Fazed by this thought, Sarah hardly heard what he was saying. She saw her father’s old black-and-white photos: that face with resonances of her own, the height and build that reflected hers. But this man would see her in color.
He was talking about Egypt, back then.
“Terrific place to be if you were young and up for anything. And then of course it fell apart. The Suez crisis. We Brits were persona non grata. Best to get out, if you were in a position to do so. Most of us were on short-term contracts anyway. She left a month before I did. We were all set to get together back home.” He pulled a face, shook his head.
Sarah said, “I’d like to hear more about that time. I wonder if we could meet again?”
He looked alarmed. “We live up north, you know. I don’t really come to these parts. I don’t think my wife . . .” He paused. “You look like Penelope. It’s eerie, seeing what she might have been like when she was older. I suppose . . . I suppose I could write to you. Actually, I’d find it quite helpful to put a few things down.”
“Please,” said Sarah. “I’d be so glad if you would.”
At forty-seven, Sarah occasionally felt that life had her by the scruff of the neck. Mostly, you could ignore the passage of time; that is to say, you tamed it, you reduced it to diary pages, to dates and days of the week, to the setting on the alarm clock or the start of a television program. You ignored the darker implications, the stalking footsteps. And then, once in a while, she would wake in the night, often after some dream in which she had been a child again, or some younger self, and would lie there thinking: I am forty-seven, for heaven’s sake, and I don’t know how this has come about. It was as though there were some baleful presence alongside, forcing her to stare at this unrelenting fact: look, look hard, and don’t you forget it.
She was alone, but not lonely. Once, she had lived with a man. She knew all about being half of a couple—about living with someone else’s views, foibles, habits, their way of folding a newspaper, washing a plate. She knew that curious fusion of companionship and private distance; she knew about good sex and bad sex and sudden quarrels and the warm glow of reconciliation. She had wondered about having a child, and believed that he did the same, though nothing was said. And then something happened: feeling had withered, she no longer smiled at the sound of his key in the lock, she found herself treasuring time to herself. And she saw that this was so for him too. They became like courteous strangers, skirting any serious engagement. And, eventually, fell apart.
Sometimes, nowadays, she missed all that. At others, she relished her independence and self-sufficiency: the freedom to do what you wished without consulting anyone else, the small comfortable indulgences of solitude. She had friends, she had her work, she spent much of her time with other people; she felt herself largely fortunate.
That said, she knew that there were gaps. There was the significant gap of childlessness. There was her solitary status, which, while now statistically respectable, one understood, still offended against expectations. The man with whom she had once lived was married, with offspring; so were many of her friends and colleagues. She would not, now, have children, and accepted that; she balanced the regrets that sometimes surfaced against the satisfactions of an unfettered life. So far as companionship was concerned—love, even, if one were to be so specific—she kept an open mind. Maybe, but quite possibly not; and if not, so be it.
After her parents died, Sarah had gone through a period when she felt untethered; those from whom she stemmed were no longer there, she had no child to carry forward aspects of herself. Genetically disadvantaged—this was the term that sprang to mind. Except that, no—that implied something rather different. She thought of the ways in which she resembled a parent—features, eyesight, asthma, skin that burned in the sun. Such were the discernible aspects; goodness knows what unquantifiable inclinations, capacities, and tendencies lurked there also. Advantages and disadvantages—the genes served up both, indiscriminately.
She had relatives, though none who were close to her; various aunts, uncles, cousins with whom she exchanged Christmas cards. But she had a friend who had no living relatives known to her whatsoever. When this was first mentioned, Sarah had been quite startled; her friend seemed grimly isolated, without that biological network into which most people are plugged. Christmas cards took on a new significance; Sarah tightened up the friendship.
When she was a child—an only child—she had invented brothers and sisters. These were a versatile crew, constructed and reconstructed to suit the needs of the moment: a companionable, confiding sister, a tomboy sister with a taste for shared exploits, a masterful older brother. As she grew up, these useful shadows faded away: she rather missed them. She saw this lack of siblings as another gap, but perhaps not a seminal one. Plenty of people do not get on at all with their brothers and sisters; you can also get along without any.
Work had become central to her, all her life: far more than just the source of an income. She had been drawn to museums since she was a schoolgirl; her degree had led her to various jobs as a curatorial assistant, until a burgeoning fascination with conservation work sent her in pursuit of further qualifications. For ten years now she had been a conservator, responsible for that department in a leading museum of ethnology. Clare was her deputy. With the help of two or three interns, they labored to arrest the destructive effects of time and the malevolence of the environment. Ideally, the objects that passed through their hands should emerge not restored but preserved for eternity in their authentic condition.
Sarah’s workroom sometimes looked like some outrageous car boot sale, or the attic harvest of a family with peculiarly bizarre tastes, she thought. Shrouded in polythene, there might be face masks, basketry, feather headdresses, moccasins, weapons, a paper kite, a skin-covered drum, strings of beads. An ethnological collection is eclectic in its tastes; a conservator requires wide-ranging skills. Sarah spent her days pondering decay: how to arrest insect damage and corrosion, how to bring a textile back to life, preserve degraded paper. The game was to step in and halt the natural progress whereby everything disintegrates. You interfered, tactfully and technically; you shone the bright light of science upon the object and froze it in the here and now. Literally, sometimes, as new acquisitions or those that had been on display were plunged into the freezer to eliminate insect larvae. The artifact in question would grow no older, age would not wither its stitches or its paint or its feathers; it would defy time, safely delivered into the care of the museum. It would no longer be used, or worn, or played; its function now would be to serve as evidence for the interesting vagaries of human behavior. People would look at it and be intrigued, or shocked, or impressed; they would wonder about the making of it, and about the lives of those for whom it had been significant—or they might simply drift past, looking around for their companions, thinking that it was time for lunch, locked into a mind-set of their own.
Ethnography takes the long view, when it comes to mind-sets: dispassionate, unequivocal. Sarah was not an ethnographer, but as a conservator she found herself exposed to some pretty provocative stuff. The objects that she handled frequently suggested attitudes and assumptions that were a far cry from the lifestyle of a forty-seven-year-old western European woman; they spiced up her days, provoked fantasies and speculation. She spent her time with things that referred her to unknowable others, that conjured up practices and beliefs that she could barely envisage. She pored over the insect tracks in a feathered hat, or the indications on the sole of a moccasin that once someone wore this, and from somewhere far away and long ago there came an echo of voices that she could not understand; imagined sights and scenes drifted above the sheets of polythene on her table, the bottles and the brushes and the instruments.
“Look,” said Sarah.
She unwrapped the locket and laid it in front of Clare.
“It was my sister’s. I want to restore it, and wear it. What do you think?”
“Easy enough to clean it
up. That dent would be quite tricky to do, though, and the hinge. The inlay is turquoise, I imagine.”
The two women considered. They passed the locket from hand to hand, made suggestions.
“Tell you what,” said Clare. “Why don’t you show it to Barry Sanders when he comes next week. Isn’t he supposed to be the last word where metal is concerned? He’d have ideas about how best to deal with the dent.”
The museum made frequent use of freelance specialists on short-term contracts, when there was an accumulation of work in some particular area.
“Good idea,” said Sarah. “I’d forgotten he was due.”
Somehow, the tarnished and broken locket had assumed a curious significance; it seemed necessary, for its original owner’s sake, to revive it, and use it. Perhaps I have become obsessed with objects, Sarah thought: a hazard of this trade. She dealt daily with things whose makers and users were long since dead; the perverse survival of fur and skin and feathers, palm leaves and parchment, iron and ivory, jade and flint—these manifestations of the physical world stood in for a shadowy human populace. The artifacts suggested systems of belief, customs, methodologies—but in the last resort they were just things. If you could not set them within a context, they became meaningless. Like framed sepia photographs in a junk shop. The locket was poignant, because of its circumstances, but its impervious survival seemed also vaguely indecent. To wear it would be to tame it, to give it a context once more—the link between one woman and another. Some sort of catalyst.
“May I show you something?” she said.
She had known Barry Sanders only from correspondence, and by reputation. It was the end of the working day, the second of his stint in the museum; a cordial working relationship had been established—why not presume on him for a moment?
He held the locket in the palm of his hand. “Middle Eastern origin. Turkish, perhaps. There’s a scrolly sort of pattern that you can’t really make out at the moment. Turquoise insets. Easy enough to get it into apple-pie order again. You’d clean it up, sort out that dent. New hinge. You could make substitutes for the missing insets with Milliput. Why don’t I do it for you?”
“Oh,” she said, embarrassed. “That wasn’t what I had in mind. Heavens! Don’t think that. I just wanted an opinion.”
“I’d enjoy it—I like to keep my hand in. I’ll take it home. I’m always tinkering with something. Things that turn up. This was my line, once.”
“Jewelry?”
“I fancied myself as a craftsman, after art school. I made jewelry, for a while, but found I wasn’t much cop on the design side. So I moved over into restoration—became a silversmith. And thence, eventually, into this business. We all come from different directions, don’t we?”
He was a dark, burly man—beard, bushy eyebrows. Fiftyish. At a glance, you would have placed him in some quite different sphere. He made Sarah think of accessory players in a Shakespeare play: the attendant lord or knight, the spearholder. You could imagine him in armor or archaic costumes, not shirtsleeves and rather grubby trousers, sitting at a worktable contemplating a piece of battered jewelry. He looked like someone who should be engaged in strenuous physical activity, but there was also something calm and concentrated about him.
People identify themselves, in some subliminal way. You know very soon into which category they fall. You know that you would like to see them again; or you definitely would not, or you don’t much care either way. Sexual attraction doesn’t much come into it; that’s another matter with its own agenda. The basic thing is simply this question of empathy, as though the other person wore some coded emblem that you recognize. It can happen with someone who serves you in a shop, or a person you talk to at a party, or a neighbor or a colleague or the man who comes to read the meter.
He was still examining the locket. “How did it get in such a state?”
And so she told him. All of it. The crash. The Italian hillside. This long-ago girl whom she never knew.
“And I just thought I’d like to bring it back to life, and wear it.”
“Of course. That’s exactly what you should do. Leave it to me. I’ll enjoy it.”
“Well, thank you,” she said. “That’s extremely kind.”
The letter from John Lambert took her by surprise. She had not forgotten his suggestion, but had thought it more than likely that he would not follow it up.
“Dear Sarah (if I may),” he began. “Well, here goes. I said I’d try to get down something about that time—about her and me.
“I should explain myself briefly, to kick off. I’m a schoolmaster—was, rather. Forty years in a north-country boys’ school. Egypt pointed me in that direction—it was there that I found out I rather liked teaching. I suppose Egyptian students were good induction material—bolshy and feckless and provocative and sometimes delightful. Much like the British male adolescent. Except that these were somewhat older—university students. They used to go on strike at the drop of a hat. They’d sidle up to you with sob stories at exam time. They were cheeky one moment, subservient the next. I taught them Shakespeare and the Victorian novel and the Romantic poets and so forth—wonderfully irrelevant, you might think. They needed English for career purposes, but Egypt didn’t need the British any longer and that was becoming more and more apparent.
“I thought it was an amazing place. I’d hardly traveled at all—camping holidays in France were my idea of abroad. And now here one was in another world—one that was hot and brilliant and ancient and spoke half a dozen languages. I can still smell Cairo. And hear it—that endless jostle of traffic, everything from trams and beat-up lorries to donkey carts piled high, strings of camels. I’ve been back once, ten years ago, and by then they’d smashed flyovers through the place and lined the Nile with Hiltons, but back in the fifties much of it was still the real thing. I loved it. I was in a state of happy culture shock from day one.
“But it’s her you want to know about. She’d been born there, of course. She was twelve when they left, just before the end of the war. She told me she’d always felt homesick, all through her school years in England. I’m not sure what going back was supposed to do. And the truth was that she’d gone back to a place that now seemed as alien to her as it did to the rest of us expats. She used to say that she felt like two people—there was part of her for whom the place was familiar and homely, and another for whom it was a foreign country, baffling and intriguing and deceptive.
“Maybe what she’d really gone back for was childhood, and that’s not on offer. I think she was quite confused, that whole year. She’d thought it would be a sort of homecoming, and it wasn’t. She had a smattering of Arabic and she knew her way around a bit, but she was really as bemused as any other new Cairo hand—as any of us who used to meet up at Groppi’s or the Gezira Club, all the flotsam out there teaching or peddling culture for the British Council. We were all young, with nice new degrees, cavalier about our futures, wanting a bit of experience. There were a few old-timers around, long-term residents—engineers, and cotton people and oil people and so forth—but we didn’t have anything much to do with them, except for anyone you were actually working with. I had my professor, who had been there since before the war, and all through it—one of those professional orientalists, nothing he didn’t know about the Middle East, and most of it he told you. And she had the bloke who ran the language school, an awful hack. Actually, he was at the service. He didn’t recognize me, and I steered clear. I suppose he must have introduced himself to you. She couldn’t abide him.
“She shared a flat in Zamalek with another girl. That’s how we met. The other girl worked at the university, so I knew her, and there was some gathering on the terrace at the club one evening, which included Penelope and . . . it just built up from there.
“We all pair up at around that time in life, don’t we? Most of us, anyway. Maybe more so then than now. You expected to get married, probably sooner rather than later. She was twenty-two; I was twenty-five.
“We went for a picnic up in the Moquattam hills, one of the first times together. I’d borrowed a car from someone I knew, and we drove out of Cairo, up into those hills that are a wonderful sort of mauve color, and we found a nice rock with a view and ate our sandwiches and our bananas and drank iced lemonade from a thermos. She remembered coming there when she was a child and being disappointed because the sand was just ordinary buff, not mauve. And I remember that afternoon so well. Most of all I remember how I felt—happy and excited, as though the world had some huge potential I’d only just discovered.
“This probably sounds foolish. I’ll sign off—for now.”
“The locket is coming along nicely,” he said. “I only get home at weekends, so it’s a spasmodic process. Another week or two. Coffee?”
Space had been found for Barry Sanders in an annex adjoining the main conservation workrooms. Periodically he would emerge and head for the museum’s cafeteria, sometimes pausing to seek company. The interns. Or Clare.
Or Sarah.
“There’s no hurry at all,” she said. “Please . . .”
They had talked shop on the first occasions: the tasks in hand, museum gossip. Then their conversations tipped into personal life. She learned something of him. He lived by himself in a village outside York; he had adult children; he enjoyed hill-walking. In his company, she felt an uprush of well-being. Which meant nothing, of course—nothing.
“My first repair job got me a good bollocking,” said Barry Sanders. “It was my grandad’s fob watch. Hadn’t worked in years. I thought: I can fix that. I was always making stuff—meccano, those balsawood airplanes, you name it. Apple of the woodwork teacher’s eye. Cocky twelve-year-old. So I took the back off, and there’s all these cogs and wheels, and I poke around with a nail file and a pair of tweezers, and presently I’ve got it pretty well dismantled—very interesting, very satisfying. But then there’s the question of how to put it back together again. You can guess the rest. Don’t worry, I’ve made progress since then.”