The Visitors (15 page)

Your loving daughter, Lucy

There was a postscript that had been heavily crossed out: with the aid of my magnifying glass I could decipher two horribly cramped words:
I hope
. The rest of the afterthought was illegible – so what I had hoped, or why I’d decided to communicate this hope to my father, was irrecoverable. I examined the card; melancholy clenched around my heart. There was a stamp, but no postmark. This uninformative missive was never sent – perhaps, knowing my father would dislike the exclamation marks, I’d sent a different one.

I could remember the hieroglyph I’d learned, however: it was Frances who taught it to me.

‘Okay, what can you see?’ she would ask, as we stood on the terrace at the Winter Palace. We’d be watching the sun begin to sink behind the hills on the horizon opposite; this was a dangerous moment – to the ancient Egyptians, it meant the sun was about to make its nightly journey through the perils of the underworld, from which, if one of the gates of night failed to open, it might never emerge; to me it meant Frances’s brief visit was drawing to a close; shortly she’d return to those hills and to the American House with her mother. From our vantage point, I could see the wide grey-green expanse of the Nile, the brown sails of feluccas, a man driving goats towards the ferry below and, on the far bank, a plume of white dust that marked the progress of Lord Carnarvon’s hired motorcar: he was returning from his day’s expedition to the Valley, Eve at the wheel, one of the boys from Castle Carter clinging to the running-board. You could set your watch by this punctual daily return.
What can you see, Lucy?

‘I see the sunset
,
’ I replied.

‘Very observant. And where do you see it?’

‘I give in: on the horizon.’

‘And the word for horizon is?’

‘
Akhet
.’

‘Which, when you write the hieroglyph, looks like?’

‘A little squashed hill, with a dip in its centre, and a small round ball resting in the dip.’

‘Progress. We’ll learn another next time. Oh, hellishness, it’s time for the ferry.’

She glanced over her shoulder: in the distance, but coming closer by the second, were the monitory figures of Helen and Miss Mack, shaded by parasols and deep in conversation; at the landing stage below, the ferry-whistle blew.

Nerving myself, I said: ‘Miss Mack and I will be leaving soon. It’s coming closer and closer. The days go so fast – oh, I wish I could come with you, Frances.’

‘So do I. Daddy’s been very tied up at his dig, and the Lythgoes have been entertaining endless Museum donors; too many millionaires to woo – that’s what’s held things up. But don’t worry, the guest rooms will be free soon. I’m working on it.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ she replied, kissing my cheek, and then running off to join her mother.

When Frances made a promise, it was always kept; when she said she was working on something, she meant it was semi-achieved. A few days later came the invitation to Miss Mack and me: would we like to join the Winlocks for two nights, staying at the American House, and, under their guidance, explore the Valley? Miss Mack sent a note of acceptance; I danced for pure joy. Then I applied myself: wanting to look my best for this visit, I pleaded with Wheeler until, with an affectation of grumpiness but actually with zeal, she agreed to get out her scissors, lotions and potions and transform me.

‘Snip, snip, snip,’ said Wheeler. ‘And stop fidgeting about – I’d prefer not to slice your ears off.’

I stopped fidgeting and steeled myself to look in the mirror: I was seated in splendour in the d’Erlanger suite, at what would be Poppy’s dressing table when she finally made it to Luxor. Its surface was prepared for her return with scent sprays, powder pots and elaborate jars containing the secrets of eternal youth; the sense of Poppy’s presence was so strong that I kept expecting to see her face in the glass. It was a triptych of a looking glass too: instead of beauteous Poppy, it reflected in triplicate my sad hair, and the expectant faces of Rose and Peter, perched on stools either side of me.

‘Pretty Lulu,’ Peter loyally pronounced, patting my hand.

‘No, not pretty,’ said Rose – an honest girl. ‘In fact, you still look a bit
strange.
But Wheeler will improve things, and it is growing back… sort of. Besides, short hair is very
it
– Mamma says so.’

‘Enough!’ Wheeler said, flourishing scissors. ‘I need silence, not you two chattering on and putting me off my stroke.’

And she began combing and flicking and snipping and smoothing, working so fast that her fingers became a blur, and my damp tufty hair – freshly washed, soothed with a scented cream, and smelling flowery and exotic like Mrs d’Erlanger’s – lay flat against my scalp one moment, and the next stood up as if electrified. It was parted in the centre – Wheeler shook her head in disapproval; then on the left, then on the right; at last Wheeler cried, ‘Got it!’ and parted it on the left again, but lower. ‘It’s putting up a fight – but I’ll get the better of it. Oh, you would, would you?’ she said, addressing a lock more rebellious than the others. ‘I know how to deal with the likes of
you… ’

The offending lock was thinned, sheared, then twisted into obedience around a curling iron; eventually, with a sizzling sound, it gave up the battle. Peering into the mirror, I began to see that, as promised, something
was
happening: the thin face in the glass belonged to someone I distantly remembered, a ghost girl I recognised.

Rummaging in a drawer, Wheeler brought out what she called ‘a fixative’. She rubbed this secret substance between her palms, applied it lightly as if anointing me, and then stepped back to admire her handiwork. ‘You’ll do,’ she pronounced.

‘Not half bad,’ Rose concurred.

‘Is it Lulu?’ Peter asked, looking anxiously at my reflection, and then at my face – and, possessed with sudden happiness, I told him it was, and danced a jig with him. Shortly after that, it was time to leave to catch the ferry. I danced my way to the door, and, pausing on the landing outside, heard Peter’s voice, raised in sudden alarm; as I’d come to understand, all partings, even brief ones, distressed him.

‘Go
too
, want to go
too
… ’ I heard him cry, and Rose hushed him.

‘Darling, you can’t – you’re too little. It’s too far and too hot and too tiring. Petey, please don’t cry. I’m staying here with you, and Lucy will be coming back, don’t worry.’

‘Soon?’

‘Very soon, Petey – I promise. Word of honour.’

‘With Mamma?’

‘No, not with Mamma, Petey. But Mamma will be here soon too. It’s just that she has further to travel than Lucy, doesn’t she, Wheeler? So it might take a while. Mamma has to catch a boat and then a train, and––’

I heard a quavering uncertainty enter Rose’s voice: Wheeler at once took charge. ‘All things come to those as wait,’ she said. ‘And from what I hear, we shan’t have to wait much longer. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if your mamma wasn’t on the boat right now… And as for Miss Lucy, it’s two days and two sleeps and you’ll be seeing her again. Now, let’s go out on the balcony, and we’ll watch out and wave goodbye, shall we?’

I looked back as I reached the hubbub of the ferry. Miss Mack climbed aboard, but I paused to scan the hotel façade, until my gaze arrowed in on the right balcony. There I could see them – and can see them still: a tall woman, in her maid’s black uniform; a small fair-haired girl, whose head just reaches above the parapet, who is semaphoring with both hands, and a little boy, lifted aloft and persuaded to wave; his indistinct shape catches at my heart. I call out, but of course he cannot hear me.

On the opposite shore, I was handed out onto the jetty and there were Helen and Frances, and the donkeys that would carry us to the American House. ‘Present,’ Frances said, giving me a welcoming hug, ‘you’ll need these.’

To my delight and surprise, she handed me a pair of dark glasses. I put them on. At once, the world changed.
New hair and new eyes
, I thought, as I climbed onto my donkey, and we set off towards the hills.

We made our way through the green fertile zone that spread out along the bank of the Nile and, after half an hour or so, reached the crossroads where we turned inland. There, the lush fields of papyrus, rushes and palm trees abruptly ended and desert began. The rough track climbed, gently at first, then more steeply. Ahead of me I saw the cliffs and crags that concealed the Valley of the Kings, and could make out the chief landmark: the high bare pyramidal hill called el-Qurn. There, the cobra goddess Meretseger had her abode; her name meant ‘She who loves silence’. She was the deity protecting these hills and their tombs, spitting a deadly venom into the eyes of anyone who defiled them.

Her domain was desolate but fiercely beautiful. My sunglasses made the hills appear uniformly black and forbidding, but when I removed them, their rocks transformed into fantastic corrugations and crevices of pink limestone, with clefts the dark purple of plums. It was burningly hot. I wondered how the donkey boys could tolerate the heat of the sand on their bare feet; but they seemed impervious, scampering ahead of us, singing and chattering, or returning to urge their animals on. The path grew steeper and the crags crept closer, until at last, crouching in close under the shoulder of el-Qurn, I saw the American House. Surmounted by a central dome, fronted by an immense arched veranda, long, white, low and assertive, it was twice as large – no, three or four times as large as I’d expected.

‘Oh, how splendid it is! Why, it’s vast,’ cried Miss Mack, reining her donkey in. ‘Helen, it’s magnificent.’

‘You must tell Herbert – he helped design it. Pierpont Morgan put up the money for it, you know – he was a trustee of the Museum then. It was to be called “Morgan House” in his honour, only it turned out his money wasn’t a gift after all, and he insisted it be repaid. So we forgot Mr Morgan and his mean ways, and rechristened it “Metropolitan”.’

‘Quite right,’ said Miss Mack, dismounting. ‘There is nothing meaner than a mean millionaire. And I’ve known a few mean millionaires in my time,’ she added.

We ushered her inside, before she could launch herself on the familiar saga of Emersons or Wigginses. Helen then took us on a guided tour: we were shown the bedrooms – a bewildering number of them, enough to accommodate all the Met’s team and numerous guests; we admired the airy dining room under the dome, with its long oak refectory table; the well-stocked library; the common room, with its fireplace surmounted by blue De Morgan tiles; and the working areas of the house, including the map room, the dark room where Harry Burton developed his photographs, and the storeroom for finds. The atmosphere of the house was calming: the white plaster walls, brick arches and tiled floors were traditionally Egyptian in style, but the furnishings, chaste and rectilinear, were by modern American designers. There was a monastic, scholarly hush to the building. Frances and I were to share a room at the back, well away from the adult residents, whom we were not to disturb – out of range of Minnie Burton, who was not fond of children.

Frances led me there and we stood at our bedroom window: situated at the far end of the house, close to the servants’ quarters, it looked directly across the sands and scree towards the honeycomb of Theban tombs in the hills. Nets to exclude scorpions were stretched tightly across the glass; one of the panes had been opened a crack, to admit a faint exhalation of hot sterile desert air.

I turned to examine the room: twin beds with white counterpanes; ceiling fans; photographs of her family, set up like a small shrine. ‘Let me introduce you,’ Frances said, picking them up in turn.

This was her great-grandfather, who had been the first director of the famous Harvard Observatory, and this was her grandfather, a curator of the Smithsonian in Washington DC. The photograph central to the shrine showed Herbert Winlock as a boy standing on the steps of that august institution, holding a toy telescope. In the faded picture next to it, Helen’s father, a Harvard architect, was standing on the stoop of a magnificent brownstone in Beacon Hill, Boston, holding hands with two children – an infant Helen in Alice-in-Wonderland garb, and her brother, mutinous in a sailor suit. I gazed at them curiously. Another era: it seemed unimaginably remote, and I said so.

‘Well, it isn’t,’ Frances said. ‘That picture was taken in 1892. My mother was five. Thirty years ago – it’s the blink of an eye.’

She turned to a collection of small objects arranged next to the shrine of photographs: most had been brought back from her father’s digs, or discovered by Frances herself. They had been laid out like offerings, I saw, beside the last of the photographs, a small faded picture whose details were hard to decipher, but which showed a house by the sea and two figures, who might have been a girl and a boy. Next to it were a bleached bone from a jackal’s paw, many stones, selected for colour or symmetry, and numerous flakes of limestone, with faded lines just visible on their flat surfaces.

She picked up one of these. ‘Look, Lucy,’ she said. ‘This is my great prize. These are ostraca – they turn up by the hundred on every dig. The workmen used them like little notebooks when they were working on the temples and tombs. Sometimes they’d draw a caricature, and sometimes they’d write words, nothing important, just like a shopping list, or they’d draw a plan of the tomb they were working on. This is my favourite: it’s a dog, and I found it at Deir el-Bahri. Daddy let me keep it. It’s someone’s pet dog, don’t you think? Both it and its owner have been dead for three thousand years.’

I inspected the small lively dog: it was panting and possessed a joyous feathery tail. With great care, Frances replaced it, and picked up the photograph.

‘And this is my little brother,’ she said, fixing me with shining eyes. ‘It’s his favourite ostraca too – he loves dogs. So I put it where he can see it, for company. His name is William Crawford Winlock: he’s named after Daddy’s father, but we call him Billy. He was two years, eleven months and two days old when he died. That’s our holiday house, at North Haven, which is the island I told you about, off the coast of Maine.’