The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

29

CALL FROM GOD

Nearly the end of May and still no word from him. Charles was kinder than usual, so solicitous he embarrassed her. Such a public event, her disappointment. But she would be strong; she would not succumb, she had promised herself. It was just a trial like all the others. She never expected to be happy, like other people. Did God even care about happiness? She thought not. What was love anyway but a frivolous yielding of oneself to another, just half a step from willing ignorance!

Three days before her departure for Greece, her dreaming returned with a vengeance. She lay abed, lost in her reveries, which negated utterly her situation. Her dreams were not of her storied greatness, or her desire to be of use in the world, but of Mme. Florence Flaubert. No. Not that, not marriage. But they did meet again. And after that, there were many trysts, twice a year in Paris alone, where Clarkey was an accomplice or, alternately, a married matron who, regressing to her Scottish roots, betrayed a newly happy Florence. Cut dead by the blood mob, Flo took a position in Margate as a governess, an even more embittered Miss Christie. And crueler, it turned out . . .

No. No! In Paris, they ate at the best restaurants, joking and plotting over wine. By then they had their own private and sophisticated language. They’d invented an entire culture! We are the Floflau tribe, giggling behind everyone’s back. He introduced her to clergy, which he had no use for, but was acquainted with from writing Saint Anthony. She visited convents and spoke at length with nuns and mothers superior, picking their brains for projects to secularize or, more accurately, Protestantize.

His mother, conveniently, soon died, and she took up residence in Croisset. They engaged a nursemaid for baby Caroline and she became the dead Caroline, not to the child, who had never known her mother and thus had no expectations, but to Gustave, who still mourned his best playmate. Now he had Rossignol instead. They had separate apartments with separate bedrooms: amitié amoureuse. Each afternoon he read aloud what he had written while she had slept the night before. And each evening, after dinner, she shared her schemes to improve the world, though these remained vague, overshadowed by their consuming friendship, by love. Sometimes theirs was a bodily love; at other times it remained platonic. This was the most perplexing aspect of the lives she lived, lying abed at the Hôtel d’Orient.

Would she become as precious to him as his whores? Would she overcome her bodily discomfort and shame? Their relationship was easiest when the night in the tent was not repeated. But in sweeter dreams, they lay in bed together as he gently stroked every inch of her, fondling her hair, tracing her eyebrows, her umbilicus (“Yours is folded like a camellia bud”), examining the inside of her mouth, the bottoms of her feet, places she’d never seen or wondered about. She loved it when he studied her as closely as a jewel, when he called her his most precious artifact from Egypt. One day he shyly asked if he might look there. Oh dear God. Coyness did not suit her. She hadn’t pretended not to understand, but turned her head, pulled down the cover, and parted her knees.

Then his desire asserted itself, and . . . what happened next? She could easily evoke his chest, arms, legs, and back because she‘d seen some part of them. (Never his underarms, it saddened her to realize.) She liked all of him—the way he walked, rolling slightly forward on the balls of his feet, as if he were excited to see where they led him; his hands, with their no-nonsense fingers and powerful wrists. Yes, she enjoyed the thickness of his body, his meaty calves, the curving and angled planes of his knees glimpsed only through his trousers or robe, like a piece of sculpture under a drape. He kept his beard scrupulously clean even when the rest of him wasn’t, not like those men whose whiskers bore a scrapbook of the week’s meals. But the parts of him she hadn’t seen frightened her. They might be ugly, if nephew Shore were any indication. Two sacs like a bull’s. A flaccid hose without symmetry, nothing to admire from the point of view of pure form. She tried to imagine seeing it for the first time, before it engorged. (She knew the technical terms, had seen the farmyard examples. They were not reassuring.) Would it pale as it stretched or flush a dull purple with the added blood? Or was the adult penis sheathed and bright pink when it emerged, like a dog’s? It might not match the rest of him, the way some black-haired men grew auburn mustaches. It was all so horrid, so irregular!—at odds with the rest of his beauty and yet, she knew, the most important part. His maleness itself. His . . . member? Such an odd appellation. If only she had a brother, she’d know so much more about the mysterious thing. That was what she and Parthe called it when they were younger: the thing. Baby Shore was cute except for his little thing. Was WEN’s thing long and slender as he was? Small or large, fat or thin, she wouldn’t care. It was not the part of Gustave she loved most, merely the part she would have to tolerate. If he chose to parade about naked in her presence, which she imagined he would do quite naturally—she’d look elsewhere. But oh! Ugh! The thought of them joined by this finger of flesh, of the grunting urgency that would overtake him, turning him into an animal, every bit of his finer self subsumed once they were doing it—

“Flo, dear, it is past noon.” Selina’s voice. Flo opened her eyes. Apparently Trout had shown her back to the bedroom. “Will you not come down with me for lunch?” Selina looked worried.

“Is it? Already?” Flo reached back and fluffed her pillow under her head. “I am not particularly hungry.”

Selina stepped closer. “But you’ve eaten nothing today. No breakfast—”

“I know.” She wanted Selina to leave. She wanted to return to her dreaming. “I’m thinking about Kaiserswerth.” She folded her hands together as if to pray. “And my family.”

“Are you all right?” Selina sat down on the bed. “Charles and I were wondering if you would be well enough to travel in two days.”

“I’m fine.” As if to prove it, she turned back the covers, swung her legs over the bed, and sat up. “Trout?” she called into the sitting room. “Could you fix me some tea with milk?”

Trout called back that she would.

“Silly me,” Selina said. “I feared you’d be moping. I thought how I might behave in your circumstances.” She smiled at Flo, her eyebrows sympathetically raised in a question. “Romance is such a mystery. You shouldn’t trouble yourself too much to solve it.” She took Flo’s hand.

“I know. Or rather, so I’ve heard.” She would not easily return to the dream now. “But he might still appear.”

Selina looked at her lap.

She pities me, Flo thought. She assumes he will not come. How could she? How dare she! The time had not run out. They weren’t to be towed up the canal to Alexandria until the thirty-first, and it was only the twenty-eighth. He’d be in Cairo by the end of May. He would.

Selina looked straight at her now. “I think not, my dear.”

“Why?”

Selina hesitated for so long that Flo realized Selina knew something she didn’t know. Oh God, she thought, sickened, he has died! He has died and they were waiting to tell me until I got home. He is gone forever in some nameless grave on the Nile. If only I had been with him. Had she said that aloud?

Selina finally raised her head. “I hadn’t wanted to tell you, dear Flo.”

Oh no. Oh please, God. Florence felt a pain in her chest as if someone had thrust a spear there. The room began to dissolve. He was gone. And she had selfishly worried over a letter while he lay suffering in some putrid mud hut.

“Paolo saw him here in town,” Selina said plainly. “Spotted him, I should say, for they did not speak.”

“What? What did you say? Then he is not dead?”

Trout entered with the tea, shakily set it on the nightstand, and hurried from the room.

Selina’s expression hardened. “He is very much alive, I’m afraid. At this moment, I wish he were dead for breaking your heart so cruelly.”

“When?” Flo clutched the sheets in her hands. She couldn’t move, might never move. Each of Selina’s words nailed her in place. “But when did Paolo—”

“Three days ago, I think. Paolo approached him to ask how he was faring, but he disappeared with his dragoman into a tobacconist’s.”

Flo sagged forward in a heap. “Oh dear God,” she wailed. “Oh God!”

“There now,” Selina cooed, enfolding her in her arms. “Oh my poor darling Flo.” She patted her and rubbed circles on her back and clutched her to her bosom. “Oh my poor dear.”

• • •

Heartbroken and humiliated, Flo plunged from one feeling to its opposite, now crushed or furious, now pathetic, listless. She had known sadness and disappointment most of her life. This was utterly different. She hated herself and him. A storm swirled around her, through her. She felt quite mad.

Determined there must be some mistake, she questioned Paolo against the advice of Selina, who said it was but pulling a fresh scab from a wound. Was he certain it was M. Flaubert? How had he looked? Was he sure it was Joseph, no chance of his having mistaken both men for a similar pair? Paolo was firm; it had, indeed, been M. Flaubert and his dragoman, Joseph, and they had evaded him.

Selina was adamant that Gustave did not intend to see her again. In the kindest way possible she urged Florence to excise him from her mind. Together, Charles and Selina pronounced him unworthy. Florence had been no more than an amusement, one of the Nile’s passing attractions.

Flo secretly hatched the notion that if Gustave missed her in Cairo, he would catch up with her en route or in Alexandria. In this scenario, every corner of the tugboat, and then the steam packet through the Mahmoudieh Canal, would flicker with his shadow. In Alexandria he might stalk the hotels and docks. No, it was more likely that he would surprise her as she climbed to the upper deck or seek her out among the women on the lower, causing a commotion—shrieks of indignation from the harem wives followed by awed silence as he lifted her hand to his lips and she melted into his embrace.

Outside of this fantasy, she existed in a state of abject anguish. He had betrayed her trust, trampled her feelings. Had she more experience with men—other suitors, another serious beau besides Richard—she might have taken it in stride. She was naive, everyone said so; she agreed. Florence the idealist, the innocent. That was how they had raised her. Virginal. Untouched. Good bridal material, but ardently uninformed as required. And so naturally she suffered not just a broken heart, but a broken spirit, too. She blamed herself for talking to him in the first place. Ridiculous. Had God appointed her to safeguard every road in Egypt from Frenchmen bearing firearms? She despised her naïveté far more than she hated him. Him, she missed. Still.

She could have loved him, she was sure of it. This admission, in the second week, made the pain of his rejection excruciating. She could not imagine her future except as an extension of her miserable present. If she continued in such an agonizing state, WEN might not settle an income on her, worried that she was too weak to live alone. She would simply give up, living at home under Fanny’s rules, pleasing her as she had during Miss Christie’s reign, when she would have done anything to secure her mother’s love. She would at least have that—her mother’s love, for Fanny, whatever her flaws, loved her. She would become her mother’s doting daughter. And a faithful sister to Parthe, never again leaving her alone. She had learned her lessons. Home was safe. Fanny was right: men were brutes. She’d have no more adventures. She’d plant a garden, play with the animals at the Hurst, take up tatting, tiny tiny tatting with its minuscule loom. Collars, gloves, camisoles, pillowslips—the list of items she could tat was satisfyingly long! She’d surround herself with people who cared for her even as they did not understand her, people who would never leave her. Milder and more obliging (broken!—why not admit it?), she might eventually wed. Perhaps an older man—a widower—who had no expectation of children (he might already have them) or of what it took to produce them. She must plan, for eventually WEN and Fanny would die, and then where would she be? She could not live with Parthe, even in this sorry state. Yes, she would wed. Late, to a man who’d respect her bedroom door. They would love each other, but without the passion. She wanted nothing now but to be protected. If she allowed herself to be loved for traits she did not much admire, she might cease hating herself, and her monster might disappear for good. She’d replace the brown Hollands, then, with a corset. A narrow world was better than no world at all.

He infiltrated her sleep with nightmares. Thoughtlessly, he left her on the beach as the tide rushed in, and she barely managed to outrace it, doggedly retracing her steps to Père Elias’s villa. At Philae they had an argument over a squeeze and he yelled at her and that was the end of that. She returned to the houseboat in tears and never saw him again. In every dream, he did something so awful that she had no option but to leave him. Her heart was still broken, but her pride was intact when she woke in the morning. Then all day, it eroded until she detested herself with the same fury and fearful despair.

• • •

On her last morning in Cairo, she felt her eyes open, sticky as usual with grit. It was not yet light out, and not exactly dark, but that indeterminate time before dawn when one can sense the impending sunrise physically, like the first awareness of fever—the little ache in the wrist, the heat in the dry eyelid. She could not bear another day. Not another moment. She was utterly spent in body and mind. In spirit.

Lying exhausted in her hotel bed, a memory surfaced of another time when she’d been in the grip of a desolating weariness, when her limbs were too heavy to move, as if they’d fossilized to stone. It had happened twelve years ago, when she was seventeen.

There had been an epidemic that winter. In Wellow, two corpses had been laid out in the street. Only she and cook had escaped the influenza. For two joyous if grueling weeks, she had run the household while caring for her parents and Parthe, not to mention fourteen bedridden servants. She had a gift for the bedside; even Fanny said so. But when it was all over, after doing so much, inhumanly much, WEN said, she was completely drained.

The first morning after the crisis passed, she had felt leaden, as paralyzed as now. The servants had begun to return to work. Only Old Gale was still bedbound. Flo’s life was about to return to normal, to make-work instead of real work, to boredom. She had dragged herself from bed. Then, after breakfast, the sun had come out—just for her, it seemed—and she decided to walk as she’d done a thousand times before down the drive and across the rise of the nearest fallow field. She could see herself clearly in memory, wearing her old green gabardine dress and Scotch cape. She carried a basket; one never knew what one might find on the heath and in the forest.

The grasses and weeds, just beginning to send forth the year’s new shoots, were springy underfoot. She picked out buttercups and dandelions, barley and wheat escapes and nameless smaller grasses with tan tassels. The outdoors was always a balm, especially that day. Near the hedgerow that divided the field from its neighbor, she often picked wild blackberries and raspberries, not caring if the thorns ripped her skirts or tore at her arms. Fanny did not approve, but as Flo had no clothes more practical for this or any physical task, there was nothing she could do about it. Besides, Fanny always tucked into the berries as heartily as the girls.

A wind chuffed up from the east, sweeping her uphill. It was an altogether lovely morning, the sky a bright Delft blue streaked with the faintest white herringbones. She liked to listen for sounds out of doors, enjoyed the way they fell upon her ears—shyly at first, then louder the longer she listened. Near the hill’s crest, she waited for the sounds to clarify and separate, like objects gradually distinguishable in a dark room. Behind her, the trees lining the drive to Embley shushed in the breeze. Closer by, a bird—a chaffinch?—sang pink pink while sparrows chittered as they reconnoitered for insects among the privet’s dense weave. There was no such thing, she had learned, indoors or out, as absolute silence. Late at night, houses creaked and groaned as timbers, floors, plaster, and paint cooled or heated according to the season. Housetalk, she and Parthe called it when they were young—her coinage, she was pleased to remember. The name rendered it less frightening, the natural resettling of inanimate objects, instead of the stealthy movements of evil spirits.

At the top of the hill, just as she picked out the call of a honey buzzard, the strangest thing happened. All sound ceased, turned off like a spigot. She shook her head to shatter the silence and thumped her temple with her wrist, as if to unclog water from her ears. The quiet thickened and constricted, pressing against her like wet cotton wool.

Around her, branches still swayed in the wind, and birds zipped back and forth, noiselessly. Her heart began to race. The basket fell from her hand soundlessly as a feather. She clapped her hands. She screamed three times and heard it not.

Had she gone stone deaf, in an instant?

Sinking to the grass, she couldn’t hear her dress rustling as it ballooned around her. Yes, deaf as a doorknob. A chill seized her spine, fanning into her limbs and torso. She closed her eyes, counted to five, and opened them again.

The sky had shifted to a deeper hue, not the indigo of night, but the violet-gray of twilight. Home—she had to get home to Fanny and WEN and Parthe. No—WEN had gone down to London. Home, then, to her mother and sister . . .

A saving thought came to her: she must be dreaming. She had only to awaken and she would be safe in her bed, alongside Parthe, drowsy Parthe. Yawning, yawning, it took Parthe forever to wake up. . . . Yes. This is a dream and I shall wake up at home in my bed.

A mighty thundering, like an avalanche, threw her flat on the ground. Or was it only the sound of blood rushing in her head? She had heard that once when the doctor plucked a leech from her stomach and blood—her blood—had spurted out. But this was louder. Louder than lions, louder even than the looms at the Arkwright Mills. And plangent, like the sea. Advancing and withdrawing, roaring and subsiding, a ferocious and magnificent sound, as if the ground itself were alive. Yes, it was the ground. As she lay in the weeds and dirt, the giant soughing moved through her body. It surrounded her, everywhere at once, with no point of origin. Oh please, she prayed, let it be my own panicked chest rising and falling and not some monster inside the hill, preparing to erupt from the earth.

In the next instant, the sound gathered her up as an eagle plucks a hare from the cornrows and bears it away in its talons beneath the wild shade, the whoosh whoosh of beating wings. It carried her dangling midair, powerless, over the crazy quilt of crops and pastures, forests and fens. More fields and valleys whisked by beneath her, all the way to the rocky coast of the channel, then out over the ocean, to the deep pelagic whites and blues thrashing. And all of it was breathing, and she was breathing with it.

And then there was something—not words in a human language, but a voice. The sound reverberated, rooting itself inside her, becoming her heart, liver, spleen, intestines, brain, lungs—every part that pumped and spilled and flowed within her. It was the thrilling voice in the tree that lives on in the cello, the useful voice of the iron tongs upon the anvil, the voice of the plumb bob saying here, here it is straight, of milk shooting from the cow’s udder. Not words, but pure meaning, as when the heart aches in the body, broken from grief or despair.

You are Mine, it said.

Mine like the corn in the fields, like the animals striving without thought or complaint. All work, it said, is My worship. All work, it said, is praise.

And she knew it was the voice of God, calling her to His service. But how? How was she to work?

Wait, it said.

• • •

At 9 A.M. on the thirty-first of May, Florence stood in the hotel lobby with its checkerboard marble floor, a pawn, she thought, in someone else’s game. She was watching the porter attach straps to the luggage when Joseph burst through the door and past the potted palm, nearly upsetting it. Rushing forward, he bowed and, with eyes downcast, handed her an envelope.

Even before she opened it, a new question entered her mind: what if meeting Gustave were part of God’s plan for her?