The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  Harriet passed over it without comment and presently came to a rather blurred impression of a small person in a long flowing gown of indeterminate style. “Oh look, here she is … Rose Jessamy – R.J. as she wanted to be called. I think she rather fancied herself as one of the avant-garde, a would-be Bloomsburyite. I’ve often wondered what happened to her – perhaps the police will trace her now – she never became famous, as we were all convinced she would.”

  Those painted rooms, never to be used, scarcely seen, even, after they were finished. Those doomed aspirations that survived only as flakes of colour and crumbling plaster. How short and transitory their life! How ironic and sad that only such a tragic discovery had brought them to notice, too late. Harriet turned the pages and Nina saw Rose Jessamy there again, still blurred. “Who’s this good-looking man she’s with? I haven’t seen him in any of the other photos.”

  She felt Harriet grow very still beside her. “Oh, that? I’d forgotten he was in here. That’s Kit.”

  Nina waited. It was quite evident, from her tone of voice, that Kit was someone of importance to Harriet, but she merely said, in a dismissive voice, “He was a very distant cousin. He came to live with us when he was orphaned as a small boy.”

  “Like another brother?”

  “No, Kit was never like a brother.”

  There was a sense of hatches being battened down. Harriet closed the album. The subject was obviously off-limits and Nina felt she had been tactless. Once, she had asked Guy why Harriet had never married. “There weren’t the young men to go round, you know, Nina – so many superfluous women in her generation,” had been the answer. Perhaps Kit, like Marcus, had been yet another one of the thousands of young men who lay forever in the mud of Flanders’ fields. But if he had once been close to the family, lived with them, wasn’t it odd that she had never heard any mention of him from either Harriet or from Daisy?

  “On the way here, Dad said there were papers as well as photos, and you were thinking of putting them all together.” Perhaps, thought Nina, there would be some mention of Kit there.

  “Did he also tell you I’d planned to rope you in to give me a hand?”

  “No – but of course I will – were you thinking of a sort of family history?”

  “If I was, yesterday changed that.” Harriet took a sip of wine and put the glass down carefully, and then said abruptly, “There’s a journal my mother wrote when she was in Egypt.” She hesitated momentarily. It was unlike Harriet to be undecided. “I think you could help, first by reading it, then telling me what you think. I believe it might – just – have some bearing on why she was killed. Have a look at it and try to read between the lines, if you will – isn’t that what historical novelists call interpretation?”

  Nina smiled faintly. “You’re not afraid you might have to curb my imagination?”

  “It can’t be any more imaginative than some of the constructions that have already been made on the subject! But you don’t have to make your mind up immediately.”

  “No, I’d really like to be in on this. So where is it, this journal?”

  “In a minute.”

  Harriet remained silent, evidently sorting her thoughts, while sounds one never heard – or noticed – in London came into the room – a branch creaking in the wind that had got up, a sudden spat of rain against the window like a handful of flung gravel, a little hiss on the hot fire as rain found its way down the chimney, the deep reverberations of the church clock. Harriet twisted her glass round and round, and the dregs of wine in the bottom looked like blood reflected in the light of the flames. “You might think you remember everything, but memory’s an unreliable commodity,” she said at last. “Things never discussed, pushed away over the years, until you begin to wonder whether they actually happened or whether you only imagined they did. There were accounts at the time, of course, newspapers and so on, the usual mass of speculation from uninformed sources. No one ever came within a mile of the truth. Not even those of us who were close to her. But now–” Nina was amazed to hear a kind of dread in her voice.

  “At least you know what happened to her now,” she reminded her gently. “There’s still the question of who killed her, of course – but that’ll be up to the police to find out, won’t it?”

  “And you think they’re going to?” Harriet raised her eyebrows. “Nina, that police inspector. He’s a different kettle of fish from the other one who looked into things after my father died, I’ll admit – but he’s working with a forty-year handicap and my natural scepticism makes me wonder –”

  “Wonder what?”

  “How much time and money Scotland Yard will devote to this. Looking at it from their viewpoint, the odds on solving the case aren’t hopeful. They’ve practically nothing to work on. Whoever did it could conceivably be dead by now and in any case, they don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for following a trail as cold as that. I told the inspector about my mother’s journal, and about some notebooks of mine that I wrote at the time, and asked if he thought they’d be any use. He gave me a very old-fashioned look, as if I thought it was all some sort of detective story.”

  Wondering how to answer, Nina came across and knelt on the hearthrug, held out her slender hands to the blaze, then reached out for Harriet’s. The flames reflected in her eyes the concern she was feeling. Harriet was usually so much in control. But the events of the day hadn’t been without cost, she was pale and drawn, as if she was in for one of her migraines, the paralysing, pain-shot headaches inherited from her mother, which occasionally prostrated her. She’d just lit another cigarette, which wasn’t going to help. “Darling,” Nina said, “you’re not really thinking of trying to find out who did this all on your own?”

  The answer was oblique. “It isn’t likely the police are going to tell us everything they may discover – I don’t suppose, in fact, they’re obliged to tell us anything at all if they don’t choose to. But I have to know for certain what happened that night. I must.” She drew fiercely on her cigarette. “Now that we know at last how it ended. Somebody must have known things at the time that never came out into the open. I for one was aware of much that I never spoke about …”

  “You?” Of all people, Nina could scarcely envisage Harriet keeping quiet in such a situation. “Then why didn’t you speak?”

  “There was nothing I could put my finger on. I didn’t know. And I believed at the time that what I suspected could only have hurt everyone even more.” Nina waited for Harriet to say what those suspicions had been, but nothing was forthcoming, though it was clear she was keeping something back. If it had been anyone else but Harriet, Nina might have thought she was afraid. Was there someone she was hoping to protect?

  “There might be a lot of things cropping up now that will be hurtful,” she said quietly.

  “Nina, I know there will be. But it’s too late for those sort of regrets, now. And what could be worse than what they’ve just found? I’m not fooling myself, I know it’s possible we may never make any sense out of it – but someone has to try.”

  For a moment there Harriet had looked as though she were treading barefoot on broken glass, not knowing where to step next, but the expression was soon replaced by a more habitual certainty and determination. She would never, Nina saw, really admit to the possibility of failure. In Harriet’s numerate, logical world, problems were always capable of solution. If A equalled B, then C must equal X. Or something.

  “Grigsby wouldn’t admit it this afternoon, but I think the same thing could easily happen now that happened before. Swept under the carpet – though then it was for fear of the scandal. I know that wasn’t entirely the fault of the police – it was tacitly understood that there was to be no real effort to trace Mama, you know. If not too much was made of it, the gossip might be stopped. And then, when my father took his own life, and there was no concealing there was something wrong any more, everyone was left to assume that she’d run off with the Egyptian and my father had shot himself be
cause he couldn’t bear the thought of living without her. Which naturally,” she added drily, “made a bigger scandal than ever.”

  “It must have seemed a reasonable enough explanation at the time, though,” Nina said slowly, thinking there might be another one, which would surely not have escaped Harriet. “But now you think this Iskander might have killed her before he disappeared?”

  “I said as much to the Inspector, didn’t I?”

  Abruptly, Harriet picked up from the table a slim book covered in limp grey suede, with gilt edges to the pages and a pretty little brass clasp fastening it. “The journal.” She sat down again, still holding on to the book, and stared into the heart of the glowing logs, her gaze turned inwards.

  “What is it, an account of their trip to Egypt?”

  “In a way, but it’s rather more than just a record of what she saw. Reading between the lines … no one else has ever seen this – I only read it myself for the first time last night. It was amongst the things I brought home yesterday, and I’d forgotten it existed until then, although I actually found it just after my mother had gone. But somehow, reading it then would have seemed like an intrusion … we all, you know, hoped she’d return, though I think we must have known she never would. And then, when we left Charnley for the last time … I simply bundled it up with all those other things when I hid them. What on earth makes one do something like that?”

  “Superstition, I suppose. Maybe leaving something behind ensures you’ll return. You know what they say.”

  Harriet thrust the little book at last into Nina’s hands, and then suddenly stood up and fetched three rather dog-eared exercise books with marbled covers from a drawer. “Here are those notebooks of mine, as well. You can get some idea from them what went on at Charnley just before Mama disappeared. You might see some connection with the time in Egypt that I’ve missed. You needn’t read them just yet, or even right through, just the relevant passages that I’ve flagged.” After a moment’s reflection, she said abruptly, “Forget I said that, read the lot, if you’re so inclined. You might as well know the worst. And in any case – well, just read everything.”

  “If it’s private–”

  “Privacy,” said Harriet, sounding more like herself, “is a luxury none of us can afford in all this.” She yawned and stretched. “I’m for bed. I’m not used to wine these days and it’s made me sleepy. I’ll bring you a cup of cocoa and some blankets before I go up.”

  “I’ll make the cocoa while you get the blankets.”

  Later, left to herself, Nina undressed before the dying fire and snuggled the blankets around her on the sofa, the rain now beating in earnest on the window-panes, the hot drink on a table by her side. She wasn’t at all sleepy and the light of the single lamp falling on the pages of Beatrice’s elegant little book was inviting, even more so when she saw the inscription on the flyleaf: ‘My Egyptian Journal’. While in the WAAF, Nina herself had served for a short time in Egypt – in Alexandria, and in a transit camp in the Canal Zone. That had been modern, wartime Egypt, of course, but on one of her leaves, she and a fellow Waaf had made an expedition to Upper Egypt, visited the great temples at Luxor, crossed to the Valley of the Kings. It would be interesting, if nothing else, to compare Beatrice’s impressions with her own.

  She read fast, but the fire had burnt out by the time she had reached the point where Beatrice and her party had arrived at Luxor and were preparing to visit the places Nina herself remembered.

  Wycombe, who had joined them there, had – though it was not explained why – apparently been dead against the young Egyptian, Iskander, accompanying them on their excursions, and though Beatrice seemed to have made some attempt to insist that he should, she had seemingly given in to Wycombe’s wishes in the end. No reason was given for this, either.

  The entry recording all that finished somewhat abruptly at that point, except that below it, in a different coloured ink, as if written later, as an afterthought, were the words: ‘He intrigues, but sometimes frightens me. A fierce excitement beats in me, tinged with shame, when I think what might happen, what I want to happen; then I hear the echo of a still small voice which says this was not precisely the sort of advice that had guided my infant teaching.’

  There was no explanation for this enigmatic utterance, and Nina quickly turned the page, hoping to find, in the account of the expedition which followed, not only descriptions to stir her own memories, but also some hint as to who the ‘he’ might be. But she was disappointed on both counts. The expedition to the west bank did not seem to have been an unqualified success. Millie had clearly been right not to go with them, Beatrice commented briefly, the experience had been debilitating and exhausting. So exhausting, it seemed, that it had left little energy left for recording her impressions of what she had seen. She wrote only flat, brief descriptions of the Colossi, the funerary temples and the Valley of the Kings, quite unlike her almost lyrical descriptions of other, lesser wonders previously encountered. It was the same with the equally lacklustre account of the subsequent visit to Karnak on the following day, this time with Millie accompanying them, and whose marvels were faithfully described, but without enthusiasm. This, Nina felt, was intriguing. Perhaps Beatrice had not been feeling well, had succumbed to the heat or one of the minor indispositions the food and climate of Egypt induced. Or maybe it was Millie’s refusal to participate, or her unwilling presence in the latter visit, that had cast a gloom over the events. Whatever it was, none of the awe-inspiring ruins, some of the greatest wonders of the world, apparently aroused any strong feelings in her.

  But then had come the visit to the Luxor Temple, a totally different matter.

  This had obviously been so traumatic an experience that the words had poured out on to the paper with a vehemence that caused the pen to splutter and made difficulties in deciphering parts of what she had written. The luridness of the account, her reactions to the guide’s flickering torch throwing grotesque shadows on the walls, the emotions the experience had aroused in her, the terror that had made her spin round to escape, the bang she’d received on her head, made it tempting to believe that she had been suffering from some temporary madness, brought on by an overdose of culture, or too much exposure to the sun.

  Indeed, the entry finished on a note of bathos, with Beatrice simply saying how she remembered nothing after the accident until she had found herself in bed, back at the hotel, with Millie and Hallam fussing around her.

  And that was virtually the end of the journal, except for one final brief entry:

  Luxor, Monday, 19th April.

  “It has not taken much to persuade Millie and Glendinning to cut short the Nile trip and to abandon the plan to sail back to Cairo on Hathor. The dahabeah will be taken back to Cairo by the sailing master, while we will all return there by train with Amory and Wycombe. In fourteen hours we should be in Cairo – in as many days again I shall be back home with my children at Charnley, safe in my own settled existence, Egypt behind me. Had I but known!”

  But what it was that Beatrice had not known remained unwritten. Nina sat for a while, the book in her hand, speculating on what this could be. She turned back the pages and it was only then that she noticed a looseness between the cover and the last pages, a space, in fact, where a section of the journal must have been removed.

  Thoughtfully, she put the journal down, and picked up and flicked through the notebooks with the marbled covers, without any intentions of reading them at this late hour. Like her mother, Harriet had obviously been a compulsive recorder of her own feelings, for although, as she’d said, the notebooks didn’t contain day-by-day accounts, they were fat, and the pages well-filled with her forceful italic script. But as a phrase here and there caught her eye, Nina’s attention was held. She went back to the beginning and once started, found she couldn’t put them down, her mind inevitably searching for connections with what Harriet had written and the events she’d just read about that had happened in Egypt, eleven years previously.


  12

  Nina had agreed to Harriet’s suggestion that it was best for her to stay at the cottage for the time being, if they were to work together. There should be no difficulty about time off from the bank, since she’d been taking her holiday entitlements in dribs and drabs in order to leave the school holiday period free for those people with families, and she was still due to at least two weeks. After a hurried cup of coffee the next morning, she set out in pouring rain, wearing Harriet’s mac and a borrowed umbrella, and took the first bus from the village to catch an early train into London, leaving Harriet to get on with some of her correspondence papers, which she vowed absolutely must be marked. There might be a subtext there: wrestling with the corrections of such imponderables as quadrilateral equations or the square on the hypotenuse, felt Nina, to whom anything above the ten-times table lurked in the unplumbed depths of uncharted seas, must surely concentrate the mind wonderfully, leaving it free to work subliminally behind the scenes on personal problems. Maybe that wasn’t so far off the mark. Nina couldn’t get over the feeling that Harriet’s insistence on the Egyptian connection with her mother’s murder masked a fear that the real truth was to be found nearer home – within the family, even. And that – possibly – she’d seized upon this chance to rout it because, in truth, she didn’t have enough to occupy her mind. There was very little stimulus to be found in the country.

  The train was already almost full when it arrived, but she managed to get the last seat in the compartment which drew up beside her on the platform, after which it was standing room only for the City-bound office workers cramming in like sardines. The windows steamed up. Everybody smoked. Leaning her head back against the seat, she closed her eyes and wondered how many nights it would take to become accustomed to the church clock, punctuating the silence with its regular booms, on the hour and the half hour, each time just as she was about to drop off to sleep. She’d spent what was left of the night, after finishing Harriet’s notebooks, in a restless, half-comatose state. But it wasn’t only the clock: she knew that the events of the day, and what she’d afterwards read, so far into the night, had been so much in her mind that she clearly hadn’t been sufficiently composed for sleep before turning out the light.