The Arnoldis had three daughters, two of whom were already married. The third, Vittoria, was exactly the same age as Claudia: in fact – a fact considered magically propitious to everyone in the family – they had been born on the same day. She too, like Claudia, became a close friend. And though Beatrice was always being shunted on to other cities and countries, she never lost touch with Claudia herself. She thought of the Schuylers as her second family, although in some respects they were her only family. Other people had aunts and uncles, in-laws: she had only her father. There were no relatives left on her mother’s side of the family, either; it was as if her parents had each been the last surviving member of a tribe, or a country, or a race.
Over the next few years the Schuylers too were on the move: to England, and afterwards to America, while Beatrice travelled with her father’s expeditions. In his opinion she’d had enough of school; she was ready to do serious work.
They went to Afghanistan, Turkey, Mesopotamia. She kept the accounts, wrote up the day’s findings and listened to her father’s theories and stories.
When she was eighteen, she and her father joined a large expedition. At the base camp there were two wives and a woman described as a niece. There were difficulties with language, clashes over customs and habits and, above all, fights about who had the authority to do what. The general atmosphere of quarrel and intrigue was further complicated for Beatrice when she fell in love with a Canadian student named Paul, who had come out with the American team. He asked her to marry him. She was still pretending to think over her answer when one of the wives spoke to her father about him.
‘I don’t know what business it is of theirs,’ Beatrice said.
‘I think they probably have your interest at heart. You’re so young.’
‘They want to stop me having any romance in my life, just because they never had any.’
‘I don’t think it’s that. Anyone can have romance, if he wants it. They may feel it’s their duty, because you have no mother. For a woman, there’s always the question of –’
‘Morality? That’s what they kept talking about in school. They nearly turned me into a religious fanatic.’
‘Of pregnancy,’ her father said. ‘Of course, he’s in the same field – you’d be able to help him with his studies for a while. When you had children, perhaps you’d leave them at home with someone. I was able to take you along with me because you were an only child, but it wasn’t easy. If there’d been anyone to look after you, it would have been safer to leave you behind. And,’ he added, ‘you’re a better archaeologist than he is. He’s superficial. He doesn’t know what to look for. He has no flair for the job.’
Beatrice’s need for a romantic alliance with a man of her own age was so strong that if her father had been talking about a young man’s character, she wouldn’t have taken his word, but the indictment of his professional abilities made her question Paul’s integrity. Her father had a reputation. Paul was a newcomer. Her father was undoubtedly right. As for the rest, she recalled that among the stories circulating through the camp there was one about a girl back in Canada. And she knew for certain that Paul was writing to three women addressed as Miss: she’d seen the envelopes. She told him the next day, ‘I’ve thought about what you asked me and I think we should get to know each other better.’
‘But you love me, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘Well, that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’
‘I think we’d have a good start, because I’ve been trained for the same job. I could help you, even if we had a large family. But …’ She thought she really ought to admit that despite her love, she didn’t trust him. She trusted her father and Claudia and everyone in Claudia’s family: if she were in trouble or ill or needed advice, she knew that they would help her, no matter what they had to sacrifice. But how long would Paul be patient or understanding? She had no idea; nor was she sure how long she’d be able to put him first if he didn’t seem to be taking her wishes into consideration.
‘I just think,’ she repeated, ‘that we should get to know each other better.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘Two years,’ she said.
‘This is a joke, isn’t it?’
‘I think we ought to be sure.’
‘Because if it isn’t, it’s an insult. If you don’t want to, Beatrice, just say so.’
‘I don’t even know you,’ she burst out.
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped. ‘Of course it matters. We’d be living with each other for the rest of our lives.’ They’d be one. The thought suddenly terrified her. She didn’t know if she wanted to be one with anyone at all, ever.
‘But that’s all just going to happen as we go along. The important part is what we knew from the beginning.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes. That instant attraction.’
‘I feel that way about lots of people,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ He looked so scandalized that she didn’t know how to explain: to say that the kind of emotion she meant was something that would come over her suddenly or, just as quickly, would go away; and it didn’t seem to have much to do with who the man was, or whether he was likeable, or what the wives would have called ‘possible’. Sometimes just seeing the way a man turned his shoulders as he lifted a load of stones or swung a pickax was enough to make her feel interest and excitement.
‘I’ think it’s better to find out what we’re like,’ she said.
‘Is there any point? If you don’t love me?’
‘I love you, but why can’t we wait?’
‘That means no,’ he said. He walked off.
She was so discouraged that she almost ran after him. A long time afterwards she realized that his abrupt departure was calculated. By then, she had also understood that he’d been right: whatever she’d said, she had meant no. But at the time, she didn’t want to let go of him and of the idea of being wanted. She tried all through the evening meal to catch his eye. She stared at him across the table. He wouldn’t lift his head. As soon as the company broke up, he rushed away.
She had almost made up her mind to go charging after him, when one of the wives called her back and, talking about inconsequential matters, took her arm and led her away from the others. ‘When I was your age,’ the woman said, ‘I never imagined that I’d be part of a scholarly expedition. It’s really most absorbing, despite the inconvenience. And the many discomforts. Yes – I know this one’s a model of its kind, but you’re used to it, my dear. You’ve had invaluable training, simply by being near your father. This life was new to me when I married. But now I see the familiar faces every year. And the young ones come and go. It’s a shame that Paul won’t be with us next year.’
‘He hasn’t resigned, has he?’
‘Not at all. But his scholarship grant runs out at the end of the season. So, unless he can find some way of financing himself privately, I suppose he’ll have to go back to Canada.’
‘I see‚’ Beatrice said mildly. She hated the woman for telling her. Undoubtedly the action was meant kindly, although she didn’t think so at the time. Later she would also wonder – after it was too late to ask him – whether her father had had a hand in the disillusionment: whether he’d asked the woman to speak to her. He might have felt that it was the sort of thing a real mother would do. Girls whose mothers were living, Beatrice knew, had to put up with that kind of interference all the time, and with the fear induced by constant protectiveness and warnings; whereas she had never had anything but the beauty of the dream she’d invented around the absence of her mother.
She kept quiet and waited. Paul tried to make up. He accused her of insincerity. She said to him, ‘That’s not true,’ but she could tell that it was too late to go back to what she had felt before. She knew that he’d never loved her. She could hear it in his voice. She said that they’d better part and there was no reason wh
y they shouldn’t do it in a friendly way. Once more he left her abruptly and indignantly, this time calling her an obscene name: a word she didn’t know the precise meaning of, although she could guess the general sense of it. That too was in his voice.
For the next few weeks she could feel that everyone was talking about her. The wives, unexpectedly, made an effort to keep her company. And her father was as easy to talk to as ever, as fun-loving and full of good conversation. She asked him, ‘Have you ever thought of marrying again?’ The question had come to her in a rush, as if it were in itself an attempt to get close to him. She’d never considered the idea before.
‘I thought of it quite a lot when you were still small‚’ he said. ‘Not that I had anyone in mind, but – it seemed to me that you needed a mother. You sometimes looked completely lost. It upset me a great deal. But then I talked it over with one or two friends. And they told me that things would be so much worse if you didn’t take to a new mother.’
‘I couldn’t imagine it‚’ she said. ‘I’m glad that you didn’t. I only wondered for your sake. I wouldn’t mind now, you know. I wouldn’t have minded even when I was at school. It was just those six or seven years before.’
‘It’s impossible to repeat something like that‚’ he told her. ‘I wouldn’t want to try. Some people find happiness more than once. More than twice. We’re all different. You’ll find out what agrees with you. Just try to ask yourself if you’re sure of what you want.’
‘What kinds of people gossip, Papa?’
‘Politicians, journalists, old women, old men. Girls. Boys. Everyone I can think of. Even your father, on occasion. Why? Are people gossiping about me again?’
‘About me, I think. I can feel it in the air. And the way they all pretend not to be looking at me too closely.’
‘Let them. Don’t allow it to worry you.’
‘If people tell me things about someone, and I don’t know whether they’re true or not –’
‘You can ask the person. Or you can just think it over. Try to sort out the probable, the possible and the unlikely. It’s part of the trade.’
‘I might end up believing something bad of someone when it wasn’t actually true.’
‘You might. What would that show?’
‘That I drew the wrong conclusion on lack of evidence.’
‘Perhaps because other evidence predisposed you to think badly of the person.’
‘What other evidence?’
‘You tell me,’ he said. ‘You started this discussion.’
‘I never really trusted him,’ she said. ‘I wanted him all the same. But not for too long. Not forever.’
He gave her a complicated assignment that entailed meticulous collations of original notes and translations. The work was harder than anything she had done before. The time passed quickly for her.
The next season saw a new set of students; and the next. She became invaluable to her father and – when he was away – to many of his colleagues, who used to consult her as if she were his partner and equal.
She presided over the house in Switzerland like a curator in a museum. She loved being there, even on her own, surrounded by her father’s discoveries. She was always occupied with some work of hers or of his; she began to publish under her own name. And she traveled, sometimes with an expedition and sometimes merely to see friends. She made regular visits to the Arnoldis, in Rome; and to Paris, where the Schuylers went for Easter. She’d stay with Vittoria Arnoldi for a few weeks and then both of them would take the train to Paris, to join the Schuylers – ‘my American cousins’, as Vittoria called them. Beatrice began to remember Paul with less anger and blame. Ten years after the event, the hurt had gone. She thought of her old self as someone, like him, who shouldn’t have been taken seriously, and who was too inexperienced to behave well.
She was happier than she had been when she was younger. She saw that she had a place in life and she liked it.
*
Her father had just come to the end of a stay in Palmyra and was back in Bagdad for a while, when he fell ill. The first indication Beatrice had of the fact was an official letter of condolence.
She was certain that whoever wrote the letter must have made a mistake; people got things mixed up all the time, even names. She wrote back, and then decided that that wasn’t enough – she had to get out there and speak to the officials herself. Everyone tried to talk her out of it. They said that she wouldn’t be able to help.
She made the journey anyway. How could she have stayed at home, when her father might be anywhere at all, and she wouldn’t know about it? He could have written to her about plans to go on an expedition: it wasn’t unknown for letters to be lost or delayed for months. He could be in danger, while some petty bureaucrat was entering his name in the wrong set of records. She remembered her father himself telling her that an acquaintance of his had had to travel all over the world as Mr Brown Gray simply because a clerk somewhere hadn’t known how to copy out the information in his papers, according to which his hair was brown and his eyes gray.
As she moved from country to country, her father’s friends came to greet her; like cities on a map, they were dotted across the great distances she had to go. And when she neared the end of her journey, two of them, an uncle and nephew named Hoffmann, took on the local and foreign officials while she stood or sat silent nearby. Sometimes she felt compelled to interrupt, especially as people seemed to keep changing their stories. Her father, she was told, might not have been exactly ill; he might actually have been poisoned – that is, murdered. There was a woman in the case: more than one woman. And that always made for danger.
‘This is ridiculous‚’ she whispered to the Hoffmann uncle. ‘My father was used to having all sorts of friendships and so on. He never left anyone feeling resentful or unhappy.’
‘Perhaps a man who was a rival?’
‘Much more likely to have been a poor cook,’ she said. Then, feeling just like Mrs Schuyler, she asked for information about the servants.
His household had loved and admired him. According to them, he’d had a fever. One of them – a superstitious man – suspected that the professor had caught the disease from something he’d found when he was digging up a grave: everyone knew that it was forbidden to disturb the dead.
She asked where her father had been buried. They were shown to a small cemetery for Christian Europeans. The Hoffmanns stood on either side of her, in case the emotion or the climate should prove too much for her. She found it impossible to believe that her father was there, in that space of earth. Could they have buried someone else by mistake? She wanted to ask to see him – just to be sure. But that would be impractical as well as shocking. Everyone agreed that the thing had happened and that he was there. Friends of friends had been at the funeral. She simply found it against the nature of the world as she knew it that he should suddenly not be there for her to talk to or to write to.
On the return journey she began to believe in his death. Everyone she had met going out tried to comfort her on the way back. So many people had loved him. It made her feel closer to him to hear them talk, and yet it also persuaded her to accept the fact that he was dead.
When she got to Switzerland there were two letters waiting for her, from him. They were just like his usual letters, with no hint of bad feeling among his acquaintance or in the household.
She began to go through his papers, which were neatly arranged, as always. She kept herself busy. There were the clothes to be given away, the boxes of papers to be gone through: letters from his colleagues, his friends, and from her. All the letters from her childhood were there – every note she’d sent him from her schools in Egypt, France and Italy.
She used to wake in the night, choking with tears, bawling. Sometimes it was as if she were in the middle of a storm. The first time it happened, her cook, Maria, ran up the stairs to pound on her door. Beatrice shouted for her to go away; the next day she said that she was grateful for the ki
nd thought but that since nothing could help, it was better to ignore these outbursts. She didn’t try to stop.
For months she carried on mental talks with him. At times they became so real to her, she sometimes imagined that she could hear his voice. Perhaps if her mother hadn’t died early, there would have been another strong influence in her life. As it was, although she had loved her mother dearly and with a particular kind of love that no other person she’d met could evoke from her, her father had always been at the center of her life. He had shaped her interests, passed on his knowledge and talents to her, yet he’d given her the freedom to leave, if she wanted to. Despite the fact that she had remained an unmarried daughter, she led a more liberal life on her own than any married woman she knew, whether happy or not. Her father wouldn’t have minded if she’d wanted to travel to a different country, visit friends for long periods, spend her time in some new pursuit, or get married and move away. They’d known each other well enough for him not to have to explain that, as before, he’d speak out against any admirer of hers whom he considered unsuitable; and for her not to have to say that she sometimes felt guilty about her comfortable life, knowing how much he’d have loved to have grandchildren.
She missed him all the time. For years – long after his death – as soon as she thought of him, his presence was with her. She understood how it was that many people became religious after a bereavement: it was because they were impelled by an urge to reach the other person again. In her case, she grew less religious. The act of prayer had become a process of having conversations with herself and her memory of her father. She didn’t feel that she was developing eccentric habits – other people told her how they caught themselves thinking of what her father would say to such-and-such, and how dear he still was to them, how clearly recalled. She loved to hear people talk about him, especially if they were old friends who had known him before she was born, or even before he was married.
Sometimes she would remember, with a dreamlike vividness and immediacy, a phrase he used to favor, the way he’d looked at certain times, the sound of his chair scraping back over the floorboards as he stood up from his desk. It was as if in her mind she were once more writing him letters. The ancient Egyptians, he’d told her, used to write letters to the dead. They’d put up a statue of the departed person and inscribe the letter on the front. Usually the survivors wanted the dead to intercede; to help them in some way. Occasionally the letter was an accusation, saying: ‘Why are you causing me such bad luck, when I was always good to you?’ Unhappiness, they believed, always had a cause. And usually the cause was witchcraft by other people, dead or alive. Beatrice’s father had shown her one of the letter-statues when she was still a child. She had immediately realized that the writing was really for the living, not the dead, who couldn’t answer. If the dead had been able to do anything, her mother would have spoken to her from wherever she had gone to.
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