The Visitors (7 page)

‘Whereabouts in Norfolk?’ I asked.

‘Swaf-something? Swath-something? I forget.’

‘Swaffham? It’s a little town. Some cousins of my father’s live near there.’

‘Then you should tell Mr Carter – he’ll like that. But I don’t think he goes back there very often. He came to work in Egypt when he was seventeen. He didn’t have a degree or anything – not like Mr Lythgoe who lectured at Harvard or Mr Mace, our conservationist, who studied at Oxford – or Daddy, who is so brainy and has degrees from Harvard
and
Leipzig.’ She frowned. ‘He never talks about it, but I reckon Mr Carter scarcely went to school. He could paint well, though – his father taught him. So someone pulled strings and he was given a job in Egypt, copying tomb paintings… He’d never left home, and he’d had very little training, but within a few months he was digging at el-Amarna with the great Flinders Petrie, imagine that! He worked for a while as an inspector for the Department of Antiquities – they control archaeology in Egypt – and he’s been here ever since. Well, he leaves in the summer, we all do – you can’t stay in Egypt then, not when it’s one hundred and forty degrees, and you certainly can’t dig. But he has a house in the desert that’s known as “Castle Carter”, so his
home
is here. At least, that’s what he says.’

My interest grew: a man who’d escaped schooling? A castle in the desert? Frances was so much better informed than I: I didn’t know where el-Amarna was or what it signified; I’d never heard of Flinders Petrie. Something about Howard Carter fascinated me – perhaps the fact that I could not decide which aspects of him were genuine, and which fakery or pretence. He had a piratical air, though he disguised it beneath a Homburg hat and gentlemanly, well-cut suits. He had a natty, substantial moustache, large white teeth that flashed in a threatening way when he smiled, a long chin, and sleek hair; he seemed given to mischievous satiric flourishes, raising his hat with great zeal to female guests, for instance, as they crossed paths in the lobby.

‘Good morning, my
dear
lady,’ I once heard him say to a bewildered English visitor who had recently arrived, and who – to judge from her perplexed expression – had not the least idea who he was. And then, on another occasion: ‘Frau von Essen!
Guten Morgen, gnädige Frau
… and still in occupation, I see. Is Berlin not calling to you?’

This remark – made at a time when the Great War was fresh in everyone’s memories and when Germans experienced prejudice in British-ruled Egypt – might have been a barb, or mere politesse. Haughty Frau von Essen bridled and gave him a cold stare, to which he responded by baring his teeth in that alarming grin, clicking his heels, and sauntering out of the lobby whistling.

Over the next few days, I became something of a Howard Carter sleuth; I found myself looking out for him and, more often than not, I’d be rewarded. I’d see him strolling across the Ezbekieh Gardens, carrying a silver-topped cane, the professional beggars giving him, I noticed, a wide berth. Or he’d be taking tea on the terrace at Shepheard’s, sometimes in the company of Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn – the elegant young woman I’d glimpsed at Madame’s dancing class; more often in the company of the rich older women who were its habitués, and with whom he seemed a great favourite: they were always gushing compliments, hanging on his every word.

‘So I shinned down the rope to the cave,’ I overheard him say one afternoon, ‘a two-hundred-foot drop below. It was the middle of the night and pitch dark, but I caught the thieves red-handed… Yes, a tomb built for Queen Hatshepsut, so my hopes were high… A sixty-foot passageway into the rock, two hundred tons of rubble to clear, and all we found was an empty unused sarcophagus. The tomb was so well hidden Hatshepsut could have lain there unmolested for millennia. But she ruled as a king, and was determined to be buried as one. So she constructed a new tomb for herself in the Valley, where it was plundered in antiquity like all the others. A king’s status she aped, and a king’s fate she shared.’

‘Oh, Mr Carter,
too
exciting, how marvellously
brave
,’ one of the admirers sighed – and I silently agreed.

What I thought of as my best Carter sighting came at the celebrated Mena House Hotel in the desert outside Cairo. It was a place where the rich – British, American, Egyptian and European – went to swim, play tennis or golf, to admire the antiques, to sample the delicious food – or simply to see and be seen. It had originally been built by the Khedive, the then-monarch of Egypt, as a sporting lodge for desert shooting parties; and such shoots, organised by British officers, were still popular. They’d massacre ducks at dawn on the Nile marshes, then assemble at the Mena House for hearty breakfasts of porridge, bacon and eggs.

The interior was that peculiar marriage I’d begun to recognise as Anglo-Oriental: you’d be served Earl Grey tea while lounging on divans; your scones or Victoria sponge cake would be served by a man in Bedouin robes. You could stroll outside to admire the famous herbaceous borders, where Egyptian gardeners in djellabas kept up a constant watering regime. You’d discover that, thanks to determination, an inexhaustible supply of money and dirt-cheap labour, the lavender, delphiniums and roses of an English manor house garden could be made to thrive in the desert, within yards of the pyramids.

Carter was alone that evening at Mena House – and he showed no wish to greet or even acknowledge the numerous friends and acquaintances of his who were present. In misfit-mode, scowling and abstracted, he made his way across the terrace, ignoring those who called his name or rose to waylay him. From the windows of the crowded hotel dining room, I watched him stroll outside, and then make his way across the lush lawns, from which the view of the nearby pyramids was justly famous.

Carter lingered there, in the lurid after-glow that follows an Egyptian sunset, framed by palms, oleanders, roses and dahlias; he was staring in the direction of the desert and the darkening blood-red sky. After a while, he took out a silver cigarette box and a gold holder, lit a cigarette and stood smoking it contemplatively. Outlined against the violent mauve of the oleanders, with the vast black shape of a pyramid looming over him, he remained there for some time. I watched the pyramid creep up on him – a celebrated and eerie effect, caused by some trickery of the light. This uncanny advance continued; then, when the pyramid had crept so close it seemed about to crush the garden and Carter with it, he extracted the cigarette from its glittering holder, threw a precautionary glance over his shoulder, tossed the stub into the flower borders and turned to go.

I expected him to return to the hotel and was sure he would come across to our table: we were with the Winlocks; Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn, had just joined us, and she had known Carter from her childhood, as Frances had explained. Surely they would catch his eye and, seeing such old friends, he’d gladly join us? I nerved myself for a meeting, but Mr Carter never materialised; when I next looked out to the gardens, darkness had fallen and he had vanished into thin air.

By then, and just as Miss Mack had hoped, I was discovering what
fun
was. The days of dutiful perambulations from one must-see tourist site to another, and of religious readings from the guidebooks, were over. We’d dispensed with the regulation afternoon rest period, and abandoned the practice of early, melancholy suppers in our rooms. Now, as Miss Mack liked to say, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to fit in the delights Cairo offered: every morning, Frances and I practised ballet steps; in the afternoons, we explored the city, with her mother as our guide. As each day passed, I learned more about Frances herself – that she had been born in Cairo, which made her an honorary Egyptian, she said; that she had a younger sister, just a shrimp of two-and-a-bit, who was too young to come to Egypt; that she loved the desert and the Valley of the Kings – but also the wild places of America, in particular Maine, where her family spent summers by the sea, in a house on a remote island.

With Frances at my side, Cairo opened up to me. I explored the Mousky bazaar with her, wandering the labyrinth of dark lanes and getting lost in the section where they sold antiquities. There, Frances and her mother showed me how to bargain, and tried to train my eye: could I not see? This
antika
was an obvious fake, but that one, ah,
that
was the real thing. We made a visit to the famous Gezira Sporting Club to watch a polo match, and there, after a long and incomprehensible series of chukkas, the two teams of sweating British officers lined up, and Lady Evelyn presented the captain of the winning team with a silver cup. It was on that occasion that I met for the first time, and was fleetingly introduced to, Lady Evelyn’s friend, Mrs d’Erlanger, the woman I’d heard her mention that first day at Madame’s dancing class.

I’d glimpsed the astonishing Mrs d’Erlanger before, speeding through the lobby at Shepheard’s, circling its dance floor in a dress that seemed to be made of liquid silver. I’d watched her run down the steps of the hotel and jump into a car driven by a dashing English lieutenant. I’d seen her in the Sudan courtyard at the bazaar, rifling through a heap of ivory tusks, bargaining for a leopard skin and tossing aside ostrich plumes. I’d watched her decide to buy all of the furs, and then, a second later, none of them… I knew she had travelled out from England with Lady Evelyn and would be continuing on to Luxor with her once Lord Carnarvon arrived, but I couldn’t believe she could be pinned down in such a way. She fascinated Frances, and she fascinated me: I thought of her as an exotic and beautiful bird of passage – an impression Helen Winlock confirmed that day at the polo match. Following my gaze across the gardens to the clubhouse terrace, where the vivid figure of Poppy d’Erlanger could be seen, first at Evelyn’s side, then separated off by an eager phalanx of polo players, she sighed.

‘She’s exquisite, isn’t she, Lucy?’ Helen said. ‘Those eyes! But she isn’t a woman you can rely on, you know – not like Evelyn… dear Eve’s only twenty, and Poppy d’Erlanger must be, oh, twenty-eight, at least, and she has children too – but Eve is so sensible, whereas Poppy is – well, thoughtless. Lord only knows what goes on in that beautiful head of hers… She’s always agreeing to do this or that, she was supposed to lunch with us last week – but then she simply doesn’t turn up, and forgets to send word, or she stays five minutes and then disappears without explanation. She’s famous for bolting… ’ She laughed. ‘And famous for her charm too, so she’s always forgiven.’

Poppy d’Erlanger bolted on the occasion of that polo match: one minute she was there, and I was being introduced and shaking her thin, cool hand, and we were making our way into the clubhouse for the post-match tea; the next, there was a vacant chair, and emissaries were being dispatched in quest of her. After a long delay, we learned Mrs d’Erlanger had left the club a few minutes before.

‘She drove off with Jarvis, I think,’ said the young captain who’d gone in search of her. He had returned out of breath, hot, disgruntled and possibly envious. ‘At least, I
think
it was Jarvis. But someone said it might have been that swine Carew.’

Evelyn seemed disconcerted by this news, but, covering up for her friend, she said lightly: ‘Of course – I remember now. She mentioned that to me. And please be kind about that swine, Carew. He’s the sweetest man, a
very
old friend of Poppy’s – and he’s a second cousin of mine, you know. Now, there’s Indian tea and China – and, oh how divine, they’ve made us one of those Gezira ginger cakes… ’

Frances and I were pressed into service, handing plates around. The moment passed, but I noted how gracefully Evelyn had handled it, and how effective her gentle reproof had been. I returned to my chair at the edge of the group and listened distantly to the ex-pat gossip with which I was becoming familiar: the horse races, the duck shooting, the latest doings at the Residency… The young officers moved on to discuss the rise of the nationalist Wafd Party, the current political unrest and the need to ‘nip it in the bud fast’ before ‘things got out of hand’.

‘The thing is, Lady E, one can’t trust Egyptians an inch – they’re devious,’ said the most voluble of them, an earnest, fresh-faced young lieutenant by the name of Ronnie Urquhart. He fixed Evelyn with his frank blue gaze: ‘The sooner we abandon all this defeatist talk of “independence” the better. Give up the Suez Canal – when it’s our passage to India? The very idea! No: what works in Delhi will work in Cairo – we need to crack down hard. Did you hear about the demonstration last week? Right outside the Residency, a bunch of nationalist ruffians, waving flags and shouting slogans. On Lord Allenby’s doorstep! Infernal cheek. We put a stop to
that
little game pretty fast. What we need to do now is pull in the agitators, get them off the streets and… ’

I think Helen Winlock was bored and disagreed with the views being expressed, though she said little. Miss Mack took on these young men once or twice, and challenged them in a sprightly way: she was listened to with grave courtesy, and then ignored. I was imagining the vitriol the officer’s remarks would have provoked in my father – not a man who tolerated fools. I was glad when Miss Mack cut short this tirade, which had now moved on to ‘Gyppo troublemakers’, and rose to her feet.

‘When Egypt gains independence, Lieutenant Urquhart,’ she said, fixing him with her keen republican eye, ‘which it will very soon, that much is obvious, then many of your so-called agitators will be elected members of a democratic Egyptian parliament. Are they to be deprived of freedom of speech then as they are now? No, don’t answer me, Lieutenant, I must go.’

We left the clubhouse, with its leather armchairs, its faint cooking smells of roast beef and over-boiled cabbage, its atmosphere that was part gentlemen’s club, part English prep school. We passed through the gardens and came out into the street; two armed sentries smartly saluted at the gates, and beyond them the clamour of Cairo reclaimed us. Frances seemed used to such contrasts, but my head was aching, my hat itched and I felt that familiar smoky dislocation as we set off along the dusty road. We threaded our way past Arabs riding side-saddle, past a pungent camel train; we negotiated a route through the crush of hawkers and beggars. It was time for evening prayers: the cries of the muezzin came from the minarets of the mosques, rising like discordant music above the din of the streets. At last we reached the corner where the loyal Hassan was waiting for us; climbing into the carriage, I touched his Eye of Horus amulet.