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By Root 1061 0

Anderson has arrived.’ Or some other work, Champollion’s work on translating the Rosetta stone. The requests he came up with! The orders I made for him! The time I spent justifying to the Head Librarian these obscure volumes as being part of the local population’s bottomless appetite for Egypt.” She told me to wait a moment, she went to a drawer next to her bed and came back with a piece of paper: “I used to keep a list,” she went on. “Listen: Pásint’s work on the judicial records of the necropolis courts. The ex–circus performer Belzoni’s exploits with the British consul Henry Salt. Mattison on the use of music in burial rites. Oskar Denninger’s pamphlet, The Chemistry and Function of Feline Mummification in the Shrine to Bastet. Whatever the latest strange title, he would plead, ‘Did it come, Miss Barry? Did it?’ ‘Well, I certainly do not know offhand,’ I would say, biting my lips. ‘I should have to examine the New Arrivals department and then the pile from the post, could take me quite a bit of time. I am terribly busy, you know.’ ‘Please, Miss Barry,’ nearly sobbing, he was. ‘Well, you have a seat at that table in the corner and I shall go have a look.’ ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ And when he turned the corner to go to that table, he would find the book he had so eagerly awaited already out and ready for him, in a circle of lamplight, next to a pencil and paper, a chair pulled out with a couple of cushions to help him sit high enough, and a plate of digestives. I loved that little boy.”

“Did you?”

“Like an aunt, Mr. Ferrell. Or a comrade. I hope that is clear.”

“Why Egypt, do you suppose, Miss Barry?”

“I asked myself often, and I asked him often. He would not or could not say. Paul once taught me that in ancient Egypt commoners could become pharaohs in some cases, so that probably appealed to him more than the world we live in, where the king is far off in London and little Paul had no more chance of ruling anyone than you or I. I might add that ancient Egypt was as far as you could get from his wretched life. When he was about eight or nine, not long before he met us, he came home with a stray dog. Bursting with excitement, he shows the dog to his mother, who dithers about expense, hardly enough money to feed the children, how will they feed a mongrel, and so on. Well, the man who was living there at the time took the matter in hand. He congratulated Paul on his usefulness, and he dragged the dog into the courtyard and killed it, and then made her cook it for his starving brood. In Australia. In the twentieth century. And do you wonder that he rarely went home, that he denied those people were his father and mother, and that he wished he were an ancient Egyptian? The day he told me that story, years after the event, he was in my office, sobbing like the little boy he had been when it happened. That was also the time he tried to kiss me. But I am getting ahead of myself.

“When he was fourteen or so, I gave him a job, his first honest employment, quite probably his last. A small salary to tidy up, stack books, order new titles. I would still try to interest him in things other than Egypt, but it was fruitless, so I decided to focus on his political awareness, and leave it at that. He would have two dimensions at least: Egypt and class consciousness. His concentration was remarkable. He was teaching himself to write hieroglyphics, simply by studying books, having me order new ones as they were published. Are you understanding me, Mr. Ferrell, getting every word? At fifteen this boy could write hieroglyphics. But for studying dialectical materialism, which I tried to introduce slowly, relating it to the obvious circumstances of his life, he was hopeless. I told him to look at his home and see it for what it was: a crime committed against him by people who should be made to pay for it. He looked at me blankly. ‘Capitalists and monarchists.’ Nothing. ‘The institutional Church.’ He just asked for more paper to practise tracing that silly alphabet.”

Ronald Barry recalls Paul at school: “This is, let’s see, when he’s about thirteen.