Chapter Fifty-Five

London, July 1973

Brograve tried to count how many strokes Eve had suffered in the thirty-eight years that had passed since her car accident. Was it four? Maybe five? Each of them had stolen something. The first took her peripheral vision, meaning she was no longer allowed to drive. The second and third had been mild but they still took chunks of memory, and left her fatigued for a long time afterward; she had never regained the fizzling energy she had possessed in her twenties. The fourth, the previous year, had taken months for her to bounce back from, and had affected her mobility, her balance, and the strength in her right hand, as well as sucking up more swathes of memory. But this latest one was different, he soon came to realize. It was as if a bomb had gone off in her head, laying waste to her intelligence and leaving her brain full of craters, like no-man’s-land.

He watched her one afternoon, sitting in an armchair, gazing into space, and saw a blankness in her expression, a haziness. It wasn’t the expression of someone who was lost in thought. Her eyes were open but there was nothing behind them.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, and she was startled. She frowned, trying to remember.

“Nothing much,” she said, and he suspected that was the truth. He turned his head so she couldn’t see the tears glinting behind his glasses.

Patricia stayed for the first week after Eve came out of hospital, making all their meals and helping her to wash and dress. “Keep her calm,” the doctor had said, and together they tried to work out a routine that would be easy for her.

She loved comedy programs on television, especially the ones with canned laughter. Brograve wasn’t sure she got the jokes but she chortled along quite happily. She didn’t like violence, flinching and trying to cover her face as if terrified, so they learned to avoid crime shows and war films. Once when Patricia raised her voice to an insurance salesman on the telephone, Eve became distressed and rushed out to the hall screaming, “No! Stop it! Stop!,” and only calmed down when she had hung up.

Emotions washed over her at random, without any obvious cause, but if she got sad, the national anthem always worked its magic, and she loved kisses and hugs.

Patricia tried to persuade him to hire a live-in caregiver. “How will you cope once I’ve gone home again, Dad? Won’t you get lonely when it’s just the two of you?”

He was surprised at the question. “Of course not! I’ve got Eve for company.”

“But it’s not her anymore, is it? Not really.”

“It is her!” He was adamant. She was still his Eve. Her personality was the same. She wanted everyone in the room to be happy just as she always had. He loved her more than ever now that she was newly helpless.

Once Patricia left, the two of them got into new routines together. Most of the morning was taken up with getting her dressed and eating breakfast, but they usually went out somewhere in the afternoon. On fine days he drove her to Kew Gardens or Hampton Court or stately homes with pretty gardens where they could walk and admire the trees and flowers. If it was raining they had afternoon tea in a smart hotel, or saw Patricia and their grandsons, or visited Maude and Cuthbert. In the evenings they had a picnic in front of the television, with cheese and crackers, biscuits and cakes, a sherry for her and a whisky for him. Who cared about eating a proper meal at their age, for goodness’ sake?

Brograve wasn’t unhappy. He found he could focus on the present most of the time. It did no good thinking back on what they had lost. He wasn’t going to start grieving for Eve when she was still there beside him, still his loving, sunny wife. But sometimes, as he lay in bed listening to her breathing, he couldn’t help comparing her mind now to the way it was before the last two strokes, just over a year earlier. They had been the cruelest.

In March 1972, she’d been invited to the opening of the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. The director walked her around the exhibits and she chatted knowledgeably about the iconic funeral mask made of sheet gold and the four anthropoid coffins that had been slotted inside the sarcophagus, about the shabti figures, the boat and the carriages, the guardian statues and the animal couches.

Some photographers persuaded her to pose for photographs next to the funeral mask. As she stood there, flashbulbs clicking, a journalist called out the standard question.

“You’re one of the only people who entered the tomb yet managed to avoid the curse. Why do you think that is?”

“Good genes,” Eve had replied, quick as a flash, making Brograve chuckle.

The Queen arrived and Eve chatted with her for a few moments—they knew each other because Porchy’s son trained her horses. Then she was interviewed by a journalist from The Times, and she was lucid and funny and articulate. Her memory had not let her down once. He’d been so proud of her that day.

She couldn’t have done that now. When the doctor came to see her at home, he asked her a series of simple questions.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Framfield, of course,” she replied with certainty.

“What year is it?”

“Nineteen twenty-two. Maybe nineteen twenty-three.” She glanced at Brograve and he smiled and nodded.

“And who is the prime minister?”

She looked at Brograve again before answering, “Lloyd George?”

“Well done,” he said, nodding and writing something in his notes. “You’re doing just fine, Lady Beauchamp.”

Eve beamed, seeming pleased with herself, and Brograve smiled too, although there was an ache in his heart that never went away.

* * *

One morning, he pulled out the lavishly illustrated book that had been published to coincide with the British Museum exhibition, then sat beside Eve to show it to her. He didn’t mean to test her, just thought she might enjoy it. She touched some of the pictures with her finger, and watching closely, he convinced himself there was recognition in her eyes.

“Beautiful,” she said about an image of the gold and blue faience shrine.

There was a black-and-white photograph of her standing outside the tomb with Howard Carter and her father and she lingered over that for a long time. It was clearly ringing bells for her.

“That’s Pups,” Brograve said, pointing. “And Howard.”

“How is Howard?” she asked.

“He died a long time ago,” Brograve said, hoping it wouldn’t upset her. “You went to the funeral, with Porchy and your mother.”

“Yes, of course.” She nodded, calmly, and turned to the next page.

All morning she sat with that book, flicking the pages one way, then the other, and Brograve was sure she was remembering some of it. She seemed animated. He didn’t ask her any questions, though. That would have been cruel.

* * *

Maude often rang for a chat, and Brograve was glad of it because she was the one person he could tell the truth to: “Her memory’s shot to pieces, but sometimes there’s a flash of recognition. Like when you are tuning the channel on the television and it’s all fuzzy until suddenly a clear picture comes through. You twiddle the knob a little more to try and make it clearer and it vanishes again. But at least she’s happy.”

“I can tell she’s happy,” Maude replied. “You’re doing a wonderful job. I love seeing the two of you, although it sometimes makes me melancholy. If only she hadn’t had that car accident, she probably wouldn’t have had the strokes. . . .”

“You can’t think that way,” Brograve interrupted. “It does no one any good. We’re all at an age where bits of us are malfunctioning—although you seem to have gotten off lightly. You’re still as sharp and agile as ever.”

“Hardly!” she exclaimed. “Oh hang on, Cuthbert wants a word. He’s holding out his hand for the receiver, waving as if it’s something urgent. I’ll call again soon. Give Eve a kiss from me.”

Cuthbert’s voice came on the line. “Did you hear any more from that Egyptian woman, Ana Mansour?” he asked, without preamble.

“We haven’t heard since last May,” Brograve replied. “She took to her heels when she realized she wasn’t getting anywhere with us.”

“I have some news from a colleague in Cairo,” Cuthbert said. “It turns out the real reason she was sacked from the university was for being overzealous in tracking down and reclaiming Egyptian artifacts held in private collections overseas. She tried to blackmail a German millionaire and he called the police.”

Brograve wasn’t surprised. Deep down, he had always felt as if Ana didn’t fit the profile of an academic trying to make the history books accurate. “What did she do with the artifacts she reclaimed? Was she trying to sell them?”

“No, everything she found went to Egyptian museums. She had access to information about private collectors through her father’s old dealership, as well as through her own research. But the university couldn’t be seen to condone her methods, and that’s why she was sacked.”

“My father’s gold clock has been missing since her visit,” Brograve said. “It did cross my mind to wonder if she might have taken it, but Eve talked me out of it.”

“I don’t have any evidence that she was a thief,” Cuthbert said. “My informant said she sees herself as a patriot doing the right thing for her country.”

Brograve remembered Eve’s disappointment that Porchy wouldn’t let her hand over the Tutankhamun items they found at Highclere. It had been obvious then that Eve had spoken to Ana since her last visit, and he wondered what had been agreed between them. Had Eve seen the woman again? Had she handed anything over? Was anything else missing from the apartment, besides his clock? It was hard to tell the way Eve moved things around. She was doing it more than ever now, like a nervous tic.

When he came off the phone he went into the sitting room and asked her: “Do you remember that Egyptian woman, Ana Mansour? The one who came here asking questions about the tomb.”

She nodded, but he wasn’t sure if he believed her. She often said whatever she thought he wanted to hear.

“Did you give her anything?” he persevered. “A present maybe?”

“No,” she said. “I think she was cross with me.”

Brograve replied, “I was cross with her. She lied to us. Did she ever come here when I wasn’t at home? Can you remember?”

Eve looked up at him, her eyes wide and childlike. “Did who come?”

“Ana Mansour.”

“Who’s that?”

He tried explaining, but her thoughts had wandered elsewhere, her fingers playing with the fringe of a blanket he’d draped over her knees.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.

“Not the kind that haunt you,” he said. “Not the scary kind you see in films. But I suppose we all carry the people we have loved in our memories. I still think of my brother, Edward, sometimes, and wonder what his life would have been like if he had lived.”

“Your brother died in the war,” she said. “You told me about it the night we met.”

Brograve shook his head, feeling choked at the window of lucidity. Such moments were rare now.

“I never met him, did I?” she said. “I wish I had. If he was anything like you, he must have been wonderful.”

“Why did you ask me about ghosts?” he asked.

She had a faint smile on her face. “Oh, just because . . .” she said.