The Mistress of Nothing (14 page)

IN MAY MY LADY TOOK THE DECISION TO STAY IN UPPER EGYPT FOR
the summer. It was the most economical thing to do, she said. Mustafa Agha told her that she would be the first
Frangi
in living memory to remain in Luxor through the hottest period of the year; not even the most devoted Egyptologists and adventurers were inclined to stay. My Lady reported this to me, laughing: “So we are pioneers, after all, in our way. We will stay here, to bake.” Sir Alick was planning to come to Egypt for a visit in November: “I’ll write to him now,” she said, “and ask him to come earlier, and we can go to Cairo to meet him in the autumn.”

I was happy at the idea of staying in the south. My Lady’s fragile health had been stable for more than two months and the sun really did seem to be helping her to heal. And it suited me to remain in Luxor, tucked away in familiar obscurity. Mr. Taylor had departed and we had returned to our relaxed, easy ways. I spent my days at my Lady’s side, and my nights with Omar.

And so, the heat. Throughout May each moment felt hotter than the last. By June our days took on a stately quality; Omar and I attempted to complete the necessary domestic tasks in the early morning light and then kept our movements to a minimum for the rest of the day. My Lady did as little as possible, morning, noon, and night. Venturing into the sun required preparation, and soon she gave up on going out entirely. By this time neither she nor I cared much about the color of our skin; one afternoon my Lady turned to me and said, out of the blue, “You look as though you’ve been dipped in walnut juice, my dear, like a true Arab.” I laughed and then caught sight of my hands and thought, Yes, it is as though I am entirely henna-stained. It was too hot to eat but Omar kept up a constant stream of delicious morsels from his kitchen; he saw it as part of his duty to make sure neither my Lady nor I lost any weight despite our lack of appetite. Before the sun came up we closed all the shutters in the house against the heat; after sunset we opened the shutters and moved outside, my Lady sleeping on the balcony at the front of the house, overlooking the Nile, both Omar and I on the terrace at the back. Inside in the dark during the day, outside in the dark at night; we began to feel like creatures of darkness, cowering from the intense sunlight that streamed in through the smallest gap in the shades. Candles could not be lit, as they attracted huge swarms of vicious little insects and even a single tiny flame felt like an inferno. “My one loss now,” my Lady said to me, “is that there is never enough light to read.”

These conditions, on their own, were not too terrible; there was an awe-inspiring intensity to the heat to which we surrendered, giving ourselves up to the awkward luxury of doing nothing. But then the sandstorms began, when full days and parts of weeks were lost as the
simoom
whipped up the desert and deposited great swaths of it on the village. I understood now how so many of the temples and monuments came to be up to their necks in the stuff; if I had sat outside during one of these storms, I would have been covered up like an ancient monument myself, only fit to be dug out at some distant future date. The
simoom
brought nothing with it that resembled a cooling breeze, only dust and sand filtering through the shutters and under the doors, and yet more heat, and some days everything we ate, everything we drank, was full of it. I forgot what it was like not to feel grit in my mouth, between my teeth, under my tongue, all the time.

The afternoon was the most difficult, when the heat plateaued and settled down to stay, and something approaching boredom threatened to impinge on the day. Both my Lady and I migrated to the kitchen, where Omar would get on with his duties, very slowly, all the while quizzing us on our vocabulary, correcting our pronunciation. My Lady spelled words for me, using Omar’s wooden spoon to draw the script in the wheat flour he had spilled on the floor. “Repeat after me,” he would say in his special tutorial tone; if either of us had had the strength we would have teased him, but instead we repeated each word dutifully, my Lady on a divan against the far wall, me lying flat on the floor beneath the workbench. Sometimes he’d ask a question with his back to us, but when he turned round, expecting an answer, he’d find us both asleep. My Lady tried to write letters home, when she could find enough light, but even letters to her beloved husband that she would ordinarily write in an hour or two took a week to complete.

By now we had lost all sense of modesty inside the French House and dressed in the minimum amount of clothing required, my Lady in a long, loose shirt, me in my lightest Egyptian trousers and tunic, my feet bare, my hair tied back and pulled away from my face. Only Omar made any real effort to look respectable but even he made do without a sash, without a waistcoat. My Lady demanded I cut her short hair shorter still, until it was quite mannish, shot through with gray. Mohammed and Ahmed came early and did their chores as quickly as possible before heading off once again. The linen of our sweat-soaked shirts and trousers grew thin with the washerwoman’s constant pounding and rinsing.

In running the house, I had come to rely on Omar more than ever; while the heat was terrible for anyone, at least Omar had a little more experience of living in it and, indeed, surviving it. I watched him carefully and copied his movements, which were even neater and more minimal than before. I relied on him to help me complete most tasks, especially during the days when the air outside was full of swirling sand; now only the most intimate tasks of my Lady’s toilet were mine and mine alone. While she rested I retired to my room to sew (though mostly I napped), and when Omar came in he would lie on the floor at my feet, rising only to roll out his prayer mat when the call to prayer came. I watched him pray, feeling a pure and precious ease.

The cattle murrain in Upper Egypt continued to rage, long past the season when it normally abated; virtually all the cattle in Luxor had been infected now and were dead or dying. Men were having to do the work of oxen, turning the water wheel, dragging the plow over the fields, all through the hot season. Though we had been able to help with sickness in the people, my Lady and I were powerless to help with sickness in the cows, and Omar reported to us daily of the losses; Mustafa Agha had lost thirty-three head and had only three left in total. On the rare occasions when I ventured out of the French House, I would see small groups of women, boys, and the few men the Pasha had not taken away to work on his grand schemes dragging the dead animals through the village and across the fields to the burial site. The town elders, Mustafa Agha among them, struggled to cope with the disposing of the carcasses and took to burning as well as burying the cattle. When the wind changed direction, the smell was terrible.

The Nile rose, and rose, and rose further still, inundating the valley, at places growing as broad and placid as a lake, its scenic beauty giving no indication of the havoc it would wreak if it rose above expected levels this year. All we could do—my Lady and I included—was wait and see.

But the dust storms did not rage continually, and there were days when the sky was so clear and blue, the sun so pure and strong, that I thought I would weep with happiness, despite the heat. When the wind came in from the north, the air cooled slightly. On these days Omar and I got out to market early, as did all the people of Luxor, and the mood was light and clear in the village, everyone greeting each other, gossiping and arguing with great relief. Because of the cattle disease, prices of milk and meat in the market had soared, and so Omar turned his cooking skills to the vegetables and grains available—stewed apricots with nuts and raisins, cucumber minced with watermelon and mint, fresh lime from our garden squeezed over everything.

When they could move from their houses, my Lady’s friends returned for the salon; Omar served tea with the
narguile,
which my Lady now used as though puffing on a communal water pipe had been part of her routine all her life. After the conversation and exchange of views—slightly less vehement than had been the case in the cooler part of the year—were finished, Sheikh Yusuf stayed on to give my Lady her Arabic lessons, but even Sheikh Yusuf, normally so formal and restrained, kept his clothes to a minimum upon entering the house and lay on the carpet while delivering his lesson, sometimes falling asleep.

And I grew. I do not mean that I grew larger. I grew within myself, as the baby grew inside me.

It was easy to hide the changes in my physical self; for the first few months I became thinner than before with the sickness and the heat; once I began to round out a little I simply adjusted my Egyptian clothes, which are, after all, made for modesty, made to disguise the true shape of one’s body. I’m tall for a woman, and I have a good strong frame, and I can carry extra weight easily. One afternoon my Lady said to me, “You are looking particularly well, Sally, your skin, your shape; obviously this climate suits you as well as it suits me.” But that was the closest she came to noticing that I was different, that I was changing.

I felt him kick in June, like a little owl in my womb, gentle, flickering. Omar would lie with his head pressed against my belly, whispering. “Your mother is very beautiful,” he would say. “She carries you as if she is a Queen—”

“A Pharaoh,” I’d interrupt. “A lady Pharaoh, if there ever was such a thing.”

“A goddess. An ancient goddess. And we both know that you will be a good, strong man when you grow up …” And our whispering would continue late into the night until we’d roll into each other’s arms and begin where it all began, once again.

We took such pleasure in each other. We took such deep and abiding pleasure in each other’s bodies.

I WHISPERED TO OMAR, “WE WON’T TELL HER NOW.”

He stroked my hair.

“We can’t tell her now, with the heat, and her plans for Sir Alick’s visit in the autumn. She’s so well, we must not disturb her in any way.”

He did not reply.

“We both know—we both know how much she loves children. Look how she dotes on Ahmed.” I paused. “When the child arrives, all will be revealed and celebrated.”

“We won’t tell her now,” I continued.

“No. We’ll tell her later,” I said.

Omar had fallen asleep.

BY THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, WE HAD HAD ENOUGH OF BAKING
ourselves. It was time to travel to Cairo. The trip down the Nile was arduous, the heat debilitating for even the
reis
and his crew on the
dahabieh
my Lady had hired for the journey. Being out on the water had no cooling effect; instead the surface of the Nile was like an enormous mirror, intensifying the sun, burning. The days and nights merged and we did not sightsee but stayed on the deck beneath the awning, discussing ice and snow and other chilling topics when we could summon the energy.

Despite my Lady’s letters to her husband telling him of her plans, Sir Alick was not in Cairo waiting when we arrived at the end of September.

“He’s not here, is he, Sally?” she said when we disembarked at Boulak and found no one there to meet us.

“Perhaps the letters didn’t reach him in time for him to change his plans, my Lady.”

She looked at me calmly. “Perhaps not, Sally, perhaps not,” she said, but I could see what she was thinking: I’ve been gone from him so long it’s as though I am dead already. She swallowed hard and blinked, and frowned, and showed no other sign of the tremendous disappointment I knew she was feeling.

And, in fact, there had been a death: my Lady’s friend, Mr. William Thayer, the American consul who had been so good to us when we arrived in Alexandria, who had found Omar for us. This was sorrowful news for my Lady. Omar quickly located another house for us to rent—we had planned to stay with Mr. Thayer—but after the silence and peace of Luxor my Lady and I found Cairo an abrupt and not altogether welcome change. The house, though cool and compact, with an inner courtyard full of fragrant orange trees and its own water supply, was in the middle of the
Frangi
quarter; whenever my Lady and I ventured out, we were assailed by French and Italian voices as well as English, which my Lady found jarring. “I’ve traveled so far from Europe now,” she said, “it disturbs my Muslim nerves to be reminded of it.” We had forgotten what it was like to live in a noisy, busy city, and while I acclimatized and began to enjoy the bustle and fray of Cairo with its great bazaars and mosques and crowded streets, my Lady retired to her divan, her spirits as low as when we first arrived in Alexandria and thought we had come to an awful place.

The day after we moved in, Omar knocked on the door of my room first thing. We’d had less privacy on the
dahabieh
than in the French House, but now we were settled, our rooms chosen carefully, I knew we’d soon be together in the night once again. I was getting dressed and I called to him to come in.

“You don’t need to knock,” I said, laughing, but I stopped when I saw his face. “Omar? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong, Sally,” he said. “Today I am going to visit my family. I’ve spoken to
Sitti
Duff Gordon, who has given me permission.”