by Jessica Mann
*
‘I wasn’t reading about the trip,’ Tamara said.
Mr Black paused almost reluctantly, his slightly mottled, liver-spotted hand gentling the pages of the notebook. With uncharacteristic absent-mindedness, he said, ‘Weren’t you?’
‘I was cursing your stooges for leaving it till the last minute to provide me with some dossiers. The messenger met me at the very doors of the departure lounge.’
‘But the material was useful?’
‘I think it had been compiled by another of your novelists manqué. And later on, of course, I could add to it myself.’
*
The system, designed to meet an emergency, was makeshift, but the people who operated it were benevolent and it worked as well as could be expected. All the same, the label tied to the coat of the child who would later be known as Max Solomon had disappeared. Perhaps he had picked it off himself. There was nobody who seemed able to identify him. He seemed to be between three and five and he was mute. He stood in the reception centre staring around him with large grey eyes under straight, strong brows, and gave no sign of understanding anything that was said to him. Nobody could discover his name, or where he had come from or even in what language to address him. His composure was infinitely touching.
At the end of the day Bertha Solomon could not bear to let the child go to the hostel. She took him to her own home in Muswell Hill where her husband, a busy, preoccupied surgeon, accorded him the gentleness due to a stray kitten.
The child did not react to what he saw, neither to the comfortable furniture nor the lavish food, to the black skull-cap that Jonathan Solomon wore for dinner or to the seven-branched candlestick on the table. He sat where he was put, and swallowed what was spooned into his mouth. He allowed himself to be washed, he used the lavatory, he slept silently on the bed in Jonathan Solomon’s dressing room.
The Solomons decided to keep the child. They called him Max after Jonathan’s father, and said that it was a temporary solution since his own family would reclaim him sooner or later. They enjoyed having him so much that they hoped, guiltily, that it would indeed be later. But very soon it was clear that it might be never, for the long-expected war broke out and the fate of Max’s blood relations was only too easily imagined.
By the time the war ended Max was effectively an English boy. There was no telling whether the tongue that spoke the language so fluently had ever used another one. As far as Max was concerned Bertha and Jonathan Solomon were his mother and father, and he admitted to no other memories. Sometimes Bertha would think she could trace a faintly Slavic cast to his cheekbones or a southern fullness in his lips. Outsiders simply saw a handsome, healthy lad, not even noticeably Jewish except in the eyes of those who knew he must be. Nobody would have guessed that he had once been a small speck of flotsam from the European hurricane.
In later years Max’s wife, Ruth Solomon, would say that they were foolish to worry so much about giving their son Jonty a happy childhood, when Max himself seemed so unaffected by early insecurity. He had satisfied the ambitions of the most optimistic parents with scholarships at school, Oxford and Harvard; with a prize for his first novel, a film made of his second, and his name on students’ reading lists by the time he had written five. A generous and perceptive critic, a fluent and amusing broadcaster, a successful author of elegantly sardonic fiction, happily married, as English as they come—Max Solomon had it made.
Max never realised how dependent he was on Ruth. He would have said, if asked, that he could manage on his own, that he was self-sufficient. He would have said that he and Ruth were a partnership of equals, together from choice not need, that Ruth gave him a hand to hold, not a crutch to lean on. He was more surprised than anyone else at the loss of his powers after she died.
Ruth had always said that his ideas bubbled up from an everlasting spring. ‘He’s an ideas man, he never runs out,’ she told the interviewer from the New Yorker, whose three-part article was entitled ‘The Ideas Man’.
Now there was a drought. The well was dry, blocked by the dead body at the bottom of it.
‘My invention was cremated with my wife,’ Max Solomon told his publisher. He had not written a word of fiction for three years.
‘But you can still write something,’ Jonty Solomon said. The inventive impulse would return, he insisted, when Max least expected it. Meanwhile he could exercise the writing muscles with description and analysis. ‘Write journalism, like me.’
But Jonty could not imagine his father’s loss of charity. Observation must be softened with it, if the reporting is not to singe the paper. Max had no charity left, except for Jonty himself. Everything else he saw through the ice of his frozen sensibilities.
It was Jonty’s friend the psychotherapist, who sent Max Solomon on his travels. She was wrong in promising that it would do what she called unblocking, for after seven journeys Max was still not writing a novel, but the strange places distracted him, and when he was far from home he did not always have Ruth somewhere in the periphery of his vision. In Bombay or Buenos Aires he did not imagine that the back of every dark head or every high, half-heard laugh was hers.
The therapist said that Max was living too much within himself. What he had lost and needed to retrieve was the outsider’s eye, that external vision that had often seemed a burden in the past, so much so that Max had once consulted another psychiatrist about the doppelgänger that he felt watching his every action. He said then that he wished to live unselfconsciously. But now, objectivity lost, he realised that it had been the foundation of his power to invent.
At least when he was abroad he could watch new sights and see strange people. One day he might again find that he was watching himself.
Even writers as successful as Max Solomon are unlikely to amass enough money for the silent years. He took a past as courier for Camisis Tours, conducting parties to China, Kashmir, Mexico, India, Argentina and the South Seas. He was a draw.
But Egypt? Max was not sure that he wanted to go there again. He had seen it with Ruth.
Once a week Jonty Solomon took his father to lunch. This time they had met in one of the expensive, short-lived restaurants that cluster around Covent Garden. The food looked prettier than it tasted. Jonty pushed heart-shaped slivers of salad and liver around a heart-shaped plate. Max’s raw fish was masked by a blue sauce representing the sea.
‘Bilberries, perhaps,’ he suggested. It was not entirely appetising.
‘You ought to go to Egypt, Father. Especially on this trip, right down into the south. There might not be another chance to get into the lake like that.’
‘The Nile cruise must be beautiful. Did you see that programme?’
‘Death on the Nile?’
‘I meant the one with that archaeologist. Giles Needham’s piece about Qasr Samaan, where the Camisis tour is going.’
‘My boss fell for him in a big way.’ Jonty worked on Vanessa Papillon’s programme. Once, when she was ill, he had presented it.
‘Has he been on Butterfly Net?’
‘Not so far. He actually said no. It’s unheard of. Vanessa was furious. She’s in hot pursuit. She always wins.’
‘How?’ Max asked.
‘She’s going to be on the Camisis trip. If you go as courier she’ll be in your care. I suppose I shouldn’t wish her onto you,’ Jonty said.
‘She travels alone, does she?’
‘Not this time. Her last bloke walked out on her and she’s got a poet at present. You know the kind of chap, cashes in on looking like an Elizabethan pirate, and preys on women as though he were one. He is said to have left half a dozen kids and a wretched wife somewhere in East Anglia, and some other bereft female in Cambridge,’ Jonty said.
‘I should like to see you doing Vanessa’s job,’ Max said.
‘My dear Father. Not a hope. You know her; that voice, those looks—how can I compete?’
Vanessa Papillon’s famous voice was inimitable, literally; many mimics had tried.
It was a contralto with a resonant undertone like a plucked cello string. She had amber eyes and streaked tabby hair that defied gravity to stick out like a cloud around her head. Once a politician had stroked it unthinkingly; and failed to get the incident edited out of the programme, although he protested all the way to the Chairman of the Board.
Max Solomon could not deny Vanessa’s beauty and fame. But he believed that his son’s talent was equal to anyone’s.
‘You stood in for her once. Everyone said you were marvellous.’
‘And I have never been forgiven.’
‘You’d be better than she is. You should have your chance.’
‘Over Vanessa’s dead body,’ Jonty said. He looked out of the window.
Jonty was bored by talk of the woman with whom he spent so much of his working life. He said, ‘I wish I could understand why snow seems so nasty here when one pays so much to see it in a ski resort.’
‘Osmond of Camisis says that in southern Egypt it never even rains.’
Chapter Three
Dr Hoyland sees me watching her. She says, ‘Mr Solomon, I might as well admit to you that I’m a fraud. I am not really an Egyptologist at all.’
My heart sinks. It is I who will receive the complaints if the lectures are not good enough. I say, ‘You mean you aren’t an archaeologist?’
‘No, that’s what I am. But I haven’t specialised in the Middle East. I just hope that nobody will notice.’
‘If that’s all . . .’ I say, relieved.
‘Mr Osmond was desperate for a replacement lecturer at short notice.’
There has been a good deal of short notice about this trip. Three people dropped out, an elderly widow (to my relief) and a couple of Americans. Dr Macmillan made a very late booking, the Bensons and Mr Bloom later still. There were vacancies on the package because of its expense. My company comes expensive.
Osmond was not specific about what stopped Professor Thomas from coming. An ill-omened expedition?
*
The separate members of the party do not meet until we are all standing at the customs tables in Cairo airport, where Mr Knipe first catches sight of Dr Macmillan.
He calls her name so loudly that even the vendors beyond the barrier cease their shouts for a moment. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I am on holiday.’
‘Here? With Camisis?’
‘I have been wanting to visit Egypt for ages,’ she says. She stares at him with what looks to me like a kind of defiance. She looks tired, more so than a four-hour daytime flight can explain. She has orange hair and a pale, drawn face, and fixes pale eyes on Knipe. He shouts:
‘You bloody liar. You had never even heard of the place before I . . .’
Miss Papillon’s voice professionally tops his. ‘Won’t you introduce me to your friend?’ But she is interrupted by the customs officer, who wishes to search her cases. He must be one of the fundamentalists who disapprove of provocative women. We pretend not to watch him feeling through the lace underwear and chiffon nightgowns. He pokes suspiciously at films, cassettes and tampons. Then he empties out bottles of tablets, and demands that she identify each.
She goes through them, as we all pretend not to listen. Her pharmacopoeia includes an alphabet of vitamins, something to stop the squitters, as she puts it, something to avert malaria, to prevent sunburn, to induce sleep and to ensure wakefulness.
‘So many drugs,’ Miss Benson says. She has already told several of us about her devotion to homeopathic remedies, many of which she has brought with her.
‘Drugs?’ The customs official knows the word, only too well.
‘No it isn’t drugs,’ Miss Papillon snaps. ‘Do I look like a hophead?’ It is obvious that the man knows quite well that these are permitted medicaments and is enjoying himself. I begin to feel that it is unlikely that I shall do so during the next two weeks.
*
‘I certainly doubted whether Janet Macmillan would enjoy herself in the next two weeks,’ Tamara said. ‘Me, you had sent on a wonderful free holiday, at least that was what it felt like so far.’
‘Not a fool’s errand, then?’ Mr Black asked.
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong. I thought it was. After all, I had just been reading what your researcher thought about Janet Macmillan. I think he missed his vocation as a gossip columnist.’
‘You ought to know where the best information comes from,’ he said.
‘Charwomen? Party tattlers?’ Tamara’s nose wrinkled as her courtier ancestress’s must have done at the reminder of things that were beneath her. ‘All the same,’ she admitted, ‘it was quite useful at the time.’
*
A typical product of that close-knit kinship system of the academic upper classes, Janet Macmillan was the daughter of a dead economist and of the first woman to have become Principal of a Cambridge college that had formerly been for men only. Janet had climbed straight up the conventional education ladder, had the usual number of previous affairs and experiences, and was knocked out by love, of a kind, for Timothy Knipe. She said he was the first man to teach her that there was a difference between the head and the heart.
Timothy had not been invited to dinner with Janet’s Managing Director in his Old Rectory just outside Cambridge. Timothy was to stay in the flat watching—and remembering to tape—Giles Needham’s last programme.
Janet’s social evening had industrial implications. She worked on the development of medical machinery. Her own special interest was in electro-encephalography. The guest of honour was Russell Kopelovitz, an American scientist working in the same field. He was tipped to win a Nobel prize.
Hugo Bloom was there. He was one of those successful businessmen drafted in to give the benefit of their entrepreneurial skills to an ailing Health Service and in a position to steer valuable contracts towards the firm. There was a professor of surgery with a dim wife and a professor of psychology with a drunken one.
The Managing Director glanced regularly around his table. There were some subjects that he intended to have discussed. His wife had been briefed.
Janet told the surgeon about her new interest in ancient Egypt. She hoped to go there with Tim, who had introduced her to the subject on which he, and therefore she, was passionate. They would see it when they could afford to; but he had five children, and she helped out with their maintenance. Her Managing Director had not invited Janet that evening in order to hear her tell the man from Addenbrooke’s about the Pharaohs. He was relieved when he saw his American visitor turn from his hostess to Janet.
Hugo Bloom, on the other side of the narrow table, was the target of heavy flirting from the drinker who, having discovered that he was not married, began to make impertinent guesses about his private life. She had elicited that he had come over from Fernley where he spent most weekends.
‘I know all about it,’ she said loudly. ‘Arty farty sub-Bloomsbury with madrigals.’
‘I play the clarinet,’ he said.
‘I’ll bet it costs you. I saw their brochure. Lots of stuff about their priceless ambience, with a hefty price tag. Anyway, it’s probably poisoning you.’
‘We eat very well,’ Hugo Bloom said, putting a sliver of duckling into his mouth.
‘I’ll bet, considering how often I’ve seen Ann Benson in the cash-and-carry buying your ready-cooked meals for the deep freeze. But I didn’t mean that. Don’t you know there’s a government research station next door? I’d be worried about radiation sickness.’ The woman’s chatter masked the fact that Janet was telling Kopelovitz a little too precisely about results that might have a commercial application.
Janet was at her best, her employer thought, enjoying the glitter of her tight rings of red hair, and freckle-sanded skin. She was prettified by love, even if it was for a useless layabout who claimed to be a poet. It was not surprising that she held the attention of Professor Kopelovitz; or that Hugo Bloom clearly found her far more attractive than the lush on his left.
&
nbsp; A good time in Janet Macmillan’s life then; professional recognition, personal happiness. It lasted, perhaps, another three weeks; until Timothy Knipe went on the television chat show called Butterfly Net. Janet watched and taped it, and it must say something about her nature that she never wiped it out. It followed immediately on the last of Giles Needham’s programmes; the one that had been shown on the evening of the Managing Director’s dinner, and taped by Tim for Janet to see when she got home.
‘Upped and left, from one day to the next, just like that,’ according to the cleaning woman Janet employed two mornings a week. ‘Early November, it must have been. I could tell she’d been crying and the dustbin was full of all his gear. He’d walked out on her.’
Had he written? Once, that Mrs Gosling knew of. ‘A postcard; he asked her to send all his books about Egypt because he was going there for a holiday, and not to forget the ones about Giles Needham’s dig because he was going to go there too. Such a shame, when Janet had been saving all that time to go there herself. But she didn’t send the books. I saw them on her desk. The card was in the bin.’
That must have been at the same time that Janet’s job blew up in her face too, though neither Mrs Gosling nor, later, the researcher knew anything about that.
Janet had been summoned to a meeting at which the Managing Director sat in like a biased umpire.
The Man from the Ministry, a smug bureaucrat with a closed mind, and Janet Macmillan, began from such different standpoints that it was hard to imagine their parallel minds ever being able to meet.
Even if Janet had been able to produce a logical argument for what to her and her friends and family was an axiom, he would not have been interested. The free dissemination of scientific results, to her almost the entire foundation of her ethical beliefs, was a meaningless concept to him. Personal reticence and public candour was what Janet’s code required; his, the opposite.
