Sphinx (3 page)

‘No. Oliver, you don’t understand—’ She broke off, staring into the distance. I decided to change my argument.

‘I’m assuming you have back-up with you - some of the French archaeologists, the Italians?’

Apart from an English archaeologist called Amelia Lynhurst, and a new young French academic who had just set up offices near the Stadium, marine archaeology was virtually unheard of in Alexandria, despite rumours of Cleopatra’s sunken palace in the bay. Up until recently the political situation, dealing with poverty and the needs of Alexandria’s citizens, had taken precedence.

Isabella smiled wryly. ‘I’m afraid it’s only me and Faakhir.’

Faakhir Alsayla was a young diver with whom Isabella had been working over the past few months. Although he was trustworthy and enthusiastic as well as a great diver, the young Arab was not an archaeologist.

‘Christ, Isabella.’ I would have preferred her to be part of an authorised team. It was dangerous to dive illegally in Egypt, a country understandably nervous of both clandestine military surveillance from its enemies and of further plundering of its ancient underwater treasures. The only way to do it legally was to be accompanied by an Egyptian official and a recognised team of foreign archaeologists, rules by which Isabella never really abided. She was a rebel in her own field and was not liked for it. But whatever her professional standing she was often lucky in her chosen sites. A mixed blessing, it was this mysterious accuracy that was the cause of both suspicion and fear from her peers.

We seemed to share this gift of divination, something I refused to discuss. I’d always felt that to have acknowledged this shared intuition meant I would be undermining not just my scientific training but also the fierce atheism I had adopted in reaction against my strict Catholic upbringing.

‘Let’s talk about it later.’ I tried to pull Isabella back towards the bed, with no success.

‘Oliver, I have to dive today! It’s all planned. We’ve found the site of a Ra shipwreck that I’m sure belongs to Cleopatra. It dates from the Battle of Actium. The astrarium could have been on board - the Greek historian Siculus mentions such an object being given to Cleopatra at her coronation.’

‘What’s the rush? You’ve waited years. Surely it can wait a few days?’

‘I don’t
have
a few days.’ Her desperation seemed to have reached new heights and I didn’t fully understand the nature of her distress: all I knew was that Isabella could easily become intractable. I looked at her, searching for another tactic.

‘Sweetheart, the whole area’s a military zone.’ I slipped an arm around her waist.

‘I’ve made provisions. There’ll be an official on the boat.’

‘Really? Or is this some dubious character you’ve bribed?’

She shrugged off my arm. ‘I’m making that dive, no matter what!’

But under her anger I thought she looked apprehensive. Perhaps about us, the marriage, our careers. But, if I hadn’t known her better, I might have assumed it was fear.

‘So you really believe the astrarium was aboard this ship?’ I asked, more conciliatory. ‘Why would Cleopatra take it into the middle of a raging sea battle?’

‘She was desperate. The political alliances of the time had shifted, putting her and Mark Antony into a dangerous position while Octavian tried to establish his power. She knew that Mark Antony was delusional about his military supremacy. She also knew that if Octavian won, he would murder her lover and sacrifice their children. This was a woman who had staked all on winning. Siculus described the astrarium as a powerful weapon that could predict when to sail and when to attack. She must have taken it to help her lover.’

I struggled to keep my expression neutral. I believed in a world of cause and effect: crushed carbon made diamonds; crushed limestone, marble; compressed organic material, oil. This was my world: palpable, exploitable. Isabella’s world was far more spiritual: there was a karmic logic to the outcome of events; the personal had an immediate impact on the political, the micro on the macro. I thought this a misinformed perception; an anthropocentric outlook that bred complacency; the determinist’s investment in the notion of meaningful destiny.

‘If Cleopatra had the astrarium and it was able to influence the outcome of the battle, why did she flee and abandon Mark Antony to Octavian?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. But if it had been me, I would have fought to change my fate right up to the last minute. The astrarium would have saved her, I know it.’ Her obsessive tone worried me. Again, the desire to protect her shot through me but I knew that to stand between Isabella and her quest would mean the end of our marriage and certainly any respect she held for me. A fiercely independent woman who had consciously fought both her family and her culture for the right to pursue her profession, I had no choice but to trust her judgement. Nevertheless there was something unsettling about this particular dive that I couldn’t quite place my finger on - all of her obsession seemed to be leading to this one event.

There was a huge clap of thunder outside. A violent gust of wind threw open the French windows and pushed over a cane chair.

‘That’s cyclone weather,’ I told her as I secured the doors. ‘You are
not
diving today!’

‘It’s too dangerous for me not to dive!’ she yelled.

Isabella was almost hysterical by now and I knew it was pointless to continue to argue.

‘You can dive tomorrow, first light,’ I said, pulling her into an embrace. ‘I’ll go with you, okay? But this day is for us. We’ll do something nice. Isn’t it the anniversary of your grandfather’s birthday? We could visit your grandmother. By tomorrow morning the storm will have cleared and visibility is going to be much better.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she murmured into my chest. But she let me guide her back to bed.

Back then I thought we had all the time in the world.

 

Already the salty tang of the sea air was discernible above the exhaust fumes and the wafting scent of incense billowing from jars placed outside night stalls, an odour tainted by the ubiquitous but faint smell of sewage. Isabella wound up the taxi window; we were driving down the Corniche - the long seafront path that swung around the glittering curve of the Eastern Harbour. We stopped at a red light and I glanced across at the cafés on the sidewalk. Huddled around small tables were groups of men, some dressed in pale brown jellabas and blue turbans, the traditional dress of the fellahin, others in Western clothes, sharing the large hookah pipes with their colourful corded stems snaking out into the mouth of the smoker. Inside one of the cafés a black-and-white television blared out to a small argumentative knot of men and youths. A football game was playing. A penalty was being taken and a sudden cheer catapulted through the men, reminding me of England and the long afternoons spent watching football with my father and brother.

I turned back to face the Mediterranean. The emptiness of the panorama was in stark contrast to the frenetic metropolis nestled up beside it. Liberating the eye, this elemental minimalism was always a comfort to me. It took me away from humanity, from the mistakes we make, the noisiness of life. In Alexandria, as in the rest of Egypt, this polarity was exaggerated. The desert touched the sea, just as the green fecundity of the delta surrounding the Nile and its canals butted right up against the sand. It was said that Alexandria had a front door and a back door and little else.

North-west of the bay, out there under the waves, lay Isabella’s archaeological site. A place where once the great sea battle between Mark Antony and Octavian had taken place, it was easy to imagine the long ancient wooden bat+tleships, oars creaking as they raced against each other, galley slaves lighting the flaming balls to catapult them high across the waves, the battering rams ready. Isabella had grown up among myths of Cleopatra’s subterranean city Herakleion, and family friends would tell stories of swimming amongst strange sunken statues, ruins of palaces. Tales that buried themselves deep in her psyche, drawing her irredeemably to their mystery. I couldn’t help being proud of the explorer within her, regardless of how it impacted on our relationship. Reaching across, I took her hand as the taxi continued down towards her grandmother’s villa.

 

The wealthy suburb of Bulkely still retained some of its original mansions, wrought-iron gates enclosing gardens of tumbling bougainvillea, Lotus trees and blossoming cacti as well as palm trees. Isabella’s family, the Brambillas, had once been one of the key dynasties within the large and influential Italian-Alexandrian community. Isabella’s father, Paolo, had died shortly after the Suez Crisis in 1956 when, in reaction to the military attack on Egypt by the French, British and Israelis - an attack triggered by President Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez canal after the US and Britain withdrew an offer to fund the building of the Aswan Dam - Nasser took control of all of the foreign-owned companies and exiled many of the old colonial class. President of the Italian Rowing Club, the Rotary Club and owner of a large and highly successful cotton-ginning mill, Paolo had been transformed from owner to manager overnight and the factory that processed the cottonseed had been handed over to the fellahin who had worked the cotton fields for centuries. The humiliation had been too much for the Don and he had died of a heart attack several weeks later. Cecilia, his young wife, remarried within the year and moved back to Italy, leaving her eight-year-old daughter with her in-laws to be brought up.

Isabella had barely talked to her mother over the years. Her grandfather Giovanni Brambilla, a man broken by the death of his son and the decline of the family, had retreated into the two passions that had always preoccupied him - hunting and Egyptology - until his death ten years ago. Now his widow, Francesca Brambrilla, was forced to rent out the top floor of her villa and had been pawning her jewellery for decades. Nevertheless, she retained her loyal Sudanese housekeeper, Aadeel, who had come with her as part of her trousseau. Although Aadeel was an official tenant of the villa these days and not an indentured employee, he still wore the uniform of the pre-Revolution servant: a red turban and traditional Egyptian male attire. It was the last act in a drama that both were determined to play out: obsolete roles from a bygone era.

The Brambilla villa, although dilapidated, was still impressive. A familiar sense of intimidation rose in me as the taxi pulled up in front of its marble-pillared entrance. Isabella’s background was one of assumed wealth, even when most of the money had been lost. But I’d come from nothing. I’d grown up with a miner for a father and an Irish Catholic mother who was deeply religious, yet had outraged her own parents by marrying a Protestant. It had always seemed to me that she’d never quite forgiven my father for seducing her away from her own family. She was a piano teacher who had greater aspirations for her children than did my pragmatic, deeply stoic father who thought it good enough for his sons to follow him down into the mine. Despite this ongoing feud, my parents’ marriage had been one of great love and after my mother died a couple of years ago my father had become as lost as a rudderless boat.

My childhood had taught me that if there was a God he’d certainly abandoned my parents to their hardships. It seemed to me that the poorer you were the more religious you were likely to be - an abdication of taking responsibility of one’s fate - and it had led to my abandonment of Catholicism, to socialist tendencies at university and finally to my material aspirations.

As we both climbed out of the taxi we noticed a yellow Fiat sports car. ‘That’s Hermes’s car,’ Isabella said with a wary tone to her voice. ‘That’ll make it an interesting encounter.’

I glanced over, surprised. Normally Isabella would have been enthusiastic about seeing Hermes, one of her few mentors.

‘I thought Francesca hated him?’

‘Exactly, but today would’ve been my grandfather’s birthday and Hermes always visits, as he did when my grandfather was still alive. Nonna is just too well-bred to refuse him.’

Hermes Hemiedes, an Egyptologist, had been an old friend of Isabella’s grandfather. When Giovanni Brambilla died, Hermes had formed a relationship with the granddaughter, sharing a fascination - obsession, I thought - with mysticism, astrology and spiritual philosophies. A very reputable interpreter, he and Isabella spent hours together poring over hieroglyphs that she needed translated. Isabella trusted him completely and although I didn’t approve of Hermes’s influence over Isabella in mystical matters he had a dry wit that I found appealing.

 

We had finished our lunch and were now drinking coffee in the conservatory, waiting for the traditional dish of marmalade that completed the meal. Francesca and Hermes sat opposite, Francesca in a chair that was reminiscent of some eighteenth-century wooden baroque throne - one of the antiques she hadn’t been forced to sell. At eighty years old the matriarch still had the upright stance of a dancer and was the embodiment of classical European grace. She made me think of 1930s Rome - her dyed black hair sculpted into a short crisp wave, the creased olive skin suckered against the bones of a lineage bred for power and beauty.

In contrast, Hermes lounged in a leather armchair. His hair was long, its silver roots merging into dyed purple-red locks that descended to his shoulders. He could almost have passed for an elderly woman, an illusion helped by a remarkable lack of facial hair. His eyes were golden brown with a tinge of yellow in the irises, indicating a curious ethnic mix somewhere in his ancestry. The shape of his face suggested the Sudan while the thinness of his lips gave him a European look. His hands, gnarled by arthritis, bore witness to his true age, which Isabella had told me was around seventy.

A silver dish filled with marmalade was placed on the table, ten matching silver spoons curving out of the thick golden paste like swan’s necks. They represented the members of the family, most of whom were long dead. Aadeel placed four glasses of water on the pearl-and-wood inlaid table. Quickly, I washed the bitter-sweet taste of the marmalade down with the water, then reached for the small cup of viscous coffee.