The Visitors (64 page)

I turned to inspect that mask once more. Oblivious to such indignities, it looked into the future with the absolute serenity of art. I hesitated in the face of its youth, beauty, sadness and stoicism, then turned to go. One last glass case stayed me: it contained the two tiny mummified bodies of Tutankhamun’s and Ankhesenamun’s stillborn children, who had been found in the room Carter called the Treasury. I wondered, as everyone who sees them must, whether they died as a result of their parents’ brother-sister union, some fatal genetic defect. I wondered, as everyone must, what the interval was between their deaths and that of the father buried with them. Not long, perhaps, given his age at death – which was probably eighteen. And I wondered, as everyone must, what became of their mother, who, after the death of her younger brother-husband, disappears into oblivion’s echo-chamber, swallowed up in the maw that is history.

I was in my twenty-second year that day in the Museum. I had yet to bear a child and was still a virgin. Even so, ignorant and unscathed as I then was, I’d mourned those tiny mummified babies in the heat of the Museum that day. Today, I mourned them again, and I mourned my own lost child too – no passers-by to see, I’m glad to say. What a spectacle: a foolish, fond old woman sitting on a bench in a north London cemetery; waterworks yet again, amid a scattering of rose petals.

Perhaps it would be wise to return home. I rose and turned back along the cemetery path I’d taken earlier, still thinking of Howard Carter and of the last two occasions on which I’d encountered him. The first, a few days after that visit to the Egyptian Museum, took place in the Valley of the Kings. Carter’s long decade of work was almost over by the time I made that fleeting visit: only a few objects from the little Annexe room that Frances and I had peered into remained to be packed and sent to Cairo, then his ten years’ toil would be ended. I’d timed my visit for late afternoon; the journalists had long departed, and the influx of tourists was much reduced, but I wanted to see the Valley as I remembered it from my childhood, when it was quiet, the domain of the cobra goddess whose name means
She who loves silence.

I took the route over the hills; by the time I reached a vantage point from which I could look down into the Valley, there were only a few last straggles of tourists. Examining the tomb area with field glasses, I recognised the photographer Harry Burton and the donnish chemist Alfred Lucas, who were packing up to leave. They were the only members of the original team still working with Carter: Arthur Mace, alleged victim of the Curse, was four years dead, and Pecky Callender, who had fallen out with Carter and resigned, had disappeared – disappeared off the map, or so Miss Mack had said. Her letters to him had long ceased to be answered. I could hear the distant murmur of the men’s voices in the Valley below: Carter, keys to the tomb’s steel gates in his hands, was seated on the retaining wall, where the journalists had once clustered. The Valley’s shadows were lengthening as I began the long trek downhill, thinking as I walked of Carter’s travails since I’d last seen him here in his moment of triumph, when Lord Carnarvon was still alive; there had been episodes of bitter controversy in the ten years since.

‘
I’m not one of nature’s diplomats
,’
Carter himself had said to me. Once he was no longer protected by Carnarvon’s influence, he had swiftly proved the truth of that assertion, and his many enemies, including Pierre Lacau, were equally swift to exact retribution. They’d made their move within months of Carnarvon’s death, and a vicious struggle had then ensued, whipped up by journalists, complicated and intensified by the forces of Egyptian nationalism. Shortly after a new constitution was agreed and democratic elections in Egypt at last took place, the Wafd Party-dominated parliament moved to take control of the tomb, a task in which they were assisted by Lacau – and, in equal measure, by Carter’s own intransigence and litigiousness.

For an entire year, he and his team had been barred from the tomb, and the Antiquities Service annexed it, though they left it untouched, there then being no Egyptian archaeologists sufficiently experienced to take it on, and no foreign ones prepared to risk the tomb’s viperous politics. This situation did not last. In the wake of continuing unrest and a series of political assassinations, the British had once more taken a hard line: they ejected the Nationalist prime minister and his cabinet, seized the political initiative once more, imposed martial law and installed a pro-British government. Within weeks of this reversal, Carter was back in possession of his tomb.

Those events had taken place in 1924. Carter had remained here in the Valley, winter season after winter season, ever since. Eight long years, I thought, as I reached the rocky floor of the Valley and turned along the track that led me towards the tomb, and Carter’s seated, unmoving figure. The shrines had been dismantled, the sarcophagus opened, the coffins extracted, the autopsy performed. Thousands of exquisite objects, large and small, had been removed, recorded, conserved, photographed, packed – and in an exemplary manner: even Carter’s most vociferous detractors admitted that. They had then been consigned in their entirety to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, as Herbert Winlock had foreseen. In this respect, Lacau and the Nationalists won the battle – and changed the ethos of archaeology, in Egypt and elsewhere, for ever.

Almina Carnarvon, inheriting her husband’s interest in the excavation, had received nothing from the tomb, let alone half its contents as her husband had anticipated – but then, as Frances had pointed out, this was no hardship, since such artefacts did not remotely interest her. Officially, nothing found in the tomb had made its way back to a display case at Highclere Castle or to foreign museums; its entire contents would remain in Egypt for ever, down to the last ivory hairpin. Other than any small objects that had been spirited away, of course: any ‘beauties’ Carnarvon had ‘taken on account’ as Frances had put it – or, to put it another way, anything which Carnarvon had (tick your preferred term) secreted, smuggled, nicked, pilfered. There were rumours that Howard Carter had been similarly light-fingered.

‘Mr Carter?’

Nerving myself, walking towards him, I held out my hand. I startled him; he had neither heard nor observed my approach. He swung around and inspected me blankly, as a sleepwalker might. He had put on weight and was portly now, his hair thinning, his complexion grey and his face puffy. He regarded me in a glowering, suspicious way. He’d last seen me as a child, now I was a grown woman. I knew he had no reason to recognise me. He ignored my outstretched hand and remained seated.

I explained who I was. When, as anticipated, my name meant nothing to him, I reminded him of Frances and my connection to her. His face brightened at once, the latent irascibility disappeared and he seemed eager for news. The Depression had halted the Met’s excavation programme in Egypt, and Herbert Winlock was now based in New York, soon to be appointed Director of the Metropolitan Museum. Frances’s annual visits to the American House and the Valley had ceased five years before, when she had been sent to a boarding school near Boston. I knew she had not seen Carter in that time, nor heard from him; neither had her father.

‘And how
is
Frances? How’s my old friend Winlock?’ Carter said, and his demeanour changed – swiftly, as it always did.

I told him Frances would be leaving school in the summer and planned to study art. I brought him up to date on Herbert and Helen’s activities. He showed little interest in Winlock’s elevation to Director, but became hospitable at once; I was invited back to his house and stayed there an hour, being plied with drinks, nuts and dates by Carter’s major-domo, Abd-el-Aal, and his younger brother Hosein – the boy, now a man, whom I remembered from our lunch in that Valley tomb.

It was a beautiful, still evening. I sat there on Carter’s terrace, looking down at the stretch of the Nile where Miss Mack and I had stayed on our
dahabiyeh
. There were numerous houseboats moored there, but none that resembled the
Queen Hatshepsut.
I wondered what had become of the boat and Mohammed; I wondered what Pecky Callender’s fate had been. Carter, uninterested, brushed all my enquiries aside. ‘Callender? No bloody idea. Took off – could be dead for all I know,’ he said, and changed the subject. He wanted to tell me about his work – and did so.

‘The great sadness was, no papyri,’ he said. ‘I had Alan Gardiner on call, ready to work on anything we unearthed. Mace had found a box, filled with what looked like rolls of papyrus – but when we investigated, they turned out to be bundles of old linen. I’d hoped for
words.
Words that told us about Tutankhamun himself, his parentage, how he became king, his life, his wife, his children, what he believed, who he was.’ He turned his eyes to the river. ‘And there was nothing.’

He remained silent for a while, and then said: ‘I thought I was bringing him into the light. But while I’ve been there in the tomb, all these years, uncovering Tutankhamun’s belongings, trying to preserve and understand them – he slipped past me into the darkness. The more I searched, the less I saw him.’ He paused. ‘And when I finally looked at his face… Despite all I know, all my experience, I was still expecting him to look like his face mask. He didn’t.’

He took a swallow of whisky. ‘More fool me,’ he said, with a bark of laughter – and returned to his more usual tone. Like a man settling down in his club for an evening’s jaw with friends, he began winding his way back and forth in the past. He told me new stories – how, just the other evening, he’d seen a black jackal in the hills above the Valley: ‘A veritable Anubis. Not one of your common-or-garden brown jackals. Black as night. Twice the size they usually are too – saw him with my own eyes.’ With equal relish, he went on to recount old tales: I think they were by then a fixed part of his repertoire, perhaps shielding him when other memories intruded.

He described again that seance at Highclere –
Coptic! Recognised it at once! More than my life’s worth to tell you what was said
– and, his manner briefly bewildered, then becoming firm, he spoke of Carnarvon’s death. ‘I was there at the end. At Carnarvon’s bedside. And the next day, every single one of the Cairo newspapers, even the Arab ones, were printed with a black border, in honour of him. What d’you think of that?’

The fact was clearly of importance to him. I murmured some reply, though I could see it was unnecessary.

‘Never happened before, hasn’t happened since, will never happen again,’ he said. ‘Carnarvon was the last of his kind. And I’ve looked after his interests ever since, made a point of it, will continue to do so. My duty. Oh yes.’

This statement, fiercely made, seemed to be a prompt, and so, rising to leave, I asked Carter whether he still visited Highclere Castle every year as he’d formerly done, if he’d be going back there this coming summer to mark the fact that his decade of work on Tutankhamun’s tomb had ended. Eve had never returned to Egypt, I knew, but I thought she and the Carnarvon family would be certain to celebrate this occasion.

A closed expression came upon his face. ‘Don’t visit regularly, no – not now,’ he replied in a brusque, dismissive tone. ‘I simply don’t have the time. Infernally busy, tied up, constant demands to lecture, write. Not a moment to call my own. It never lets up. And once I’m finished here, I’ll be starting on the definitive account of the tomb and its contents. Beyond that, I have
plans.
’

He gave me a sidelong look. ‘Can’t reveal them. Like to keep my cards close to my chest. But watch the newspapers, because I have a few surprises in store, and our journalist friends would give their right hands to find out more. I knew where Tutankhamun’s body was buried and I know where some other bodies are buried too. Illustrious ones. Ones that will make this discovery pale in comparison. I’ll give you a little clue…
Alexander the Great
.’ He bared his teeth. ‘Believe me, there’s a few tricks in the old dog yet.’

I could hear his voice, as I turned out of the cemetery gates today, re-entered the park, and began the long, slow and increasingly painful ascent to the sanctuary of my home. The arthritis was back with a vengeance: I’d stayed too long, come too far, and the spooks were now in full clamour – they always know when you’re weakening. I set my face towards the wavering outline of my house, which I could just see in the distance beyond the thick dull July green of the trees ahead. As I’d learned on the journey that gave me my
Deserts
book, and had relearned on subsequent ones, the secret to walking distances over difficult terrain, in circumstances that are less than ideal, imperfect health, for example, is – don’t stop. Don’t pause. Don’t allow yourself to rest.

So I pressed on, and Carter came with me and I saw him as I had the last time we met. That final meeting took place in the winter of 1937; it was some five years after the encounter in the Valley that I’ve described, and two years before Carter’s death. My own life had changed in the interim: I had married. On the occasion of that last meeting, I was in flight from my first husband and taking refuge in Egypt. The Carter sighting took place at the Winter Palace Hotel, where I was staying for a few nights. I was sitting on the hotel terrace one morning, contemplating the Nile, thinking of the time I’d spent here as a child with Frances, with Rose and Peter… If I thought about them hard enough, it might block other memories of Egypt and this hotel: my honeymoon here, for instance.

I’d brought with me the bound typescript of Miss Mack’s book that she’d given me the week before she died, and I’d determined that, while I was here, I’d at last make myself read it.
To the Lucy I once knew
: that dedication, written in a wavering hand, distressed me. I sipped coffee and turned the onion-skin pages; I could quickly see that Miss Mack’s years of rewriting had effected an act of censorship. Entire episodes, lengthy conversations that I knew she’d recorded, had disappeared; Pecky Callender, her hero, had been virtually erased. I had once featured in The Book as a fellow bystander – now I found I too had been cut, cut comprehensively; there was nothing left of me.