painted on them.
‘Mummy portraits,’ said the old lady. ‘The panels were inserted over the mummy wrappings. The portrait was a likeness of the dead person.’
‘Where do they come from?’
‘Near here. Over at Hawara. There was an archaeologist working there. His name was Petrie. He often used to stay at our house and my husband got to know him well. The best ones have gone to museums, but there were some that were damaged or even in pieces. He let us have some of those and my husband had them made good. If you look carefully you can see the joins. But if you are looking that carefully you can also see beyond the joins to what was there in the first place. And what was there was, well – you can see for yourselves.’
The faces seemed to leap out at you. They hadn’t the stylized, dead look of much classical portraiture but were individual, strong, vivid, as if their subjects might have started up a conversation with you at any moment. The eyes were large and rounded, the eyebrows arched. The hair was short and curly. They were the sort of faces that you might see today at any Mediterranean resort.
‘Encaustic on limewood. Some are tempera. I prefer the encaustic. The colours are richer. But what is so nice is that it’s a mixture. Just like Egypt. This one, for instance. It’s obviously Greek in its treatment of the face and the way it poses the figure. But the hairstyle and the jewellery are pure Rome.’ She bent and peered at it. ‘Mid-Antonine, I would say. But the context, the atmosphere – surely, entirely Egyptian!’
She stepped back.
‘My husband loved them. And so did Tvardovsky. He used to sit here for hours looking at them. Funny, that – that he, the son of a serf –’
She looked at them.
‘Did you know that? His father was a serf on our estate. My father freed him when the Emancipation Act went through. He still went on working on the estate, though, and Tvardovsky grew up there. My father paid to have him educated – he was always very clever, you could see it from the start. When he left school he worked for us for a time, not in the fields – that would have been a waste – but in the office. He was often in the house and I think it was there that he acquired his love of beautiful things. My mother used to take him round and tell him about them. Of course, he didn’t stay with us for long. He went away and became rich, and we—’
She laughed.
‘Well, I married Boris. He didn’t exactly become poor but he had to leave Russia in a hurry. We lost touch with Tvardovsky but then, years later, he found us again.’
She shook her head.
‘Poor Tvardovsky! He was a lovely man.’
‘We are investigating his death.’
‘And so you should!’
‘It may, of course, have been an accident.’
‘It was no accident,’ she said firmly.
‘You say that very definitely.’
‘I feel it in my bones.’
‘But is there any other reason? Had he enemies?’
‘For anyone in Russia interested in democracy,’ she said, ‘there is always one enemy: the Tsar.’
Among the stalls selling such things as onions, sugar cane and poultry (live) which made up the bazaar at Medinet, Tvardovsky was, as the waiter at the hotel had said, well known; but the most useful information came from the barber, holding court under the trees behind them, his bowls and instruments spread on the ground beside him, his victim sitting apprehensively on a dilapidated, wickerwork chair, and an admiring circle of supporters squatted round. The man to talk to, he said, was the Sheikh of the madrissa.
‘Sheikh’ was an honorary title given to religious leaders. The school, however, was not one of the traditional ones, where only the Koran was taught, but one of the new government ones which had a wider range of subjects. The respect that the title suggested became understandable at once when they rounded a corner and saw two boys ahead of them dressed in Eton jackets and turn-down collars.
‘This is what English boys wear?’ asked Mahmoud, impressed.
‘Not where I was,’ said Owen.
The madrissa, they said, was on the edge of the town. It had closed now for the day but the Sheikh would still be there, outside on a bed, resting. They offered to show the way.
As they walked along, one of the boys said to Owen: ‘I know you.’
‘I don’t think you do,’ said Owen.
‘You are the Mamur Zapt.’
‘How did you know that?’ asked Owen, astonished.
‘My uncle is a waiter at the hotel where the effendi was shot and he told me that there was one there who stayed behind afterwards and was the Mamur Zapt.’
‘Even so, how—?’
The boy put on an imitation of what even Owen could see was an Englishman, although he could not see how it applied to himself.
Mahmoud laughed.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Owen, ‘then you must be the boy who was stealing grapes?’
‘It’s a lie!’ said the boy. ‘They fell off by themselves. I found them in the road.’
‘I thought you were put in the caracol?’
‘The Sheikh spoke for me.’
‘It is bad,’ remonstrated Mahmoud, ‘that a boy like you, who is evidently high in the Sheikh’s esteem, should be found doing a thing like that.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t have been found if the ghaffir had not crept up behind the wall. And he certainly wouldn’t have caught me had it not been for the fiki.’
‘Fiki?’
‘He came up the other way through the bushes and when I lingered to exchange words with the ghaffir—’
‘The ghaffir should have been treated with respect!’
‘He is old and fat.’
‘Even so. He was but doing his duty.’
‘He does his duty when it comes to boys and grapes. But grapes are a small thing. What when it comes to big things? Then he sits on his big fat behind and does nothing. He is not like the Sheikh, who speaks the same words to big as to small.’
‘You think well of the Sheikh, then?’
‘When the man comes from the Ministry, I will speak up for him.’
‘That, I am sure, he will be grateful for.’
The boy gave him a sideways look.
‘It is not a small thing. The Sheikh’s dues depend on the man from the Ministry. But when he questions the others, they will not speak up. But I will speak up. I will give the right answers and then the man from the Ministry will know that our Sheikh is a good Sheikh.’
‘That is highly laudable. Be sure, though, that they are the right answers.’
‘There will be no problem about that; for I am at the head of my class. The Sheikh says that great things lie ahead of me. If I do not steal grapes.’
They walked on a little way in silence. Then the boy said: ‘I am going to be a lawyer when I grow up.’
‘My friend is a lawyer,’ said Owen, indicating Mahmoud. ‘He is from the Parquet.’
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