Death Comes as End - Agatha Christie [1]
From her early childhood Renisenb could remember hearing these elder brothers of hers arguing in just those selfsame accents. It gave her suddenly a feeling of security…She was at home again. Yes, she had come home…
Yet as she looked once more across the pale, shining river, her rebellion and pain mounted again. Khay, her young husband, was dead…Khay with his laughing face and his strong shoulders. Khay was with Osiris in the Kingdom of the dead–and she, Renisenb, his dearly loved wife, was left desolate. Eight years they had had together–she had come to him as little more than a child–and now she had returned widowed, with Khay’s child, Teti, to her father’s house.
It seemed to her at this moment as though she had never been away…
She welcomed that thought…
She would forget those eight years–so full of unthinking happiness, so torn and destroyed by loss and pain.
Yes, forget them, put them out of her mind. Become once more Renisenb, Imhotep the ka-priest’s daughter, the unthinking, unfeeling girl. This love of a husband and brother had been a cruel thing, deceiving her by its sweetness. She remembered the strong bronze shoulders, the laughing mouth–now Khay was embalmed, swathed in bandages, protected with amulets in his journey through the other world. No more Khay in this world to sail on the Nile and catch fish and laugh up into the sun whilst she, stretched out in the boat with the little Teti on her lap, laughed back at him…
Renisenb thought:
‘I will not think of it. It is over! Here I am at home. Everything is the same as it was. I, too, shall be the same presently. It will all be as before. Teti has forgotten already. She plays with the other children and laughs.’
Renisenb turned abruptly and made her way back towards the house, passing on the way some loaded donkeys being driven towards the river bank. She passed by the cornbins and the outhouses and through the gateway into the courtyard. It was very pleasant in the courtyard. There was the artificial lake, surrounded by flowering oleanders and jasmines and shaded by sycamore fig trees. Teti and the other children were playing there now, their voices rising shrill and clear. They were running in and out of the little pavilion that stood at one side of the lake. Renisenb noticed that Teti was playing with a wooden lion whose mouth opened and shut by pulling a string, a toy which she herself had loved as a child. She thought again, gratefully, ‘I have come home…’ Nothing was changed here, all was as it had been. Here life was safe, constant, unchanging, Teti was now the child and she one of the many mothers enclosed by the home walls–but the framework, the essence of things, was unchanged.
A ball with which one of the children was playing rolled to her feet and she picked it up and threw it back, laughing.
Renisenb went on to the porch with its gaily coloured columns, and then through into the house, passing through the big central chamber, with its coloured frieze of lotus and poppies and so on to the back of the house and the women’s quarters.
Upraised voices struck on her ear and she paused again, savouring with pleasure the old familiar echoes. Satipy and Kait–arguing as always! Those well-remembered tones of Satipy’s voice, high, domineering and bullying! Satipy was her brother Yahmose’s wife, a tall, energetic, loud-tongued woman, handsome in a hard, commanding kind of way. She was eternally laying down the law, hectoring the servants, finding fault with everything, getting impossible things done by sheer force of vituperation and personality. Everyone dreaded her tongue and ran to obey her orders. Yahmose himself had the greatest admiration for his resolute, spirited wife, though he allowed himself to be bullied by her in a way that had often infuriated Renisenb.
At intervals, in the pauses in Satipy’s high-pitched sentences, the quiet, obstinate voice of Kait