The Visitors by Sally Beauman

made up my mind. A dahabiyeh could take weeks. The steamboat will get us there in four days. The fares are so reasonable.’
    ‘And the company so intolerable,’ said Herbert Winlock, stealthily refilling her champagne glass. He glanced across at his wife, and at Evelyn, who had joined us for dinner that evening; both were suppressing smiles. ‘Miss Mackenzie, I can’t allow it. Do you really want Lucy to experience the Nile for the first time from the deck of a steamboat, with all that noise and nasty cramped little cabins, and a crowd of ignorant tourists hell-bent on buying hideous souvenirs, complaining about the heat and the food and the flies? An old Egypt hand such as you are? Surely not?’
    Miss Mack’s egalitarian views fought a battle with pride in her status: she hesitated. ‘Well, I guess you have a point, Mr Winlock, but––’
    ‘Herbert, please. And as Helen addresses you as “Myrtle”, may I not do so too?’
    Miss Mack blushed scarlet as she acquiesced. Herbert Winlock could be charming, and I think he genuinely liked Miss Mack, as well as being amused by her. For her part, she had been predisposed in his favour by the immediate devotion she’d felt for his wife, and archaeologists could do no wrong in her eyes. Winlock was head of the Metropolitan’s Egyptian excavation team; Rudyard Kipling, her supreme hero and favourite poet, had visited one of his digs years before – a meeting that in her view sealed Winlock’s own heroic status. Within two days of making his acquaintance, she’d pronounced him courtly, witty, highly intelligent and an erudite tease with a dramatic taste in bow ties. By now there were distinct signs that he was the latest paragon – for example, a tendency to quote him ten times a day.
    With his customary skill her paragon now sensed his moment and pressed home his advantage. ‘Besides,’ he added wickedly, ‘what was that phrase – “No expense spared”? I think the Emerson and Stockton coffers could stand it, don’t you, Myrtle? Would the cost of a dahabiyeh bring the railroads to a halt and close down the steel mills?’
    ‘Well, that is true, of course,’ she replied, visibly wavering. ‘I want Lucy to experience the Nile the best possible way. But those dahabiyehs are so darn slow––’
    ‘They are, ’ Frances put in. ‘If the wind drops, or you get stuck on a sandbank, you can sit there for ever – that happened to you once, didn’t it, Eve?’
    ‘Well, perhaps not for ever, Frances,’ Evelyn said, ‘but you can get becalmed for days and even the most beautiful river can get boring. Anyway, I’m my father’s daughter – I like speed , just as Pups does. So I adore the train – I love whizzing through the dark – and then waking up with the desert on one side and all the hubbub of Luxor on the other.’
    ‘And there’s a dining car on the train,’ Helen put in, ‘and mighty civilised it is. French food, lovely wine, the desert flashing past––’
    ‘And efficient plumbing, Helen.’ Evelyn laughed. ‘Which definitely cannot be said of dahabiyehs or the steamboats . ’
    ‘That is true,’ Miss Mack conceded, beginning to look anxious. ‘The plumbing in all boats leaves much to be desired.’
    ‘Daddy always says the steamboats can be very unhealthy , don’t you, Daddy?’ Frances said, on a note of innocent appeal – and it was then I began to understand that there was an agenda here, that Frances had initiated it, and that the Winlocks, aided and abetted by Evelyn, intended to push it through.
    ‘Unhealthy? Heavens above – I hadn’t considered that, which is very remiss of me. I have to be mindful of Lucy’s welfare, she… Do you really think that, Herbert?’
    ‘Well, I wouldn’t wish to alarm you,’ Winlock replied, straight-faced. ‘But there can be a rat problem – Nile rats are gigantic, you know. And those boats vary greatly in their standards of hygiene… ’
    He left the sentence hanging, leaving it to