by John Burke
“If it wasn’t money he was after,” said Adam Beauchamp, “do you know what else there might have been?”
John looked uneasy. He was remembering the loss of those all-important lists in Egypt. Before embarking and while on board he had been making an attempt at collating his notes and sketching out the beginnings of a new catalogue. The material was locked away in his own cabin, not with Sir Giles. Would there be another attack there in due course?
Annette said: “It must be something to do with Ra, mustn’t it? It couldn’t just be a coincidence.”
“It doesn’t seem likely.”
Annette turned to Adam Beauchamp. “You see, both—”
“You do not need to explain.” He smiled and his slim hands sketched a graceful, deprecatory movement in the air. “Your recent discovery is far too well known. But surely Sir Giles doesn’t keep any of the treasures in his cabin?”
“Certainly not.” John spoke brusquely as though to warn off anyone who might be listening. “The treasures are in the ship’s hold under heavy guard.”
But somebody, thought Annette, intended that those treasures should be returned to Egypt. That basic demand was behind all the difficulties they had encountered while getting away from the country and somehow behind the attack on Sir Giles. The treasures might be safe in the hold, but once they were taken out there would be nothing but trouble again.
“What are your plans?” Beauchamp was asking.
“We’re taking everything to London,” said John. “Originally we planned to spend some time in Paris, but Mr. King is anxious to get started with the first exhibition in London. Before we can set it up I have to continue my retabulations.”
And then there would be thousands of visitors, and among them would surely be enemies. Annette’s heart sank at the thought of her future with John—of the constant vigilance, the suspense, the dangers into which they could easily walk and from which it might not be so easy to escape. This was not how her father had intended that things should be.
“Where will you stay?”
Adam Beauchamp was in no hurry to leave. Annette could see that John was anxious to be rid of him. John needed to go back to his cabin, satisfy himself that nothing had been stolen from there, and then lie down. She tried to help by moving away from Sir Giles’s cabin. Automatically the two men followed her, talking.
“I’ve booked rooms for us in a Bloomsbury hotel,” said John. “Annette and I will stay there.”
“Oh, but that’s not good enough.”
Annette glanced back, surprised. John frowned. It was an odd comment, coming as it did from a perfect stranger.
John said curtly: “It’s near the British Museum. Useful for reference. It’ll suit us very well.”
“I live on my own in a large house in Regent’s Park. I wonder if I might ask you to come and stay with me?”
They stopped by the stairs which led up to the restaurant and the bar. Annette felt an absurd quickening of excitement. She could see that John was taken aback by this offer: he had a true Englishman’s reticence, and found such directness embarrassing. There was no reason for it—no contact between Beauchamp and himself, no sense behind such a spontaneous invitation. Yet Annette suddenly wanted to accept. She knew it was ridiculous, but Beauchamp’s magnetism was irresistible.
John, at any rate, did not find it irresistible. He said: “I’m sorry. That’s quite out of the question.”
“But very kind of you,” said Annette, to soften the blow.
“Your work fascinates me. I’ve always felt that I should devote more of my time to the arts.”
“Archaeology is a science rather than an art,” said John stiffly.
“I wonder? And surely the treasures you unearth are of artistic rather than scientific value? Or both, perhaps—a wonderful combination such as every philosopher has always sought. You would be of the greatest assistance to me if you would come and stay.”
“I wish I could assist your ambitions, Mr. Beauchamp, but I’m afraid we can’t alter our plans at this late stage.”
Beauchamp glanced at Annette to assess her reaction. She tried to look indifferent and to remain loyal to John, while all the time she was hoping that somehow there would be this change, this stimulus . . . this danger. Yes, she admitted to herself that there was danger in it; danger to John and herself, perhaps, and to all that they meant to each other; and yet a danger she longed to face. She was startled by herself and frightened at what she might learn about herself.
“Join me for a liqueur,” said Adam Beauchamp, “and we’ll discuss it.”
“That would be rather nice,” said Annette.
John scowled at her. “Look, there isn’t anything to discuss.”
“But we could all do with a drink.”
“We’ve made other arrangements,” said John doggedly.
But Adam Beauchamp and Annette went up to the bar, and after he had been back to his cabin to tidy up John joined them.
5
During the rest of the voyage Adam Beauchamp exerted his considerable charm in a campaign to win John round. Annette shared John’s bewilderment, unable to understand why it should be so important to Adam. It had all the signs of being a rich man’s whim, but unlike so many whims it did not evaporate overnight. Younger, suaver and more personable than the blustering Alexander King, Adam nevertheless shared the American’s determination to make things go the way he wanted them to go. Yet this was an over-simplification. Adam was insistent but without being offensive. He created the impression that he was humbly asking a great favor. The mixture of humility and persistence was a provocative one.
To Annette he described his house with a warmth and pride that endeared him to her. She longed to see the places of which he spoke and to relate him to his background. To John he painted a picture of calm and seclusion where it would be possible to work under ideal conditions. There would be none of the clatter of horse traffic that made Bloomsbury so noisy, and none of the disadvantages of an impersonal hotel. John would make much swifter progress on his cataloguing and on the business of setting up the exhibition.
“But why is he so anxious to have us there?” John asked Annette more than once. “It has become his ruling obsession. Why should it matter so much to him?”
She had no answer. If she had the glimmerings of an explanation in her own mind, it was too private and personal and disturbing to be confided to John. She was far from admitting the truth—if it were a truth—to herself. But as they approached England she was both exhilarated and alarmed. She found it impossible to meet Adam’s gaze, so often fixed on her. She was in the grip of conflicting emotions stronger than any she had ever known.
The confusion at the docks was the cause of John’s ultimate surrender. He insisted on supervising the unloading of the precious cargo himself, only to find that the formalities took the larger part of a day, that certain essential papers were missing, and that the transport which had supposedly been arranged was missing. Alexander King stormed and raged. John and Annette doggedly worked at each problem as it came up. But without Adam they would have been lost. His money talked, not as loudly as King’s but in a more smoothly commanding tone of voice. As unflagging as John himself, he went up to London and back to straighten out difficulties, and stood by his new friends for a whole night and day. When they were sure that the job was safely completed, they succumbed to exhaustion. And at this stage Adam, laughing, said that there was only one place to go—home, where there would be good food and comfort and decently aired beds to sleep in . . .
And John grinned and said, “All right, I give in,” and they all laughed with a sort of hysterical relief.
The house overlooking Regent’s Park was all that Adam had promised. Its carved pediment stood out white over the trees as they approached, and in spite of her tiredness Annette felt a thrill of anticipation as they drove in under a noble arch and entered the shaded tranquillity of a courtyard. Here they were, as Adam had assured them they wou
ld be, cut off from the bustling world.
John and Annette were shown to their rooms by Jessop, a dignified, unobtrusive manservant who had clearly been given detailed instructions long before the party arrived. Annette thought that Adam must have been confident of luring them here right from the start; but she did not pass on this observation to John.
Her room was small but not cramped. It had a finely grained silk wallpaper which seemed to catch the daylight and glow with it. The window looked down on to the courtyard. After the dust and intolerable heat of Egypt, after the throbbing and rolling of the ship which had brought them to England, and after the irritations of the last day, this quiet little room was all she could have wished for. It was all she could do not to roll on to the bed and go fast asleep.
But they were to have drinks downstairs. She hoped that they would not have to sit up too long making polite conversation; but Adam wanted to make them formally welcome to his home, and it would be ungracious to seem too drowsy and bored.
When she entered the sitting room she found that her desire to yawn was leaving her. The spicy aroma from a bowl of hot punch on a brass table in the middle of the room was both soothing and stimulating. Adam’s smile as he rose to greet her was more direct and challenging than any he had ventured while they were still aboard ship. John looked relaxed and uncritical. Whatever reservations he might have about Adam and his insistent hospitality, for the moment he was only too glad of the chance to sink into comfort.
Jessop, the manservant, poured steaming punch into a mug and handed it to Annette. She sipped gratefully at it. The English climate was a great relief after Egypt, but it was capable of provoking the shivers. She laughed. It was so strange to think that in such a short time she should be wanting a warming drink.
Holding the mug between her hands and feeling its prickly warmth seeping into her palms, Annette looked appreciatively round the room. Its gracious proportions induced a certain tranquillity in the occupants. This was a room of which one had to be worthy. Here there could be no haste and no vulgarity.
She was standing by a small glass-topped case with slender beechwood legs. Below the glass there glinted a small arc of jewels, some mounted in silver and one in a florid yet delicate porcelain setting. The collection was an eccentric one—very much one person’s unashamed, individual taste—yet perfectly in keeping with the room and its furnishings.
Adam stood at her shoulder. He said: “You find them interesting.”
“They are so lovely.” Lovelier, she thought, than the over-ornate, overpowering splendor of the Egyptian treasures which by now she almost took for granted.
“Fabergé could sometimes be too extreme,” said Adam, lifting the glass and reaching in. “But he had some inspired moments. This one . . .” He removed a small cluster which winked in the light. He held it against Annette’s dress and she was sure that he would be aware of her heartbeat quickening. “This belonged to the Empress of Russia,” he said. “I’ve always felt it should again belong to a beautiful woman.”
She lifted her hand and he allowed the jewel to drop into it.
“Beautiful,” she whispered.
“I would like you to have it.”
Annette started and drew back. Vaguely, dazed by tiredness or by the fumes of the punch, she felt that this was forcing the pace too hard . . . too soon.
“But it’s priceless,” she feebly protested.
“It is valueless compared to the pleasure it would give me to think of it in your possession.”
Adam’s gravity robbed her of confidence. He was so weighty, so sure of himself. John, sprawled at ease in an armchair, seemed far away. She wanted to dodge past Adam and appeal to him: it was up to him to save her, to establish normality again. But John, dear hard-working John, was lost in thoughts of his own. Probably he was doing mental calculations regarding the size of the exhibition tent in the park and the placing of the main pieces.
Annette looked into Adam’s eyes. Again she had the impression which had been so immediate when they first met: he was older and wiser than a fleeting glance would suggest, and quite sure of himself. Whatever he did, it would be done consciously and purposefully. His offer of a gift was no casual impulse which he would regret later.
“You will take it.” It was not a question, not a command; simply a statement.
“It . . . it would be ungracious of me not to accept,” she said haltingly.
He touched her hand. She did not withdraw it. With a light pressure between his fingers he lifted her hand and kissed it.
Annette moved away across the room. She was trembling. When she spoke to John she was startled by the loudness of her own voice. Too eagerly, too unsteadily, she said:
“John . . . look. Isn’t it beautiful?”
John looked at the jewel. His mind full of other treasures and an utterly different beauty, he said: “Hm. Yes.”
His mug was empty. Adam came to take it from him and refill it. He smiled sideways at Annette. The implication was that she and he were in a half joking, half conspiratorial alliance against John. This was not what she wanted.
But was she sure she knew what she did want?
Adam raised his mug of punch. “May I propose a toast? To the success of the exhibition of Ra.”
John and Annette raised their mugs.
“And,” said Adam, “may the gods smile down upon our newfound friendship.”
They went to bed early that night. Annette fell asleep before she could fully savor the joy of lying in such blissful comfort in such a room.
The next day she and John started work in earnest.
Alexander King had organized the erection of a huge tent in a corner of Hyde Park. Certain objections had been raised to the questionable commercial elements in this exhibition, but King had ploughed through them. He had made great play with the cultural aspects of his show and enlisted the aid of some eminent savants, largely by hinting that if he did not get his own way in this matter he would transport the whole exhibition at once to the United States without allowing anyone in England so much as a glimpse of the fabulous treasures.
Now the treasures themselves were to be uncrated. King insisted that John should supervise every stage of this. There was no need for such insistence: John could not have borne that anyone else should be responsible. While King took away the breath of contractors in his demands for immediate installation of the tent, the erection of barriers, and the provision of stands and showcases, John concentrated on the careful unpacking of the tomb objects.
Annette knew that John was not happy. He found this rush undignified. There was still a great deal of cataloguing to be done, and in his view it was more important that the exhibition should be scientifically laid out than that it should draw in crowds of the uncritical public. But King was boss. King made that very clear. This was a road show, and if John wanted to preserve certain important elements he would have to do so within the context of that show.
Even before the supports of the tent were safely pegged, King was pacing up and down inside barking orders. The mummy was to be the centre-piece and he knew exactly where he wanted it placed. He wanted lights in such and such a place. A platform here, the panels of hieroglyphics to form a mural along this side of the tent, the unguent jars to be raised on a pedestal just so . . .
“There you are, John!” The great bellow rang out down the tent, louder even than the crack of the canvas as it flapped and then was stretched tight. “Come and give me a hand. I’m getting nowhere with these workmen. You’d better try them in their own language.”
“Ancient English,” John murmured ruefully to Annette.
It was John who had to strike a balance between King’s pressing demands and the surly slowness of the workmen. He also had to preserve the peace when King changed his mind about some essential part of the display and the carpenters had to be told to start all over again. There was an unrelenting hammering and banging, and in the middle of it all the treasures of the tomb were gr
adually unveiled.
The dog head of Anubis looked down on this utterly foreign scene. Pert little Cockneys scrambled about under the golden gaze of a prince of Egypt. John was a constant bundle of nerves, waiting for something irreplaceable to be broken, trying to supervise a score of things at once, averting one minor disaster after another and always sure that sooner or later there would be some major catastrophe.
But gradually the pattern established itself. Built around the awe-inspiring centre-piece, the mummiform coffin itself, the grave furniture formed a coherent picture which must evoke dread and an almost religious admiration in even the most materialistic beholder.
King grew expansive and affable again. He slapped John on the shoulder and congratulated him. “I knew we could do it. Knew we’d get it set up on time.”
Immediately inside the entrance to the tent, shielding the exhibition from anyone who might peep in, stood the doors of the gilded shrine. Visitors to the exhibition would see the whole story of the life of Ra told on the panels of the doors, and would then turn left to pick out the individual items of rich furnishing.
Annette, tired of stumbling over planks and boxes or of being bumped into by workmen, retreated to the entrance and once more studied the panels. It was the first time she had allowed herself to contemplate the grim but magnificent story since the death of her father. Now she felt herself returning to life; and at the same time it seemed that the golden pictures from the past took on life, the men and women of a vanished age moved from their eternally fixed postures and enacted a story as real now as it had been then, and the world of Ra Antef took on significance once more.
The first panel showed Rameses VIII being presented by obsequious women with his twin sons Ra and Be. Ra was the elder by a matter of minutes. The two boys grew up in the same environment but as very different characters, both physically and mentally. Ra became a thinker, a searcher for truth and the secret of eternal life. But Be was a sensualist who spent his time seeking only the pleasures of the body.
