The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

27

BEAUTIFUL CAIRO

Avertiginous cliff with a stray goat glued to the rocks; fields of barley; water wheels pumped by oxen: sailing with the current and a south wind, the river flew by in vignettes of Egyptian life, as if Flo were watching a magic lantern show. Then the wind reversed, blowing from the north, and they lay about, unable to make progress or tie up. The temperature dropped. Paolo said that in twenty-five trips on the Nile, he had never encountered such frigid weather. Scoured by sandstorms, Flo’s lips blistered and her face peeled. Unless securely pinned up, the women’s hair whipped into Gorgonian tangles. Charles was seasick off and on.

Between Kenneh and Cairo, there was nothing on the scale of Abu Simbel that they hadn’t already seen. Only Dendera, just outside Kenneh, and Memphis, far to the north, promised new antiquities. They reached Dendera on the first day of fair weather. It turned out to have a crude temple that dated to Roman times. Flo found its miles of sculpture and bas-reliefs inauthentic, like trying to fathom Greek sculpture through Roman copies.

After Dendera, for more than four hundred miles Arab hamlets dotted the riverbank: Girgeh and Asiyoot, Manfaloot and Benisoof, their minarets visible like hat pins through the felted air of constant sandstorms. It took three days to put ashore at Girgeh, the wind was so severe. Not a single candle was to be had in the entire town. A Coptic father supplied them with a small cache of church votives. Each city, otherwise, was the same: a market, the ubiquitous water-wheels, buffaloes, and ibises, and beneath it all, brutalizing poverty. She hungered for a real city, for Cairo.

Memphis, however, was inspiring. Though fallen into a reflecting pool, its single most beautiful statue was of Ramses. Again that serene face! She strolled through a palm forest, retracing in her mind Moses’s tribulations, for this was his city. His tribe never forgot the story of their exodus. In every generation, Moses warned, they must behave as if they had just gone forth from Egypt. Memory was sacred, part gratitude, part scar. The cooling of the fires of suffering into history. She, too, would never forget Egypt, she promised herself as they struggled northward against the cold windings of the khamsins.

At Giza, just south of Cairo, a storm prevented them from disembarking for the pyramids for two more days. The pyramids! It was time, at last, to tour them. Selina remained shipboard, too infirm for the arduous climbing required.

In England, people regarded Egypt as nothing more than a tray to hold the giant monoliths. If you went to the East and missed them, you hadn’t “done” Egypt. A simple formula applied, like something out of Euclid. Egypt = Pyr and Pyr = Egypt. Aided by guides up and down the face and through the passageways, Flo compared herself to a rat navigating the drains at Embley. Yes, exactly like a rat sniffing through the maze of a bigger, more important rat. They were, she reported afterward, monomaniacal tributes to tyranny, amazing only for their size and expense.

On May 16 they reached Cairo and sadly prepared to leave the boat that had been their home for four months. The farewell to the crew brought an inundation of tears all around. Even the stodgy rais wept. Two days later, to everyone’s surprise, the crew appeared at the Hôtel d’Orient for a second round of good-byes. This was an occasion of deep sentiment, since they had already received their baksheesh. Again, a flood of tears. Each sailor gave her the Arab salute, grasping her hand, kissing it, then pressing it to his heart and head. She wept profusely and without illusions, moved, she knew, not only by the pitiful Egyptians, but also by the prospect of seeing Gustave within the next two weeks, and the fainter prospect, too, of never seeing him again. She didn’t like to ponder what and where their last adieu might be, or have been.

Cairo was the end of Egypt, for to her mind it was not Egyptian but Arabian. She took her leave of the magnificent land of Ramses, Abu Simbel, and Philae. Farewell, she wrote in Lavie, blinking back tears, dear, beautiful, noble, dead Egypt.

• • •

Cairo was even more splendid than Flo remembered. By May there were extra touches of color, the dun city like a pavement in spring when rain has driven the tender new leaves and flower petals to the ground. So much loveliness! Bright rugs on clotheslines exhaled glittering motes with each thwack of the rug beater. On the avenues, mimosa trees sprouted tufts of pink swansdown. The carob trees with their sweet-smelling leathery pods cast a reticulated shade to complement the wooden grilles of the balconies and harems. But what pleased Flo most were the skyline views, the domes of mosques rounding upward like earthbound clouds, the minarets at dusk pointing to the first stars.

The desert dashed relentlessly against Cairo’s gates, a petrified sea waiting to flood it daily, but by the time she arose at seven, the sand and dung had been swept away. Without vigilance, Cairo would have succumbed to the dunes on which it perched like a faerie kingdom. She wrote to Parthe, calling it a jewel that rose to the seventh heaven and the most gorgeous of cities. With Trout and an efreet, she wandered the streets, slipping into tiled courtyards and dark bazaars. Repeated visits to her beloved Sistine Chapel had added the beauty of familiarity and made it more like home. But she didn’t repeat any of the tours of her first Cairo visit. The new vistas and thronged intersections were freshly exhilarating. She had the easy freedom of a person with a pouch of gold in her pocket and a secret she could choose the exact moment to contemplate or reveal.

On the third day, with Trout, Selina, Charles, and their efreets, she went to the street of perfume sellers and silk mercers to buy gifts. She and Trout rested in chairs while the merchant unrolled fabrics. Bolt after bolt spilled onto the cobbles in sumptuous layers—translucent voiles, iridescent organdies, heavy damasks threaded with gold and silver. She could nearly taste the purple haze of plums, the chalky pink of a petit four, billows of white silk lustrous as boiled icing. She wished to clutch them in a giant bouquet, fling them like streamers into the street.

But she didn’t buy a single yard, suddenly aware that her own eagerness had exaggerated their beauty. The possibility of impending bliss had made her generous, willing to grant a greater splendor than before. The mosques struck her as especially majestic not because they brought her closer to God, she now realized, but because she imagined herself walking with him there polished by moonlight in another week, two at the most. The prospect of happiness had painted the city exquisite.

Should she mention this odd effect to him? If they did speak of beauty—she felt the blood rush to her cheeks just pondering this—they would be talking about themselves. About their happiness, a word she rarely allowed herself to contemplate. She was prepared to answer any question he posed, thrilled at the prospect of being known to her depths. She might rally her courage and speak of the night in the tent, if only to say how much it had meant to her. And that she did not care if it was repeated.

The next two days, rains came, heavy and incessant, the streets gushing into brown creeks. The Cairenes threw ashes and rubbish to dry the mud and make it passable, trampling down another layer of refuse the way the Nile deposited soil. When the sun returned, there was no sign of what lay buried.

• • •

On the river, when she had no word from him she hadn’t troubled much over it. He had been ill when they parted, barely able to stand upright. He was a lively, loquacious man; at some point, a letter would arrive.

After a week in Cairo, when his silence grew louder, the city was still a lovely consolation. At the same time, she began to worry about him and secretly to steel herself against desolation, in case their friendship had ended at Kenneh. She had been awkward and self-conscious; so had he, unable to look her in the face. Only the mention of writing letters had heartened them both.

And yet, silence. He must be ill. Or delayed. Another week and she would be gone.

Selina periodically caught her eye, an invitation to confide. Otherwise she stole glances, appraising Flo’s face for distress the way you cup a child’s forehead for fever. Flo hated denying her information, but if she spoke to Selina, she would have to acknowledge the possibility that he had vanished without explanation.

Selina suggested they tour the tombs of the viceroy. They had already visited his mosque, begun before his death as a place of worship and a shrine to his life.

Unwilling to dress in mufti and risk another probing, Trout stayed at the hotel.

Flo took a strong and immediate dislike to the tombs. They were an insult to the memory of the beloved viceroy, whom even the British called the father of Egypt. He had planned to be buried in his alabaster mosque, but when he died a year before, his grandson and successor, Abbas Pasha, had consigned him to a garish vault at Hawsh al-Basha instead. It was there that she began to see the ugliness of Cairo.

She had glimpsed Abbas Pasha on his houseboat at Esneh, where he had ordered a man to be lashed five hundred times. The English consul called him an indolent degenerate who openly tolerated corruption and cared more for horses than for people. In the past year, he had fired every Christian in his employ.

The tombs, a discordant mishmash of European and Oriental styles, fit this cruel tyrant to a tee. She was bored when not disgusted as she toured chambers tricked out like dance halls, the walls painted in bright colors and jammed with Greek, French, and Egyptian molding and cornices. Shrouded in dust and grime like a thousand dirty windows, the crystal chandeliers struck an especially hideous note. If the mausoleum had been modeled on a Neapolitan bordello, it could not have left her more displeased and irritated.

When she returned to her rooms in the afternoon, she found Trout sitting motionless, barely registering her arrival as she entered and clicked the door shut. “Are you all right?” she asked.

Trout sighed and nodded. “And you, Miss Florence?”

“Fine.” She removed her gloves. “You look quite strange.”

Trout stood and straightened her apron. “Do you imagine I shall continue as lady’s maid when we return, mum?”

No matter how far she and Trout progressed in their relations, Trout’s precipitous beginnings and endings always threw her off balance, even now, when she was feeling kindly toward her. “If you are wondering about an increase in wages—”

“No, mum. Not an increase.”

“Well, then,” Flo said. Trout might as well have thrown a cold glass of water at her.

“Mum?” Trout was nothing if not persistent.

“Yes?”

“Will Mariette be your maid in future?”

“I am not prepared to discuss this at present.” Had Trout misconstrued her kindness, thinking herself a pet, or her favorite? In fact, Flo did want Mariette to resume, but it was none of Trout’s business.

“I am not asking for the job, mum. That is my point. I’d rather be maid-of-all-work when we return.”

“I shall remember that when Mrs. Nightingale and I speak of it.”

“Thank you, mum.”

Flo moved toward the bedroom, gathering her gloves and veil from the foyer table.

“There is another something, mum.”

There was no way to gauge the importance or nature of a topic from the way Trout raised it. Flo had learned to be apprehensive from just such vagaries. She froze.

“About the caravan.”

Flo sat on the nearest chair. It was French, a relative of Père Elias’s gilt Louis XVI lugged to the shore. “What about the caravan?”

“I don’t know as they understood, but when they tried to marry me off—”

“Who? What do you mean?”

“I think that’s what the primitives were up to. They brought one bearded fellow after another to me. What else could it have been?”

“I certainly don’t know.”

“I told the mother I was to be married, mum. It was none of her concern, but I was afraid, so that’s what I said.”

“And you are worried about having lied?”

“No, mum. No, it made me feel bad as I had not yet told you or Miss Fanny. It was a secret, but now the secret is out. I thought the consul might of told you.”

“No, he did not.” Flo was getting more confused by the moment. “How would he know what you told them? As you yourself said, he wasn’t there.” She wasn’t at all certain she had grasped Trout’s point. “And why would he tell me if he did know?”

“I don’t know what anybody told anybody else in all that babbling.” Trout’s voice warbled with pique. “I speak only the Queen’s English.”

Flo had allowed repeatedly that it was impossible to be lucid if everyone around you spoke blather, reducing you to pantomime and grabbing at words like rags to stanch a bloody cut. How had the Ababdeh understood anything Trout told them? It made her head swim to imagine the scene. “None of this is clear, Trout. But it’s not a sin to lie to save your life. Anyway, it’s done and over. And besides, you say you weren’t lying.”

“Yes, mum.”

“Whatever passed in that tent,” Flo said (tent triggering a flood of associations that made it difficult to stay on track), “is none of my business.” His soft lips, her skin flushed from the rakı, his fingers sticky with papier-mâché. “I am only glad you were not harmed. I was very worried, you know.” Above all, his gentleness. She remembered exactly how she felt when they kissed—

Trout dropped to her knees and scooted in front of her. “Oh, mum, I am so happy to know you. You are the finest of ladies.”

“Goodness,” Flo said, “we all care for you.” She knew Trout loved to hear this, and though it was true, she felt guilty for resorting to a sentiment that had been truer—more spontaneous and heartfelt—at the time of Trout’s return. To repeat it now was a cheap trick, especially as she’d snooped in Trout’s diary and entertained unkind thoughts about her. “We were all worried—myself, Max, Gustave. Joseph, and Père Elias. We would have gone to great lengths to find you.”

Trout began to emit the high-pitched mewling of a sick kitten. “Oh, mum,” she squeaked, “if only I could describe what it was like to be whisked away in the night by heathens.”

“There, there,” said Flo, lightly patting Trout as she grasped both elbows and helped her to her feet. They moved to the sofa, arms still interlaced.

“I am so grateful,” said Trout. “How can I ever repay your kindness?”

“No need. You would have done the same for me, I’m certain.”

“And here am I,” Trout’s voice quavered, “saying I do not wish to continue as your maid!”

How like Trout to point out baldly her own infelicities. It was almost endearing.

“You must think me an ungrateful wretch.” Trout blew her nose and tucked her hankie back into her apron pocket, where her chatelaine, diminished by the dangles she’d given the Ababdeh, still rode. “So you don’t mind?”

“What?”

“That I am to be married?”

A dozen questions rushed into Flo’s head. “I am quite amazed by your news,” she said, her voice lacking in wonder. How could she subtract what she’d read in the diary from her mind? If Trout ever found out, her humiliation would be total. “Will you stay on at Embley? I imagine, like Mariette, you shall wish to live apart.”

Trout shook her head. “Oh, no, mum. I don’t hold with living with a man under one roof. It makes for bad feelings.” She leaned closer to Flo. “But we are going to Paris together for a honeymoon, next December. Gilbert has it all planned. He is keeping it a secret, too. His family are quality people and would not approve of such as me.”

Trout’s gentleman poet, it seemed, was ashamed of her. “And that doesn’t trouble you?”

“Oh, no, mum.” Looking down at her lap, Trout shook her head.

Flo was growing impatient. “But if he does not respect you—”

“Oh, he does, mum. But his kin would not understand, him being a gentleman and me not being a lady nor wishing to be one or act like one.” Trout looked her in the eye. “He says it is an ordinary miracle, me and him. But that most people don’t credit miracles.”

Would Trout allow herself to be gulled in the name of love? Flo could not abide such drivel. “What in the world do you mean?”

“I know Gilbert’s heart. I knew it before I ever met him.”

“How is that possible, Trout?” Flo sighed and leaned back on the sofa. “Listen to what you have said.” Trout was the last person she would have figured for a romantic sop.

“I don’t rightly know how it’s possible, mum. I only know it’s true.”

“I see.” Flo looked around the room for a distraction. “Do you suppose we could have some tea, Trout? I think there is time before dinner.” Did Gilbert have honorable intentions, or was he taking advantage? She felt protective of Trout and abhorred the idea that a smooth-talking, educated man might casually misuse her.

“Yes, of course, mum. I should of thought of it myself.”

Trout set the kettle to boil on the potbellied porcelain stove. She removed dishes from the buffet and laid the table opposing the sofa with napkins, spoons, cups, and saucers. “You see, mum, I saw Gilbert’s face before I ever met him.”

“Was it one of his photographs?”

“Oh, no, mum, nothing like that.”

Trout told the story quickly, without embroidery. Seven years before she came to live with the Nightingales, she was working at a lodging house in Grosvenor Street. The kitchen chimney was greasy, and the sweep had missed his appointed time. Late that night, while everyone slept, she undressed, climbed the rungs, and brushed the chimney herself. She liked drudgery, she said. To be covered with soot and char and lead, too, from blacking the grates gave her satisfaction, she explained.

She had laid a fire to warm herself, washed up in a basin in the kitchen, and fallen asleep. Most unhappy she was, she added lightly, though Flo thought this might be important. She hated where she was working; the maids had stolen from her, and the house was not completely reputable. The owner was a vulgar woman to boot, Trout said, and she feared a character from her would tar her good name by association, though without a reference, finding a new position would be difficult.

Trout paused to pour two cups of tea and then set the teapot to rest on a trivet.

In the middle of the night, she continued, she heard a sound and woke to see a man’s face complete with beard and mustache in the fire, formed from flames. It changed expressions, as if they were conversing—smiling, laughing, thoughtful, etc.

A man in the fire. That was familiar. Flo was sure she’d heard those words before from Trout.

“The very next day,” Trout continued, “I went down the road to buy a pitcher of ale for the house and passed a man in the street who was the image of the face in the fire.”

“That is strange,” agreed Flo, not sure what to think. Hallucinations? If Trout could unwittingly invent bodily illnesses, might she not also conjure a face from a blaze?

“I watched him go into a tavern and waited for him like a dog until he came out. I was ashamed, but I could not help myself.”

“Then what happened?” Flo could hardly imagine stern, flinty Trout in the throes of an infatuation and servile as a dog.

“I introduced myself and told him the story. From that day to this he has not left me.” Trout added a lump of sugar to her tea.

“And that was your Gilbert?”

“Yes, mum. That is my Gilbert. Gilbert Pennafeather. He is a known poet.” She sat back, teacup in hand.

As Flo drank her tea, she wondered if the story of sweeping the chimney had anything to do with Trout’s custom of “blacking up” for Gilbert and calling him “Massa,” as if she were a slave on an American plantation. But, of course, Flo only knew about those details from the diary. Oh, and the chains and lock. And the iron key, which still hung from the chatelaine, as incongruous as ever. “And what do you make of it all?” she asked.

Trout regarded her big pale hands. “I don’t rightly know, mum. It was a long time ago. I never could abide a man who interfered with me.” She laid her spoon on the saucer. “Gilbert lets me be. I clean for him sometimes. We play that I am his maid and he is my mister,” she said, smiling. “He’s offered to keep me, but I have refused. I like to come and go as I please.” She gulped her tea to the dregs. “And I like to work.”

Flo was silent, afraid to say anything lest she give herself away.

“Gilbert is my sweetheart. He reads to me and I write to him. He likes to know how I spend my days.”

Blacked the grates, scrubbed the flags. Why would a poet care about such banalities? Then Flo remembered that disturbing line in the diary—but most of all, licking your boots.

“I do remember feeling I was not in my right mind waiting outside the pub that first night, not knowing if he would speak to such as me.”

“But now you are in love.”

Trout grinned but did not answer. She stood and collected the flatware and cups.

“Thank you for the tea.” Flo was anxious to rest before dinner, a formal affair at the Hôtel d’Orient. She had had enough of Trout and especially of her unquestioned happiness.