The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [191]
Also, I’m a wee bit triste because I have held on to the enclosed pages for years now, despite enquiries from Hugo’s family and our vulgar antipodal sleuth. But what good are they to me now? You were led out of Egypt, not he.
I have become an impossible bore, these last years. I should be a hero to the youth of London, and all I do is sit in my rooms, getting daily older. I had a visit the other day from a Balliol chum, and he quite rightly chided me for becoming an old woman, something out of Balzac. Have you read Balzac? Hugo described you as quite maniacal for your field, but not much for other things. There is more to life than— Oh, listen to me, as if I have any right to urge you to expand your horizons, when mine have shrunk to a handful of letters from a dead soldier-boy.
I am enclosing five. They explain everything you need to know, except, I suppose, where it all began. Originally, at Oxford, he was a bit of a joke, you see, just some easy camouflage, a mutually corroborated name, a fellow we could all use when corresponding with the maters and the paters. It had become dogma, you see, in our circles, that we were incurable, though there were still some glum fellows amongst us who tried to resist, or curse our natures, or do as the aged parents demanded of us and speak to some horrid specialist down in London, in Harley Street, who was prescribing psycho-analysis, showers, travel, boxing. (“What about wrestling, love?” I asked him.) How all the parents seemed to know of the same quack is beyond me. At any rate, the boldest of us—Hugo, of course—simply said one day as the little club was dining in our apartments, “What’s wrong with you girls? You submit to this? I refuse treatment. Why don’t they seek treatment?” Delicious: the thought of our uncomfortable fathers seeking out a cure for their persistent gynophilia from some delicate doctor of our choosing. We all loved Hugo, you know. I could never have him all to myself, even then. But he was so very much what I longed to be. Women never looked at him, of course; he was not built for them, and the beasts could sniff that out from miles away, while my appearance always confounded them and had them dropping their Jane Austen novels near me with significant looks in their eyes.
“Well, I refuse,” said our Hugo. But some of the younger men were not as brave, so Hugo suggested that we all tell our families that we were already cured, much better, thanks, and thinking seriously of proposing to a young woman of good family we’d met recently at a party. What was her name meant to be? Odd, now I cannot produce more than Gwendolyn, but that isn’t it. And, best of all, Mother and Father, we have met the most marvellous fellow, greatest friend, just the fellow one goes up to Oxford hoping to meet, he will probably be my second should I muster the nerve to tell this lovely girl just how superlative I think she is, and he, well, he was flexible, that was his charm; he was whatever you thought your parents wished to hear. If they or that leech in Harley Street had had the audacity to discourage you from your current circle of friends, just reassure them that you were now spending your free moments in the company of a grand fellow, a tremendously trustworthy chap of good breeding who was rowing like Odysseus that season, who was running like Hermes, who was certain to take a first in Egyptology (on this, Hugo insisted