have exhausted me. I wish you good day.’
She swept out of the room. When I was sure she was gone I thanked Frances for her generous lie, and her mother for intervening, and Miss Mack for pressing my case; but I was incoherent. I was experiencing fierce emotion, of a kind I’d almost forgotten, and had assumed long gone.
‘There, there,’ said Helen Winlock, ‘let’s say no more about it. I reckon we should celebrate, don’t you? Miss Mackenzie––’
‘Myrtle, my dear, please.’
‘Won’t you and Lucy join us for dinner tonight? I’m letting Frances stay up. If we dine quite early? My husband Herbert will be so pleased to meet you – he’s an archaeologist, out here working for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ll introduce you to a whole bunch of our archaeologist friends if you think you can bear that––’
Miss Mack’s face lit up: as she was a devotee of tombs and temples, nothing could have delighted her more. She demurred, but was soon won round.
Later that evening, wearing my best dress and with my patchy tufts of hair artistically concealed by a scarf, I found myself at a huge table in the very centre of the glittering Shepheard’s dining room, Frances seated next to me and explaining in a whisper who everyone was. That was the first time I met her father, Herbert Winlock, and the colleagues whose photographs now rest in my albums, forever frozen at that supreme moment of triumph that was almost a year away.
‘And who is that?’ I asked, indicating a man seated near her father, who seemed somewhat isolated and withdrawn, neither participating in the repartee nor sharing the easy manners and good humour of the other guests. So far, the only remark he’d made, was a curt, ‘Tommyrot’. It had come at the end of a long discussion between Frances’s father and the man she had pointed out as the senior curator of Egyptology at the Met, a small, quietly spoken Bostonian named Albert Lythgoe. Neither seemed to mind the brusque comment: Lythgoe raised an eyebrow, Winlock grinned, and they continued their discussion serenely.
‘That’s Howard Carter,’ Frances replied. ‘He’s an archaeologist too. He works for the Earl of Carnarvon, who has the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Mr Carter is an especial friend of mine. I’ll introduce you one day, but be warned, Lucy: he has one devil of a temper. Daddy says he’s the rudest man he’s ever known.’
Howard Carter seemed to resent the lack of reaction to his ‘Tommyrot’ remark. He slopped some wine in his glass and slumped back in his chair, staring off into space. He was in his late forties, I judged, hawk-nosed, dark-haired, ill at ease, broodingly assertive even when silent. After a brief interval, he rose to his feet and, without a word to his companions, walked out.
I watched him leave with interest. To me, Mr Carter looked like an outsider – it takes one to know one, of course.
6
Cairo was a relatively small city then, not the spreading metropolis it has become since. The haunts favoured by visiting Americans and Europeans were limited in number, so I saw Howard Carter often over the following days, though it was some time before I’d actually be introduced to him. He was not staying at Shepheard’s, I learned, but at the Continental Hotel across the Ezbekieh Gardens, where the Winlocks also had their base. Like them, he visited Shepheard’s daily, using it as an informal club.
Frances gave me nuggets of information: she said his father had been an artist, who specialised in portraits of animals, that he was the youngest of eleven children and his family had been poor. He’d been farmed out as an infant to two spinster aunts and brought up by them in Norfolk – there his grandfather had been a gamekeeper on a large estate, and there both his parents had been born. That interested me: with my dual nationality, I had a good ear for accents, and the expert Miss Mack had sharpened it. I was familiar with
She swept out of the room. When I was sure she was gone I thanked Frances for her generous lie, and her mother for intervening, and Miss Mack for pressing my case; but I was incoherent. I was experiencing fierce emotion, of a kind I’d almost forgotten, and had assumed long gone.
‘There, there,’ said Helen Winlock, ‘let’s say no more about it. I reckon we should celebrate, don’t you? Miss Mackenzie––’
‘Myrtle, my dear, please.’
‘Won’t you and Lucy join us for dinner tonight? I’m letting Frances stay up. If we dine quite early? My husband Herbert will be so pleased to meet you – he’s an archaeologist, out here working for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ll introduce you to a whole bunch of our archaeologist friends if you think you can bear that––’
Miss Mack’s face lit up: as she was a devotee of tombs and temples, nothing could have delighted her more. She demurred, but was soon won round.
Later that evening, wearing my best dress and with my patchy tufts of hair artistically concealed by a scarf, I found myself at a huge table in the very centre of the glittering Shepheard’s dining room, Frances seated next to me and explaining in a whisper who everyone was. That was the first time I met her father, Herbert Winlock, and the colleagues whose photographs now rest in my albums, forever frozen at that supreme moment of triumph that was almost a year away.
‘And who is that?’ I asked, indicating a man seated near her father, who seemed somewhat isolated and withdrawn, neither participating in the repartee nor sharing the easy manners and good humour of the other guests. So far, the only remark he’d made, was a curt, ‘Tommyrot’. It had come at the end of a long discussion between Frances’s father and the man she had pointed out as the senior curator of Egyptology at the Met, a small, quietly spoken Bostonian named Albert Lythgoe. Neither seemed to mind the brusque comment: Lythgoe raised an eyebrow, Winlock grinned, and they continued their discussion serenely.
‘That’s Howard Carter,’ Frances replied. ‘He’s an archaeologist too. He works for the Earl of Carnarvon, who has the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Mr Carter is an especial friend of mine. I’ll introduce you one day, but be warned, Lucy: he has one devil of a temper. Daddy says he’s the rudest man he’s ever known.’
Howard Carter seemed to resent the lack of reaction to his ‘Tommyrot’ remark. He slopped some wine in his glass and slumped back in his chair, staring off into space. He was in his late forties, I judged, hawk-nosed, dark-haired, ill at ease, broodingly assertive even when silent. After a brief interval, he rose to his feet and, without a word to his companions, walked out.
I watched him leave with interest. To me, Mr Carter looked like an outsider – it takes one to know one, of course.
6
Cairo was a relatively small city then, not the spreading metropolis it has become since. The haunts favoured by visiting Americans and Europeans were limited in number, so I saw Howard Carter often over the following days, though it was some time before I’d actually be introduced to him. He was not staying at Shepheard’s, I learned, but at the Continental Hotel across the Ezbekieh Gardens, where the Winlocks also had their base. Like them, he visited Shepheard’s daily, using it as an informal club.
Frances gave me nuggets of information: she said his father had been an artist, who specialised in portraits of animals, that he was the youngest of eleven children and his family had been poor. He’d been farmed out as an infant to two spinster aunts and brought up by them in Norfolk – there his grandfather had been a gamekeeper on a large estate, and there both his parents had been born. That interested me: with my dual nationality, I had a good ear for accents, and the expert Miss Mack had sharpened it. I was familiar with
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