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“It’s no trouble at all,” he said, jabbing his glasses up his nose as he spoke, perching for a seat on one arm of an unoccupied armchair. “I have to admit I’m intrigued by the pictures you emailed. Is there any more context you can give me?”
“These hieroglyphics appear on a second version of Juliette Willoughby’s Self-Portrait as Sphinx that has been found at Longhurst Hall. I’ve been asked to authenticate it. Patrick’s gallery is trying to sell it.”
At the mention of Patrick, his smile stiffened slightly.
“I see. And you want me to translate the phrase?”
“Yes, and perhaps offer some insight into why it meant something to Cyril Willoughby,” I explained. “It was written over the door to the east wing at Longhurst, where he kept his collection. And it’s carved over the entrance to his pyramid tomb. What I was wondering—”
“Is if it features in any of the materials in the Willoughby Bequest?”
“Exactly.”
“I can tell you the answer to that question very easily,” he said, looking pleased with himself. “It features in all of them. You see, our understanding of the collection has developed quite significantly over time. Back when I started working on the written materials in the bequest, it was assumed that Cyril had a general interest in funeral texts and coffin inscriptions. It’s since become clear that in fact he spent his life collecting as many different versions as he could lay his hands on of one particular chapter of the Book of the Dead. Chapter sixty-four, to be precise.”
“I see,” I said, although I wasn’t sure I did, entirely.
“Look, the thing to bear in mind when we talk about the Book of the Dead is that the ancient Egyptians didn’t call it that, and it wasn’t a book. It is a collection of writings—prayers, or spells, or instructions—on tomb walls, inside coffins, on papyri inserted between the bandages of mummies—designed to guide the soul of a deceased person through the afterlife. Then in the nineteenth century it was ordered into a vague sequence and translated by a German scholar, Karl Richard Lepsius, and given the title Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter.”
As he said this, something tugged at the corner of my mind—the white-bandaged body in the painting, the beaked boatman rowing it across the lake.
“Those passages were copied again and again over several thousand years, so for each chapter we have innumerable versions. Versions from a coffin which has been exposed to the elements. Versions from a tomb wall an ancient robber has gone at with a pickax. Versions where the scribe has missed something or repeated it. And that is what seems to have obsessed Cyril Willoughby. Collecting versions of chapter sixty-four, collating them. Trying, perhaps, to reconstruct an original, perfect version—or at least that’s what his notes suggest,” he explained.
“And that’s where this hieroglyphic phrase comes from?” I asked.
“Absolutely. It’s the first line in most versions: Ga ba ka, baba ka, ka ka ra ra phee ko ko. In Budge’s Victorian translation, which is the one Cyril would have been most familiar with, it reads: ‘I am Yesterday, To-Day and To-morrow, and I have the power to be born a second time.’ Meaning in the afterlife, of course.”
I repeated the phrase to myself, thoughtfully, wondering aloud why Juliette had chosen to incorporate it into her work.
“That’s not something I can help you with, I’m afraid,” said Sam. “But there is something else I noticed in the photographs of the painting you sent. I’m not sure if it’s useful, but...”
He paused. When Sam spoke again it was with the cautious hesitancy of someone who feels themselves at the outer limits of their professional expertise.
“I must preface this by saying that I am no art historian. However, what Juliette seems to be doing with Egyptological motifs is interesting. By which I mean interestingly wrong. She has taken great care to get the hieroglyphs correct, but then look at the hooded figure in the boat.”
I called the pictures up on my computer. I had spent years analyzing this image. “The figure with the Ibis beak? That’s Thoth. The god of knowledge,” I said, pleased to contribute something.
“And magic, yes. But that’s not the right god. Thoth is not the god who carries the souls of the dead through the afterlife on his barque, his mandjet. That ought to be Ra, the sun god, who has a falcon’s head. Completely different bird. Completely different beak. The artist knows that, just like she knows Egyptian Sphinxes don’t have wings. These are deliberate mistakes, which carry some sort of significance. What I am not sure about, though, is what.”
Welcome to my world, I thought.
“Anyway, Caroline, that’s pretty much all I can tell you. But, look, if you did want to discuss it further, perhaps we could do it over dinner...”
“I’m sorry, Sam, I—”
“Of course. I understand. Very sensible,” he mumbled, holding out a hand to shake.
“I am really sorry,” I said, conscious I was repeating myself, unable to think of a kind way to say it was impossible. Because there was nothing in my life I regretted more than sleeping with Sam Fadel, and I could never let it happen again, never let even the possibility of it happening again raise its head, for both our sakes.
In retrospect, it was easy to understand how it had come about. By that stage in my marriage to Patrick, we hardly ever saw each other. By the time he got back from the gallery most evenings I’d be asleep. Three nights a week during term I was up in Cambridge, and sometimes I went for a drink with Sam, to talk about colleagues, joke about our work frustrations. He must have been able to sense I was unhappy, that Patrick and I were not getting along. He had just been through a nasty breakup himself, and he talked about how over time, relationships accumulated resentments, frustrations, flashpoints. How hard it could be sometimes to recall why you’d fallen in love in the first place. How you could reach a point when every conversation seemed freighted with the potential to turn into an argument, every comment was capable of being taken as a coded insult. It all sounded very familiar.
It was easy talking to Sam. It was something I looked forward to a lot more than I did going out with Patrick on weekends in London. Being buttonholed by some up-and-coming young conceptual artist at a loft party in Shoreditch and harangued for hours about the pointlessness of my academic discipline. Loyally turning up to every one of Patrick’s private views and having to sit there and not pull faces or wriggle through garbled speeches by the showcased artists mixing misunderstood art theory with misremembered art history. Listening at dinner parties as he and fellow dealers talked about artists and their reputations like they were brokers discussing stock prices—who was on the way up, who was on the way down. Conscious that I was probably not hiding what I thought and felt as well as I might have done. Aware that there were times Patrick found me just as irritating as I found him.
Then one day Sam kissed me.
We were in a pub, on a sofa in a corner. It was nearly closing time. We had both been drinking. I should have told him we had got our wires crossed somewhere. I should have explained that even though I thought he was kind and clever and funny and attractive, I had never thought about him like that before. That I was very flattered, but it was not something he should have done or should ever do again. That the reason Patrick’s parents had divorced was his father’s cheating, and he had always made it clear how impossible he would find it to stay with someone who betrayed him that way. I should have told Sam all that. I didn’t. Instead, I kissed him back.
In a way, perhaps that was precisely the reason I did cheat. To break up the marriage. To bring to crisis an intolerable situation. It was only after I had told Patrick, after I had explained to him what had happened, after we had talked it over, and fought, and thrown accusations around, and cried, and come to a decision, that it dawned on me I also had to tell Sam that what had happened was a mistake, something I regretted. It was only seeing his attempts to suppress his reaction—we were in a café, it was lunchtime—I understood that he still felt very differently about things, that he had not been exaggerating when he told me how much he had always liked me, that I was watching someone’s heart breaking in front of me in real time.