The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [25]
“He looked up and saw me standing in the doorway of his dreadful home, and I am certain my face revealed what I thought of the scene. I think it was the first time he ever looked me in the eye. Up jumped the little boy, ignoring the chaos and noise around him, and he took my hand. ‘Why did you come here?’ he asked, pulling me out the door and walking me as fast as he could up the street, while his family stuck their heads out to gawk. ‘So I could see if you were all right,’ I said, ‘because I worry about people I am fond of.’ ‘I’m fine,’ he said, ‘but you shouldn’t come anymore. That’s not my family, not my real family.’ He started to talk more than he had the whole time I had known him. ‘My father was lost at sea, and that woman, she’s not my real mother.’ I did not know if this was true, but I doubted it.
“Once he asked why Ronnie was not married, and then, very quietly, so I thought my heart would burst, he asked me ‘as his sister’ if perhaps Ronnie ever wanted a son.”
The next day, Macy, I asked Ronald Barry if he recalled Paul Caldwell wanting to be his son. “Didn’t last long. By the time he was thirteen or so, he was raging at everything and everyone except Cassie and Egypt. I had done something to offend him. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was only this: I was telling him that I had once wanted to be a University professor, but of course that lofty task was reserved for toffs. I was telling him that brains aren’t counted, just your family, and the rich take care of each other. Paul looks up from his reading—a book on Egypt, of course—and he says, ‘Your enemies block your advancement? Why don’t you slay them?’ I thought he was joking. Mr. Ferrell, I tell you this as a fact: he was not joking. That was how Cassie’s pet was developing. I should have throttled him right there, saved us all the subsequent trouble. He says to me, ‘If you’re not strong enough to defeat your enemies, what are you?’ A thirteen-year-old boy, Ferrell.”
Miss Barry now: “When he read everything we had on Egypt, I tried to lead him into other areas, even other areas of archaeology or history, or just good storybooks, and he would try them, like a little boy trying his vegetables, then he would have no more of it. But the day he learnt I could order books for him, nearly anything in the world, you should have seen his face. He asked for titles he had seen in the bibliographies or notes of other Egypt books.
“He was amusing, the little researcher at eleven, twelve, thirteen. He would come into the library, breathing very hard, and I knew he had run all the way from the school building. I used to tease him: ‘And what brings you into our humble establishment today, Mr. Caldwell? Something in particular you’d like to read? Perhaps some stories about knights? I have a lovely Ivanhoe. No? Maybe a history of Australia’s brave pioneers, those raping monsters? How about a guide to sheep and the farming thereof?’ I would just talk on and on to see his little face contort itself up, trying to remember what I had taught him about politeness. Finally, he would burst out, ‘Please, Miss Barry. Has it come? Has it?’ ‘And what would that be, Mr. Caldwell? We’ll need to comport ourselves like a gentleman in this world, mind our manners.’ ‘Please, Miss Barry, I am sorry to interrupt you, but I am hoping that Cults of Ra by Professors Knutson and