The Orpheus Trail (13 page)

‘Beth and I are going to stay with my brother.’

I felt defeated. My only living relative that I knew of, was a distant cousin I had no contact with, apart from a Christmas card, though, for all I knew, Budapest might be teeming with half brothers and sisters and their offspring. Once I’d leafed through a Hungarian dictionary, wondering whether I ought to try and learn my father’s language but it looked so alien that I gave up. Only from a glossary of names at the back I discovered that in Budapest I would be Sandor and liked the sound of it, tougher, more positive, I thought than Alex.

Suddenly I missed Jack. I was being forced to look at my life of work and home to Caesar rather as an insect must experience its own emerging from a pupa to dry its wings and peer about before take-off over this new world. Even the spring which had seemed to promise so much at the beginning of February was now on hold under a bitter wind bringing showers of sleet, cold enough to chill to the bone but without the purity of snow.

Well, on Saturday morning I could work and then… It was too soon to go back to Oxford and try to pin down Stalbridge again. I would go to the British Museum and see whether among its engraved faces and sculptured dead, intuition would help me out since everyone’s reason, mine included, didn’t seem to be coming up with anything. I would just wander from room to room in the hope that the lightning would strike and I could leap from my bath shouting ‘Eureka’.

Even going up Smirke’s great wing of grey stone steps I could see that Saturday afternoon wasn’t the best time to come if you were hoping for a revelation among the crowds from, it seemed, every nation on earth thronging in and out.

Still I was there now and I hadn’t anything else to do. ‘No man is an island’, I remembered as I was absorbed into the crowd, and yet we were all islands, floating islands, contiguous maybe, an endless string of atolls, lapped round by solitude, a fleet of canoes or coracles
frenetically
paddling towards some shore before squalls sank us or the currents drove us back.

A continuous stream of people was heading for the Egyptian
galleries
. The mummies were always the most popular with children, except for the dinosaurs at the National History Museum. Fleetingly I wished we had a couple of really popular draws. Where should I go for my road to Damascus experience? There was a special exhibition: ‘The Forgotten Empire’. If it was forgotten maybe fewer people would want to remember it. I went to the ticket desk and then through a great stone arch of winged figures Smirke might have copied for the museum itself, into a narrow corridor, lined on one side with exhibits taking us back in time to forgotten emperors Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, to the first known Aryan Empire that once stretched from the Danube to the Indus, and from the Oxus to the Nile, so the wall map told me. Briefly I wondered if Hitler would have admitted them to his
pantheon
. There was the first known writing in an Indo-European
language
, the immutable laws of the Medes and Persians, and a list of the Tributes sent from all the conquered territories to the capital
Persepolis
, including a marble statue of Penelope from Greece and five hundred boys to be eunuchs whom a magnanimous emperor had sent back. There too was the meticulous script of the seal of the Emperor Cyrus allowing the Jews to return from their captivity in Babylon after he had conquered it. But the thing that touched me most was two gold coins, no bigger than buttons, like the coins we had found in the prince’s grave. There was an answer here if only I could grasp it. And then ahead as I turned a corner I saw what I thought was the figure of Stalbridge bending over a glass case.

I stepped back at once. What was he doing here? But then why
shouldn’t he be? Perhaps I was mistaken. I chanced a quick look around the corner. No mistake. There was the shaggy moustache, the wings of bushy hair. Why was he in this exhibition and not among the mummies that were his field of expertise? Perhaps he was just bored with them, had seen them too often. Or maybe he was looking for a new twist to his career now that Iran was so much in the news, laying claim to that old empire as its legitimate sphere of influence re-
conquering
Babylon – Iraq by faith and stealth. It would certainly be a way to liven up a dull lecture on Middle Eastern politics.

I peered round my corner again. He seemed to be sketching
something
in the case, presumably because in most museums you aren’t allowed to take photographs: we all want to sell our own souvenir merchandise of bling, T-shirt and postcard. I saw him look from his notebook down into the case and back again at the page. Then he shut the notebook, put it, together with the pen, into the briefcase he was carrying and walked away. Once he was safely round the next corner I moved to see what he had been copying. It was a golden symbol, a winged disk that looked as if it was a figure, the whole thing reminding me of the Holy Spirit descending as a dove in a Renaissance painting of the Annunciation. The label identified it as a classic Persian
representation
of Phanes, the creator. It told me nothing.

I hurried after Stalbridge but he had disappeared. Perhaps he had simply left the exhibition but when I went outside into the main hall there was no sign of him. The crowds were even denser now as if all the tourists in London were converging on this one space.

What were we trying to give them, those of us engaged in this
enterprise
of preserving and presenting history. A sense of the past, of it all being the same yet different? A way of understanding the present? We have been here before. War, technology, art, religion, everything we call culture. The DNA of history, a double helix of genetic
programming
and external pressures to produce the variations through time. And that’s what we mostly see. The momentary manifestation in a new toy or a new conflict, not what shapes it and us.

Saul was overwhelmed with joy when he fell off his horse. Mine was a bleak vision though, seeing us as rats on a tread wheel, doomed to pursue the same meaningless path, a bloody determinism. How
was it still possible to reconcile the concept of free will with such knowledge?

I’d never looked at what I did in this way before. I’d got up and gone to work, put in a good day, made decisions, kept the organisation running smoothly without considering what it was all for, whether it had any purpose beyond satisfying the public curiosity, giving us a chance to feel superior to our quaint ancestors, and providing
teachers
with a break, somewhere to go on a wet afternoon. Perhaps it was mere self indulgence, a waste of precious time, to look for purpose, meaning, beyond the thing itself, the doing of it. Like asking for a Creator to justify the existence of butterfly or flower, rather than simply their own being. Suddenly I was considering all the questions usually posed and resolved in adolescence. Next thing I’d be throwing up my job and taking a gap year to backpack round the world before it was too late, if it wasn’t already. Looking down the hall of sculptured forms and carved masonry I suddenly saw the murdered boy from the Museum of London stretched out on a plank at the end of a row as if fallen asleep but when I moved towards him I saw it was only one of the stone figures reclining face down with an arm under his head. It was time to go home, away from such hauntings.

That evening I rang to see if Hilary was back from her weekend away with Beth, to fill her in on my latest sighting of Stalbridge but got only the voicemail. Tomorrow I must put it all out of my mind and concentrate on planning the summer exhibition which should open after Easter, only weeks away. I must set Lisa hunting down saucy postcards, bathing machines and costumes, antique ice-cream carts and pier concert posters. The board of governors, even the chairman had seemed quite enthusiastic about the project, voting me a small increase in budget. ‘Something light-hearted, Kish. That’s the ticket,’ the chairman had said, ‘after all we’ve been through.’

It was Hilary’s turn to ring me. ‘Did you have a good time?’ I asked.

‘It was good for Beth to see her cousins but my brother and I have never had much in common, excepts our parents. I know he thinks I should have married again and he’s never understood the fascination of the job, bringing things and ways of life back to the light. He’s an accountant. He finds what I do rather disgusting – cleaning up bones
and bits of broken pot. His worst moment was when I told him we were working on a plague pit. I bet he searched his armpits for
pustules
after our lunch date. So what did you get up to?’

I told her about seeing Stalbridge but not about my pitiful attempt at enlightenment, as I now saw it.

‘What was he copying?’

‘A sort of winged disk. The caption said Phanes.’

There was a pause and then Hilary said: ‘I think that was the
creative
principle that first sprang out of the primal egg and was swallowed by Ormuz. The Greeks took it into a version of their mythologies, with Zeus swallowing Protogonus and giving birth to the universe. Something the same turns up with the Gnostics in their theories of creation via Plato. Sometimes there’s a female principle in there too: the creator-mother, Night or Thought or, for some of the Gnostics, Sophia, Wisdom. Sorry about the lecture. Isn’t that part of our job? Anyway, it all makes Darwin sound comfortingly simple.

Some people still accept explanations like it: the spirit of god moving on the face of the primal waters and so on. Maybe the Big Bang is just another theory to try to make sense of the inexplicable. Maybe we’ll never know. We still have to put the milk bottles out and recycle the tins and papers.’

‘You’re a pragmatist.’

Hilary laughed. ‘In my job, when you’re dealing with the dead all the time, it seems safer.’

‘When can I see you?’

‘Why don’t you come to supper tomorrow?’

This time we fell on each other ferociously as soon as Hilary had shut the door of her flat behind us and she turned to face me. Later with our first hunger satisfied we ate the supper of pasta and salad that she had prepared, and then to bed, my arm under her head resting on my shoulder until we moved apart in sleep, but still wrapped around each other, companionable as an old married couple.

In the morning over a quick breakfast of tea and toast, before I went off to catch the Tube for Liverpool Street and work, she said: ‘What happens next? Will you tell Hildreth?’

‘About seeing Stalbridge? I keep imagining myself ringing him up
and then I don’t know what I would say. It’s all so nebulous. If Jack were still alive I feel he would know what to do.’

‘We’re like the babes in the wood having to fend for ourselves and hoping not to fall into the clutches of the wicked witch.’ Hilary laughed. ‘A bit pathetic at our age and job seniority. I suppose we’re out of our depth because, like most people, we’ve never had to deal with anything so far beyond our usual experience.’

When I came out of our miniaturised Victoria Station the sun was shining and I imagined I caught a whiff of the sea. Instead of going directly into the museum I crossed the roundabout, turned down the High Street, and over the cliff, down to the esplanade towards the entrance to the pier and the distantly glinting water, the narrow passage for incomers to cross, whether hostile or benign or merely
desperate
. Last night with Hilary had made me uneasy about my lone state. Perhaps I should look for a transfer to London? But I loved the town that had nurtured me in my career, its history, its mix of royal bathing and works outing, and I loved the sea that today was lying
glassily
relaxed but in winter could become a heaving beast hurling itself against the town’s defences. Should I ask Hilary to marry me? We’d never discussed permanence, apart from that one moment right at the beginning when she’d asked me if this was more than a one-night stand. Yet somehow I shied away from the question, sensing that perhaps she did too. I turned back towards my office and the ‘old toad’ of work.

A small padded manila envelope lay on the top of the pile of
officially
franked letters asking for my attention or a quick trip to the shredder. It was addressed in handwriting and marked ‘personal’. I never received such post at the office; indeed like most people in the email age I hardly received post at all that wasn’t charity or sales flyers. I picked it up. The thought of a letter bomb passed through my mind but the envelope felt too light and there were no obvious wires sticking out of the stapled flap. But then such devices must be more sophisticated these days, and what about things like anthrax spores or polonium which must have just this appearance of weightlessness.

Suddenly it all seemed silly, the result of a media-induced paranoia that kept us trembling and reaching in our pockets for the price of
the latest horror story. We were losing mankind’s necessary resilience to the fact of death that was part of the individual and collective
survival
kit. I remembered the words of a traveller I had read somewhere, writing home in the seventeenth century for news of the pregnant wife he had left behind: ‘I know not whether I be increased by a child or diminished by a wife.’ Now somebody would have sent him a text message. I opened the top drawer of my desk and took out a paper knife to prise up the staples.

Inside was a single sheet of handwritten paper. I unfolded it to read:

The spidery signature confirmed that the note was from Stalbridge, I upended the envelope and shook it. A small round object wrapped in tissue paper fell into my palm. Even before I uncovered it I knew what it was. The medallion from the Prittlewell Prince’s buckle lay there burning in my hand like a stigma.