Shadows on the Nile Read online

  ‘Are things so bad?’

  ‘Pretty dire, to be honest.’

  She continued to stare at one of the chairs, searching for her brother’s imprint in the faded green silk of its seat.

  ‘Is that why the rooms are so empty?’ she asked. No furniture. No ornaments. No fine china or Georgian silver.

  He shrugged eloquently and she felt a tug of sorrow for him, for the leanness of his limbs and the emptiness of his casual gesture. ‘Sold to fix the roof,’ he told her. ‘I’m starting on the paintings now. Just shifted a Watteau at Sotheby’s. Got a rotten price for it.’

  She turned to study him. ‘You are a lucky man to have them.’ She thought of the men in Archie’s flat, the ones with the flat caps and the flatter bellies. ‘Most people have never even seen a Watteau, never mind owned one.’

  He treated her to a polite nod. ‘Lucky. That’s me all right. In my lucky house. As lucky as a four-leafed clover wrapped around a rabbit’s foot.’

  Jessie didn’t linger in the room, not with his words just asking to be ripped out of the air.

  They emerged onto the front driveway, gravel crunching under their feet. All around them the estate spread out in soft rolling pastures and shadowy patches of woodland, through which Jessie could make out the silvery metallic surface of a lake. What, she wondered, did it do to you to be raised in a place like this? Where you were lord and master of all you survey. Did it make you believe you were the centre of the universe? She rather thought it might. At the very least the centre of your own universe.

  ‘What disaster happened here?’ Jessie asked.

  For no more than a flash, her companion’s brown eyes darkened and she caught a glimpse of inner turmoil. Then it was gone and in its place slid his usual ironic smile as he gestured in the direction of the east wing of the house.

  ‘Ah, you mean our … structural restyling.’

  They both gazed at the blackened remains on their left, at the charred shoulders of stone doorways and brick walls, sprawled with ivy and strings of bindweed. She stared sadly at the ruined section. In the fading light of the October afternoon, ropes of mist were creeping up from the distant lake with the stealth of a burglar.

  ‘How long ago was the fire?’ Jessie asked.

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He dragged his eyes from the degrading sight of beauty gone bad, and gave a light-hearted laugh. It was out of place but she recognised that it was part of this man’s armoury, an attempt to distract her from his words.

  ‘My father – the previous and woefully extravagant Sir Montague Chamford – decided to incinerate himself. Bit drastic, don’t you think? Admittedly the debts on the estate had grown so horrendous that he thought it was time to call it a day. The thing was,’ his smile took on a fixed quality as though nailed to his face, ‘he believed that if he burned down the whole lot, I – as his heir – would at least inherit the insurance money. Daft old blighter. They were onto him like a shot. Arson doesn’t pay out, don’t you know.’

  ‘It must have been terrible for your mother.’

  ‘She tried to save him. Died in flames, her hair a fiery halo around her head.’ His smile didn’t alter, but something in his eyes did, something he couldn’t quite control.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Jessie murmured.

  ‘Don’t be. It’s not your business.’

  It was not said rudely, just a statement of fact. He walked over to her muddy Austin Swallow and opened its door for her. His manners were impeccable. He still wore his heavy jumper but had discarded the leather apron, so that he looked leaner than ever, his legs as long and fleshless as ladders.

  ‘Two o’clock tomorrow,’ she reminded him.

  She climbed in the car but just when she was about to drive off, he leaned down and spoke through the window. ‘Splendid. I look forward to it. Don’t forget to bring your ouija board.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  As she drove off, she could hear his laugh trailing behind her in the bruised afternoon light.

  So. That was over. Lies and all.

  Montague Charles Gaylord Chamford drew a deep breath into his lungs as he stood on the front steps of his home and watched the little car scoot down the drive. Smoke was whooshing out of its skinny exhaust pipe. It didn’t surprise him, the way she drove. It was the same way she walked – full of energy and a sense of purpose. For a moment he allowed himself to imagine what it would be like to jump into her tiny back seat and drive away for ever from this scorched albatross that hung around his neck.

  He had enjoyed talking to Miss Kenton. She had brought a burst of life into Chamford, though her appearance here had scared the daylights out of him at first. She had popped up from nowhere like a bad conscience. Something close to a smile passed over his face. He watched the mist crawling on its belly out of the woods and up towards the house while he considered the way Miss Kenton held his gaze, eyes rock steady, navy flecks embedded in the blue of her irises. He recalled how her face grew intent when she was listening, how when she was really concentrating she forgot to blink and lifted the weight of her hair off the back of her neck.

  Yet she had believed him. Of that he was certain. She was a young woman who seemed – unwisely – to possess so little guile in her own heart that she was slow to recognise it in others. Tomorrow may not be as bad as he’d feared, especially if Nell kept her turban screwed on straight.

  ‘Coriolanus!’ he shouted sternly into the damp air.

  The dog was streaking across the lawn towards a rabbit foolish enough to venture out of the shadows to a patch of clover, but the collie veered back at the sound of its master’s voice.

  ‘No rabbit pie tonight,’ Montague scolded.

  One defenceless victim per day was enough.

  10

  Georgie

  England 1922

  You arrive in what you call your cricket whites. They don’t look white to me. They are the colour of the pearls that I remember used to hang around my mother’s neck, but your whites are streaked with green grass stains and there are what look like lipstick smears on your thigh. You tell me it is where you rub the red ball when bowling.

  ‘Why do you rub the ball?’

  ‘To help the bounce.’

  I leave it there, though it makes no sense. I leave it because it brings back to my mind the feel of my father’s hands on mine as he tried to adjust my small fingers on the handle of my cricket bat. The warmth of his skin burning mine. The strength of him. All powerful. When I think of that moment something starts to judder and shake inside me and I have to bend down to take off my shoes, so that you will not see my face. My father wanted something from me. He wanted a proper son. I look sideways at you with your bright blue eyes and your cricket whites that aren’t white and it dawns on me abruptly that they must love you very much. You are a proper son. A proper brother.

  When I think of Jessie loving you, waking you, laughing with you, reading to you, I feel cold inside and words tumble from my mouth before I can chain them to my tongue.

  ‘Does Jessie know you come here?’ I ask.

  ‘Do you want her to?’

  Your question sweeps into my mind, tearing something loose. ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We sit on the floor after that, across the room from each other, throwing a cricket ball back and forth. It is oddly satisfying. I drop it often but you laugh and so I laugh. You show me how to close my fingers over it as it thuds into my palm. I am getting better, but I do not like touching the ball because it is red.

  ‘Why don’t you want Jessie to know that I have found you?’

  ‘It is obvious,’ I tell you. ‘You are too intelligent to need to ask.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘I don’t want her to see me. Not like this.’

  You are silent. You won’t look at me. You look down at the ball in your hand. I wait for a time and when eventually you speak, your
words sound tired, as though they have been on a long long journey.

  ‘Georgie, I think she would love to see you. Whatever you are like.’

  ‘No. You don’t know her. Don’t tell Jessie.’ My voice is rising.

  ‘It’s not fair on her. I’m sure she still misses you.’

  The burning in my chest is so fierce that I expect to see flames melting my flesh.

  ‘No, Tim. She let me go.’

  ‘No, that’s not true. She tried to find you but—’

  ‘Hush! Throw the ball. I never want us to speak of her again.’

  ‘But, Georgie, she—’

  ‘Shut up!’

  You throw the ball and I throw it back. I count one thousand and ninety-two throws before I ask the question again.

  ‘Does Jessie know you come here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  I never want us to speak of her again.

  Those nine words haunt me all week. I pour them out onto sheets of paper, covering the blankness with my tiny writing that looks like black ants scurrying across the pages. Hundreds of pages. Drilling them into my mind. When you knock at my door the next Saturday, I open it and open my mouth at the same time to say those nine words to you again. So you will know that I am serious about it. That I mean it.

  ‘Hello, old thing,’ you say with your warm smile. ‘Had a decent week? Mine was hellish. Old stinky Benton kept me in detention for—’

  ‘Tim,’ I interrupt. I shut the door behind him. My mouth is open. The nine words are ready. ‘Tim, tell me about Jessie.’

  No! The wrong words come out. We stare at each other, shocked. Jessie is one subject we have tiptoed around, afraid that if we unwrap it we will find a cobra inside. It will spit poison at our eyes, so that you and I will never be able to see each other clearly again, we will be blind. I know it. But still I ask.

  ‘Tell me about Jessie. Didn’t she ever wonder about me? Didn’t she care about me? What has she told you?’

  ‘Sit down,’ you say in a voice so gentle I put my hands over my ears to trap the gentleness inside my head. ‘Stop crying.’

  ‘Crying?’ I touch my face. It is wet. How long have I been crying? Hours? Days?

  I sit on the bed and you drape my blue bedcover around me to stop my shivers. You take my desk chair, turn it so that its back is towards me and you sit on it facing me, legs astride the seat. I have never seen anyone sit on a chair like that before, and it strikes me as debonair. That’s how a prince or a pirate would sit. I like it. Until I realise that the curves of the chair-back are dividing us, covering your heart, keeping it safe from me.

  You start to talk, quietly and for a long time, your blue eyes never leaving my face. I hide my eyes from you, but I can feel the warmth of your gaze, like sunshine on my skin. I listen intently. Memorizing each word. You tell me how angry and upset Jessie was in the early months after I was sent away, how she tried to find out where I was, using all her strength and cunning to extract the truth from our parents. Sometimes she would shout, sometimes cry, sometimes beg on her knees. She tried not eating, not talking, not walking. She tried being the perfect daughter, all smiles and good school grades, and just when Pa and Ma thought she had forgotten, she would suddenly slip in the question, ‘Where is Georgie living?’ Then everything would catapult back to square one and it would all start again.

  Because always their answers were the same.

  We will not talk about him.

  He is gone. He is sick in the head.

  You have a new brother. Forget George.

  Silence! George is an aberration who is being properly cared for among his own kind.

  Don’t mention that name any more!

  You pause, but you do not spare me the truth. They are ashamed of me and fear that I will contaminate their daughter if she sees me. I am not a human. I hug my knees to my chest and taste the word in my mouth: an aberration.

  ‘Every Christmas and every birthday,’ your quiet voice vibrates, as if someone is shaking you, ‘she gave them a present to send to you, but after a while they didn’t even pretend. They refused to take it and when she insisted, stamping her young feet, they put it in the rubbish bin in front of her. To make her stop.’

  You describe to me how, whenever our parents were out of the house, she would rummage through their cupboards, prise open their desk drawers with scissors, tear open their letters, and she would take the cane marks on her palms without flinching when they came home and discovered what she had been up to.

  I stare hard at my hands. Are they the same shape as hers? I picture them with red weals crossing them like tyre tracks. My teeth chatter uncontrollably but I am not crying. I am far past that. I force my eyes to yours and see that they have changed from blue to a dirty colourless grey, the same non-colour as the balls of fluff under my bed. I am frightened by the alteration and want to ask you to stop talking, to stop dragging the past into my room, to stop plunging your words into my head. But I don’t. I can’t. My tongue is paralysed.

  ‘Sometimes she would get me to ask them,’ you say, and I can hear a smile in your voice. ‘That drove them mad. The cane came out for both of us then and those were the only times I heard her sob, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”’

  ‘To you? Or to our parents?’ I whisper.

  ‘Who knows? Maybe it was to you.’

  I ache. All over. ‘Jessie!’ I bellow at the top of my voice. ‘Jessie!’

  ‘Shut up, Georgie. You’re not wounded.’

  ‘I am.’ I wrap my arms around my bony body. ‘I am, I am.’ I start to rock back and forth.

  You leap from your chair and you throw your arms around me, squeezing me to your chest so hard I can’t breathe.

  I scream, ‘Don’t touch me!’

  But you are immensely strong. Fifteen years old and yet strong as a man. You are crushing me to death. I scream and beat your face with my fist but when your nose gushes blood over my hand I am sick over you. Blackness erupts in acrid patches in my mind, lights and bells flash and jangle behind my eyes, so that when the white-coats suddenly seize you and force you to the floor, I do not know if it is real or in my head. I call your name.

  ‘Tim!’

  ‘Georgie, fuck off, you stupid old thing.’

  I beg them to let you stay. They come at me with needles but you beat them off, and somehow we are suddenly again sitting down, me on the bed and you on the desk chair, alone in the room. I am trembling violently and fear that the whole eruption has been one of my episodes, another war zone that exists only in my mind, except that I can smell the vomit on myself and I can see the dried blood and bruising on your nose and upper lip. But now we are quiet once more, sipping water like civilised people.

  ‘Go on,’ I say. It takes a huge effort of self control.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, the strange thing was that when she reached ten years old, it all stopped. She no longer asked the question. She gave up.’

  My heart folds up and dies in my chest.

  ‘I’ve never heard her mention your name again, not since that time,’ you continue, and thoughtfully you finger the damage to your swollen nose.

  ‘Why?’ I murmur, frightened.

  ‘I don’t know, Georgie boy. Maybe she decided to think of you as dead instead of shut away, maybe it was easier that way.’

  Dead? Anger churns the acid in my gut.

  ‘Of course she still had arguments behind closed doors with Pa and Ma over the years, but I rarely knew that they were about, and anyway that’s normal for someone growing up.’

  ‘Is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. She’s seventeen now.’ You pick off a scab of clotted blood. ‘I’m sure she will leave home very soon. I’ll hate that. Being there … without Jessie.’

  It had not occurred to me before, how vast the gap is between your life and mine. Mine goes in a straight line, like a short piece of string. Only the episodes leave it frayed and
broken in places. Yours is a whole ball of string, all wound up and criss-crossing on itself, complicated and confusing, disappearing in different directions. Just the thought of it makes me short of breath.

  ‘How did you find me?’ I ask. I want you to say that my father gave the address to you on a slip of paper and told you to be my brother, but I know you won’t.

  You laugh. It is your happy laugh, not your sad one. I am better at voices than I am at faces. I understand you better when I close my eyes and block out the pictures, because pictures confuse me. I listen now with eyes shut tight and can hear that you are pleased with yourself.

  ‘It wasn’t so hard,’ you chuckle. ‘I am more devious than your sister. I waited year after year, until Pa trusted me completely.’

  Your voice comes closer. You must be stretching towards me. I shuffle backwards a fraction on the bed.

  ‘I showed no interest in you, Georgie, or in your whereabouts. Georgie who? That was my attitude. Your name never passed my lips with our parents, even though when I was little I was sleeping in your bed, wearing your clothes, and reading your books.’

  My books. That hurt. Why should that hurt so much?

  ‘So,’ I ask, ‘how did you find me?’

  ‘You sure you want to talk about this?’

  I nod.

  ‘Well,’ you continue, ‘Pa was on the telephone in the hall. He called me over and gave me – for the first time ever – the bunch of keys that lives in his pocket. He wanted me to fetch a document from his desk drawer in his study. Instead I shot straight to the safe that I knew was hidden behind the mirror in there, found the right key, unlocked it and …’ You laugh. ‘Hey presto, here I am!’

  ‘Hey presto, here you are. What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I found a letter from Dr Churchward from this address. But don’t look so depressed, Georgie.’

  I flop on my back on the bed and stare up at the grey ceiling. A spider is busy in one corner and I know from experience that busy is good. I start to count to one thousand out loud. Numbers are stable. They never change.

  ‘Oh, Georgie! My brother. Don’t blame them. You were impossible to live with. Honestly you were. I’ve heard from Jessie all about your tan trums and screaming, your disobedience and your violent attacks on people.’