by Jessica Mann
*
The exchange had sounded convincing. But Tamara found herself vividly reminded of the situation Agatha Christie had presented in Death on the Nile. Was it possible that Janet and Tim were putting on a show? And if so, whatever for?
*
Max Solomon wrote:
I slept, but badly.
Half-conscious, I heard conversations. Asleep, I dreamt.
I dread my dreams. Once I could neutralise them by making fiction of them. They were my raw material. Now I dream and there is no consolation. Trains thunder through my imagination. There are uniforms. There is—
No. No more. Tonight I shall take a double dose of barbiturates. Then at least I shall not remember the nightmares.
Vanessa Papillon says she had a sleepless night. I am not sure whether it is a complaint or a boast. John Benson was disturbed by other people’s snores.
Breakfast is coffee, ships’ biscuits and tinned butter ennobled by Oxford marmalade. We are assured that the coffee was made from mineral water.
In daylight we see that the living room is a pleasant, wood-lined saloon. Giles Needham says that it is really just camping. But it is the kind of camp that empire builders had, well maintained by respectful natives who pad in and out with the food, and clear plates away with a grace more suitable for a West End hotel.
‘How cheerful they all look,’ Ann Benson says.
‘Remarkable considering that we are sitting above their villages.’ Giles tells us what is lost under the vast lake. Nine thousand homes and nine hundred thousand palm trees were drowned in the Sudan. Now its people starve, and their sympathisers in a small country far away try to extort food for them by crime against our Pharaoh’s relative. North of the border in Egypt, as many trees and homes again disappeared to less regret than the temples, monuments, and the Nubians’ own traditional culture.
Qasr Samaan is very near the uncertain border between the two countries. We are more than five hundred kilometres from Aswan, sitting by a new island that was a mountain top. It is about two acres, roughly triangular.
Thirty kilometres north of us is Qasr Ibrim where the Egypt Exploration Society has been running excavations since long before it became an island. It was on the southern border of the Roman Empire. Then it became a Nubian bishopric, and later was occupied by mercenaries from Bosnia until only a century ago. A wealth of written material from all periods has been found. It is a richer site than Qasr Samaan, but Giles Needham’s propaganda was for his own.
‘Nobody suggested we could go there,’ John Benson complains.
‘That’s my good fortune then,’ Giles replies very pleasantly. ‘I am looking forward to showing you our site here, and giving you a taste of life on the dig.’
‘Just what we wanted,’ Hugo Bloom says.
‘We are working on the remains of a cathedral with some wonderful frescoes.’
‘Christian?’ Benson asks.
‘Yes, Coptic of course. And we have the southernmost example of pharaonic material too. We are well beyond the boundary of the Egyptian empire.’
‘Jewellery and gold?’ Vanessa asks.
‘Alas, no. Pipe stems. Fragments of textile and bits of artillery. What about fetching the site plan, Poll, would you? We’ll show everyone the layout.’
Hugo Bloom wonders who keeps the things that Needham finds.
As we have already heard from Sayeed, the Egyptian government is very keen to prevent any antiquities from being exported. That’s why an inspector from the state antiquities service is stationed here. The dig may not proceed without him.
*
It has seemed a long day. The incessant wind becomes exhausting. Vanessa wears a hat fastened down by a long chiffon scarf that ties under her chin. Polly says:
‘I think being windswept suits me.’ From time to time she pulls a glass from her pocket to make sure of it.
We all become very dusty. Needham tells us not to worry; the servants will wash all our clothes. We see them washing their own, kneeling by the lake in traditional poses, their movements graceful and unforced as they slam the fabric against the rock, up and down, up and down, and then swirl it in the water. A line on their barge, fifty yards from ours, is festooned with blue, brown and white garments.
Miss Benson wishes she could swim here. Giles Needham often does. He says there is no bilharzia in the lake, except where it is stagnant. The water here is well enough agitated by the wind. It is not deep on this northern side of Qasr Samaan where the rock slopes away gently, but on the other side a cliff drops down to one hundred and fifty feet.
‘What about crocodiles?’ Miss Benson says.
‘They say there are some,’ Giles says, and Polly squeals:
‘You never told me that.’
‘You are unlikely to see any. But when one of the ferries to Wadi Halfa from Aswan went down a few years ago, all the passengers were eaten if they weren’t drowned.’ He has a ghoulish, satisfied smile; the adults among us disbelieve him.
We straggle across the rocks behind him to see his excavations.
Trenches outlined by string are dug into the dust. From them arise white and grey stones. They are the remains of the church. Needham shows us the frescoes. At first it looks as though only the eye of religious or archaeological faith could discern them but the ghost of multicoloured pictures gradually emerges. The remaining paint is pink, pale blue, faint beige. Once it was lapiz and azure, terracotta, ochre and gold. Giles runs his finger around outlines that were the Virgin and Child, St John and St Antony.
Tamara Hoyland is enthralled. She stoops to the trench, gazes up to the decorations, hangs on Needham’s words.
The rest of us are more easily sated. We begin to wander across the island. It is uniformly grey, rocky and dusty. Across the water on the shore more dirt and stones run out of sight to north and south. There are no palm trees. There is no sign of present or past inhabitation. It is desolate; a wilderness. The only special feature is a row of rough rectangles cut into the side of the rock on the lake-shore. Polly says that they are the graves of the Roman soldiers who died here, beyond their frontier.
‘Poor things,’ she says. ‘So far from home. So lonely. It’s . . . it’s rather creepy, don’t you think?’
‘Creepy?’
‘They must have felt cut off from everything, like us. I might as well be on the moon. Or in prison or something.’
‘You are kept busier,’ I suggest.
‘Yeah. Labelling bits of broken pottery with red and green ink.’
‘You are sorry you came?’
‘I wanted to work with Giles. He’s so . . .’ Her voice trails off. Even to a man who could be her grandfather, perhaps especially, she cannot utter the thoughts; I can guess them. He wild as a hawk, she soft as a dove. True love; and all the self-obsession that accompanies it. She never forgets herself for an instant, always looking in her little mirror, re-tying her headscarf, pulling at her skirt, touching the little blemishes on her face.
Polly is not a star, like Vanessa, not delicious like Tamara, not intellectual like Janet, nowhere near as intelligent as any of them—three remarkable women, after all—but she has the attraction that the young hold for us as we get older, of, simply youth—firm flesh, supple limbs, attributes that Polly will not learn to value herself until she has lost them. She probably agonises about her underslung jaw and close-set eyes.
My hat blows off, and she retrieves it for me. She says, ‘This wind. It gets on your nerves, don’t you think? The others say that awful things happen if you are out here too long. Do you think it could really make you mad?’ I tell her about the wind variously known as the khamsin, meltemi, or mistral and how its influence can be accepted as an excuse for crime.
‘Crimes of passion, yeah,’ she says. ‘I wonder what it would feel like if a man killed for me.’ But no man would kill for Polly; nor for Ann Benson. I could see the other three women as femmes fatales; in their own ways, each could be a tragic heroine.
Chapter Eight
I have been sitting on the peak of the island watching my party. The Bensons poke discontentedly among the ruins. John will be saying that he cannot bear them. His sister will say that they are perfectly fascinating. Usually Hugo Bloom pacifies his friend but he has been lying in the sun in the windbreak of a rock with Janet Macmillan. I watch him sit up, and speak to her earnestly and at some length. He takes her by the arm. He seems to plead. Janet rolls over abruptly. She stands up, and makes an unmistakably negative gesture with her hand. She moves away.
‘Very interesting,’ Vanessa Papillon says. I had not noticed that she was standing so close to me. She goes on, ‘That’s the difference between me and amateurs like your son Jonathan. All he would have seen there is a man getting the sexual brush-off.’
‘What did you see?’ I ask.
‘What a professional journalist who has useful sources and knows how to use them would see.’ She smirks, like the other cats she resembles.
I shall advise Osmond that this part of the package should not be repeated next year. The place is too claustrophobic. We are thrown too much together.
I have never felt quite as I do here. The isolation makes me uneasy, even frightened. It is a kind of panic fear. There is no communication at all with the outside world. The expedition is self-sufficient, with its supplies of preserved foods and its own doctor. ‘He gets very bored,’ Giles Needham says.
After lunch (tinned tuna fish, peas and pears) most of us disperse to lie down out of the midday sun. Giles Needham works on—‘We always do a nine-hour day’—but since digging is suspended during the absence of the government inspector he is sorting finds on the pot deck.
I listen to the sounds of this curious environment. The water is naturally tideless but is blown into waves that slap against the sides of the barge; wind whistling into every corner; the flapping awning; the continuous clicking of sand or dirt against the deck and sides of the barge; the voices of the Nubian workmen. They never bring their wives, though some have gone away now to visit them. They earn enough in a season here to support their families for a year. They think themselves lucky in comparison with the rest of their dispossessed countrymen.
Hugo Bloom asked Giles why the Nubians don’t use feluccas or other smaller boats on the lake. It seems they have no tradition of going on the water although the ancients garrisoned the Nile and had a fleet as far as it was navigable—which was about as far as where we are now. South of their patrols the Nile was obstructed by cataracts and ran through ravines. Now the water is navigable and ferries ply it between Wadi Haifa and Aswan. But for the poor inhabitants there is no wood left to make boats.
Perhaps it is because they have no tradition of sailing that the men are having trouble in mending the tug that brought us here. We were to spend the afternoon travelling further south, probably into the Sudan to see some carved rock statues. The patriarch has explained to Giles that this is impossible. Even those of us who cannot understand the gutturals and fricatives of Arabic can read the sign language.
‘Don’t say we shall be stuck here tomorrow?’ Vanessa protests, having evidently given up any hope of charming the impervious Giles. He regrets that she is so anxious to get away. She glances from him to Polly. ‘You know how it is for us journalists. Never happy out of reach of a telephone.’
‘But you are on holiday,’ Miss Benson says.
‘Nothing to report from here, surely,’ Giles says.
Vanessa turns her tawny gaze on him. ‘You’d be surprised. Or perhaps you wouldn’t.’
John Benson sits in the awning’s shade, ignoring the pots that are spread out beside him, and grumbles. Tamara Hoyland is still lying down. She ate little lunch. ‘Cleopatra’s revenge?’ Vanessa said to her.
Hugo Bloom has gone with Polly to examine the facilities for taking and developing photographs. It is an important part of the work here, so much of which consists of recording what cannot be moved and may disappear. The cubicle, boarded in against the light and as hot as the black hole of Calcutta, contains an extraordinary assortment of chemicals and equipment.
‘I cannot bear inefficiency,’ John Benson says.
Vanessa, walking past him, says lightly, ‘Even in the fine arts?’ He watches her with dislike as she goes downstairs towards Tim Knipe’s heroic snores. She is a dislikeable woman. She has told me at least a dozen times that I should be getting down to work. Can she suppose that I actually choose not to? Sometimes she speaks of Jonty. Her tone is slighting. But if it were not for her, Jonty would have his chance.
*
An under-occupied afternoon. My childlike charges should have been provided with entertainment, and resent going without. Giles Needham began to look harried. He will be glad to see us leave tomorrow.
Now we are all ‘changing for dinner’. Both words are euphemisms. The tinned food will be served with vitamin supplements. Only one of us has brought a wardrobe that is capable of variation.
Somebody has diarrhoea. Somebody else has sinus trouble.
Vanessa Papillon sends Tim to fetch her a new bottle of mineral water. I hear him commenting to somebody else that its distributors must be making a fortune.
John Benson, in the cabin next to mine, is uninhibitedly farting.
Footsteps go up the stairs. Drinks are on offer in the saloon.
I hear rubber soles squeaking up the stairs. Ann Benson, in her sensible, if hot, brogues. The rest of them wear rope-soled shoes.
I shall go up now. I shall click up in my leather sandals. Who will recognise my tread?
*
Later. Shall I take the barbiturates against the dreams? Or shall I sleep naturally? My supply is running low. Vanessa Papillon ‘borrowed’ my spare bottle. I may have a greater need of them before I can get more. But the dreams!
I have left my party listening to a lecture by Giles Needham, who performs with the fire and vision that tempted so many of our party here in the first place. Polly hangs on every word. Vanessa went down to bed saying that she never listens to lectures. Tamara Hoyland did not come up for dinner. She is the first of us to succumb to the dreaded D and V.
I feel uneasy myself; not as to the digestion, but probably as a result of last night’s dreams. They stay with me all day.
I shall take some pills later; when the others are in bed and my duties are done.
Someone is shouting.
Feet are thudding on the stairs. I
*
There, mid-phrase, the diary of Max Solomon ended.
His writing carried on, even on the same page, even on the same line, but it was of a different kind.
The journal had been in a considered prose style, in careful handwriting, as though the author were performing an exercise to keep his muscles supple; brainwork.
After the interruption the pen had raced across the page almost without punctuation, undisciplined. It was a gush of creation that would be published to the greatest acclaim of Max Solomon’s career, and to astonished critical evaluation of the new style in which he had written. It was uninhibited, unmannered, a flood of truth. The book was titled Refugee. It began as it had begun in that exercise book. The first sentence read, ‘The mother threw the boy away from the soldiers, out of the moving train.’
Chapter Nine
When Tim Knipe screamed Tamara Hoyland was standing by the open door of her cabin with the fresh bottle of water. She crossed the passage to Vanessa’s room. Tim moved further into it and she followed him, allowing the door to swing closed behind her.
Vanessa Papillon was sprawled on the bed with her arms flung above her head, and her legs, outlined by the sheet, widespread. Her mouth hung open. Her eyes stared. Vomit smeared her face and the pillow onto which it had fallen. Excrement stained the bedclothes.
The glass on the angareeb had been overturned. There was a quarter-full bottle of water beside it.
Tamara gently shoved Tim aside. She picked up the opened bottle of water, and replaced it with her own
full one. Then she turned, and hit Timothy Knipe on each cheek in turn. She put all her strength behind the blows. The falsetto screaming stopped. He fell to his knees beside the bed.
‘Well done,’ Hugo Bloom said. He joined Tamara in the narrow space. The other members of the party were jammed in the doorway, craning to see in.
Max Solomon’s face had turned grey. The lines under his eyes, deeply incised, outlined them as though with a kohl pencil. His mouth had fallen open, squared like the mask of tragedy. Ann Benson’s underlip was caught in her teeth, her forehead crinkled in an intense frown. John Benson looked as though he was about to say that he could not bear people to die.
Janet Macmillan peered between their shoulders. Her face was intent, as it must be when she looked into a microscope; detached and scientific. Polly on the other hand was completely subjective in her reaction. She had buried her face in Giles Needham’s shoulder. He absent-mindedly patted her back. Then he put her to one side and edged his way into the room. It was as though a director had demanded action.
Hugo Bloom said, ‘How very macabre.’ He twitched at the soiled sheet to pull it up over the dead woman’s head.
Polly had begun to cry in whoops and gasps like a much younger child. Giles Needham said, ‘She shouldn’t be here. Could someone take her upstairs?’
‘I’ll give her one of my homeopathic potions.’ Ann Benson assumed the mantle of efficiency. ‘Come along, my dear.’
Max Solomon followed them, away from the death chamber, walking like an automaton.
‘I suppose he is all right,’ Giles said. ‘He isn’t a young man. The shock . . .’
Hugo Bloom followed the writer, and looked in through the door of his cabin. ‘He’s already scribbling.’
Tim Knipe wiped his face on the back of his hand. Moisture glistened on his beard. He said, ‘Work is the artist’s therapy.’ He pushed past Tamara and the others and turned towards his own cabin. ‘You have to write it out of you. It’s the way to deal with your traumas.’
