The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [41]
“Of course, ducks, very man of action of you. Would you happen to have an address for dear old Ralph, you clever man? I’ve lost all track of him since the War, and I have so much to tell him. Are you going to see him soon? You must tell him that Bevvy sends his very best love.”
At my request for photographs of his friends, Quint produced a painting of Hugo Marlowe, a large-scale bust portrait of a very ugly youth, though someone had spilt heaps of pigment to get him on canvas. He was positively reptilian, to my admittedly undiscerning eye. From the base of his neck to the tip of what must have been his chin, there was a nearly straight line, and his curly black hair was stuck at random to his head, here in unstable piles, there just thick enough to cover the scalp. His translucent elephant ears joined his temples at right angles. He had bags and circles under his eyes, and his colouring was as floury as Mr. Quint’s manner was flowery. “Handsome devil,” I managed.
“Quite, but only the most refined can see it,” purred my host with evident pride of ownership.
The odd thing, Macy, is that Quint himself was undeniably handsome, the way we’d all like to be and quite precisely how every pom imagines himself: square jaw, clear eye, cocked eyebrow, and that smirk to make women swoon. If Hugo Marlowe had been Quint’s fancy man, it was a lopsided match, beauty and the beast.
And did Quint have a picture of Trilipush? “I think so, I should do.” But all he could find was a photograph of some childish theatricals from Oxford, Quint front and center, periwigged and powdered as Marie Antoinette, a very clear (and even uglier) Marlowe as a dour revolutionary, and in the very back, in a crowd of identical blurs, under Quint’s manicured fingertip, the blurry peasant third from the left. “There’s our Ralph. Just look at that smug expression!” exulted Quint. “Who else could be such an unbearably self-assured French revolutionary peasant? That’s just poetry. That suited Ralph down to his toes.”
“Did Trilipush ever meet your parents? Or Marlowe’s?”
“But of course, dear boy. One did introduce one’s dearest chums to the old folks. Holidays, dinners, the usual. How do you people express friendship down there on the bottom of the earth?”
Meanwhile, Macy, you’re reading all the documents you can get from Oxford’s old man of records, and while there’s absolutely no trace of Ralph Trilipush, there’s an extensive trail of the capers of Marlowe and Quint. Marlowe was a student of Egypt under a don, now deceased, named Clement Wexler. Quint read French literature, so his reference to Greek seems to have been a lie, which should cast all his testimony in a certain light. Further interviews that day at the Bodleian and Ashmolean libraries, where they keep the Egyptian stuff, reveal the regular presence of Marlowe but not a whisper of Trilipush, until you’re interviewing a librarian in one of these hushed temples of unnecessary education as you’re growing convinced that Trilipush was never at Oxford, and an excessively delicate young man behind you says, “Excuse me for interrupting. I couldn’t help hearing, did you say Trilipush? Are you a friend of Trilipush’s? I wouldn’t have thought—”
“Do you know him?” you say, much too eagerly, but you’re inexperienced, Macy.
“But of course. But, do you? Surely not—”
“No, I haven’t had the pleasure.” Another mistake, Macy, you should’ve lied and said you were old friends. “Did you study with him?”
“Oh, yes, Egypt in all its exotic delights, but I really shouldn’t tell tales if you don’t know him.” And the young man walks off, quite unwilling to speak another word but corroborating at least Trilipush’s unofficial presence at Oxford, so not bad, young Macy. The odd thing, though, is that this undergraduate in 1922, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, wouldn’t’ve been old enough to have attended Oxford with Marlowe, Quint, and Trilipush back in 1914. Mysteries upon mysteries. As you walk into the Oxford rain, puzzled by your discoveries, I’m still sitting in the glowing,