The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [114]
Can you tell Daddy again that you went to Oxford? And this snoop, Harry, keeps looking at me with a wolf-face, and saying things like “Well you never know” and “Things ain’t always what they seem, especially with poms.” Poms he calls the English. He’s jealous. I hate him for not respecting you like I do. I love you, Ralph, because everything about you is real even though it’s exciting, and everything about him is a lie even though it’s boring, and that’s why he hates you and makes out to Daddy like there are things about you that aren’t true.
Don’t worry. Inge is going to cure me of my little things and I’m getting better every day and it will be just as I promised by our wedding day, all cured. But I need you around to help me do that, OK? You’re my best doctor. I can get better with you around to keep me busy and happy, so come home now, please. Bored is bad for me, really bad for me.
If there’s something you want to tell me, I would listen, you know. Anything you told me would be OK. Just like you’d still love me no matter what you learned about me, right? I don’t want to know anything more about it, just put everything back the way it was. As soon as you can.
I’ll be healthy and so very good to you, just for you. But you have to come home now.
Your girl.
m.
(Sunday, 19 November, 1922, continued)
What is all this? Did I already know of all this? Did my cable telling you he was a liar and a stranger reassure you after this? If this is nothing but misunderstandings exacerbated by crossed letters, then more letters will only distort things further, each one passing the next, curdling it into nonsense as they float blindly past each other. What is going on there now, right this moment? I am reading of events of long ago, of extinguished stars. I cannot understand who Ferrell is, or how he has crept into my family’s bosom.
You will be well, you will be well, you will be well. I will it. I have never doubted it, never worried. Once, only. At the museum that rainy day in June, I worried. I have never told you.
I escorted you to the Museum of Fine Arts, Inge still a silent, hovering valkyrie, though by now I had noticed in her face the expressions of an incurable debauchery, particularly as we passed the magnificent Maiherpri loincloth (and I tried in vain to interest you in how Carter had stumbled upon it way back in ’02).
As we gazed at the statue of the ram-headed god Herishef, I told you how as a boy I had dreamt of opening tombs even before I knew what the dreams meant, even before I knew the word tomb or had ever read of excavations. Before I even had the vocabulary to explain it, my imagination produced the most wonderful things in my sleep: comforting caves filled with lights and warmth and sleeping bodies in soft beds, animals and friends and food and happiness, always in a safe, enclosed place, far from danger. I was probably three or four at the most, and my claustrophilia had begun.
And I explained to you the displays we were passing, even as I noticed you were needing to rest more often. I described Harvard and its conservative faith in old excavators using old methods. As recently as 1915, I was telling you, Lyman Story still wanted to use TNT for his expedition for this very museum! “Harvard is not ready for Atum-hadu or for me,” I said, “but they will be.” I turned to you, and you were shaking: out of sympathy for my trials, or from the beauty of the relics? “Nothing to worry, sir,” says businesslike Inge, already leading you off to the ladies’ lounge. Twenty minutes limped by, but then out you came, fresh as anything, lovely, ready for a day of shopping and eating. You had never looked so lovely and fresh, but you did not seem to recall anything