetched out desert gear. A fly-switch, a pair of dark glasses. I stared in astonishment as she put them on. Such sophistication, dark glasses for a child, how I envied her this protection from the punitive light; how free she looked, how her dark hair, almost black, shone.
‘Hot, hot,
hot
,’ she called to her mother – was it her mother? They were the first words I heard her say. ‘Daddy, it’s
baking.
I told you it would be.’
Her voice was light, discernibly American. Her father shrugged. ‘Sure it’s hot if you insist on gymnastics. Try sitting down.’
‘May I climb a pyramid before lunch?’
‘Don’t be fresh, Frances. That’s not funny and no, you may not. Neither before lunch, nor after it. It’s vandalism, as you very well know. Now sit down and eat your sandwiches. I’ll test you on your hieroglyphs when you’ve finished. Did you learn the six I set you?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Kind of won’t do. Accuracy is all. Helen, is that confounded picnic ready or not? This was a damn-fool idea – I’m due back in Cairo in an hour… ’
Their voices faded; they withdrew out of sight behind the palm trees. I was wondering dreamily if they too were apparitions, when Miss Mack, followed by Hassan, rejoined me. The table was unfolded, a cloth spread upon it; baskets were opened, and the bounty of a Shepheard’s packed lunch was revealed. Cold roast quails and a pilaff; sweet quince pastries, dates and greengages. Miss Mack and I ate in state at the folding table, with plates and knives and forks and linen napkins; Hassan, who, at Miss Mack’s insistence, shared this plenty, squatted on the ground. He had brought with him some flat Egyptian bread, which he unwrapped from a cloth bundle. He then shinned up the Sphinx’s foot, placed the bread carefully in full sun on the paw-knuckles, allowed it to warm through, and shinned down again. Explaining that his wife had made it for him, he offered it to us to share. Miss Mack froze: seeing I was about to accept some, she shook her head at me.
‘Excellent bread,’ Hassan said, somewhat mournfully: I felt he was used to such offerings being refused. ‘
Shamsi
, you see? Sun bread. You will like it – that is sure.’
‘Indeed we would, Hassan,’ Miss Mack said firmly. ‘But my friend Lucy has been ill, you see, so we have to be very careful what we eat. That is tremendously kind, but we have so much already, and we wouldn’t dream of depriving you.’
Hassan gave up with melancholy grace. He seemed saddened – I hoped not affronted. I scraped at my plate, pushing the food back and forth into little piles. I could eat very little. The meal took an age. We were still scarcely halfway through when I heard voices, then a car engine. The acrobat girl was departing. I watched her disappear in a shimmer of light and a cloud of dust – and she couldn’t have been an apparition since Miss Mack also registered the exodus.
‘Automobiles,’ she remarked, with a frown. ‘At the pyramids! Some people have no sense of respect. They might remember – this is a holy place. It’s a
burial
ground.’
We inspected the burial ground again when lunch was finally finished. Miss Mack was reinvigorated, determined to evoke
some
spark. All three pyramids and no escaping them: kingdoms, dynasties, reigns; probable building methods; alignment with compass points and stars; number of pharaonic wives and daughters buried in adjoining necropolis… The sun was now directly overhead. I squinted at the wives’ section of the necropolis. It was only partly excavated, and the sands were encroaching on its rough jumble of stones. Any decoration or inscriptions they might once have had, had been long scoured and obliterated by millennia of desert storms.
Wandering away, I leaned over one of the burial pits. Miss Mack, reading from her guidebook, had informed me it was an unknown princess’s tomb, stocked with wine, fruit, and grain to sustain her in the afterlife. Now it was about ten feet deep – a dazzle of debris. An emerald-green lizard darted for a wall crevice. A faint breeze brushed my skin. I watched the sands shiver beneath my feet – and realised that this burial place was not deserted after all: moving in the shadows below me was a girl. She was about my own age, thin, wiry and alert. I could see she was trying to escape the pit. She made a series of nervous runs at its encircling walls, as if meaning to climb or jump them. She advanced on its boundaries, then backed off again. After a while, she seemed to sense my presence: she raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun’s glint, lifted her transparent face and turned to look at me. We stared at each other, hard and long. I raised my small box camera to capture her on film, and at once, as swiftly as she had manifested, she disappeared.
Should I inform Miss Mack of this interesting mirage? I knew if I did I’d be dosed up with aspirin and confined to base again. I said nothing. Miss Mack was gathering up our belongings: time to return to the hotel. She looked dispirited; I think she felt the pyramids had been woefully ineffective, and was now pinning her hopes on the afternoon’s dancing class.
The young man paid his first visit to me today. He had come to interrogate me on the subject of a tomb – a very famous tomb. His name is Dr Ben Fong. He is an American scholar, formerly of Berkeley, California, now a Fellow of University College London. He is writing a book (
another
book!) about the most famous discovery ever made in the Valley of the Kings. A television documentary, a co-production jointly funded by the BBC and some American channel, perhaps HBO, is also being planned. Its working title is
Tutankhamun’s Tomb: The Truth
. Laid-back, photogenic Dr Fong will be fronting this alliterative, high-budget, four-part marvel. The book and the TV series, he informed me, are ‘linked in’ and interest in them is ‘awesome’. He dropped this information early on in our interview, when still under the illusion that I’d find this prospect impressive, even flattering. He’s quick on the uptake, however, and unlikely to make that mistake again.
This first visit was preceded by a polite letter, citing Dr Fong’s impressive academic qualifications, his previous books, and his Egyptologist contacts and friends, including the one who recommended approaching me, who had provided my address. That man, an expert on the transcription of papyri, is an acquaintance I’ve not seen in twenty years. The letter was followed by several emails. Dr Fong expressed gallant surprise that a woman of my great age should be ‘computer-savvy’. In view of that unpromising start, I have no idea why I agreed to see him: was my curiosity aroused? I doubt it. I think it’s simply that in winter my arthritis can be vicious, I don’t get out as much as I’d like and can experience cabin fever even here in London. Loneliness, of course, had nothing to do with it – no, I agreed to see the man because he pressed me, and I was bored.
These days I tend to spend winters in England, and summers either in America or elsewhere. Where I go and when I go now depends on no one but myself: this, as I’m always telling people, is a pleasant state of affairs. My journeyings depend on the current state of my arthritis – also on mood. Since it was January when we met, and the arthritis was in its winter ascendancy, Dr Fong came to my house in Highgate. It is an old and beautiful house, if overburdened with stairs, and it is set at the top of the highest hill above London. It has a fine view across the famous Highgate Cemetery, where people as diverse as Karl Marx and George Eliot are buried; I find this stupendous view, over burial crosses and guardian angels towards the towers of the new London, very useful. I can usually divert my guests’ attention with its wonders for at least ten minutes, which gives me ample time to assess them. Dr Fong proved impatient, however. I hadn’t got beyond early thirties, keen-eyed, modish hair, wearing a wedding ring, pity about his shoes, when, four minutes in, I found myself installed in my chair by the fire, Fong opposite me, notebook in hand and pencil poised. Between us, on a small table, lay a tape recorder. Without preamble, Dr Fong switched it on.
‘Just say something, Miss Payne, so I can check sound levels… Great, that’s fine. What an incredible room you have here! So many books, quite a library of them. And amazing paintings, I mean like
seriously
amazing. Is that a… could it be… ? Wow, yes it is. Professor Yates did warn me, but even so. I see you keep a
shabti
figure on your desk. A very beautiful one too. Would it be––’
‘A fake?’
‘Genuine, surely?’
‘The bazaar in Cairo. Bought in 1922, the year I first went to Egypt. One of the more unscrupulous dealers. I was a child. Eleven years old. Green in judgement. So, alas, no.’
I was not warming to this interviewer.
Game on
, I thought. I suspect Dr Fong came to the same conclusion – but then the
shabti
in question, one of the small faience figures made to serve an Egyptian king in the afterlife and placed in his tomb for an eternity of servitude, was genuine. I knew that, and Dr Fong knew I knew.
We fenced around for forty-five minutes. I may have divorced two husbands, buried a third, and generally led what has been described as a rackety life, but for the past two decades I’ve lived alone. I’ve reverted to the solitude of my childhood, and reacquired old habits, one of which is caution. I’m nervous with strangers and suspicious of them. I dislike taking others into my confidence and avoid doing so. As I’ve outlived most of the friends who
had
gained my trust, there are precious few confidantes these days. Dr Fong did not fail to point this out: he ran through a roll-call of eminent men, including all those involved in the astonishing discovery and excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, all those that I first met in Cairo, as a child; those I knew at Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. Every last one of them was dead as a dodo. Drawing breath, he then described me as a unique living witness to the greatest archaeological discovery ever made, and to the extraordinary and historic events that galvanised Egyptology in the decade from 1922 to 1932…
‘No, 1935.’ My mind had strayed elsewhere. The words were out before I could stop myself.
‘Nineteen-thirty-five?’ He gave me a puzzled look. ‘Sorry – I don’t follow. Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922. It was opened in the presence of his patron, Lord Carnarvon, later that same month. It took ten years to document, conserve and remove all the artefacts. The last of them left for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in February 1932, Miss Payne. All done and dusted well before 1935.’
‘Of course. Memory failure. I apologise.’
‘Your memory seems fantastically good to me. If mine’s in such good shape when I get to your age –
if
I do, of course – well, I reckon I’ll be pleased.’
‘You’re too kind.’
‘Am I missing something here? Nineteen-thirty-five? I’m not aware that… Could you be thinking of 1939, when Howard Carter died? I guess that must have been a significant date for you: the end of an era? You went to his funeral, I hear. Not too many people did.
Not
a well-attended departure. I was going to ask whether––’
‘Another time, Dr Fong.’
‘Hey, no need to be so formal. Call me Ben. Everyone calls me Ben.’
It took me a further half-hour to curtail the interview. As far as Dr Fong was concerned, I was merely a source of what journalists call ‘colour’, I’m sure; an old woman who might provide the odd anecdote or
aperçu
he could use. I could tell he was on the lookout for evidence of Alzheimer’s, or some other depressing variant of mental decay. He cannot have expected any revelations of significance, not from someone who’d been a mere child at the time. And if he had been expecting revelations, I intended to disappoint him: I’m still bound by ancient loyalties – he’d learn nothing of significance from me.
But I should have remembered how remorseless scholars can be: the questions were interminable. I tried everything – hauteur, old-lady vagueness, silence, even incipient tears; none of it washed. When he inserted a new tape in his machine, inspiration came at last. I produced my photograph albums. They are numerous and large. I felt sure that page upon page of faded sepia snaps would ensure a quick exit. They were taken with the Kodak box camera Miss Mack bought me in Cairo, first used on our pyramids expedition, then taken on to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. It’s many years since I last looked at these photographs, and they tug at my heart.
I turned the pages of the first album. There were all the distinguished men whom I had known in another country, another era, another life, acquaintance with whom explained Dr Fong’s presence now. There were their wives and children. There were the places so central to my existence then: the Winter Palace Hotel on the banks of the Nile where Miss Mack and I stayed when we travelled on from Cairo to Luxor; Howard Carter’s house in the desert; and, just a mile or so away, the house where I stayed with Frances. It had been built by the Metropolitan Museum of Art shortly before the Great War. Its purpose was to house the team of archaeologists excavating in Egypt for the Met, several of whom were co-opted to work for the Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, once the astonishing discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb had been made.