Death comes as the end – Agatha Christie
Renisenb stood looking out over the Nile.
In the distance she could hear faintly the upraised voices of her brothers, Yahmose and Sobek, disputing as to whether or not the dikes in a certain place needed strengthening. Sobek’s voice was high and confident as always. He had the habit of asserting his views with easy certainty. Yahmose’s voice was low and grumbling in tone; it expressed doubt and anxiety. Yahmose was always in a state of anxiety over something or other. He was the eldest son and during his father’s absence on the northern estates, the management of the farm lands was more or less in his hands. Yahmose was slow, prudent and prone to look for difficulties where none existed. He was a heavily built, slow-moving man with none of Sobek’s gaiety and confidence.
From her early childhood Renisenb could remember hearing these elder brothers of hers arguing in just those selfsame accents. It gave her suddenly a feeling of security… She was at home again. Yes, she had come home…
Yet as she looked once more across the pale, shining river, her rebellion and pain mounted again. Khay, her young husband, was dead… Khay with his laughing face and his strong shoulders. Khay was with Osiris in the Kingdom of the Dead – and she, Renisenb, his dearly loved wife, was left desolate. Eight years they had had together
-she had come to him as little more than a child – and now she had returned widowed, with Khay’s child, Teti, to her father’s house.
It seemed to her at this moment as though she had never been away…
She welcomed that thought…
She would forget those eight years – so full of unthinking happiness, so torn and destroyed by loss and pain.
Yes, forget them, put them out of her mind. Become once more Renisenb, Imhotep the ka-priest’s daughter, the unthinking, unfeeling girl. This love of a husband and brother had been a cruel thing, deceiving her by its sweetness. She remembered the strong bronze shoulders, the laughing mouth – now Khay was embalmed, swathed in bandages, protected with amulets in his journey through the other world. No more Khay in this world to sail on the Nile and catch fish and laugh up into the sun whilst she, stretched out in the boat with little Teti on her lap, laughed back at him…
Renisenb thought:
“I will not think of it. It is over! Here I am at home. Everything is the same as it was. I, too, shall be the same presently. It will all be as before. Teti has forgotten already. She plays with the other children and laughs.”
Renisenb turned abruptly and made her way back towards the house, passing on the way some loaded donkeys being driven towards the riverbank. She passed by the cornbins and the outhouses and through the gateway into the courtyard. It was very pleasant in the courtyard. There was the artificial lake, surrounded by flowering oleanders and jasmines and shaded by sycamore fig trees. Teti and the other children were playing there now, their voices rising shrill and clear. They were running in and out of the little pavilion that stood at one side of the lake. Renisenb noticed that Teti was playing with a wooden lion whose mouth opened and shut by pulling a string, a toy which she herself had loved as a child. She thought again, gratefully, “I have come home…” Nothing was changed here; all was as it had been. Here life was safe, constant, unchanging. Teti was now the child and she one of the many mothers enclosed by the home walls – but the framework, the essence of things, was unchanged.
Death comes as the end – Agatha Christie 2/245 | Previous page | Next page |