The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  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.

  33

  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 sacram
ental 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.’

  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 boa
t 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.