There was toast and jam and a plate of rock buns and a cutting cake. Mr Emmott was very polite passing me things. Quiet as he was he always seemed to notice when my plate was empty.
Presently Mr Coleman bustled in and took the place beyond Miss Johnson. There didn’t seem to be anything the matter withhis nerves. He talked away nineteen to the dozen.
Mrs Leidner sighed once and cast a wearied look in his direction but it didn’t have any effect. Nor did the fact that Mrs Mercado, to whom he was addressing most of his conversation, was far too busy watching me to do more than make perfunctory replies.
Just as we were finishing, Dr Leidner and Mr Mercado came in from the dig.
Dr Leidner greeted me in his nice kind manner. I saw his eyes go quickly and anxiously to his wife’s face and he seemed to be relieved by what he saw there. Then he sat down at the other end of the table, and Mr Mercado sat down in the vacant place by Mrs Leidner. He was a tall, thin, melancholy man, a good deal older than his wife, with a sallow complexion and a queer, soft, shapeless-looking beard. I was glad when he came in, for his wife stopped staring at me and transferred her attention to him, watching him with a kind of anxious impatience that I found rather odd. He himself stirred his tea dreamily and said nothing at all. A piece of cake lay untasted on his plate.
There was still one vacant place, and presently the door opened and a man came in.
The moment I saw Richard Carey I felt he was one of the handsomest men I’d seen for a long time – and yet I doubt if that were really so. To say a man is handsome and at the same time to say he looks like a death’s head sounds a rank contradiction, and yet it was true. His head gave the effect of having the skin stretched unusually tight over the bones – but they were beautiful bones. The lean line of jaw and temple and forehead was so sharply outlined that he reminded me of a bronze statue. Out of this lean brown face looked two of the brightest and most intensely blue eyes I have ever seen. He stood about six foot and was, I should imagine, a little under forty years of age.
Dr Leidner said: ‘This is Mr Carey, our architect, nurse.’
He murmured something in a pleasant, inaudible English voice and sat down by Mrs Mercado.
Mrs Leidner said: ‘I’m afraid the tea is a little cold, Mr Carey.’
He said: ‘Oh, that’s quite all right, Mrs Leidner. My fault for being late. I wanted to finish plotting those walls.’
Mrs Mercado said, ‘Jam, Mr Carey?’
Mr Reiter pushed forward the toast.
And I remembered Major Pennyman saying: ‘I can explain best what I mean by saying that they all passed the butter to each other a shade too politely.’
Yes, there was something a little odd about it…
A shade formal…
You’d have said it was a party of strangers – not people who had known each other – some of them – for quite a number of years.
Chapter 6. First Evening
After tea Mrs Leidner took me to show me my room.
Perhaps here I had better give a short description of the arrangement of the rooms. This was very simple and can easily be understood by a reference to the plan.
On either side of the big open porch were doors leading into the two principal rooms. That on the right led into the dining-room, where we had tea. The one on the other side led into an exactly similar room (I have called it the living-room) which was used as a sitting-room and kind of informal workroom – that is, a certain amount of drawing (other than the strictly architectural) was done there, and the more delicate pieces of pottery were brought there to be pieced together. Through the living-room one passed into the antiquities-room where all the finds from the dig were brought in and stored on shelves and in pigeon-holes, and also laid out on big benches and tables. From the antika-room there was no exit save through the living-room.
Beyond the antika-room, but reached through a door which gave on the courtyard, was Mrs Leidner’s bedroom. This, like the other rooms on that side of the house, had a couple of barred windows looking out over the ploughed countryside. Round the corner next to Mrs Leidner’s room, but with no actual communicating door, was Dr Leidner’s room. This was the first of the rooms on the east side of the building. Next to it was the room that was to be mine. Next to me was Miss Johnson’s, with Mr and Mrs Mercado’s beyond. After that came two so-called bathrooms.
(When I once used that last term in the hearing of Dr Reilly he laughed at me and said a bathroom was either a bathroom or not a bathroom! All the same, when you’ve got used to taps and proper plumbing, it seems strange to call a couple of mud-rooms with a tin hip-bath in each of them, and muddy water brought in kerosene tins, bathrooms!)
All this side of the building had been added by Dr Leidner to the original Arab house. The bedrooms were all the same, each with a window and a door giving on to the courtyard. Along the north side were the drawing-office, the laboratory and the photographic rooms.
To return to the verandah, the arrangement of rooms was much the same on the other side. There was the dining-room leading into the office where the files were kept and the cataloguing and typing was done. Corresponding to Mrs Leidner’s room was that of Father Lavigny, who was given the largest bedroom; he used it also for the decoding – or whatever you call it – of tablets.
In the south-west corner was the staircase running up to the roof. On the west side were first the kitchen quarters and then four small bedrooms used by the young men – Carey, Emmott, Reiter and Coleman.
At the north-west corner was the photographic-room with the dark-room leading out of it. Next to that the laboratory. Then came the only entrance – the big arched doorway through which we had entered. Outside were sleeping quarters for the native servants, the guard-house for the soldiers, and stables, etc., for the water horses. The drawing-office was to the right of the archway occupying the rest of the north side.
I have gone into the arrangements of the house rather fully here because I don’t want to have to go over them again later.
As I say, Mrs Leidner herself took me round the building and finally established me in my bedroom, hoping that I should be comfortable and have everything I wanted.
The room was nicely though plainly furnished – a bed, a chest of drawers, a washstand and a chair.
‘The boys will bring you hot water before lunch and dinner – and in the morning, of course. If you want it any other time, go outside and clap your hands, and when the boy comes say, ‘jib mai’ har’. Do you think you can remember that?’
I said I thought so and repeated it a little haltingly.
‘That’s right. And be sure and shout it. Arabs don’t understand anything said in an ordinary “English” voice.’
‘Languages are funny things,’ I said. ‘It seems odd there should be such a lot of different ones.’
Mrs Leidner smiled.
‘There is a church in Palestine in which the Lord’s Prayer is written up in – ninety, I think it is – different languages.’
‘Well!’ I said. ‘I must write and tell my old aunt that. She will be interested.’
Mrs Leidner fingered the jug and basin absently and shifted the soap-dish an inch or two.’
‘I do hope you’ll be happy here,’ she said, ‘and not get too bored.’
‘I’m not often bored,’ I assured her. ‘Life’s not long enough for that.’
She did not answer. She continued to toy with the washstand as though abstractedly.
Suddenly she fixed her dark violet eyes on my face.
‘What exactly did my husband tell you, nurse?’
Well, one usually says the same thing to a question of that kind.
‘I gathered you were a bit run-down and all that, Mrs Leidner,’ I said glibly. ‘And that you just wanted someone to look after you and take any worries off your hands.’