It seemed that Esmé had also had a poor night, perhaps pining for me. I felt sorry for her. While I had embarked on a harebrained personal chase, she had been working to help our company. Did Mrs Cornelius appreciate how much all our fortunes depended upon my little girl? I remember that the ferry ride was conducted in a mood of general conviviality, especially since our crew was growing increasingly more anxious to complete their work and get back to Hollywood. They had had enough, they said, of the local colour. Most had had bouts of dysentery. Professor Quelch made some dry joke about ‘crossing the River of Death’ while Seaman, who was better read in Egyptology than the rest of us, looked about him and asked where ‘Turnface the Ferryman’ had got to. I believe he referred to Sir Ranalf. We were all in high spirits as we disembarked and mounted the donkeys which were to take us to the valley of the Tombs. Helped by courteous boys we mounted the little animals, surprised to discover that their saddles were relatively comfortable. Suddenly we were trotting up a long, dirt road into a low line of hills, the burial caves of the pharaohs and their favourites. It was already warm. I was glad of my wide-brimmed straw hat, my dark glasses. We had not gone half-an-hour, with the dust of the road beginning to rise like mist behind us, obscuring our view of a distant line of tourists, before I had the urge to remove my jacket, but decorum disallowed me from taking it off until I saw others doing the same. Behind us the Nile had become a path of grey silver through the red-brown clay, through the dark yellows and the untidy clumps of green, of rocks and palms, while Luxor was a ghost on the far shore, distance as usual undoing the damages of time. My little girl, prettily sidesaddle on a donkey more her size than mine, seemed entirely at her ease, jogging at the rear, chatting to Professor Quelch, while Mrs Cornelius rode beside me, a billowing cloud of white linen and lace. A sunshade over one shoulder, a gloved hand upon her donkey’s pommel, she could not maintain her ill-temper but shrieked with pleasure every time the donkey’s hooves struck an uneven part of the path. ‘Y’d pay an effin’ fortune for a ride like this at Margate!’ But she admitted she would be relieved when we got to what she was insisting on calling ‘Tooting Common’. His long legs brushing the ground, Wolf Seaman bounced moodily in her wake, glancing at his watch and looking up at the sun, while the rest of the crew trailed back along the path, commenting on the scenery and waving away the occasional group of children who appeared from nowhere to offer us reed fans, straw scorpions, huge living lizards harnessed with string or the usual figures of Bast and Osiris. I began to think the whole area hid a troglodytic city, a warren of caves where these children skulked and their goods were manufactured. Could that barren landscape deceive the eye and support human life in subterranean tunnels? Was all of Egypt living, literally, with its dead? But I knew this to be fanciful. The villages were behind us and to one side. That was where the bony children originated. Everything else here was dedicated to Death and the Netherworld. How careful had these people been to ensure their immortality! How vulnerable, in the end, that immortality was proven! When the day came for the souls of the dead to return to their bodies, there would be nothing for them to occupy but the temporal forms of huge German Hausfraus in sturdy cotton walking-suits or slender French homosexuals in the latest Paris cut. One could imagine them feeling a certain amount of confusion.
The Valley of the Kings is itself a somewhat disappointing sight. It was, after all, picked for its isolation rather than its beauty. It is a wide, shallow wadi in the walls of which, over the centuries, tombs were bored and into these tombs had been placed the mummies of kings, some of which survived until the twentieth century when, with our more sophisticated methods, we succeeded in disturbing the rest of what were probably the last untroubled dead. Cook’s and the Egyptian Society had built sets of iron or wooden stairs to some tombs so that the thousands of tourists who came here every year to peer, without much interest, at what the looters had spared (mostly wall-paintings) and giggle or gape at the oddness of it all, might save themselves even the discomfort of a modest scramble. There were only a few tourists here before us, most of whom belonged to Thackeray’s German Touring Group which had pitched its tents overnight, perhaps in the delicious hope that the spirits of Tutenkhamun or Horemheb might be tempted to return to earth by the smell of canned frankfurters and sauerkraut. These Germans did not look as if they had seen ghosts and as we approached were finishing a hearty selection of breakfast meats. O. K. Radonic, who was our best German-speaker, went up to explain what would be happening, asking merely that they did not stray into camera-shot. I noticed that many of the campers had been looking rather sullen and actually cheered up at his news, taking rather more interest in our Company than in the ringing tones of Miss Vronwy Nurture who addressed them, in clear, precise schoolroom English, on the lineage of the Egyptian God-Emperors. Even in Germany, that bastion of culture, there are those who would rather watch a modern movie crew at work than absorb the wisdom and revelations of ancient stones or admire the beauty of an unnamed artist whose skills were dedicated only to an unearthly posterity.
There would be time to inspect the tombs later, said Seaman. For the moment he wanted some good outside shots. Later that afternoon, Sir Ranalf would send a party of fellaheen to us. These we would dress as slaves to carry the mummy into the tomb. We had not yet decided whose tomb to use. Radonic said we seemed to have come a long way to get a take we could have gotten better in Death Valley. Seaman, who had invested so much of his reputation in this film, asked him pompously not to display his philistinism but just to turn the camera when he was commanded. Radonic, who had been losing patience with Seaman as his boredom increased, told him there was only one place he was prepared to point his camera at that moment whereupon Seaman began to utter his familiar self-pitying squawks, like a gannet discovering a damaged nest.
‘ ‘E’s started early,’ observed Mrs Cornelius with a placid smile. ‘I ‘ope that means we finish early, too. It’s gonna get effin’ ‘ot soon, Ivan.’
There came, as if in concert, a high-pitched wailing from the entrance of the valley where an enormous dust-cloud began to thrash upwards obscuring the sun. The children dropped back, knowing an afrit when they saw one. The wail dropped to a roar and then a cough, almost lion-like, as through the dispersing sand came a monstrous Rolls Royce half-track, the kind I had last seen abandoned on the Odessa road as we retreated to the sea. This one was not camouflaged but vivid with scarlet and yellow livery, with a great Ibis in outline above a motto reading Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo scrolled in elegant Gothic and above its head the angular words Egyptian universal moving picture co. Sir Ranalf Steeton himself sat at the wheel while behind him two servants held tightly to a rope-lashed mummy-case poking at an uneasy angle across two sets of back seats.
As it rolled to a rasping halt its tracks threw up a huge curtain of sand, which fell back to half-bury the Thackeray camp. ‘Don’t worry, sweet lads and lasses,’ Sir Ranalf assured us as he dusted his own coat free of the beige-coloured dust. ‘I’ve seen them here before.’ He glanced up briefly as the campers flapped over collapsed canvas. ‘They’re only Krauts. Well, what do you think? Isn’t she a beauty? The real McCoy, too, though I’m not so sure she’s a Queen exactly. Will she do? The slaves are coming by a separate route.’ And with a rap of his cane upon the mummy-case the little man, almost a pantomime pig in tropical whites, crossed the sands to help my Esmé free herself from her donkey, to flick a wisp of cotton from where it had caught on the saddle, to kiss her upon the cheeks and to pat her little head while Mrs Cornelius (dismounting with all the easy skill and grace of Buck Jones about to confront troublesome rustlers) called out to nobody in particular, ‘It’s orl right everybody, ther bloody star’s passed ‘er ordishun.’
If she thought to alert me to anything, she failed. Instead I was shocked and upset by this unseemly display of petty jealousy and spite from a woman whose integrity and judgement I habitually respected above all others. As she strode towards Professor Quelc
h, he looked almost in panic from her to Sir Ranalf. She paused beside him, clearly expecting moral support, but he peered over her shoulder and smiled apologetically at an expectant Steeton, who showed evident satisfaction at this display of equivocation. I wondered what had caused Quelch to change allegiances. As Mrs Cornelius stalked disgustedly across the sand in my direction I, too, found myself offering a placatory grin to our new master. And in betraying Mrs Cornelius, just for that instant, I knew in my heart I had betrayed myself.
* * * *
NINETEEN
WHAT I EXPRESS IN SADNESS, she expresses in anger; but the pain is the same, the pain of watching people destroy themselves, destroying any hope for their children. ‘Yer carn’t save ev’rybody, Ive,’ says Mrs Cornelius. Yet I thought I had found a way. ‘They ‘ave ter make their own mistakes,’ she says. Sometimes she falls prey to that careless tolerance which is her caste’s bane but which the middle-class idealise as its greatest virtue. Their myth of the British sense of fair play is their most effective means of maintaining a status quo favouring an elite. If there was anything wrong with what they were doing, they say, the people would complain. Everyone knows the British will only complain about the weather to which their combined creative intellects have failed to make a jot of difference. And yet they are always surprised by it. They have a myth of snowy winters and hot summers, imprinted from childhood Annuals. What is more they have been conditioned so thoroughly to a Stoic conceit, wherein suffering is morally superior to pleasure, that they are now the chief guardians of their own confinement. I see this clearly. Anyone could. Observing the truth does not make me a Communist! It is easy enough to identify the disease but far harder to agree on a cure. This is what neither side will ever understand. I am not a fool. I know what it means to take an independent position in life. People do not appreciate the consequent pain and the loneliness of that position, the contempt and insulting threats one frequently endures. I do not think this is ‘amoral’, as those women say. Nor is it immoral. I am a man of profound and subtle conscience. Only a moron would disagree that it is not always possible to be sure of the best course of action. Why make politics confrontational? One cannot solve every moral dilemma in an instant. Am I the only man on earth who is naturally tolerant and unbiased? Who likes to weigh all arguments?
Why should I feel guilt because I refuse to march through the streets of Paris side by side with some semi-literate student? Does it make me a monster because I have actually seen the red flag flying over vanquished courts and parliaments and understood its immediate meaning? Why are the agents of Terror such figures of romance to the young? Bonnie and Clyde? I saw the movie. During their hey-day, ask anyone, it was no fun to step in their path.
Though lighting problems made it impossible to film just then in the tombs, our photoplay progressed fairly well during that first fortnight and the basic story was soon ‘in the can’. Sir Ranalf assured us that we should eventually receive a generator or, failing that, he would seek permission to shoot what we needed in the complexes of Karnak. The rest, he said, could be reconstructed in the studio. I still had my chief love scene to enact with Mrs Cornelius in the tomb. We would die in each other’s arms, to be resurrected centuries later as the young lovers of the opening. Then I must perform what we called ‘the seduction scene’ with Esmé when, for a few brief days, I had to fall under her spell, almost betraying my love for Mrs Cornelius. Few - even Wolf Seaman himself - denied this was my greatest acting achievement. If I never acted again the world would remember this film for the passion and sensuality I was able to bring to it! A monument, a testimony to my love and my aspiration, even should I die the day it was completed. This film would be seen in every picture-house in the world. Cornish and Peters would be as famous as Garbo and Gilbert. We performed our parts in the blazing sun, with an audience of grubby German tourists, local children and tarbooshed guides. They applauded every gesture and embrace. The lack of sleep and the sapping heat meant we resorted increasingly to our cocaine, of which our ‘technical producer’ Malcolm Quelch had an endless supply. Sir Ranalf Steeton expressed gargantuan delight in our achievements. Desert Passions would set new records at box-offices across Europe and America. During the day he now insisted upon Esmé accompanying him wherever he went. She was his ‘sweet little kiddy’, his ‘perfect girl’. At the time, I found cloying and unnatural these affected pronouncements of an older man for the charms of young flesh. Yet Esmé explained how important it was to keep his goodwill. She had overheard him praising the merits of the film to his partners, who were all Egyptians. She thought they expected something more sensational. By now I had seen a few examples of the local shadowy melodramas. I told her our own film was so much above those that there was no point in making a comparison. Egyptian ‘thrillers’ scarcely travelled out of their country, let alone to America. But I understood the importance of encouraging our producer not to drop artistic standards for short-sighted commercial gains, so I permitted my girl her time with the Englishman when, on more than one occasion, she attended meetings and helped reassure his partners as to the nobility and certain financial success of our venture. If any other relationship was developing between Sir Ranalf and my girl I did not detect it, although I must admit I suppressed suspicions now and again. I thought often of Kolya and I was desperate to ensure that my scenes with Mrs Cornelius would be as perfect as possible. I must admit I did not give as much time to my little girl as she deserved. It is folly to neglect a perfect flower, as we used to say in Kiev. Without appreciation, such a flower fades or is plucked by another. I blame myself as much as anyone. Sir Ranalf Steeton plucked my flower, but I do not think I was to blame for most of what followed. I suppose, too, I should not blame Esmé for feeling a certain jealousy while she watched those powerful scenes between my old friend and myself, though it was always clear we were platonic comrades off-screen. While Seaman did not suspect me, he was on the other hand deeply suspicious of Professor Quelch. Mrs Cornelius seemed the only person able to get a smile from the old boy. Quelch grew almost foolishly relaxed in her company and said he thought she was the most amusing companion he had ever known.
Another distraction was the general attitude of the crew. Grace was almost constantly in a state of bridling offence and disappeared one night, apparently with a Greek soldier on leave, while O.K. Radonic clearly had no respect for the director or sympathy with the story. He spent most of his time looking for cigars, operating his camera only when forced to do so, and displaying all the signs of the heat fatigue which eventually brought him down. He was taken to the Hungarian doctor in Luxor and was declared unfit to work. Seaman solved the problem by turning the camera himself until our two lighting people deserted with a pair of wealthy Swedish women they had met in Tutenkhamun’s tomb. We began to look less like a film company than a small dramatic troupe, yet the beaming Sir Ranalf was undismayed by anything! He assured us that new staff would soon be entrained from Cairo. He knew only the best Egyptian film professionals and could easily get skilled technical staff from Italy if necessary. Eventually we were joined by an Alexandrine Greek, who was impressed by what he called our ‘modern’ equipment, but showed himself a competent enough cameraman under Seaman’s direction. Two more Greeks and several Copts followed until we had a full complement again, although Seaman moaned constantly about their incompetence and laziness. The Copts, discovering Esmé to be fluent in Turkish, spent most of their time chatting with her. She was soon on excellent terms with them until Sir Ranalf objected. Her friendliness was not good for discipline. We should keep a proper distance.
Finding himself with only moderately expert help, Seaman grew increasingly distracted. Few of the team spoke English, one spoke a little German and Seaman was forced to rely on those of us with French to translate the simplest instructions. Eventually, when I was unable to fix the run-down old generator brought to us to power our lights, he announced he could no longer work in such conditions. We had set up our camera in Tutenkhamun
’s tomb, a rather chilly, narrow place for a king to be buried, with tiny chambers and unimpressive paintings like bad comic strips. None possessed the beauty or the inspiration I had seen in other tombs and temples where it was impossible not to become familiar with ancient Egyptian art. Eventually the two-dimensional form seemed perfectly natural to me and it was easily possible to distinguish sublime from crude. There were wonderful bas-reliefs and tomb paintings, temple art and monumental sculpture, but there were also, thousands of years on, wretched copies of the great originals, heartless academic facsimiles, just as exist in our own world. Age does not improve bad art. There are never many great artists alive at any one time and Tutenkhamun’s fame appears to rest on his gold and his physical beauty rather than upon the magnificent workmanship of his burial goods, the artistry of his tomb’s paintings. They believed the tomb was really meant for a minister, but that the boy king died suddenly and it would have taken too long to quarry a fresh tomb from the rocks of the Wadi el Mulak. The stars in the dark roof were lifeless; the blue, green and red figures in procession on the walls seemed without direction. I found the place depressing. But that, I suppose, is the nature of tombs. I do not share the public’s fascination with such places. While everyone else spent their free time exploring the various resting-places of the much-disturbed dead, I contented myself with sketching designs for a new project in which I hoped to interest Sir Ranalf. I had conceived the idea some months earlier. I called it my Desert Liner. Finally the patient camel would be discarded as ‘the ship of the desert’ in favour of a gigantic motor! My vehicle would carry passengers across the dreaded Sahara Desert in the comfort and luxury they enjoyed on an ocean liner. I showed the plans to Sir Ranalf one afternoon as he sat in his car watching Esmé playing cricket with the Alexandrine, Mrs Cornelius and Professor Quelch. ‘Howzat!’ he would cry, and, ‘Well caught!’