The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [74]
Nine words drawn at random from a hat, some obscure parlour game of the Boston rich? What does your father mean, my love? He is confused about Oxford and needs clarification. Of its existence? Its function? What is a ferrell and in what conceivable manner can it question my accuracy? One point is unquestionable: much does depend. Sunday the 22nd, I shall walk into the bank here to find my account fattened by the prearranged credit which is to be wired from Boston the 22nd of every month as long as the expedition progresses. Oh yes, much depends indeed. This is no time for parlour games.
I am relying—it is this morning clearer than ever—on men far below the calibre I would have hoped for. Not your father, of course, my darling, but his evidently jumpy partners who have prompted this oddity. I accepted his money as a gesture to him, because I love you, M. I will not claim I was blind to the effect I have on him; English snobs and Irish mobs seem to thrill our CCF equally, but I could have found my backers in more respectable, traditional circles. You knew that, and that is why you suggested this as a gift to your father. I sincerely hope our favour to him—mine to you—will not be one I live to regret.
Enough. If I am anxious now, it is because I find myself running out of funds, expecting your father’s help to arrive in forty-eight hours, and instead he sends me riddles. I shall not show you any of this. It will resolve itself.
But I will someday be able to hold you, in our own home, and remind you of the moment I knew I would marry you: May, only three or four weeks after my talk at the Historical Society. You are in excellent health, and as lovely as anything imaginable in this life. We walk along the banks of the Charles, with giant Inge gliding a constant ten yards behind us, first to our left and then to our right, as if she were a dinghy. The sky rolls and the clouds wring their knotted fingers, nervous to rain on your beauty. You float forward away from me as I bend to tie my shoe (and Inge stops the same respectable margin behind me, pretending to sniff a spray of blue flowers), and one ray of sun emerges and paints a patch of river and your white dress with a single brushstroke, and while I fumble with my bootlace, I watch you bend to pat the head of a small tan-and-white hound with a wonderfully wrinkled, smiling face. He has just run through a picnic, collecting a string of sausage without breaking stride, dodging all avengers, leaving chaos in his wake, but at the sight of Margaret, he stops, drops his prize at your feet, and allows you to scratch his chin, while he tips back his head and stretches his neck to savour the affection. That was it, my love: I decide at that instant to make you my consort in this world and the next (for you will be mentioned in my every written work, assuring your immortality, too). And at that instant, I imagined you sculpted by the great artist Thothmes, bent over the banks of the Nile, placing a long-fingered hand upon the soft head of a canine envoy of Anubis. “I have something urgent to ask you,” I shouted as I stood. “What did you say?” you cried, the rising wind bringing your voice to me. “I have something urgent to ask you!” and I began to run towards you. My excitement agitated the little dog, who began to run in circles, howling the most melodious song, leaving his sausage in the grass as if he had stolen it not from any hunger but from sheer joy of mischief. “You must be my queen, you must, you must.”
“You will be the one to rescue me?” you asked as I took you in my arms.
“Of course I will. That is why I’m here with you.”
It was days later when you suggested your father’s investment club, eroded my doubts and arguments, and some weeks after that when I asked him for your hand. And yet today I am forced to sit as a python squeezes my belly, and I scratch my head and puzzle over his cryptic cable, running through a dozen styluses for the WC gramophone, and in short losing a day to worry. I suppose all