The Collector's Daughter Page 25

  As they walked into the front hall, Eve had a curious sense of feeling at home immediately. She remembered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saying that houses held memories in their stones. If that were the case, she felt sure the previous occupants had been happy here. It had a welcoming atmosphere. There was plenty of room to invite visitors for weekend house parties, the garden was a full acre, and there was good walking around about. It wasn’t palatial, but it felt more like a family home than Highclere ever had.

  Brograve put in an offer and they hugged each other in glee when it was accepted. After they moved in, they discovered that the roof leaked, the bathroom plumbing drained into the cavity above the kitchen ceiling, and there were moles in the lawn, but right from the start they loved it dearly. They made friends with the neighbors in the lane, inviting each other for gin and tonics on long summer evenings. When they heard that the local school had an excellent reputation, Eve put Patricia’s name down.

  Brograve became increasingly irate as the disastrous policies of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party following the Wall Street Crash led the country into acute financial crisis. He often slammed his morning paper on the table in disgust or grumbled through the evening news on television. Still, Eve was astounded when he announced he was going to stand for parliament in the general election of October 1931.

  “But the Liberal Party is dead as a dodo,” she replied. “Are you sure it’s a good idea?”

  “I’m going to stand for the Conservatives,” he said. “They’ve offered me the seat of Walthamstow East. I’m sure if my father were alive, he would also switch allegiance since it seems the party most likely to save the country from ruin.”

  When she got over her surprise, Eve was thrilled. She had time on her hands now that Patricia was at school, and she would relish going on the campaign trail with him.

  She and Brograve drove out to explore Walthamstow in northeast London, and found a largely working-class constituency, enclosed by the Lea Valley to the west and Epping Forest to the east, with some picturesque historic areas and a mile-long street market full of bustle and color.

  “I’m told that unemployment is an issue,” Brograve said, “and the people feel they have suffered unfairly under the Labour budget cuts. Our message is that we will promote business and create wealth for all.”

  He had grown in confidence since the Lowestoft defeat. On the hustings, he spoke with a certainty that made people listen. He sounded like a man who had the answers. Eve wandered the streets, chatting to the market traders and women shoppers, and they told her about their desperation for decent housing and a secure living. It surely wasn’t too much to ask.

  A journalist from the local paper requested an interview with Eve and she agreed, meeting him at campaign headquarters one late September morning. He was an eager lad who came armed with sheaves of notes, and—as she had anticipated—he quickly veered away from Brograve’s policies to question her about her family history. How did she feel about her mother’s notorious court case against Dorothy Dennistoun?

  “That’s ancient history,” she told him. “I’m sure your readers have far more pressing issues to worry about.”

  Did she feel her family had been cursed by its connection with Tutankhamun?

  She laughed. “Yes, I broke a nail this morning, and I hold the Egyptian king entirely responsible.”

  “Seriously, though,” he said, “your family seems to have had more than your fair share of tragedy, most recently with the sudden death of your brother-in-law.”

  Eve took a calming breath before replying. Catherine’s brother had dropped dead at the age of twenty-nine while playing tennis on the court at Highclere. It seemed there had been an undiagnosed heart condition. Catherine went quite mad with grief. She came to Framfield to stay for a week after the funeral, and the only consolation she found was in the gin bottle.

  “Catherine’s brother never entered Tutankhamun’s tomb, and had never even been to Egypt,” she told him. “Are you suggesting that anyone remotely associated with my family might be cursed, despite the fact that I myself remain mysteriously unscathed? In that case, are you sure you are not putting yourself at risk simply by being in my presence?”

  He grinned at that. “Sorry. I had to ask. The editor insisted.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m used to it.”

  “There’s one more question of a delicate nature that he wants me to put to you. We’ve heard that your mother arranges abortions for upper-class girls at her private hospital. Would you care to comment?”

  Eve flinched. “Blimey, which gutter did you trawl that nonsense from?”

  “Shall I record that as ‘no comment’?” he asked.

  “No, record exactly what I said. And remember that my mother knows her way around the law courts should you be tempted to print anything slanderous.”

  He laughed. “Fair point.”

  “Could it be true?” she asked Brograve as they drove home that evening.

  “Very likely,” he replied. “Nothing your mother gets up to would surprise me. Why don’t you ask her?”

  Eve closed her eyes. They were friends, she and Almina, but mainly because Eve never challenged her. Ian had proved an unreliable sort of husband and Almina had no one else to turn to, so Eve didn’t want them to fall out.

  Perhaps she would pretend she’d never heard the abortion rumor. She hoped with all her heart it wasn’t true.

  * * *

  On the twenty-seventh of October, 1931, Brograve won a resounding victory over his Labour and Liberal counterparts, getting almost sixty percent of the vote in Walthamstow East. It reflected a national landslide for the Conservatives and a new era in British politics. As she watched him make his acceptance speech, Eve felt fit to burst with pride. If only Pups could have witnessed this!

  She thought about the man Brograve had become since she first met him as a quiet, traumatized soldier at the Residency Christmas party in Cairo. Had she somehow sensed back then that he would turn out to have such inner strength? Or had it been the luck of the draw when she picked him as her husband-to-be? She felt a surge of lust for him. Winning an election was extremely sexy.

  Eve was excited to explore the new opportunities that opened up for her as an MP’s wife. Before Brograve made his maiden speech, she had joined dozens of social committees at the House of Commons. She got involved in organizing charity fundraisers, volunteered to entertain the wives of politicians visiting from overseas, and took on umpteen other unpaid roles, simply because she loved meeting new people.

  Every morning she drove Brograve to Uckfield station to catch the London train before she dropped Patricia at school, then she got on with her commitments for the day. She often drove to Walthamstow to help Brograve on constituency business, or to Putney to visit his mother. Some days she would be at the House or in one of the meeting rooms around Parliament Square. If she had time, she drove to Newmarket or Kempton Park, Cheltenham or Newbury when one of their horses was racing—they had bought another foal, named Hot Flash after the white flash on her nose.

  It was the most fulfilling period of her life, she reflected. Eve had not accomplished her childhood dream to be a lady archaeologist, but she had no regrets about that. Her time was filled with pursuits that used her personality and skills, a family she cherished, and a home she loved.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  London, May 1973

  Eve flicked through the old black-and-white photographs of the Framfield house. There was one of Patricia dancing on the lawn, wearing a summer frock with a ruched bodice; it had been rose pink with sprigs of green leaves, she remembered. Another showed the giant Christmas tree they installed in the front hall every year with an explosion of presents underneath. Next there was Patricia bouncing on the four-poster in cotton pajamas.

  There weren’t any pictures of her mother or Porchy at Framfield. Her mother wouldn’t come because she had never forgiven Brograve for his outburst on the telephone when Eve was pregnant. Her bro
ther didn’t come because he was lazy; he was happy for them to visit Highclere, and he met Brograve for long lunches at his London club, but he couldn’t be bothered to drive the extra sixty miles or so to her country house—not even to see his little niece.

  Howard Carter came, though. There was a glorious photograph of him reclining on the lawn wearing a daisy chain Patricia had made for him, pretending to sip tea from a doll’s teacup. Another showed him crouched in front of Patricia’s dollhouse helping her to arrange the furniture. Who would have thought that a childless man could have such a knack with children?

  “They used to gossip about you and Howard,” Brograve said, glancing over her shoulder when he came to top up her sherry. “Said I should keep an eye on the pair of you because you seemed rather too close.”

  Eve chuckled. “A Daily Mail journalist tried to get that rumor off the ground, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Poor, dear Howard. He was like a friendly uncle, I suppose.”

  She remembered one occasion when he came to stay for the weekend of their annual summer picnic. Most of the village was invited—all their closest neighbors and the parents of Patricia’s school friends too—and they treated Howard as a celebrity. All day long he was surrounded by folk asking about the tomb, and he never tired of answering them. Eve brought him a plate of sandwiches and cold cuts because he’d been so busy talking he hadn’t had a chance to visit the long trestle tables laid out around the lawn, laden with food she’d spent the best part of a week preparing.

  “Have you retired from archaeology now that work on the tomb is finished?” she heard one neighbor asking.

  Eve knew that Howard would never retire. After he finished dismantling the tomb and overseeing the installation of its contents in the Cairo Museum, he had spent several years on the lecture circuit. Lots of countries bestowed honors upon him, and he wrote well-received books on Tutankhamun.

  “Far from retiring, I am looking forward to my next challenge. I have a secret ambition to search for the tomb of Alexander the Great.” He turned to Eve with a grin. “Care to accompany me?”

  “Definitely,” she said, trying to remember if they thought it was in Alexandria, Babylon, or Greece. There was a mystery surrounding it, that much she knew.

  Before she could ask, one of the school mothers interrupted. “I know you take a dim view of stories about the curse of Tutankhamun, but I recently read an article by Sir Bruce Ingram in the Illustrated London News about disasters that befell him after you gave him a mummified hand from the tomb. He says that soon after he placed it in his country house, the building burned to the ground—yet the hand survived. Then after he had the house rebuilt, it was badly damaged by flooding. He wrote that since he donated the hand to the Cairo Museum, there have been no further misfortunes. How do you explain that?”

  Eve thought Howard might rebuke her, but he smiled and answered politely.

  “Sir Bruce is a good friend of mine and we have agreed to differ on this. I see his misfortunes as pure coincidence and his blaming the mummified hand I gave him as superstition. Perhaps you have seen the Boris Karloff film The Mummy, which came out last year? I suggested to Sir Bruce he should get in touch with the script writers to give them material for the follow-up.”

  There was general laughter at that, and Eve left them to fetch the first of the desserts from the kitchen: a sherry trifle, Brograve’s favorite.

  * * *

  Eve looked up from the photograph album, trying to remember if Howard had ever begun his hunt for the tomb of Alexander. She couldn’t remember seeing him again after that summer picnic.

  “When did Howard die?” she asked Brograve.

  “Nineteen thirty-nine. You, Almina, and Porchy went to the funeral in Putney Vale. I was busy in the House that day.”

  Eve couldn’t remember. “What did he die of?”

  “Hodgkin’s disease. His last years were difficult because of the side effects of the radiation treatments. His niece, Phyllis, moved in to take care of him, but you visited often. We took him for dinner at the Savoy one evening when he felt a little better, but I remember he scarcely ate anything. He got very thin toward the end.”

  “Poor Howard. I miss him.” It sounded silly to miss someone more than thirty years after their death, but she did.

  She turned the page of the album and there were some photographs of Betty, Brograve’s mother, someone else she missed. She had come to stay at Framfield for the last three years of her life, once she was too frail to live alone. They gave her a wing of the house, so she had her own sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, and a small kitchen, but she invariably dined with them. She was never any trouble, Eve thought. Had Almina lived with them, every arrangement would have had to revolve around her, but Betty quietly fitted in, the way she had when she stayed with them for six months after her husband’s death.

  There were few pictures of Brograve in the album because he was usually the one wielding the camera, but she stopped at one that showed him standing in front of the mantelpiece in Framfield with the gold clock behind him. That’s where it should have been. Why had she moved it?

  “I can’t find anything anymore,” she complained to Brograve. “I don’t know why. It’s as if things move around on their own.”

  He looked up. “What else is lost?”

  “Your father’s clock and the gold container from the tomb. Maybe other things, I’m not sure.”

  He pursed his lips. “Are you still convinced Ana Mansour didn’t take the clock?”

  Eve shook her head firmly. “She’s not like that.”

  He gave her an inquisitive look, as if to ask how she knew what Ana was like, but she turned back to the album before he could question her further.

  On the last page, there was a photograph of a brown bear grazing by the side of a river. Clearly it hadn’t been taken at Framfield. She squinted, trying to remember where it was, and suddenly it came to her.

  “This bear was in Canada, wasn’t it?” she asked, holding it up so he could see.

  He turned to look, and surprise spread across his face. “You remember that?”

  “Of course I do. I was petrified. You kept saying the bear was on the other side of the river and it was safe to stop and take a photograph, but I wanted to get back in the car and drive away. I knew bears could swim and they are faster than humans too.” She chuckled. “Then you took ages lining up the shot, getting as close as you could. . . .” She stopped. “When was it?”

  He seemed boyishly excited by her answer. “Patricia was ten. It was just four months after your accident and we went there so you could see a rehabilitation specialist, but we made a holiday out of it too. Do you remember now? You’ve never been able to remember that holiday before. You were still recuperating.”

  Eve thought hard, but Patricia wasn’t in the image in her mind—just the bear, the river, and her husband.

  Brograve came to stand beside her and pointed to some other photographs on the same page. “That’s Niagara Falls,” he said. “Do you remember being there? The deafening roar of the water?”

  She looked at the image of the three of them against a railing in front of a wall of grayish misty water but nothing came back to her.

  “We went out on a boat called the Maid of the Mist,” he said, “and we all got soaked by the spray. It ruined your hairstyle. Look!”

  He pointed to a picture of Eve with her hair plastered to her head. She stared hard, willing her brain to work, but it wouldn’t.

  “It was perishing cold that day,” he persevered. “We only had summer clothes with us and had to buy Patricia a warm coat in a shop.”

  Eve considered lying, pretending she could remember just to please him, but there was nothing there. Maybe she didn’t even remember the bear. Maybe she just remembered the photograph and her mind had created a memory around it.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, disappointment in his voice. “It’s wonderful that you’ve got one memory back from that tr
ip.”

  Looking at him, Eve realized in a burst of insight how sad it must be to have a wife who couldn’t remember huge chunks of your shared past. They were old now, him and her. Every morning she listened to him coughing and hacking in the bathroom, saw the exertion it took for him to bend and pull on his socks, watched him rubbing his lower back after bringing in the coal scuttle—the tiny signs of a body wearing out. But that was nothing compared to what he had to put up with from her as her mind wore out.

  “It must be ghastly for you,” she said. “Me not remembering. I’m sorry. I wish I could.”

  “It’s not ghastly at all,” he said, with a fond smile. “You’re still you and that’s what counts. That’s the only thing that counts.”

  Chapter Fifty

  London, July 1973

  Eve walked around the apartment opening all the windows to try to get a breeze blowing through. Brograve had gone for his walk but she found it too hot to venture out these days until late afternoon when the sun was less intense. It wasn’t like the heat in Egypt, the dangerous kind that pressed down on you like a lead weight, but it still gave her a headache if she stayed out for long. She felt anxious when he went outdoors, in case anything happened, but he was never gone for more than an hour.

  The buzzer rang and she answered the entry phone, but it seemed to have a loose wire and all she could hear was muffled crackling. The buzzer rang again. It was probably the postman. She pressed the door entry button to let him leave any post in the hall downstairs.

  Next she heard the clank of the lift approaching their floor. Could it be Patricia? But she had her own keys and wouldn’t have needed to ring the buzzer. None of their friends dropped by unannounced. They’d always telephone first. She froze on hearing a knock on the door. The visitor was just a few feet away.

  Eve opened the door, remembering as she did so that Patricia had told her always to look through the peephole first.

  “My goodness!” she exclaimed. Ana Mansour was standing outside, wearing a tailored white summer dress, with sunglasses balanced on her head and a tan leather shoulder bag hanging by her side.