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about
    such things, one of the most celebrated
    Egyptologists of his time. 'He's right up there with
    Petrie and Carter,' one of his colleagues had once
    told her. 'If there's anyone alive who's done more
    to advance our understanding of the Old Kingdom
    I've yet to meet them.'
    She ought to have been proud. As it was, her
    father's academic achievements had always left her
    cold. All she knew, and all she ever had known
    from earliest childhood, was that he seemed more
    content in a world that had been dead for 4,000
    years than he did with his own family. Even her
    name, Tara, had been chosen because it in-
    corporated the name of the Egyptian sun god Ra.
    Each year he would travel out to Egypt to
    excavate. To start with he'd gone only for a month
    or so, leaving each November and returning just
    before Christmas. As she had grown older, how-
    ever, and her parents' marriage had slowly broken
    apart, he'd spent longer and longer there.
    'Your father's seeing another woman,' her
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    mother had once told her. 'Her name's Egypt.' It
    had been meant as a joke, although neither of
    them had laughed.
    Then the cancer had come and her mother had
    begun her rapid decline. It was during this period
    that, for the first time, Tara had really come to
    hate her father. As the disease chewed away at her
    mother's lungs and liver and her father had kept
    his distance, unable to offer even a few salutary
    words of support, she had felt an all-consuming
    fury towards this man who seemed to value tombs
    and old potsherds more than his own flesh and
    blood. A few days before her mother's death she
    had called him in Egypt and screamed obscenities
    down the phone at him, surprising even herself
    with the violence of her rage. At the funeral they
    had barely acknowledged each other, and after-
    wards he had moved to Egypt full time, teaching
    eight months of the year at Cairo's American
    University and excavating for the other four. They
    didn't speak for almost two years.
    And yet, for all that, there were good memories
    of him too. Once, for instance, as a young child,
    she had been crying about something and to stop
    her tears he had performed a magic trick whereby
    he had appeared to remove his thumb from the
    rest of his hand. She had laughed uproariously and
    urged him to do it again and again, staring in
    wonder as he had repeatedly separated his thumb
    from his palm, groaning in mock agony as he
    waved the severed digit around in the air.
    On the morning of her fifteenth birthday – and
    this was her favourite memory – she had woken to
    find an envelope addressed to her sitting on her
    44
    mantelpiece. Opening it, she had found the first
    clue in a treasure trail that had taken her all round
    the house and garden before eventually leading
    her up into the attic, where she had discovered an
    exquisite gold necklace concealed at the bottom of
    an old trunk. Each clue had taken the form of a
    rhyming verse and been written on parchment,
    with drawings and symbols to add to the air of
    mystery. Her father must have spent hours arrang-
    ing it all. Later he had taken her mother and her
    out to dinner, regaling them both with wonderful
    tales of excavations and discoveries and eccentric
    academics.
    'You look beautiful, Tara,' he had told her, lean-
    ing forward to adjust the new gold necklace,
    which she had worn specially. 'The most beautiful
    girl in the world. I am very, very proud of you.'
    It was moments like these – few and far between
    as they were – that somehow balanced out her
    father's coldness and self-absorption, and bound
    her to him. It was why she had phoned him two
    years after her mother's funeral, asking for a
    reconciliation after their long silence. And it was, in
    a sense, why she was travelling to Egypt now.
    Because she knew that deep down, in his own way
    and despite his innumerable faults, he was a good
    man and he loved her, and needed her too, just as
    she needed him. And of course there was always