Song of the Nile

by Fielding, Hannah

  Even as a girl, Isis Geratly had always been attractive, poised and sophisticated; now, as a young woman, she was beautiful, elegant and charismatic. Aida felt a hard knot slowly forming inside her. Here was one of those ‘respectable Coptic girls’ who were falling over themselves to become Mrs Phares Pharaony, she thought darkly.

  ‘Aida, how lovely you look!’ She spun round to see Camelia, who had detached herself from a group of foreign ladies and was rushing to greet her. A beaming smile lit up her fine features as she welcomed her friend with the usual greeting reserved for feast occasions.

  ‘Kulle sana w’inty tayyeba, habibti, may you be well every year, my dear!’

  ‘W’inty tayeba, and you too,’ Aida replied, her dark thoughts evaporating at the sight of her friend’s delighted face.

  ‘Was that Aunty Halima I just saw talking to you? I bet she was overjoyed to see you, no?’ Camelia’s mouth quivered with amusement.

  ‘Mmm, I’ve never seen that woman overjoyed about anything.’

  Camelia laughed out loud. ‘Come, let me introduce you to people.’

  The two women moved away, passing some guests who were having their glasses topped up. One of them, a bespectacled Egyptian man in a pale suit surveying the room as he sipped his drink, caught sight of Camelia and quickly detached himself from the group.

  ‘Camelia, Kulle sana w’inty tayyeba, habibti, another wonderful Sham El Nessim. Let me say, your family always gives the best parties,’ he exclaimed smoothly. His light brown eyes were brightly alert behind his round spectacles, though his smile, which revealed a slight gap between his front teeth, seemed slightly vacant. With an uncomfortable jolt of recognition, Aida saw that it was Adly Geratly.

  The years had barely changed Isis’s father and his even, quite handsome features were strikingly similar to his daughter’s, as was his studied air. As a child, Aida had not met him often as the Geratlys tended to frequent the high-society parties more than the informal gatherings that the El Masris preferred, and now she hoped that she would not have to make awkward conversation with him for too long.

  ‘W’inty tayeba. Thank you, Uncle Adly.’ Camelia shot Aida a look before continuing, ‘Of course this year is a particularly special one because our dear Aida is back with us. You remember Aida El Masri?’

  Adly Geratly turned his inquisitive eyes on Aida and she registered his fleeting surprise as he shook her hand. ‘Of course I remember Aida,’ he said without hesitation, his voice pleasant and not particularly deep. ‘All you girls grew up together. Welcome home, habibti. I didn’t realise this party was in your honour.’ He smiled, peering at her through his glasses.

  ‘Thank you, Adly Bey,’ answered Aida.

  ‘You’ve been away from our country a long time.’ He gave her an inscrutable look. ‘Are you back to stay for good?’

  Aware that she was being appraised, Aida’s answer was non-committal. ‘Well, I have a lot of work to sort out on the estate.’ She accepted a glass from the tray of lemonade a suffragi was passing around and smiled at him blandly as she took a sip.

  ‘Of course Aida is staying,’ said Camelia, nudging her friend affectionately as she helped herself to a glass too. ‘She belongs here, with us.’

  Another male voice entered the conversation. ‘Well, that is rather good news.’

  Aida turned around with a laugh, relieved when she saw that Alastair Carlisle had joined them. ‘Mr Carlisle, how lovely to see you again.’

  ‘Likewise, Miss El Masri. I must say, it would be a shame to lose such a charming member of our community again.’

  ‘Indeed,’ chimed Adly Geratly. ‘I was just saying, Alastair, that Aida has been gone too long.’ His gaze returned to her. ‘You must feel like a foreigner after living in England for so long. I’m sure Isis would show you around all the old places when she has time.’

  Aida was reminded why her father had disliked Adly so much. There was an air of condescension in the way he continually smiled as he spoke, and how he liked to be the focus of attention. Aware that he was attempting to deflate her, she answered lightly, ‘Oh, I don’t need to bother Isis, thank you. Phares has already offered to take us around Cairo, isn’t that right, Camelia?’ She flashed her friend a mischievous look.

  Camelia hid her surprise admirably. ‘Ah, yes, of course … we are both looking forward to it, habibti.’

  ‘That is excellent,’ said Geratly, though his smile faded slightly. ‘Phares is a dutiful brother.’ He turned to the consul: ‘Speaking of duty, Alastair, how are your investigations going into those recent tomb lootings in Qurna?’

  ‘Now then, Geratly, you know I’m not at liberty to discuss our activities,’ Alastair answered pleasantly.

  ‘So, no leads then,’ the other answered, lighting a cigarette.

  Alastair would not be drawn. ‘Suffice to say, these lootings would be curtailed if the Qurnawis weren’t living in the tombs and mining for valuable artefacts.’

  ‘Qurna is a problem that isn’t going to go away,’ interjected Camelia. ‘The war has taken the tourists from Egypt, so it’s no surprise that desperate fellahin have been looting.’

  ‘The Egyptian authorities want to solve that problem by getting the Qurnawis out somehow,’ said Alastair.

  ‘But surely it’s the same all over Egypt,’ offered Aida. ‘These antique dealers are getting their hands on stolen antiquities all the time. While foreign Egyptologists are here selling these artefacts for thousands of pounds to their foreign buyers, there will always be looters. They are simply supplying a market.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that is true, young lady,’ said Geratly, regarding her through a blue haze of smoke. ‘But one must understand, these objects have always been taken and sold on.’ He gave a huff of amusement. ‘Even the Egyptian Museum is selling genuine artefacts in its gift shop. And after all, who owns the past? Can we claim ancient artefacts as our cultural property? We ourselves are almost an entirely different culture to our Ancient Egyptian ancestors, are we not? I have written a paper on just such a subject.’

  Aida raised an eyebrow. ‘There are many Egyptians who would fiercely disagree with you, Adly Bey. My father certainly would have been hotly opposed to that line of thought. He argued passionately for preserving our antiquities here in Egypt.’

  ‘Ah yes, as I recall, your father often enjoyed baiting me on this subject.’ He produced another thin smile and stared at her with a sad shake of his head. ‘A tragic business, his death. Ayoub was a talented man. Such a waste.’

  His affectation of sincerity made Aida’s hackles rise but she kept her tone neutral. ‘Many would say that our connection to our ancestors is bound up with our identity as a nation. They have a value to us that is unique.’

  ‘And do you share this sense of identity, Aida?’ Geratly looked at her unblinkingly. ‘I mean, only your father was Egyptian.’

  ‘You must forgive me, Uncle Adly,’ interjected Camelia with forced brightness, throwing a look at her friend, ‘but I must steal Aida away. We’ll soon be opening the buffet for breakfast and there are so many people wanting to meet her again after so long.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ answered Geratly with a distracted smile, his gaze already roaming beyond them.

  Brunch was delicious, the company lively and fun, but Aida’s throat felt constricted. All through the morning she mingled with the guests talking, smiling, and performing her movements mechanically, almost like a robot. No matter how much effort she made not to follow Phares with her eyes, he was like a magnet to her senses. For Aida, the swirling kaleidoscope of colour, the brilliant and elegant men and women, the beautiful grounds with their specimen trees and vivid-hued flowers under a cloudless azure sky were drowned out of consciousness; everything was a void in which Phares’s dark head and face stood out starkly, the centre of the small universe of laughing, warmly admiring friends and relations, and Isis taking his arm as they moved from group to group, casual and easy, as though she had done it a hundred times before. For a spli
t second, Aida deeply resented him – it was as though he was deliberately shutting her out.

  In order to fight her restless absorption with him, she assumed a bright exterior and attempted to chat cheerfully to women, and rather flirtatiously with men. With mingled irritation and self-pity, she fell to giving a reasonable performance of a young woman enjoying herself and her successive partners laughed appreciatively, gazing admiringly at her, doing their level best to stay with her until their wives and fiancées galloped in to break them up.

  Isis did not leave Phares’s side, and he seemed attentive to her in the most natural of ways: sitting, talking with gleaming amusement-filled eyes, one hand gesturing, the other holding a glass. During brunch he once looked up abruptly mid-sentence and trapped Aida’s gaze, his black brows lifting. As she met his intent coal-black stare, her heart fluttered. He smiled and winked at her, and she managed to raise her glass of wine and smile coolly back at him.

  After brunch it was time for the garden entertainment. The Pharaonys’ guests gathered first to watch a juggler who also swallowed knives and ate fire and then a conjurer, the háwee. This one called himself the ‘Gully Gully Man’ – the reason for it becoming quickly clear when he began to perform his tricks. Instead of blowing through the háwee’s zummárah, the large shell used by most sleight-of-hand performers, he would cry out, ‘Gully, gully, gully, gully’. To Aida’s delight, as she took her seat next to Camelia, she recognised him as the same old Nubian magician who used to enliven her birthday parties when she was a child.

  After executing a few amusing tricks – drawing a great quantity of coloured silk handkerchiefs from his mouth and blowing out fire, then placing his skull cap in a large covered box, saying his magic words, uncovering the box and producing a small army of chicks – the conjurer asked for someone in the audience to entrust him with a valuable ring. Camelia reached forward and offered him her diamond engagement ring.

  Taking the ring, the magician put it in a small box. ‘Gully, gully, gully, gully,’ came the magic words, and then, ‘Efreet, change it!’ Opening the box, he showed the audience a cheap white metal ring, which was met with amused murmurs. Closing the box and opening it again, he produced a lump of metal which he declared to be the ring melted, and offered it to Camelia, who insisted with a laugh on having her ring back in its original state. The conjurer then asked her for one Egyptian pound to recast it and, closing the box again and uttering the gully gully incantation, he opened it and took out the original ring.

  The next entertainment act was a dance show by a Brazilian couple, Sabina and Thiago Madriguera. Delighted, Aida clapped her hands with joy, recognising them as the pair who had lit up London during the war, and whose dance classes she had attended once or twice. In 1942 they had taken over a warehouse in the capital’s Covent Garden and turned it into a dance centre where they taught sensuous, flamboyant dances like the samba, tango and rumba. Every Saturday night men and women congregated there to drink and take part in a dancing competition. One could hardly move in the press of bodies and those dance evenings were always full of uniforms of all nations, men and women home for a short leave and then gone.

  Thiago and Sabina were both in their thirties, a good-looking, lively pair. Aida wasn’t the only one who had adored their dance evenings. Many others had appreciated how they had helped wartime Londoners escape the mundane, the misery of rationing and the hard, physical work involved in most people’s jobs. Their motto, ‘Dance as if you are making love to your partner here on the floor’, helped break the ice among strangers. Thanks to Sabina and Thiago, you could live your dreams for a few hours and come out of their dancehall lighthearted, transported to another world for a short while. Aida had been one of the lucky ones who had attracted Thiago’s eye for regular special lessons, but she hadn’t taken him up on his offer. Meeting individuals who were ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ was a poignant part of her day-to-day life on the wards, and she preferred to read a book, go to the cinema, or just sleep whenever she had any time to spare.

  Having performed their act, Thiago announced he would like to choose someone from the audience to help him with his next – a tango. His eyes roamed the tables and he headed towards Aida, but before he could state his request, Phares had left his seat next to Isis and was whispering urgently to him and then to Isis, who rose to her feet. The dancer bowed to Phares’s command and escorted Isis out of the circle of tables as everyone applauded.

  Aida froze in her chair. What was Phares doing? How dare he! Had he thought her incapable of assisting in the act? Isis, of course, was as much at home in the limelight as sitting there at the table, and it had all happened so fast and Phares had handled the situation so smoothly that she was sure that few people guessed the dancer had been fobbed off with the one he hadn’t chosen. Aida couldn’t help but take it as a personal slight, though she hid it well, cogniscent of the fact that she was Phares’s guest.

  As a violinist and accordion player started up their tango music, Aida forced herself to stay in her seat while the elegant Isis, clearly delighted to be clasped in Thiago’s confident embrace in front of the assembled guests, was instructed in the steps of the dance. Although Isis executed the moves imprecisely, she was eminently watchable; below her cinched waist, the flared skirt of her dress swished becomingly around her long legs as she moved, and her perfect glossy chignon accentuated her graceful neck and classic beauty. Aida’s gaze flickered over to where Phares was sitting, pensive and unmoving, seemingly riveted by the dance. Her heart gave a painful squeeze and she looked away, her eyes determinedly watching the musicians.

  After the dance act, in an effort to get away from it all for a few moments, Aida went to sit in the shade of a sycamore, trying to concentrate on the scenery of the Nile as though it were a colourful film unrolling before her. Behind her in the garden, tiny puffs of smoke floated up into the soft spring sunshine from the delicious aroma of spit-roast lamb, koftas and kebabs, gently cooking on the charcoal fires. The air was warm and from time to time the refreshing breeze whispered in the trees, making the leaves rustle with a light swishing sound. Most of the guests had left after the performance, including Isis, and only a handful remained for an early supper. Although Aida had been eager to return home after such a frustrating day, she had stayed on because Camelia had very sweetly asked her to. She felt sorry for her friend who, despite putting on a brave face in public, Aida sensed was still grieving for her husband.

  A movement caught her eye through the trees. Holding a basket of coloured eggs, Phares, jeans encasing his narrow hips and sinewy thighs, was ambling towards her. The tan of his muscled forearms stood out against a short-sleeved shirt in the palest of blues that clung to his broad chest, imparting a leopard’s grace to every lithe movement. He came to a stop under the tree and stood looking down at her, feet slightly apart, big and powerful and devastatingly sexual.

  Exposed to a virility that was normally hidden beneath his more formal or riding outfits, a frisson crept up Aida’s spine. The churning, treacherous feeling was back inside her. She wanted badly to run, yet another part of her wanted just as much to stay. Aida only wished she could sort out what she did feel right now.

  Silently, Phares stretched out the basket towards her.

  Aida swallowed to clear the peculiar tightness in her throat. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured as she helped herself to a royal-blue coloured egg.

  Phares sat next to her on the grass and placed the basket between them. Saying nothing, his serious gaze flickered over her, a trace of questioning in the depths of his eyes.

  He picked up a red egg and surrounded it with his fingers, leaving just a small part uncovered. ‘Want to crack an egg?’

  Without looking at him, Aida hit the top of the egg with her blue one, cracking it with the first tap.

  ‘You’re going to break my heart.’

  ‘Really? Who says?’

  ‘Isn’t it a traditional belief that the person whose egg is cracked will have th
eir heart broken?’

  Only then did Aida lift her head to meet his smiling face. ‘No, you’ve just made that one up to flirt with me.’

  ‘Can’t people flirt and yet remain friends?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Men start by just flirting then they – they …’

  ‘Can’t you say it?’ Phares grinned. ‘Well, there isn’t any harm in any of that. It’s all rather delicious, chérie … for the woman as well as the man.’ His eyes were full of devilry.

  Aida ignored the remark. ‘The way the story goes is that the one whose egg doesn’t break will have good luck in the future. Maybe I’ll be fortunate enough that you’ll leave me alone.’

  Aida felt Phares stiffen, but he didn’t respond to her barbed comment.

  ‘I thought of coming over to Karawan House the other day, but I reckoned you’d be busy with the preparations for Easter, so I decided it would be better if I spoke to you today.’

  Aida’s heart was pounding, but she managed a cold response. ‘Speak to me? About what? Haven’t you said enough?’

  ‘More than enough.’ He paused. ‘I wanted to apologise for my behaviour.’

  She glanced up at him, eyebrows raised. ‘Gosh … I’m impressed. The great surgeon Phares Pharaony apologising?’

  Phares’s eyes flashed but his voice remained neutral. ‘Don’t mock, Aida. This is already hard for me.’

  ‘I can imagine. It must be the first time in history.’

  ‘Why are you attacking me?’

  ‘I’m not, I’m just being direct. You’ve always known that I’m not afraid to speak my mind.’

  ‘True,’ he whispered, fixing on her face.