Chapter Forty-Nine

London, May 1973

Eve flicked through the old black-and-white photographs of the Framfield house. There was one of Patricia dancing on the lawn, wearing a summer frock with a ruched bodice; it had been rose pink with sprigs of green leaves, she remembered. Another showed the giant Christmas tree they installed in the front hall every year with an explosion of presents underneath. Next there was Patricia bouncing on the four-poster in cotton pajamas.

There weren’t any pictures of her mother or Porchy at Framfield. Her mother wouldn’t come because she had never forgiven Brograve for his outburst on the telephone when Eve was pregnant. Her brother didn’t come because he was lazy; he was happy for them to visit Highclere, and he met Brograve for long lunches at his London club, but he couldn’t be bothered to drive the extra sixty miles or so to her country house—not even to see his little niece.

Howard Carter came, though. There was a glorious photograph of him reclining on the lawn wearing a daisy chain Patricia had made for him, pretending to sip tea from a doll’s teacup. Another showed him crouched in front of Patricia’s dollhouse helping her to arrange the furniture. Who would have thought that a childless man could have such a knack with children?

“They used to gossip about you and Howard,” Brograve said, glancing over her shoulder when he came to top up her sherry. “Said I should keep an eye on the pair of you because you seemed rather too close.”

Eve chuckled. “A Daily Mail journalist tried to get that rumor off the ground, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Poor, dear Howard. He was like a friendly uncle, I suppose.”

She remembered one occasion when he came to stay for the weekend of their annual summer picnic. Most of the village was invited—all their closest neighbors and the parents of Patricia’s school friends too—and they treated Howard as a celebrity. All day long he was surrounded by folk asking about the tomb, and he never tired of answering them. Eve brought him a plate of sandwiches and cold cuts because he’d been so busy talking he hadn’t had a chance to visit the long trestle tables laid out around the lawn, laden with food she’d spent the best part of a week preparing.

“Have you retired from archaeology now that work on the tomb is finished?” she heard one neighbor asking.

Eve knew that Howard would never retire. After he finished dismantling the tomb and overseeing the installation of its contents in the Cairo Museum, he had spent several years on the lecture circuit. Lots of countries bestowed honors upon him, and he wrote well-received books on Tutankhamun.

“Far from retiring, I am looking forward to my next challenge. I have a secret ambition to search for the tomb of Alexander the Great.” He turned to Eve with a grin. “Care to accompany me?”

“Definitely,” she said, trying to remember if they thought it was in Alexandria, Babylon, or Greece. There was a mystery surrounding it, that much she knew.

Before she could ask, one of the school mothers interrupted. “I know you take a dim view of stories about the curse of Tutankhamun, but I recently read an article by Sir Bruce Ingram in the Illustrated London News about disasters that befell him after you gave him a mummified hand from the tomb. He says that soon after he placed it in his country house, the building burned to the ground—yet the hand survived. Then after he had the house rebuilt, it was badly damaged by flooding. He wrote that since he donated the hand to the Cairo Museum, there have been no further misfortunes. How do you explain that?”

Eve thought Howard might rebuke her, but he smiled and answered politely.

“Sir Bruce is a good friend of mine and we have agreed to differ on this. I see his misfortunes as pure coincidence and his blaming the mummified hand I gave him as superstition. Perhaps you have seen the Boris Karloff film The Mummy, which came out last year? I suggested to Sir Bruce he should get in touch with the script writers to give them material for the follow-up.”

There was general laughter at that, and Eve left them to fetch the first of the desserts from the kitchen: a sherry trifle, Brograve’s favorite.

* * *

Eve looked up from the photograph album, trying to remember if Howard had ever begun his hunt for the tomb of Alexander. She couldn’t remember seeing him again after that summer picnic.

“When did Howard die?” she asked Brograve.

“Nineteen thirty-nine. You, Almina, and Porchy went to the funeral in Putney Vale. I was busy in the House that day.”

Eve couldn’t remember. “What did he die of?”

“Hodgkin’s disease. His last years were difficult because of the side effects of the radiation treatments. His niece, Phyllis, moved in to take care of him, but you visited often. We took him for dinner at the Savoy one evening when he felt a little better, but I remember he scarcely ate anything. He got very thin toward the end.”

“Poor Howard. I miss him.” It sounded silly to miss someone more than thirty years after their death, but she did.

She turned the page of the album and there were some photographs of Betty, Brograve’s mother, someone else she missed. She had come to stay at Framfield for the last three years of her life, once she was too frail to live alone. They gave her a wing of the house, so she had her own sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, and a small kitchen, but she invariably dined with them. She was never any trouble, Eve thought. Had Almina lived with them, every arrangement would have had to revolve around her, but Betty quietly fitted in, the way she had when she stayed with them for six months after her husband’s death.

There were few pictures of Brograve in the album because he was usually the one wielding the camera, but she stopped at one that showed him standing in front of the mantelpiece in Framfield with the gold clock behind him. That’s where it should have been. Why had she moved it?

“I can’t find anything anymore,” she complained to Brograve. “I don’t know why. It’s as if things move around on their own.”

He looked up. “What else is lost?”

“Your father’s clock and the gold container from the tomb. Maybe other things, I’m not sure.”

He pursed his lips. “Are you still convinced Ana Mansour didn’t take the clock?”

Eve shook her head firmly. “She’s not like that.”

He gave her an inquisitive look, as if to ask how she knew what Ana was like, but she turned back to the album before he could question her further.

On the last page, there was a photograph of a brown bear grazing by the side of a river. Clearly it hadn’t been taken at Framfield. She squinted, trying to remember where it was, and suddenly it came to her.

“This bear was in Canada, wasn’t it?” she asked, holding it up so he could see.

He turned to look, and surprise spread across his face. “You remember that?”

“Of course I do. I was petrified. You kept saying the bear was on the other side of the river and it was safe to stop and take a photograph, but I wanted to get back in the car and drive away. I knew bears could swim and they are faster than humans too.” She chuckled. “Then you took ages lining up the shot, getting as close as you could. . . .” She stopped. “When was it?”

He seemed boyishly excited by her answer. “Patricia was ten. It was just four months after your accident and we went there so you could see a rehabilitation specialist, but we made a holiday out of it too. Do you remember now? You’ve never been able to remember that holiday before. You were still recuperating.”

Eve thought hard, but Patricia wasn’t in the image in her mind—just the bear, the river, and her husband.

Brograve came to stand beside her and pointed to some other photographs on the same page. “That’s Niagara Falls,” he said. “Do you remember being there? The deafening roar of the water?”

She looked at the image of the three of them against a railing in front of a wall of grayish misty water but nothing came back to her.

“We went out on a boat called the Maid of the Mist,” he said, “and we all got soaked by the spray. It ruined your hairstyle. Look!”

He pointed to a picture of Eve with her hair plastered to her head. She stared hard, willing her brain to work, but it wouldn’t.

“It was perishing cold that day,” he persevered. “We only had summer clothes with us and had to buy Patricia a warm coat in a shop.”

Eve considered lying, pretending she could remember just to please him, but there was nothing there. Maybe she didn’t even remember the bear. Maybe she just remembered the photograph and her mind had created a memory around it.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, disappointment in his voice. “It’s wonderful that you’ve got one memory back from that trip.”

Looking at him, Eve realized in a burst of insight how sad it must be to have a wife who couldn’t remember huge chunks of your shared past. They were old now, him and her. Every morning she listened to him coughing and hacking in the bathroom, saw the exertion it took for him to bend and pull on his socks, watched him rubbing his lower back after bringing in the coal scuttle—the tiny signs of a body wearing out. But that was nothing compared to what he had to put up with from her as her mind wore out.

“It must be ghastly for you,” she said. “Me not remembering. I’m sorry. I wish I could.”

“It’s not ghastly at all,” he said, with a fond smile. “You’re still you and that’s what counts. That’s the only thing that counts.”