Free The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips Page B

That's not my family, not my real family.' He started to talk more than he had the whole time I had known him. 'My father was lost at sea, and that woman, she's not my real mother.' I did not know if this was true, but I doubted it.
    "Once he asked why Ronnie was not married, and then, very quietly, so I thought my heart would burst, he asked me 'as his sister' if perhaps Ronnie ever wanted a son."
    The next day, Macy, I asked Ronald Barry if he recalled Paul Caldwell want• ing to be his son. "Didn't last long. By the time he was thirteen or so, he was rag• ing at everything and everyone except Cassie and Egypt. I had done something to offend him. I didn't realise it at the time, but it was only this: I was telling him that I had once wanted to be a University professor, but of course that lofty task
    was reserved for toffs. I was telling him that brains aren't counted, just your fam• ily, and the rich take care of each other. Paul looks up from his reading—a book on Egypt, of course—and he says, 'Your enemies block your advancement? Why don't you slay them?' I thought he was joking. Mr. Ferrell, I tell you this as a fact: he was not joking. That was how Cassie's pet was developing. I should have throt• tled him right there, saved us all the subsequent trouble. He says to me, 'If you're not strong enough to defeat your enemies, what are you?' A thirteen-year-old boy, Ferrell."
    Miss Barry now: "When he read everything we had on Egypt, I tried to lead him into other areas, even other areas of archaeology or history, or just good sto• rybooks, and he would try them, like a litle boy trying his vegetables, then he would have no more of it. But the day he learnt I could order books for him, nearly anything in the world, you should have seen his face. He asked for titles he had seen in the bibliographies or notes of other Egypt books.
    "He was amusing, the little researcher at eleven, twelve, thirteen. He would come into the library, breathing very hard, and I knew he had run all the way from the school building. I used to tease him: 'And what brings you into our hum• ble establishment today, Mr. Caldwell? Something in particular you'd like to read? Perhaps some stories about knights? I have a lovely Ivanhoe. No? Maybe a history of Australia's brave pioneers, those raping monsters? How about a guide to sheep and the farming thereof?' I would just talk on and on to see his little face contort itself up, trying to remember what I had taught him about politeness. Fi• nally, he would burst out, 'Please, Miss Barry. Has it come? Has it?' 'And what would that be, Mr. Caldwell? We'll need to comport ourselves like a gentleman in this world, mind our manners.' 'Please, Miss Barry, I am sorry to interrupt you, but I am hoping that Cults of Ra by Professors Knutson and Anderson has ar• rived.' Or some other work, Champollion's work on translating the Rosetta stone. The requests he came up with! The orders I made for him! The time I spent justi• fying to the Head Librarian these obscure volumes as being part of the local pop• ulation's bottomless appetite for Egypt." She told me to wait a moment, she went to a drawer next to her bed and came back with a piece of paper: "I used to keep a list," she went on. "Listen: Pasint's work on the judicial records of the necropo• lis courts. The ex-circus performer Belzoni's exploits with the British consul
    Henry Salt. Mattison on the use of music in burial rites. Oskar Denninger's pam•
    phlet, The Chemistry and Function of Feline Mummification in the Shrine to Bastet.
    Whatever the latest strange title, he would plead, 'Did it come, Miss Barry? Did it?' 'Well, I certainly do not know offhand,' I would say, biting my lips. 'I should
    have to examine the New Arrivals department and then the pile from the post, could take me quite a bit of time. I am terribly busy, you know.' 'Please, Miss Barry,' nearly sobbing, he was. 'Well, you have a seat at that table in the corner and I