A Dangerous Crossing

by Rachel Rhys

  A hawker tries to press something into Lily’s hands – an exquisite hand-carved bird, fragile as spun sugar.

  ‘No,’ she says, dropping her hands to her sides. ‘No, thank you.’

  The hawker’s eyes are impassive as he once again thrusts the bird towards her. She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. More loudly. And steps back into a tray of intricate, inlaid music boxes which clatters to the ground. The vendor whose tray it is thrusts his face close to hers, shouting so that her cheek is sprayed with spittle. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says as he drops to his knees to retrieve his stock, but he only glares up at her.

  There is a whir of yellow and Eliza appears, waving something aloft like a trophy.

  ‘It’s all taken care of,’ she says. ‘Two extra tickets. Helena, I know you would prefer to stay and, of course, that’s entirely your choice. But Lily and Edward are coming with us, even if we have to kidnap them and load them on to camels ourselves.’

  Lily, still shaken from the altercation with the music-box vendor, is aghast at the thought of sitting on the coach with all the passengers from first class. Them knowing they are there because of charity. She cannot say this to Eliza, so instead she says, ‘I have nothing with me. No clothes.’

  Eliza scoffs.

  ‘It won’t take you a minute to run back to your cabin. It’s only one night, for heaven’s sake! Will you please leave me alone!’ She is addressing a young boy who has been tapping her insistently on the shoulder. He looks momentarily sorrowful, then begins again. Tap, tap, tap.

  ‘Oh, please, hurry up, you two, so we can get out of here.’ Eliza raises her voice, glaring at the boy.

  Lily glances at Edward, helpless. He shrugs.

  ‘Look, you might as well come, otherwise the tickets will just go to waste,’ says Max, swatting off an eager vendor as easily as if he were a fly.

  ‘Well, in that case,’ says Edward, ‘I suppose there’s nothing to say but thank you. You really shouldn’t have, but I should so like to see the Pyramids. Lily, shall we?’

  He turns towards the ship, and Lily finds herself meekly following him back up the gangway, pushing past the tail end of the disembarking passengers. In her cabin she is in such a state of shock she cannot focus on anything apart from gathering up a few things and cramming them hastily into a small overnight bag. She does not dare ask herself how she feels about going, or think about how it might be. I will visit the Pyramids, she tells herself. I will see the Nile. It seems as little connected to her reality as if she were announcing her intention of travelling back in time.

  Ida bursts in and stops short, surprised to find her back.

  ‘I’m going on the coach tour to Cairo,’ Lily tells her. ‘I will be back tomorrow. Please tell Mrs Collins where I am.’

  Ida narrows her black eyes, waiting for the explanation that never comes.

  Out on the deck, Lily sees Edward and Helena waiting by the gangway. They are deep in conversation and do not hear her approach. ‘I’m begging you, Edward, do not do this.’ Helena looks fevered, some of her hair still hanging loose at the back. ‘You owe this to me. Have you forgotten how much I’ve given up for you?’

  ‘Not given up. Given up implies you did it voluntarily. Out of choice.’

  Edward has been glaring at his sister, but now he looks up, noticing Lily for the first time. Instantly, his tone softens.

  ‘Shall we go?’ he asks her.

  Lily nods but hesitates at the top of the gangway.

  ‘I wish you were coming,’ she says to Helena.

  Helena sighs.

  ‘You take care of yourself, Lily,’ she says eventually. ‘And take care of him.’ She nods in the direction of Edward’s retreating back.

  ‘It’s only one night.’

  ‘A lot can happen in a night, Lily.’

  On the coach, Lily is silent, looking out of the window at the dust-blurred fields where peasants labour in close-knit rows in the searing heat. ‘Oh,’ she says, spying her first glimpse of a camel, kneeling in the dry earth and being loaded with sugar cane. Next to her, Max Campbell follows the direction of her gaze. ‘Stupid-looking things, aren’t they?’ he says. ‘With those humps on their backs, like old women.’

  Lily still can’t quite work out how they came to be sitting in this configuration, with Edward and Eliza in front and her jammed into the window seat beside Max, who seems not to notice how much space he is taking up, with his broad shoulders and his legs spread apart.

  The orange dust outside the window gives way to lusher, green vegetation. ‘The Nile Delta,’ announces someone sitting behind, as if that should be quite explanation enough. They pass a man herding goats and sheep by the roadside. He raises a weather-beaten hand to shield his eyes and follows the coach’s progress without change of expression.

  But Lily is finding it hard to concentrate on the scenery, so anxious does she feel. Though she saw a couple she recognized from tourist class getting on to a separate bus, this coach is exclusively first class, with the exception of her and Edward, and she cannot shake off the sense of being watched and judged.

  Then there is also the fact of the money the Campbells have paid for her to join them. Lily has never stopped to wonder how rich they are, presuming only that their presence in First presupposes a certain standard of living, but now she finds herself dwelling on it. Perhaps the twelve pounds they have paid out for her and Edward to join them is nothing to them, like the small change her father carries around in the pockets of his trousers and jingles when he’s feeling nervous.

  But still, that does little to stave off the humiliation that buzzes gently but insistently around her ears and, worse, the heavy fug of obligation. I didn’t ask to come, she reminds herself. But this knowledge fails to improve her frame of mind or dispel her unease at being, whether she asked for it or not, in thrall to the Campbells.

  Edward, for his part, shows little sign of being similarly beset with doubt. He and Eliza have their heads close together, sleek black hair next to unruly dark curls. Edward says something, and they both laugh, Eliza throwing her head back so that her laughter escapes to the roof of the bus, like Stromboli belching smoke into the sky.

  I am not being entertaining, she thinks, panicked. Max Campbell is not getting his money’s worth.

  Through the window, the sight of buildings, gradually increasing in density, indicates they are arriving in Cairo. The streets are once again dusty, the houses narrow and tall. But as they progress further into the city the roads open out, becoming wider, some tree-lined, and the buildings more impressive. The coach overtakes horses and carts ambling alongside the motor cars.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are arriving at the Shepheard Hotel,’ says their Egyptian guide, a good-looking young man with very straight black hair that falls across his eyes and smooth brown skin that gleams like the casing of a freshly shelled conker.

  Lily is surprised and slightly thrilled to find she shares a name with the hotel in which they are to stay but, just as she’s about to remark upon it to the others, she glances past Max, out of the far window, and stifles a gasp. The hotel is enormous, taking up a whole block of the street, and impossibly grand, with its pale stone façade and its rows of shuttered windows and the glass-roofed portico supported by the slenderest of pillars and flanked by palm trees in the most enormous pots Lily has ever seen. A row of awnings runs along the base of the hotel, behind which shopfronts are visible, though Lily cannot tell what they are selling. At the very top two flags droop, listless in the breezeless air.

  Inside it is more intimidating still – a vast vestibule, its high ceiling held up by immense marble columns. There are velvet armchairs in which people sit, reading the newspaper or drinking tea, under the watchful gaze of two scantily clad statues. An imposing staircase rises up at the far end before dividing into two separate branches that turn back on themselves.

  If only Lily could relax enough to appreciate her surroundings, committing the details to memory so she ca
n re-create this room exactly in her next letter home. I can just imagine what you’d have to say, Mam. ‘Not exactly homely, is it?’ But, instead, her nerves are being plucked like harp strings. Surely she isn’t going to be given a room of her own here, in this place. How much would that cost? How much will she owe?

  As if reading her thoughts, Eliza turns to her. ‘We have two double rooms between us – that’s all that was left.’ Then, seeing Lily’s face, she breaks into a laugh.

  ‘No need to fret. Your honour is perfectly intact. You and I will share our original room and Max and Edward can have the other.’

  Edward has his face turned away but Max doesn’t bother to hide his displeasure at finding himself cast out of the marital bed.

  ‘Can I have a quick word?’ he says, steering his wife away by her elbow and leading her to the edge of a vast Persian carpet, where a turbanned waiter dressed all in white stands immobile as one of the statues behind him.

  ‘He doesn’t seem very happy,’ Lily whispers to Edward as they watch Max Campbell gesture angrily to his wife, who gazes away into the distance, as if bored.

  Edward doesn’t reply and Lily notices that his face is paler than ever and his long fingers claw at each other as if he is trying to knit them together. She wonders if he is regretting the scene with Helena on the boat. She wonders if he, too, wishes they had never come.

  They stand together, stiff and mute. The statues gaze out, haughtily, over their heads; the miniature palms flare from their pots. The musical clink of bone-china tea cups on a tray and the occasional rustle of newspaper pages turning are muffled by the rich velvet curtains and the soft ply of the Persian carpet. It is the most glamorous building Lily has ever been in and yet she can scarcely remember feeling more miserable.

  13

  THE ROOM LILY is to share with Eliza faces the front and has two enormous windows with slatted shutters on the outside. A fan is suspended from the centre of the ceiling, rotating at a stately speed with a gentle whirr, while a few feet away hangs a large hook from which a sheer white mosquito net tumbles like a spider’s web over the king-size bed. They have only half an hour to freshen up before the afternoon’s trip to the Pyramids, so there is hardly time to take in the luxurious en-suite bathroom with its enormous claw-foot tub or admire the paintings on the wall or acknowledge the thump thump thump of her heart as she considers the strangeness of her position and asks herself again what she is doing here.

  Downstairs, Edward has picked up a British newspaper. There are two spots of high colour in his otherwise pale cheeks. Lily hopes he is not getting ill. She remembers again how Helena had said ‘he won’t ever be completely cured’. Perhaps this might be the very worst thing for him – the extremes of temperature: passing from the heat outside to the coolness of the hotel lobby; the awkwardness of the situation. He glances up anxiously when he senses someone approaching, then visibly relaxes as he sees it is her. He must like me a little, Lily thinks, if I can make him smile like that.

  ‘What is the news from home?’ she asks.

  ‘Things with Germany are grim. Hitler has told the Polish government that by refusing to co-operate with his demands to annex Danzig, he considers them to have invited Germany to invade. And, if that happens, we’re more or less committed to going to war with Germany ourselves.’

  Lily feels cold fingers of fear wrapping themselves around her throat. So far, all the talk of war has been entirely theoretical to her, a dark cloud that has floated above her head but which she long ago stopped believing would release rain.

  ‘But Chamberlain wouldn’t allow it. Surely there would be another treaty, as over Czechoslovakia.’

  Edward shrugs. ‘Perhaps. But there is also all this business with Japan.’

  Suddenly, the newspaper is snatched out of his hands.

  ‘No war talk. It’s too boring for words. Here we are in one of the world’s most glorious hotels and you two are discussing politics? For heaven’s sake!’

  Eliza holds the newspaper behind her back and glares at the two of them in mock-admonishment. Next to her, dressed in white linen trousers and a pale blue shirt, Max stands with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, gazing off into the distance. The tension between the spouses hums angrily in the air.

  ‘Sit with me on the coach, Lily,’ urges Edward as they follow the guide out of the hotel. ‘Please?’

  They push ahead so they are ensconced into a double seat before the others arrive. Lily is flushed with pleasure at Edward’s request, until she notices him shooting covert looks across the aisle to where Eliza has settled sulkily with Max. But soon all thoughts of Edward and of Eliza are wiped from her mind as, having followed a dusty road out of the city, they emerge from the built-up area to be greeted on one side by a row of distant palm trees and beyond them the River Nile and on the other a vast, sandy plain. And there in the distance, the unmistakable triangular humps of the Pyramids, silhouetted against the hazy sky.

  As she gazes at the astonishing sight, Lily thinks suddenly of her gentle, silent father. How much she should like to have him here by her side, seeing this with her, his large, soft hand holding hers. The thought, taking her unawares, gives her a savage stab of pain. Almost as if he can sense her sadness, Edward slips a hand through her arm.

  ‘Doesn’t it make one feel small?’ he says softly. ‘Imagining all the people who have looked on this same sight over the last five thousand years, and all the ones who will come after us? Makes all one’s personal, private horrors seem insignificant, don’t you think?’

  Lily is stopped from prying further into what horrors he is talking about by the good-looking Egyptian guide, who has launched into a potted history of the site.

  ‘Incredible to think that a hundred thousand men worked for thirty years to build the structures you see here,’ he tells them in heavily accented English. ‘But how did they bring the millions of blocks of stone from those cliffs’ – he points through a window to the hills that rise up steeply on the far side of the Nile – ‘across the river and the desert? And how then did they manage to construct, without the modern tools we have today, these monuments, which measure up to four hundred and fifty feet high? It is one of the greatest mysteries of all time.’

  As they troop off the coach it is the sand that hits Lily first, getting into her eyes and nostrils, settling in a fine spray on her lips so they feel grainy and strange. And now comes the heat, pressing like an iron on her skin. They are at the base of the Great Pyramid, the largest of the structures, and Lily, like Edward, feels that sense of being dwarfed by history, of being just a speck of sand on the surface of time. Even the Campbells seem awed by their surroundings, listening in uncharacteristic silence while their guide talks to them in his melodious voice about kings and pharaohs and tombs and gods.

  Inside the pyramid, they climb up a steep, narrow passageway. By the time they emerge into a grand, vaulted gallery twenty-six feet high, but also on a steep slant, Lily’s heart is pounding. Her cotton dress sticks to the backs of her thighs as they progress onwards through the ancient hall. Now there is a great stone step, its surface worn almost smooth, to navigate, by way of two metal rungs. She peels her dress off her legs before stepping on to the first rung, aware of her hair hanging damp around her face and the sweat trickling down her neck. Now comes a second, very low passageway, also rising steeply and stuffy with stale air. Max is behind her. As she waits for the woman in front of her, who has stopped to catch her breath, Lily is horrified to feel Max pressing on her from behind and something hard against her buttocks, and his breath hot in her ear. Ahead of her, the woman starts once again to climb and Lily propels herself forward, not daring to look around.

  They come to the King’s Chamber and Lily quickly steps to the side, her chest tight. Immediately, she is doubting what she felt. It was so close in that narrow passageway, everyone piled on top of everyone else. Probably Max had himself been pressed forward by the crush behind him. Gradually, her breath, which has been
coming out in shallow bursts, calms and she risks looking for the others.

  Eliza and Edward are deep in conversation, their dark heads close together like Siamese twins. Max is standing to the side with an expression of benign calm. He does not look shifty or furtive or even leering. She has imagined it all.

  The room in which they find themselves is smaller than the great gallery, and far less ornate. The only adornment is a huge granite slab at one end. This, the guide informs them, is the king’s sarcophagus, a stone coffin. Lily is relieved to hear that grave robbers have long since stolen any remains from within. Nevertheless, something about the room chills her, some malign presence that hovers above their heads, where the huge granite blocks are held in place as if by magic, not even a hair’s space between them.

  Their guide tells them that Napoleon Bonaparte once spent the night in here and was by all accounts left shaken by whatever transpired. More recently, a British philosopher and traveller had managed to arrange to have himself locked in the chamber for a night and claimed to have undergone a profound spiritual experience in which he became completely detached from his own body and roamed freely around the various hidden parts of the pyramid.

  ‘I would not care to do that myself,’ the guide says, shuddering in a theatrical way. ‘I believe the dead must be allowed to rest in peace.’

  And now comes into Lily’s mind an image of Mags, her own Mags. Her face as it was the first time they met in the kitchen of the Spencers’ house overlooking Ealing Common. Her eyes set wide apart, the palest, softest blue and ringed by navy, as if a child had outlined them in ink then used a sooty pencil to fringe them with dark lashes. Pale cheeks, still with the blurred, unfinished look of adolescence, and a shy smile that seemed to question her right to be smiling at all.