Shadows on the Nile Page 15

  Too late to take it back.

  All she could do now was get rid of him. Muscle by muscle, bone by bone, she eased herself off the settee. So far, so good. It was still dark outside, the blackness edging sideways into the room around ill-drawn curtains and Jessie had to curb the urge to fiddle with them. Instead she aimed for the closed kitchen door. Weird sparkles like Christmas lights reflecting on water kept getting in the way, but she made it and opened the door.

  The light was bright. It spiked right into her temple. Standing on one side of the narrow strip of flooring were Monty and Tabitha, their eyes wide with astonishment at the sight of her. Opposite them stood another man, leaning his bulk against the sink. Even through the racket that the steamroller was making in her head, she recognised his voice, and his face. Dr Easby. Her father’s doctor. In Kent. What the hell was he doing here in Putney?

  ‘Good morning, everyone,’ she said in a bright voice. ‘I assume it’s still early morning, anyway.’

  Tabitha was the first to move. ‘Jessie, honey, thank God!’ She threw her arms around Jessie, squeezing her tight, making the room rock.

  Over her friend’s shoulder Jessie saw Monty watching her intently. He thrust his hands in his pockets and shifted from foot to foot. Did he think she was going to throw him out? Something about him had changed. As if a thin layer of his skin had peeled away while she slept, leaving him slightly raw at the edges. He looked drained, but he made a sound that she recognised as a low laugh, a sound of welcome. She was too tense to laugh. She extricated herself from Tabitha’s embrace and turned to the other occupant of the small space.

  ‘Dr Easby, what are you doing here?’

  She held out a hand for him to shake but instead he placed his fingers on the pulse of her wrist and studied her eyes in a professional manner. He looked immensely serious – unusual for this jolly bon viveur, who was wearing a crumpled suit with the Fair Isle waistcoat his mother knitted for him before she died of meningitis last year. He had soft warm hands and a soft warm smile that he dispensed along with his medicines. Jessie’s father thought the world of him.

  ‘What brings you to London?’ she asked.

  ‘You do.’

  Not good. Not good at all.

  ‘I asked Tabitha to telephone your parents,’ Monty told her.

  ‘We thought it was for the best,’ Tabitha added.

  Jessie wasn’t aware of her expression changing but it must have because Monty reacted immediately.

  ‘You were asleep too long, Miss Kenton. You had us worried.’

  Jessie withdrew her hand. ‘It is morning, isn’t it?’ She directed her gaze to the black square of window. Just a flicker of daylight out there in the east.

  ‘Yes, my dear, it is morning,’ Easby soothed, ‘but it is Thursday morning. You’ve been asleep over twenty-four hours and your father thought it best that I should come up to town and check you over. You remember receiving the bump on your head?’

  She started to back towards the door. ‘I’m fine.’ The thought of people man-handling her while she was asleep was too ghastly to contemplate. ‘I’ll just go to my room and …’

  ‘Now, now, my dear girl,’ Dr Easby said with his soft treacly voice, ‘you need to relax. I’ve given you something to calm you down, something to get you over the shock of …’

  ‘I’m perfectly calm.’

  She stopped herself wiping her palms on her dressing gown.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’ He smiled his warm smile. Paused a moment. Everyone knew there was more to come. He held out his hand, palm up, the way he would offer an apple to a nervous horse. ‘Take these. Just in case.’ There was a small white tablet-box. ‘For your nerves.’

  He took a step towards her, so she snatched the box quickly and slipped it into her dressing-gown pocket to stop him coming closer.

  ‘Your parents are worried.’

  ‘Not worried enough to come and see me themselves, it would seem,’ she said and walked out of the room before he could reply.

  By the time she reached her own room, her head was foggy and she could feel sweat beading on her forehead. She leaned her back against the closed door and slithered slowly to the floor, gathering her knees to her, clasping her hands around them to hold everything together. She was overreacting, she was aware of that. But she didn’t want some doctor reporting on her to her father, whatever his motives. The gap between her father and herself was too precipitous, altogether too barren to allow such flimsy seeds to grow. She wanted her father to believe she was in the best of health. Nothing wrong with me. I’m not Georgie. You can’t shut me up in a home for the sick in the head. You can’t.

  She was shivering. The pain sent fingers down from her temple to her jaw, making her teeth ache, but that was low on her list of concerns. After a long moment’s thought she yanked up both sleeves of her dressing gown and inspected her arms. She found what she was looking for. Two puncture marks. Her heart lurched. What had he injected into her? While Tabitha and Monty stood by in docile agreement because a doctor was a god of sorts. The power of life and death lay in his hands.

  She removed the tablets from her pocket, examined them for a name, but found none. Her hand was trembling.

  Was she stupid? Was Dr Easby right? Did she need help?

  Jessie threw the tablet box across the room and heard it collide with her artwork portfolio that was propped against the wall. In the black portfolio lay her pictures, the ones she had drawn for herself, the ones that mattered to her, and their images reared up uninvited in her head. She rubbed her arms vigorously, feeling suddenly chill, because she knew those images were all about belonging: a child’s fingers in a parent’s hand, a cat on a lap, a pair of lovers asleep, a girl plaiting her mother’s silken hair, a pearl hanging from a woman’s ear … She could go on and on. It’s what her hand drew, she couldn’t help it. Belonging together. Not alone. Not disjointed. Not a child left to cry helplessly on a bedroom floor.

  She rested her head on her knees. ‘Tim,’ she whispered. ‘Come home.’

  19

  Georgie

  England 1929

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ You unfold a white five-pound note.

  You crackle it between your fingers.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I know what it is.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘I am not a performing dog.’

  ‘It’s money.’

  I look away.

  ‘Do you know what money is?’ you ask.

  I want to hit you. Instead I jerk myself over to my desk and start drawing, small neat images in graphite that crowd the blank sightless sheet of paper in front of me. An owl. An eagle. A hand. I repeat the pictures. An owl, an eagle, a hand. Over and over until the page is full. At the bottom I squeeze in one more picture of an owl and then a single feather. I put down my pencil. Over and over it spells out an M and an A and a D in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  ‘Pleased with yourself?’ you say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now can we continue our conversation?’

  ‘It was your conversation, not mine.’

  ‘All right, I will assume that you know what money is and what it is for.’

  The five-pound note is still in your hand but I try not to look at it. Money is the root of all evil. But I think not. How can money be a root? Mankind has evil growing within itself as big and fat as hydrangea flowers in summer, but money is lifeless. Life less. It is only paper and metal, but it has the scent of hatred all over it. I can smell it from my desk. Sour and brown.

  ‘What good is money to you in here, Georgie?’

  You waft the banknote through the air like a piece of cheese, as if you know how much I want to touch it. I have never even seen money before, let alone touched it, but I do not tell you that. I don’t want to be a Nobody-Know-Nothing. Not like the man in the next room who thinks that voices are beamed from the stars into his head at night, voices a
nd violent pictures. He has cat-shit for brains and cannot understand that dreams come from your own subconscious. I have read Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. I am not a Nobody-Know-Nothing.

  I want to snatch the money, to crumple it in my palm and feel its evil power.

  ‘Your room here in this Domicile of Doom costs money, you know, Georgie.’

  I blink. I blink because I am a Nobody-Know-Nothing after all. Disgust, like a white-hot poker, burns my skin. I stand up from the desk and throw myself onto my bed where I lie down, curled up with my back to you. Your voice is soft and full of feathers, but it won’t go away.

  ‘To feed you and clothe you and keep you here with doctors and nurses year after year takes lots of money, have you never thought of that?’

  ‘Who pays?’ I whisper.

  ‘Your father.’

  I howl. It goes on and on, as dark and slippery as diarrhoea in my mouth.

  You try to make me stop but cannot. You read to me but I don’t hear the words and the howling grows louder until you leave. I howl for three days and then they take me to the Treatment Room. When you come again next Saturday, I am a zombie on the bed.

  ‘Don’t talk,’ I mumble. ‘Just read.’

  You read The Adventure of the Speckled Band.

  20

  Jessie rang the doorbell. The door was opened immediately, as though her mother lurked behind the door. She saw that both her parents were standing in the hall with their coats on.

  ‘Jessica! You should have telephoned to say you were coming. We’re just on our way out.’

  It was her father who spoke. Her mother stood holding onto the door, staring at Jessie’s battered face.

  ‘Oh, Jessica,’ she murmured so softly that it barely brushed her lips.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jessie told them. ‘Just bruising.’ It wasn’t what she had come to talk about. ‘Can you spare a few minutes?’

  ‘What were you doing in Trafalgar Square, Jessica?’ her father asked reproachfully. ‘What possessed you? You’re not like young Dashington, I hope – in league with the damn communists who organised the march. They are the ones who started all the trouble. The damn young fool is a disgrace to his father.’

  ‘No, Pa. Don’t worry, I’m not a communist. But don’t be hard on poor Archie. He was trying to help the workers to make their point after their leader, Harrington, was arrested.’

  ‘He brought shame on his father’s fine name! Lord Trenchard did what he had to do in sending the police to deal with it by force. To protect this country’s law and order.’

  Jessie sighed. She didn’t want this argument now. After a long day at work, a visit to Archie in hospital, and then the fraught drive down to Kent in the dark, the steamroller was back.

  ‘I just wanted a quick word,’ she said.

  Her father nodded. He looked restless, eager to be off. The folds of his face were stiffly controlled, and as always Jessie had the feeling that he had more important things to do than talk to her. She turned to her mother.

  ‘I have news.’

  ‘You’ve found Timothy!’

  ‘No, nothing definite, Ma, but I have an idea where he might have gone.’

  ‘Where? Tell me. Where?’

  ‘To Egypt.’

  ‘What? He wouldn’t go all that way … not without telling us. When he went on that archaeology trip to Egypt two years ago, he told us in advance. Why not this time?’

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ her father stated flatly, adjusting his bowler hat and doing up the buttons of his coat. The material was a very dark grey, almost black, a good thick wool. Jessie had never realised before how dark the hall of the house was with its oak panelling, and tonight the darkness seemed to centre on the coat, creating a soft thrumming in her head.

  Or was that the vibration of her mother’s distress? Because Catherine Kenton’s eyes were frozen with fear. Her slender face looked smaller, as if it had been chiselled back to the bone, and dun-coloured smudges were painted under her eyes. The energy that was her trademark had vanished and in its place lay a bright foolish smile that convinced no one. Even so, her small frame was elegantly garbed in a stylish camel coat, tan leather gloves and a chocolate-brown hat with a single black feather at an angle. A tiny discreet veil obscured the creases of tension on her forehead. Jessie felt a rush of concern for her.

  But she turned to her father. ‘Pa, I came to ask you if Timothy’s passport is still in his room, or has it been removed? If he’s gone to Egypt, he’d need it.’

  Ernest Kenton considered the question and considered his daughter. He removed his hat and placed it on the hall table in such a way as to make Jessie aware that he was showing patience with this small gesture.

  ‘Of course it’s in his room. I’ll go and fetch it,’ he said and started up the stairs.

  His back was straight, his movements brisk.

  ‘Pa?’

  He turned, expectant.

  ‘Pa, thank you for sending Dr Easby to me in Putney.’

  A faint trace of a smile crossed his face. ‘I knew you wouldn’t go to a doctor in London.’ He nodded at her, just a brief dip of his head, then continued upstairs.

  She didn’t ask why he hadn’t come himself. Alone in the hall with her mother, the air was quieter. Stiller and more muted.

  ‘Ma, are you all right?’

  ‘How can I be all right, Jessica?’ her mother said softly. ‘How?’ She held up one gloved hand. It was shaking. ‘Look at me.’

  Jessie took the small hand in her own and drew her mother to her, wrapping her arm around the small frame, holding it close. They stood there in the gloomy hall, not speaking.

  When she heard her father’s footsteps on the landing, Jessie murmured, ‘I’ll find him. I will.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that.’ A faint whisper in her ear.

  They stepped apart as Ernest Kenton descended the stairs, and Jessie had to push down the tears that rose in her throat. He handed her the dark blue British passport and she made no comment at the sight of her brother’s flamboyant signature on the front of it, nor when she flicked it open and saw the photograph of his handsome face inside. She shut it quickly.

  ‘Thank you, Pa.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I intend to travel to Egypt to see if—’

  ‘No!’ Her father’s voice boomed in the confines of the hall. ‘I forbid it.’

  Jessie allowed no flicker of annoyance to show. ‘But Pa, I really think he seems to have left some kind of coded message to indicate that it is to Egypt that he’s gone.’

  ‘That’s preposterous.’

  ‘Today in my lunch hour I went to the British Museum again. Still they have heard nothing from him, but there’s worse …’ She heard her mother take a ragged breath. ‘Worse,’ she continued, ‘is that his girlfriend,’ she almost said the words Egyptian girlfriend but remembered in time that her father was unaware of her existence, ‘has given in her notice and also disappeared. It might be that they are together somewhere.’

  ‘What girlfriend is this?’ her father demanded.

  ‘Someone he worked with,’ Catherine Kenton said quickly.

  ‘You never mentioned her.’

  ‘No.’

  A lull. Brimming with unsaid words.

  Her mother suddenly pointed at the blue document in Jessie’s hand. ‘His passport is here.’ The bright smile widened. ‘He can’t have travelled abroad without it.’

  ‘He may have travelled on a false passport.’ Jessie had thought about this. ‘I’m told they are not difficult to acquire. Though why he would do so is …’

  Her father gave a snort of annoyance. ‘Now you are in fantasy-land, my girl.’ His patience was running out. ‘You must give up this childish idea and face reality.’

  Both Catherine Kenton and Jessie fixed their gaze on him and a faint tightening of the mouth was the only sign that maybe he regretted his outburst.

  ‘What,’ Catherine Kenton asked, ‘do you mean by “reality”, Erne
st? What is it that you think has happened to Timothy that you are not telling me?’

  Ernest Kenton switched his eyes to his daughter. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that while he was staying with you the night before he disappeared, you said something to him, Jessica, not something intentionally hurtful, I dare say, but it was something that distressed him. Something that made him decide to abandon his family.’ His grey eyes were as flat and unyielding as slate. He touched a finger to his moustache, weighing his words. ‘Something about George, I suspect.’

  ‘No! That’s not true.’

  Jessie turned to her mother but already Catherine Kenton had stepped away from her, as if she were unclean.

  ‘No,’ Jessie said again. ‘I swear it’s not true.’

  Her mother reached for the front door. She swung it open. Activity, always activity. If you keep active, life will never catch up with you. Stay one step ahead of it at all times.

  ‘We really must be going,’ she said brusquely. ‘We have a meeting to attend.’ Cold air jumped through the doorway and wove around their legs.

  ‘What meeting?’ Jessie asked dully. Shock had left her numb.

  ‘We’re going to listen to Oswald Mosley,’ her father announced. ‘He’s giving a speech over in Bromley. There is a huge swell of new members in his British Union of Fascists party after the riots. People are angry.’ He was back on familiar territory now and the tightness around his lips was sliding away. ‘Jessica, I want you to abandon this foolish notion of going to Egypt. Why don’t you join us at this meeting? It will do you good to listen to what Mosley has to say.’

  Jessie could think of nothing worse. ‘No, thank you. I am tired.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She walked out of her parents’ house, hands balled into fists in her coat pocket. ‘Enjoy your evening,’ she said as she headed for her car.

  ‘We will.’