The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [28]
I hear you ask, not at all unreasonable, why would she talk to me about all this? Well, her tart manner to me wasn’t the least of it: she was surprisingly like a lot of upper-class charity ladies, despite her politics. She was a Lady saving the poor, not from themselves but from the monstrous capitalists, whoever they are, but still a lovely Lady of salvation, for the poor to admire but never touch. And she had her own little notions of romance, I don’t doubt, thought herself a virtuous queen, taking in the poor orphan, letting him serve in the kitchen until he grows up into Lancelot, simply from the guiding light of her chaste example. And, no question, she wanted me to clear her name a bit, would tell the same practised stories to anyone, with the same coy looks and virginal pose, just so she could say she hadn’t done some of the riper things she was accused of in the scandal sheets. But, Macy, it’s the strangest thing, the strongest feeling I have now, copying over my shorthand and adding my recollections, I realise now: she told me most of this as a proud mother. She spoke in her schoolmistress tone about Paul, but saved her harshest words for Eulalie Caldwell, whom she glimpsed only twice. And our Miss Barry had kept diaries, too, she read some of these scenes to me right out of them. And, remember, she had kept and cherished that list of books her little man had requested from her those first months. I’m surprised she didn’t have a portrait of her dear Paul to weep over, now that he was dead in a desert somewhere and she was living in a tiny flat, taking employment where she could. Certainly one can say Paul Caldwell destroyed her life (or helped her destroy it for herself, to be more accurate), and that’s how Ronald saw it, but for all that, so much of this was pride—in her creation, in her boy.
Well, for some years Paul lives in the bare spare room of a Red agitator, sleeping on a cot. He finishes school. His own family never looks for him, never seems to care that he’s run off to join a Bolshevik library. He goes to Bolshie meetings down at the harbour, sets up folding chairs, distributes pamphlets, holds the bags of the leadership while they lie to dockworkers or factory hands. Paul turns sixteen, seventeen, worships Catherine Barry, but so she says, is not encouraged. He reads about Egypt, even sends letters to Egyptian scholars all over the world, asking for positions on excavations. No word is received in return, and Catherine tells him (“though it broke my heart to show him the truth”) that he would forever be excluded by the rich classes who indulged in this sort of sport, the noblemen and capitalists and “crypto-colonialists,” because he was a working-class boy, and the capitalists wouldn’t let him near their elitist games. Not to be dissuaded, Paul read and read, went to look at the few relics they had in the museum in Sydney, and travelled all the way to Melbourne to see the little collection there. By now Miss Barry was heartily sick of Egypt, as any right-thinking person would have been. She no longer asked why it interested him, and he spoke of it to her less and less. From a shy eight-year-old to a nearly friendly eleven-year-old to a lustful fourteen-year-old, Paul was again silent, a diligent seventeen-year-old. He was under her eye most of the time, either at the library working and studying, or at Communist meetings.
The day comes when our healthy young man decides he’s done enough to win the heart of the fine lady he wants. That he was confused by her is obvious to men of the world like you and me. But see it from his point of view: he’s seventeen, eighteen, a grown man. She’s a single woman who knows him, has been kind to him, asked him to serve her. He reaches that age—we’ve been there, eh, Macy? I remember it, no lie—when he sees what he wants and he reaches out to take it. I don’t