Shadows on the Nile Read online

  ‘We said goodnight.’

  ‘Did you quarrel that evening? Did he walk away? Angry for the second time that day. Is that what happened?’

  Jessie saw a mask fall into place, as rigid as Tutankhamen’s, as the Egyptian woman answered, ‘We were going to a lecture by Professor Bascombe about the exciting new finds on the Giza plateau near Cairo, but …’ she blinked, just once, ‘but he told me he had somewhere else to go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you ask?’

  ‘No.’

  Jessie could imagine it. This young woman too proud to ask, and Tim too absorbed in his own turmoil to notice. Did he come to Putney? To seek out his big sister. But she had been out that Friday night at the jazz club with Tabitha. A kick like a mule’s hit her stomach but she didn’t even flinch. It was guilt. Her old friend.

  ‘If you hear from him – or hear anything that might give a clue as to where Tim is – please telephone me.’ Jessie placed her business card on the mahogany surface of the table beside the ancient bones. It looked out of place. As if a segment of 1932 had accidentally slid down a fissure into the wrong millennium.

  Anippe did not even glance at it.

  ‘Goodbye, Miss Kalim.’

  A faint nod was the only response, nothing more. Frustrated, Jessie walked away but as she did so, she felt a fierce sense of groping in the dark. Her footsteps echoed across the floor, like the footsteps on the landing that echoed in her mind.

  7

  Feed me. Please. Feed me.

  The words were silent. Locked inside the eyes that stared dully up at Jessie from the gutter. A little girl, sooty as a chimney sweep, was sitting on the kerb, hugging her bony knees to her chest. Her thin coat was belted with string and her feet were bare in her shoes, the tips of which had been cut off to allow for growth. Her hand stretched out limply towards Jessie as she passed, but it transformed itself instantly into a sharp little mousetrap when Jessie placed coins in it. With a scrabble of limbs, the child scuttled away down a narrow alleyway under lines of washing.

  Jessie watched the skinny legs vanish and she felt a surge of anger. The National Government was a sham. It was doing nowhere near enough to sort out the economic disaster in Britain right now and Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald was a fool. A fool who had betrayed his own socialist cause. Each day the newspaper headlines grew worse and each day her stomach turned at the sight of despairing queues outside soup kitchens. The Great Depression they were calling it. The Slump. Though one MP had the gall to call it no more than a set-back. It didn’t matter what name the politicians pinned on it, it all meant the same to the men and women in the street. Factories closed. No jobs. No bread on the table. Hardest hit were the workers of Scotland, Wales and the north of England where mass unemployment was rife, but even here in the East End of London conditions were appalling.

  And now Sir John Gilmour, the Home Secretary, was going to snatch the roof from over their heads by cutting unemployment benefit and imposing a means test. The savagery of it had created unrest throughout the country, and here in these helpless, hopeless streets where people huddled, raw-faced in the wind, Jessie could sense the tension as thick as the yellow fog in the air. It made the hairs on her arms rise and the thickness of her winter coat feel like a disgrace.

  ‘Archie, open this blasted door!’

  Jessie’s hand banged against the wood. Its paint was peeling and the smell of damp-rot sent sour spikes up into her nostrils. The dilapidated building was one of the many back-to-back terraced houses in a maze of narrow mean streets. It had outside steps leading down to a basement, and it was down this flight of crumbling stone stairs that she had descended to Archie Dashington’s basement flat. In the gloomy stairwell, set ten feet below street level, rubbish had accumulated: discarded Woodbine cigarette packets, fish and chip papers, a sodden Sunday Pictorial and a broken clothes-mangle. Jessie knew it was no good expecting Archie to clean up the mess. He wasn’t that type.

  With one eye alert for rats, she rapped on the door once more and heard the soft pad of feet on the other side. It opened halfway to reveal a mole-eyed young man of about her own age with rumpled ginger hair, wearing a collarless flannelette shirt tucked into shapeless trousers. He looked – mistakenly – like a workman. Jessie had known Archie since he was thirteen, when he had given Timothy a black eye at school.

  ‘Gosh, Jessie! Jolly early in the morning to come calling.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Archie, it’s almost eleven o’clock. Hardly early.’

  His small eyes blinked at her uneasily. He might have hidden his breeding behind second-hand clothes, but he betrayed himself in his upper-class vowels and a vocabulary straight out of a boarding school tuck-box.

  ‘I need to talk to you, Archie. About Tim.’

  ‘Oh?’ He didn’t open the door any wider.

  ‘May I come in? It’s filthy cold out here.’

  He made no move to admit her, so she stepped forward, forcing him to retreat into the dank hallway.

  ‘It’s not frightfully convenient just now,’ he muttered, belatedly standing his ground. ‘Next week would suit …’

  Jessie smiled. ‘Come on, Archie. Whatever or whoever you’re hiding in there, I won’t tell, I promise.’ She kissed his freckled cheek. ‘Unless it’s Tim, of course.’

  ‘It’s not Tim.’

  ‘Then let’s go in and talk.’

  She slipped an arm purposefully through his and steered him towards the door to the living room. It was always the same with men of Archie’s class, born to privilege and wealth. They might rule the British Empire but they had no idea how to stand up to a woman. She put it down to a childhood spent dominated by a nanny in starched white uniform who wielded the back of a spoon with enthusiasm over bare young knuckles. Why Archie Dashington had chosen to exist in this dismal working-class hovel while still drawing a generous monthly allowance from his father who was a minister in the Ramsay MacDonald’s coalition government, Jessie had no idea. Archie certainly didn’t appear to do any work, had in fact never held a job in his life, as far as she knew, not since leaving Harrow School along with Tim. She swung open the door, a tight grip on her host’s arm to stop him bolting.

  The smell struck her first. Unwashed socks and the sour breath from empty bellies. There must have been twenty men crammed in the small room. No sound. Just suspicious eyes fixed on her and a grey pall of cigarette smoke blurring the edges of scowls. Thin as ferrets, all of them, and dressed in work clothes. Some stood in huddles, others sprawled on the bare linoleum, a few propped up the damp walls. Jessie could sense their hostility.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ she said brightly.

  ‘Who’s this?’ a voice demanded. It came from a man who wore a stained flat cap and was chewing on a crust of bread. In fact, Jessie noticed that all the men had something to eat in their hands.

  ‘She’s the sister of a friend of mine,’ Archie explained with a dismissive shrug. ‘Just fussing over something. Nothing for you to worry about.’ He barged a pathway through the men, pushing her towards the tiny kitchenette at the far end of the room, and shut the door behind them, but not before someone’s hand had touched her calf as she stepped over him. Tiny was too big a word for the kitchenette. It was barely larger than a telephone booth.

  ‘Archie! What on earth is going on out there?’

  ‘Just some men.’

  ‘I can see that. Who are they?’

  ‘They’re marchers. Union men.’ He pushed his face towards her, worried. ‘Don’t say a word about them to anyone, will you?’

  ‘Marchers?’

  ‘The Means Test march.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Archie, are you crazy?’

  ‘No.’

  An organisation called the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement had rallied thousands of unemployed from all over the country to set off on a march on London to present a petition to Parliament. Against the Means Test. A
million signatures. The snaking column of thousands of marching boots and banners was due to arrive for a mass gathering in Hyde Park the following Tuesday, 27th October. But rumours were spreading already. That it was Communist-led. That they intended to smash the government. That London was in danger. Panic was seeping under the closed doors of government offices throughout London. Here in the slums of the East End the mood was sour, and this close to Archie, Jessie could see the anger in his eyes. But there was something else there, too. Shame. That was it, a dark grey wing of shame.

  ‘The police will be waiting for them,’ she warned in a voice too quiet for the men in the next room to hear.

  ‘That’s why you must tell no one. Promise me, Jess.’

  She nodded. ‘Of course I won’t. But you know you are taking a risk.’

  He leaned his back against the door, and kicked a cigarette butt that lay squashed on the floor. ‘Someone has to. Poor bastards. I am ashamed of this government.’ He raised his eyes to hers. ‘Ashamed of my father’s part in it.’

  For a moment in the miniscule kitchen with its greasy walls, they exchanged a look, as a thread of understanding stretched between them. It was what had always bound them together as friends, their mutual disconnection from their fathers. Never mentioned. Never discussed. As if words would inflict too much damage, spill too much blood.

  ‘I’m sorry, Archie.’ Jessie lightly touched her fingers to his sleeve. ‘But don’t get yourself into trouble. Those men are spoiling for a fight.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be?’

  ‘I don’t want that pretty nose of yours to get into an argument with a policeman’s truncheon.’

  The muscles of his face relaxed, making him suddenly younger, turning him into the boy who used to be the conker king at school. He reached out for the dented tin kettle, ran water into it and placed it on a gas ring, all without moving more than a foot.

  ‘So,’ he rumpled his fiery hair and gave Jessie his full attention, ‘what has that bally idiot brother of yours done now?’

  ‘He has disappeared.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Vanished.’

  He laughed, a burst of sound that stirred up the chill air.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ she told him seriously. ‘He’s been gone a week. Nobody has seen him since Friday of last week.’

  ‘Last Friday?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Damn me! Vanished, you say.’

  ‘Do you know where he went on that Friday night?’

  ‘Yes, actually I do.’ He held his hand out to the blue flame of the gas burner for warmth. ‘The same as he did most weekends. He was obsessed with it.’

  ‘Tim? Obsessed? He never mentioned anything to me – except the museum’s Egyptian collection, of course.’

  ‘That’s because he knew you would disapprove. You know what he’s like, always desperate for big sister’s approval.’

  Jessie frowned. Is he? He had hidden that from her too.

  ‘So where did he go?’ she urged.

  Archie hesitated.

  ‘Where?’ She shook his arm. ‘Where?’

  He looked away, suddenly awkward. ‘To a séance.’

  ‘What kind of idiot would do that?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Jess, it was only a stupid séance. Don’t look like that.’

  She snatched her car key from her coat pocket. ‘Just tell me where.’

  Séance.

  A word that hissed and slithered. It crawled up her back and made her shiver. Timothy, what were you thinking of? She felt a tightness grip her chest. She wanted to sit down with her brother and talk to him calmly about this extraordinary secret obsession of his, but instead she was hurtling along the A40 at breakneck speed, knuckles white on the steering-wheel. Her little Austin Swallow swooped around a Saturday morning charabanc and a sign to Denham Village flashed past.

  Who was it he was reaching out to? Who was he so keen to contact?

  She shook her head, exasperated.

  It was all the fashion, this idea of seeking out the spirits of the dead, a nation in chaos trying to find guidance in the past. As if the previous generation hadn’t made enough of a mess of things without dabbling their interfering fingers in the present. Everyone was doing it. Biddy Brad shaw, a girl who worked alongside Jessie at the studio, was always threatening to bring in her ouija board for a session during their lunch break. It was society’s latest craze, drawing in the hard-nosed intellectuals as readily as the fragile young widows bereaved in the Great War. It worried Jessie. That a nation could be so gullible, so eager to hear the voices of the dead when it should be listening to the voices of those starving on the streets.

  How could she have missed it in Tim? Shouldn’t she have spotted something so huge sitting on his shoulders and something so opaque clouding his mind?

  She stamped on the brake as a cyclist with his dog trotting alongside came around a blind corner as if he owned the road. She sounded the horn.

  Slow down. Think straight. She cast her mind back to the last time she’d seen her brother. They had gone to the cinema to see Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan the Ape Man and she had cooked Tim liver and bacon, his favourite. She could picture him now, grinning at her across the table, his eyes a clear innocent blue. No clouds. No veil. No obsession.

  She felt betrayed. Tim was the only person in her life with whom she could let her guard down, the one she could dare trust. The one she could dare love. Because she had learned at a young age that love was too dangerous, like a time-bomb in your chest waiting to go off. And yet again it had proved itself unreliable. It could not be depended on. Recently her life had been going well, so – stupidly – she had relaxed and forgotten to be watchful. She had looked away. Just for a moment.

  So what did it mean?

  ‘Timothy!’

  It was the tone she always used to him when he was young and had pinched one of her carefully sharpened drawing pencils or when he bounced a tennis ball against her wardrobe while she was trying to read. She was never any good at reprimanding him, yet now she wanted to shake him till his eyes fell out – just as she did the very first time she found him in Georgie’s bed.

  Had death become more real to him than life?

  As she turned left into a rural lane edged with thinning hedge rows, signposted Lower Lampton, she fought off a ferocious urge to jam her fist on the horn. To blast the quiet smug country air into pieces.

  8

  Georgie

  England 1921

  In the early days of your visits, you grow impatient easily. You do not know me yet, do not understand that my brain works in a different way from yours and takes twisted paths. You suggest that we sit and talk in the public room downstairs.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘Because it’s more acceptable than sitting here in your bedroom.’

  ‘I hate downstairs.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s full of …’ I try to explain. ‘Full of Others. I laugh when someone spills a drink or trips over. Dr Churchward tells me that my responses are “inappropriate” and that I have no social skills. He says I cause trouble downstairs.’

  You sit in my desk chair and study me, until I feel my cheeks burn and my head is filling up with rage, though I don’t know why. I stare hard at my blank white wall.

  ‘You don’t like being looked at, do you?’ you whisper.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t like being touched.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t like loud sounds.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t like people.’

  ‘I like you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you don’t ever look me in the eye.’

  I say nothing. The wall is flat and cooling. I try to squeeze some of the rage out of my head and onto the wall instead. I do like you but I have never said those words before to anyone except my sister and I
am frightened that you might disappear now that I have said them to you. I stand up without looking at you and take off all my clothes.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ you say quickly, ‘what the hell are you doing?’

  ‘I want you to see me truly, without the bits that are hidden, because I know parts of me are ugly but I want you to know that they are there, so that you won’t run away when you see them at some point in the future.’

  I tear off my socks and stand naked.

  ‘Christ, you’re crazy.’

  It feels bad when you say that to me. It feels the same as when the boy downstairs with the droopy eye – one of the Others – stabbed me in the cheek with his fork and the prongs went right through to my tongue. I chased him up the stairs with the fork hanging out of my cheek, my blood dripping on the carpet. When I caught him, I—

  ‘All right, Georgie,’ you interrupt my thoughts. ‘I’ve seen you now, so you can put your clothes back on, thank you.’

  ‘Did you see the bad parts?’

  ‘You look perfectly normal to me.’

  I feel sick. I pull on my vest. ‘Didn’t you see the bad bits, the bits inside that are ugly and deformed?’

  ‘Oh, Georgie, let me tell you a secret.’ You lean forward, making me leap back towards the window in a panic, one leg in my trousers, one out, and I fall flat on my back. My head hits the skirting board. You stare at me, shocked. But you sit back down on your chair, wait for me to stand up and continue talking as though nothing has happened. I think that is the moment I start to love you.

  ‘My secret,’ you say, ‘is that I also have bad bits inside that are ugly and deformed. But I hide them better.’

  I listen to your voice, your soft sad voice, and I rub the back of my head.

  ‘Show me one,’ I say.

  You think for a long moment. You run a hand through your thick curls and tug at them so hard it must hurt.

  ‘I hated you, Georgie, when I was a child, even though I didn’t know you. I hated you because Jessie loved you so much, and I wanted her to love me instead. I blamed you for making me miserable when I wanted to be so happy in my new family. I slept in your bed and each night in the dark I plunged one of Ma’s hatpins – one I had stolen – into your pillow. And do you know what I imagined it to be?’