Whispers in the Sand (19 page)

She stared after him for a moment, acutely aware with some part of her brain that he was still annoyed with her and that, for the sake of her own peace of mind and probably his, she was going to have to make amends somehow—probably by showing him the diary. She turned and made her way to the end of the corridor, listening cautiously for a moment at one of the doors, where she thought she had heard a movement. There was only silence, as there was at the next. Then, from the opposite side of the passage, she heard the quiet murmur of a female voice. Raising her hand, she knocked. The voice fell silent, then she heard the clack of wooden sandals on the floor, and the door opened. It was Charley.

“Well, well.” She looked Anna up and down as though she were some particularly odd form of low life. “To what do we owe this pleasure?” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“Is Serena there?”

Charley shrugged. She stepped away from the door and went to sit at the dressing table, leaving Anna in the doorway. “It’s for you,” she called.

The cabin was exactly like Anna’s, except that there were two beds and two cupboards crammed into a space barely larger than that of her own. The shower room door, an exact replica of the one in Anna’s cabin, opened, and Serena appeared, wrapped in a towel. Her short, wet hair was pushed back off her face, and her shoulders were covered in droplets of water.

“Sorry, I was in the shower.” She stated the obvious with a smile. “What is it, Anna? Is something wrong?” Her smile faded.

“Something’s happened,” Anna blurted out. “I needed to talk to someone—”

Charley swung round on the stool and stared at her curiously. “What sort of someone? Someone else’s boyfriend, perhaps?”

“Charley!” Serena’s voice was sharp. “Don’t be stupid.” She looked back at Anna. “Give me five minutes. Wait in the lounge. Then we can talk.”

Numbly, Anna nodded. She turned away from the door and made her way slowly back to the stairs and began to climb.

The lounge was empty. She stared out of the double doors towards the shaded deck with its awning and tables. It looked pleasant out there—cool out of the direct sunlight. The elderly clergyman and his wife were sitting beneath the awning, cold drinks in front of them, and near them a couple who had told her they came from Aberdeen. At one table she could see Ben. He appeared to be asleep. Toby was seated alone at one of the tables near the door, a beer in front of him beside the open sketchbook. He was working away at a drawing, his back towards her.

She watched him for a while, studying his profile as he reached forward, picked up his glass, drank, and bent back over his sketchbook, his slim brown fingers moving swiftly over the page. From the direction of his gaze, she assumed he must be drawing the graceful minaret she could see above the waving fronds of the palm trees on the opposite bank.

A large tourist cruiser was heading downstream past them. She could hear the beat of music over the pulse of the engines. Judging by the numbers of these huge, noisy boats, she thought wryly, a large proportion of visitors to Egypt must be allergic to silence; probably allergic to history, too. They were the ones who jostled and laughed at the monuments and listened to no one and looked at nothing. She felt a sudden quick surge of resentment. How was it they could all be so carefree? Many of them had probably come here on a whim, could have gone anywhere, probably had been on package tours all over Europe, if not the world, already, whilst she, who had so passionately wanted to come to Egypt for so long, was feeling nervous and worried and very lonely.

“Why not come out here and join me?”

She realised that Toby had put down his pencil and was leaning back in his chair. He must have sensed that she was there. Reluctantly, she stepped out through the doors. “Thank you.”

He half rose. “Can I get you a beer?” It seemed to be a gesture of appeasement.

“No. No, thank you.” She tried to modify her refusal by smiling. “I just came out for a breath of air.”

“Noisy bastards, aren’t they.” It was as though he had read her thoughts as he nodded towards the cruiser disappearing around the long, shallow bend behind them.

“They do rather spoil the silence.”

“It’s their way of enjoying themselves. I suppose we mustn’t be judgemental.” He glanced at her, the trace of a smile on his lips. “The birds take no notice. You see the egrets over there, on the trees at the water’s edge? They just sit and stare and look enigmatic.”

“They’re used to the boats. There must be hundreds of them every day, and I suppose they know the people never get off. Not just here, anyway.” Anna pulled out a chair and sat down at his table. His sketch showed the minaret as she had guessed, together with the palms and a group of flat-roofed mud-brick houses. Since leaving Kom Ombo, the boat had been travelling through Nubia, and there was a distinct change in the landscape. For one thing, the houses were painted bright colours.

“You’re lucky to be able to record the trip like this.” She indicated the sketchbook. “I have to resort to the camera.”

“Are you not a good photographer, then?” He was drawing again, cross-hatching a shadow on the page, and did not look up.

She felt a quick flash of resentment. “Why assume that?”

“I didn’t. Your own doubt in the merits of your photography implied it. After all, this must be the most photogenic country on earth. You would have to be singularly inept not to be able to take a passable clutch of snaps home for your album.”

“My God, that sounds patronising!” She exploded, unable to stop herself.

“Does it?” His pencil hovered for a moment as though he were considering the matter. “If so, I’m sorry.” He didn’t look it. He merely raised an eyebrow. “I see you are no longer trundling all your possessions around with you.”

“My possessions?” She stared at him, puzzled for a moment. Then she understood. “Oh, you mean the diary.”

He gave an almost imperceptible shrug. “Women seem to need to carry huge sacks of stuff with them wherever they go.”

“Unlike men, we do not have voluminous pockets.”

He looked up at last and eyed her dress with, she felt, rather more than necessary care. “I suppose not,” he conceded.

“Anna?” Serena’s voice behind her made her look round in considerable relief. The woman was standing looking down at Toby’s drawing. “I don’t want to intrude,” she said with a smile.

“No. No, you’re not.” Anna stood up hastily. “I’ll leave you to your creative processes,” she said to Toby with some asperity. She did not wait to hear whatever retort he came up with next. Heading for the stairs to the upper deck, she led the way up.

Serena followed her to the rail. Companionably, she leant on it, watching the passing scene for a few minutes. At last she spoke. “So, aren’t you going to tell me what is wrong?”

“Do you think I’m mad?” Anna stared down into the water.

“I doubt it. Unless Toby Hayward has pushed you over the edge. You don’t like him, do you?”

There was a long pause. “He’s too acerbic for me. I don’t want to spend the holiday duelling. I don’t see the need for it. He seems to have a massive chip on his shoulder!” She changed the subject abruptly. “Serena, there is something in my cabin. It’s weird. Horrible. I want you to come and look at it.” She shuddered. “And the bottle has gone.”

“Gone?” Serena swung to face her. “Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. I left it in the make-up bag, in the shower. The bag was open, emptied on the floor.”

“Then it has been stolen. One of the crew perhaps—”

“No. I think it was something—someone—else.”

Serena eyed her. “Anna, sometimes when we’re overwrought,” she said gently, “we start to imagine things. It’s easy to do.”

“No.” Anna’s voice was bleak. “Please come with me and see. I’m not overwrought. I’m not suffering from sunstroke. I’m not hallucinating.”

“OK. OK. This is me, remember?” Serena leant across and laid her hand on Anna’s arm for a moment. She thought for a second, then she went and sat down sideways on one of the sunloungers. “Tell me exactly what you have seen.”

“Our libation to the gods didn’t work.” Anna murmured sadly. She bit her lip.

“It seems not. But tell me what you’ve seen.”

Anna shrugged. “Dust. Incense—in my cabin. I don’t know what it is, or how it got in there—I can feel them close, Serena. Louisa’s good priest and the evil djinn. I can feel them so close.” She shook her head. “I’m so scared.”

With a sudden crescendo of noise, another cruiser drew level with them and began to pass them, churning up the turbid water. A line of figures on the top deck, all dressed alike in shorts and dark glasses and a dazzling selection of garish tee-shirts, waved and yelled at them. Anna raised an arm reluctantly in acknowledgement of a race conceded without ever having been declared and turned her back. She looked down at Serena. “I have this rather naïve, childish desire to pray. ‘Please God, make it all right. Make the bad men go away.’”

Serena glanced up at her. “Why is it naïve and childish to pray?” she asked gently.

“Because it never works, does it.” Anna sat down on the lounger alongside Serena’s and faced her. She leant forward, her elbows on her knees. “When push comes to shove, we’re on our own. Aren’t we?”

Serena looked at her for a moment, an expression of extreme sadness in her eyes. “I don’t think we’re alone,” she said at last.

“Well, obviously not, or you wouldn’t be making sacrifices to Isis and Thoth!” Anna retorted. “Although I did wonder if you were doing that just to make me feel happy.”

Serena shook her head. “I don’t believe in meaningless gestures, Anna,” she said sharply. “We may not have known one another very long, but I hoped you would have realised that.”

“Yes.” Anna sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“I do believe, genuinely, that prayer works.”

“Does it?” Anna shrugged. “For you, perhaps.” She stood up restlessly and moved back to the rail. The other boat, far larger and with powerful engines, had overtaken them and drawn away. The river was quiet again. In the distance, a felucca headed for the bank. She could remember praying. Praying her father would love her and approve, just once, of something she did. Praying that Felix was really away on business as he had said, praying that her suspicions were not justified, praying that her mother wouldn’t die. None of the prayers had worked. Not one.

“Maybe your prayers were heard, but the answer, for reasons you could not at the time comprehend, was no.” Serena leant back and swung her legs up onto the footrest. She folded her arms. “It is perhaps childlike and naïve, to quote your own words, to expect the answer always to be yes. But if you pray for something which is right for you, then your prayers will be answered with a yes. Never stop praying, Anna.”

“But who do I pray to?” A large brown heron was flying up the river, only a few feet above the water, its slow wingbeats keeping time to the oar strokes of a small boat crossing their wake behind them. “Isis? Thoth? The Jesus of my childhood?” She shook her head suddenly. “I’m sorry. This is not the moment for deep philosophical discussion.”

“I think it is. It’s very relevant. I have a rather unorthodox answer to your question. One that fits the Egyptian context very well. In my opinion they are one, Anna. Isis. Thoth. The Aten. Jesus. All different aspects of the one great God. Pray to any and all of them, my dear, but pray.” She smiled wryly. “If my views were widely known, I would probably be burnt at the stake by somebody even in our so-called enlightened age. No fundamentalist of any faith would put up with me for an instant. Perhaps you’d better not listen.”

“It’s a comforting thought, though. Sort of covering all your options.”

“Think about it, Anna. In all the tens of thousands of years that mankind has existed and worshipped his gods, each successive generation has replaced the gods of the generation before with the gods to suit itself, and they have all in turn said, ‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me,’ or words to that effect. But why should one be better than another? One be better than several? In my view, each god is the manifestation of the one god in an appropriate form to fit his age. For our age and culture, we had Jesus, a gentle healer, an idealist, but we turned out to be a far from gentle and idealistic people in the Europe and Middle East of the last two thousand years, so some of us have adapted Jesus accordingly, and some have reverted to previous incarnations of the gods of the past; others have adopted gods from other parts of the world.”

“I think you’re right. I think fundamentalists would indeed have problems with your views.” Anna shook her head. “But the fact remains, we offered a perhaps rather superficial handful of wine to the gods of two thousand years ago in the hope that they would protect us from the ancient djinn, and they have, probably quite rightly, ignored us. So, what do I do now?”

Serena climbed to her feet. “Right. To the practicalities. There is something in your cabin that you want me to see. Let’s go and look at it right now.”

The strange substance had gone, and with it the smell.

Searching the cabin and the small bathroom did not take long. They checked and double-checked and then sat down, Anna on the bed, Serena on the little stool she had hooked out from beneath the dressing table.

“I suppose you think it was my imagination.”

“No, Anna, I believe you.”

“But the smell has gone.”

“I still believe you.” Serena smiled.

“And someone has taken the bottle.” Anna shook her head. “You know, in some strange way, I’m almost relieved.”

“You don’t sound too sure.”

“I’ve had it a long time. I treasured it.”

“Ah.”

“And I’m not convinced a ghost, even a cunning Egyptian ghost, can pick something up and carry it away.”

“But why should anyone else steal it?”

“It’s an antique.”

They looked at each other for a moment, then Serena shook her head. “No. Not Andy. No way. Why should he? He thinks it’s a fake. Who else knows about it?”

Anna shrugged. “No one.”

Had Toby seen it in her bag? She frowned. But surely, even if he had, he would not have taken it.