The Visitors (63 page)
‘Do you believe in the famous Tutankhamun Curse, Miss Payne?’ Dr Fong asked me the other day, on one of his visits. ‘Did you ever believe in it?’
I had told him ‘no’, which is the answer I generally give when asked – and I’ve been asked that question many times over the intervening decades: the concept of Tutankhamun’s Curse, for some reason, exerts a continuing undimmed fascination.
‘Oh, I don’t believe in it either,’ people usually reply to my denials, ‘of course, it is all nonsense.’ And I wait for the ‘but’, the ‘even so’, and it almost always follows. ‘But, even so, one must admit – it
is
odd, macabre… That cluster of deaths, some of them seriously
nasty
. I’m sure it’s nothing more than coincidence, but––’
In the past, I used to argue. My questioners would cite their evidence: the cluster of deaths in the years after the tomb was opened: Lord Carnarvon, and his two much younger half-brothers, all dead within a few years; kindly Arthur Mace, returning to England an invalid after his second season in the Valley, never able to work again, dying six years later. They’d cite the sudden death of Albert Lythgoe and the unpleasant, premature death of the journalist Weigall, deaths that occurred within months of each other. They’d add other names: a secretary who’d briefly worked in the Valley for Carnarvon, who’d died in mysterious circumstances; that man’s father, who contrived to jump to his death from a fourth-storey window despite being bedridden; and a little boy who’d been knocked down and killed by the hearse at the father’s funeral. On and on that list went: out would come the names of more marginal figures – those who were
said
to have visited the tomb and
said
to have died within weeks, having been in perfect health until…
Once upon a time, when more combative than I am now, I’d point out that Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutankhamun, opener of his coffins, had worked on in the Valley for ten long years without mishap, and had died of natural causes in his own bed in London in 1939, seventeen years after first breaking into the tomb. I’d remind them that Eve, present when the tomb was opened – and one of the four people who broke into the Burial Chamber in secret too, though I’d never reveal that – had lived into serene old age, and had died in England at the age of seventy-nine, which did not suggest the forces in the tomb were too punitive or selective. Now I say nothing. People have this unassuageable appetite for supernatural influence; they
want
to believe in shadowy powers, ancient taboos – and who am I to argue?
Now I stay quiet and do not admit the truth, though I could admit it to myself, sitting in the quiet of the cemetery. I believe in the power of chance – and have good reason to do so. Beyond that, the truth is I
do
believe in curses, but I believe they emanate from within, are the fruits of our own nature and upbringing. Why should we need to believe in supernatural malevolence, in ills that are fated to strike us down from outside, when we are all more than capable of contriving them, bringing them down on our heads without the least external interference?
The curse is born within me, cried/ The Lady of Shalott.
The first book I wrote was called
Deserts.
I began work on it in 1931, immediately after graduating – though, as I was female, my degree had limitations: it would be another seventeen years before Cambridge would permit female graduates to be full members of the university. I was twenty-one when I began the book, twenty-three when it was published. Eager to leave England, and with the carelessness of youth, I selected almost at random the two deserts that would be its subject. The first was an area of the Sahara – that chose itself, for I could begin my journey in the Valley of the Kings, then, with Arab guides, explore further and see what happened. The second was the Mojave – which I selected for no better reason than it was in the right continent, and I could visit Frances after my journey. Many of my subsequent books, which are inevitably classified under ‘Travel’, have involved exploration of remote, inhospitable places. By the time I came to write these later books, people accepted my periodic vanishings: ‘Oh, Lucy’s taken off again,’ they’d say and, obligingly, forget my existence until I reappeared. But that first book, and the journeys it involved, did cause remark and argument – even protest.
Those close to me flatly opposed the project and ridiculed the proposed title. ‘The whole idea is foolhardy and ridiculous. Just when I believed you’d be coming home at last. Three years at Girton, never here – last year, an entire
summer
in Princeton with your beloved Miss Mack – and now you’re going to
desert
me, Lucy?’ Nicola Dunsire cried.
That remark angered me, as she’d intended: the summer spent in Princeton was Miss Mack’s last. Her elderly mother had finally died some years before, and Miss Mack was living alone when illness gripped her. She had needed me, and I had stayed for those last months at her side… My so-called ‘desertion’ of Nicola was unlikely to affect her too grievously, I felt, given that bicycle-thief Clair Lennox was planted in our house, had already been dug in for the three years I’d spent at Girton, and still showed no inclination to uproot herself.
‘You’ll have the cuckoo in the nest to keep you company,’ I snapped – at which Nicola gave an impatient sigh and the cuckoo concerned laughed unashamedly. She was sprawling in our sitting room, lounging in that old chair of my mother’s with its ‘Strawberry Thief’ cover. A summer’s evening: she and Nicola, as was their custom, were drinking glasses of red wine. Clair was smoking, dressed as usual in filthy old trousers and a smock, both paint-encrusted.
‘Christ, you can be a pain in the arse, Lucy,’ she said. ‘Sod off to your desert. It should be right up your street.’ Clair never minded mixing her metaphors – or mixing
it
, as we’d say now.
Nicola remained venomously and vehemently opposed to my deserts project: it seemed truly to frighten her – though whether on my account or her own was hard to say. When her opposition and threats failed to move me, she embarked on an outflanking manoeuvre. She raised the issue with my father, asking him to intervene – she did appeal to his authority, oddly enough, on occasion. In due course and in his presence the question of my journey and my book was canvassed one last time; his visits to our Newnham house were regular by then, always taking place on a Sunday, for lunch; he’d stay precisely two hours before returning to college.
The resulting argument lasted throughout one of those Sunday lunches. I said little. As had become my practice, I closed my ears to the discussion and let my mind drift away. I was thinking of those final weeks with Miss Mack: sometimes alert, sometimes high as a kite on morphine, she liked me to read the Bible to her in the morning, and Shakespeare in the afternoon. ‘I am the resurrection,’ she’d mutter. ‘Must be
absolute
for death.’
Her funeral was already planned in fine detail; she had decided she wanted a blue lotus flower, Egyptian symbol of rebirth, on her tombstone. I’d helped chivvy the mason who was creating difficulties. I’d watched her browbeat the local Presbyterian minister, who, incensed at this heresy, was forbidding it – she soon put paid to
his
objections.
Upstairs in my attic room, where my suitcases were already packed for the journey Nicola was even now disputing, was my copy of The Book: it had never been published, and Miss Mack had spent much of the last nine years rewriting it. She had presented it to me the week before she died. The typescript was still in a manila envelope, on which, in Miss Mack’s loopy handwriting, was the enigmatic inscription,
To the Lucy I once knew…
I hadn’t been able to bear reading it.
With an effort, I returned to our Newnham dining room, where Nicola’s appeals and arguments eddied. She was reaching the end of her dissertation, and her hands had begun to tremble; her voice had risen. Finally, the appeal to my father was made. ‘Robert, surely
you
can make Lucy see sense?
Deserts?
It’s just an excuse to run away from home. Within a week, she’ll be running back to England. Or America. Taking shelter with her precious Rose and Peter. Rushing off to see that little prodigy, Frances. Write a
book
? Where did
that
idea come from? Lucy hasn’t the will-power. She’ll never see it through.’
‘Oh, she’ll see it through. I don’t doubt that for a moment,’ my father remarked, in an even tone. He had already pointed out that attempting to argue with me was futile. Along the length of our dining table, he inspected first Nicola, then a silent Clair Lennox, then me. Still handsome, his dark hair springy but greying; his light, faintly mocking hazel eyes rested on my face. He patted his mouth fastidiously with his white linen napkin, then tossed it aside. I could tell that he found the discussion tedious, that the atmosphere in the room, sharp as knives, merely served to irritate him. The library, as usual, called to him. His mind was on the book he had begun that summer. It was to be on Aeschylus, on the implacable nature of Aeschylean tragedy.
Now he glanced at his watch. ‘
Deserts
. A foolish, ill-considered project and, in my opinion, a preposterous title,’ he remarked, with a tight smile. ‘Surely it could be improved? Have you considered
Just Deserts
, Lucy, my dear?’
That was his final word on the subject. It took me years to realise how apt his punning was, but then my father, blind when he chose, could also be uncannily, and painfully, accurate. Sitting in the cemetery now, alone on my bench, hemmed about with gravestones, I caught the sound of laughter. Its mocking note was faint, but inescapable. It was visitors’, no doubt – but I thought of it as my father’s, dead these many decades, amused and delighted to be proved right at last.
Get lost
,
I said sharply and out loud, the sound of my own voice startling me. Obligingly, the ghost of my father bowed from the depths of the undergrowth and retreated. My mind drifted away to that
Deserts
journey I’d made: the crossing to Egypt, my stay in Cairo, travelling on the White Train, express to Luxor and the Valley…
He slipped past me in the darkness
,
said a familiar voice. Difficult to say where it came from; perhaps the tangle of dog roses behind me.
I met Howard Carter during the course of the journeys for my desert book. It wasn’t the last encounter I had with him, but it was the penultimate one – unless you include attendance at his funeral, which I do not. It was January 1932, exactly ten years on from my first visit to Egypt with Miss Mack: I had planned it that way. En route, and in Cairo, I visited the Egyptian Museum and spent many hours examining the ‘wonderful things’ Carter had unearthed from Tutankhamun’s tomb over the decade that had passed. I had read about them, in numerous articles and books, by then, including those accounts Carter himself wrote, the first of which – written with the help of Arthur Mace – is untruthful in many respects, yet powerful and curiously honest, even so. I had seen them before too, in photographs – but pictures do not prepare you for the astonishing beauty of the objects themselves, nor for the force they exert when inspected closely, alone, and in silence.
I gazed at these wonderful things, with which almost everyone is familiar – the blue and gold outer shrine; the gold coffin; the gold face mask; the golden canopic chest, with its guardian goddesses glancing over their shoulders as if in protection or warning – and that is one of the greatest works of art I have ever seen, in Egypt or elsewhere. I looked at the golden throne, on which Tutankhamun is portrayed with his young wife-sister Ankhesenamun: she is tenderly anointing her husband-brother with some oil or ointment. I turned to the less famous relics, those that do not glitter but which speak, the things some visitors pass by: the hank of hair belonging to his grandmother, which, presumably, the boy king wished to have buried with him; funerary wreaths, with intricate weavings of papyrus, olive leaves, beads, berries and cornflowers; the child’s glove Pecky Callender once spoke of, which someone had lovingly preserved. I wondered what these objects told one about the dead king: had his grandmother reared him? Had he been especially close to her? And who had chosen these wreaths? They were resonant, these clues, but the questions they raised remained unanswered and unanswerable.
I knew there were ugly realities behind the timeless serenity here. Carter, together with the chemist Lucas and the pathologist who had assisted them, had extricated the dead boy from the shell of his magnificent innermost coffin with the greatest of difficulty. The ritual libations, the resinous oils poured over his mummified, en-coffined body, had, in the space of three thousand years, become bituminous. They had solidified; as a result, the famous gold mask had fatally adhered to the embalmed face beneath it, and the king’s remains were stuck fast inside their solid gold carapace.
The archaeologists had laid the coffin outside, in the fierce sun of the Valley of the Kings, in an attempt to soften this hard, black substance. When that failed to melt it, hot knives and burners were used, until at last a combination of gas jets and brute force freed the king’s body and released it from its protective gold casings. When the autopsy took place, and the mummifying bandages were cut open with scalpels, a piteous shrunken body was finally revealed, in a poor state of preservation. Wrapped and concealed within the bandaging were astonishing artefacts. Tutankhamun’s body had remained in his tomb, as Carnarvon had wished (and is still there, the sole king left in the Valley), but the riches found on his body were on display here in the museum.
I examined the gold dagger and the iron-bladed one, the amulets, the dazzling pectorals, collars, rings and bracelets, all masterpieces of the goldsmith’s art. They glittered with inlays of blue faience, orange carnelian, green feldspar and that yellow Libyan desert glass whose origins remain mysterious. These sacred jewels, over one hundred of them, many decorated with spells from
The Book of the Dead
, had been placed to protect Tutankhamun’s throat, his groin, his heart, his wrists… It was for this kind of booty that the thieves in antiquity had ripped their kings’ mummies apart. In the case of Tutankhamun, uniquely, these sacramental jewels were saved. But damage had been caused. ‘They broke his neck,’ Frances had written to me. ‘They broke his neck when they removed the gold face mask.’