by Ahdaf Soueif
‘No.’
‘Edward, dearest, we could go down to Horsham for a few days. You can ride, be out in the air —’
‘No, Anna. I am going nowhere.’ He still does not look at her, but his grip on the arm of the chair becomes tighter, and his voice, though not raised, pitches itself a note higher. ‘Will you please understand that? Nowhere. If you wish to go —’
‘But Edward, I have no wish for myself. I only thought —’
‘Let us not talk of this. I have no wish, no strength —’
‘Please, dearest, calm yourself.’
Anna puts down her cup and rises to bend at his side. She puts her hand on his, trying to ease her fingers between his palm and the armrest. When she fails, she simply lets her hand lie on his.
‘You must not become agitated. We will do nothing that you do not wish. I have no desire except to help you; to help you come back to yourself. Please, dearest, will you not tell me what I can do?’
When there is no answer, Anna bends further and places her lips and then her cheek against his brow. It feels hot and slightly damp. Edward Winterbourne pats his wife’s hand as it lies on his and disengages his own.
‘Please, Anna. There is no need to be so concerned. It is just a matter of resting.’
Anna stands beside him. She knows he would not welcome her sitting down again. But this is not some womanly folly; they are all concerned. The servants go about their business with muffled tread. Visitors leave cards to which she replies with polite notes saying that Edward finds himself indisposed, but as soon as he is better … His father is concerned to the point of anger. Yesterday afternoon she had entered the library to find him speaking to the butler. When he heard her at the door he had come forward and taken her hands.
‘Ah, Anna. I have just asked Wilson to take all the shot out of the guns. Just a precaution, you know. No sense in having all that lead lying around. What d’you think?’
‘Yes, of course, Sir Charles,’ she had agreed. ‘There’s no need for it.’
And when Wilson had left the room and closed the door behind him, she had allowed the fear to show in her voice and eyes. ‘You don’t really think, do you?’
‘No, no. Of course not. Of course not.’ He had paced away from her, the erect soldier’s figure striding to the end of the library table. ‘I hope you don’t mind, my dear —’ He gestured at his boots. ‘I rode over suddenly, you know.’
Anna shook her head. Halfway back he stopped and struck his fist against the back of a chair.
‘By God! You’ll pardon me, my dear, but I feel like taking a whip to him. If he had not the stomach for it, what drove him to go? He requested that commission — he would not be denied.’
‘He believed he was doing the right thing.’ And also, she thought, he wanted action, adventure, purpose, a mission …
‘I told him, though. I told him this was not an honest war. This was a war dreamed up by politicians, a war to please that widow so taken with her cockney Empire — Ah, what’s the use?’
He paused, and Anna came to stand beside him. Together, they stared out of the window at the trees darkening in the quiet square. He turned to her.
‘You should get out, my dear. This is no life for a young woman.’
‘I do get out, Sir Charles. I go out every day, for an hour. Mr Winthrop said I must. He said I must walk in the air. I go out every day at three, and I don’t come back till four o’clock. Edward likes to rest then, you see —’
‘But your little face is getting quite peaky, Anna, my dear.’ He had put his hand to her chin and under that gentle touch she had felt the tears rise to her eyes — as they are rising now.
‘Edward, dearest, is there anything you would like? Anything that I can fetch or do?’
‘I think I should rest now, for a while.’
For shame, for shame, Anna. To be weeping for yourself now, at such a time. All your thoughts should be bent on him, devoted to him. He is in need of rest, and he cannot find it.
How different this homecoming has been from that of his father when, as a child of ten, recently bereft of my mother, I lay on a corner of the smoking-room carpet, studying the map of Egypt Sir Charles had given me and listening to him tell of how they beat Urabi and took Tel el-Kebir. And I heard him talk of heroism and treachery and politics and bonds, and I felt his anger at the job he had been made to do.
But Edward will not speak and I am afraid. I have not dared voice the thought, but I am afraid we are in the grip of something evil — my husband is in the grip of something evil, something that will not allow him to shake off this illness and come to himself.
Caroline Bourke tells me that Sir William Butler, meeting General Kitchener upon his arrival at Dover, said to him, ‘Well, if you do not bring down a curse on the British Empire for what you have been doing, there is no truth in Christianity.’ And Kitchener simply stared at him. I asked her what he meant. What had they done beyond taking the Soudan and restoring order? And she said she did not know — but with such dark looks as left me full of foreboding. I long to ask my husband what this means, for my instinct is that there is a key here to what ails him, but I am afraid. He is so changed and now is unable to take any nourishment but the thinnest broth and some crusts of bread.
Anna stands up and walks slowly round the gallery, coming to a stop in front of an old man, his white beard and turban set off against a wall of golden brick hung with pages of white, inscribed paper. Before him, on the floor, robed in vivid reds and blues, sit the children he teaches. A sun-striped cat reclines on a green cushion watching a pair of doves pecking at the spangled mat. In the half-open doorway, the smallest of the children hesitates.
In the street, Anna starts to hurry. It is four o’clock and the light is fading fast.
I have failed him. I am constantly and repeatedly failing him. If I could but find the key to the locked door of his mind, I could sweep out all the tenors that lurk there. And he would be well again.
For I know there are tenors and they have to do with the mission he has been engaged upon, which culminated earlier this week in the signing of the Soudan Convention. An event which has greatly angered Sir Charles and his friends so that they have written to The Times:
Sir,
What would be said in private life, if a guardian and trustee who had undertaken to manage the estate of a minor, allowed the estate to run to ruin and then took possession of it as being worthless? In 1884 we forced the Egyptian Government to abandon the Soudan and leave it derelict, and now, the opportunity having occurred, we are taking possession of the country as belonging to nobody. It is a comment on the tone of the age that we should be doing this with the apparent approval of the whole world, moral and religious.
It would also appear, according to the Convention signed by Lord Cromer and Boutros Pasha, that we are saddling on Egypt the whole cost and labour of the war of reconquest not yet completed and making her budget responsible for the Soudan deficits.
This invention, the British Empire, will be the ruin of our position as an honest Kingdom.
Yours etc.
Sir Charles tells me that George Wyndham said to him plainly that it is agreed by the Powers that the aim of African operations is to civilise Africa in the interests of Europe and that to gain that end all means are good.
I cannot believe George truly meant that ‘all’ means are good — but he is Under-Secretary for War and is bound to espouse more warlike principles than Sir Charles would think right.
I wish to ask Sir Charles to speak to Edward about the Soudan and to try to unlock — but I fear Sir Charles is too impatient and of too volatile a temper. My father would have been a better man for the task, for it was in his nature to be gentle —
* * *
Dear God, dear sweet Lord Jesus, I pray constantly for my husband’s mind and for his soul. He is grown weaker and cannot or will not leave his room.
* * *
Caroline came to visit and told me how they
say Kitchener’s men desecrated the body of the Mahdi whom the natives believe to be a Holy Man and how Billy Gordon cut off his head that the General might use it for an inkwell. It cannot be true, for if it were — I truly fear for Edward now.
* * *
Sir Charles tells me that Billy Gordon confirms the story of the cutting of the head, but is angry that the deed is imputed to him — but he will not say who did it. Sir Charles did not wish to speak of this at first, but when he learned how much I knew already, he saw that it could not be helped and that it would be kinder to allow me to speak with him, for surely there is no one else to whom I can talk of this.
Oh, how I wish now more than ever for the presence of my beloved mother! For I feel sure she would advise me on some simple, womanly way to reach my poor, imprisoned husband. I have no confidante save Caroline Bourke and she, I fear, carries my own personal interest — as she sees it — too close to her heart to be able to advise me how I can best help my husband.
* * *
Edward brings up everything we give him now. His stomach cannot retain so much as a cupful of thin gruel and I fancy he is attempting to purge himself of — all manner of things. I beg him to take heart, for our Lord surely watches over him as he watches over us all and God judges the actions of men but surely too He judges them by their hearts and their minds, else how can one act be held distinct from another? And surely that distinction He would make — but Edward turns away.
Meanwhile, I find out that General Gordon’s sister has distanced herself from this expedition all along. She has said that if it is to avenge her brother, then she does not wish him avenged and she is certain he would most strongly have not wished it himself. She says she knows the Mahdi had not wished General Gordon dead but rather had wanted him alive so that he could exchange him for the freedom of Urabi Pasha, the exiled leader of the Egyptian uprising of 1882. She tells anyone who will listen that her brother was among the first to come forward when Mr Blunt set up the fund to defray the expenses for the defence of Urabi, and that he had said, ‘Here’s the money, I’ll wager Urabi pays it back himself in a couple of years.’
Each day now brings fresh horrors and Edward sickens so that I cannot bring myself to leave the house, nor do I wish it but content myself while he sleeps with a turn about the garden — the garden in which all things appear so brown and bare and dead that it would seem impossible that May will come and all will be in leaf again — and yet, today, I spotted the cheery white of the first snowdrops: the usual five, faithful to their usual place at the base of the old plum tree — and I was filled with a kind of melancholy hope —
Sweet Mary, Mother of God, I pray for my husband’s soul as I pray for the souls of all the men who were joined in that terrible event —
The papers are full of it: an army of 7,000 British and 20,000 Egyptian soldiers loses 48 men and kills 11,000 of the Dervishes and wounds 16,000 in the space of six hours.
Winston Churchill promises to publish a book that tells how General Kitchener ordered all the wounded killed and how he (Churchill) had seen the 21st Lancers spearing the wounded where they lay and leaning with their whole weight on their lances to pierce through the clothes of the dying men and how Kitchener let the British and Egyptian soldiers loose upon the town for three days of rape and pillage.
The Honourable Algernon Bourke, Lady Caroline’s kinsman, tells Sir Charles a heavy ‘butchers bill’ was ordered for that day and communications with London were cut on a pretext so that no tempering word might find its way to the General.
Oh, I do so completely fear for my husband now, for if it is true and if he took part in those terrible deeds, he who puts honour above all else and truly thought that in embarking on this expedition he embarked on a brave and honourable task, I cannot now see how he can put it behind him — most particularly when he is so ill in body and at the mercy of the fever which burns him up for hours and leaves him, when it does, limp and so weakened that he can barely take the water that we put to his lips.
Edward Winterbourne died on 20 March 1899.
He had stood on the plain of Umm Durman and the thought that had hovered around him in Atbara, in Sawakin, in the officers’ mess — the thought that he had for weeks held at bay — rose out of the dust of the battlefield and hurled itself full in his face in its blinding light. And once that thought had revealed itself and taken hold, the fanatical dervishes transformed themselves in front of his eyes into men — men, with their sorry encampments, with their ragtag followers of women and children and goats, with their months of hunger upon their bodies, and their foolish spears and rifles in their hands, and their tattered banners fluttering above their heads. Men impassioned by an idea of freedom and justice in their own land. But still they planted their standard and still they rushed forward with their spears and it was too late, too late to do anything but stand and fire.
I have told Sir Charles that I believe that in his heart Edward was just and honourable to the end. And that I believe that, at the end, he stood closer to his father in his convictions than he was able to say. I trust this may — in time — provide him with some comfort.
4
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Walt Whitman
And what comfort was there for Anna?
There was the funeral. There was the memorial service. There were the practicalities: the solicitors to be seen, the papers to be signed. All these are chronicled in a flat, matter-of-fact manner as though by setting them down meticulously with dates and names Anna was doing her duty — what was left to her of her duty — towards her husband and her marriage.
And there was the grief, the questioning, the regrets. For months the journal in the brown leather binding is a medley of statements of fact, of fragments, exclamations —
If only he had died contented … If only he had died at peace …
There are no children to be comforted, no memoirs or letters to be sorted and wept over, no heartening story to be told. There are no rituals of mourning. In the twenty-odd years I lived in England, I never found out how the English mourn. There seems to be a funeral and then — nothing. Just an emptiness. No friends and relatives filling the house. No Thursday nights. No Fortieth Day. Nothing.
The house is already silenced through her husband’s long absence and illness. I see Anna wandering through it. I see her sitting in the library, her tea untouched, a book unopened on her knee —
If he had died contented …
There is Sir Charles’s sorrow —
Sir Charles comes to see me almost every day. We sit together, mostly in silence …
Friends come to call. Emily, her maid, chides Anna into at least going out into the garden —
I sat in the garden for an hour today. I had not even been able to persuade him to take the air. If I had understood him better — if I had been able to make him speak to me —
Day after day she relives each scene: he sits in the library, he sits in his room, he lies in his bed. His face is pale and drawn and his eyes look past her and the words she uses are never the right words, the touch she offers is never the right touch.
If I had been able to make him speak to me —
Anna can speak to no one, can give no voice to the thoughts that weigh so much on her mind. In the early days of their grief she had asked Sir Charles, ‘What should I have done?’ and he had said, ‘Nothing. You did everything you could, my dear.’ And there it was left. For she does not wish to rouse Sir Charles’s sorrow. There is Sir Charles’s sorrow and his anger. Thank God for his anger; it keeps his back straight and his step strong.
Sir Charles comes to see me often. We sit together, mostly in silence, except when he is moved to a tirade against the Empire — or rather, the spirit of Empire, for he is angered equally by the doings of Kitchener in South Africa, the King of the Belgians in the Congo, the Americans in the Filipines and all the nations of Europe in China. It is very hard, listening to him, not to
feel caught up in a terrible time of brutality and even he is helpless — save for letters to The Times — to do any thing but wait for history to run its course. But underneath all the anger, I can hear the thought, again and again: And to think that I have lost my son to this.
On a Monday evening, early in June, he tells her how Arthur Balfour had persuaded the House to reward Kitchener for the campaign; how they voted him a peerage and £30,000 and then his fellow peers left the Chamber without speaking to him. ‘It’s damn hard, my dear, forgive me. Damn hard,’ I hear him say, when he feels he has run on too much, too vehemently, the large, rough hand resting for a moment on the thin, pale one; the narrow edge of grief the old English soldier will permit himself to show. And then his concern for this unhappy daughter he is left with.
Today I walked — as I had walked so many times during his illness — to the South Kensington Museum. I found when I got there, however, that I was unable to look at the Lewis paintings I had grown to love so much —
I watch and listen, helpless to help. There is no point in saying ‘This, too, shall pass.’ For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.
She must have gone into black, although she makes no mention of fittings or dressmakers. But in January 1900 she is persuaded to accompany Lady Caroline Bourke to Rome:
13 January
Caroline, musing over what we are to wear at the Costanzi tomorrow, shook her head sadly over my weeds, and wondered whether they might not be brightened by a corsage or some jewels. I gently reminded her that it has not yet been a year since Edward’s passing and she somewhat reluctantly agreed that such Ornament would be unbecoming. I did say that I would not mind if she went without me, but she would not hear of it and has resigned herself to my forlorn appearance at her side. I was most sincere in my offer, for truly all the noise and glitter only serves to make me feel more — not more sad precisely, but more apart, more set aside — and the thought of relieving my mourning, even slightly, for a moment filled me with a kind of fear —
