Whispers in the Sand (25 page)

She nodded. “So nearly finished. So perfect.” She refocused the camera. “The sun is too high. There aren’t enough shadows for the contrast which would show its imperfections.”

“Did Louisa come here?” He was concentrating on the paper. “It is hard to convey the scale of these things. Even if I transfer it to a large canvas and put in people to show how large everything is, it will be hard. You know this is thought to be one of the largest obelisks ever carved? It’s about forty-two metres in length. Imagine that standing upright. A pointer to the heavens.” He looked up, held up his pencil for a moment, then glanced back at her. “Did she?”

“Did she what?” She tucked her camera back into her shoulder bag.

“Did she come here? Louisa. Did she paint the obelisk?”

Anna shook her head. “She came here, but she didn’t write much about it in her diary, other than that she came on a camel. She was distracted, I think. She came with friends—or rather acquaintances—whom she doesn’t appear to have cared for much. One of them was a man called Lord Carstairs.”

She was intrigued to know what his reaction to the name would be, if indeed he had heard of Carstairs at all. It appeared that he had. He gave a low whistle. “I remember my grandmother once telling me something about him when I was a kid. Grandfather heard her and was furious; he said she mustn’t talk about him. I didn’t understand why, then. But then his grandfather was a vicar, so I suppose that explains it. How on earth did she get to know an evil bastard like that?”

Anna shrugged. “I don’t think she did. They moored near his boat here in Aswan, and he came to visit.” She didn’t mention the scent bottle.

Squinting into the sun, she realised suddenly that Andy was heading towards them. Behind him, Charley and the Booths were standing with a whole group of their fellow passengers staring down at the blinding white rectangle of the obelisk as it lay below them at the foot of the quarry wall.

Andy arrived with a rattle of stones on the path near them. He glanced at Toby’s sketch. “Not bad.” The tone of his voice implied that he had reservations.

Toby ignored him. He flipped over the page and began a second drawing. His subject this time was an aged Egyptian man standing near them, arms folded, impassive as he gazed out across the city, the planes of his cheeks and nose as rugged as the hewn stone around them.

Anna glanced from Andy to Toby and back. The tension between them was palpable. She frowned. Whatever it was between these men, she didn’t want it spoiling her day. Turning, she began to make her way hastily towards the other group, digging once more in her bag for her camera.

It proved impossible to speak to Serena again that morning. Even on the bus she found herself next to Ben—loquacious, enthusiastic and very large in the narrow seat next to her. Their return to the boat with the usual warm drink to cool them down and the hot towels for the dust was followed almost immediately by lunch and the news that they were going to have the chance to sail that afternoon in a felucca to Kitchener’s Island—the Island of Plants.

Andy, Charley, and the Booths were aboard the first felucca. She watched with the second group as its sail filled and it drew away from them, then it was their turn to climb down into their boat, where she found herself sitting once more next to Toby. He grinned at her briefly, but seemed disinclined to talk as he squinted up at the tall, graceful parabola of the off-white sail against the intense blue of the sky. As they disembarked on the island to explore the botanical gardens, it was Toby who handed her ashore and Toby who fended off the swarming children begging for baksheesh with a handful of cheap biros which he produced from his bag.

As she gazed round, she couldn’t restrain her cry of delight. “It’s so beautiful! I hadn’t realised how much I had been missing gardens and greenery.” It was as heavenly as Louisa had described on her visit to nearby Elephantine Island, and as overwhelming. Ahead stretched a network of paths, winding between trees and shrubs. Everywhere there were flowers and birds. This must have been how Louisa felt when she had landed with Hassan. She reached automatically for her camera. “I can’t take all this in, in just a couple of hours. How can they have scheduled such a short visit here!”

Toby shrugged. He was still beside her, though the others had moved on. “That applies to every site we visit, every sight we see!” He stared round thoughtfully. “I am going to come back to Egypt on my own next time. Spend several months here.” He had brought a brand new sketchbook, she noticed, and she wondered how many he had used up already.

“Aren’t you tempted to use your camera at all?” she asked suddenly. She had glimpsed one in his bag.

He grimaced. “I use one. I have to. When there isn’t time to sketch. But I have had time today. My notes mean more to me than celluloid.” He allowed her to see his page for a moment, and she saw that already it was covered in small drawings, each one surrounded by notes about colour and light. “If I have problems when we get back to England, I’ll get you to show me your photos.” He whisked at the page with a grubby putty rubber and sketched on at lightning speed. A tree, a peacock, a blend of spiky palms, a small, enquiring, semi-feral cat, one after another they flew from his pencil.

The assumption that they might see each other again once they returned to England filled her suddenly with strangely mixed emotions. She considered them thoughtfully. Half of her was indignant that he should presume, if only in jest, that they might remain friends; the other half was perhaps a little pleased.

“Are you a good photographer?” His question was tossed over his shoulder as he drew.

She hesitated. “I’m not sure. My husband always called it my little hobby.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Just because your husband patronised your photography doesn’t mean it was no good.”

She frowned. “No. No, it is good.” Unconsciously she had braced her shoulders. “I’ve exhibited some of my work. I’ve won prizes.”

Toby stopped, looking at her with renewed interest. “Then you’re good. And yet your ex-husband’s view of you still matters to you?” He shook his head. “You must have faith in yourself, Anna. It seems to me that you’ve been suppressed for too long!” He grinned suddenly. “Stop hiding your camera. You keep putting it away, have you noticed? Flaunt it. You’re a professional. Be proud of it.” He paused, then he shrugged. “Sorry. End of lecture. It’s none of my business.” Already he was drawing again. This time it was an old man, sweeping the path ahead of them, capturing with a few sure strokes the rhythm of the body, the dignity of age, the refusal to bow to the stiffening of the bones.

Slowly they walked on, together now by some unspoken symbiosis, drifting along the path to where, in front of them, a vista of the River Nile opened out, framed by a dead tree on the shore at the edge of a narrow sandy beach, very like the one Louisa had described. A group of egrets stood on the bare white branches, asleep in the sun.

She glanced round and realised that they were alone. The others had moved off down the main path and disappeared deep into the gardens. Toby sketched on, oblivious to anything except the rapid details he was conveying to the page he held braced against his forearm.

She squinted through the viewfinder of her camera at the river. Out on the water, two feluccas had been tied together midstream, their sails lowered, and the sound of Nubian drums and singing drifted towards them across the water.

“Earlier, you said you’d heard of Lord Carstairs,” she said as she dug for a new roll of film in the bottom of her bag. “What was so evil about him?”

He gave a tight smile. “Having been forbidden to speak his name at home, I naturally looked him up as soon as I could when I got to a library. It must have been in the 1870s, he was chased out of England for what would nowadays be called Satanic practices. I think they involved little boys.” He snapped the point of his pencil and cursed. “He ran some kind of secret society in London—a bit like the Hell Fire Club. I don’t know where he ended his days. I suspect North Africa or the Middle East somewhere would have suited him rather well.”

“I wonder if Louisa realised.”

He shook his head. “When was she out here? Late sixties, wasn’t it? I don’t think the scandal had broken then. I don’t know much about him, to be honest, but I can imagine he would have loved Egypt with all the myth and legend and curses and
Arabian Nights
stuff.” He produced a penknife and began to whittle at the pencil point. “Did she only see him the once?”

Anna shrugged. “I’m managing to read a bit of the diary each evening. Just enough to keep up with where we are on the tour. Remembering, of course,” she added with a smile, “to keep it away from the sun and other sticky hazards!”

For a moment she didn’t think he was going to rise to the remark, but snapping the penknife shut and pushing it back into his hip pocket, he gave her a quick, mischievous glance. “That still rankles, does it?”

“A bit.” She folded her arms.

“True, though.”

She shrugged. “As it happens, yes.”

“And am I going to be allowed to see it? If I don’t touch it? I’ll stand well back and let you turn the pages.”

“With my own fair, clean, unsticky hands! Yes, I’m sure I could allow you to see it on those terms.”

For a moment, their eyes met. She looked away first.

His pencil resumed its lightning stokes, conveying the scene before him onto the page. Mesmerised by the movement of his hands, she saw him scribble the words:
crimson hibiscus…green: aqua, malachite, emerald, grass…blinding light off water/sand…contrast deep shadow/but dry rustle…

“You quite fancy that chap Andy, don’t you?” A quick look at her under his sandy eyelashes and he was drawing again.

“I don’t think that is any of your business.”

“He seems to have dumped Charley, and she is making it everyone’s business. Her complaints on the bus about you were not kind.”

“The fact that he dumped her has nothing to do with me!” Anna tightened her lips crossly. “It was much more to do with the fact that she was being a complete pain.”

“So, you don’t like him.”

“I didn’t say that. But I am here on holiday. I want to relax. To enjoy myself. To see Egypt. And I don’t want any complications.” Stepping back onto the path, she left him abruptly, ducking back between the bushes.

To her surprise, he followed her. “I’m sorry. It was none of my business.” He shut his sketchbook and tucked it into his bag.

“I think it’s time we found the others.” She didn’t glance back at him. The mood was spoilt.

It was early evening before she had the chance to talk to Serena again. They had taken the last two sun loungers on the top deck. The return from Kitchener’s Island found the boat quiet again after a further search for the snake which had apparently taken up most of the afternoon. Serena and Anna had said nothing. What was there to say? That the snake was magic? That perhaps it hadn’t existed at all? If anyone needed to say something, it would surely have been Ibrahim. They collected books and writing materials and went outside to relax after their exhilarating sail back. The plants had been watered, Anna noticed. The decking around each pot glistened in the evening sun; in only a short while, the wood would be dry.

“I’ll rescue it tonight.” Anna grimaced. “I don’t like the thought of it being soaked.”

“Of course, you could stand up now and walk over to it and dig it up. No one would notice. Probably.”

“Probably.” Anna smiled. And if they did, whose business was it but hers? But she didn’t move. A casual glance around the deck had revealed Andy asleep beneath his straw hat, a beer beside him on the small table between the chairs. There was no sign of Charley. And no sign of Toby.

Moored as they were now alongside another much larger cruiser in the crowded river at Aswan, she had the uncomfortable feeling all the time that they were being overlooked. Two people at least were standing on its top deck looking down at them. Perhaps a dozen more might be staring from behind the shutters of their cabin windows. But it was more than that.

She shifted uncomfortably in her chair and glanced again at the scarlet, green, and orange of the plants.

A tall figure was standing beside them. For a moment she could not move. She stared, taking in every detail of the long, white, pleated robe, the dark, aquiline features, the glittering eyes. It must be one of the crew. One of the waiters. Slowly, hardly daring to breathe, she raised her hand to her dark glasses and pushed them up onto her forehead so she could see better. Immediately he disappeared.

“Serena.” Her voice sounded strangled, even to her own ears.

There was no response. Serena’s eyes were closed.

“Serena!”

“What is it?” Serena sat up. She had caught the urgency in Anna’s tone.

“Look at the plants!”

Serena swung round to look. Then she turned back to Anna. “What?”

“Can you see anything? Him!”

Without a word, Serena turned back towards the bow of the boat. Then, slowly, she shook her head. “What did you see?”

“A tall man. In a long, white robe. He’s guarding it!” She took off her sunglasses with shaking hands. “I saw him clearly. In broad daylight! With people all around!” Her voice had risen to a high-pitched cry. “I saw him!”