The Mistress of Nothing (6 page)

I was surprised by this transformation, this redirection of my gaze, surprised to find myself abandoning my amateur study of Isis, my once-wholehearted curiosity about the true meaning of the hieroglyphs, and instead expanding my knowledge of Egyptian farming practices. I got to the point where, if asked to choose between a visit to the ruins at Kom Ombo or a stroll through the lively village next door, I’d choose the village, every time.

And so, sated with temples and sand and tiny settlements where the women and children rushed out to greet us as though we were Pharaohs on our last journey up the Nile, we arrived at Luxor and thought—yes. We will stop here for a while. We had visited briefly on our way south and my Lady had formed the idea then of returning to make Luxor our base: Alexandria was too damp, Cairo too busy. We had been to view the French House on our first visit, and after that, my Lady made inquiries about hiring it. “This is it,” she said. “Sally, Omar, this is our destination.”

Luxor. The name itself felt warm in my mouth. Luxurious. My Lady called it “Thebes,” the Greek name, she said, meaning “the most selected place.” And it was, I agreed, even then, the day we arrived, the most selected place.

We disembarked, and
Zint el-Bachreyn
was unloaded—all the bags, boxes, trunks, crates, cases, all the things Mr. Abu Halaweh and I had purchased in Cairo, everything my Lady had brought with her from Esher. The donkey boys crowded round, and we set off, in convoy. Along the waterfront and into the village, through the great pylons of the temple, past the grand stone columns, some still erect, others topsy-turvy, the mud-red dwellings perched and pitched in over and around and above, donkeys, chickens, children, rubble, gravel, dirt, sand, all higgledy-piggledy, Mr. Abu Halaweh marshaling our raggedy procession, the village women making that
ul-ul
sound, to the house. The French House. So-called because it was owned by the French consul, who had graciously agreed to lease it to Lady Duff Gordon.

The French House rose above the other dwellings at the south end of the buried temple, like a lone white turret left standing in the Tower of London after all else has collapsed. It was by far the grandest building within the village; in fact, several of its windows were glazed and some of the rooms had doors. When we had passed through Luxor the month before, the French consul told my Lady that the house had been built by the British consul, Henry Salt, in 1815; Salt had overseen many excavations and had imported a good deal of antiquity from Egypt to the museums of Europe. “You’ll be interested in this, Sally,” my Lady said. “The famous Italian adventurer Belzoni lived here for a time, as did Champollion, the Frenchman who deciphered the Rosetta Stone.”

“The Rosetta Stone!” I said, shivering with pleasure.

“And the French writer, Gustave Flaubert,” my Lady added, “for a time.”

“Madame Bovary?”
I asked. My Lady had a copy of the novel, in French, with her, which I had not read—could not read.

My Lady laughed. “We shall endeavor not to be scandalized.”

Though we had been to look at the house once before, I felt almost frightened as I climbed the rough stony steps that led to the door: this is where I’m going to live, I kept thinking, and it is not like any Esher house. Both my mistress and I were relieved to be disembarking from
Zint el-Bachreyn
now; though we loved the boat and our floating life on the Nile, it was good to get back onto solid ground once more, to stop being a tourist day after day. I paused to catch my breath, stepping aside so that the bearers could pass, and as I paused I turned round to see what was behind me, and—“Look!” I cried out with no regard of who was there to hear. There was no one near; Mr. Abu Halaweh was back down at the riverside already, supervising, and my Lady was still en route on her donkey, one child from the village perched in front of her, another at her back, all three struggling not to fall off. I suppressed my urge to talk to a boy who was hefting an enormous case past me at that moment; my Arabic was still too basic to express any of what I was feeling, and besides it might not be appropriate to speak to a village boy in this way. The Nile, that most venerated of rivers, stretched out before me, a tableau of hills, palm trees, green fields, and the broad stretch of glinting water. I felt so overcome, I inspired myself to laugh: it was not as though this was the first time I’d seen the river; I’d been living on it these past weeks. Why did the Thames never do this to me?

The ground floor of the house was dark, windowless, the floor covered in grit; animals had been kept there until recently—chickens and goats perhaps—and the air was pungent. There was no front door but a gaping hole in its place. “Yes,” said Mr. Abu Halaweh. He was standing beside me now, slightly out of breath; I hadn’t heard him arrive. “We will need a door, I’ll see to it.” This was his most recent, and reassuring, English expression: “I’ll see to it right away, Miss Naldrett.” Up the bare, uneven stairs—no banisters—and we entered the light.

It was like emerging from a cave, like moving from the ninth century directly into the nineteenth. We were in a large room, with shuttered windows on opposite sides, the front opening onto a small balcony that faced northwest and that glorious view of the Nile. At the back there was a larger terrace, and I went out onto it now; it was shaded by tall palms that rose from below. When I looked down I saw a walled garden, densely planted, a feature I had not noticed on our first visit; the view beyond was of orange and green hills. I was almost used to finding extraordinary vistas wherever I looked; almost, but not quite. As I turned to remark on the garden to Mr. Abu Halaweh, I realized he had gone and I heard him call for me at the same time.

My Lady was outside the house, at the foot of the stairs, smiling with anticipation. Mr. Abu Halaweh shooed away the children and helped her down from the donkey and I led her into the house and up the stairs. She did not remark on the state of the ground floor—if I have learned one thing from her on this journey, it is the importance of taking everything in one’s stride—and when we emerged on the first floor she said, “Oh, how lovely. We’ll be happy here, Sally, you and me.”

“I think we will, my Lady.”

“It needs to be cleaned,” Mr. Abu Halaweh said.

“I quite like it in its current state,” she replied.

He tutted. “Too much dust. Bad for the chest.”

“So who’s the expert on my health now?” my Lady said, laughing. “You sound just like Sally, Omar.”

Mr. Abu Halaweh bowed and said he thought we should retire outdoors while the place was given a good airing.

The house was full of dust and sand—no one had lived in it for three years or more—and before my Lady had time to reply, my heart sinking only slightly as I assessed the task at hand, a great crowd
of fellahin
began to arrive up the stairs one after the other until there were at least twenty young men. I bundled my mistress back down the stairs and out to the walled garden as the men set to clearing and cleaning like a swarm of worker bees, beating and shifting carpets into place, shouldering divans up the stairs, shifting packing crates. Mr. Abu Halaweh shouted orders and my Lady and I were told to sit and contemplate the view, and so we did, well away from the dust and industry. Then they were gone. And the French House was quiet and clean and perfect around us, as though we’d been residing there calmly for weeks. We made our way back inside. Mr. Abu Halaweh prepared tea, and my Lady settled into what was now her salon to speak with her first guest, Mustafa Agha Ayat, the Luxor merchant, consular agent, and the gentleman who, it turned out, had arranged the army of cleaners. He brought with him his tiny black-haired daughter; she set up house on a carpet with her dolly, and when my Lady showed her a picture of her own little Rainey, she took it in her hands and kissed it sweetly.

THAT FIRST NIGHT IN THE NEW HOUSE,
I
WAS RESTLESS. I’D GROWN
accustomed to sleeping aboard
Zint el-Bachreyn;
I was used to hearing the river at night, to feeling my bed move beneath me. I’d grown used to moving on, always moving on, to see what there was to see. We were back on land now, once again, and I wasn’t all that certain if I liked the feeling, though I had longed for it towards the end of our journey. I got up and lit a candle; I would write a letter to my sister, Ellen, who must be back in Alexandria with the Rosses and their new baby by now. The flickering candlelight turned the whitewashed walls burnished gold. Outside the shutters I could hear bats come and go. I felt sure my Lady was awake in her room, writing her own letter home. I put on the shawl that, with Mr. Abu Halaweh, I had bought in the market in Cairo—an Arab shawl, a fine and soft cotton weave; it was the first thing I had bargained for myself, though Mr. Abu Halaweh assisted me, of course. I opened the shutters and the bats hanging from the lintel dispersed. Cold night air flowed into the room. I brushed away the sand that had collected along the sill. The night was very bright and when I looked up, I gasped out loud, then covered my mouth, hoping no one had heard. The moon was high over the Theban hills and the sky was blue and black and indigo, pricked out with stars. The river was black, the palm trees were still, and Luxor was silent. I had never seen such beauty. I stood and stared out the window until the call to prayer interrupted my reverie.

I closed the shutters—I was tempted to leave them open but thought of the bats—and lay back down. In the next room I could hear Mr. Abu Halaweh stirring and I pictured him putting on his cap and rolling out his prayer mat. I was surprised at how devout he was, how devout all the men we had met seemed to be (we had yet to actually meet many Egyptian ladies, only village peasants and Bedouin; Mr. Hekekyan Bey and his wife were Armenian). My Lady and I admired the portability of Islam with its simple dictat: face Mecca. At times on the
dahabieh,
I wished I was one of the crew, slipping off my shoes, getting down on my knees. I never felt much for religion in England, and neither did my Lady; in fact, I once heard her mother-in-law refer to my mistress as “particularly godless.” My Lady had laughed and grimaced and exchanged a glance with her husband. But in Egypt, Islam was such a natural part of life, so easily integrated into the everyday, that I found myself wanting to know more, wanting to understand more deeply. I’ll have to ask Mr. Abu Halaweh, I thought; we can add religion and religious customs to my Egyptian education.

TIME PASSED QUICKLY. EACH DAY WAS FULL; THERE WAS ALWAYS A
task to hand and the conditions, though not harsh, were basic. The household expanded: we had our own water carrier now, Mohammed, who spent at least one hour every morning walking back and forth from the Nile with his
balaas
—a clay water-carrying pot—on his head, filling up the household
ziir,
an enormous clay water-storage urn, as tall as me, that sat in one corner of the ground floor. A little boy called Ahmed appointed himself
bowab,
doorman and factotum, and he busied himself running errands for Mr. Abu Halaweh. Tasks that would have taken minutes in Esher could take hours in Luxor. The battle against the sand was, to me, the most pressing. I would begin each day by sweeping, forcing my Lady to shift from one room to the next while the air cleared of dust and debris.

“Really, Sally, it’s not necessary,” she said.

“It is,” I insisted. “If we don’t keep up a constant fight, we’ll be buried alive!’

My Lady laughed and I heard Mr. Abu Halaweh laughing too. I looked over to where he was leaning against the wall. “Don’t smile at me like that,” I said.

“Sally,” my Lady said, “when Omar stops smiling, it’s as though the sun goes behind a cloud.”

He tried to frown but could not.

“You wait,” he said, “this is nothing. Sometimes in winter the wind blows half the desert our way.” But after that he gave Mohammed the extra task of sweeping every morning, and Mohammed made me a special palm-frond broom to use in my bedroom at the end of the day.

The days were cooler now, though the temperature could rise quite high by lunchtime, and the nights were almost chilly. After a few weeks, we found the French House had become our home. The large room, with its back and front balconies, was the salon. Off one end, my Lady’s bedroom, off the other, the kitchen, although it did not resemble any kitchen I had ever worked in before: an open fire in the smooth mud chimney, a long, sturdy workbench that Mr. Abu Halaweh had a local carpenter make, the copper pans and enormous kettle we had purchased in Cairo. During the cool evenings the three of us would sit at the table and work, candles and lamps blazing for light: my Lady on her letters, me on my sewing, Mr. Abu Halaweh at his cooking. In the salon the windows were glazed; in the kitchen the glassless window gaped directly onto the village, towards the mosque at the other end of the temple. Beyond this room, Mr. Abu Halaweh and I each had quarters of our own. Both my Lady and I had European-style wooden beds specially made by the local carpenter with blankets we’d brought with us from England, while Mr. Abu Halaweh slept, Egyptian-style, on a thick mat he rolled out every night.

Christmas came: I had asked Mr. Abu Halaweh to make my Lady the sweetmeats in honey that I knew she loved, and I placed a few of them in a little sandalwood box I’d purchased in Cairo. “You two are always trying to fatten me up,” my Lady said as she opened it, “as if I’m a big goose and you are planning to eat me.” And it was true that our household went through vast quantities of Egyptian honey, the sweet black syrup the locals made from sugar cane, but we all loved it—in tea, on bread, in the sweets and cakes Mr. Abu Halaweh baked nearly every day. My Lady presented me with a set of letter-writing papers that she had ordered specially from London. She had received a thick pile of post from England: letters from Sir Alick as well as her mother, notecards and drawings from Maurice and Rainey. “Look,” my Lady said, showing me, “Rainey has learned to write her name.” Then she disappeared into her room for the rest of the day, having said she was not to be disturbed. At lunch, I placed my Lady’s meal tray outside her door and knocked lightly. At supper, I did the same. And I got on with my own Christmas Day: the sun shone and the Nile sparkled and waved and there was no sign of Christmas in Luxor, none at all, and I found myself feeling strangely lighthearted and brave, with absolutely no trace of homesickness for the heavy dark rituals of Christmas in England. In the afternoon I went down to the garden for a while. In Esher I would never have had time to sit and stare up at the blue, blue sky, to pause and pinch the fragrant fading blossom from the jasmine that grew up over the garden wall, to pull a lemon from the lemon tree, rolling it between my palms to release the scent. Imagine! Sitting outside in the warm sun on Christmas Day like the Mistress of the Nile. Mr. Abu Halaweh must have heard me laughing to myself because, a little while later, he brought down two glasses of his sharp and sweet lemonade and sat with me.