The Mistress of Nothing (15 page)

“You have?”

He nodded. “I’ll go after breakfast. I’ll be back in time to cook the evening meal. I know there is a lot to do in the house, but much of it can wait until tomorrow. I’ve prepared lunch, all you need do is serve it—”

I held up my hand to stop him from speaking. We were in Cairo, the city of his family, his parents and wife and child: Omar’s city. I’d somehow got very good at not facing up to the truth, at denying the facts even when they were presented baldly to me. We were in Cairo, and Omar was going to see his wife and his child. I would stay behind with my Lady. “That’s good,” I said, and I kept my voice light. “I hope it goes well.” And Omar was on his way.

It was a long, dark day for me. My head began to ache and the dizziness and sickness I hadn’t felt for several months returned. Omar’s wife. The phrase repeated itself over and over again in my head: Omar’s wife. For a moment—a long, terrifying moment—an abyss opened up before me: I am an unmarried woman, a spinster, a lady’s maid, and I have got myself into a position of absolute insecurity. I couldn’t be more compromised. Omar is married already; Omar is married to another woman; he has a child. Maybe I should tell her now. Maybe I should tell Lady Duff Gordon that I am going to have Omar Abu Halaweh’s child. I will tell her today. I calmed myself down by whispering over and over again, “I am loved, I am loved, Omar loves me, Omar loves me, and my Lady will protect me.”

I was in my Lady’s room helping her dress for supper: we agreed that Cairo might require a little more formality than Luxor, though my Lady still refused to wear her English clothes. I’d chosen my words carefully; I would start by reminding her of how long we had been together. I would remind her, tactfully of course, of my absolute loyalty. Then I would tell her my wonderful news. And she would be so pleased.

But before I could say anything, Omar returned. We heard him moving through the house. “That will be our man, home from his family,” said my Lady. “You know,” she added, “I’ve grown so used to our little threesome, I found myself missing him today.” She laughed. “Silly.”

“Me too, my Lady,” was all I was able to say.

I avoided Omar for the rest of the day, which was much easier in our Cairo house than it would have been in Luxor. I excused myself from supper by claiming my lunch had not agreed with me and attempted to busy myself elsewhere. But I was drawn to the room where they were sitting together to eat; I could not keep away. “How sweet your child sounds!” I heard my Lady say to Omar. And I heard in her tone a wistfulness for her own family.

When Omar entered my room that night I shocked myself by pretending to be asleep. But when I felt him lie down beside me—so cool and clean-smelling—I turned towards him once again. “Did it go well?” I asked.

He sighed heavily. The circumstances weighed on him as well. “Yes. It went well.” Before I could speak again he placed his finger across my lips, then moved close, kissing me.

THE WEATHER WAS CONSIDERABLY COOLER IN CAIRO ALREADY,
which was both a relief and a disappointment; summer had brought out the reptile in me. Suddenly my Lady was ill with a high fever, coughing up phlegm, the pain in her side becoming increasingly acute with each new day. She’d been so well throughout the spring and summer that the illness was like a bad memory, returned to haunt us. I treated her carefully with all the old cures, to no avail; before long she was coughing up blood as well. I inspected my Lady’s handkerchiefs, showing the bloody contents to Omar, who turned a pale shade of green. I brought the vial of laudanum out from its inlaid wooden box and dosed my Lady, alternating with the castor oil that Omar and I had made earlier that year, during the village epidemic. The effect of the laudanum was almost instantaneous and she slept more easily for a while; while she slept I wrote a letter to Sir Duff Gordon myself, detailing my concerns for my Lady’s health:
The climate in Cairo is not good for her, she cannot linger here for long, we must return to Upper Egypt soon, Sir.
I’d written to Sir Duff Gordon before, at the behest of my Lady, during periods when she was too unwell to write herself, but this was the first time I had written to him with a direct request this urgently expressed:
You must come to Egypt now if you want to see her.
I hoped he would not receive the letter, that he had left England and was en route already.

But our wait continued. Omar was able to find more time to visit his parents and his wife and child, though he went only on the days he felt my Lady was well enough and there were weeks when he didn’t go at all. I tried my best not to feel relieved. “I should like to visit your parents, and to meet Mabrouka,” my Lady said, and Omar promised to arrange it, but nothing was done to set up the event, and I was relieved about this as well. My Lady needed to conserve her strength for when Sir Alick arrived. For the first time ever her illness was useful—advantageous even—for me.

With my Lady an invalid once more, there was plenty for Omar and me to do; as well as run the Cairo house, we needed to lay in supplies for when we returned to Luxor. In the market one day I was on my own buying almonds and dates—Omar had gone off to purchase eggs—and I was addressing the stallholder in Arabic, as was my custom, discussing which dates were most fresh and sweet, when I became conscious of two women staring at me.

“Look at that one,” the younger woman said, in English; she was wearing a bonnet and a stout dress and was perspiring heavily, despite what felt to me a cooler-than-usual day. “What an odd costume.”

“She could almost be English,” said the older woman, “if you look at her face.”

“Very brown-skinned though.”

“She’s looking at us.”

I turned away quickly, my heart pounding, and strained to hear the women, who had lowered their voices. Omar arrived at my side and relieved me of the heavy bags I’d been carrying. Still the women continued to speculate.

“Do you think she’s a European, gone native?”

“Oh! To think of marrying one of them.”

“Disgusting!’

“Are you finished?” Omar asked, in Arabic.

“Aywa,” yes, I replied, pulling my
tarhah
up to cover my hair. Then, “I want to buy some cloth; we’ll do that another day,” in English, loudly. I glanced back at the women, who stared after me dumbly.

The days passed and my Lady’s health gradually improved but her mood remained dark. “I’m as homesick for Luxor as I’ve ever been for England,” she said, and I wondered at this, understanding that my Lady felt nervy and anxious over Sir Alick’s forthcoming visit. She had achieved an astonishing equilibrium in Luxor, her love for the village and the country, her interest in the people, her good health in the dry air almost balancing out her longing for her family, her children Maurice and Rainey, and her own mother, her dear husband. But her sangfroid vanished as she waited for Sir Alick to arrive. I worried that a visit from him would be as damaging to her health as it was longed for and anticipated.

News came from my Lady’s mother, Mrs. Austin, that the idea for a book of my Lady’s letters home to England had been accepted by her publisher. Mrs. Austin would select and edit the letters herself, and my Lady was to write a preface. The book would be published in spring, next year. “Let’s raise a toast,” my Lady said after she had read the letter, though she was lying in bed, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had taken a drink of alcohol. “Omar,” she said, “make us tea!”

Mr. Hekekyan Bey was a frequent visitor to our Cairo residence. He came bearing gifts, perhaps an ancient amulet for my Lady, a smooth blue scarab for me—pilfered, no doubt, from the Antiquities Service—bestowing these trinkets as he swept into the house in his red fez. He was fond of Omar’s lemonade and would drink an entire jug of it as he sat with my Lady, perspiring heavily. “What do you need, Lady Duff Gordon?” he’d cry. “I can get you anything your heart desires.”

“An elephant,” my Lady said one afternoon. “Don’t you think, Sally, that an elephant is what we actually need?”

Mr. Hekekyan Bey laughed.

I nodded. “Yes, my Lady.”

“If we had an elephant with us in Luxor, we could get so much more accomplished!”

Mr. Hekekyan Bey removed his fez, wiped his brow, then popped the hat back on again. “African or Indian?”

“African, of course,” said my Lady.

“You tease me, Lady Duff Gordon,” he said, “but I would never let you down.”

“I know that, Hekekyan,” she replied.

FINALLY, IN MID-NOVEMBER, SIR ALICK WAS DUE TO ARRIVE. THIS
was the original date he and my Lady had planned to meet; either our letters had not reached him or he was unable to change his plans. We were to go to the port at Boulak to meet him; for the first time in many months my Lady allowed me to fuss over helping her dress. I had fetched her English clothes from the traveling trunk and spent several days repairing and preparing them, but in the end, my Lady said she couldn’t face wearing any of it and decided on a pair of harem trousers and a white linen shift, freshly washed and pressed.

I pulled my old brown muslin English dress out of my traveling trunk in honor of the occasion. I put it on but, to my horror, was unable to do up any of the buttons or laces. Panicked, I took all my clothes out of my case and attempted to assemble a decent European-style outfit, with only partial success.

The Cairo house had a mirror in the entrance foyer which both my Lady and I had been carefully avoiding; my Lady stood in front of it now and said, “He won’t recognize me. I don’t recognize myself! I’m neither English nor Arab; I’ve become a kind of creature in between. I look a kind of man/woman, don’t I?” My Lady laughed and I tried to disagree but it was too true; she was thin and brown and had shorn gray hair and in no way resembled the woman her husband had said goodbye to in Marseilles, the woman in the portrait that Henry Phillips had painted more than a decade previously.

“And look at you, Sally,” she said. “You’ve got fat! Omar’s cooking is clearly too good for you.” She continued to laugh as she put on her hat, while I felt as though someone had just walked over my grave. There was nothing I could do or say; “fat” was better than “disgraced.”

Omar was very excited about meeting Abu Maurice; to refer to Sir Alick as my Lady’s husband discomfited his Egyptian sense of propriety. Abu Maurice—father of Maurice—suited my Lady as well. “I’ve shown you his photograph so many times,” she said to him, “I’m sure you know his face as well as do I.”

And then, there he was, disembarking from the steamer: my Lady’s beloved Alick, looking the same as always, tall and straight-backed, wearing glasses and the type of hat common to English travelers in Egypt. “Too hot,” my Lady said, taking it off his head and putting it onto her own, and laughing, “too
serious.
We’ll take you to the bazaar, my dear, and we’ll kit you out, like an Egyptian, won’t we, Omar?” she said over her shoulder as she led her husband away, her arm through his.

But I had seen how Sir Alick had paused when he found his wife in the crowd, paused and taken in her appearance. He paused and, in that pause, he did not smile; a moment passed, a moment as long as a heartbeat, a moment as long as the year and months he had spent wondering if he would ever see his wife again, and here she was, and she was so utterly changed. Then he drew a deep breath and opened his arms and let her remove his hat and smiled a great warm, happy smile and I felt myself hoping, hope against hope, that everything was going to be fine for my Lady, and yet thinking it might not be.

With the arrival of Sir Alick, everything in the household changed again, and the hot dusty complicity between Lady, maid, and manservant was altered, and we lost our easy ways with each other. Omar jostled us all into place: Abu Maurice was the master of the household now; our will would bend to his. We spent a happy week; my Lady made herself into Sir Alick’s guide and showed him the famous mosques in the city and the great citadel on the hill, and we rode out into the desert on donkeys and finally visited the Great Pyramids at Giza, which filled me with wonder and glee. My Lady showed off her Arabic and instructed me to show off mine as well. Omar cooked from dawn until dusk every day, preparing his most flavorsome and delicate dishes. Sir Alick smacked his lips together and ate everything he was given and praised our Arabic and our knowledge of Islam and marveled at the wonders of the city.

But then the temperature dropped one night as November drew on and I overheard my Lady saying to Sir Alick that perhaps it was time they traveled to Luxor, there was so much she wanted him to see up the Nile, and the French House—the French House!—how he would love Luxor, and how the people of Luxor would greet him as one of their own and—

Sir Alick interrupted his wife. “I don’t think I’ll travel with you to Luxor after all, my dear.”

I was moving down the corridor, away from the room where Sir Alick and my Lady were talking. I stopped.

“Janet has made plans; we’ve been invited to visit Suez, where they are building the canal, in a party led by de Lesseps himself. And after viewing the construction, we’ll hunt gazelle in the desert. Janet has set it all up; we leave in a few days.”

I couldn’t move.

It was a few moments before my Lady spoke, and then her voice was low and hoarse. “I’m not well enough for that kind of expedition.”

“Oh no, my dear, we weren’t expecting you to come.”

I moved away, not wanting to hear any more.

Omar had set mint tea and sweetmeats on a tray. I stopped him from interrupting my Lady and Sir Alick. After ten minutes had passed, I took the tea tray into the room myself. Sir Alick was on his feet, looking through the wooden screen that shaded the window. My Lady was sitting at her writing table, clutching a handkerchief but looking entirely composed. “Thank you, Sally,” she said, when I put down the tray. “I’ll ring if we need anything.”

Two days later the Rosses arrived in Cairo, Miss Janet and her husband, Mr. Ross, accompanied by various staff, including my sister, Ellen; they had left their baby behind in Alexandria with his nanny, which seemed a shame given that my Lady had never met her first grandchild. “Oh, Mummy,” Miss Janet said, in lieu of a greeting, “what have you done to your hair? And what on earth are you wearing?” She heaved a great sigh and gave her father a look that said, See, didn’t I warn you?