The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Part 12

Max tapped Flo on the shoulder and pointed to the back of Gustave's robes. Two ovals of solidly caked sand formed a tawny imprint of his b.u.t.tocks. Gustave hung his head in mock shame. "All right," he conceded, "we shall make a squeeze of this. We shall call it 'What the Great French Left Behind.'" He wiggled his f.a.n.n.y. Flo and Max howled.

"Agreed." Max shook his hand and bowed to Flo.

"Tomorrow?" Flo asked.

"I shall send a letter to your dahabiyah, setting the time. And now"-he extended his elbow to her-"shouldn't you be returning?" He patted her hand as she linked it with his. Max looked to him for a clue, but Gustave gave no hint of the events that had played out while Max was taking photographs. "I will see you back on the cange," he said, keeping his face impa.s.sive.

Staying within the perimeter wall of granite and sandstone, they trudged along, arm in arm, toward the dahabiyah.

"What do you think of the temple to Osiris?" Flo asked. Judging by her tone, it was clearly a place deeply laden with meaning for her. She pointed to it in the near distance.

"I'm not quite sure." He had been so distracted by her desperate notes when he wandered by that he had paid no attention once inside. "Let's go down to the beach here," he said. Forming a stirrup with his hands, he gave her a boost over the low wall.

"This is not the way I came," Flo said, scrambling over the top. "I never climbed the wall."

"But you came alone today." He hadn't thought about it in those terms until that moment. "You had no chaperone."

"That's true. But it's an uninhabited island. And I was only gone a short while."

He wagged a finger at her. "Still, you've broken the rules as you explained them to me."

"I suppose so."

It genuinely pleased him that she had shown some gumption, that she had the potential, like Caroline, to be a miscreant. What other rules might she be willing to break?

From the sh.o.r.e, the encircling river fractured and multiplied the light like the beveled edge of a looking gla.s.s. He felt deeply content, as when he and Caroline wandered the riverbank at home with no destination.

They reached Trajan's bed, an open-sided tomb that resembled a greenhouse, with vigorous weeds growing up through the floor. In the cove below, they spied the dahabiyah. Selina and Charles were sitting under the reed panel, drinking tea and reading.

Selina raised her arm in welcome. "You've come back, my dear. And with an old friend."

He saw that Miss Nightingale was blushing and smiling, happy to see her dear friend. Or was she, possibly, happy to be seen in his company? For an unpleasant moment he wondered if the Bracebridges had a role in finding a match for Flo. He banished the thought.

As she set foot on the gangplank, Flo waved good-bye. He waved, then turned around, his back burning with her gaze.

They had been in the temple of Osiris? He made a mental note to return. It was one of the most important monuments on Philae. He'd noticed nothing but Miss Nightingale.

13.

MAHATTA.

The next day, as promised, a letter from Gustave arrived before breakfast. His plans had changed. They were relocating the cange to the eastern side of Philae to camp there later in the week. In the meantime, he and Max would trek overland past the cataracts to Aswan to replenish their stores. He would return in a few days and write again.

Flo was disappointed. She wondered why the crew could not shop for him and suspected other reasons were at play. (Brothels immediately came to mind.) Also, he made no more mention of making squeezes together. Had he formed no attachment to her, no special affection after their talk yesterday? Did he not at least pity her? Perhaps he did, and that was the problem.

She pushed these questions from her mind and decided to resume work on the long letter she had started to Parthe. Another diversion presented itself later in the morning when Charles announced that he and Selina had been invited to dinner at Mahatta, a village on the eastern bank of the river, a short ride by boat from Philae. Flo could come along if she wished.

She did wish. If she stayed busy, she might keep at bay her desolate thoughts as well as new fantasies of Gustave-brief flashes intense as lightning. (Gustave leaning forward to wipe dust from her brow; the two of them rambling hand in hand; removing a smudge from his earlobe after licking her finger . . .) The word lover glittered in her mind, like a stage marquee. Richard had never been a candidate for anything but wedlock. In retrospect, she found his frivolity and his determination never to feel dejection, except as it could be conveyed in rhyme, limiting.

That was unkind. Surely he'd felt miserable the day she refused him, a bright afternoon the previous October sharply etched in her mind. They'd been chatting in the parlor at Embley. Curled up in a corner of the sofa, Richard was paging through a sheaf of poems, preparing to read to her. She loved the way he lolled and lounged against the furnishings. He was no taller than she, and she theorized that he adopted these postures partly to prevent easy comparison. Whatever the motive, the way he dispensed with the strict horizontals and verticals of his surroundings was catlike and comforting.

He stood and walked to the fireplace, leaning on the mantel, one foot braced against the wall.

She often listened with pleasure to his poetry as well as drafts of his biography of Keats. He read without histrionics, his voice smooth and intimate, completely different from the voice he used in Parliament, which was quavering and too effusive for the setting. She'd heard him speak there several times, dismayed once to observe an opponent parodying his florid diction.

"This one is called 'Familiar Love,'" he announced.

She sat on the sofa in front of him, attentive if somewhat alarmed by the t.i.tle. A proposal had been in the air for weeks. Had he come to demand an answer at last? He was thirty-nine and she was twenty-nine. She'd known him for seven years.

"Familiar Love," he repeated, clearing his throat.

We read together, reading the same book Our heads bent forward in a half embrace . . .

Her mind wandered, taking stock again of how she felt, preparing what she might say (nothing came to mind!) if he asked. By any logical measure, her equivocation was irrational, for from the beginning they had a natural affinity for each other. She'd been considering him for years, because his asking seemed inevitably keyed to the rhythm of life, like bird migration or the falling of leaves.

Their backgrounds couldn't have been more similar unless they were siblings. Both came from privilege, the Milnes having made their fortune in the wool trade in the previous century. Like her, he was one of two children. Both came from Dissenter Unitarian families and had been educated at home, she because women were not permitted to attend the public schools and because the academies for girls weren't intellectually rigorous enough to meet WEN's standards; and Richard because he was a frail child, p.r.o.ne to lung ailments. They'd both sojourned during their youth in Italy with their families.

Her parents had made it clear that they found Richard an ideal match for either sister, with charm enough to impress Parthe, and a wit that pa.s.sed muster with Flo. He was a pleasant-looking man, with an open gaze, fair brown hair, and a broad forehead. He had published several volumes of verse and was an important figure in Mayfair. The lively breakfasts he threw at 26 Pall Mall when Parliament was in session attracted everyone of note-politicians, scientists, artists, writers, and socialites.

Had he ever seriously considered Parthe? At first, f.a.n.n.y had set both daughters on display like auction items in the cunningly appointed public rooms at Embley: propped up like costumed dolls upon the horsehair sofa, their skirts arranged just so, their feet clad in glove-leather slippers; or ranged around the dining table along with the silver epergnes overflowing with flowers and fruit. Parthenope needed no persuasion to enter the fray. She ached for a life spent in the service of a husband and children. She was perfectly happy en famille, while Florence was utterly downcast to the point of madness at home. Had her family been Mahometans, Florence thought grimly now, they could have offered a bargain-two wives for the price of one.

"We had experience of a blissful state," Richard read. She remembered the line; it was stiff and airless, not like Richard at all. She forced her attention back to the poem. He'd be expecting her to comment on it.

Richard's voice rose with pride as he continued.

The beauty of the Spirit-Bride, Who guided the rapt Florentine . . .

Oh, the Spirit-Bride! She couldn't bear it. Yet, she thought she loved Richard. She couldn't imagine a more empathetic soul; he was more like her than any man she had met. Only WEN had treated her with such equality and gaiety.

She loved to hear him describe his years at Cambridge, where he was a member of the exclusive Apostles society, though he'd never taken his exams, his nerves being inflamed. He had let her read the journal he kept during the three years he spent in Europe after university. In Italy he'd read poetry and soaked up the Mediterranean until it had tinged his soul with sunlight. He often spoke with Flo of his plan to make prolonged visits there, and when she returned from her trip to Italy with the Bracebridges, he'd been her keenest listener.

Once, he'd taken her (chaperoned by WEN) to Cambridge. The library was splendid, with its black-and-white checkered floor, its busts of great thinkers, and portrait medallions on the walls. Oriel windows spilled morning sun on row after row of bookshelves. A strange thought had occurred to her there, which she had whispered to him: "If I began reading now," she lamented, "I would not live long enough to read all these books." Richard had wiped away a tear from her cheek and guided her back outside.

He arranged for tea that afternoon in the dormitory of a friend who kept a tame bear cub. For Flo, the main attraction had been the room itself. What she would have given for a place she didn't have to share, a room that was a shrine to learning, with walnut bookshelves surrounding a st.u.r.dy old desk on whose scarred top a ream of white foolscap lay like a pool of cream.

She'd tried to mesmerize the cub, but it waved its paws at her. Richard had intervened, tenderly returning the animal to its cage, where, after a few moments, she succeeded and the bear lay down, purring like a cat. What other man would have trusted her with the creature, or come to her aid more gallantly without making her feel foolish? Since that visit, the dorm room at New College had appeared, altered, in her dreams, furnished with a globe, a fur throw (the bear, she wondered, made docile?), and three young men listening raptly to her.

Yes, she admired him. Surely that was part of love.

She sensed from the slight rise and crackle of Richard's voice that the poem was ending: To braid Life's thorns into a regal crown, We pa.s.sed into the outer world, to prove The strength miraculous of united Love.

Still clutching the sheaf of paper, he lunged toward the sofa and dropped down on one knee, a worried expression on his face. "Marry me, Florence?"

"I do love you, Richard," she said, taking his hand and pressing it to her cheek.

"So you say." He was staring at the Aubusson carpet on the floor. "Repeatedly."

"If I cannot agree, it is not a judgment on you, my dear friend," she told him. "Please trust me and try to understand."

"You can't spare my feelings, even if you want to," he replied, his voice low, more hiss than whisper. "If you refuse me, so be it." He sat back on his haunches, letting his hand slip from her grasp. He looked like a child who had been slapped.

"I am not certain it is you I am refusing." As soon as she said it, a contradictory image came to mind: Richard's monogram embroidered on every towel, tablecloth, pillowcase, shirt, and bathrobe, the graceful M's like so many waves rushing toward her in a storm of Milnes-ness. Her own initials would vanish except on lawn handkerchiefs with which she might dab away a tear on difficult days, days when the M's dictated every moment, even if Richard did not plan it to be so.

"Not me?" His face had gone a deep crimson.

It was a ridiculous thing to have said. She stumbled on. "I couldn't bear to lose our friendship."

"But you don't care for me enough to marry me. I don't understand." He rested his head on his knees. Was he weeping?

Had she any doubts before of her monstrosity, there could be none in that instant. "I am not sure I shall ever marry. I think I should be lost as a wife. To any man."

"No winters in Rome for you, then?" He rose and retrieved the gla.s.s of wine he'd set on the mantel and drained it, his back to her.

If only she could have spared him this pain. Perhaps more candor would soften the wound. "Darling Richard," she said, "please wait here a moment. I must show you something." She rushed up to the bedroom to retrieve her diary. When she returned, she thrust it into his hands, a book no other eyes had seen. "I beg you, Richard, read this. You have been generous to share your journal with me."

As in the poem he'd just recited, they bent their heads over Flo's neat handwriting and read together silently: I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in Richard. I have a pa.s.sional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have an active moral nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life. . . . I could not satisfy this nature by making society and arranging domestic things. . . . To be nailed to a continuation and exaggeration of my present life would be intolerable. Voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.

Richard gasped and took a step back from her. "I am your suicide?" he shouted. He turned and walked from the room, glaring at her from the hallway. That his sadness had flared into fury, Flo thought, was probably better for him because it left him with the satisfactions of indignation, while despair held no satisfactions at all.

Every day that had pa.s.sed since, she'd missed his company. And though they'd never done more than peck on the lips or place a hand on the other's arm, she sensed he, too, had a pa.s.sionate nature, a molten core just waiting to be ignited by the right partner. Now she'd never know the pleasure of that unbridled warmth.

After her refusal, Richard stopped coming to visit, his absence as palpable as his presence had been. In company together, he avoided her, gliding casually to the other side of the room, dining, by conspiracy with his hosts, out of earshot at the other end of the table, dancing at the opposite side of the ballroom. And always refusing her glance, as if she were invisible. It made her weep to think how much he must loathe her for rejecting him.

That afternoon, she continued writing to Parthe about Philae. There was no one she liked writing to more than Parthe, for the two of them shared so much that it was easy, almost like writing in her diary. Like the earlier letter about Abu Simbel, this one threatened to stretch into a religious tract. She'd spent many hours in the chamber of Osiris, whose life shared much with Old and New Testament stories. Osiris's jealous brother, Set, had chopped him into thirteen pieces and scattered them in the Nile. But Isis, Osiris's wife, aided by crocodiles, found all the pieces but one-her husband's p.e.n.i.s. So she fashioned him a p.e.n.i.s of gold that allowed him to father their son, Horus. Afterward, Osiris descended to the infernal river of the underworld. There, in the seventh room of the night, he judged the worthiness of souls to pa.s.s to the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian heaven. Hieroglyphs in the chamber depicted Osiris's severed body parts in caskets and containers of all shapes-here a foot, there an arm, his entire trunk and legs in a shallow drawer. A Nilometer that measured the height of the river bore his severed head. In another panel, he lay fully a.s.sembled on a cow-legged bed. Was it not resurrection, piece by bodily piece? As for the p.e.n.i.s-a word Flo had never spoken that made her color to see it on the page-perhaps it stood for nature's regenerative powers. Or male resolve. She'd never seen an adult human p.e.n.i.s. Those of the donkeys she rode were embarra.s.sing when they emerged, the length of their bellies, red and slick. It was distressing to imagine WEN naked, and impossible to picture how the organ produced her and Parthe. Better to focus on the face and hands of a man; that was her policy.

She decided to omit the golden p.e.n.i.s from her letter.

John Frederick Lewis was a friend of the Bracebridges who had lived and painted in Egypt for nearly a decade, most of it in Cairo. Now he and Mrs. Lewis (he had recently married) had set up housekeeping on the Upper Nile, in Mahatta. "Mr. Lewis is a world traveler," Selina had told her that morning. "He has hardly lived in England since coming of age."

"How I envy him that," said Flo. She fancied traveling to India and the Holy Land, but without a husband, future tours were unlikely. The Bracebridges were not as adventuresome or energetic as she was. The Egypt trip would probably be the most daring and the last of her life.

At three o'clock, Selina knocked on the cabin door and entered. She looked refreshed, having just napped. "Are you getting ready, my dear?" she asked. With a nod, Selina acknowledged Trout, sitting on her divan, a wool stocking stretched over a darning egg in one hand, and a threaded needle in the other.

"Mum," Trout said, barely lifting her eyes from the work.

"I can be ready in a trice," said Flo, capping her inkwell and wiping her pen.

Selina edged closer and took stock of her friend. "You must wear more clothing."

"Oh?"

"Once the sun sets, the temperature could drop to freezing."

"Really? Freezing?"

"That is what Paolo said. h.o.a.rfrost is common this time of year."

Paolo was an excellent dragoman, precise and pragmatic. He never exaggerated to inflate his own importance. "I shall bring a cape then." Flo set aside her travel desk and reached for the garment.

"Charles said we must wear all our clothes." Selina had an impish gleam in her eye. "At the same time."

"No!"

"I told him you and I should look like s...o...b..a.l.l.s. s...o...b..a.l.l.s in the desert." Selina giggled. She was such a jolly soul.

Laughing, Flo pictured the crew rolling them along the sh.o.r.e, coating them like sweet rolls in sand instead of sugar. She patted the divan for Selina to sit next to her. "I'm going to check with Murray." She retrieved the book from the cabinet between her bed and Trout's, blowing away the fine veil of grit on the cover. Selina put her arm around Flo's neck, straightening her lace collar.

"It says the thermometer can vary between one hundred twenty in the day and thirty at night. But I believe that's in the Sahara-"

"Those were Paolo's words. He says the weather will be chilly tonight and we shall be exposed to it. Apparently the Lewises are living in a tent."

"I didn't know." Flo imagined a soldier's pup tent, low and insubstantial, made of scratchy Scottish wool the color of dirty drawers.

"Yes, so wear something under your dress and two pairs of stockings. And bring a blanket. Some of the amenities are lacking. They asked that we bring along chairs and carpets."

"The conditions sound primitive."

"Charles is worried about dyspepsia. He fears he will have to eat while reclining if there is a shortage of chairs. But he's eager to see Mr. Lewis and meet his bride." Selina twisted her wedding band back and forth, a habit she frequently resorted to when discussing Charles. "I think it will be less like dinner than a hiking trip."

It might be a lark. Flo loved it when things turned unpredictable.

"I can't wait to see Mr. Lewis's paintings and drawings," Selina continued. "Did I tell you he lived in Spain after his Grand Tour? He published a folio of his Spanish drawings. Marvelous. We have it at home." Selina rose from the divan and fluffed out her dress.

Trout said, "May I stay here then, mum? I won't be needed, sounds like."

Flo and Selina raised eyebrows. "Your services will not be required," Flo said.

"Thank you, mum. I want to finish these socks. The sand eats holes through them worse than the mice back home."

"You will remain on board with the captain and crew," Flo added. "They will serve you whatever they cook for dinner." Let it be a local dish, she thought. Croquettes of Nile mud. Quail's feet. Beak of eagle in mashed lentils.

"Yes, mum."

Selina turned to Flo. "We shall leave in half an hour. Come up when you are ready. Charles will send the men down for the carpets." She kissed Flo on the cheek. "Bundle up, my dear."

"I shall."