The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [125]
“A rose of the finest colour,” I continued, “the walking fragrance of springtime.” And she was that day, damn everything, and healthy, too. I should have turned on my heel, ignored my monstrous patron and his driving urges, and simply swept her up there and then. I could have taken her off right then, ended all this right where it mattered most, forgotten all the rest of this and just won her as my wife. No, no, she would never have had me, not then, not without a victory. But she was clean and clear that day. She will be still, if I can somehow win the chance to be back with her, successful somehow.
“I’m sorry for the interruption, Perfesser,” says Finneran and summons Inge to pull Margaret out of the room and haul her around the Garden for some fresh air. The moment the oak door shut on his den he was back on his feet, furiously tipping that first book up and down again. An instant later there was a scratching at the locked door that provoked in Finneran a sort of spasm in his back and cheek. “Christ’s kidneys and spleen!” he shouted, or some such Celto-Catholic nonsense, and vaulted past me to open the door, but it was only one of Margaret’s spaniels, who paid dearly for the interruption.
“Finally!” he bellowed, after returning to his hypnotic task, as the bookshelf emitted an audible click and moved a fraction of an inch, dislodged by some spring mechanism under that sluggish book. Finneran put his shoulder to one edge of the bookcase and turned the whole six-shelf structure on its centre axis, opening it enough for him to squeeze his girth through. He beckoned me to follow. With the portal closed again behind us (apparently relying on that same untrustworthy spring to release us someday), he switched on a row of electric lights.
“Perfesser, the Finneran Collection of Fine Art,” he intoned, waving grandly at the glass cases and racks of portfolios in the brick-lined enclosure in which we stood. “Perfesser, great civilisations have, as I’m sure yer aware . . .” And on and on wheezed the justifying drone, the text of which I need not write here, since it varies so little from one to another member of his pitiful community. Finneran’s loot was not bad, of type, and quite varied, though he had miscalculated embarrassingly when he assumed my work with Atum-hadu had any relationship to this hodgepodge. He adjusted the focus of the small electric lamps that lit from above the six or eight glass cases, each holding eight or ten pieces: stone Incan crocodiles grinning as they unfurled themselves over Guatemalan virgins; Ming dynasty urns, blue on white, the unrobed emperor squatting on concubines, ortolans performing nonculinary stuffing functions; multi-limbed bronze Hindu goddesses engorged, engaged, entwined; a slab of what appeared to be ivory or bleached wood crowded every which way with carved pictures of huskie dogs, seal flippers, fur-ringed faces grinning in closed-eye rapture. “Inuit. The Eskimo people of Greenland,” commented the mad curator. “On whalebone.” And then we were examining the leather portfolios, each embossed, bless his knotted heart, with the words THE FINNERAN COLLECTION. “Works on paper,” he declared as he delicately revealed his treasures: first a series of Georgian engravings of roast-beef-cheeked, periwigged scowlers examining the scullery staff for personal ailments; then: “Japanese. Woodcuts,” and his inkspot eyes examined me as he flipped slowly through a series of ornate prints that told the story of a samurai and the village women who served him, much sheathing and unsheathing of swords, grasping of topknots, et cetera. “And contemporary artworks, too, of course,” he whispered, picking up speed and confidence. “I’m not, you know, a stick-in-the-mud conservative, not a, not a . . .” But he could not think of the thing that he was not, too eager to untie