‘The train?’ Frances asked, on my return from the steamboat inspection the next morning.
‘The train,’ I replied.
‘That is what you wanted?’
‘I wouldn’t have minded any of the alternatives.’
‘Liar! You were angling for the train as much as I was, Lucy Payne.’
‘No I wasn’t. I stayed neutral.’
‘Not true! And don’t look so goody-goody. You don’t fool me.’
I wondered who was right about my character, Frances or I. Linking her arm in mine, she marched me up the great staircase at Shepheard’s: it was time for my daily dancing practice. Thanks to Frances, I’d now learned the five basic ballet positions. I hadn’t mastered them, and couldn’t claim to perform them well, but I had learned the rudiments. We were now ready for the final push: the day of Madame Masha’s test was fast approaching.
We’d been unable to use Madame’s studio at Shepheard’s to practise – that was out of bounds, but we’d needed a barre, so had improvised. We’d ended up in the huge mausoleum of a bathroom next to my bedroom; there, the daylight was dimmed and filtered through windows of pearly glass, which gave our exercises a ghostly air. But there was a long towel rail of about the right height, and a door we could lock, so there was no danger of any outsider glimpsing my ugly, patchy hair or witnessing my clumsiness and ineptitude. At first, I had practised with Frances alone. Then, on the third day, we’d been joined by Lady Rose, the little girl whom I’d seen at Madame’s class – she claimed she needed extra practice too. That morning, I discovered, we were to be joined by Rose again, and also by her infant brother Peter, otherwise known as Viscount Hurst, aged three. This did not please me – and neither did the fact that Frances had kept this development a secret.
‘Why do we have to have them?’ I complained, drawing Frances aside and into my bedroom, leaving Rose and Peter at play in the bathroom beyond. ‘It’s bad enough having that stupid, stuck-up Rose. Now we’re landed with a three-year-old cry-baby with a ridiculous title as well.’
‘Oh, come on. Peter can’t help the title. He’s not a cry-baby, he’s cute. And Rose isn’t stupid or stuck-up – when you know her better, you’ll like her. Besides, it’s not their fault, it’s their mother’s: she insisted on bringing them out to Egypt, and now they’re in Cairo she’s always dumping them on someone – usually Eve.’
‘Rubbish. They must have a nanny or something.’
‘They did. But she was a snoop, so she got fired two days in. Meanwhile, their mother’s always gadding about somewhere. Eve says she’s got a new man – I overheard her.’
‘A what?’
‘A new man – you know. One of those flirty-flirty sort of things.’ Frances batted her eyelashes hideously. We stared at each other and then giggled.
‘But I don’t understand,’ I said, when we’d finally stopped laughing. ‘How can their mother flirt? She’s a mother. She’s married. What about her husband?’
‘Ah,’ said Frances, giving me a measuring glance. ‘Well, that’s kind of tricky. You see, she divorced her first husband, and now she’s finished with her second husband too – people say he got his marching orders before she sailed for Cairo with Eve. So I guess she’s on the hunt for a third husband, and that takes time. Which is why we have to look after Peter and Rose, and why you have to be nice to them.’
I considered this. I was wavering.
‘Also,’ Frances continued, ‘Rose and Peter’s father, who was the first husband of course, is a man called Lord Strathaven. He’s an earl too, like Eve’s father, and he’s horrible. Peter and Rose hate him. But Peter lives with him because he’s the heir, so he can only escape for holidays, and Rose lives with her mother because her father can’t be bothered with a stupid girl.’
‘Oh, poor Rose – does she hate her mother too?’ I asked.
‘Of course not,’ Frances replied airily. ‘She adores her – everyone does. She’s really sweet-natured and good fun. It’s just that she isn’t like most mothers and she isn’t around much. But you must know that – you’ve met her.’
‘Met Rose and Peter’s mother?’ I met many people at Shepheard’s in the course of the day, and was finding it hard to navigate their bewilderment of names and titles. ‘I haven’t met anyone called Lady Strathaven.’
‘Don’t be silly. I told you: she’s divorced. She used to be Lady Strathaven. Three years ago she was still Lady Strathaven. But she couldn’t bear living with the horrible earl a second longer, so she bolted. She escaped two months after Peter was born. Now she’s Poppy d’Erlanger.’
‘Mrs d’Erlanger is their mother? But I’ve never seen her with Peter or Rose.’
‘Of course you haven’t – I told you, Poppy is too busy finding husband number three, so she leaves them with Eve, or her maid Wheeler, or whoever else she can persuade to look after them. Anyway,’ she made an impatient gesture, ‘if her plans work out, she won’t be Poppy d’Erlanger much longer, she’ll be Poppy-someone-else. And just think, she and Rose and Peter are all coming to Luxor too, so we’ll have ringside seats when Poppy finally decides who to marry next. My money’s on that Carew man we saw playing polo at the Gezira . . . Now, can we get on with this dancing class?’
It was shaming how little I knew, I thought, as we returned to the echoing bathroom. This world of multiple divorces was as foreign to me as the world of the pharaohs. Frances was light years ahead of me. None of this appeared to shock or confuse her; she simply took it in her stride with a sophistication she’d acquired in Cairo. In the fustian Cambridge circles in which I’d grown up, divorce equalled disgrace. Yet here was Rose with a mother who’d already dispatched one husband, possibly two; a divorcée who was welcomed on all sides at Shepheard’s . . . I was never sure whether to believe all the things Frances told me: I had much to learn, I realised.
Before we began our ballet practice we played a game; Rose and Peter had already begun it before we rejoined them. The huge, marble-floored and -walled bathroom contained the largest bath I’d ever seen, mounted on a marble plinth with four couchant lions as feet. By the time Frances and I returned, both Rose and her little brother were lying down in this sarcophagus.
‘We’re playing mummies,’ Rose announced. She crossed both her brother’s arms on his chest, and then settled herself beside him, her right arm next to her body and her left arm across her heart. ‘Look, Peter’s a king and I’m a queen,’ she added.
So, she too must have visited the Egyptian Museum, and learned these funereal differences, I thought: she was observant, I had to give her that.
‘Oh, excellent,’ Frances said. ‘Shall I perform the Opening of the Mouth ceremony?’
‘Does it hurt?’ Peter asked, on a piping note of apprehension.
‘Of course it doesn’t, silly,’ his sister replied. ‘How can it hurt? You’re dead.’
Frances found my toothbrush and advanced on the bath. In a priestly way, reciting some incomprehensible and eerie hocus-pocus that she claimed was a spell from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, she made an ugly levering gesture with the toothbrush handle, first at Rose’s mouth, then Peter’s.
‘There,’ she said. ‘This is the most solemn moment in your entire funeral. Now you’re alive again and your ka is freed. He guides you on the sacred journey, down to the underworld. When you get there you will be presented to Osiris, the god of the dead, and you will get judged. Peter, Rose, are you ready for that?’
Rose and Peter, still lying in their bath sarcophagus with their eyes shut, had a brief conference. Peter, not surprisingly given his age, had no opinion on the matter. Rose did: ‘Yea, we are ready and prepared . . . ’ she intoned in a sepulchral voice.
‘Right,’ Frances continued, ‘this is the moment of truth. In fact, Ma’at, who’s the goddess of truth, is watching, and so is Anubis, the great black jackal god, so there’s no faking. Now your heart will be solemnly weighed, on a huge set of scales, like the scales of justice, but much bigger. On one side there’s your heart and on the other side there’s a feather—’
‘A feather?’ Rose sat up. ‘They weigh my heart against a feather?’
‘Yes, they do,’ said Frances firmly. ‘And if they don’t balance out, boy, you’re in trouble.’
Peter opened his eyes. The word ‘trouble’ affected him at once; his lips wobbled, and he made a grab for his sister’s hand. ‘What kind of trouble?’ Rose asked recklessly.
‘Big trouble,’ Frances replied. ‘If the scale that side goes down it means your heart is heavy with evil. It means you have a bad heart because you’ve done bad things in your life. So this huge horrible hairy monster comes along and gobbles you up. And that’s it: no afterlife for you.’
‘That can’t be right,’ Rose said, in a Sunday-school voice. ‘What about forgiveness? What if you repent?’
‘You can’t repent. Egyptian gods don’t forgive. It doesn’t work like that. You are what you’ve done. And if you’re bad, bad, bad . . . that’s it, you’re finished.’
At the repeated word ‘bad’, Peter made a small whimpering sound, covered his eyes with his hands and clung to his sister. Rose lay down again and hugged him.
‘On the other hand,’ Frances added, kindly, quickly and diplomatically, ‘if you have a good heart, like you, Peter, and you, Rose, then everything is hunky-dory. Your heart and the feather balance perfectly – and off you go to paradise, which is just like this life, only much better and even more beautiful, and you – you live by the Nile and the sun shines and . . . and there are no more tears, only joy and rejoicings, and you have nice things to eat and lots of servants to do things for you. For ever and ever . . . That’s if you’re a king, of course.’
She paused, then continued in a helpful, pedantic way: ‘Meanwhile, it’s pretty neat being a mummy, because of course you don’t rot, not if the priests have done their job properly, anyway . . . They’ve left your heart in, because you’ll need it for the weighing ceremony, but they’ve taken out your liver and lungs and all the gut-stuff and pickled them. And they’ve pulled your brains out through your nose with a special hook—’
At the mention of brains, noses and hooks, Peter could stand it no longer. He uttered one long agonised wail, then sat up. Large tears plopped silently down his flushed face.
‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Rose said, also sitting up and putting her arms around him. ‘Honestly, Frances, you are the absolute end. He’s only three . . . now he’ll have nightmares.’
‘He has nightmares already, you told me so.’
‘That’s because of Papa and his tempers. You don’t have to make it worse. Why do you have to be so gruesome? Now you’ve really upset him . . . Oh, hellishness! There, there, Petey – don’t cry, it’s all right. Frances didn’t mean it.’
‘Yes I did. It’s the truth. You asked—’
‘Oh, put a sock in it.’
‘Give him to me,’ I said. ‘I have some barley sugar in my room. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Peter?’
I held out my arms and the small trembling boy was bundled into them. He looked at me apprehensively, and wriggled at first, and I wasn’t sure how best to hold him, but I made the kind of soothing noises I could remember my mother making to me, and they seemed to have the right effect. I took him to my room, and found the barley sugar stick, and broke off a piece for him. He seemed to like its amber colour and twisted shape; he certainly liked its taste. The tears ceased.
It took a long while to suck the sweet down to nothing, and by the time he’d done that he’d forgotten Frances’s scare stories – although I had not. I cuddled him tight and kissed his forehead, and told him that of course he was a good boy and not a bad one – he seemed very anxious on this point. When his eyelids began to droop, I tried to settle him for a nap on my bed. But the second he realised I was leaving him alone, he clung to me and began to cry piteously, so in the end I took him back to the bathroom, where we could keep an eye on him while we practised our dance steps. Its marble floor was cold and hard, but I made a deep, warm nest for him out of the enormous, soft towels that Shepheard’s provided; he snuggled down into them, put his thumb into his mouth, and in an instant was asleep.
Later, when we’d finished our exercises, he woke up, toddled over and took my hand. He couldn’t pronounce my name, so he called me Lulu; he told me I had funny hair, but he liked it. I bent to kiss him again – he looked vulnerable, his skin still flushed from his sleep, and so sweet and trusting, that my heart gave a strange lurch. At his earnest request, I called him ‘Petey’ and he continued to call me Lulu. It was under this new name, and in this new guise, that, later that day, I was finally introduced to Howard Carter.