The Mistress of Nothing (20 page)

IN THE WEEK THAT FOLLOWED THIS INCIDENT, MY LADY CONVINCED
herself that I was trying to persuade Omar to divorce Mabrouka so that I would be his only wife and my marriage could be recognized by English law. Nothing Omar said, none of his denials, would persuade my Lady otherwise. I pleaded with him to persuade her to hear me out, to allow me to speak to her; he tried his best, but she would not agree, saying, “Do not ask such things of me.” At the salon one evening—the regular salons continued and were as jovial and convivial as ever, as far as I could hear, as though there was no domestic drama taking place within the French House—my Lady insisted that Sheikh Yusuf and the magistrate Saleem Effendi oversee her latest decree: she asked Omar to stand in front of her while she laid down the law. “You will not divorce Mabrouka, Omar,” she said. She looked at her guests, adding, “You are my witnesses. Such a cruel injustice will not take place; and if it does, I will make sure, Omar, that you are discharged from your position in my household. English law recognizes only your first wife, her alone, and your marriage to Sally is not recognized as such and never will be. In the eyes of English law, Sally Naldrett is an adulteress.”

The magistrate chuckled, not noticing the look Sheikh Yusuf gave him. “There is no need for this,
Sitti
Duff Gordon,” he said. “English law doesn’t apply in Egypt. It’s the Khedive you need to worry about, and Omar Abu Halaweh’s having two wives is not going to bother Ismail Pasha too much.”

Omar stood with his fists clenched behind his back, composed and still, saying nothing.

He did not come to my room that night. He did not come to my room the following night either. I paced, desperate with worry. Would I lose him now, despite the marriage? When he came in to collect the washing the following morning, he tried to leave again without taking the time to speak to me, without greeting his son. As he went towards the door, I grabbed his arm. He pushed me away, hard.

“What are you doing?” I said. My breast hurt where his hand had struck me.

“I have my duties,” he replied.

“Why are you not coming to see us?”

He hissed at me, “You ask too much of me.”

“I ask too much?” I said. “I ask nothing.”

He stooped, beaten. “She has humiliated me.”

“You must stay strong, Omar. You must stay strong for me, for Abdullah.”

Omar left the room again then. He did not return to my bed for more than a week.

I did not want Omar to divorce Mabrouka; I had never suggested such a thing. I will admit to thinking about it, to wanting to have Omar to myself, especially during those months we were in Cairo waiting for Sir Alick to arrive. When he felt able to get away, Omar would head off to spend the afternoon with his family. He’d return from those visits smelling clean and fresh, as though he had bathed in water made fragrant with rosewater and orange oil, his mood light, and he’d give me the news from his home, smiling, laughing, chasing away my jealousy. He told me all about his parents and his little girl, Yasmina, and Mabrouka as well, whom I imagined to be dark and petite and pretty; he took it for granted that I’d want to hear about them. “She is very shy,” he said, “very quiet. A good wife,” and then he’d look at me and laugh, teasing. “You will meet one day, when we are married, and we return to Cairo with my Lady. Next summer, I think.” From this I guessed that he hadn’t told them our secret either, and that he continued to fulfill all his marital duties, and I said to myself that Egypt was not England, everything in Egypt is entirely unlike anything in England, including Omar, his marriage, and his relations with me. We assured each other that everything—
everything
—would be fine. We promised each other that the future looked grand, as though we were master and mistress of our own fates. And, in fact, Omar was master of his own household, however infrequently he was able to attend to it, while I was mistress of nothing.

That autumn the Cairo house, like the French House in Luxor, had afforded us great privacy. My Lady was laid low, first by illness before Sir Alick’s arrival, and then by—what is the right word?—deep melancholy after Sir Alick departed; she retired early and rose late, leaving the long and sparkling Cairo nights to Omar and me.

In the beginning, I was a stranger to passion. I was a stranger to love itself. And I’ll admit, I was greedy; once I’d tasted both, I was hungry for more. After my parents passed away, my aunt Clara had not been able to care for me and my sister; I was sent into service early and there was no one in the world who looked out for me, just me. Had I been asked, I might have ventured that my Lady was possessed of a distinct fondness for me after all the years I had been her maid, but I wouldn’t have dared to stake my claim in her affections; after all, I was paid for what I provided. Had she been asked herself, I don’t doubt that she would have claimed to love me; my Lady bestowed love and kindness freely and graciously, inspiring the same in those around her, and she was good to the people in her household. It was characteristic of her servants, in England just as much as in Egypt, that we felt privileged to serve her.

But now it was over. My best instinct was to continue to do all I could in the household, while staying out of my Lady’s way, but my best instincts were corroded and corrupted by humiliation, my own and Omar’s beside me. I stayed in my room and lost myself in Abdullah and waited for Omar.

MY ROOM BECAME MY CUSHIONED PRISON. FINALLY, AFTER WHAT
felt like an eternity, late one night when my Lady was asleep, Omar returned to me. When I saw him at my door, I rushed into his arms, and he whispered to me, “My wife. My love. My wife.”

THE PUBLICATION, IN ENGLAND, OF MY LADY’S BOOK OF LETTERS
home came and went as though it had happened to someone else. She told Omar she was glad of the income, but the world of books, the sparks and flare-ups of London literary life, was distant to her now, as unreal as Luxor itself had once been. When she lived in England an event like that would have been a highlight, a huge cause for celebration, marked with parties and suppers and outings. She would have fretted about the critics; she would have sought out the opinions of her writer friends. But in Luxor the day of publication had passed before she remembered to mark it. Instead, she took a glass of mint tea and remarked to Omar, “I feel more Arab than European,” and told him that this feeling, this knowledge, meant as much to her now as any publication.

That spring, unwelcome guests kept arriving; the Nile tour was as popular as ever and, once my Lady’s book was published, it was as though the French House had become a destination as worthy as the Valley of the Kings.

“The truth is that my book,” my Lady said to Omar and Omar reported to me, “will help Sir Alick pay my bills. The more copies they sell, the better. But I never meant for it to serve as an invitation to the whole of London: come and visit the old ruin herself.”

“Of course not,” said Omar. “You do not like to entertain, after all.”

“No,” my Lady laughed, “don’t tease me!”

And, of course, the guests were a diversion and most days it was good for my Lady to see friends, and friends of friends, and friends of those friends even. Baroness Kevenbrinck and Lord and Lady Hopetown passed through and were duly received by Lady Duff Gordon; they, in turn, invited her to supper parties aboard their
dahabiehs.
My Lady traveled by donkey down to where the Hopetowns were moored, led by Ahmed, who told me later that he found a “lovely restful spot” on the riverbank to nap while he waited for his mistress. On the occasion of Lord Dudley’s visit, my Lady threw a great dinner, sending Omar into a cooking frenzy. She invited all her grandest Luxor friends, who dutifully appeared to take a look at the latest English nobleman to journey through their country, but the party was not a success. Omar reported that Lord Dudley amazed everyone present with his lack of manners, his haw-haw laugh and his overboisterous talk; he brooked no ceremony and talked over Mustafa Agha when the consul stood to greet him, as though he couldn’t even begin to imagine how one might address, let alone be addressed by, the natives.

The fourteen-year-old heir to the Rothschild fortune arrived, traveling like a royal prince in a grand steamer with a huge entourage, his expenses paid by Ismail Pasha. Rothschild’s own dragoman, Mohammed Er-Rasheedee, was a respectable elderly man who had fallen ill during the journey up the Nile. Despite the fact that there was a doctor traveling with the party, the young Rothschild took the decision to cast the old man out at Luxor, abandoning him with only his bare wages and a small sum to take him back to Cairo. My Lady was struck with sympathy for the old man and took him into the French House, where she and Omar nursed him. He was racked with high fever and died quietly one day, at noon. My Lady laid his face to the
kiblah,
and those present, Omar included, chanted a prayer,
La illaha illa’allah.
His body was washed and within an hour and a half he was wrapped in linen and carried by the men to the burial place. I watched from my window as everyone in the village made their way through the broken colossi and pylons of the temple to the mosque for prayers; when they finished, they went out to the graveyard to bury the old man, my Lady in her Frankish hat and scarf, the village women veiled and wailing. When they returned to the French House, a boy from the village recited the Quran in the room where Er-Rasheedee had died, his young voice unbroken and clear, and later on, Omar described the day to me. I was as hungry as always for news of the household and village.

Omar also reported that many of these friends, and friends of friends, of my Lady seemed to know all about me and my situation and took it upon themselves to offer their advice to my Lady. Some thought her decision too harsh, others too lenient, and the only real consensus, Omar said, was that no one thought that my Lady should even consider continuing to live in Egypt without a lady’s maid. “Unheard of!” Omar mimicked Lady Hopetown. “A catastrophe!”

As well as this, Omar told me, letters on the subject had begun to arrive from my Lady’s family. Mrs. Ross—Miss Janet—was particularly adamant. “She thinks my Lady is wrong,” Omar told me. “Wrong to send you away.”

My heart skipped a bit. Miss Janet, taking my side? “Really?”

“Yes! My Lady read me the letter.”

“What did my Lady say?”

“Oh, she dismissed that. But Miss Janet also insists that my Lady engage a new lady’s maid straightaway.” And it was this issue—not my misfortune, not my fate—that had become the issue of the day. I hadn’t expected any member of the Duff Gordon family to be my advocate, not seriously. But even so, to hear that news of my predicament had traveled down the Nile astonished me.

THROUGHOUT ALL THIS, I REMAINED OBEDIENTLY IN MY ROOM WITH
Abdullah. I cared for my child with all the methodical devotion I had once given to my Lady. I sewed his clothes and kept him clean and did everything in my power to keep him content and happy. Content and happy and thus, quiet; my goal now was to make her forget that the child and I were in the French House, to make my Lady feel as though we had already departed and gone away. “If she doesn’t see us,” I whispered to Omar late at night, “doesn’t hear us, never thinks of us, it will be as though we don’t exist, and if we don’t exist, we won’t have to leave.” I asked Omar to bring me extra work, so that I could help with his duties; I knew how much had fallen on his shoulders. At first he resisted, wanting me to be able to give myself fully to our child, but eventually he relented, and he brought my Lady’s clothes for me to repair. And so I sat and sewed and fed my child. I opened my windows and let the spring sun into the room in the morning; I hoped it would melt my loneliness away. To be in a busy household, yet shut away, what fate could be worse for a skilled and industrious lady’s maid?

Abdullah was growing fast; he lay on his back and examined his own fingers and toes as though they were objects of wonder and, indeed, to Omar and me, they were. He smiled all the time and looked around expectantly, wriggling with pleasure every time someone entered the room. He’d found his baby voice and gurgled incessantly, as though partaking in an ongoing conversation. The day he accidentally rolled himself over from his back to his stomach, clonking his chin on the floor, crying out with surprise at the new position as much as at the pain, it was all I could do to restrain myself from rushing out of my room into the French House to tell everybody. Instead, I scooped him up and cuddled him and sang and stood by the window where we could both look out and see what we were missing in the village.