Only in the Night (14 page)

‘Antonio, I don’t intend to let you down,’ she told him, apropos of nothing.

‘It’s a hard and thrilling life doing the work we do here, Eliza. Just do the best you can, that’s the way we all approach it. Make the best personal life you can for yourself. Everyone does that too. Nobody makes judgements, least of all me. But I am a hard task master, and not always the most diplomatic of people, I don’t ask forgiveness for that, only understanding. It’s the way to get the job done.

‘The hospital and clinic are in two separate buildings but close together, connected by a roofed terrace which overlooks the river. There’s a landing dock for our ferry boat and those patients who arrive at the hospital by boat from villages up or down river. You will have a small bungalow for yourself very near mine. They’re a short distance from the hospital but do give a modicum of privacy. The place is very badly run for many reasons: poor administration, the nature of the people and the staff. It isn’t so much that we need rigid order imposed but we need a structure, some sort of order to replace chaos. That may sound strange but once you get there you will understand. I am sometimes away for days on end when I’m making my house calls or doing my monthly visiting clinic route, travelling considerable distances. Once you’re settled in, if your schedule allows, I’ll take you with me. It’s a great
way to meet the people and see the country. I hope you can see by now that this job is going to be pretty much what you make of it.’

Eliza listened and understood that the attraction that Antonio Rinaldi and she felt for one another was going to be what she made of that too, which suited her just fine. He was not putting his cards on the table vis à vis that attraction but had cleverly skirted the issue by talking work. Not good enough, old boy, and I’m having none of that, she told herself.

‘Those women were romantics, thinking the doctor and his new administrator are going to fall in love. They are wrong, Antonio. The new administrator is not looking for love. Romance, erotic idylls, yes. For the excitement and pleasure, the adventure of great sex – if the right man were to appear on the scene. But not even affairs of the heart, and affection, glorious erotic mating, would be able to keep her tied into a relationship. The new administrator wants her sexual freedom, to live that sort of life she chooses. I like to begin the way I intend to go on. Now, how does that sit with
you,
Antonio?’

There was a passionate look in his eyes, a smile of delight on his lips. He raised her hand and lowered his head to place a kiss upon it. He toyed with the beads on her turban, and then undoing several of the buttons on her dress, exposed her naked breasts. He looked at them for several seconds before he caressed them, lowered his lips to their nipples and sucked, not hungrily but lightly, sweetly, until Eliza came with the merest shudder and sigh, a faint moan of delight. He closed the buttons and brushed the side of her face with the back of his hand. ‘I have the distinct feeling I will
have to share you with Anwar, he made that clear to me when we said goodbye in Asyut. Is that true, would you like that?’

‘Yes, if the attraction is still there, the time and place right, and it doesn’t interfere with my work. Does that shock you?’ she asked.

‘I have shared other women with him before.’

‘That isn’t what I asked you, Antonio.’

‘No, it doesn’t shock me, it surprises me. It also intrigues me, excites my lust. The luxury of the erotic and sexual bliss with no strings attached is thrilling. Will it be an adventure for us – who knows? Time and passion govern the answer.’

With that he rose from the ground, and taking Eliza’s hands in his, pulled her up and into his arms. He held her close and caressed her body through her dress. His sex was swollen and strained against his trousers. Eliza closed her eyes and savoured the feel of him pressed against her. He released her to place an arm around her shoulders and together they walked back to the Range Rover. ‘We have far to go, you and I.’ A smile crossed his lips and he laughed. ‘I think I’ve just made a double entendre.’

It was a long and very hot drive to Luxor where they stopped to fill the tank with petrol and drink tiny glasses of hot, very sweet mint tea. Feeling somewhat revived, they pushed on, skirting the city and its temples. The heat and the motion of the Range Rover did their work, Eliza once again slipping in and out of sleep which she found very annoying because she did not want to miss seeing anything en route. She had fallen hopelessly in love with Egypt from the moment she looked down at the Nile from the Gulf Stream’s
window, and felt a passion for the place she had only felt for one other before: her beloved Tuscany.

She was nudged awake by Antonio. ‘I think we must open another bottle of water, Eliza.’

He took a long drink from the bottle, and after handing it to her, surprised Eliza by beginning to speak about himself. ‘I’m forty-five years old, married to a beautiful but selfish and too self-centred woman who is the mother of my four children. She lives in Florence with them where we have a house and I have a very large and prosperous practice. I spend ten months of the year here and two working in my practice. Originally I came here for a month but have been seduced by Egypt and the work that has to be done. I will not abandon this project and return for good to Italy until I am sure that we have it up and running, with the right doctors and staff to continue our work. When that is achieved, I will resume coming here for a month’s work every year. I have been giving that speech now for the last five years.’

‘Tell me more,’ she said, placing a hand on his thigh. He took his eyes from the road to glance at it.

‘That’s a very dangerous act, Eliza.’

She removed her hand as fast as if she’d been burned. Antonio laughed and took her hand in his and placed it over his mouth to kiss it, without even taking his eyes off the road. Then he told her, ‘How does one admit to being highly sexed without frightening you off? I don’t want to. I would rather excite your interest instead. A strong libido, that’s how I shall explain myself. Yes, a strong libido that is never quite sated but for the most part satisfied. The foreign women and the Alexandrines and Cairenes of
the upper classes are luscious and seductive creatures. Sexual affairs are easy and never get complicated. They are romantic and intriguing, beguiling even. Not to mention adventurous, deliciously decadent, and always thrillingly erotic. I think it’s the heat, the lazy soft sweetness of the way of life that is led here. It eats away at the hypocritical sexual morality of the west.’

It was all flooding back to her: the excitement of sexuality, creating adventurous sexual acts to satisfy fantasies, the sheer bliss of great fucking, wallowing in one’s own lust and a lover’s. Eliza had not until now realised just how much of herself she had given up for kindness, love based on friendship and affection. She was ready, so very ready, to express her own sexuality, to share it with a man such as Antonio who was being ruthlessly honest about himself and how he wanted her. And Anwar? Would he come to visit her, sweep her into an erotic affair that she suspected would be sublime? Eliza felt so young and fresh, reborn even, now that she could begin again to enjoy men, enter new worlds of sexual ecstasy.

‘You’re very quiet. Surely I’m not shocking or surprising you?’ asked Antonio.

‘Not in the least. I’m just a little distracted at the prospect of pleasure unbound.’

At El Ridisiya Bahari, a small town on the east bank of the Nile, Antonio stopped to see the local doctor and drop off a box of vaccine. They were delayed while he made two house calls and used the telephone, then they were once more on their way. Eliza was by now dazzled by the mystique of Ancient Egypt, having caught her first glimpse of the Temple of Idfu off
in the distance on the other side of the river. Several miles from there they stopped at the ancient site of Gebel Serag and Eliza was, as so many others had been throughout the centuries, seduced by the Egypt of ancient times. She was astounded at the power it cast over her. She had a fleeting vision of the life she imagined was going to unfold for her here in this new and strange world: one of hard work and passion for life amidst the mysteries of the dead that seemed to linger in the very air one breathed, the silence and beauty of the desert. Eliza sensed she was catching up with a life that had run away from her. She was expecting much from this second chance.

Of course, she said none of this to Antonio. When she turned to join him he was squatting on his haunches, looking out across the Nile and smoking a large Havana cigar. There was something in the look on his face … it was not unlike the way she was feeling and she knew that he too had found his second chance in Egypt. They were kindred spirits.

The heat, which was still intense, quite suddenly became her friend because Eliza was giving in to it rather than fighting it. They crossed the Nile a few miles from the ancient site on an old wooden ferry boat that had been awaiting their arrival. The vessel had had cosmetic surgery to spruce it up and to accommodate two cars: today it carried only one, the overloaded Range Rover. There were several dozen people on board: poor men dressed in robes and turbans, some not looking at all well; the women in their black muslin, with no more of their face showing than their dark and exotic eyes, underlined with kohl, appeared sultry and sensuous.

Eliza stood aside as people came to greet Antonio: another doctor and two Egyptian nurses in starched white; two others in white traditional dress with heads covered; several people who had come long distances from their villages and seemed to know him and treat him as if he were a god. There was a great deal of bowing and kissing of his hands. He looked not at all embarrassed, taking it in his stride. There were several stretcher cases, all men, and a small boy who looked very ill indeed. Suddenly the glamour and beauty of Egypt, her own self-centred sexual preoccupations, seemed to assume their real proportion in the new order of Eliza’s life. She suffered a momentary fear as to her own inadequacy. It passed, never to return again.

There was a kind of mad confusion on board as the ferry boat pushed off to cross the river. Eliza, who had been forgotten, watched and listened. It was all as Antonio had described it, more or less everyone doing their own thing and hoping for the best. One of the nurses was having a contretemps with several patients going to the clinic. Eliza realised that though the boat belonged to the Nile Hospital and Clinic, it was carrying people on board who were blatantly using it to cadge a ride across the river. A donkey, several chickens and a duck, a goat and some huge cartons tied with rope, gave the game away. She saw Antonio fly into a rage at one of the nurses because she could not get people to settle. Eliza went not to the nurse but a screeching old woman, smothered in black, smelling of rancid butter and garlic. She was shabby and dirty and out of control, the more so for being shoved around by one of the nurses who had at first told her the boat was full. Eliza went to the old
woman and took her hand, stroking it. The woman tried to pull away several times but Eliza did not relinquish the hand. Then she stroked the woman’s head and her cheek and she grew calmer. Tears rolled down her wrinkled face and Eliza took the scarf off her own head and wiped the woman’s tears away, all the time talking to her, calming her with words the woman could not possibly understand while she led her to a bench. One look from her to the men sitting on it was sufficient for them reluctantly to make room for the old woman and Eliza.

Eliza called the nurse over and was much relieved that she not only understood but spoke English. She told her, ‘I’m the new administrator and I never want to hear you shout at anyone ever again. You and I will have to find a better way so as not to upset the people here or ourselves.’ Then she sat down next to the old woman and told her in sign language that all would be well but there was to be no more hysteria from her either. Then Eliza left her to settle another dispute on board.

As she passed Antonio, he took her by the arm and led her to a quiet spot at the railing of the boat. ‘I saw how you calmed that old woman. It was impressive. Like someone who knows how to tame a troublesome horse, I half expected you to blow into her nose.’

Eliza was impressed that Antonio knew that old horse trick, delighted to learn that they had something else in common: a love of horses. That had to be so or surely he would not have recognised she was taming the old woman as she would have a distressed horse.

‘It’s true, I do know some taming tricks. Horses, and especially spirited ones, have always been in my
life since I was a child,’ she told him, assuming that he would understand such a passion: the relationship between an Englishwoman and her horse.

He made no further comment about her love of horses but instead told her, ‘I liked the way you handled that situation. Look around you. Everyone is settled, impressed by your authority. How did you do that by barely taking action?’

‘What I did was instinctive. There was something quite unjust about not taking the old lady on board and giving her a free ride as long as we had the room.’

Antonio smiled down at Eliza, lit the stub of his cigar and gazed silently across the water for several minutes before he left her to vanish among his patients.

The chaos was much the same when they landed on the west bank of the Nile as it had been when they embarked: the same nerve-racking and inadequate suggestions from half a dozen men while another half dozen were giving directions for getting the Range Rover safely off the ferry boat. Eliza had her first view of the hospital and clinic buildings, with a modest distance away several outbuildings. It all looked terribly impressive, more so than she’d imagined, in the hundred-degree heat, a blood red sun slipping lazily down a sky dusky with the coming of night.

Those first few weeks were not easy for Eliza. She endured eighteen-hour working days where no one had time to give her instructions, just tell her their problems. She had but one job description: sort it out, make it work – whatever
it
may be. Her nights were no more than exhausted interludes in the oppressive heat
and tremendous humidity. It was ‘Doctor Rinaldi’ and ‘Mrs Flemming’ when on duty, and hardly a whisper of friendliness off. There was simply too much going on, too much readjusting to a new work ethic, a new and fascinating culture, for Eliza to deal with anything more personal. And a gruelling schedule of inoculations against polio. There were three doctors in residence and a visiting French surgeon, five trained nurses, dozens of untrained orderlies and other staff who were working for no more than bed and board and a handful of coins, and finally Eliza Flemming, to tend the relentless stream of patients that kept arriving.