The Pearlkillers Read online

  ‘There’s a man down in Florida,’ Lily said, ‘who thinks the pyramids were poured.’

  ‘Oh?’ her mother answered. She wasn’t interested. She probably thought it meant they’d been poured through a funnel.

  ‘It could be true, I guess. There’s been a lot about Egypt recently. There was the woman who believed she was the priestess of Isis. I told you about her. She went to live there.’

  ‘Just another nut. She’s like that woman who says she’s receiving spirit messages from Mozart and Beethoven, and then she plays those cheap little things.’

  ‘That isn’t a very good example. She’s such a nut, she’s made millions – on TV and everything. But in her case, you really wonder if she’s a fraud.’

  ‘Are you kidding? Of course she is. You think Beethoven—’

  ‘You wonder if she’s tricking people deliberately, instead of just deceiving herself. Now, this other woman – well, what you wonder about that, is: could there actually be some deep, biological, hereditary impulse directing her? Something we don’t know about yet. See what I mean? I read an article a few years ago that talked all about people’s sense of direction; it said they’ve found out that we’ve all got this magnetic centre in the brain.’

  ‘Oh, boy.’

  ‘Well, that’s what it said.’

  ‘What does Don say when you come out with these things?’

  ‘He said yes. I told him I’d marry him if he took me to Egypt for the honeymoon, so he said he would. He’s getting the tickets this week.’

  Her mother’s face came up from the buttons and thread. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘We’re getting married after New Year’s,’ Lily announced. ‘I just said so.’ Her mother looked astounded. ‘I told you,’ Lily repeated. ‘When I said we were going to Egypt.’

  ‘I didn’t take it in,’ her mother said. She stared.

  ‘Well, that’s the end of the news.’

  ‘That means … the wedding, the invitations, the catering. Why does it have to be so soon?’

  ‘That’s the best time to go.’

  ‘Go? Where?’

  ‘To Egypt,’ Lily snapped. ‘Are you feeling all right? We’re planning a quiet wedding, in a registry office. His mother’s going to take care of the reception at that house they’ve got down in the country.’

  ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ her mother said again.

  And you resent that, Lily thought.

  ‘To have a boy like that.’

  It doesn’t matter how nice people are, if you don’t love them. You love him more than I do. To me, he’s unexciting. I’ve been at parties where girls were flirting with him, and I’ve said to myself: well, they just don’t know how dull he is. I’ve even been in a shop where the tie salesman obviously thought he was the nearest thing to a classical statue he’d ever come across. But not for me.

  ‘So good-looking.’

  So boring, and actually sometimes irritating. I couldn’t last out a lifetime of it. I should never have gotten myself into this mess. But it’s nice to be admired like that; it’s flattering. And I can’t go on living this way.

  Her mother said, ‘I guess that extra-sensory, reincarnation stuff started back in the twenties, when they found the tomb.’

  ‘No. It began before that. It was part of the Victorian interest in psychic phenomena. It all had to do with the disintegration of Christianity.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘That’s what they told us in school.’

  Her mother went back to her sewing. They didn’t talk again. They hardly ever talked, anyway. Ida had always taken the brunt of her mother’s blame, inquisitiveness, disapproval, worry and desire to interfere. Lily used to think that that showed a difference in the quality of her mother’s love, though recently it had occurred to her that maybe it was simply a matter of positioning: that she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, so that the only mother-love she could remember had come from her father, her grandfather, one aunt, and a cousin who was of her grandmother’s generation. She knew how lucky she was about that: some people didn’t have anyone at all.

  She and Don had the vaccinations they needed, got the passports ready, and rushed out invitations. Lily had no time to go to the museum any more, but she began to have the same dream at night, often several times in the week: she found herself standing in sunlight, under a blue sky, and looking up at a huge, almost endlessly high sandstone wall above her; it was a golden-tan colour and carved all over with strange writings like hieroglyphics. In the dream she stood and looked at the picture-writing and couldn’t figure out what it said. She guessed that the lines on her lucky-piece had been the same – they’d meant something, but no one knew what. She liked the dream. Very few dreams in her life had ever repeated; the ones that did were all landscape-dreams: just special places she remembered, that were good spots for nice dreams to start from. She’d never had a repeating dream that was a puzzle, but it pleased her to be standing in the sun, under the hot sky that was so blue and far away, and examining the foreign shapes of an unknown language. In real life, outside the dream and outside her apartment, the air was bitter, there was deep snow on the ground and more blizzards had been forecast. She hoped that the airlines wouldn’t have to ground their planes for long. She was impatient to leave.

  *

  Two days before they were due to fly, they read and heard about a sandstorm that had closed all the airports in Egypt. The storm was actually a giant cloud. The papers and television said it stretched from Cairo to Israel. Lily became agitated. She thought they might not be able to take off. Don patted her arm and smiled at her. Ever since she’d accepted his proposal he’d been smiling inanely; it made her so guilty and annoyed that she almost wanted to hurt him in some way. She could feel herself burning up, unable to get where she was going, or do what she wanted to do. She meant to reach Cairo even if she had to walk.

  ‘These things usually blow themselves out within twenty-four hours,’ he told her. ‘We’ll be OK.’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t get any refunds. This is one of those things in the Act-of-God clause, isn’t it?’

  He sat up. ‘Of course they’d refund us. They’d have to.’

  ‘I bet they wouldn’t. It isn’t their fault there’s a sandstorm.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t mine, either.’

  ‘Tough,’ she said.

  He got on the phone about it and tried to force a response out of the travel company. No one would give him a straight answer because so far nothing had gone wrong; but they seemed to be saying that if things did go wrong, then it wouldn’t be up to them to indemnify anybody. In a case of delay the agency might – as a gesture of goodwill – be able to offer a day in a different country, but not an extra day in Egypt once the plane got there. He hung up.

  ‘Told you,’ she said.

  ‘I guess they could send us to the Riviera. That might be nice.’

  ‘It’s freezing there. This is the coldest January they’ve had in Europe since 1948 or something like that.’

  He put his arm around her and said he didn’t care where he was, as long as he was with her.

  She smiled back, feeling mean, unable to join him except by pretence. She knew already that she could never stay faithful to him. She’d been faithful to her first and second husbands, both when they were alive and after they’d died. But she could tell this was going to be different.

  She honestly didn’t love him, that was the trouble. And all at once she couldn’t believe that she’d said yes, that she had the ring on her finger and was on her honeymoon. Why hadn’t she just gone to bed with him and left it at that?

  *

  When they arrived, the air smelled hot and scorched, the sky was still laden with the aftermath of the storm: tiny particles that were invisible, but made it impossible to see clearly for very far. Lily didn’t mind. She didn’t mind anything, now that they were there.

  Their hotel wi
ndows looked out on to two nineteenth-century villas set among palm trees. She was practically delirious with excitement. She didn’t want to stay indoors and rest, or eat, or make love. She wanted to be outside, seeing everything.

  He wasn’t quite so enraptured. He hadn’t realized it was going to be difficult to get his favourite brand of sourmash. And he said he thought the people were dark and dumpy.

  ‘They’re wonderful-looking,’ she told him. ‘Especially their faces. You aren’t seeing them right. Why don’t you like it here?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem all that romantic to me.’

  ‘Wait till we get to the pyramids. We haven’t even started.’

  ‘I keep thinking what Ollie and Phil said about the flies. Sandflies everywhere.’

  ‘But that’s later in the year, not now.’

  ‘And how sick they were with that gut-rot they picked up.’

  ‘You won’t pick up anything if you dress right. That’s what my book says: wear a heavy sweater.’

  ‘Not in the sun.’

  ‘All the time. Dress like the locals, and you’ll be all right.’

  They went through the markets, where he was disappointed once more, because they couldn’t find any sheets that were a hundred per cent cotton. The only ones on sale were cotton mixed with polyester; the rest had been exported.

  But he liked the fact that she had calmed down. She held his hand now as they walked, where back home she had always seemed to be slipping her hand out of his. She smiled at him, saying, ‘I love it here.’ He said, ‘And I love you.’

  They began the tours. Straight away they were put into the middle of the place where all the pictures came from: the sphinx, the pyramids, the vast space full of chairs for the son-et-lumière show. She was trembling with eagerness. She almost seemed to be a little crazed. He whispered, ‘Are you OK?’ and she nodded vigorously, while motioning him with her hand to be quiet.

  Their guide was a thin, grey-haired Austrian woman who had a thick accent. The other members of the troop were all American. Lily could see, as the guide took them from one spot to the next, how most of the little parties of tourists had been grouped according to nationality, so that the guides wouldn’t have to repeat the same information in different languages; she wondered why their guide, Lisabette, had been chosen for an English-speaking group. Lisabette was definitely good at her job and made her subject sound interesting, but some of the others said afterwards that they were having trouble understanding her. Don said he’d heard her stating that one of the ancient characters on their list had had to ‘accept the inedible’.

  There were two old people in their group: Selma and Orville Potts. Selma had something to do with a cultural club back home. Orville was retired from the bank. They enjoyed everything and asked a lot of questions. They had also read a lot, unlike Don or the couple called Darrell – John and Patsy – who had a nine-year-old child in tow. The child’s name was Cindy; she was orange-haired, freckled, and had white eyelashes and pale eyes. Despite the weak eyes, she was a determined starer. Selma had tried to make friends with the child, failed, and commented to the mother, Patsy, that, ‘I reckon it’s real nice for little Cindy to get let off school to go on vacation with you.’ Patsy said, ‘Oh, Cindy’s between schools at the moment.’ At the same time, John said, ‘They’ve closed her school for a couple of weeks, to fix the pipes.’

  ‘Well,’ Selma said brightly, ‘and are you having a good time?’

  Cindy glared up at the old face peering down at her. Lily thought for a moment that the child was going to spit, but after a hesitation she muttered, ‘Sure. It’s OK.’ Selma simpered. Cindy walked off, as if there were something a few feet away that she wanted to look at. Patsy and John seemed relieved.

  Don and Lily moved ahead a few steps. They were followed by the other honeymoon couple, Ruth-Ann and Howie: she was tall, toothy and raucous; he was a tubby, high-voiced man. The idea of coming to Egypt had been his. Ruth-Ann didn’t mind where she was, as long as they got away from the snow. She’d been thinking more of Hawaii, but this was fine. The only drawback was –

  ‘No booze,’ Howie complained.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Don said. ‘You at some kind of Temperance hotel?’

  ‘Oh, they’ve got a bar, but not like a real American bar. And no Jim Beam in the entire town, far as I can see.’

  ‘You’ve got to bring it with you.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Ruth-Ann said. ‘We got so worried about rationing it for two whole weeks that we drank it all in the first three days. God, the hangovers we’ve had. It’s like those stories about twenty people in a life-raft and only one canteen of water. What are you doing about it?’

  ‘Well, we just got here,’ Don said. ‘I guess we’ll measure it out in thimbles till the week is up, and then go on to wine. At least they still sell the stuff. I’ve heard they’re thinking of making the whole country teetotal.’

  Lily asked, ‘Were you here for the sandstorm?’

  ‘We sure were,’ said Howie. ‘We went to this hotel to meet a friend of Ruth-Ann’s mother, and suddenly everything started to get dark, and then – wham! – they pulled all the shutters down, and we were stuck inside.’

  ‘It can kill you,’ Ruth-Ann said.

  Lisabette was looking at her watch. It was almost time to start the tour again. Ruth-Ann said, ‘Doesn’t she look like something off of one of those tombs?’

  Lily turned her head. Lisabette, small and emaciated, was adjusting the shoulderstrap of her bag. She still had her walking stick clenched to her, which made the operation more cumbersome. But when she finally straightened up, she put a hand to the piece of cloth wound around her head from the front to below the tight, grey bun at the back; she changed the stick over to her right side, then stood still. And it was true – she resembled some sort of ancient court official bearing a ceremonial staff.

  ‘And what’s the story with the kid?’ Ruth-Ann murmured. ‘Jesus, what an argument for birth-control.’

  Howie sniggered. Lisabette raised her stick a few inches and looked up. Her nine listeners grouped around her again.

  At the next break, most people took photographs. Lily hadn’t thought about bringing a camera. She’d said she’d rather have a good postcard. But Don had brought along a small, cheap, foolproof camera. He told her, ‘What I want are pictures of you.’ He took two of her, then they changed places. She clicked the button twice, closed the slide over the lens and handed the camera back. She looked past him at one of the pyramids. ‘The eternal triangles,’ she said, and laughed.

  ‘They aren’t triangles. They’ve got five surfaces and the base is a squ—’

  ‘For heaven’s sake. I know that.’ She turned away abruptly. She’d been careful for so long about not showing her true thoughts, that she was afraid to let out even a little irritation. When the outburst came, she might just start screaming, ‘Oh Christ, you’re so boring,’ for half an hour. She was turning herself inside-out to entertain him and knocking herself out in bed to please him, just because she didn’t love him enough. And it wasn’t his fault. He was a good, decent man; her mother was right. But it didn’t make any difference. When she’d married before, both times, she’d been in love; she’d shared herself. Now she was only pretending. As a child, she’d loved playing make-believe. Now it wasn’t for fun: now it was cheating.

  She’d never be able to keep going. He’d be true to her – she was sure of him that way. And besides, he’d grown up in a family of ugly women who’d sat on him hard. The father had been the one with the looks, and had used them too, being unfaithful all over the place and finally leaving Don’s mother. The mother and his two sisters looked like parodies of plain frontierswomen. They were also very concerned about all sorts of social, public and political issues that didn’t interest Lily. They were the kind of women who would talk for hours about Vietnam at cocktail parties instead of getting married to somebody who’d die there. Don thought the way his sisters did, but h
e’d wanted to marry something different.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, hurrying up behind her.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine. She’s going to start the spiel again, that’s all.’

  Lisabette raised her stick and brought it down on the ground. It made no noise, but the movement caught the attention of the rest of the group.

  ‘You aren’t mad at me, are you?’ he said.

  ‘Of course not.’ She didn’t take his arm or even look at him. She hated the way she was behaving.

  ‘Egypt’, Lisabette said, ‘is a marriage between the Nile and the desert.’ She began to talk about the importance of the periods of inundation and about the special regard paid to the androgynous deity of the Nile, Hapy. Lily’s glance moved across the other tourists; it stopped at nine-year-old Cindy, whose fixed stare was boring into the back of Orville Potts; she suddenly felt a horror of the child. Something was wrong with Cindy. The parents obviously knew it, too. The mother was a nervous wreck. And the father – it was hard to tell: he wouldn’t have had to live with the worry, the way the mother would. He’d only have to hear about it in the evenings and say, ‘Yes, dear.’

  Don reached out for Lily. She jumped as he touched her. He was trying to slide his hand up under her folded arms. She let him, since other people were there. If they’d been alone, she’d have pushed him away and walked off. She tried to concentrate on what Lisabette was telling them. Lisabette actually looked less like a living monument to ancient Egypt than like someone who’d once been alive and was now mummified; ‘Hathor,’ she said. ‘The cow-goddess.’