The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  ‘Not half bad,’ Rose concurred.

  ‘Is it Lulu?’ Peter asked, looking anxiously at my reflection, and then at my face – and, possessed with sudden happiness, I told him it was, and danced a jig with him. Shortly after that, it was time to leave to catch the ferry. I danced my way to the door, and, pausing on the landing outside, heard Peter’s voice, raised in sudden alarm; as I’d come to understand, all partings, even brief ones, distressed him.

  ‘Go too, want to go too… ’ I heard him cry, and Rose hushed him.

  ‘Darling, you can’t – you’re too little. It’s too far and too hot and too tiring. Petey, please don’t cry. I’m staying here with you, and Lucy will be coming back, don’t worry.’

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘Very soon, Petey – I promise. Word of honour.’

  ‘With Mamma?’

  ‘No, not with Mamma, Petey. But Mamma will be here soon too. It’s just that she has further to travel than Lucy, doesn’t she, Wheeler? So it might take a while. Mamma has to catch a boat and then a train, and––’

  I heard a quavering uncertainty enter Rose’s voice: Wheeler at once took charge. ‘All things come to those as wait,’ she said. ‘And from what I hear, we shan’t have to wait much longer. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if your mamma wasn’t on the boat right now… And as for Miss Lucy, it’s two days and two sleeps and you’ll be seeing her again. Now, let’s go out on the balcony, and we’ll watch out and wave goodbye, shall we?’

  I looked back as I reached the hubbub of the ferry. Miss Mack climbed aboard, but I paused to scan the hotel façade, until my gaze arrowed in on the right balcony. There I could see them – and can see them still: a tall woman, in her maid’s black uniform; a small fair-haired girl, whose head just reaches above the parapet, who is semaphoring with both hands, and a little boy, lifted aloft and persuaded to wave; his indistinct shape catches at my heart. I call out, but of course he cannot hear me.

  On the opposite shore, I was handed out onto the jetty and there were Helen and Frances, and the donkeys that would carry us to the American House. ‘Present,’ Frances said, giving me a welcoming hug, ‘you’ll need these.’

  To my delight and surprise, she handed me a pair of dark glasses. I put them on. At once, the world changed. New hair and new eyes, I thought, as I climbed onto my donkey, and we set off towards the hills.

  We made our way through the green fertile zone that spread out along the bank of the Nile and, after half an hour or so, reached the crossroads where we turned inland. There, the lush fields of papyrus, rushes and palm trees abruptly ended and desert began. The rough track climbed, gently at first, then more steeply. Ahead of me I saw the cliffs and crags that concealed the Valley of the Kings, and could make out the chief landmark: the high bare pyramidal hill called el-Qurn. There, the cobra goddess Meretseger had her abode; her name meant ‘She who loves silence’. She was the deity protecting these hills and their tombs, spitting a deadly venom into the eyes of anyone who defiled them.

  Her domain was desolate but fiercely beautiful. My sunglasses made the hills appear uniformly black and forbidding, but when I removed them, their rocks transformed into fantastic corrugations and crevices of pink limestone, with clefts the dark purple of plums. It was burningly hot. I wondered how the donkey boys could tolerate the heat of the sand on their bare feet; but they seemed impervious, scampering ahead of us, singing and chattering, or returning to urge their animals on. The path grew steeper and the crags crept closer, until at last, crouching in close under the shoulder of el-Qurn, I saw the American House. Surmounted by a central dome, fronted by an immense arched veranda, long, white, low and assertive, it was twice as large – no, three or four times as large as I’d expected.

  ‘Oh, how splendid it is! Why, it’s vast,’ cried Miss Mack, reining her donkey in. ‘Helen, it’s magnificent.’

  ‘You must tell Herbert – he helped design it. Pierpont Morgan put up the money for it, you know – he was a trustee of the Museum then. It was to be called “Morgan House” in his honour, only it turned out his money wasn’t a gift after all, and he insisted it be repaid. So we forgot Mr Morgan and his mean ways, and rechristened it “Metropolitan”.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Miss Mack, dismounting. ‘There is nothing meaner than a mean millionaire. And I’ve known a few mean millionaires in my time,’ she added.

  We ushered her inside, before she could launch herself on the familiar saga of Emersons or Wigginses. Helen then took us on a guided tour: we were shown the bedrooms – a bewildering number of them, enough to accommodate all the Met’s team and numerous guests; we admired the airy dining room under the dome, with its long oak refectory table; the well-stocked library; the common room, with its fireplace surmounted by blue De Morgan tiles; and the working areas of the house, including the map room, the dark room where Harry Burton developed his photographs, and the storeroom for finds. The atmosphere of the house was calming: the white plaster walls, brick arches and tiled floors were traditionally Egyptian in style, but the furnishings, chaste and rectilinear, were by modern American designers. There was a monastic, scholarly hush to the building. Frances and I were to share a room at the back, well away from the adult residents, whom we were not to disturb – out of range of Minnie Burton, who was not fond of children.

  Frances led me there and we stood at our bedroom window: situated at the far end of the house, close to the servants’ quarters, it looked directly across the sands and scree towards the honeycomb of Theban tombs in the hills. Nets to exclude scorpions were stretched tightly across the glass; one of the panes had been opened a crack, to admit a faint exhalation of hot sterile desert air.

  I turned to examine the room: twin beds with white counterpanes; ceiling fans; photographs of her family, set up like a small shrine. ‘Let me introduce you,’ Frances said, picking them up in turn.

  This was her great-grandfather, who had been the first director of the famous Harvard Observatory, and this was her grandfather, a curator of the Smithsonian in Washington DC. The photograph central to the shrine showed Herbert Winlock as a boy standing on the steps of that august institution, holding a toy telescope. In the faded picture next to it, Helen’s father, a Harvard architect, was standing on the stoop of a magnificent brownstone in Beacon Hill, Boston, holding hands with two children – an infant Helen in Alice-in-Wonderland garb, and her brother, mutinous in a sailor suit. I gazed at them curiously. Another era: it seemed unimaginably remote, and I said so.

  ‘Well, it isn’t,’ Frances said. ‘That picture was taken in 1892. My mother was five. Thirty years ago – it’s the blink of an eye.’

  She turned to a collection of small objects arranged next to the shrine of photographs: most had been brought back from her father’s digs, or discovered by Frances herself. They had been laid out like offerings, I saw, beside the last of the photographs, a small faded picture whose details were hard to decipher, but which showed a house by the sea and two figures, who might have been a girl and a boy. Next to it were a bleached bone from a jackal’s paw, many stones, selected for colour or symmetry, and numerous flakes of limestone, with faded lines just visible on their flat surfaces.

  She picked up one of these. ‘Look, Lucy,’ she said. ‘This is my great prize. These are ostraca – they turn up by the hundred on every dig. The workmen used them like little notebooks when they were working on the temples and tombs. Sometimes they’d draw a caricature, and sometimes they’d write words, nothing important, just like a shopping list, or they’d draw a plan of the tomb they were working on. This is my favourite: it’s a dog, and I found it at Deir el-Bahri. Daddy let me keep it. It’s someone’s pet dog, don’t you think? Both it and its owner have been dead for three thousand years.’

  I inspected the small lively dog: it was panting and possessed a joyous feathery tail. With great care, Frances replaced it, and picked up the photograph.

  ‘And this is my little brother,’ she said, fixing me with shining eyes. ‘It�
��s his favourite ostraca too – he loves dogs. So I put it where he can see it, for company. His name is William Crawford Winlock: he’s named after Daddy’s father, but we call him Billy. He was two years, eleven months and two days old when he died. That’s our holiday house, at North Haven, which is the island I told you about, off the coast of Maine.’

  I leaned closer and peered at the picture. The clapboard house Frances was indicating was built at the summit of a sheer bank; below it was a boathouse, with a large jetty and landing stage raised on piles, at the shoreline, just feet from the waves. This dead brother had never been mentioned before.

  ‘We go to Maine to stay at that house every summer – and in this picture, it’s the summer of 1918. Daddy was in the army then, still fighting in France. But we were there. And that’s where my brother Billy died: he fell off that jetty, and drowned in the cold blue waters of Penobscot Bay.’

  I can’t remember what I said, but I must have said something, for Frances patted my arm in a consoling way. ‘Yes, it was very terrible,’ she went on. ‘We were all there – my grandparents, and my mother and me. I was five – well, almost. It was the day my mother took me for my first race in a sailboat. There was just one tiny moment when everyone was looking the other way, fussing with picnic baskets and waterproofs, and that was the moment when he fell. But that’s the way of things. They’re fast. You know that too.’

  ‘I do,’ I replied. I closed my eyes, Egypt vanished and I was back in my Cambridge bedroom: my mother bent over my bed and stroked my forehead. I drifted into sleep, and when I woke from that long hot feverish sleep, she was gone. I opened my eyes again, and looked at the photograph. From its shadows, two figures emerged: I saw a small girl, who I realised was Frances, and a little boy, with bright hair, clutching her hand. Now I understood that reaction of Helen Winlock’s in the museum in Cairo.

  ‘He has very fair hair. He’s a dear little boy. He looks like Peter,’ I said, after a pause.

  ‘Perhaps. But Peter cries – and Billy never did. And he talked more than Peter does. He likes coming to Egypt with me, and when I’ve been somewhere, like Daddy’s dig, or the Valley maybe, I come home and describe it to him. I’ve told him all about you, of course, and he gave me permission to tell you his story. Normally, we keep it a secret – it doesn’t do to broadcast important things around, and besides, it makes my mother cry, to be reminded, you know. But Billy considers it’s right to tell you. You don’t blab. And besides, he knows you’re my closest and most particular friend.’

  ‘Am I truly, Frances?’ I asked anxiously; this honour was unexpected and powerful.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied, in a tone of careless reproof, as if I were being exceptionally obtuse. Turning away, and with a matter-of-fact air, she lifted my suitcase onto one of the beds and, moving to the washstand, poured some water into a bowl.

  ‘Right, time to wash and brush up,’ she continued, in a businesslike way. ‘No need to unpack, the servants will do that. Then coffee on the veranda with the Lythgoes and my parents. That’s the routine… You’d better know what you’re in for,’ she continued, as I washed my dusty face and hands. ‘The past – and then, just when you think at long last it must be over, more past. Albert Lythgoe will tell you how Daddy was the most brilliant student he ever tutored at Harvard – and also the most rebellious one. Then Mrs Lythgoe will start in on her famous father Rufus, who ruled the American School of Archaeology in Athens with a rod of iron, and didn’t permit women to excavate… She’ll tell you how Albert proposed to her at dawn on the Parthenon – imagine Mr Lythgoe, proposing! You’ll have to inspect the silver coffee service the King of Greece gave her as a wedding present… it goes on for ever! Meanwhile, Minnie Burton will carp from the sidelines, and boast about how her father ran the British army single-handed. You have to listen to all this, and not yawn or fidget once. I do it this way.’

  Frances turned full face and assumed an expression of lively attention, eyes satirically wide. ‘After that,’ she went on, ‘there’s the ceremonial signing of the Visitors’ Book, and then my mother loses her spectacles and her watercolours, and finds she’s packed them, and Daddy cusses a bit, and then – at long last – we mount the donkeys again… ’

  ‘And we go to the Valley?’

  ‘We go to the Valley. Eve is thrilled that you’re coming, and so are her father and Mr Carter, she says. We’re in their good books for some reason, all our espionage at Shepheard’s, I think – anyway, they’re laying on a picnic lunch for us.’

  ‘In the Valley itself?’

  ‘Better than that. In the Valley and in a tomb,’ Frances said, performing a cartwheel.

  13

  The tomb selected for our picnic was sited at the far end of the Valley, in a remote ravine well beyond the most visited burial sites. It was a place of uncertainties, devoid of paintings or inscriptions, Herbert Winlock explained: scholars disagreed as to which king had commissioned it. It had been quarried a short distance into the rock, then abandoned, but this was not unusual, he added: Egyptian kings could be capricious when deciding their final resting place. All the tombs in the Valley were numbered and identified according to a system first evolved in the nineteenth century; they were referred to as KV 15, KV 24 and so on. Frances and I had by then adopted the acronym ‘KV’, which, when spoken, and particularly when hissed, sounded like the Latin warning cave, or the schoolboys’ cavey. It was now our watchword of choice, used when adults circled near by. ‘KV, Lucy,’ Frances had said several times that morning when Minnie Burton had come threateningly close to our whispered conferences. Beware, beware: I examined the entrance to the luncheon tomb – no painted number; unidentified.

  The tomb had a low, dark entrance, set under a rocky overhang. Facing north and protected from the rays of the sun, it looked like some natural fissure. Pausing and looking back the way we had come, I thought the unknown king had rejected a magnificent site to wait out eternity. Here, the wide central section of the Valley was invisible and the hills closed in, their rocks scoured into soaring columns. It was a wilderness place, and the heat was intense, yet the atmosphere was peaceful, the only sounds the murmuring of rock doves and the mew of kites circling the blue updraughts high above. My mind was still lingering on Frances’s little brother, and how he had died. Now that I knew his story, the way in which I saw his parents had irrevocably changed. How often did they think of him? I wondered, as Herbert Winlock led the way cheerfully into the tomb, and Helen, lingering behind, peered about the rocks in search of Frances and me, giving that now-familiar gesture of the hand, the gesture that betrayed her nervousness, her instinct to locate missing children and gather them in. ‘Ah, there you are,’ she said. ‘Come along, my dears.’

  Turning to follow her, I ventured into the dark tomb, and found myself in a dining room. I looked around in astonishment: in the centre of the shadowy space, a long table had been erected and eight chairs arranged. The table was draped in a starched white damask cloth; each place setting had a large array of glasses, silver cutlery, crisp linen napkins, and gilded plates decorated with the initial ‘C’. Lined up with military precision was an array of chutneys and pickled fruits bearing the labels ‘Fortnum and Mason’.

  ‘Prospero’s feast,’ Helen murmured. I was wondering if the initial ‘C’ signified Carter or Carnarvon, and marvelling at this display, when I realised that our hosts were waiting for us. Eve, together with Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, stood together in the recesses of the tomb, flanked by four Arab servants wearing white turbans, white gloves and white galabiyas, all four drawn up to attention like footmen. Eve came forward to greet us, but our two hosts hung back inspecting the new arrivals. Once we had all crushed in to the narrow space, they embarked on introductions – Carnarvon diffident to the point of languidness, Carter ill at ease and voluble.

  ‘Lord Carnarvon, if I may introduce Miss Mackenzie, in charge of my little friend here, Miss Payne, making her first visit to Egypt, and to the Valley.’
He dropped his voice, and I caught the words ‘Emerson’, ‘Norfolk’ and then ‘Trinity’.

  Once I’d been stamped and labelled, Carnarvon shook my hand, smiled, and murmured: ‘Cambridge… my own alma mater, Miss Payne – and Trinity was my college too. Only lasted a couple of years, though, found it all a bit boring, trekking off to lectures at dawn, couldn’t wait to go travelling, bought a yacht and took off for the Cape Verde islands instead… Miss Mackenzie, delighted… Frances, my dear, and Helen… now, isn’t this amusing? I thought, after that long hot ride you’ve had, maybe something refreshing?’

  Several bottles of champagne appeared, and while the four servants busied themselves with glasses, Carter began bustling back and forth, barking commands in Arabic. Turning to us, with much nervous jocular rubbing of the hands, he said, in his odd staccato way: ‘Cold cuts. Of necessity. “The funeral baked meats” as the bard put it, at least I think he did… Delicious too, chosen by Eve from the stores at my house. Now let’s see… we have tongue, potted fowl, pâté de foie gras… ’

  ‘And the most delicious shamsi bread, made in Howard’s kitchens this morning,’ Eve put in, coming to his rescue. ‘Now, where shall we all park ourselves?’

  The informality of ‘parking’, I noted, was followed by strictly observed placements: Lord Carnarvon ambled to his place at the head of the table, with Miss Mack, as the oldest woman present, seated on his right hand; Helen was seated on Carter’s right at its foot, with Frances on his other side. On the strength of being a newcomer, I think, I was placed on Carnarvon’s left. Herbert Winlock, who never cared where he sat, ended up in the middle, with Eve opposite him.

  ‘Well now – this looks delicious,’ Winlock said. ‘A great improvement on the old days when we archaeologists all roughed it. What was it the great Flinders Petrie survived on, Carter?’