Shadows on the Nile (17 page)
Suddenly a small shoulder hitched up under his arm, halting the spinning world. He blinked and saw a bone-white face, a mass of golden hair. Fierce blue eyes glared into his.
‘Don’t you fall down!’ Jessie ordered. ‘Hold onto me.’
He nodded. A mistake. It took another ten long seconds to find his eyes again. Together they hoisted Archie’s senseless form onto Monty’s good shoulder and staggered towards
the archway, but a police constable got there first. Red-faced and breathing hard, his small eyes were bright with excitement. He was young and out of control. He ignored Monty, ignored the slumped body of Archie, but he had greedy eyes for Jessie.
‘Out of our way, officer,’ Monty commanded in his best Sir Montague Chamford voice and the constable automatically yielded to the tone of authority and stepped aside.
But as they hurried past, the hand clutching the truncheon could not resist. It flicked out. Monty saw the wood connect with Jessie’s temple, heard the dull reverberation of pain and her intake of breath. Her knees buckled. He wrapped his free arm around her to keep her on her feet, but his right foot shot out and nailed the constable’s shinbone just below the kneecap. The policeman screeched and bent over, clutching his leg, his chin perfectly placed as Monty’s knee rocketed up to crack open his jaw. He toppled sideways onto the road.
Monty tightened his grip on his two companions. ‘Let’s get out of here before he wakes up.’
Jessie raised her head to look at him, her shoulders trembling, her eyes out of focus but struggling for a smile of some sort. He liked her for it.
‘Thank you,’ she mumbled. ‘What are you? St George fighting the dragon?’
He uttered a grim laugh and started to carve
a path for them back up the Mall. ‘Something like that.’
Georgie
England 1928
You knock. I open the door and you are there with a wide smile on your face, your blond hair trimmed shorter than usual. My blood flows faster at the sight of you, as if it is your energetic heart that is pumping for both of us. That’s what it feels like, that I am a pale translucent ghost for six days a week, but on a Saturday I become a person. I notice how tall you are now.
‘Happy birthday, Georgie.’
‘Is it my birthday?’
‘Yes. Today’s the day.’
‘We have never celebrated it before.’
‘But today you are twenty-one.’
You are full of movement, your hands, your shoulders, your golden eyebrows, and I am frightened you will touch me, but you don’t. You know me. You know me well.
‘Today,’ you say, ‘you must come out of your bubble.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
You smile at me and say – with that something in your eyes and
in your face that makes me feel like warm toffee inside – ‘I know, dear Georgie. Let’s just enjoy today. No lessons for you or me on your birthday, all right?’
I nod. You have taught me that it is the correct response to a statement ending in ‘all right?’
‘Look at the present I’ve brought you.’
I expect a small box with a pink bow like in the books I’ve read. But you open the door again and push two armchairs into my room, though they only just squeeze through the doorway. I have never seen chairs like this. They are curved like the end of a bathtub, made of silky pale wood the colour of milky tea and have seats of ivory leather. I touch it. Soft as my tongue. They are the most beautiful objects I have ever seen in my life.
‘They’re the latest style,’ you tell me. ‘It’s called art deco. The wood is maple. Do you like them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then smile.’
I make a smile. But it is not real. What I want to do is cry because they are so beautiful. I can feel the tears creeping up behind my eyes. You wave a hand at the seat of one of the chairs.
‘Try it out.’
I sit in one, my heart beating fast, and stroke the butter-smooth veneer where my hand lies, my fingers tingling with excitement. I am touched to the core.
‘Like it?’ you ask.
‘It is the most uncomfortable chair I have ever sat in. The back is too straight and the seat too long.’
But I do not mind. I sit there in silence, wrapped in beauty. It is several minutes before I realise something is wrong. I don’t know what. I don’t know why. But you are not speaking. I just sit. Waiting.
‘For heaven’s sake, Georgie, you needn’t have said that. It took me a lot of time and trouble, not to mention hard-earned vacation money, to get you these. You could at least …’ You stop yourself and take a concentrated breath. ‘If you are ever going to get out of here, you must learn to filter the words
that come out of your mouth. Like I use a sieve in my excavations of old ruins to get rid of sand and earth and all the rubbish I don’t want. I keep only the valuable bits. You must discard your rubbish thoughts. You must filter them out. Now try again.’
I go through the list you have taught me. It is written out in the big booming silence in my head.
I’m fine, thank you. How are you?
Won’t you sit down?
Thank you.
No, thank you.
How nice to see you.
What fine weather we are having today.
What can I do to help you?
Would you like a cup of tea?
You look very smart today.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I didn’t mean to offend you.
I panic. Because you are angry. I don’t know which to choose. I look at you. I look at the chairs.
‘Won’t you sit down?’ I say.
You sit. You wait for more.
I perch on the edge of the bed. ‘What fine weather we are having today.’
You look out of the window. It is raining.
The list of sentences blurs inside my head, like the rain on the window-pane. They run into each other, they melt into the words you spoke:
If you are ever going to get out of here.
It is a prospect as distant as the sun from the earth, ninety-three million miles, and as terrifying, yet you have placed it in my lap. It burns right through my flesh, and I feel my heart expand in my chest until it is hard for me to breathe. I struggle to find the correct words
to give in return.
‘Won’t you sit down?’ I offer.
No, no. It’s not right. You are sitting.
You frown.
I am running out of air.
‘Georgie, for God’s sake, can’t you …?’
I gabble out another from the list. ‘I’m fine, thank you. How are you?’
Your mouth is a tight line. I remember at last, your instruction, over and over you tell me,
Don’t panic. Breathe. If in doubt, go for Number Ten
. It is underlined in blue ink in my head.
And for heaven’s sake, SMILE
.
I can’t breathe but I can smile. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I didn’t mean to offend you.’
You become very still. I don’t know what is the matter. I am no good at faces. I see a face change from wide eyes to narrow eyes, from mouth turned up to mouth turned down, I see lines creep across a forehead and I don’t know what they mean. I can read ancient Greek and Latin and ancient Egyptian but I cannot read a face. I cannot tell whether it is surprise or annoyance. You once brought me twenty photographs of faces and you wrote on each one what the expression meant – happy or unhappy, angry or confused, surprised or disappointed, bored or interested. You tested me on them for weeks until I could get them right every time. You taught me that the size of a person’s iris changes when they lie.
But it is much harder to do with real people. I want to hold the photographs next to your face. To compare. I go to the drawer and take them out but you start to shout at me. Harsh cruel words that I have never heard from you before. I cover my ears with my hands because the pain in my head is so bad. This is wrong, wrong. You are wrong. My mind is filling up with red mist, my chest is drowning in scarlet. But still the dirty gutter-black words spill from your mouth at me.
‘Filter!’ I scream at you. ‘Filter your rubbish words, Timothy.’
You stop. You stare at me, eyes wide as oranges. Mouth open. I remember the photograph: it means
shocked
. A noise starts to escape from your lips, a growl at first, then it turns into a laugh, and you laugh so hard you fall off the beautiful uncomfortable
chair onto the floor. You laugh and laugh.
I walk over to the window and stare out at the lawn. I do not understand.
Jessie woke with a jolt. Her heart was going crazy inside her chest, her skin hot and tight. She had been dreaming. In the dream she had been fleeing naked down Piccadilly pursued by a pack of baying foxhounds, while ahead of her Dr Scott stood with a shotgun in his hands. She knew that her only escape was to fly over the roofs but she couldn’t unstick her feet from the ground.
She blinked hard and realised she was lying fully clothed on a settee. In her own flat, wrapped in a blanket. That was odd, as she had no recall of how she got here. But she dragged in a deep shuddering breath of relief and let her mind untie its knots. She sat up. Huge mistake. The whole room cartwheeled and a thousand hammers got to work on the underside of her skull.
And then she remembered.
The brutality of Trafalgar Square, horses with huge frantic eyes, shouts and screams drumming in her ears. Archie! Poor Archie! Where was he? She threw aside the blanket and was about to fight her way to her feet when she caught sight of a figure in an armchair by the window. The room was gloomy. It was dark outside and only a dim table-lamp burned in one corner, casting deep navy shadows
over the silent figure.
‘Archie?’ she breathed.
But even as she said it she realised her mistake. His legs were too long and his shoulders too broad. Doubting her own thought processes, she stared hard at Sir Montague Chamford and as she did so, she felt something open up inside her, something sore and battered, and in its place flooded gratitude to this man she barely knew. He had saved Archie. He had saved her. And taken a beating in exchange. It was no wonder he had broken that constable’s kneecap. Now she thought about it, the surprise was that he hadn’t snatched up the constable’s truncheon and broken his other kneecap too.
Jessie rose slowly to her feet, waited for the walls to stop dancing a can-can, and walked on stockinged feet over to the armchair for a closer look. He was asleep. His head tilted slightly to one side, a lock of brown hair had fallen over his eyes, and his large hands were clasped together on his lap as if he had been twiddling his thumbs, waiting patiently for her to wake up. She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. Two fifteen.
Two fifteen?
In the morning? Where had the day gone?
Why was he here?
Oddly Jessie felt in no way threatened by his presence, alone with this man in her flat, though she knew Tabitha would be home soon. Was there something in him she sensed, something decent, something of St George? As she turned to look down at him again, disjointed scenes slotted in and out of her vision but not in any order. Nurses in a hospital, Archie on a trolley, a doctor shining a light in her eyes, blood in a taxi-cab, vomiting over Monty’s trousers; the images flashed in and out.
Vomiting over Monty’s trousers?
She could smell it on him now, the sickly sweet stench of vomit. Her cheeks burned at the memory. His legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle and she wanted to take off his beautiful suit trousers and dunk them in the bath. Not really feasible without waking him. He had removed his
jacket and was wearing just a shirt, waistcoat and silver tie, the elegance of which was spoiled by the dark stains on them. Dried blood, long streaks of it.
He uncrossed his ankles and murmured something in his sleep, frowning, but didn’t wake. In the shadows she studied the firm lines of his face, the thick sweep of his eyelashes, the resolute set of his mouth even in sleep. What kind of man was he? What lies slid off his tongue, hidden by the silky charm of his class? How far could she trust this quiet controlled face?
A shape moved in the room. It was Jabez. But as she stroked his black fur, nausea hit her. She dived for the bathroom, flicked on the light, squinting in the sudden brightness, and flinched when she saw the face in the mirror above the washbasin.
It was ugly. She barely recognised it as Jessica Kenton. The face in the mirror was pale as chalk-dust except for a nasty swelling on her left temple which was sprawling up to her forehead with black and purple streaks. As though someone had painted it on while she slept. Her hair was a mess. The thick blonde waves were sticking out in all directions, as if trying to escape. She didn’t blame them. She would escape if she could. Worse were the eyes. They were big and round, and looked wary. Eyes that didn’t know how to trust people, today or any other day. They scared her. Guilty eyes. What we remember of ourselves from our childhood is never forgotten and never forgiven.
Quickly she ran the cold tap. Splashed water over her skin, her mouth, her eyes, eager to wash away the face in the mirror, to find a new one underneath. She dragged a brush through her hair and cleaned her teeth. Her teeth were the only part of herself she liked, white and straight and happy-looking.
He woke almost imperceptibly. Jessie watched him. One moment he was asleep, the next he was awake, with barely a ripple between them.
‘Hello,’ he said softly from his chair. He didn’t move.
‘Hello, Monty. Feeling sore?’
‘No worse than you, I dare say.’
There was a pause while they smiled at each other, a small acknowledgement of something they
shared. The smile felt alien on her face, at odds with the images in her head.
‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Four-thirty in the morning.’
‘I’ve been asleep too long.’
‘I’m sure you needed it … and more. Go back to sleep.’
He noted the blanket she had tucked around him and nodded his gratitude, but gave no indication of returning to his slumbers.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Headachey. But I’ll live. More important, where is Archie?’