The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [124]
“If only love were so easy,” I call after him as he disappears into the night.
Tuesday, 28 November, 1922
Cable from CCF: CARTER NOT ON YOUR TEAM? PAPERS ARE FULL OF HIM—HE IS NOT YOURS? CATALOG OUR FIND AT ONCE. IS CARTER ACCEPTING INVESTMENT? ADVISE.
There is a disturbing moment when you hand the boy the cable reply slip and instinctively expect him to answer it, when of course he is only a mute conduit. It is like shouting into a deaf and deafening wind. And yet one can hear a distant echo, read something in the boy’s blank face: CCF is done with me. In the end, trusting others always leads to this, always. Yet you are always surprised by those who snort after grubby self-interest and will spend anything for it, will spend love, will abandon you to any risk if it saves them even an instant’s trouble.
On the difficulty of trusting one’s financial backers: “Professor Trilipush,” I remember him saying, just after the other investors had left our June meeting, “if you would have one more moment for me, it would be much appreciated.” I remarked his sudden politeness, as no matter what you think of Chester Crawford Finneran, gentlemanly does not usually jump to mind. “I’m wonderin’ if you could gimme yer opinion of my personal collection.” His tiny, agate eyes wandered just over my shoulder, and his cigar tip flared and faded. “I know there’ll be piles of gold in our Pharaoh’s grave, mummies and everything, as you described so elegantly just now to the fellows. But I’d like to show you other aspects, those fine arts, plastic arts, sculptural and graphical, although maybe less likely to show up in museum collections due to debate over interpretation. More of interest to a private collector. As I know you know. More functional.” On and on dithered this monologue, and I nodded noncommittally. “You of all men, of any scholar, will surely understand.” Finneran picked at an invisible thread near his waist.
He led me into his study and stood at the bookshelf behind his desk, from which he repeatedly half-withdrew and then replaced one volume, rocking it on the bottom edge of its spine as if he were unable to decide whether he wanted to remove it. Leaving it, sighing in his increasing discomfort, he turned to me and crossed his arms. “It’s simply a question, see, of your, your, uh . . .” He reached up to stroke his thick moustaches and mutton chops, but those still existed only in the portrait of him hanging on his study wall. He followed my eyes to the picture. “You always been clean-shaven? I can’t get used to it.” He put his smouldering cigar, glowing and askew like a lightning-startled tree trunk, in an ashtray and returned to pushing and pulling that same book halfway off the shelf. He called on Jesus to perform a specific action on a particular Boston-Irish carpenter. He pushed and pulled the book with frantic energy, over and over again, cursing.
“What’s the book, CCF?”
“Milking mother of Christ, I will roast him alive,” he mumbled, rocking it madly back and forth.
“Hello, Daddy. Is your meeting over?” She had appeared unheard behind us. “Hello, Ralphie. How’d you make out with Boston’s plutocrats?”
“My lovely darling,” I say. “You are a sight of unimaginable beauty.”
“We’re busy. Scram,” snarls the ever-engaging master of