Prodigies

by Francis King

  Chapter Seven

  HARRIET NOW RARELY LEFT THE HOUSE, unless on business to do with the expedition. When she received an invitation, she would either wholly ignore it, thus causing certain offence, or send a few perfunctory words of regret, with often the same result. People once close to the family would ask each other if those three silly women had finally taken complete leave of their senses. Every conversation about them was a mixture of pity, disapproval and derision.

  Head bowed over her desk and pince-nez low on her nose, Harriet was making yet another of her lists. About these lists Alexine would tease her that she seemed to believe that, if something were written down on a piece of paper, then that gave it reality.

  Harriet wrote:

  1)

  A microscope.

  2)

  An ice machine, with ample stock of powder.

  3)

  Sewing machine, simple kind. Worked by hand, not feet. Thread, extra needles.

  4)

  A reveille matin. One that lights a candle when it wakes one? Possible? Read somewhere of it. Enquire.

  5)

  A large chest of good black tea.

  6)

  Magnifying glass (capable of lighting fires).

  7)

  An appareil photographique Debroni for myself (Alexine has her own). Easy to manage, small. Requires few chemicals.

  8)

  25 yards of black cloth, ditto red.

  9)

  24 gaudy cotton handkerchiefs, 24 ditto silk (first quality not necessary).

  10) 11) 12)

  20 tins Liebigs extract of meat. Not essence of beef only, lamb and chicken also. Tooth powder, brushes. 20 of each? Dr James’s fever powders, IMPORTANT.

  As she underscored the last word, there was a knock at the door and Nanny Rose entered.

  ‘Oh, Nanny, may we talk another time? I have to concentrate. It’s so difficult to remember everything. If we could be certain of what can bought in Cairo and what can’t …’

  ‘I just want a short word, madam. I won’t keep you long.’

  Harriet sighed and laid down her pen. By now she knew that, if Nanny Rose had decided to do something, then it was hopeless to attempt to deflect her.

  ‘Well, what is it?’ Nanny Rose remained standing, her hands clasped before her. ‘Oh, do sit down! Sit down!’ Harriet indicated a chair.

  Having begun to suffer from arthritis, Nanny Rose walked stiffly over to it and lowered herself with care. She sighed and began to smooth down her black skirt over her knees. Since her widowhood, many years ago now, she always wore black. Sophie had once gigglingly told Alexine that the shiny black dress, which always seemed to be the same one, and the no less shiny black widow’s cap made the humpbacked Englishwoman look like a giant beetle.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking, madam.’ This was Nanny Rose’s usual prelude to saying something that might be unwelcome to her employers.

  ‘And what have you been thinking, nanny?’

  ‘I’ll have to come with you.’

  ‘Come with me?’

  ‘Come with you, Miss Addy and Miss Alexine. On.this madcap jaunt of yours. I’d better come. I’ve thought about it and that’s what I’ve decided.’

  ‘Oh, but I don’t really think …’ Harriet broke off. She wanted to say, ‘Oh, no, you’re far too old for anything so demanding,’ but Nanny Rose was in fact younger than Daan, Addy and even herself. Her life, at first impoverished in a small, overcrowded farmhouse and then unremittingly strenuous as she had brought up first other people’s children and then her own children, while at the same time nursing a husband mortally ill with consumption, had aged her prematurely. She had carried an endless succession of burdens, and that bent back of hers seemed to be the physical witness to it. ‘I’ve been counting on you to keep an eye on the house in our absence. There’s no one among the servants that I can trust as I can trust you.’

  ‘I’m sure you can trust Mrs Palmel.’ Harriet had just appointed this woman to be housekeeper in her absence. ‘You told me she had a reference from the Palace.’

  ‘Oh, well, yes, perhaps. But you’re the one …’

  ‘I don’t really care for travel. When we went to that Bled place, all those train journeys, with their joltings and noise, gave me a constant headache. I could hardly think. And you know what the heat does to me. But I like to do my duty. I feel you’ll need me. Particularly as I don’t think Eva is going to go with you after all.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Eva was the plain, perky maid whom the three women were planning to share on their travels.

  ‘Her – her intended told her that he wasn’t prepared to wait for her. Didn’t she tell you? It was yesterday evening. They were walking out and he suddenly broke it to her. She was crying and crying when she got back, a real scene. Well, one can understand it. He’s impatient to get married now that he’s got that job at the butcher’s. And she was impatient to get married.’

  Harriet considered in silence.

  ‘I’ve no objection to doing the sort of things that she was going to do for you,’ Nanny Rose went on. ‘I’m better with an iron than she is, I can tell you that. And I’m not likely to be carrying on with all and sundry,’ she added.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I won’t be any burden to you.’

  ‘You know of course that this trip of ours could be dangerous, don’t you?’

  Nanny Rose gave a shrug. ‘All my life’s been dangerous in one way or another, madam, since I first drew breath. I’m past fifty now. It’s too late to worry about danger.’

  At that moment Addy rushed into the room, two books in her hand. ‘It’s really too bad! I told John that what I wanted was Barry Lyndon and Harry Esmond, and that wretched bookshop has sent me neither of those but these two volumes of Pendennis instead. I’ve read Pendennis – and I hated it. Now it’s highly unlikely that the two others will reach me in time.’

  ‘I’ve just been having a chat with Nanny Rose. She wants to come with us.’

  Addy was appalled. ‘What! Oh, but Nanny Rose – I honestly don’t think …’

  ‘I’ve made up my mind, madam. I feel that you’ll all need me. I’m not one to shirk my duty.’

  Harriet and Addy looked at each other. Mouth pulled down, Addy raised her bony shoulders in despairing resignation. Harriet then did likewise.

  Chapter Eight

  SLUMPED, LEGS THRUST OUT, at the circular café table out on the quay, Adolph yawned and yawned again. His eyelids were heavy, and his blue eyes had a glazed, drowsy look to them. Dock workers constantly passed, their voices strident and their sabots clattering on the cobbles, as did overloaded drays and an occasional carriage. There was a smell of putrescence in the air from the fruit and vegetable market held in the square at the end of the street. Some ragged, barefoot children were going through the produce jettisoned in the gutters after the close of business for the day. But those eyes, wide open but vacant, took in nothing of all this.

  ‘Adolph! Aren’t you coming aboard? You’d better make it snappy. They sail in less than half an hour.’

  Adolph stared at the dapper young man, in a white, shiny collar so high that it all but touched his earlobes. It was Franz, who had lent the lovers his garconniere. He and Adolph were close friends, but anyone seeing them at that moment might have assumed them to be acquaintances, even strangers. He shook his head. ‘I’ve not been invited.’

  ‘Invited!’ Franz laughed. ‘You don’t have to be invited, old chap. It’s a free for all. Everyone welcome.’

  ‘Everyone?’

  A laugh. ‘Well, everyone who’s anyone.’

  Morosely, Adolph leaned forward, picked up his tankard of beer and raised it to his mouth. When he lowered it again there was a line of foam along his upper lip. ‘ Enjoy yourself,’ he said.

  Franz frowned, puzzled and disquieted. ‘Oh, do come!’

  Adolph shook his head.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell them
that you wished them bon voyage.’ Gold-knobbed cane in hand, Franz hurried on.

  Now Adolph suddenly became aware of the braying of the small German brass band on the upper deck of the ship. When there was a silence between one number and another, it would at once be filled by a din of laughter and chatter. He shut his eyes. It was as if he were lying on a beach and, wave on wave, the tumult of the ocean, vast and perilous, swept over him. The tumult increased, became deafening, was like a physical assault. He shut his eyes, he succumbed to its battering, he even came to welcome it. He had been an idiot, he had ruined his life. But for that crazy business with that Molnar woman, he might himself be travelling with them.

  He picked up the tankard, and this time he drained it.

  ‘It’s quite extraordinary. And rather magnificent.’ Juliana, who had supplanted Addy at the Court, was talking in her loud, plummy voice to Monsieur Thierry. She agitated her fan. Even though it was now October, the unprecedentedly hot summer still flared on. ‘Do you know, that they’ve taken over the entire first-class section?’

  ‘Well, it’s a small ship.’

  ‘But even so. Imagine! The entire first-class section, all the way to Alexandria. You can guess what that must have cost them.’

  Madame Thierry, accompanied by Sophie, approached. ‘Thirty-six pieces of luggage,’ she said. ‘That’s not including all that’s been put in the hold. Someone said there’s a piano.’

  ‘Oh, no, mama, that’s not true. Alexine told me that Madame Thinne is planning to buy a piano in Cairo.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I overheard someone saying. He must have got it wrong. People exaggerate so.’

  ‘They are taking five dogs with them,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Five dogs! Egypt is full of stray dogs! Why take more dogs?’ Juliana rolled her eyes. ‘Mercy! What it is to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice!’

  Sophie wandered off. She heard her mother calling, ‘Sophie! Sophie! Where are you going? Come back here!’ But without glancing round, she continued to thread her way through the people crowding the deck.

  At last she saw Alexine, the centre of at least a dozen people, male and female. She wanted to push through them all and stand close to her, but lacked the boldness to do so.

  ‘You must be terribly excited,’ a woman said.

  Head on one side, Alexine considered. ‘No. Strangely not. I was terribly excited, until this morning. And now …’ She laughed. ‘I might be going off on a holiday visit to Knokke or somewhere equally dreary.’

  ‘I must say, I think you’re all amazingly brave,’ an elderly man, one of the richest landowners in the country, announced in his loud, gruff voice. Only the evening before he had been telling friends at his club that he thought the three women so dotty that the place for them was a madhouse.

  ‘If one wants to do something strongly enough, bravery doesn’t come into it.’

  ‘It would for me,’ the old man said. ‘ But I’ve always maintained that women have more courage than men. If men had to bear children, instead of the so-called weaker sex, the human race would die out in no time at all. And I’m talking as a man who fathered eleven children in his day.’

  ‘Oh, I do wish that band would give us a moment’s peace!’ a woman complained. ‘One can’t hear oneself speak.’

  ‘It all adds to the jollity,’ her husband told her.

  ‘But is it so jolly – to say goodbye to three of our oldest and dearest friends for who knows how long?’

  The words pierced Sophie, since they confirmed all that she had been feeling. Why was everyone laughing and drinking champagne? Why was that band blaring out all those marches and polkas? It was beastly. She put both hands to her lips, pressing fingertips against them, and stared imploringly at Alexine, willing her to look in her direction.

  The band broke off abruptly. The ship’s siren sounded, a melancholy wail, followed by two more. A moment later an officer, megaphone in hand, was pushing between one group of people and another. ‘Would all people who are not passengers please leave the ship!’ he shouted. ‘ Please! Ladies and gentlemen! Please, please! We are about to sail!’

  The imminence of the separation at last gave Sophie the courage to fight her way through. ‘Oh, Alexine … Alexine … I just wanted to say – to wish you … Write to me if it’s possible to write.’ She was looking up at Alexine, her eyes brimming with tears, and Alexine, still smiling from her previous conversation, was looking down at her. ‘Come back soon. Oh, I shall miss you. I’ll miss you so much. I wish, wish, wish I could have come with you.’

  Perfunctorily Alexine was kissing her. But her eyes were elsewhere. As Franz approached, she broke away. ‘ Franz!’

  ‘Alexine. I’m late. My horse went lame and – oh, well, it’s too long a story. I saw Adolph. On the quay, drinking beer. He wouldn’t come with me. He said he didn’t have an invitation. But I told him …’

  She was staring over his shoulder. Her mouth was drawn into a hard line, a muscle twitched in one of her cheeks.

  ‘He was right not to come. He wouldn’t have been welcome.’ Her gaze returned to his. ‘Tell him that, if you like. Tell him. He wouldn’t have been welcome.’

  Book 3

  Chapter One

  NANNY ROSE WAS HELPING ALEXINE tO dress for a dinner-party given in honour of the three women travellers by the Italian Minister, Alessandro Rossetti, and his second and much younger wife, Maria. The Italian legation acted for the Dutch government, which as yet had no representation in Egypt.

  Nanny Rose, aided by two diminutive Egyptian maids, had helped Alexine to have a bath – ‘ No, no, not so much hot water,’ Alexine had repeatedly protested, as Nanny Rose had yet again ordered one or other of the maids to fetch another ewer – and now, while the maids watched in silent awe, Nanny Rose was helping her to dress.

  Nanny Rose held a pair of long, lace-trimmed drawers up to the light from the window, and then effortfully stooped with them, for Alexine to insert her legs. ‘This under-petticoat has been badly ironed.’ She showed it to the girls and repeated the words. Understanding nothing, they both began to giggle. There followed a petticoat wadded at the knees and, in its upper part, stiffened with whalebone. Alexine drew in her breath as Nanny Rose helped her into it and then let out a groan. Nanny Rose made a sign to one of the two maids and then exclaimed: ‘Oh, come on, come on!’ The girl at last understood what was expected of her and fetched a white, starched petticoat, with three stiff flounces, off the bed. A muslin petticoat followed, so diaphanous that, as Nanny held it, her hand, red and gnarled with arthritis, could be seen through it. Finally, between them, the two maids brought over the heavy brocade dress, carrying it as though it were a living thing.

  ‘Wasn’t this the dress that Madame Molnar made for the last palace ball?’

  Alexine nodded.

  ‘It suits you. That green is just right for you. She always knew what she was doing, I’ll say that for her. Perfect taste.’

  Alexine gazed down at the dress. Then she exclaimed: ‘ Oh, this is ridiculous. How can one wear all these clothes in this heat?’

  ‘Well, you want to dress properly for the ambassador, don’t you?’

  ‘Minister, minister,’ Alexine corrected irritably.

  Alexine sat on a sofa with the Minister’s wife, while Harriet sat on another sofa with the Minister.

  It was Harriet’s task to enlist the help of Rossetti, who had lived for many years in Egypt and who was said to have innumerable influential contacts, to procure one of the few paddle-steamers available to people not members of the government. A tiny, desiccated man, with a stiff kiss-curl stuck, as though with glue, on to his wrinkled, dark-brown forehead, he was dressed in clothes such as she remembered her father, then a mere Lieutenant, wearing for evening events in her childhood: stockinet pantaloons reaching down to his bony ankles, patent-leather pumps below them, and a coat with high collar and spreading lapels above. He smelled strongly of patchouli. At one moment, she peered at his hair. Yes,
she was sure that, lustrous black with an orange glint to it, it was dyed, it must be.

  He responded delightedly to her flirtatious manner, constantly assuring her, in a French as old-fashioned as his dress, that her word was his command, that he would be only too pleased to help her in any way he could, that she must not hesitate to ask for anything she needed. But when she spoke of the paddle-steamer, he became evasive.

  ‘I can find you as many dahabiahs as you need. All comfortable, some, yes, luxurious – perhaps not by your standards but by the standard of this country. That poses no problem, no problem at all. But a steamer … Occasionally, very occasionally, one becomes available. Last winter our Minister for Home Affairs and his wife came here – she for her health – and for them I did manage … But it took a lot of time and effort.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Of course, dear madame, I am also prepared to devote endless time and effort to find such a steamer for you. But’ – he shrugged and gave a rueful smile – ‘whether I shall be successful – that’s another matter.’

  ‘What we need is the steamer and then, in addition, well, three or perhaps four dahabiahs, which the steamer can tow. Is that feasible?’

  He looked amazed, his mouth opening and shutting to reveal teeth almost all of which were capped with gold. ‘ Feasible, yes, madame, of course, if we can find the steamer. But hugely expensive. Most parties manage with one dahabiah. Perhaps two if there are many people and also many servants.’

  ‘Ours is likely to be a very large party. And there are also five dogs.’

  ‘Five dogs! I am not sure …’

  ‘We travel everywhere with our dogs. We couldn’t be separated from them.’

  Meantime, Alexine was asking the Minister’s sprightly, swarthy wife, her full cheeks hectic with rouge and her magnificent bare shoulders floury with powder, how she managed in such heat.