The Egyptologist

  CABLE. BOSTON TO RALPH TRILIPUSH, LUXOR, 11/29/22, 10:27 A.M. ENGAGEMENT OFF. YOUR LIES REVEALED. DO NOT CONTACT ME EVER AGAIN. M.

  I could reply, but to whom am I replying, the author of this “cable from Margaret”? The mind reels at his crimes and betrayal. He merits a punishment worthy of the great king’s imagination.

  My cats lick the wounds administered by Ahmed and Finneran alike. Why does Fate insist on casting us in such unoriginal, flat roles, when so much more is possible? My own self-casting would have been—could be still—far more interesting, but no, I must be taken for whatever flinty Finneran can paint in stick figures and garish colours. He cannot afford to cover an Egyptian expedition that does not instantaneously produce treasures and barrels of smut for his needs, and so he must betray me and dream up stories about me to poison the love of his poor daughter, keeping her semiconscious and stupid while he pleasures himself with her Nordic warden. O judges of the Underworld, weigh my heart in your balance, read its every secret inscribed in scarlet fibres and swollen grey vessels, every hidden thought I ever had. Can you not read there that I loved her, love her, despite her father’s money? I am sure a cynical user of people like Finneran would say that Margaret did not produce for me what I expected of her, did not come equipped with a limitless fortune to place at my disposal. I suppose such people would say I should forsake her now, reveal that my love for her was all a sham. And it is true, from where I lie, that Margaret deserves a share of the blame for my predicament. She did not, as it turns out, lubricate the financial wheels of this great excavation, nor is one quite reassured that her fidelity has maintained its vigour through my absence.

  Was I “slumming” when I swooned for her, or was she? I will not deny my first thought was of her wealth. No, I must deny it: that could not have been my first thought, since I did not know of the fortune to which she was heiress until much later. And so my first thought was of her beauty. No, that was not true either, for by many standards, Inge is more lovely. My first thought, knowing me, was one of pity—a young woman burdened with some sort of physical weakness, ashamed of her condition, at a public lecture on a notorious subject, failing to hide her infirmity, sidling to the stage to introduce herself and compliment the lecturer, claiming she was an amateur of Egypt and— No. No, I cannot say that I even noticed her infirmity. I did not desire her money, nor her beauty, nor her weakness. She made me laugh.

  I would sail to her this very day, prove my feelings, but I cannot leave this place until my work is done, my discovery complete and acknowledged. She certainly will not return to me if I arrive broken and empty-handed; if I am not her English explorer then I am nothing to her. Nothing and no one waits for me in Boston without Atum-hadu wrapped and stately in golden bedding, the last chambers of the tomb.

  They were gods for good reason, these cats who repay loyalty and understanding. Maggie the orange beauty is all kindness, like her namesake, who did not mean what that cable says. She did not write that cable, she did not even see that cable.

  Nov. 15

  My own, sweet Ralph,

  Yesterday I got your letter of October 19th. And it made me so sad. I miss you very much. And of course just four days ago was the cable bearing the grand news of your Find, Daddy showed it to me and I was so very proud of you. We both were, of course.

  I read your letter again just now. I don’t know what to write I am so sad. I’m crying as I read your lovely letter, full of concern for me, which I fear I do not deserve. That’s being very absurd of me, isn’t it, now that everything is going well?

  Daddy finally lost his temper and showed the snoop the door the other day. I didn’t hear the whole thing, and when I asked Daddy what had happened, he just told me to go away, and not very nicely. Daddy’s under terrible pressure, you see. He never tells me a word of it, doesn’t want me to worry, but you must forgive him if he gets angry sometimes or listens to liars like the snoop or that professor, your boss, the German. He came to the house last month to talk to Daddy about dynasties and fragments and you and Oxford and whatnot. (And besides, are we supposed to trust Germans now? Not me, darling, not after everything you went through in the War.) Ralph, you know I never listen to these people. I know just who you are, and I love you from the top of your head down to your dusty boots and I always will. Do you know that? You simply must believe me, you must. Without you, I would be so lost. I keep your cable telling me Ferrell is a liar under my pillow.

  But you have probably already been told that Finneran’s Finer Finery is having certain problems. I can see it, and Daddy looks worried often, and J. P. O’Toole tells me this and that. So your wonderful Success is even more important to everyone here, and they are even more proud of you, almost as proud of you as your Queen. I hope this news is not alarming to you, or changes anything about how you view Daddy, or us. But I know you are not like that. And it is not so serious as all that.

  You are so good and kind to be so worried about Inge and my medicine and seeing me healthy for our wedding day. Please don’t worry. It will all be fine. Just knowing how much I mean to you and how important it is that I be healthy for you is enough to make me healthy and keep me healthy. I will simply get myself well out of love for you, and so you won’t worry another moment for me. I can feel it happening already. I can do this for you. Anybody could for a man like you.

  You are coming home, and then I won’t be so bored and that’s usually what gets me thinking about going out on the town. This is it: I will not go out even one more time.

  I think of you whenever I am awake and able. You always said that you are guided by science and deduction, not passion. Do you remember saying that when we walked on the river? But all the evidence says you shouldn’t love me, archaeologist. But you do. So I swear I will be better for you and will deserve you and will make you feel rewarded. I will make myself better right now. Done!

  Write me again soon, and about our wedding, tell me about our wedding and all the gold rings and crowns you’re finding in the sands, tell me of the Hall in Kent and when we will meet the King of England—a live king, you know, is better than a mummified one when it comes right down to it.

  I am your eternal Queen.

  m.

  Thursday, 30 November, 1922

  Margaret: Margaret, my love, you will want to know all about this someday, the order of events as precisely as we can reconstruct it. So, first thing this morning, the day after your “split” with me, I hobbled off to the post. And of course, today’s post brings a letter from you, dated 15 November, and it makes me laugh, the sweet thing. I cabled you right away, my darling, thank God for cables to clear up misunderstandings completely and at once from far across the sea. Now all is clear. Our love is unshaken. Of course: your father is in financial strife and cannot bear to admit it to me, the poor man! Of course! Of course that would make him feel ashamed and worried about the integrity of those around him, and he would test me by sending me that false cable. And what have we learnt? I love you no matter, no matter.

  That explains all, and I feel nothing but pity for your father today. It is for the best, my love, that my relationship with your father be detached from the issue of financing the expedition, especially now, when he is under pressure. I have been presented with a likely new backer here, so it is all for the best. You did your father a good turn when you introduced us, and I will do him another by releasing him from his debts to me. We will find a solution to it all, as long as you and I are together. I am so relieved, my love. Last night was unbearable.

  I will return to the site tomorrow, but today I must reflect on all I have discovered so far. Carnarvon will need to understand my success before we can proceed as partners. I must concentrate my battered energies on making my work to date as clear and tidy as possible for my potential new financier. Margaret, I can offer no greater proof of my love than this: Lord Carnarvon will assume the responsibility of financing the expedition for the tomb of Atum-hadu, and still you will be my wife. You an
d CCF cannot possibly still nurse doubts after hearing that. It is 30 November, 1922, at 11.15 in the morning, and my love for you is an indestructible stone.

  Journal: A few hours’ consideration and planning, out of the sun, taking sweet tea. After lunch, I now feel able to consider again the state of Atum-hadu’s puzzling legacy. A stage performance has begun, a small-town imitation of the cabaret I saw in Cairo so long ago. The girls nod as coins fall at their slippered feet, the drums throb and odd fiddles keen, and the veils drift down like leaves shaken loose by a light autumn breeze.

  Historiography lesson: Understanding the relationship between a (complicated) life and a later (simplified) account of that life, using the case of Atum-hadu: One can imagine one’s own future archaeologist making a terrible mess of it. Trying to explain you, he fills and fudges where he must, and all of your nuance and detail—which is precisely what makes you you—is lost or imagined, replaced by the nuance of your chronicler instead. Your virtuous behaviour, your generosity or bravery or acts of humble gratitude—if there is no record of it, it did not happen. And if there is instead a record of something else—a momentary lapse, a persistent rival’s well-recorded lies, an angry lover’s obsessive, unilateral collection of correspondence, a detective’s confident miscomprehension of a smudged dossier—what will your hapless excavator say of you?

  And this is why one must be careful to leave one’s own truth behind oneself, honest but unambiguous, loose ends snipped off: the Admonitions of Atum-hadu, for example, or this very notebook, whatever the result of my work.

  When our excavator, our clarifying biographer, comes for us—as we all certainly hope he will—when he chronicles our life and simplifies it enough for the dimmest reader to grasp and remember forever, how can we have helped him ahead of time? How can we help him know when to stop digging and start writing? Where is the centre of our life, the core of our character, with all extraneous detail eroded? Under one layer is another and another, under each silk veil more silk, under dust more dust, behind one door another and then a sepulchre and an outer sarcophagus and an inner and the cartonnage and the golden head mask and the linen wraps and then . . . a black skeleton in tight, crispy skin, intact but with no brain, liver, lungs, intestine, stomach. Is this the truth? Or did we, in our rush to get to this “answer,” pass right by the humble truth, knock it down, cover it with the dust of our hurried burrowing?

  I think before further excavation, which is slow and expensive, the tomb as it stands now deserves a more careful examination, a detailed inventory of my hurried progress to date.

  I have underestimated the amount of ink, paper, and paint I will need to copy down the tomb’s extensive illustrations, the ladder I will need to read and copy out the highest rows of hieroglyphic inscriptions. So, off now for last supplies, with nearly the end of my funds, and then to bed with the regal cats.

  This is my last night in a soft bed for a spell because, with this next phase of the excavation, it only makes sense that I sleep at the site. Tomorrow I move out of the villa; it is a burden for now. Must think of a plan to care for the cats.

  The next day, the 30th, things had gone from bad to horrible in no time at all. He wasn’t well, your great-uncle, swinging from screaming rages to periods of quiet that were anything but calm. I’d rarely seen him drink before, but now he was on the nose. Obvious he hadn’t slept. I’ve seen men in his predicament before, Macy, and it’s interesting how alike they are. Pressure does predictable things to men, that’s what I’ve learnt. There are really only two or perhaps three human responses to high pressure. I’ve seen them all.

  The evening before, Finneran did as I’d advised and sent the cable breaking off Margaret and Trilipush’s engagement. Today, Trilipush had responded, and with some heat. That did puzzle me, I have to say, as I didn’t think Trilipush would’ve cared one way or the other at this point, since he’d taken what he wanted from the family and Margaret could therefore hold no further interest for him, and I was ready to catch her in her fall, but Trilipush’s plans were evidently deeper than I could see, and he didn’t seem to like losing his fiancée one bit. No, in response, he’d cabled not Finneran or Margaret but O’Toole, and the Irishman had ominously sent that cable round for Finneran to read and sweat over. Trilipush’s cable read: O’TOOLE. CONGRATULATIONS ON OUR MUTUAL GOOD FORTUNE. I ASSUME FINNERAN HAS SHARED WITH YOU ESTIMATES OF THE FINAL FINANCIAL PAYOFF. HANDSOME RETURNS FOR US ALL. O’Toole had scribbled at the bottom of the cable in pencil: “Good news indeed, CC. Do come around with an accounting.”

  Trilipush knew just where to shoot. “He’s trying to get me killed,” moaned Finneran, showing me the ominous cable. “I just broke the news to O’Toole yesterday that the expedition was a bust.” Trilipush wasn’t finished: an hour earlier, a reporter from one of the scandal sheets had rung Finneran’s doorbell. “Can you imagine?” Finneran shouted as he told me the story. “A scribbler from the Boston Mercury came by because they got an anonymous cable saying I’m a collector of filthy art and I want to talk about it to the Press. He’s playing games with my reputation in my city. I am gonna crush his neck,” he roared, spilling his liquor on his desk. “And the cardinal’s office telephoned. The cardinal. Of Boston. My cardinal. A prince of the Church. His office had received a disturbing cable, they said, probably a vicious joke, they said!”

  I listened politely; displays like this are nothing to me, Macy. I’m a professional and I’d seen it all before. But in this case, I was also involved. “Has anyone told Margaret yet?” I asked, getting back to the important issues. Finneran’s anger melted away, and he slumped into his chair. “She’s a wreck. I told her he used her, us, been playing her for my money. She was out all night. Inge has her upstairs now. What am I going to do?” he muttered, running his hands through his hair, picking at his collar. I didn’t pity him much, Macy. He’d been warned often enough, but he hadn’t wanted to hear it. He’d wanted social standing and easy gold to pay off his debts to very bad men, but he got himself a confidence trickster instead, lost his reputation and his daughter’s happiness in the bargain. Nothing I could do for him.

  He looked at his watch, took up pen and paper to write, waved me out of the room. I left him chewing on the nib, shaking his head, still in the stage where a doomed man hopes he might only be dreaming.

  I walked upstairs in the Finneran mansion for the first time. Talking to Margaret was impossible; Inge had her quite asleep. “She was hysterical,” said the Viking. “She is adjusting to some new medications.” Inge allowed me into the room to see her, but there was no budging Margaret. I can’t even imagine what Inge’d given her. The ministering devils of Sunset on the Bayview give some of the rowdy ones here something strong, too, a horse tranquillizer, I think, when the old fools realise too clearly that they’ve been parked here to die and they raise a stink about it, or when the nutters start screaming like they’re invading Turkey again. It must have been something strong like that in your poor aunt’s case, because it was all she could do to push the air out her nose.

  I sat next to her bed, waiting for her to come around, her rrrrrare Tibetan spaniels snoozing in a heap on a little white-and-green sofa across from the bed. Hours passed, and the last November sun set early. I went downstairs to check on the man of the house, but amazing: he was gone, hadn’t thought anything of leaving me in his girl’s boudoir, you see, when his hide was in trouble. So much for the doting father charade. He’d left letters and other papers on his desk, including a letter to Margaret I found, in which he apologised for everything, not very clear what that meant, said he was going to fix everything and would be gone for a while, would contact her soon, don’t worry, trust Inge for everything in the meanwhile. I had my suspicions where he’d gone, and I was right: as it turned out he was on his way to New York on the sleeper that very night. An Alexandria boat left the next day, see, December 1st. I knew the timetable well: I’d reserved a place on that boat several times in my long, hesitating sojourn in Bosto
n. I wandered the Finneran house, and Inge left an hour or so later, perhaps assuming I was on to watch Sleeping Beauty (or guard the prisoner, depending on point of view).

  A few hours later, your aunt was sitting up awake, as if she’d just had a quick nap, not a drugged sleep of the dead. “Oh, it’s you,” she said sullenly and turned away to face the window. She asked me for her coat but didn’t look at me when I gave it to her. She searched it, alternately furious and dazed, scratching at the pockets but then falling asleep for a few seconds at a time. “Can I help you find something?” I asked. “Shut up,” she said and finally found what she’d been looking for, something small enough to hold in her fist. “Bless you, JP,” she said.

  Macy, I just reread this long, long letter. It’s taken me the entire damn day to write about my time in Boston, which suits me fine, rather write down this difficult tale than play along with the forced Christmas cheer the rough bastards try to push on us this time of year. Especially since, tonight, it’s not even the usual crew of thugs who run this place but the rare monsters who are pleased to work Christmas, with nothing better to do than clean up after the old and the ill and the batty and slap us around a bit for fun.

  I think I mentioned somewhere in here your aunt’s three moods. Well, what to call the third? Maybe it was a real part of her, or maybe just a product of the opium, or maybe it was something about me, something only I brought out of her. Either way, it was ugly. “Get away from me, you,” she shouted, when I tried to hand her a glass of water. “What did you do, Harry? What did you do? Get away from me, you horrible— Just leave me alone. I’m going to JP’s.” But she didn’t move. She wouldn’t look at me.

  “There are things you don’t understand, that I have to tell you.”