Lyrics Alley (24 page)

‘That’s good. He is an excellent tutor.’ Nabilah turned to Waheeba. ‘You see? I am always looking out for Nur’s welfare.’

Waheeba snorted. ‘You don’t fool me. Let us look back, let us see what you did on the day of the accident.’ Spittle flew from her mouth. The neighbour sat up straight in anticipation.

‘Where were
you
on the day of the accident?’

‘I was in Cairo.’

‘Yes, you were in Cairo, and when you heard the news what did you do? You didn’t budge! You didn’t accompany Mahmoud to Alexandria. He travelled as soon as he heard the news on that same day. And you didn’t follow him, not the day after, or even the week after. You did not get on that train and visit Nur in hospital. The staff from the office made the trip. Friends, business acquaintances, people I didn’t even know made that trip. But did you show your face? No. You stayed in Cairo with your mother. Shame on you. Shame, shame.’

There was a hush in the hoash. Neither Fatma nor Halima extended a word in Nabilah’s favour. If this were a showdown, they would close ranks with Waheeba.

‘I acted according to my husband’s wishes,’ said Nabilah. ‘I stayed in Cairo because he told me to stay. I went to London because he asked me to go. This is exactly how an exemplary wife would behave. A wife who knows how to please her husband and hold on to him. And if you don’t know how to please your husband, learn from me!’

‘Learn from you!’ Waheeba cried out. ‘If I learned from you I would learn to be hard-hearted. You are without tenderness. You live with us, but you have no sympathy for us. Your heart is as black as can be and your eyes are hot and envious. You don’t wish us any good! We were living well before you came from your country; we had nothing to complain of. I ask myself, who gave Nur the evil eye? Who would wish me, and my son,
harm? It’s you! And you’re not even hiding it. You come in here smiling and gloating!’

‘I will not sit here another minute to be insulted, not another minute!’

Nabilah stood up and yanked the children up by their arms. But instead of marching out, she paused. It was a cue for one of the other women to intervene, to put in a good word, a sweet phrase to calm the atmosphere, to placate the two of them and restore peace. Nabilah did not want to flounce off; she wanted Fatma to beg her to stay, to plead with her not to take offence. But Fatma kept silent because Waheeba was her mother-in-law. Halima, then, should play that conciliatory note, but she merely looked down at the floor. The neighbour was an amused spectator, a collector of gossip. She watched with a grin on her face to see what Nabilah would do next.

Nabilah grabbed each of her children by the hand and tottered out of the hoash. The floor was uneven underneath her, not the smooth surface needed for her high-heeled sandals.

‘Who is Zeinab?’ Ferial asked, as Nabilah tucked her into bed.

She felt great tenderness towards her daughter tonight. Ferial was clearly and irrevocably a piece of her, though vulnerable and somewhat contaminated by Sudanese blood. This made her imperfect, in need of guidance and rescue.

‘Zeinab is the daughter of your half-brother, Nassir. Her mother, Fatma, is your cousin, Uncle Idris’s daughter.

‘So Zeinab is my niece and I am her aunt.’

‘Yes.’ She kissed her cheek.

‘So she should call me Aunty.’ Ferial giggled.

‘She won’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she is the same age as you, and because they don’t respect titles here. Now go to sleep. Enough of this, enough of them for one day.’

Yet Nabilah did not leave. She stretched out and lay next to
her daughter, smelling her hair and the talcum powder on her neck. Ferial’s breathing became steadier. She was falling asleep, happy because her mother was close. How trusting she was! Everything Nabilah told her she would believe, every place she would take her, she would go. A surge of love filled Nabilah. There were only two people in the world she loved equally and as much as her children; her mother and grandmother in Cairo. She ached to tell them about her visit to Waheeba, to rally them to her side. Her words would rouse their indignation. How lonely she was, how far away from home. She could tell Mahmoud all that happened today and he would not sympathise. ‘Women bickering,’ he would say, or something along those lines.

Last summer in Cairo her grandmother had reproached her.

‘Why don’t you love your husband? Why is your heart hard towards him?’

It was not hard any more. Seeing him struggle to help Nur, seeing him weep at the hospital in London, had softened Nabilah. She felt sorry for him, that rich, powerful man who could not buy a cure for his son. She fell in love with his vulnerability, his chivalry and eagerness to succeed. London drew them together, those three months in the Ritz that might well be the happiest period of their marriage. Free from their respective countries, the two of them became buoyant; they turned to face each other unrestricted by the demands of Egyptian versus Sudanese culture, equalised on imperial soil. Charming London, atmospheric London, solid and looking forward; it made them a couple, a ‘Mr and Mrs’, as was the English expression. This brought out the best in Nabilah, and she returned to Umdurman with high hopes, resolved to tolerate the Sudanese side of her husband. His marriage to Waheeba and his closeness to Idris was a shell, she decided, unrelated to his true progressive personality, the one she had discovered in London and cherished.

For this reason, Nabilah brushed aside the incident at Waheeba’s hoash and deliberately belittled the antagonism that
increasingly wafted from her co-wife’s side. Waheeba would never forgive her for usurping her rightful place by Nur’s bedside in London and there was nothing Nabilah could do about that. She had obeyed Mahmoud, and he was the important one. How could Waheeba ever be a true rival? How could Nabilah’s position ever be threatened when Mahmoud publicly and privately, in no uncertain terms, favoured his younger wife?

The news from Egypt distracted Nabilah, too, funnelling from the public sphere to the private. In Suez, Mahmoud told her, the English commander, besieged by guerrilla fighters, demanded that the Egyptian police and paramilitary officers lay down their arms and leave the city. Of course they refused! How could they not? They were punished with open fire and the numbers killed appalled the whole country. Then Cairo burning, places she had visited; the downtown that held memories – Groppi, Cinema Metro, shops and businesses with foreign connections – were targeted in retaliation for the massacre at the Canal Zone. Nabilah did not have to strain or go out of her way to get the news, Mahmoud always had the latest developments, and he was as avid as she was, if not more. Dispatches of a more personal matter reached her through her mother’s letters. Nabilah’s stepfather had lost his job. His party, the Wafd, had fallen out of favour. There had been a government shake-up and Uncle Mohsin was summoned to stand before the Purge Committee, accused of corruption and pensioned off.

‘He is sitting at home,’ wrote Qadriyyah. ‘He doesn’t know what to do with himself. We go for walks or he meets his friends in the café. I do my best to amuse and distract him but I cannot compensate him. He is pining for his old job and highly irritable most of the time. No one knows how long this crisis will last.’

When Nabilah showed Mahmoud this letter he said, ‘Let them come here. The travel will do them good and I can find your Uncle Mohsin a position in Khartoum.’

Nabilah was overjoyed. She flung her arms around him and thanked him in a gush of words and kisses that made him laugh.
Her mother here! In the same country! Nabilah’s life would be enhanced, it would be shared, and the loneliness so long inside her would finally be cured. Such joy and optimism! She set out immediately to redecorate the guest room, with new beds, new curtains and a fresh layer of paint on the wall.

There was, too, another dimension to Nabilah’s excitement. Her mother had never visited her before. This would be the first time. Now Nabilah would see her own Umdurman life through Qadriyyah’s eyes. Her position as Mahmoud Bey’s wife would be inspected and assessed. Now that he was intent on helping her stepfather, Nabilah felt honoured to have such a powerful, generous husband. But what about other things? She was never quite certain whether she was in an enviable position, or a wretched one. She wanted, naturally, to be in an enviable position; that was what she aspired to, that was what she worked for from morning to night. But a side of her felt that she had been wronged, that her marriage was unjust, hastily arranged, even a mistake. Qadriyyah’s visit would lay the matter to rest. Her mother would be the judge.

Walking down the steps of the airplane, both her mother and stepfather looked considerably older and less steady. It was not only the fatigue of the journey; Uncle Mohsin was tired from deep within. His once athletic body seemed frail, and over the next few weeks he was often absent-minded, as if he could not stop mulling over the upheaval that Egypt was going through, the demise of his party and the rise of his adversaries. Qadriyyah was solicitous towards him, engineering every situation to meet his comfort, possessive about his new fragility and mindful of his new prospects in Sudan. It was not the situation Nabilah had envisaged. She wanted her mother’s full attention, more intimacy, more analysis, but she hid her disappointment even from herself and threw herself into the role of the perfect hostess.

Mahmoud gave a dinner party for his in-laws to which every high-ranking Egyptian official, including the Minister, was
invited. There was a picnic in the Abuzeid ranch in Kadaro, and another in Burri, where they sat under the trees in a charming boathouse overlooking the Blue Nile. Qadriyyah met all of Nabilah’s friends, and she visited the children’s school and studied every corner of the saraya. A visit to Nur was scheduled as part of the visitors’ itinerary because Qadriyyah and Mohsin felt that they could not possibly be in Sudan, in the adjacent house, without visiting their host’s invalid son. Mahmoud accompanied them himself, and they made a substantial party: Mohsin and Qadriyyah, Mahmoud and Nabilah with their children.

It was the first time the Cairo couple had seen a traditional Sudanese hoash, and although Waheeba was their hostess, she remained a silent figure in the background. She stared at the visitors, but apart from exchanging simple greetings, said nothing. Nur was in good form, sitting propped up and chatty. He seemed to enjoy seeing new faces and hearing all the news from Cairo. He charmed his half-brother and sister, whom he rarely saw, and, in general, showed himself to be a witty conversationalist. Nabilah felt a surge of fondness for him. They had become close, in London, and she missed him when they returned to Umdurman. But Waheeba was a barrier in their relationship. Nur’s loyalty to his mother made him keep Nabilah at a distance, and Nabilah’s need to avoid Waheeba’s hoash prevented her from visiting him.

Afterwards, on the way home, Ferial whispered to her mother, ‘Hajjah Waheeba pinched my shoulder.’

‘Maybe she was just being playful.’ Nabilah held the children at arm’s length these days. She was straining, instead, to have her mother all to herself.

‘No, she was being nasty. She’s a beast!’

‘Shush. Don’t be rude about grown-ups.’ But Nabilah’s reprimand was mild. She was eager to hear Qadriyyah’s assessment of Mahmoud’s first wife.

They talked that night, staying up late on the terrace after
Uncle Mohsin had gone to bed and Mahmoud left for a dinner engagement in Khartoum. By Sudanese standards the night was cool, but both women were in summer nightgowns, enjoying the breeze, the slight chill in the air and the heavy disc of the moon. It was the talk Nabilah had ached for, and it started with Nur.

Qadriyyah said, ‘They treat him very casually, I couldn’t help but notice. That little girl, Zeinab, climbed onto his bed and slotted a cigarette in his mouth!’

Nabilah laughed. ‘He never used to smoke in front of his father, now he has no qualms.’

‘But it’s in such poor taste for a child to light cigarettes! And is he always surrounded by all and sundry? Invalids need their peace and quiet.’

‘I told them this, and they said he loves company. They are spoiling him. It took months for them to realise that he can read on his own if someone turns the pages for him, and it’s only now that they’re using the wheelchair! In London the doctors stressed the importance of independence, but his mother wants him waited upon. No wonder he has his ups and downs!’

‘Poor boy! Your Uncle Mohsin said to me, “When I see the tragedy of others, my own seems small in comparison”. He is not himself at all. Mahmoud Bey is going out of his way to secure him a suitable position here, but Mohsin is not interested.’

Nabilah did not want the conversation to drift yet again to her stepfather. She spoke sharply, ‘What did you think of Waheeba, Mama?’

‘She is nothing next to you, of course. Your fingernail is more valuable than the whole of her. Everyone knows this, and Mahmoud Bey more than anyone else.’

‘So why doesn’t he divorce her?’

‘Oh Nabilah,’ Qadriyyah sighed, ‘you should not even think about her. She doesn’t threaten you in any way. She will come round, you’ll see. She will be on your side, eager to serve you and your children.’

‘But it is not only her that is the problem. It’s the whole country!’

‘Don’t start again. Don’t start complaining.’

‘I just want to know what you think, now that you are here, seeing my life and my house for the first time. Is this what you imagined when you married me to him?’

Qadriyyah lit a cigarette and inhaled. She was bringing her attention round to a serious subject.

‘When I saw Mahmoud Bey for the first time,’ she began, ‘I saw an Egyptian man wearing a suit and a fez, speaking as we do. He was a little dark, but not too dark, and he was in his prime. We heard that he was wealthy, that he was well-known, and that he had been received by the King. All positive credentials. Yes, he was married and he had grown-up sons – he didn’t hide these facts – but he was no longer living with Waheeba, and no bridegroom is perfect.’

‘Didn’t I have other options?’