The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

Mother still hoped he would marry. For years, she’d asked constantly whether he had met a suitable girl, or would allow her to find one. Later, when the question fell silent on her lips, she inquired by means of anxious looks or hopeful ones if a female name was mentioned. Recountings of the weddings of the offspring of her friends. Eyre believed himself unlikely to marry. Not cut out for it.

  The whine resumed, and with it came a sharp stinging on the rim of his ear, a hot bump rising. He groped in his whisky glass, hooked out what remained of a lump of ice, and applied it to the bite. The ice slipped from his fingers, dropping down inside the neck of the dressing gown, and he threw the dregs of the Scotch toward the shutters. Lighting a cigar, holding it between his lips, he removed the lid from a pot of sandalwood pomade and began to work the grease into his hair.

  Augustus had been dead for a decade but the power he wielded in the family was undiminished. Despite all she’d suffered, Mother still worshipped the old man. She kept the London house as a shrine to him, preserving his correspondence, his handkerchiefs, his pipes and boots and belts, his hats and gloves. The gloves and boots bore the traces of the old man’s bent, stubby hands and feet, like casts in plaster of Paris, the leather hardened around the spaces where he had been. Eyre disliked catching sight of the boots lined up on the rack in the cloakroom downstairs as if Augustus might step out over the floor, leaving his deep, dirty footprints once again, might don a pair of the gloves on the stand in the hall, ready to reach out with a thick gauntlet, take what he wanted.

  Mother spoke of Augustus in a hushed voice as if he were asleep nearby and not to be disturbed. She silenced her son with a wave of her hand if Eyre suggested changing anything, clearing the studio.

  “Your father visits me every day and has more to say than he ever had when he was alive. I am under strict and particular instructions, Eyre, to disturb nothing.”

  The old place on the coast had been sold off decades earlier, when Eyre was still a child, but the London studio remained as it was on the day Augustus died, an unfinished painting of the latest dark-haired muse balanced on the easel. They were all alike, each one indistinguishable from the one before her, the one after. His mother was a saint.

  Much of the work had already been sold. Only a few canvases remained. Among them was the Thetis, the sultry, half-clad sea goddess, sitting on the floor in the studio wrapped in an old sheet, along with a few other goddesses and nymphs and some early work that Augustus had disowned. Mother wouldn’t have the Thetis on display in the house; she insisted that Julia, Eyre’s younger sister, shouldn’t see it. Eyre refrained from pointing out that the Thetis was no worse, morally speaking, than any of the others.

  Perhaps he would sell the painting to Louisa’s husband. Eyre was not as affluent as his detractors believed. The money was being depleted. The London house, where Mother insisted on remaining, was expensive to keep up, and the price the paintings fetched had dropped in the years since the death of Augustus. His own work rarely sold.

  Hair slicked back over his head, Eyre heaved on the bell pull, intending to order another glass of Scotch. There were distractions in prospect. Julia was coming out and Jim Simpson had telegraphed to say that he was arriving with his new wife. Docking Suez 21st, traveling Cairo same day. Meet Shepheard Hotel, 6 p.m. They were probably in the bar by now, waiting for him.

  Despite his desire to remain in Alexandria, to press on with his plan, Eyre had been obliged to come and meet them. He’d promised over an inebriated dinner before Christmas that he would act as his old friend’s guide. Jim had set his heart on a crocodile twenty feet long. Eyre disliked hunting, the paraphernalia of guns and shot, the whole pointless palaver of it.

  He intended a hunt of a different kind. He lifted one hand, pointed two straight fingers toward an alabaster statue of an Egyptian princess, and released a single shot in a whistle from his lips. Seeing Miss Heron looking back at him from across the dining saloon on the steamer, he’d remembered something Jim once told him of the way hunters trapped elephants. They rounded up the young, then waited for the mother to approach, tethered by invisible chains to her offspring, willing to act against every instinct to stay close to the calf.

  He must write the girl another note. Assure her of his passionate intentions and explain his obligation to escort his old friends up the Nile. It spoke well of a man, to have old friends.

  My dear Henrietta. He screwed up the sheet and threw it in the wastepaper basket. It was on the tip of his tongue. Helen. Hannah. He found her name impossible to remember, slipping away like soap in the bath.

  There was a knock at the door and he opened it to see a fellow done up in a black-and-white-striped robe, a tarboosh faded to an insipid pink, pointed red slippers. Eyre resented the silent plea in his eyes. There was no dignity in poverty. He took the glass from the tray, signed the chit with an extravagant scrawl and shut the door.

  My dear Miss Heron—

  Probably best to observe the formalities. The time to play the ardent lover would come later.

  Forgive my silence. I have been called away to Cairo. How I wish that you might be here in the same city! Some old friends . . .

  Eyre Soane continued to write, his attention only half on the lines forming under his hand. Near his head, the insect whined.

  • • •

  “There you are at last,” said Jim Simpson.

  “Hello, Eyre,” said his wife, putting down her book.

  Soane nodded at them. Jim was leaning on the bar; next to him, his wife perched on a high apparatus that was half chair, half stool. They both bore the hallmarks of the newly arrived, their complexions gray from the London winter. Mrs. Simpson was attired in a dress that might have suited a London drawing room but here appeared fussy, and Jim wore a tropical suit made for a taller man.

  Jim looked out of place wherever he was, Eyre thought. He’d looked just the same on his first day at school, drowning in a new uniform, his face pink. He could still picture him.

  Jim ordered a whisky for Eyre from the barman. “We’ve been waiting. Expected you at six.”

  “Did you, old man? Chin-chin.”

  When discussion of the hire of the dahabeah river cruiser, the likelihood of increasing temperatures on the journey south to Luxor, and the pleasure each felt at the prospect of seeing the antiquities had run its course, Eyre judged the moment right to begin.

  “I’ve met a girl,” he said, putting down the glass on the shiny surface of the bar, drawing it along the wood, watching the trail of moisture in its wake.

  “Oh, Soanie,” Effie Simpson said, leaning forward on her stool, her features expressing a mix of interest and concern. “Tell us everything about her. Where did you meet her?”

  His new wife had begun to use Jim’s schoolboy nickname for him at the same time that Jim had abandoned it. Eyre glanced up to meet Jim’s skeptical eyes, the woman’s widened ones.

  “On the voyage out, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Simps—”

  “Oh, please, do call me Effie.”

  “She’s traveling with her mother and aunt.”

  “How romantic.” Mrs. Simpson’s eyes shone. “To meet on the voyage out. Did you hear, Jim?”

  “The pity of it is that the mother’s set against me.”

  “What possible reason can she have for that?” Effie Simpson’s voice was flooded with a sudden and excessive loyalty. “She’s only got to get to know you, Eyre. That’ll set her mind at rest.”

  Jim Simpson shifted from one foot to the other and his wife glanced at him.

  “Stop fidgeting, Jim. Eyre’s telling you something of significance. Is she beautiful? What’s her name?”

  Eyre lifted the glass again. The lumps of ice had shrunk to the size of peas. He drank it to the watery, unsatisfying end and ordered another, felt in the inside pocket of his waistcoat for his cigar case.

  “She is . . .” He c
ouldn’t come up with a word. The truth was that he had no thoughts about Miss Heron. “She has red hair.”

  Jim Simpson drank pale ale from a glass-bottomed pint pot, his Adam’s apple protruding like an elbow. The new Mrs. Simpson sipped from a glass of chilled champagne. She left lip prints on the rim of the flute, creased marks in pale pink.

  “Well,” she said. “It can’t be helped. And anyway, it’s not her fault.”

  “I’d like you to make her acquaintance. Perhaps you’ll put in a word for me if we happen to meet them.”

  Effie clasped her hands against her chest, tilted her head to one side.

  “Of course I will. Jim, you might congratulate Eyre.”

  “Indeed,” said Jim, his eyes shifting to a point behind Eyre’s shoulder. “Congratulations, old chap. It’s about time you settled down. If you really are serious this time.”

  Idiotic fellow had blushed like a woman.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Harriet and Louisa had been waved off by Yael from the station at Alexandria at nine in the morning. Now a great clock, marked in both Arabic and Roman numerals, indicated that it was four in the afternoon. Wrapped in her pink shawl, perching on the lid of her trunk while Louisa and Fouad went to find assistance, Harriet felt disoriented. In just hours, she had arrived in another world, a busier, more thoroughly foreign one than that she had left behind.

  The Europeans among the urgent travelers that rushed across the tiled concourse of Cairo station looked not as grand or consequential as the Eastern people. The Turkish men were white-skinned, opulently clad in embroidered cloth, looped strings of amber prayer beads dangling from their fingers and silver-tipped sticks held under their arms. Shrouded women took little steps behind them, dressed in more somber hues than their male counterparts, like a species of bird where a drab female attends on a vivid-feathered mate.

  Breathing in air heavy with fumes from the train engines, mingled with the sweet scent of jasmine from baskets of flowers that ragged-looking children were pressing on parties of German and French travelers, Harriet found herself scanning the passersby for someone she knew. She was looking, she realized with surprise, not for Eyre Soane but for the long limbs, crumpled suit, and pale straw hat of the man with the piano. The disappointment she’d felt on not seeing his face had stayed with her.

  She wondered where, in all the vast continent that lay to the south of here, the instrument had come to rest. Whether the man was playing it now, transporting himself to his homeland through its resonant chords. Picturing his angular body bent over its keys, his hands ranging across them, Harriet heard in her head a wistful piece of music that evoked the wind blowing between the stones in a graveyard.

  The haunting notes continued to play in her head as, with a strength disproportionate to his skinny frame, Fouad lifted her bodily into a sedan chair, and from there into another dusty cab. With Louisa looking anxiously out of the window, the three of them set off for the hotel, rattling past domed mosques with needle-like minarets, under the shadow of dark buildings, the upper windows covered in latticed woodwork screens, and along narrow alleys lined with shops that looked as if they and their goods had been there since the dawn of time.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The service was over and, with its wide doors standing open and congregation departed, the church had lost its hushed, sacred atmosphere. The bleating of goats floated in from outside over the rows of wooden pews, along with the smell of baking bread.

  “There you are, Miss Heron,” a voice boomed. “I expected to see you before now.”

  The Reverend Griffinshawe’s white eyebrows waggled as he spoke, distracting Yael from the speech she’d prepared, the appeal she’d intended to make to his Christian charity. Moving toward the dais where he stood, Yael braced herself. She had never liked asking others for help or favors but, she told herself firmly, needs must. She intended to inquire of Reverend Griffinshawe whether there was a doctor within the congregation who might lend his services once a fortnight, for the cases that were beyond her scope.

  He beamed at her. “I have been considering your offer and I have a particular request to make of you.”

  “Good morning, Reverend Griffinshawe. What is that?”

  “I am in need of a housekeeper. An Englishwoman—”

  “Reverend, I don’t think I—”

  He raised his hands in the air.

  “You misunderstand me, my dear Miss Heron. I am not for one moment suggesting that you would undertake the work yourself. I need a woman to train the servants to make English tea and order the groceries, teach my maid how to iron linen. I find myself so much taken up with domestic issues, there is scarcely time to pursue the mission.”

  Yael wished that he would step down from the dais. She disliked looking up at him, from a greater distance even than that which nature had decreed.

  “Reverend, I have an apology to make.”

  “Come, dear lady.” The eyebrows knitted together as Ernest Griffinshawe looked down on her with a look of benign approval. “I cannot believe you can have anything for which to apologize.”

  “I had thought that I could devote my spare time to assisting your project here in Egypt,” she said. “But I find I am called to other work.”

  “What other work? Who by?”

  “I intend to establish a clinic for children. An eye clinic.”

  The Reverend took a step back.

  “I wasn’t aware that you had expertise in ophthalmia.” He guffawed. “Should I have been addressing you as Doctor?”

  “The clinic will be for first aid and teaching basic cleanliness. I will offer what simple treatments I can. But this is what I wished to talk—”

  Reverend Griffinshawe looked up at the rafters.

  “If there is teaching to be done, Miss Heron, it should surely begin with the word of God.”

  Yael did not contradict him, although she was becoming aware since she had arrived in Egypt that the people here, as far as one could see, had their own word of God. From the same God or at any rate through one of His prophets. Not equal to His son, of course, but theirs nonetheless.

  She smiled pleasantly.

  “I hoped, Reverend, that you might be able to offer me some assistance. I wanted—”

  “Don’t see how, dear lady,” he said, looking past her with a distracted air, his eyes ranging over the parched white ground outside the doors. “I am not much of a one for children. Females. More concerned with souls than runny noses and so forth.”

  “Please hear what I have to say . . .”

  Reverend Griffinshawe was gone, disappeared into the sacristy. A minute later he emerged with three great tomes hugged against his chest, and Yael glimpsed the distinctive brown and gold binding of Shaftesbury’s Arabic-language Bible.

  “You may have these, Miss Heron,” he said, stepping off the platform at last, thumping the volumes down on a pew next to where she stood. “For use in your clinic. I hope you may find some opportunity at least for study with your ladies.”

  Coated in a layer of dust, their pages still uncut, the volumes looked old already. Yael became aware of her back teeth clenched painfully together. She shifted her jaw experimentally and felt a stabbing pain in the hinge of it, below her ear.

  “Reverend, these women are quite unable to read in any language. That much I do know, from my work in London. I wanted to ask—”

  “My point exactly,” he said, nodding as he spoke, as if to confirm his agreement with himself. “You could serve the flock better by teaching them the English alphabet.”

  Yael took a sudden objection to the word flock.

  “I don’t believe so,” she said. “Children who are blind cannot read, after all.”

  He looked at her with dislike.

  “I must bid you goodbye, Miss Heron. I have a meeting to go to.”

  His tone had
been unpleasant, Yael decided, walking back through the narrow streets of the old town, skirting around a donkey laden with two milk churns. The jovial assumption of common purpose had departed from it entirely. She had omitted to give him back the pound he’d lent her.

  She carried on, walking in the shadow of ancient-looking buildings, their foundations made of great boulders of white stone, the upper stories of mud bricks, roughly patched with plaster. Despite what had happened on her first outing, Yael had taken to walking everywhere she went. She enjoyed glimpsing domestic life through half-open doorways, peering into courtyards or the musty interiors of the large cupboards that in the native quarter passed for shops. Her experience with the children, the first time she’d gone out alone, had taught her a lesson. She no longer brought out her purse in public places. She kept half a dozen silver piastres loose in her handbag. If a child approached her, she slipped one or two of the small coins into his or her hand without fuss or fanfare, as she had seen the local people do. No one molested her.

  The smell of food reached her and Yael’s stomach rumbled in answer. On the shady side of the alley, a group of men were squatting around a large dish. Dressed in black-and-white-striped sateen gowns, red felt hats, and embroidered shawls, each with the right sleeve pushed up to the elbow, they were dipping their right hands into the bowl, rolling bread and beans into balls and sliding them into their mouths with deft, economical movements. Seeing her looking at them, one gestured for her to join them.

  “Welcome,” he said in English. “Welcome, Sitti.”

  Mustapha called her Sitti on occasion. It meant lady, as far as she could tell, and was a respectful address to a woman, not only a foreign one. She disliked being called khawaga. Foreigner. Harriet had told her that in the ancient Egyptian script the sign for foreigner was the same as the one for enemy; a person with their hands tied behind their backs.

  “Thank you,” she said as she passed by, nodding. “I shan’t join you but thank you.”