The Egyptologist Read online

Here we are then. Paul’s eight or nine or ten. This is before winning the heart of Mrs. Hoyt at age nineteen, before snake acts in the circus, before lightening pockets in the market. This is a little boy going to the state school. He’s a quiet, sullen little fellow, no surprise. He absorbs his share of beatings from Eulalie and the men she keeps. But he has no feeling at all for his fellow victims, his half siblings, because when Eulalie’s not whacking him about, she’s holding him on her lap and telling him that those other filthy kids aren’t on his level, since he’s the son of the great gentleman Barnabas Davies, lost at sea, drowned on his way back to Australia to take Eulalie and Paul to London. “Paul’s mother was so blinded by her respect for the rich, there she was feeding notions of class superiority to the boy, even in the midst of their brutal poverty and oppression,” said one of the Barrys, I didn’t note which. They were both virulent Reds, you see, Macy, not to shock you, but we have them down under, too. A dark and infectious philosophy the Bolshie Barrys imbibed, and they cherished it, even after it sunk them.

  Paul was—except for one quirk—nothing special at school, according to Ronald Barry, his schoolmaster. He kept quiet. Filthy, of course, like most of the very poorest kids, but disciplined enough to sit still and do as he was told. “Mostly we were just trying to move the poor bastards along and keep them out of trouble,” said Ronald. “Not permitted to educate them at all, really. Just oppression by other means, pretending to teach them something, to dull them enough to accept the conditions the owning class had in mind for them.”

  Then one day they do a little lesson on Egypt. Egypt’s a place in the desert, very old and pointy buildings, and the pagans in the old days, they didn’t know about Our Lord yet, so when their kings died, they wrapped them up in bedsheets and said they lived forever. “I probably added something along the lines of ‘The pyramids were built by working folk, forced to labour for their brutal kings,’ ” says Red Ron. And then they pass around a little picture book, and then on to the day’s arithmetic.

  Well, end of the day comes and the ragamuffins head out the door, and Ronald Barry is tidying up, and he can’t find the picture book about Egypt, too bad, since he’d borrowed it from his sister at the public library. Clearly, one of the scoundrels had swiped it, and next morning, Ronald’s thinking about how to conduct his investigations when little Paul Caldwell comes in early. The boy looks worse than usual, but he hands back the missing book. Turns out he hadn’t gone home the night before, had stayed out all night long just looking at this book, actually slept outdoors. He doesn’t say just what made it such a ripping read, doesn’t say much at all, “doesn’t even apologise, the little thief,” says Mr. No-Private-Property. Then the boy asks, under his breath, might there be other books like this one?

  “Mr. Ferrell, there are few moments in my career when I felt real pride in what I was doing. But I remember clearly how I felt that moment. This little child wanted to learn. I forgot at once about the theft: this one was going to be one we could save. Of course, if I knew then what I know now, I would have throttled the viper when I could still get my hands round his neck.”

  That afternoon, Ronald Barry takes his prized pupil to one of the smaller branches of the public library. And which librarian greets him that day but Catherine Barry, the teacher’s lovely sister. “Sis, here’s a young fellow with real promise who wants to learn how to get more books about ancient Egypt, of all things.” “Hello, Paul Caldwell,” Miss Barry says sweetly, a little twinkle in her eye saying, “Don’t take me too seriously, I’m a good chum if you want one,” all misleading kindness and appropriately red curly hair and a sweet face. (Even by ’22, even after what she’d been through, I must confess she was a lovely thing. Treacherous, appearances.) The boy has no social graces, can barely speak, looks at the ground, has probably never been in a building as clean and official as our little library, has probably never been spoken to as kindly by anyone, has probably never seen anyone as beautiful and apparently friendly as Miss Barry. All because he’d been taken by something in a picture book.

  “Well, Mr. Ferrell, we decided to take the little fellow under our wing,” Catherine Barry told me with flirtatious pride. “Let’s see about making you a member of our library,” says the Red agent to the little boy. That first day, Miss Barry showed him all around, and though he barely spoke, she was encouraged to see his eyes widen at the sight of all the books, the neat tables, the lamps and chairs. “This is all yours to use as a citizen, the equal to any rich man,” I can hear her saying to the tiny scholar.

  “He was heartbreaking,” she told me, and I wrote that down and underlined it, noting, “Why no children of her own?” “This boy had been betrayed by everyone—family, state, church. It was all I could do to get the poor fellow to speak to me, and no surprise. Even then, the only thing he would really talk about was Egypt. Something about that book Ronnie had shown him just tickled him. Well, first things first: I found him a different one, A Boy’s Own Book of Egypt, I remember the cover. He immediately took one of the chairs in the corner and did not look up again until I came over to tell him the library was closing, but he could come back tomorrow after school, and read some more, if he liked. ‘Is no one waiting for you at home, then?’ I asked. Poor creature. You could see that home held no meaning for him, even at that tender age.

  “He did not want to go home, or say why not. So I asked him, ‘Would you eat a piece of kidney pie, then?’ and the poor little fellow practically jumped out of his skin.” I can imagine that boy, Macy, with her standing behind him, gently placing her hands on his shoulders, looking over his reading, smelling so nice, all false promise. “Mr. Ferrell, it was a class crime, a fine young boy, starved by devilish church and corrupted state. I showed him how to shelve the book, and then I led him back to the office. He was not such a fool as to turn down food, probably more than he saw in a week, more than he could steal in days. Oh, yes, have no illusions, he was already stealing at that age. The rich need thieves, Mr. Ferrell, and they are careful to breed them young. ‘It’s customary to thank someone,’ I told him. He managed to mutter a ‘thank you, ma’am,’ as he stuffed his face.

  “Ronnie and I discussed it next day, and we were of one mind. As charitable people, we would do what we could for this little one God had sent our way. As political people, we owed it to him and to the future to prove that the working class had as much brain and worth as the moneyed. And as educators, well, there could be no question: this one wanted learning as much as he wanted food. We would feed him, Ronnie and I, and split the expense.”

  (Ronald’s words on the matter: “Cassie decided, Cassie dictated. The Pygmalion Fallacy, if you ask me, but she didn’t. Party warns against this.”)

  Ask me, Paul Caldwell didn’t have a chance to escape her lures, Macy. He met Catherine Barry when she was probably twenty-six, and he was a little boy. I met her in 1922, and even at forty-five or so, she was a powerful charmer, smelled nice, smiled sweet. I was a man of the world, had my choice of lady friends, you know, and I knew just how her sort used its wiles for nefarious purposes, but even I found her something potent to sit near, nearly found myself begging her to discuss my questions with me over a supper. Her smile—of course, I could resist it, but a little boy? No hope. It’s a very certain smile, the smile of someone who thinks they’re so much smarter than you that they think they can see and steer your very thoughts. They toy with you, make you jump to amuse them. Women have it. Reds have it. Red women are the worst.

  “ ‘Home doesn’t appeal? Is that why you sit here at all hours reading about pyramids?’ I asked him a few days later when he was back, still shy. He had run up to me and asked for the same book without looking me in the eye, as if he’d never met me. I gave him the book, and after he read, I fed him again. And I offered to see him home, it was late, but he said no, and was off.

  “After three or four weeks he had come a dozen times and read nearly everything we had on ancient Egypt, which was hardly so very much. Each
time he would read until closing, and then I would feed him, and each time he refused to be walked home. He was growing friendlier, but not quickly. Whatever had been done to him was enough to keep him suspicious of people for some time. I asked Ronald to find his address from the school, and I went round to see his home myself. Oh, you’ve been there recently, Mr. Ferrell? I wonder if it’s much changed. When I saw it, it was the scene of a crime, a rape of the worker by the capitalist, and nothing less. That humans were treated like this, and especially a little boy of his quality and promise. Well, the closest I ever come to forgiving him is when I think of how he was raised. Experiences like that make you either very strong or very weak, and in Paul’s case, it weakened his moral fibre beyond anything that could be done to repair it. I believe everyone can improve themselves, but the last I heard of him, he was still a selfish sentimentalist.

  “He looked up and saw me standing in the doorway of his dreadful home, and I am certain my face revealed what I thought of the scene. I think it was the first time he ever looked me in the eye. Up jumped the little boy, ignoring the chaos and noise around him, and he took my hand. ‘Why did you come here?’ he asked, pulling me out the door and walking me as fast as he could up the street, while his family stuck their heads out to gawk. ‘So I could see if you were all right,’ I said, ‘because I worry about people I am fond of.’ ‘I’m fine,’ he said, ‘but you shouldn’t come anymore. That’s not my family, not my real family.’ He started to talk more than he had the whole time I had known him. ‘My father was lost at sea, and that woman, she’s not my real mother.’ I did not know if this was true, but I doubted it.

  “Once he asked why Ronnie was not married, and then, very quietly, so I thought my heart would burst, he asked me ‘as his sister’ if perhaps Ronnie ever wanted a son.”

  The next day, Macy, I asked Ronald Barry if he recalled Paul Caldwell wanting to be his son. “Didn’t last long. By the time he was thirteen or so, he was raging at everything and everyone except Cassie and Egypt. I had done something to offend him. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was only this: I was telling him that I had once wanted to be a University professor, but of course that lofty task was reserved for toffs. I was telling him that brains aren’t counted, just your family, and the rich take care of each other. Paul looks up from his reading—a book on Egypt, of course—and he says, ‘Your enemies block your advancement? Why don’t you slay them?’ I thought he was joking. Mr. Ferrell, I tell you this as a fact: he was not joking. That was how Cassie’s pet was developing. I should have throttled him right there, saved us all the subsequent trouble. He says to me, ‘If you’re not strong enough to defeat your enemies, what are you?’ A thirteen-year-old boy, Ferrell.”

  Miss Barry now: “When he read everything we had on Egypt, I tried to lead him into other areas, even other areas of archaeology or history, or just good storybooks, and he would try them, like a little boy trying his vegetables, then he would have no more of it. But the day he learnt I could order books for him, nearly anything in the world, you should have seen his face. He asked for titles he had seen in the bibliographies or notes of other Egypt books.

  “He was amusing, the little researcher at eleven, twelve, thirteen. He would come into the library, breathing very hard, and I knew he had run all the way from the school building. I used to tease him: ‘And what brings you into our humble establishment today, Mr. Caldwell? Something in particular you’d like to read? Perhaps some stories about knights? I have a lovely Ivanhoe. No? Maybe a history of Australia’s brave pioneers, those raping monsters? How about a guide to sheep and the farming thereof?’ I would just talk on and on to see his little face contort itself up, trying to remember what I had taught him about politeness. Finally, he would burst out, ‘Please, Miss Barry. Has it come? Has it?’ ‘And what would that be, Mr. Caldwell? We’ll need to comport ourselves like a gentleman in this world, mind our manners.’ ‘Please, Miss Barry, I am sorry to interrupt you, but I am hoping that Cults of Ra by Professors Knutson and Anderson has arrived.’ Or some other work, Champollion’s work on translating the Rosetta stone. The requests he came up with! The orders I made for him! The time I spent justifying to the Head Librarian these obscure volumes as being part of the local population’s bottomless appetite for Egypt.” She told me to wait a moment, she went to a drawer next to her bed and came back with a piece of paper: “I used to keep a list,” she went on. “Listen: Pásint’s work on the judicial records of the necropolis courts. The ex–circus performer Belzoni’s exploits with the British consul Henry Salt. Mattison on the use of music in burial rites. Oskar Denninger’s pamphlet, The Chemistry and Function of Feline Mummification in the Shrine to Bastet. Whatever the latest strange title, he would plead, ‘Did it come, Miss Barry? Did it?’ ‘Well, I certainly do not know offhand,’ I would say, biting my lips. ‘I should have to examine the New Arrivals department and then the pile from the post, could take me quite a bit of time. I am terribly busy, you know.’ ‘Please, Miss Barry,’ nearly sobbing, he was. ‘Well, you have a seat at that table in the corner and I shall go have a look.’ ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ And when he turned the corner to go to that table, he would find the book he had so eagerly awaited already out and ready for him, in a circle of lamplight, next to a pencil and paper, a chair pulled out with a couple of cushions to help him sit high enough, and a plate of digestives. I loved that little boy.”

  “Did you?”

  “Like an aunt, Mr. Ferrell. Or a comrade. I hope that is clear.”

  “Why Egypt, do you suppose, Miss Barry?”

  “I asked myself often, and I asked him often. He would not or could not say. Paul once taught me that in ancient Egypt commoners could become pharaohs in some cases, so that probably appealed to him more than the world we live in, where the king is far off in London and little Paul had no more chance of ruling anyone than you or I. I might add that ancient Egypt was as far as you could get from his wretched life. When he was about eight or nine, not long before he met us, he came home with a stray dog. Bursting with excitement, he shows the dog to his mother, who dithers about expense, hardly enough money to feed the children, how will they feed a mongrel, and so on. Well, the man who was living there at the time took the matter in hand. He congratulated Paul on his usefulness, and he dragged the dog into the courtyard and killed it, and then made her cook it for his starving brood. In Australia. In the twentieth century. And do you wonder that he rarely went home, that he denied those people were his father and mother, and that he wished he were an ancient Egyptian? The day he told me that story, years after the event, he was in my office, sobbing like the little boy he had been when it happened. That was also the time he tried to kiss me. But I am getting ahead of myself.

  “When he was fourteen or so, I gave him a job, his first honest employment, quite probably his last. A small salary to tidy up, stack books, order new titles. I would still try to interest him in things other than Egypt, but it was fruitless, so I decided to focus on his political awareness, and leave it at that. He would have two dimensions at least: Egypt and class consciousness. His concentration was remarkable. He was teaching himself to write hieroglyphics, simply by studying books, having me order new ones as they were published. Are you understanding me, Mr. Ferrell, getting every word? At fifteen this boy could write hieroglyphics. But for studying dialectical materialism, which I tried to introduce slowly, relating it to the obvious circumstances of his life, he was hopeless. I told him to look at his home and see it for what it was: a crime committed against him by people who should be made to pay for it. He looked at me blankly. ‘Capitalists and monarchists.’ Nothing. ‘The institutional Church.’ He just asked for more paper to practise tracing that silly alphabet.”

  Ronald Barry recalls Paul at school: “This is, let’s see, when he’s about thirteen. Apparently he’d learnt something about assertive political tactics from Cassie, because he writes an anonymous letter to the headmaster, denouncing one of the teachers as crimin
ally ignorant, an insult to the proletariat of Australia, a social parasite, a capitalist corrupter of youth. Of course, the letter hardly keeps its anonymity when he lists the teacher’s six specific lapses, all of which are confusions of Egypt’s Middle and New Kingdoms. He was flogged to within an inch of his life.”

  Catherine: “His parish priest, God alone knows what the man thought he was doing for his parishioners. Nothing, to be brief. But he certainly scared Paul terribly. This Father Rowley somehow finds out about Paul and the library and Egypt. And only now does he take an interest in the family. One less of his flock taken by drink or sin, you would think, rather a success, this studious boy? No: he informs Paul’s mother that her son is learning about Satan and paganism at the library, and must be kept away from these books and this place. I can scarcely believe she knew what the man meant, or even which snivelling, unhealthy son was which. But in front of the priest, she duly forbids Paul to mess around any more with books or libraries. He was fourteen, I think, when he came that very day to me with a bag of his belongings, told me the story about the priest and the one about the dog, wept like a child. I comforted him. He was a boy and I pitied him. But then he was trying to embrace me, as a man embraces a woman.

  “I had a difficult task, Mr. Ferrell, and you should judge me fairly. I was shocked, of course. Things had been terribly misunderstood in the heart of a very confused, very lonely boy. He offered up words of love and devotion, most of which were last used for wooing in ancient Egypt. Picture a young man trying to win the heart of a woman a dozen years his senior by telling her that her neck is like a goose’s. He told me his loins would burst, that I was his horned sundisk, his turquoise cow, that the colours of my flesh were stolen from Horus and painted by I-can’t-remember-which-one. I know, it is laughable. Go ahead and laugh, Mr. Ferrell, it is funny, I do understand that. But then, oh, it was a strange moment, and I am proud that I did not laugh in his face. Perhaps I should have, but this was only minutes after he had howled about his poor murdered dog, you will recall. So I did the right thing, I would say so even now.”