The Pearlkillers Read online

  The Pearlkillers

  RACHEL INGALLS

  Contents

  Title Page

  Third Time Lucky

  People to People

  Inheritance

  Captain Hendrik’s Story

  Copyright

  Third Time Lucky

  Lily had married first when she was eighteen. He’d been killed in Vietnam. She’d married again when she was twenty-one. He too had died in Vietnam. She’d had proposals after that, but she’d refused without even considering the possibility of accepting. She was sure that if she said yes, he’d be killed just as the first two had been. It was like having a curse on you: she could feel it. Perhaps when she’d agreed to go to the Egyptian exhibition she’d been attracted by the knowledge that there was something called the Curse of The Pharaohs.

  She’d forgotten all about that. She didn’t remember it again until long after she’d heard the radio interview with the old woman who lived in Cairo.

  Lily listened to the radio a lot. As a child she’d been introduced to literature through the soap operas; even at the age of seven, she’d realized that the stories were preposterous, but she loved them. She’d also liked the way they gave you only a little piece of each story every day, so that if you were lucky enough to get sick, or if school had been cancelled because of snow, you could hear the complete collection from morning to late afternoon – like eating a whole meal of Lifesavers, all in different flavours.

  In her teens she’d watched television, mainly the late-night movies. And then later, when the most popular family show had been the war, she’d stopped. She’d gone back to the radio. Her favourite station broadcast its programmes from the other side of the ocean in British voices that sounded just like the people in the movies. She was charmed by their accents.

  The woman who lived in Egypt had spoken in one of a number of interviews compiled by an English woman reporter. The programmes set out to make a study of British people who had lived in Egypt for a long time. All the broadcasters were women: that, apparently, was the point of the series. One of the speakers was a girl who’d married an Egyptian; she talked about what it was like to become part of the family, how it was different from life at home, and so on: she seemed to have a very happy marriage. She could also throw in foreign phrases as easily as she spoke her own language, her voice full of enthusiasm. She praised her mother-in-law. Lily was drawn across the room as she listened: she went and sat right next to the radio to make sure she didn’t miss anything or that she could retune if the speech broke up in static – a thing that often happened during the international programmes.

  She was fascinated by accounts of other people’s marriages. She couldn’t hear enough. It was like being told fairytales, and yet it was the real thing – real people her own age. Once she’d grown up, she’d started to prefer fact to fiction. That was what she thought, anyway.

  Immediately after the young married woman came an archaeologist. And after her, the reporter introduced the old woman.

  Her name was Sadie. She’d been born and brought up in London. When she was six years old her father had taken her to the British Museum to look at the exhibits. There she had seen a room full of Egyptian mummies and had been so impressed by them that she couldn’t sleep. She’d said to her parents that her home was in the place where those people had lived, and that was where she wanted to go, because that was where she belonged. Her parents had told her not to be silly. When she persisted, they called in a friend who wasn’t exactly a doctor, but who knew a lot. The friend succeeded in restoring Sadie’s sleep by assuring her that strange as her story sounded to everyone else, there might be something to it. She would be free to test the truth of it as soon as she grew up. But to insist on instant transportation to a distant country wouldn’t be fair to her parents while they were still trying to give her a good home and make sure she was well-fed and healthy.

  Sensible man, Lily thought. That was the kind of doctor people should have – not like the ones who’d tried to deal with her and who’d probably primed her mother with a load of nonsense until the whole family was driving her crazy. It had been as if twice in her life she’d become a freak – like a woman who’d been struck by lightning and survived. It was almost like going through the sort of thing she’d read about in magazine stories: accounts of women who’d had to keep on living in a community when everyone there knew they’d been the victims of some shameful act of violence or humiliation.

  Of course people felt sorry for you and they hoped to make you well again. They believed that you ought to recover. They tried to cheer you up and yet they wanted you to be suffering the correct amount for the occasion, otherwise they got nervous: there might be some extra grief around that wasn’t being taken care of. She herself had sometimes thought: Am I feeling the right things? Am I even feeling enough? She didn’t know. She thought she didn’t know much of anything any more.

  She started hanging around the museum in order to fill up her days. She’d gone back to work, but there were lunch hours when she didn’t want to be eating her sandwiches with the rest of the girls, and the museum wasn’t far from the job she’d had at the time.

  She began by just walking around. That first day she saw Greek statues and Roman coins. The second time she went, she looked at Chinese jade and Japanese scroll paintings. On her third visit she got lost trying to find the Etruscans, and came upon ancient Egypt instead. It hadn’t produced an instant, revelatory obsession like the one experienced by the six-year-old Sadie, but it had certainly done something extraordinary to her. She had felt magnetized by the appearance of everything: the colours, the style of drawing, the mysterious hieroglyphics – the whole look. The museum had several items that were rare and important: a black wooden panther surmounted by a golden god in a high hat; a painted mummy case that was covered in pictures of birds, animals and pictograph writing; a grey stone hawk that stood about four feet high; and a granite statue of a seated Pharaoh who had a face framed by a head-dress that merged with the shoulders, so that he too had the silhouette of a hawk.

  She knew then, at her first sight of the sculpture and painting, that she wanted to find out more about the people who had made them. She picked up a leaflet at the main desk. It turned out that there were museum lectures you could attend in the mornings or afternoons. There were even some that took place during the lunch hour. She signed up in a hurry.

  Her real conversion to the art of Egypt happened in semi-darkness, to the accompaniment of a low hum given off by the museum’s slide projector. She studied temples, frescoes, jewellery, furniture, corpses thousands of years old. She felt that all these sights and objects were familiar to her in a way that her own life was not.

  The Englishwoman named Sadie hadn’t needed lectures. After the family friend had made her see reason, she’d struck a bargain with her parents: that she’d be good and do what they told her, as long as they realized that her one ambition was to go to Egypt, and that she actually did plan to go there as soon as she was grown up. It took several more years, and undoubtedly a certain amount of research, before she narrowed down the rather vague passion for Egyptology to a specific dedication: she found out through a dream that in a former life she’d been a priestess of Isis and many centuries ago she had lived in a particular house, where she’d had a wonderful garden full of flowers and herbs, and plants that possessed healing properties. It became her mission to return to the house, live there and replant her garden.

  It had taken Sadie twelve years of work in London to raise the money for her fare. On her arrival in Egypt she attached herself to British archaeological societies, which allowed her to earn a little by helping them, although – because she’d had so little formal schooling – they dis
counted anything she had to say on their subject. It came as a surprise to the official bodies when she discovered the ruins of what she insisted was her house, and which, as it was excavated, proved to have contained at one time a plentifully stocked courtyard garden. It was surprising, but not in anyone else’s opinion a matter of supernatural or preternatural knowledge, as Sadie claimed. In spite of the scepticism of the experts, she managed to present the urgency of her desire so convincingly that she was given permission to camp out in the ruins and eventually to try to reconstruct the house and garden.

  When the woman reporter interviewed her, Sadie was eighty-two. She spoke of the quest for her true home with an assurance and simplicity that made Lily think what a good life it had been: to know so exactly, from such an early age, what you wanted and where you belonged. If she herself had had that kind of vision as a child, she might now feel that her life meant something, instead of thinking that it all just seemed to be dribbling away around her, never getting anywhere, always going wrong.

  Egypt had begun to be important to her for about a year and a half, yet she didn’t recall the circumstances of her breakdown until she’d been going to the lectures for five weeks. The memory came back as if it had fallen on top of her. While she was looking at slides of famous statues and wall paintings, she recognized certain things that she’d seen when the great Tutankhamun exhibition had come over to America. That was shortly after she was supposed to have recovered from her second widowing. Friends and relatives had thought it would be a nice idea, a treat, to take her to the show. She didn’t care what she went to see. She’d said sure, OK.

  It was too long a trip to make all in one day, so she’d stayed with her aunt, and even then it was a considerable drive by car from there. Her cousin, Charlie, and his girlfriend, Sue, drove in one car, while two of Sue’s old schoolfriends went in the second one, together with some friend of theirs – a man who, Lily suspected, had been asked along because of her. That too had happened after her first husband had died: everybody had started trying to match her up with somebody.

  The lines of sightseers waiting to get in to see the exhibition had been so long, and so often mentioned in the papers, that everyone had a different theory about what was the best time to go, when to avoid the school groups, the adult education classes, the old, the young, the tourists. They got into the line in the middle of the afternoon, and were fortunate – they had to wait for only an hour and a quarter.

  Lily took out her wallet to pay, but Charlie and Sue insisted on buying her ticket. She put the ticket into the change compartment of the wallet, on the side where she kept her backdoor key and her lucky-piece – an old silver coin covered in patterns that might have been foreign writing; a great-uncle had brought it back from overseas. The coin had been in the safe with the rest of her grandmother’s treasured and worthless ornaments. Her father had given it to her because she’d seemed to be so interested in the markings on it.

  The line advanced slowly, even after they had paid. The guards were being careful to let in only a certain number at a time. Nobody wanted to have overcrowding or pushing. And, naturally, the people who were already inside would feel they were entitled to stay there a good long while, after having waited so long, paid so much, and at last come face to face with objects of such magnificence.

  Lily wasn’t expecting to be asked for her ticket when a hand was suddenly held out to her. She scrabbled around quickly in her bag and found the stub as the crowd moved forward into the darkness.

  All at once everyone fell silent. People were afraid of tripping over themselves in the dark, or bumping into each other. She fumbled in her wallet, shut the change purse, zipped up her bag and held on to it tightly. She was looking at a set of floodlit glass boxes that sprang from the darkness like lighted boats crossing an ocean at night. In each glass case a single treasure was positioned. The lighting must have been controlled from above, although it was impossible to see how. The impression was definitely that all the illumination emanated from the golden deities and blue animals, painted birds and flowers.

  Lily stared and lost track of the time. There was no doubt in her mind that the jars, tables, gods, faces, jewels and masks were gazing back, looking out from the repose of their long past and giving something to her as she passed by.

  She stopped in front of an alabaster vase shaped like a lotus blossom on its stem. The crowd jostled her lightly, but no one was shoving. The atmosphere seemed churchlike: the worshippers in darkness, the sacred relics shining. She lingered for a long time in front of a beautiful face – yellow-white, with black lines painted on the eyebrows, around the eyes and outward at the sides. The face was framed in a head-dress like the one worn by the sphinx. And the whole thing, according to the description underneath, was part of a canopic jar. She’d forgotten what canopic meant.

  She stepped aside, to let other people see. In front of the cases of jewellery, a young man had come to a standstill; he’d apparently been in the same place for a long while, because an official was trying to get him to move. The young man responded immediately, saying – in a very audible voice – that he’d paid his money and he had a right to look for as long as he wanted to. The official backed away, murmuring about being fair to the other people: he didn’t want to start a fight in the middle of the crowd or to disrupt the discreet, artistic and historic hush brought about by the presence of so many tons of gold and lapis lazuli.

  She took a good look herself at the young king in his blue-and-gold headcloth, which fell in stripes to his shoulders. And as she walked on, she realized that she’d worked her way around to the exit. The others were nearby. Sometimes people went through exhibits at such different rates that it made more sense to split up for a set period; but they’d all finished at about the same time.

  They moved out into the shopping area where people were selling books and postcards. Lily opened her bag and got out her wallet. She unsnapped the coin compartment and began to rummage inside it. She couldn’t feel her lucky-piece. She couldn’t see it. She shook the bag from side to side. Sue asked what was wrong. Charlie said, If you’re looking for your wallet, you’re already holding it in your hand.’

  The next thing she knew, she was screaming. Everyone tried to calm her down but she let go completely, shrieking hysterically, ‘I’ve lost it, oh God. It isn’t anywhere.’

  ‘Something important?’ a voice said.

  ‘The most important thing I’ve got,’ she spluttered. ‘It’s my lucky-piece.’ She wanted to go back into the exhibition rooms, to make the museum authorities turn up the lights and hold the crowds back, so that she could go over the whole floor.

  They couldn’t do that, everyone told her. They’d report the loss and hope the staff would pick up the coin at closing-time.

  That wasn’t good enough, she yelled.

  Shock, embarrassment, distaste, were on people’s faces. She didn’t care. She could barely see them but she could hear the change in the sounds around her, and especially the difference in their voices as they let her know that everything she wanted was impossible and unreasonable. They thought her lucky-piece was insignificant; she was in the presence of Art and of the past, and of an entire civilization that had been lost. She even heard one of their own crowd whispering about her – though later on she wasn’t sure if she might not have imagined it – saying, ‘Don’t know why she wants it back – it didn’t do her much good, did it?’ All she knew was that losing the coin seemed to her the final blow. She’d lost everything else: she couldn’t lose that, too.

  The lucky-piece had had little worth as silver and no real value to anyone but her. Nevertheless, despite the efforts of the museum authorities and their cleaning crew, the coin never turned up. And she finally learned to accept its loss, as well as to understand that she’d had some sort of collapse, and that maybe she had needed to express her grief in that way, in public. She also realized – many months after the event – what she must have forgotten at the time: that all
those wonderful objects they’d been admiring had been the contents of a grave.

  And, eventually, it seemed to her that the loss of the lucky-piece had been a sign; it had been intended to happen, so that she would have no doubt about the fact that there was a curse on her. She had married two men and both of them had died. She was certain that if she tried to find happiness again, the same thing would happen a third time.

  She didn’t say anything about the curse to the men who took her out, courted her, and wanted to marry her or just to sleep with her. She merely said no. When Don Parker asked her to be his wife, she said no for four months, said maybe for two, and in the end told him she would if he’d take her to Egypt for the honeymoon.

  ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ her mother said to her one evening. ‘The chances you’ve had. They aren’t going to keep asking for ever, you know.’

  From across the room Lily gave her newspaper a shake. Her mother sewed a button on the wristband of a blouse. They were waiting for Channel Two to show the play. That week it was a repeat of an old one – Ingrid Bergman and Trevor Howard in Hedda Gabler. Lily read in her paper about an African bird called a hoopoe that had been closed up inside a packing crate by mistake and been found at a German airport; the authorities had trapped it in an airline hangar and were just about to catch it with a net – in order to send it back to its own country – when it flew into one of the wire-strengthened glass panes up near the ceiling and broke its neck.

  She turned the page. The paper crinkled noisily. She held it high, the way her father did at the breakfast table. She read about floods, fires, insurrections, massacres and robberies. She read about a chemist in Florida who believed that the building-blocks of ancient Egypt’s pyramids could have been poured into moulds rather than quarried.

  Everything she saw now reminded her of Egypt. It was like following the clues in a detective story. It was like being in love. Once you were aware of a thing, a name, or a word, you began to notice it everywhere. And once you had seen the truth of one cause of pain, you could recognize others. It was only after her breakdown in the museum that she understood how little her mother liked her – in fact, that her mother had never loved her. Perhaps she’d never loved Lily’s sister, Ida, either. Ida was married and had two children; her husband had divorced her. And now Ida and her mother and the two children – both girls – were locked in an insatiable battle of wills that everyone except Lily would probably have called familial love. To Lily it seemed to be an unending struggle invented by her mother because otherwise life would have no meaning. Lily’s father hadn’t been enough of a challenge. And Lily herself had escaped into the protection of the two tragic events that had isolated her from other people.