The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  ‘Oh how nice!’ Rose exclaimed, accepting the card, and tucking it into her ancient Hermès handbag. ‘I do hope you’ll be kind about dear Lord Carnarvon, Dr Fang. He was a charming man, you know – perfect manners. So delightful to have met you at last.’ She shook his hand. ‘I wish you every success with your labours.’

  Rose had had many decades to perfect the act of dismissal: Fong accepted defeat. He drank the last of his wine and gave the room one final, keen inspection. ‘I see you’ve moved your shabti figure, Miss Payne,’ he remarked. ‘Pity. I liked that.’

  I led him into the hall, making no comment. ‘I like your shabti too,’ Rose said, when I returned. She had retrieved the little figure from the drawer where I’d concealed it, was holding it up to the light and turning it this way and that. ‘It has an alert look – ever-watchful eyes. One of those enigmatic Egyptian smiles – the ones you see on so many of their statues. Just a small curve of the lips. An air of wise benevolence… If you call, does he answer? Have you ever tried it, Lucy?’

  ‘No. He was made to answer to a king, not me. Disappointing if he didn’t answer my calls. And alarming if he did.’

  ‘Is this the one Carnarvon gave you – is that why you hid it?’

  ‘No. I gave that one to Nicola Dunsire. She kept it for years. And then, during the Blitz… it disappeared along with everything else. There was nothing left of her house, Rose. It took a direct hit.’ I hesitated. ‘This is its twin – its near-twin. It’s the one Lord Carnarvon gave Frances.’

  ‘And Frances gave it to you?’ Rose looked at me closely. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘It was at Saranac Lake. It was the last time I saw her.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  There was a silence. Rose gave the little answerer a last considering look, then gently replaced it on my desk. She and I are attuned to each other. ‘How hard it is, being old, too many memories,’ she said softly, catching my expression, lacing her arm through mine. ‘How glad I am you’re still here, Lucy. What would I do without you? I’m sorry, this is my fault – I started it, didn’t I, rattling on about your paintings? And now I’ve been clumsy again. What a fool I am. I didn’t mean to trespass, truly. Don’t, Lucy, darling, oh, please don’t cry – we mustn’t be sad: not today. It’s your birthday, remember.’

  Rummaging in the pocket of her jacket, she produced one of her handkerchiefs: starched, monogrammed, lace-edged, relic of a lost era. I dabbed at my treacherous eyes, and she said: ‘Stiff upper lip. England and empire and backbone and all that tosh. Dearest Lucy – deep breath. That’s better. Well done. Now tell me – what have you made for us?’

  ‘It’s a sort of chickeny thing.’

  ‘I love your chickeny things. Let’s go and have lunch.’

  As we ate, I could tell Rose was casting about for a subject that was neutral and unlikely to provoke waterworks. We were eating in my kitchen, which is large, comfortable and dilapidated. The table is an old one of scrubbed pine, rescued from some scullery region, and a trophy from one of my marriages, I forget which; the first, Rose always says. Rose, expert since childhood at meaningless social conversations, her art honed by decades of dinner and cocktail parties, was very good at talking about nothing, to anyone, and at length. We had reached the pudding before she risked any subject beyond the charming objects on my kitchen dresser, the charming view of the garden beyond the rear window and – to liven things up – the latest escapades of her sons, one of whom was divorcing his errant wife. They’d been married some three years, and now she’d flitted.

  ‘And about time too,’ Rose said. ‘Naturally, I haven’t interfered, and I’ve been as silent as the grave on the subject, but I knew she’d be trouble. I disapprove of divorce, but in this case… Oh, poached peaches – and they’re delicious. What a good cook you are, Lucy – do you remember, at Nuthanger, those cookery lessons Wheeler used to give us? How I loved that house! This kitchen so reminds me of the one there – making pastry! Petey and I were cack-handed, but you had a light touch, even then… I’m just thinking, Lucy, dear.’ She paused, and I braced myself. ‘Is it good for you, digging around in all this Egyptian stuff? I can see why you embarked on it, when Dr Fang showed up – but aren’t you getting buried? I saw those bundles of letters, those book mountains. You’re looking exhausted. Slightly haunted. It’s not healthy. Why not give the past a rest?’

  I made some non-committal remark. It seemed effective – though with devious Rose, one could never be certain. She diverted.

  ‘Mind you – I did like Fang,’ she announced. ‘And he certainly knows his stuff. He had some ingenious theories. He thinks one of the reasons Carnarvon decided to give up on Egypt that summer – before Carter changed his mind for him, of course – was the knowledge that naughty Almina Carnarvon was straying. She’d almost certainly strayed before, but this time it was serious. That last year she was in Paris with that frightful Dennistoun man for months. Your Dr Fang thinks the Carnarvons did a deal: I give up Egypt, and you give up that creep Dennistoun.’

  ‘Possible,’ I said. Almina Carnarvon, subject of marital gossip before Tutankhamun’s tomb was even found, conspicuous by her absence once it was found, had been summoned by Eve, and had flown to Cairo when her husband lay dying. She reached him in time; her inconsolable grief then and at his funeral had been remarked upon by everyone. She married her lover the following November, a scant eight months later.

  ‘Or ere those shoes were old,’ Nicola Dunsire had remarked tartly, on seeing the reports of the sparsely attended Register Office wedding. Lady Carnarvon’s action caused affront, as did her choice of bridegroom, ‘Tiger’ Dennistoun, louche ex-husband of her friend Dorothy, the woman with coiled-cobra hair whom I’d briefly encountered that day at Highclere. Scandal ensued; there had been some notorious court case. I wondered why Rose kept harping on divorce and marital infidelity. I changed the subject.

  ‘Did Dr Fong ask about Eve?’ I asked, making coffee.

  ‘Not much – and I was hyper-careful what I said. I reminded him Eve married lovely Brograve Beauchamp six months after her father died. You remember him, Lucy? He and Petey fed my little puppy that day at Highclere. He and Eve were tremendously happy, you know. I emphasised that to your Dr Fang – I thought it might help scotch any rumours he’d heard about Eve and Howard Carter, and he had heard rumours, I could tell… So ridiculous! Carter was cantankerous, ill bred and old enough to be her father. As if Eve would have given him a second glance.’

  ‘She did give him a second glance. Even a third. I saw it.’

  ‘A passing infatuation. If that. How you exaggerate, Lucy.’

  ‘You weren’t there, Rose,’ I snapped. Rose’s ability to detect other people’s feelings had always been unreliable. Sometimes she could be sharp, at other times, obstinately blind. ‘After they found the tomb – there was something. You could sense it. Frances thought––’ I hesitated. ‘Frances thought it was the experience of discovering the tomb with him that caused it. She thought it had – bewitched Eve.’

  I was expecting pragmatic Rose to dismiss that word and that suggestion; to my surprise, she didn’t. ‘Bewitched?’ she said in a tart way, eyeing me. ‘How clever of Frances. She often hit the nail on the head, didn’t she? All right, I can imagine that. I’ve seen women bewitched, Lucy. And I’ve seen the consequences.’

  She did not expand on that acidic remark – and I did not invite her to do so. It was followed by a few uncomfortable moments, un mauvais quart d’heure. But the awkwardness that had fallen between us passed, as it does with those who have known one another as long as Rose and I have. With our coffee, Rose produced a box containing a miniature birthday cake, adorned with a single candle for simplicity’s sake. We lit it, and I solemnly blew it out. Rose wished me Many Happy Returns – which, as we both knew, was a triumph of hope over realism.

  At three, she made ready to leave. Wheeler was collecting her in her new eco-efficient car, a baby Mercedes – she was going on to visit
the divorcing son, in deepest Kensington. I think she truly was anxious on my behalf, for she said I shouldn’t be on my own, and tried to persuade me to join her. I was touched, but I refused. I wanted to be alone with my importunate ghosts. The time had come, I felt, to propitiate them.

  At the far end of my back garden, there is a gate that leads out into a lane, and that lane winds behind houses towards a verdant park and, adjoining it, to the two sections – ancient and less ancient – of Highgate’s famous cemetery. By the time Rose left, the thin rain of the morning had ceased, and a watery sun had emerged. I decided to go for a walk, to take my phantoms for a walk. The arthritis re-awoke and began to nag, inevitably, but it’s fatal to give in to its arguments: if you do, it exhibits those same Napoleonic tendencies once so evident in Miss Mack’s book. It takes you over and it does you down. I’m going for a walk, I told it. Get used to it.

  I set off, grasping my stick, and took the route through the park. I passed the tennis courts where numerous sportive enthusiasts were grunting and banging balls within millimetres of the baseline – Wimbledon fortnight always has this effect. I passed the disused bandstand that’s redecorated with new graffiti each week, and surveyed the duck pond. One white swan traversed the dark mirror of its surface, and my mind drifted to a swansdown powder puff hiding a wedding ring on Mrs d’Erlanger’s dressing table, then to a Swan Lake girl in a Cairo ballet class: Maintenant, on essaie le ballon, mademoiselle, said a voice – so I knew my ghosts were assembling.

  By then, I’d reached the southern section of the park, and through its boundary hedge could glimpse from the rear the great granite head of Karl Marx that marks his burial place. As I had come this far it seemed faint-hearted not to continue, so I left by the lowest of the park gates and turned immediately left, into the eastern section of the cemetery. It is large, wild and beautiful; it contains old graves, but it is still in use. I have purchased a plot here – one must look ahead and be practical.

  The park had been crowded with children, with sunbathers, with dog walkers, though I’d scarcely registered their presence. I became aware of them only once they were absent. There was a cluster of German and Japanese tourists paying homage to Marx, but once I was beyond his colossal Ramessid head, there were few visitors. I passed into the winding leafy avenues of the cemetery, choosing my route at random, passing a huddle of angels, of crosses, and (the tombs here are eclectic) paused at a pyramid. I was in one of the more overgrown sections now, deep in the blue shade of trees, the tombs necklaced with ivy. I debated whether I should go in search of famous graves, George Eliot’s, for example: she lies here, beneath an Egyptian obelisk. I could hear Miss Dunsire’s voice, sharp with reproof, black in mood, reprimanding me for my failures with Eliot’s Middlemarch. Learn to read, you stupid obstinate girl, she said. Can’t you see under the words, behind them, beyond them?

  Had I ever learned that difficult art? Perhaps not – though it was not for want of trying. I decided against searching for Eliot – too far; might get lost. So I sat down on a memorial bench by a tangle of dog roses, inhaled their fugitive scent and closed my eyes. A certain constriction around the heart, an incipient faint breathlessness: I’d walked further than was wise. I closed my eyes and the spooks, who are patient, who had bided their time, were on me in an instant.

  The Egyptian ghosts are the wiliest and they came first, as they usually do – or perhaps, knowing them to be less dangerous than some of their accomplices, I offer them less resistance. They caught me by the hand, pushed and propelled, until they had me where they wanted me, deep in the Valley of the Kings. Back to its heat and its silence, the only sound the murmur of rock doves and the sharp cry of the kites skimming the updraughts. I watched as Frances and I buried a pink leather purse below a guardian statue, a purse containing a confetti of lineage; I watched Miss Mack scan the Valley with her field glasses from the hills high above, Lord Carnarvon tip his hat in ironic salute to a cluster of journalists as he strolled into a tomb, and Howard Carter, thinking himself alone, pick up a handful of stones and fling them at the rock face. The dead await us, Herbert Winlock said, and taking Frances’s hand, following the beam of our flashlights, I stepped out of the heat of the sun and into the dark world tunnelled into the hillsides.

  ‘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.