Daniel Martin (65 page)

Never mind that Dan had rebelled against such timidity in countless outward ways, he still strove, even in the shifting news of his life, always for control, a safe place. The nature of his work, his frequent experience of beginning a new script before the last one was fully realized, was paralleled in his private life, in the way he would so often think himself out of relationships with women long before they actually ended. That might seem to argue against a desire for stasis. But perhaps it was simply that the old man had found—by hazard and unthinkingly, since Christianity in this context was no more than the answer to a fear—what his son was searching for. Dan’s solution had been, like some kinds of animal, to find safety in movement; to be Jenny’s suitcase in eternal transit; a windblown ball of tumbleweed. His father had chosen attachment to the established order, social and metaphysical; Dan had tried a little of the same with Thorncombe, but otherwise his religion had been non-attachment… what the woman now sleeping the other side of the door had said to his daughter. Yet somehow this seemed a very superficial paradox between father and son. In both cases there was a same flaw of nature: a need not to question, to ban certain possibilities.

He did think of Jane again while he undressed, but more practically. One couldn’t really do anything about the situation and its minor embarrassments: it was as irremovable as the wedding-ring on her finger. The scenario was already written, by their past, by their present, by Anthony’s ghost, by their family relationships and responsibilities; and Dan was a great believer in keeping to the agreed lines in scripts. Behind all this, in any case, lurked the knowledge that he might amuse Jane, that she might be grateful to him, that she liked him and might even admire him a little; but she was not satisfied by him. Still, as he always had done, he failed where she could not relax her standards; and he could not resent that since increasingly he doubted even his own.

Once in bed, to stop any more of this and send himself quickly to sleep, he picked up the Lukacs paperback he had been given.

Luxor, after a further jading experience of the airport at Cairo and an uncomfortably crowded flight on an Ilyushin, was a relief. The actual town, with its tired corniche, its two or three would-be grand but apparently deserted hotels overlooking the river, did not impress them. But the warmth was delicious; the brilliant azure sky, the mimosas and acacias and poinsettias in flower, the drifting feluccas, the shimmering water tinged a pinkish ochre by the reflections of the cliffs of the Theban necropolis to the east… it was one of those landscapes, and climates, that immediately justify their reputation. Even the provinciality of the little town, its air of rundown indolence, of trying to get itself into a Graham Greene novel, was appealing after the stress and noise of the capital.

The modern white ‘floating Hilton’ that was to be their home for the next week, and which they found moored beside the corniche, seemed clean and efficiently run, if lacking in the picturesqueness of the old Nile steamer Dan had taken his previous cruise on. Their cabins were on the same side, but separated by three others. Dan had hoped they might get a table to themselves in the dining-room and tried, when they went to lunch, to bribe the head waiter into fixing it; but it couldn’t be done. All he could offer during the cruise was a table with an American couple. There were two large parties of French and East European tourists; the Americans were the only other native anglophones aboard.

They turned out to be a rather shy young couple in their late twenties. Dan and Jane consoled themselves, when they were alone afterwards, that they might have done worse. He suspected she might have been happier at one of the French tables, but he felt loth to leave the one small Anglo-Saxon island, in the babel of tongues surrounding them at lunch, available. Besides, the American pair seemed to have been abroad long enough—they had been in Cairo some four months—to have quelled that least attractive (to Dan) of national characteristics: the need to overwhelm you with personal information and then demand yours. The occasional conversation at lunch—it was properly a rectangular table for six, which allowed them some separation-was almost English in its discreet generality.

The lingua franca of the East Europeans seemed to be German—they were mainly from the Democratic Republic, with a few Czechs and Poles thrown in… ‘kind of rivals of mine, I guess’, added their table companion, who had been chatting with one of the ship’s officers. Most of them were working in Egypt under various industrial and technical agreements; and so was the American. He was a computer expert, on a year’s loan from his company to the Egyptian government, training programmers at a new branch of the Ministry of Finance just outside Cairo.

They were all taken after lunch on their first tour, a mile or so north in fiacres, to the temple of Karnak. Dan had privately decided that he would cry off some of these side-trips on the cruise, but felt he should show willing on this first day; he was curious, in any case, to see how Jane would react to the first full frontal assault of ancient megalomania. Somewhat to his relief the cruise guide took the four English-speakers aside when they were assembled outside the temple. He was embarrassed by the predominance of French-speaking passengers—the East Europeans had brought their own guide—he would have to use that language, perhaps they could follow him? Jane could, the American girl said she would try, while her husband and Dan held up their guidebooks. Neither of them, it turned out, was a conscientious tourist, and both preferred, amid such regimented sightseeing, to wander about on their own. The American was at least characteristic in his mania for photographing everything; and that left Dan free to let Jane translate the essence of what the longwinded little Egyptian guide said or to drift off.

He soon felt the same reactions as on his previous visit. The place was graceless, obsessed by the monumental, by exactly that same sort of grandiose and bloated vulgarity some more recent dictators had favoured in their architecture. At this distance it was even rather ludicrous; the way each succeeding pharaoh seemed to have spent most of his life ripping out his predecessor’s stone bellows, and trumpetings for the attention of posterity… as mockable as the more contemporary delusions of grandeur Sabry had been attacking. The large complex had a certain theatricality, but he enjoyed the incidentals much more than the tour proper: the names of early nineteenth-century French, Italian and British travellers carved high up the huge phallic columns—high, because they had once, before the sand was cleared away, been at ground level; and he liked the inner lake, where the sacred barges had once been brought. That still had a charm. He spotted a magnificent bird there, an emerald-green and copper bee-eater, and took Jane to see it closer; then felt a secret irritation when he could see she was anxious about missing the guide’s eternal lecture. He began to find her disconcertingly dutiful, almost Teutonic in the way she solemnly stood and listened to the outflow before each bas-relief and building. But he found he was doing her a partial injustice.

They were taken into a room to see a delicately incised wall-carving of the ritual pouring of the flood waters of the Nile, and he and she stayed on to see it better when the others followed the guide out. Two divinities, a male and a female, faced each other, holding up tilted flasks from which the water poured in two curved and crossing lines, forming an arch; except that it wasn’t water, but chains of the ancient keys-of-life, cascades of little loop-topped crosses.

He murmured, ‘Three stars, that one.’

‘Yes, it’s very moving.’

They stood there, alone in the shadowy room now, in silence, staring at the Isis and Osiris, brother and sister, husband and wife; for the first time since their arrival he had a sharp recall of Andrea, standing here with her nearly twenty years before, in exactly this place, this same time of year—even alone like this, and for the same reason, wanting to savour by themselves this clear small masterpiece embedded in the oppressive and elephantine architecture outside. In spite of the stylization, the scene had deep humanity, a green fuse. Jane turned and saw something in his face that he hadn’t really meant to show; but which he acknowledged with a wry smile, as if he was being foolishly sentimental.

‘I was thinking of Andrea. Standing here with her once.’ He nodded. ‘She loved that.’

They stood a moment, still looking, and Jane said gently, ‘I always remember that marvellous passage in Mrs Dalloway. About the only conceivable life after death being the memories people retain of you.’

‘I doubt if that would have satisfied dear old Queen Hatshepsut and her brood.’

‘I think one has to envy them in a way. Their innocence.’

‘I wonder. I have a suspicion they were running scared. All the bad vibes in places like this must come from somewhere.’

‘It is a bit much.’ They turned away to move outside and rejoin their party. ‘Except it’s so remote. Like Stonehenge.’

‘I don’t know if it is remote. When you think of the way we’re ruining London. San Francisco. Andrea wanted to mount an exhibition here. Megalopolis through the ages.’ She smiled, and they came out into the sunlight.

Dan glanced at her. ‘Money back?’

She laughed and shook her head. ‘But in a way I’m glad I’m seeing it all later in life.’

‘We saw through Rome. I think we’d have got it right. Even then.’

‘I’ve been thinking that as well. How Roman it all is.’

‘How Egyptian Rome was.’

‘Of course. I suppose every great civilization needs its Etruscans.’

They were nearing the twenty or thirty passengers gathered round the guide.

‘Or its French?’

She stared drily ahead at them.

‘They take it all so seriously. Have you noticed the one like an old-style actor-manager?’

Dan had noticed him, there was an outrageously handsome and unmistakably queer young man with him; a gentleman in his late fifties, with a face eternally poised between aesthetic eagerness and a supercilious air of aristocracy—or at any rate considerable superiority over the heterosexual world around him.

‘I’d rather marked him down for you, Jane.’

She bit her lips.

‘I hereby baptize him the Barge-born Queen.’

And Dan was left, because they had regained the group, with the image of her bitten lips and the clearest flash yet of her old self. She moved forward from him, in response to one of those mutely reproachful looks at laggard sheep guides in full spate employ, and he watched the back of her head. He felt the dead around him: the ancient and their own dead, Anthony and Andrea; but richly, poetically, in the late afternoon sunlight. It occurred to him that be was perhaps not so remote from these ancient kings and queens as he liked to think. He too was haunted by remembering and being remembered, by death and his own death; intimations of mortality—but they came to him with a patina of contentment, one was dying perhaps, but one knew more, felt more, saw more; all she had meant by her ‘later in life’.

On the way back to the boat they stopped for half an hour to look at the other great temple of Luxor, where the wretched Ramses II, Il Duce of the dynasties, had had himself celebrated at every angle and in every granite vista, ad nauseum. Then they were allowed an hour’s free period. Assad had given him the name of the ‘only honest antique dealer’ in Luxor, a Mr Abdullam, and Jane and Dan strolled into the town to find his shop. There seemed to be antiquities shops of a sort at every turn, and they were continually pestered in the street. One man on a bicycle came beside them and thrust an object wrapped in newspaper at them, exactly like a spiv of the 1940s; it was a mummified foot, a hideous shape, like something in a Bacon painting, of twisted black and yellow and tawny parchment.

‘Not today, thank you,’ said Dan politely.

The man insisted, with a wolfish impatience.

‘Is true, is true.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Lady!’

The grisly thing was thrust against Jane, who raised her hands and shook her head. He persisted for a few more yards, but then turned to waylay a French couple behind him. After a moment there was an angry Gallic shout.

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh tol, tu m’emmerdes. Thou are a pain in the neck.’

‘I think the Frogs are rather better at handling the natives than we are.’

‘That’s because being French is a state of mind. I heard one of them at Karnak. She said in a somewhat surprised voice to her friend, Ii y a des abeilles. There are bees. Then she said, I have also seen flies. Even insects don’t truly exist until their presence has been announced in the only real language.’

‘I wish I spoke it.’

‘I don’t think you’re missing much. They sound a ripe old bunch of Gaullist nouveaux riches.’

‘Yes?

‘Yes?’

‘Actually I wish we spoke German. Apparently their guide’s a professional Egyptologist.’

‘I know. He looks a learned old boy.’

They came to the shop they were looking for and found, talk of the devil, that they had been forestalled; the German-speaking group had preceded them on the two sightseeings and as they entered the narrow room with its glass-cased walls, they saw the ‘learned old boy’ sitting on a chair at the back talking with the hawk-nosed and even older owner. There were two small coffee-cups. As soon as he saw them, the dealer came to meet them. He spoke a broken English. They wished to buy antiquities? Dan said they wished just to look a little; then mentioned that the shop had been recommended by Assad. The old man bowed his head respectfully, though Dan suspected that the name, or his pronunciation of it, meant nothing. They wished scarabs, beads, figurines? He was a shade too eager.

‘If we could just look.’ Dan gestured towards the back of the shop. ‘And please… ‘

But the man there raised a hand in polite refusal. ‘I am a friend. Not a customer.’

They smiled, surprised, his English accent was so good. He was a thin old man with a last forelock of ashen hair and an almost white close-trimmed Van Dyck, or perhaps it was an Ulbricht, beard. It was a face that had a faintly circumspect, yet alert, authority. He had a walking-stick beside him. Dan had seen him at Karnak, using it as a pointer. Mr Abdullam began to pull out trays of scarabs and beads and they stood at the counter, slightly embarrassed by all this attention and the watchful eyes of the old dealer. Jane took to some rows of beads made of countless minute sea-green discs interspersed with tawny cornelians, and asked where they came from. They came from graves. Yes, but she meant from which site? That seemed to confuse the dealer, and he turned and said something in Arabic down towards his guest at the back, who now spoke again.

‘The beads come from different places, madame. They are put on strings here by Mr Abdullam. They are old, but they have no archaeological value.’

Jane said, ‘I understand. Thank you.’

Mr Abdullam produced a key and unlocked a shallow drawer below his counter. That was full of better-authenticated strings, but the prices were much higher, and the oracle at the back of the shop was silent now—they had no idea whether they were cheap for what they were, or exorbitant. They went back to the made-up strings, whose prices seemed to vary between three and five pounds. Jane picked two for her own daughters, and then helped Dan pick one for Caro. But he noticed that two of its cornelians had suspiciously fresh-cut edges, and from some obscure feeling that one ought to at least go through the motions of haggling with an Arab merchant, mentioned his doubt. Again the authority at the back of the room was invoked. He held out a hand.