Authors: Roberta Latow
‘No, just not happy enough to go on, Eliza.’
‘You’re saying we deserve better than what we’ve got, is that it?’
‘Yes, I think we need a chance to go out and look for the passion, the adventure, that’s missing from our lives. We married each other because we were friends who cared about each other. We had Samantha and she bound us together, gave our marriage stability and contentment.’
‘But it hasn’t been enough?’
‘We’re still young enough to try again for more, be alone for a while, get used to ourselves again, discover a wider world and a more thrilling way to live and love. The way I feel is not just for me. I sometimes see a yearning for something I’m not giving you, there in your eyes. I’ve never been able either to fathom or satisfy that yearning. You’re unfulfilled and I have caught that sense of unfulfilment from you.’
‘I never knew it was so obvious. Oh, Robert, I
haven’t hurt you, have I? I simply could not bear it if I have.’
‘No, no, never think that. I wouldn’t have missed these last eleven years with you for the world, nor having Samantha, but it seems to me that it’s time for us to move on. We will always have what we have had, a deep and abiding affection and friendship for one another.’
Ten-year-old Samantha was thrilled at the prospect of living with her father in London. She was made to understand her parents’ divorce to be a necessity so that they might all remain together as family and friends, and took her mother’s decision to settle in Oxford alone as part of a new life that Samantha would eventually be part of.
Eliza refused to be kept in any way or form by Robert. She left the marital home empty-handed for the second time, with the exception of a ten-year-old BMW, a suitcase of clothes and a loan of ten thousand pounds from Robert so that she might begin another life.
Detached and free was what Eliza wanted to be, and to find her place in the sun – something she felt she had not done since she had left Tuscany all those years ago, never to return. Tuscany … how happy and uncomplicated her life had been there, the wonderful innocent years in love with Vittorio. They were on her mind often, they were her companions during those first lonely days on her own again. Returning was an option but one she somehow felt she was as yet unready to take. She had things to do in her life before she could honourably return. And for Eliza to return to her beloved Tuscany honourably meant saying
she was sorry for the pain and humiliation she had caused Vittorio when she rejected him for John. Still unmarried, Vittorio had remained loyal throughout the years. He was the tenant farmer working the land that kept the Villa Montecatini going for the Forresters, having inherited the job after his father’s demise.
Alone in Oxford in a rather shabby bed-sit Eliza was unable to settle. She had drifted too far away from herself. But she did accomplish one thing: she came to realise she had spent more years of her life than not serving husbands and trying to serve her children. They had been years without thought for her own desires and needs, years of lost youth and dreams. Effie, Constanza, Dendra and Clara, all married now with families of their own, remained supportive of her, understanding and sympathetic towards their sister in spite of their being, except for Clara, geographically apart. Dulcima, living with Clara and her husband at Little Barrington since Julian’s death several years before, remained close to Eliza, seeing her more often than the others. It was Clara who pointed out to Robert that of all the Forrester girls Eliza had always been more of a European than an Englishwoman, mentally and emotionally. Abroad suited Eliza, and it was Clara who influenced Robert to do something to help her find herself in another country, away from her Englishness and her past failures.
As chance would have it, it was only a few days later that Robert was approached by an old friend and colleague for help. Doctor Cousins recruited doctors to give some of their time gratis to work in third-world countries where his small organisation established hospitals and clinics. Doctor Cousins was
in England looking to hire someone to run a provincial hospital being established on the banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt. That person had to be someone who was quick to learn languages and could speak Italian, because it was an Italian and Egyptian collaboration being funded from Rome.
While they were looking for someone efficient, even more important was the need to have someone who could relate to people: mostly poor, uneducated, wary of hospitals and doctors, modern medicine, modern anything. A woman, the right woman, could achieve something worthwhile by serving a large community of remote villages that thrived, at considerable distances from one another, along the banks of the Nile between Luxor and Aswan and from the river inland among the stony hills and desert. These were impoverished people from a remote part of Egypt who had to be won over to a better health care system.
Robert knew instinctively that this was the job, the place, for Eliza at this time of her life. Doctor Cousins could hardly believe his luck once he met Eliza. That she was fluent in Italian was such a bonus since most of the supply system and administrational red tape were dealt with in Italian; that she had studied law and had been a Justice of the Peace indicated to Doctor Cousins that she would know how to settle the endless squabbles between the Italian and Egyptian authorities. The patients would see in her a woman who would not take sides against them. Forty-eight hours after Eliza met Doctor Cousins, at the age of thirty-seven, with two broken marriages and three children left behind, she was gone from England.
* * *
Eliza wanted to feel that surge of excitement that a new life, travel, strange people and their customs, can bring. She sensed it was all there somewhere beneath the surface of her life but she was too worn out from failure, the mechanics of survival and a just-adequate love, to feel it. But if excitement didn’t happen on that flight something else did. As soon as the wheels of the Boeing 747 left the Tarmac at Heathrow and they surged at a steep angle up into the sky, Eliza experienced a fluttering sensation in the pit of her stomach and felt her heart race. Beads of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Then, as suddenly as those sensations had appeared, they vanished. She wiped her upper lip with her fingers and sighed with relief as she sensed her past begin to drop away: the husbands, bad marriages, children, life in the Cotswolds and London.
By the time the cabin speaker announced the white cliffs of Dover could be seen through the windows of her side of the plane, Eliza had gathered sufficient strength to smile and wave farewell as the chalky cliffs receded to no more than a slim line of white slashing the blue sky and the sea.
Several hours and a bottle of champagne later, the heat of Egypt and a hot wind blowing in from the Western desert wrapped themselves around Eliza as she walked down the steps from the plane into the chaos of Cairo airport. It was difficult to work out whether it was the heat and dust, the sights and sounds, or the sheer volume and vibrancy of the people that triggered in her something that made the past recede and become no more than history leaving her feeling young and fresh, ready to experience everything Egypt
had to offer. As if from the depths of her soul that surge of excitement and adventure she had yearned to feel when she had been in flight surfaced, and a long lost Eliza, from before husbands and children, domesticity and lost-self esteem, was reborn. She was filled with enthusiasm, amused by her fellow passengers complaining of the heat and dirt and disorder on the Tarmac before they even entered the terminal. Unlike them Eliza embraced the mayhem and immediately became a part of it. She felt as if she had come home from a very long and boring journey.
She was to have been met by a representative from the Italian Embassy but no one claimed her. She had travelled light, with one large piece of luggage, and sat on that outside the terminal surrounded by people laden with all sorts of bundles and suitcases, pushing past her to enter or leave. There she waited at what should have been a taxi rank but was instead a jumbled traffic jam of cars and taxis. The travellers and luggage carriers dashing between cars, to deposit baggage in car boots, on roof racks or shove it into the automobiles, appeared to be taking it all in their stride. The din of honking horns, shouting, and policemen’s whistles, the clouds of exhaust pumped from creaking pipes, was pure theatre of the absurd but deliciously Egyptian, an introduction to the Cairo to come.
Two hours later, having tried several times to catch an empty taxi without success, Eliza was still sitting on her luggage, resigned to waiting to be claimed. Eventually she was, when the embassy’s car arrived, Italian flags flying from stainless steel poles mounted on the well-polished fenders. The embassy representative, a man a few years younger than herself,
dressed impeccably in a white linen suit, emerged from the fifteen-year-old Rolls-Royce and rushed into the terminal, obviously in search of someone. Eliza guessed she was that someone and so, after handing her suitcase to the chauffeur, she followed him.
After profuse apologies, not for being late but because he had not recognised her, they settled in the rear of the car. Eliza was amused at how many times she had to tell the young aide that, yes, she was Eliza Flemming, and yes, she was going to run the Nile Hospital and Clinic. They spoke in Italian as if they were great friends and he beamed with pleasure at the idea of being the one to present her at dinner at the embassy that evening, because as he explained, ‘You are not what we expected.’
Eliza bathed and changed into the one long evening dress she had brought with her for just such an occasion as an elegant dinner at some foreign embassy, which Doctor Cousins had explained she must at times take the opportunity to attend in the cause of good public relations. She left her Nile Hilton room for the lobby. There waiting for her was the same young man, Mario Derotti. All the way to the embassy he beamed at and flirted with Eliza. She was charmed, amused, and not at all interested, although for the first time in many years she felt stirrings of desire such as she had known with Vittorio and John and it felt good.
Eliza had had a good sex life with Robert, better than good, but the wild passion she had experienced with Vittorio and John, the obsessive yearning to vanish into sexual oblivion, had never been there. She had given up those things for kindness, a good heart, admiration and love from a man who did not know what it was
to be cruel to her, did nothing to denigrate her as John had done. Robert had seduced her with friendship, not sex, and they had both made the mistake of believing it had been love, could eventually be passion.
Mario placed a caressing hand on her knee and gazed into her eyes. His voice had dropped to a sensual whisper. She gazed back into the young man’s eyes and found it hard to believe that she had only had three men in her life. Mario was tempting. Effie’s words to Eliza, backed up by Constanza and Clara when they had seen her off at Heathrow, came to mind. ‘Eliza, I think you did it in reverse – the marriages and babies before you had your fling. Now’s the time to have your men.’
‘We mean it, Eliza, you’ve had marriage, had your children. It’s a case of been there, done that. Now go for sex and romance without the strings,’ advised Constanza.
‘At least for a while. But, darling, don’t, I beg you, this time round mix them up with love.’
A smile crossed Eliza’s lips and Mario took that as a sign of interest. ‘I never expected anything like you,’ he told her, awe in his voice as he raised her hand and lowered his head to kiss her fingers.
‘What did you expect, Mario?’
‘Middle-aged, unattractive, bulky and dressed from Oxfam. A worthy woman, a do-gooder not so interested in men as she might be in women, although that can be interesting to watch.’
‘Mario!’
‘Have I shocked you, Mrs Flemming?’ he asked, a twinkle in his eyes, obviously delighted with himself.
‘No, but you are hardly being discreet, giving yourself away as to what a liberal sensualist you
are with someone you’ve only known for a few hours.’
‘I can’t help it, you’re a very foxy lady.’
Eliza playfully slapped the hand that was holding hers and told him, ‘Forget it, Mario. As attractive as you are, it’s not going to happen.’
‘I had to try, you understand?’
‘Of course, it’s the nature of the Italian man,’ she answered, and knowing smiles appeared on their faces before Mario hunched his shoulders and looked for a moment just a little sad.
They were inching along in the evening traffic on the Sharia El Nil and it was fun for Eliza to be flirting with this young man. She liked him, his Italian charm and flattery. He seemed to fit in perfectly, this ‘wanting to be decadent’ young foreign diplomat in residence, with the heat and the pungent smells: garlic and jasmine, desert heat, dust and carbon monoxide. The black sky was studded with a myriad of stars and besides a bright white crescent moon, yellow lamplight hissed from Kerosene lanterns, highlighting exotic fruits, tired-looking vegetables on the flat carts parked on the Nile side of the road, and the river flowing darkly, ridden lazily by lateen sails in the soft warm breeze that looked like winged creatures from another age.
The Italian Embassy was exactly what Eliza had expected: a marvellous, extremely elegant, stone and marble mansion designed by a French architect at the turn of the century. It was surrounded by high walls and had a handsome iron gate and beautiful gardens overlooking the Nile. The Ambassador was charming, his wife as elegant and chic as only Roman aristocrats can be. The other dinner guests, of which
there were twenty-seven, were a dazzling array: the women all without exception beauties and dressed in the best French and Italian couture, jewelled and groomed to grace soirées such as the dinner Eliza was attending. They flirted discreetly, the Greta Garbos of the Nile. Eliza thought she looked extremely English with her blonde hair done in a French twist at the nape of her neck, her fair skin, and smart lipstick red crêpe-de-chine evening dress that looked little more than a long underslip cut on the bias with garnet straps over her shoulders and no jewellery. A Versace left over from her social life with Robert.