Shadows on the Nile (36 page)

In the sleepy villages and
towns Jessie spotted an occasional black and white cow or a handful of knobbly goats. And everywhere small brown donkeys. Donkeys and women were clearly Egypt’s beasts of burden, but the sight of a camel was cause for celebration to break the monotony.

As the hours passed, the sky turned a blazing blue that scorched the land and glossed over the rotting piles of rubbish heaped on the banks of the canal outside towns. Jessie was conscious this water was a vital artery of life – men fished on it in long pointed rowboats, women in black garb washed their clothes and their pots in it and packs of wild urchins urinated into it before leaping into its cool murky depths with shrieks of laughter. It proved endlessly fascinating to Jessie.

The only thing she missed were trees. It wasn’t that there weren’t any; there were, offering shade in ribbons along the edge of the canal. But there was no variety – they were always palm trees, tall graceful date palms whose delicate fans of greenery leaned over the water like women trying to catch a glimpse of their own reflection. Beside them the banana palms fluttered their large succulent leaves in competition, but their trunks were stunted, like ugly sisters to the date palm.

Men gathered in threes or fours on the canal bank or on a wall outside a house, smoking and taking time to put the world to rights while the figures in black laboured on. It was a world that absorbed Jessie totally. And all the time in the far distance an escarpment or an ancient line of low hills would drift out of the haze unexpectedly, soft petal-pink, never allowing anyone to forget that the desert lay out there. Relentless. Implacable. Unforgiving.

The second reason for the
lack of tedium was Monty. His hip touching hers. His eloquent eyebrow raised in amusement when two of the Egyptian businessmen goaded each other into argument over a certain horse running in a race at the Gezirah Club the next day. Their voices were deeper than Europeans’, their gestures bigger, their eyes fiercer. Jessie pictured Tim in their midst – blond, soft-featured, mild-mannered Tim, and her stomach swooped with fear for him.

Monty must have sensed it, because he said in a low voice, ‘Tell me one of your Egyptian stories, one of the myths about their gods.’

So she told him the tale of the war between the brothers, Osiris and Set.

‘Osiris was the wise god of the afterlife, ruler of the dead and of fertility, eldest son of the Earth god, Geb, and the sky goddess, Nut. Set was his jealous younger brother, god of the desert and storms.’

‘It bodes ill already,’ Monty smiled.

‘I know how irritating younger brothers can be,’ Jessie murmured and he laughed.

‘So what did Set get up to?’

‘Nothing good. He wanted his brother’s throne, so he did what all wicked brothers do in stories – he killed Osiris.’

‘Nasty.’

‘Sadly, he didn’t stop there. He chopped poor Osiris into fourteen pieces and scattered them over Egypt.’

‘Painful!’

‘Ah, but you are reckoning without the powers of Osiris’ devoted wife, Isis. She was also his sister, by the way.’

‘Tell all.’

‘Well, she and her sister went searching for these pieces, but they could only find thirteen of the fourteen. Fish had swallowed the last piece.’

Monty opened his eyes in horror. ‘Don’t tell me. I can guess which piece.’

‘Exactly!’

‘Poor Osiris!’

‘But Isis
was a resourceful goddess. She created a new …’ Jessie’s voice dropped to a whisper, ‘phallus for him of gold, and used a magic spell to put her beloved husband back together for one last marital fling.’

Monty laughed delightedly and one of the Germans gave him a dour frown. ‘Don’t stop now,’ he urged.

‘The inevitable happened, I’m afraid. She became pregnant and gave birth to the beautiful Horus, whom she had to protect desperately from the wicked Set who kept trying to kill him off. But he managed to grow up to become the powerful falcon-headed god of the sun and of war.’

‘Not surprising, I suppose. But don’t keep me waiting on tenterhooks. Did old Set manage to do for Horus too?’

‘It was a close run thing, I can tell you. They had many struggles. For eighty long years. One involves,’ she put her lips to his ear, ‘semen and lettuce, but we will pass over that.’

Monty gave a snort.

‘To finish quickly,’ Jessie declared, ‘there was a bit of old-fashioned cheating by Horus in a boat race, which meant he won the throne of all Egypt. And he ripped off Set’s testicles, making him as barren as the desert.’

‘Ouch!’

‘But Set got his revenge by gouging out one of Horus’ eyes – the fabled Eye of Horus.’

‘What then?’

‘That’s it, really.’

‘What? They all lived happily ever after?’

‘No. But Horus won. Good over evil.’

‘Is that what this is about?’ Monty’s look was abruptly sombre.

She shook her head, a sudden tightness in her chest. ‘How do we know who is good and who is evil?’

In the midst of the heat and chatter in the carriage, the question lay unanswered.

‘We have to rely on our own judgement,’ Monty said eventually. ‘It’s all we have.’

‘Yes. But can we
trust it?’

Monty released a long sigh. ‘You women!’

‘Pardon?’

‘You women. You and Isis. Determined to risk everything to save your beloved brothers.’

It hadn’t occurred to her. Isis and herself. Scouring Egypt for traces of their brother. Somehow, in some inexplicable way, it made a difference. She rested a hand on Monty’s wrist and turned her head to look out of the window at the fleeing desert where Set lived with his curved snout and forked tail, and nothing but scorpions for company.

The solidity of Monty’s flesh and bone under her fingers kept her mind away from the thought that Set was also the god of storms.

The third reason that the long journey from Cairo to Luxor proved to be entertaining was more unexpected. Monty was reading the
Egyptian Gazette
while Jessie was working out whether to ask the smart Egyptian gentleman opposite if he knew of a good hotel in Luxor, when the ticket collector in scarlet uniform and gold sash entered the carriage looking apologetic.

‘Miss Kenton?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have a friend travelling on this train?’

‘Yes, I do. He’s sitting right here.’

‘No.’ The official bowed politely to Monty. He was the sort of man with kindly eyes who looked as though he lived with too many women in his household. He had the unassuming browbeaten manner of a man used to being in the wrong. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Kenton, but I am referring to an Egyptian friend.’

She was surprised. ‘No, no one I know.’

‘Ah, I thought as much. He claims you will pay for his ticket.’

‘Who is this person?’ she asked.

‘A nobody. Don’t concern yourself, madam.’

There was a sudden flash of white teeth as a young face pushed in under his arm and bright black eyes peered in at her with a grin.

‘It is me, Missie Kenton. Malak.’

Georgie

England 1932

You are here. But you are
not here. You do not listen to what I say. You barely speak. You run hands through your hair so roughly that threads of gold float down on your shoulders, and you kick my Indian exercise club so that it rolls back and forth across the floor.

‘I want you to go,’ I say.

‘To leave?’

‘Yes.’

You upset me when you are like this. It makes me feel bad inside. I get jittery and nervous because you don’t want to be here.

‘I have a problem,’ you say.

I don’t look at you. I open the wardrobe door a crack and peek at the darkness inside. Would you notice if I crept in there for a while? Some people are addicted to alcohol, others to chocolate or cocaine. When I am upset, I am addicted to darkness.

I don’t know what
to do. I don’t know what to say.

‘Go and look it up,’ you mutter.

‘Pardon?’

‘On the list, the list of answers.’

‘I want you to go,’ I mumble again.

‘Well, hard luck.’ You are flicking your lighter on and off, on and off, and it is driving me crazy.

‘Look it up,’ you shout at me.

I leave the wardrobe door ajar and pull out the list from my bedside cabinet. I read through it slowly, testing out each possibility in my head. I reject the
please
and
thank you
and travel down to the two last ones.
I’m sorry if I have offended you
and the new one:
You seem unhappy. What has happened?
I regard them with distaste. I do not know how I can have offended you. You arrived like this today. It was nothing I did. But I know that doesn’t mean I am not at fault in some way.
Blissful ignorance
, you call it. Ignorance, yes. Blissful, no.

The
What has happened?
question is worse.

I don’t want to know what has happened, I just want you back the way you were, back to normal. I have tried different topics of conversation like the latest finds at Medinet Habu. Or whether the new construction of Broadcasting House in Portland Place in its modern art deco style will expand the BBC’s horizons in ways that excite you but won’t affect me one jot. That kind of question usually gets you all fired up. Today you stare at my shoes and don’t even hear what I say.

Whatever has happened is bad. So I don’t want to know about it.

‘You seem unhappy,’ I say miserably. ‘What has happened?’

For the first time you look at me. I glance fleetingly at your face and go to stand right next to the door of the wardrobe. Alarm is chewing on my eyeballs and I need to put them in the dark.

‘Georgie, come over here.’

I shuffle a pace closer. You start to talk about our father, about the meetings you attend with him to listen to Sir Oswald Mosley speaking about Fascism and what it will do for this country. I watch my fingers tear a button from my shirt because I am so frightened.

You have never done this before, telling me things about Pa.

‘You and I have talked about
Sir Francis Galton before,’ you say carefully. ‘Remember?’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘Tell me.’

‘He was the cousin of Charles Darwin and invented the science of eugenics. He put forward the idea that it was possible to produce a highly gifted race of men by selective breeding.’

‘And?’

‘And discourage the reproduction of undesirables in society.’ I walk away from you and pick up my heavy Indian club. ‘I know that I am an undesirable.’

‘Pa knows that too.’

I swing the club. ‘I am not going to reproduce.’

You watch the club. ‘Pa spoke to me last night about Adolf Hitler’s ideas on maintaining racial purity among the Aryans and about the huge following for Galton’s ideas in America and here in Britain at the eugenics centre in Lambeth.’

I raise the wooden club and swing it down onto my bed. The springs moan.

‘Pa is very much in favour of the idea,’ you tell me.

I swing the club again.

‘Georgie, listen to me. I am worried.’

‘I want you to leave now. Come back when you—’

‘Damn you, Georgie, I am not leaving.’

You are shouting. I cover my ear with my left hand to block out the noise but keep the club in my right.

‘I am worried,’ you say more calmly, ‘that he might be planning to …’

You stop. You start to make strange sobbing noises at the back of your throat. I back away further.

‘I am worried,’ you say again, ‘that he will not …’

‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’

‘Don’t,’ you hiss at me. ‘The whitecoats will come.’

I lift the Indian club
with both my hands and slam it against the wardrobe door, which splinters into a thousand pieces and the noise scrapes on my eardrums.

The whitecoats come and they make you leave.

I have snakes in my head. It has not been a good week for me, not since you came and talked about Pa. The snakes are there, slithering through cracks in my skull. I hear them. All the time. Their hissing and their squirming, the rustle of their dry scales against the moist curls and coils of my brain.

They are so boisterous that at times I dig a finger deep in my ear to try to hook one out. I am so desperate that I ask Dr Churchward to examine my ears with an otoscope to check on what the serpents are doing in there, but he laughs and sticks a needle in my arm instead. I even insist that he must use the brutal electric wires, attach them to my skull because it is the only way to kill the snakes – to shock them to death. But he refuses and forces a tablet into my mouth. I think about what you told me about Pa’s championing of eugenics and I quickly sick the tablet up in the secrecy of my door-less wardrobe. When you come, I am sitting in the gloom of the wardrobe staring at the tablet in its puddle of beetroot, redder and more ferocious than blood. I know it is beetroot, but it still scares me.

You pace. Your footsteps sharp and accusing. I pull a shirt off a hanger and drape it over my face.

‘Georgie,’ you say. ‘Get out here.’

I hiss in tune with the snakes, so that I won’t hear you. You wait a while, then you sit down on my bed. You never sit on my bed unless I am on it. I hiss louder.

You say, ‘I’ll do you a deal. You come out of there and I’ll give you this.’

You don’t say what
this
is.

I am forced to remove the shirt. You are holding up a new record for my gramophone. I scurry out of the wardrobe and snatch it from your hand to see who it is. It is Louis Armstrong . I squeal with delight, remove it from its mouse-brown sleeve and place it on the turntable. I wind the handle and carefully position the needle in the groove, and when the notes of the trumpet pour into the room, they silence the snakes. I stomp triumphantly across the floor, grinding them into dust under my feet.

I am bereft when
the music stops. I start to wind the handle again but you say no.

‘Sit down and listen to me, Georgie. That was the deal.’

‘That wasn’t the deal.’

‘Sit. Down.’

I sit. Scared. But the snakes have not returned, so I smile.