Shadows on the Nile (23 page)

‘Jolly good show, my lord.’

He relaxed back in his seat with a smile. The oddest thing about travelling was the people you rub shoulders with while rattling along in a train and this Maisie Randall was the last one he’d expect to find in a first-class dining car en route to Egypt. It brightened his day no end. He took out his cigarette case.

‘Would you care for a smoke?’

‘Nope. Filthy habit.’

Instead she dived into a cornflower-blue handbag that matched her gloves, clearly brand new, and drew out a narrow Bakelite box. She popped it open to reveal a row of skinny
black cheroots.

‘Now that’s what I call a smoke.’ She offered him one.

‘I’ll stick to my own, thanks.’

He lit both and the split second of intimacy when she leaned over his flame gave him an unexpected sense of well-being. There was something so alight in this woman that you could warm your hands on it.

‘Travel much?’ he asked.

‘First time abroad.’

‘On your own?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Nervous?’

‘Scared bloody witless.’ She exhaled a string of foul-smelling smoke. ‘Excusing my French, my lord.’

‘I have a feeling it’s the Egyptians who will be scared when they see you coming.’

‘Get away with you!’

‘Why Egypt?’

‘Why not? Everyone has made such a bloody fuss of this digger-fellow, Howard Carter, that I thought I’d take myself off to get a butchers at this King Tutamen.’

‘Tutankhamen.’

‘That’s the chappie.’ She narrowed her eyes and paused, thoughtfully inspecting Monty. ‘And you? Why Egypt?’

He glanced out of the window, at the night thundering past, solid and impenetrable. What he saw was his own face looking back at him, black holes for eyes and cheekbones about to push through the skin. He looked away.

‘I felt like some fun,’ he answered with a smile.

‘I’ll drink to that.’

He laughed and waved a hand at the waiter. ‘Splendid. Now where’s that damn champagne?’

‘Tell me more about Tim, Jessie. What kind of person is he?’

They were eating
breakfast. Or, to be more exact, Jessie was scoffing breakfast while he poured a pot of coffee down his parched throat. His head felt as if a donkey was kicking around inside it and chewing the back of his eyeballs. Opposite him Jessie looked up from her breakfast plate, surprised.

She looked young and fresh this morning, her hair gleaming, its corn-coloured waves loosely nudging her shoulders as she lifted her head. There was a special morning shine to her.

‘What kind of person is he?’ he repeated.

She thought for a moment. ‘He’s the kind of person you’d want watching your back if you were in trouble.’

Such a statement. Such an open declaration of sisterly love. It simply took his breath away. To cover the moment he sipped his black coffee though it tasted like tar. ‘I know Tim is familiar with ancient Egypt, but …’

‘He and the pharaohs are like that.’ Jessie twisted two fingers together. Teasing him.

‘But how much does he know about modern Egypt?’

‘What exactly do you mean?’

He was careful to buff the sharp edges from his words. ‘Just that there is some unrest over there.’

A forkful of scrambled eggs was halfway to her lips. She returned it to her plate and pushed it aside.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘Oh, you know, it’s the usual hot-under-the-collar stuff. It will probably blow over.’

The smile slid from her eyes. ‘But they have their own king in Egypt, King Fuad. And their own democratically elected parliament now. I thought everything was quiet out there.’

‘It is. More or less.’

‘But?’

‘But would you be quiet if you had another country’s military jackboots strutting up and down your streets?’

‘Don’t.’ She shuddered.

He tasted more of the tar and shut
up. He didn’t want her to lose her shine because of him.

‘I realise,’ she said, ‘that as a colonial power we are bound to be unpopular at times, but …’ Her fingers moved to the centre of the table and waited there.

‘You have to keep in mind the country’s history,’ he pointed out. ‘We invaded Egypt in 1886 and have been the masters there ever since. It is a territory regarded as vital for us because of where it lies geographically, a strategic point halfway between Britain and the jewel of our colonial crown, India. So of course we are ruthless in keeping our stranglehold on the Suez Canal and our military might on show in the streets.’

‘I know. Tim was always regaling me with lurid stories of the great battles that have been fought over Egypt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lived through Lord Nelson’s Battle of the Nile victory over the French.’

She tried to laugh, a small self-deprecating sound, but it didn’t quite come off. It was the mention of Tim. Monty felt a sadness spilling out of her and quietly he started to fill her mind with Egypt instead. ‘Egyptians have suffered foreign occupation for the last two thousand years. It if wasn’t the Persians, it was the greedy Greeks and Romans. And they only left because the cunning Turkish Mamelukes seized power and had their wicked way with Egypt for centuries before Napoleon and the Ottomans got in on the act. I tell you, we British are newcomers to the game in the Middle East.’

Gradually he became aware that she was watching him instead of listening to him. He stopped speaking.

‘You know a lot of things,’ she said.

‘All totally useless to me when I’m digging out ditches on the estate.’

She smiled, the kind of smile that reaches the eyes and keeps on going. ‘Maybe you should abandon your ditches to the weeds and try your luck at something else – and I don’t mean séances.’ Her hand slid forward, easing into his half of the table, and he picked it up. It wasn’t a delicate hand. It was broad and
square with short flat fingernails and no jewellery. His fingers closed around it.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said quietly. ‘I am grateful. It would be harder without you.’ The smile on her face gained a twitch of amusement. ‘You look rough this morning,’ she told him.

He tore his gaze from her face and looked down at her hand nestled in his. ‘I feel rough.’

The human heart is wreathed in darkness. That’s how it seemed to Monty, that mankind has an infinite capacity to inflict pain on its fellow members. He had witnessed it before and had his illusions ripped apart by man’s ingenuity at the task, but still he harboured hopes that he was wrong. Ridiculous, pathetic hopes that Timothy Kenton was playing a game of some sort, one designed to goad and test his sister for some piffling reason known only to himself.

It was possible.

It was unlikely, but it was possible.

Monty was seated on his narrow wagon-lits bed, listening to the great iron wheels turning beneath him. It would be so damn simple if everything were pre-ordained, if life rolled along on a pair of silvery rails with just a few undulations along the way. He lit a cigarette and shook his head. The image of Jessie’s hand encircled by his own was still in there. Unsettling him. No, he didn’t believe in destiny, well, not that kind anyway. Not the kind that laid down the rules for you all straight and narrow. That would suit politicians, of course, everything tied up neat and dandy, like the way that fellow Adolf Hitler was imposing a new regime on Germany with his Nazi party right now or that poppycock Mussolini who was strutting over Italy with his Fascist party. And let’s not forget the bastard Mosley who saw himself as the saviour of Britain, bringing Fascism to our green shores. God forbid!

No. You create your own destiny. You make your own choices, right or wrong. They pre-ordain the mess you get yourself into. He gave a grim smile. Hell, that was what made life thrilling – that you could at any time make new choices, new decisions to haul yourself out of those damn bottomless wells that in your infinite wisdom you decided to jump into. This train was his rope and
he was hauling himself up hand over fist, towards that small circle of light at the top.

It was almost dark outside now; that moment in time when the day holds its breath before it exhales a last whisper and draws the shadows of night over itself. The mountains of Switzerland hung blue and bruised-looking around them, leaning so close at times it was as though they were trying to peer inside the carriage. As they thundered past one snug village of steep-roofed houses, the church-bells were ringing and a herd of goats stopped what they were doing to watch the train, round-eyed as children.

This was the time to make new decisions. To alter
destiny. Before it was too late.

Georgie

England 1929

Facts circle inside my head. You laugh at me and my facts but I learn not to mind.

The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
has been my Bible for so many years that I have read each volume until their embossed covers are tattered and hold the imprint of my hands. I cannot help it if I remember facts.

We sit in the beautiful uncomfortable chairs and I tell you facts.

‘Knapping is what they call the process of shaping a flint. Or it could be a piece of chert or obsidian or any other conchoidal fracturing stone used to manufacture stone tools. Lithic reduction is the term used for chipping away segments of stone to create a sharpened edge.’

‘Thank you for that piece of information,’ you say.

I am pleased. Today you are interested in
my facts, which is not always the case. Sometimes you tell me to shut up. I have learned from you that I must not bore people, so I swap subjects to entertain you.

‘Do you know that using trigonometric parallaxes is the way to find out the distance of stars?’ I lean forward, excited. ‘This is the good part … that by using the earth’s orbit as the base-line, the distance can be found in parsecs from the angular size of the parallax. Hence d = 1/p, assuming of course that both the sun and the star are not moving with a transverse velocity.’

‘Utterly fascinating, Georgie.’

I feel so good that I bang my hand on the maple arm of my birthday chair, the way you do when you’re pleased. I expect you to do the same but you don’t. Instead your foot starts to tap on the floor. I study it in its brown leather brogue, uncertain how to interpret the movement. I feel my right eye twitch. It has taken to doing that recently. Dr Churchward pointed it out to me and made me take a yellow tablet instead of a blue one. As long as it isn’t red, I don’t fight it.

I recite Frege’s mathematical Theory of Aggregates but this time you say nothing. I try to understand your body movements without looking at your face but you have not yawned yet, so I have to rely on your hands. They are fiddling with your shirt buttons. Not a good sign. Fiddling equals bored. You told me that.

I shift from science to the arts.

‘Today is December the seventh,’ I point out.

‘So?’

‘So on this day in 1783 Emperor Joseph the Second engaged Amadeus Mozart as chamber composer at court.’

‘How nice for him.’

‘Yes, it was. He was paid eight hundred gulden a year. But when he died on the fifth December 1791 he was penniless and was buried the next day with only the gravedigger in attendance.’

‘That’s sad.’

‘Why?’

You shake your head slowly like you do when
your cricket team loses and I know you are not going to try to explain. All you say is, ‘He was a great composer.’

‘I know. But I’ve never heard his work.’

Suddenly you beam at me. ‘Next week I will bring you music. Yes! We shall have music and you will dance.’

I try. For you I try my hardest. But my feet and the music and my counting out loud all get jumbled up together and I step all over your shoes.

‘You are an uncoordinated dunce!’ you say but you laugh, really laugh, as you say it, so I know you’re not cross.

This is what I do not understand. You call me
an uncoordinated dunce
, when we both know I am not a dunce. So it is rude, yet you are laughing. So you mean it kindly. Yet downstairs one of the whitecoats, the one who arranges the pathetic group quiz on a Friday, is always saying ‘You’re a right clever dick, aren’t you?’ and you tell me it is an insult. Even though he calls me clever. I do not understand. Words have so many meanings that don’t make sense.

You arrive with a dark blue box in your arms, the size of a child’s suitcase, and you ask permission to place it on my desk. I want to say no. My papers are all lined up in a special order on my desk, with my pens and pencils neat as a row of soldiers on the right, my stack of spiral-bound scrapbooks on the left. They are full of photographs that I have cut out from the newspapers and magazines you bring me. You call it
Georgie-land
, my version of the world out there. I worry that I might have got it wrong, so I am protective of my spiral-bound scrapbooks. If anyone touches them, I …
say it, say it
… I have an
episode.

But I lift the scrapbooks and place them in a corner of the room. Then I cover them. With my striped dressing gown. You place the dark blue box on my desk and open it. I am fascinated. It is a gramophone. I stroke the chrome arm, feel goosebumps up my wrist when I finger the velvet turntable and squeal with joy when you let me wind up the spring motor using the handle at the side. You take a record out of its brown paper sleeve and
hand it to me.

It is the most beautiful object on earth, even more beautiful than the chairs. I tell you this.

‘You haven’t seen enough objects,’ you say in an odd voice. ‘Or touched enough things, my dear brother.’

But I scarcely hear. I am holding the record and I know I will never want to let it go. It is perfect. A perfect twelve-inch circle with another perfect circle at its heart, black and shiny, flat but ridged. It is the ridges, the grooves, that bring a strange peace to my mind. A blankness sweeps through me and my limbs lose the muscle spasms that afflict them when I am excited. I imagine that this is what Bernadette felt when she saw her religious visions in Lourdes in 1858.

But it is not God I worship. It is the grooves. They turn in a tight-fitting spiral until they reach the outer edge. A spiral is a plane or curve that extends in length and width, but not in height as it winds around a fixed centre point at a continuously increasing form. I touch it with awe.