Little Egypt

by Lesley Glaister

  The tall windows were so thickly frosted that the light was white and solid in the room and there were even faint frost ferns growing on the mirrors. The birds were perched on the chandelier, fluffed and huddled for warmth. Beneath the chandelier was a miniature mountain range of droppings and feathers. I caught my reflection between the ferns, red-cheeked and ridiculous in the floor-length coat, my head tiny between the military shoulders. I was disappointed by what a child I still looked, and what a sight my hair – grown out of shape and stringy with grease. I was itchy under my arms but couldn’t get to them to scratch inside the heavy coat.

  Mary had long since given up cleaning the ballroom and the piano was thick with dust and droppings. After I’d fed the birds, I lifted the lid and pressed my finger on a high C sharp, and the note hung and shimmered on as if it didn’t want to die. I dropped the lid with an echoing bang and caught a shiver of movement in one of the mirrors, like the hem of a dress sweeping past. It brought back a party there, when the ballroom was warm and full, alive with music and voices and dancing feet. Osi and I had been small enough to hide under the piano with our plate of iced fancies and watch the stockings and trousers swishing past, and feel the fuzzy thumping of the music through our skulls.

  I hurried from the ballroom before I could catch myself – or anything – in the frosty mirrors.

  22

  MARY WAS IN the pantry. ‘Can we have a bath today?’ I called.

  She came out scowling.

  ‘You’ve been at the Cheddar,’ she said.

  ‘Have not!’

  ‘Well it wasn’t Jack Sir flaming Frost.’

  ‘Honestly, I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, most of it’s gone and I was planning on doing a colly cheese for your lunch.’

  I pushed past her and went into the dim smelly space, where the wax-papered shelves held crocks of flour and salt, slabs of butter and lard, wire baskets of vegetables, jars of jam, currants and honey. I hadn’t been in at all since we’d been home. The wire cheese-cover was off and there was only a small wonky wedge left – and Mary always sliced things with beautiful precision.

  ‘Osi?’ I said, doubtfully.

  ‘You know as well as me he only eats what’s put in front of him.’

  ‘Well it honestly wasn’t me,’ I said.

  Mary sighed. ‘I’ll do a soup. That’s not like you. And get that filthy old coat off. Whatever do you look like!’

  ‘That’s because it wasn’t me. And who cares what I look like?’

  ‘Well it wasn’t a blooming mouse.’

  I was tempted to shout, or to flounce away and slam the door, but I didn’t want to make her headache worse, or her temper, and besides I liked to think I’d grown beyond such behaviour. Instead I went into the scullery and hung up the coat. Back in the kitchen, despite a discouraging look from Mary, I sat down beside the stove.

  She stood with her back to me scrubbing the burnt pan with a fistful of wire wool. The scratch of it put my teeth on edge, but I made my voice sound warm and friendly.

  ‘I’ve got a book you’d like,’ I said. ‘It’s called Desert Longing.’

  She sniffed and turned on the tap.

  ‘It’s frightfully romantic,’ I said.

  ‘I reckon I’ll give it a go.’

  ‘It’s about a love affair between a Lord and Lady and there’s this handsome Arab Prince and –’

  ‘Don’t spoil it, then.’ She turned off the tap.

  ‘I’ll get it for you.’ I stood up. ‘And later on you can have a lovely read beside the stove.’

  Mary put the scrubbed pan on the draining board and wiped her hands on her apron.

  ‘We haven’t had a bath since we got home,’ I pointed out. ‘I feel quite putrid – and as for Osi …’

  She scritched her fingers through her hair and sighed. ‘Oh, reckon I could do with a spruce up myself.’ And to my relief she gave a weary smile.

  I ran upstairs to fetch the book. Seeing the garish cover, battered and stained from its travels, brought back the inside of my tent, the heat and dirt and tedium of the desert, which hardly seemed part of this same world at all. In my dreams there was the wet of paint, breath on my neck, a plummeting sensation from which I would wake with a startled jolt. But when I was awake I was able not to think about the tomb, or rather to remember it as something from a story. No more real than Desert Longing. I flicked through the pages and saw my dirty fingerprints, smudgy daisy patterns on the flyleaf. Compared with Victor’s nightmares my dreams were nothing. Poor Victor. My belly twanged with guilt.

  I noticed that the place where Mary had melted a space on the window had frozen thinly over. And then I saw that another space in the frost had been scratched away, higher up and more recent. Only Osi was here and why would he want to look out? There was nothing to look at, only whiteness through a fence of icicles.

  I went into the nursery where he was lying on his stomach reading.

  ‘Did you make a hole in the frost?’ I said.

  He had to crick his neck to scowl up at me. ‘What?’ He clearly had no idea what I was talking about.

  ‘Did you pinch some cheese?’

  The end of his beaky nose was red, and he was sniffling. If he had a cold it was no surprise, he didn’t bother about trying to keep warm at all.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No.’ He resumed reading his blasted hieroglyphics.

  ‘Well, someone did.’

  He shrugged one shoulder as if it was no concern of his. I felt like kicking him. I took Desert Longing downstairs for Mary, but I was thinking. What if someone else was in the house? A man with narrow feet. I could only guess that it was Mr Patey. And that’s why Mary wouldn’t talk about him – because she’d hidden him here. And that must be where the cheese had gone – I was surprised she couldn’t work that out for herself. Wasn’t she feeding him?

  She was chopping another lot of onions for the soup. She was still pale, but smiled when I returned to the kitchen and put the book on the table. Once she’d read it she’d realise that I knew about love affairs now and perhaps she would confide in me.

  ‘That looks good,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if I can get that bathroom stove lit this afternoon. See if we can’t work up a bit of a fug.’ There were tears in her eyes, but they were only onion tears. You don’t need to keep him secret, is what I wanted to say, but didn’t dare. Instead I went upstairs to search.

  There were seven bedrooms, two bathrooms and the nursery on the first floor, and in the attic a maze of cramped servants’ quarters, including Mary’s room. In Grandpa’s heyday there had been a full staff, but by the time he was old there was only one manservant, a housekeeper, a cook and a tweenie – Mary. And now there was only Mary.

  Most of the first floor bedrooms and one of the bathrooms had been locked for years. I had been walking past them without a thought all that time, but now, suddenly, it seemed dreadful to imagine all that stale and boxed-in air, all that dead space. All those mirrors with nothing to reflect.

  But Mary would be keeping him in the attic, of course, perhaps even in her room. Perhaps they were keeping each other warm at night. I went up the attic stairs calling, softly, ‘Mr Patey?’ And I thought I heard a movement. I hesitated half way up, straining my ears. At the top I called, ‘It’s all right, Mr Patey, I know you’re there.’ Cautiously, I pushed open the door. But there was no one. Mary’s bed was messy and unmade and her clothes piled untidily on a chair, papers from her headache powders were scattered about, which was not like her. I looked round – the wardrobe would be too small for a man to hide in – the only place he could be was under the bed, but there was only a suitcase and a box, a chamberpot and a pair of shoes.

  And then I heard footsteps on the stairs and Mary came storming in. ‘What the flaming hell are you up to? Can’t I have one room in this blasted mad house to call my own?’

  ‘I was looking for Mr Patey.’

  Her mouth opened and closed and opened again, the vapo
ur of her breath fogging the air between us. ‘You what?’

  ‘I know he’s here.’

  ‘Stop this nonsense. Mr Patey indeed! Have you lost your wits!’

  ‘I’ve seen his footprints,’ I said doubtfully.

  She was shaking her head at me. ‘That foreign sun must have addled you brains good and proper. If you must know, Mr Patey’s marrying a milliner from town what he got in trouble and apart from dropping off the coal I haven’t seen him for weeks.’

  I stared at her. ‘A milliner?’

  She shut her eyes and squeezed her hands against her temples. ‘What with everything else and what with my bloody head,’ she said. ‘How am I supposed to cope? Now get downstairs.’

  I left the room, closing the door behind me and heard the squeal of bedsprings as she flung herself down – not to cry, I hoped.

  23

  AFTER LUNCHEON, MARY went up to light the bathroom stove, but it took hours to take the chill off the room and by the time the frost on the window had melted the daylight was fading. The iron of the gigantic tub was so cold it cooled the rusty water that chugged from the taps, so we had to fill it twice – as with a teapot – once to warm it so that the next lot of water would stay hot.

  When the bath was drawn, I threw in three fistfuls of Evelyn’s Gardenia Bath Salts. I collected all the candles I could find and stood them along the edge of the bath and the candlelight mixed with the scented steam into a thick, sweet mist. Mary stood for a moment staring as if at nothing; she seemed insubstantial, wavering in the steam. She had come down to make lunch without referring to my trespass. As well as a temper she also had a forgiving soul. She was distant though, vague with headache, and had spent most of the afternoon squinting at Desert Longing beside the stove. Now she sucked in a sudden breath and frowned, pressing the heel of her hand against her temple.

  ‘Oooh, that’s really sharp,’ she said. ‘That’s like a fork. Call me when you’re both done and I’ll see if I’m up to getting in myself.’

  ‘We won’t let the water go cold,’ I promised.

  When we were small, Mary used to sit on the lid of the WC and chat while Osi and I wallowed in the tub. We used always to get in together, it was such a big bath, one each end and plenty of room to move our legs, but since we’d got older Mary thought bathing together wasn’t quite decent anymore. She thought that we should have separate bedrooms too. Perhaps we may have done, if things had turned out differently.

  It would take too long, I thought, if Mary had to wait for us to bathe separately. The water would be cold. It wasn’t practical.

  I found Osi in the nursery hunched in his tiny armchair copying something from a book. I felt a surge of fondness for him and bent over to see with what beautiful neatness he had filled his page.

  ‘What does it mean, though?’ I asked.

  ‘This is an informal hieratic script, probably 19th dynasty,’ he explained, and began to read: ‘The scribe salutes his Lord, the Fan bearer on the right side of the King, re Chief of the gangs in the Place of Truth, Seal Bearer, Chief Priest of the –’

  ‘All right, all right.’ I pulled back hastily. ‘The bath’s ready. Come on.’

  I didn’t want there to be anything Egyptian about the bath. It was an English bathroom on an English January afternoon and nothing could be further away from Egypt. It was amazing to think that this was the same planet and that all those miles away the Nile was flowing greenly between its banks and the sun beating, glittering down. And the horse and the whiskery dog? Oh I snatched my mind from them.

  Osi picked up a fine brush and slicked it with his tongue, leaving a groove of black down the centre of his lower lip.

  I pulled him up by the hand. ‘Let’s get in together; it’ll be quicker. Mary needn’t know.’

  The bathroom was warm and the particles of steam gleamed in the candlelight. Condensation streamed from the walls and plopped from the ceiling in long drips. I felt rather self-conscious as I took off my layers of woollies, dresses, stockings, liberty bodice and drawers. But the light was dim and in any case, unless it was Egyptian, Osi hardly noticed anything past the end of his nose.

  The bath was high and there was a wooden box you had to climb up onto in order to hoist a leg over and step in. I gasped as I sank into the water that was just too hot, a shocking luxury, and I forced my body down into it, gooseflesh riffling up my body till I got my shoulders under and equalised the temperature. As soon as they were warm my chilblains began to throb. Mary’s cure was a raw potato rubbed on, which did help though it stung. I’d ask her to do it for me later. Osi undressed. He had a dark face, neck and hands, though his torso where the sun hadn’t reached was maggot-white – and my skin was marked in the same way. I shut my eyes against the detail of his nakedness as he stepped in.

  Once we were both submerged, our legs slid against each other and I caught hold of a foot and lifted it from the water. ‘Your toe nails are a scandal!’ I examined the way they curled under the ends of his toes. Between them the creases were dark with caught-up squirms of dirt. I soaped my finger and began to push it between his toes, but he yelled and splashed at the tickliness and I gave up. I held my breath to submerge my head and then I sat up and scrubbed my hair with soap, splashing one of the candles so that it expired with a smoky hiss. I tried to wash Osi’s hair, but he struggled and snorted and I let him go.

  Spits of rain against the window emphasised our cosiness. The water and the gardenia steam lulled us, slid us together, rocked and cradled us as they had through all our childhood bath-times; and my poor itchily throbbing toes buried themselves in the loose scrumple of skin between his legs, the softest gentlest place for toes. For a short time we lay there, comfortable and comforted, just for that moment of twinny peace and closeness, not waiting, not lonely, just being.

  Then I heard footsteps on the landing, and sat up straight. Mary would be cross that we were in the tub together. I watched the door, waiting for it to open, but the footsteps went away. They didn’t sound quite like Mary’s feet – the tread was heavier.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I said to Osi.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We should get out,’ I said. ‘Before Mary comes.’

  We did not speak as we dried ourselves with stove-warmed towels, or as we dressed, backs to one other. Cold rivulets trickled from my hair down my back and I shivered and coughed. If Osi heard nothing, maybe there was nothing to hear. I must stop imagining things before I drove myself mad.

  I was so glad that Osi was there. After a bath, especially in winter, we always used to sit by the stove in the kitchen brushing our hair as it dried, while Mary would make cocoa for us. I coughed again. The air was becoming choky with smoke leaking from a crack in the stove pipe. I would have to tell Mary about the smoke and hang the expense; we would simply have to have the chimney man in if we were ever to bathe in wintertime again.

  ‘That was nice,’ I said to Osi and he smiled before he went out – back to his studies, I supposed, though how could he bear to be alone? How could be bear to return to that freezing nursery with his hair all wet? It would turn to icicles. I was encouraged by that crumb though, that smile, just a small proof that he’d enjoyed the closeness too; crumbs were all you ever got from Osi.

  Time to call Mary before the water was quite cold. And I would surprise her with cocoa when she came down, that would cheer her up.

  ‘We’re out,’ I called from the landing, but there was no reply. ‘Your turn, Mary. It’s still warm.’ I waited to hear her coming, but she didn’t and I heard the creaking of a board in one of the rooms, I swear I did, like a cautious footfall and the click of a carefully shutting door. I went shooting down the stairs to the kitchen. I’d never been afraid in the house before, never noticed how much darkness there was, how many places a stranger could hide. Don’t be silly. Mr Patey would be with his milliner and why would anyone else be there?

  I wished that I could stay put in the warm kitchen and make my cocoa and dry m
y hair, but Mary – who must be up in her room – should have the bath before it got too cold. Reluctantly I crept up the stairs, skin bristling, ears on stalks. I called up to the attic, but there was no rely. I forced my feet to climb those dark, narrow stairs and my heart was punching.

  I tapped on her door. At first there was no reply, then I thought I heard a groan. I called again, but there was nothing. My feet were squeaking the floorboards. I hesitated, teeth chattering, as my eyes adjusted to the scanty moonlight slanting through the skylight.

  ‘Mary,’ I called and my voice was thin and strange. If someone came up the attic stairs behind me there was nowhere I could run. ‘Mary!’

  This time I heard a high-pitched whimper. What if someone was in there with her? Someone could have crept up, perhaps Mr Patey after all, perhaps a stranger. When she moaned again I gritted my teeth and flung open the door.

  She was lying on her back with one hand across her eyes, illuminated by a drizzle of moonlight, her hair lit up like choppy water. She was still wearing her clothes, even her shoes. I could smell sickness and saw that she had been ill in the chamberpot. Although it was horrible to see her so, I felt a flicker of relief that she was alone.

  ‘The bath is waiting,’ I told her.

  ‘No. My blasted head,’ she whispered in a papery voice. I knelt and stroked her hair, put my hand on her clammy brow, but she winced at my touch and feebly turned her head away.

  ‘Can I get you something?’ I asked. ‘Cocoa? A cup of tea?’

  She groaned at the thought.

  ‘Have you taken your powders?’

  ‘Can’t keep anything down.’

  ‘Do you want a candle? I could fetch you a lamp.’

  ‘No light,’ she said. When her head was bad, light was like daggers in her eyes.