Chapter 6
A Brother's Keeper
T he British Museum is, by any reasonable assessment, a monument to the conviction that the world can be catalogued and comprehended, an ambition that I find both admirable and deluded.
Its great halls are filled with the collected spoils of empire, the plundered art and stolen antiquities of every civilisation that has risen and fallen within the reach of British power, and its visitors move through the galleries with the particular reverence that people reserve for institutions that confirm their sense of their own importance.
I had been coming here since childhood, first with my mother, who regarded the Egyptian collection as a useful training ground for the observation of mortality, and later on my own, because the museum offered something that was increasingly scarce in my adult life: the freedom to observe without being observed.
I brought Edmund because he loved it. Not in the measured, strategic way that I loved things, which is to say, not at all, but in the expansive, uncomplicated way that was characteristic of everything he did.
He loved the mummies. He loved the Rosetta Stone.
He loved the Assyrian winged bulls with their enormous, staring eyes and their bearded human faces, which he drew in his sketchbook with a fidelity that was all the more remarkable for being achieved without any formal training.
He loved the Parthenon sculptures, which he called the belly men because of the abdominal musculature that distinguished the male figures from the more modestly rendered females, and he loved the clock room, where the mechanisms of ancient timepieces fascinated him with a mechanical intricacy he could follow even when other forms of complexity eluded him.
We entered through the main entrance on Great Russell Street, Edmund walking slightly ahead of me in his eagerness, his breath fogging in the December air, his attention already fixed on the massive Ionic columns that flanked the doorway.
He was wearing his dark coat and his grey scarf and his hat, which he had put on crooked and which I reached forward to adjust as we climbed the steps, smoothing it into a position that was closer to correct without being entirely so, because Edmund's hat, like Edmund's collar, resisted permanent correction.
"Cecilia, can we go to the mummies first? Please? I want to see the one with the gold on his face. The one with the cats."
"The mummies, then. But you must not touch the glass."
"I never touch the glass. Dorothea says touching the glass leaves marks, and the marks make the guards cross, and when the guards are cross, everyone has a bad morning. I don't want anyone to have a bad morning."
"Very sensible."
The museum was quiet in the late morning, the crowds thin and dispersed, the galleries echoing with the hushed footsteps of a handful of visitors and the murmured commentary of the guides.
We made our way through the Greek and Roman galleries, past the vitrines of pottery and jewellery and sculpture that Edmund passed without interest, because the Greeks and Romans, in his estimation, were not as interesting as the Egyptians, who had the good sense to wrap their dead in bandages and put them in boxes.
His priorities were, I had long ago concluded, more sensible than they appeared.
In the Egyptian gallery, Edmund pressed his face close to the glass of the case that held the mummy he favoured, a nobleman of the Twenty-first Dynasty whose gilded funerary mask stared out at the viewer with the serene, painted expression of a man who had been dead for three thousand years and had made his peace with it.
Edmund studied the mask with the focused attention he brought to everything that interested him, his breath fogging the glass in small, regular clouds, and his fingers, those perpetually busy fingers, traced the outline of the mask's features in the air, following the curves of the painted eyes and the line of the golden headdress.
"He looks very calm," Edmund said. "Do you think he was calm? When they wrapped him up? Or do you think he was frightened?"
"I think he was probably confident. The Egyptians believed very strongly in the afterlife. They considered death a transition, not an ending."
"What's a transition?"
"A change from one state to another. Like when the seasons change from summer to autumn."
Edmund considered this. "But in summer the trees have leaves and in autumn the leaves fall off. So the tree changes. But it's still the same tree."
"Yes."
"So if you die, you change, but you're still the same person?"
This was a theological question of considerably more complexity than Edmund's usual range, and I suspected it had been prompted not by the mummy but by Richard, whose death, despite my best efforts at explanation, remained a source of confusion and intermittent distress.
I had told Edmund that Richard had gone away, which was true, and that he would not be coming back, which was also true, and that it was all right to be sad about it, which was a performance of empathy that cost me nothing and provided Edmund with a framework for processing an experience that his limited comprehension could not fully accommodate.
"In some traditions, yes," I said. "In others, death is an ending."
"Which do you think?"
The question was directed at the mummy rather than at me, and Edmund's voice carried the particular quality of earnest curiosity that made his conversation, in my experience, both endearing and dangerous.
Endangering because Edmund said whatever came into his mind, without the filters and calculations that governed the speech of everyone else I knew, and what came into his mind was, by virtue of his innocence, frequently more revealing than he intended.
"I think," I said, choosing my words with care, "that it does not matter what I think. What matters is how we behave while we are alive."
Edmund nodded, accepting this with the easy trust that characterised his response to everything I said.
He returned his attention to the mummy, and I stood beside him in the quiet gallery and watched him watch the dead, and I felt, as I often felt in Edmund's presence, the particular sensation of being in a room with someone who perceived the world in a way that was fundamentally different from my own.
Edmund saw the mummy and wondered whether it had been frightened.
I saw the mummy and noted the quality of the gilding and the condition of the linen wrappings and the effectiveness of the funerary practices that had preserved it for three millennia.
The difference between us was not one of intelligence but of orientation.
Edmund's attention was directed outward, toward the world and its inhabitants, toward feeling and wonder and the simple, undiluted experience of being alive.
Mine was directed inward, toward the mechanics of perception, the architecture of performance, the calculus of advantage.
We moved on from the mummy to the other cases in the Egyptian gallery, Edmund pausing before each one with the absorption of a man examining a shop window, his face pressed close to the glass, his breath fogging the surface in small oval patches that evaporated almost as quickly as they formed.
He was fascinated by the canopic jars, those elegant containers designed to preserve the organs of the dead for the journey to the afterlife, and he asked me what each one held, and I told him, because the information was readily available and because Edmund's questions, however childlike, deserved answers that were accurate.
The stomach, the liver, the lungs, the intestines.
The Egyptians, I explained, believed that the soul required its body to be intact in order to enter the afterlife, and so they preserved everything they could, drying and wrapping and sealing each organ in its appointed vessel.
Edmund considered this with the particular gravity he brought to all matters of mortality and said that he thought it was a good idea to keep everything in its proper place, because if things were not in their proper places, they tended to get lost, and getting lost was very inconvenient.
I did not argue with this reasoning. It was, in its own way, as coherent as any philosophical system I had encountered, and considerably more honest than most.
A party of schoolboys entered the gallery, their master trailing behind them with the harassed expression of a man who has been tasked with maintaining order among a group of creatures for whom order is an alien concept.
Edmund watched them with the wary interest of a small animal encountering a herd of larger ones, pressing slightly closer to my side as they passed.
He did not like crowds, and he did not like strangers, and a group of boys, who represented both crowds and strangers in concentrated form, was one of his least favourite things.
He endured their passage with the stoic patience of a person who has learned that unpleasantness, like the weather, is something that must be tolerated rather than changed.
"Can we go to the bulls now?" he asked, as soon as the schoolboys had moved on.
"The bulls, then."
We spent an hour in the Egyptian galleries before moving to the Assyrian room, where Edmund sat on a bench before the carved panels from Nimrud and drew the winged bulls in his sketchbook with a concentration that excluded everything else from his awareness.
I sat beside him and read a book I had brought, a volume of essays by Montaigne that I had read before and was reading again because Montaigne's prose had the particular quality of engaging the mind without overwhelming it, making it ideal for situations in which one's attention was divided between a text and the management of a companion.