The Mistress of Nothing (19 page)

Omar listened, his head bowed as though in obedience. After a moment, he looked up at his mistress. “I will marry her,” he said. “I will be father to my child.” Then he left the room quickly.

I don’t doubt that Omar’s stand made my Lady furious. No member of her staff had ever defied her in this way. The next time he dared to raise the subject of our marriage, my Lady gave up any pretense of calm and shouted at him. “She has tricked you, Omar! And she has tricked me as well. She will not get away with this deceit. She must leave. She can’t stay with us in the French House. The French House, where I have been so happy. The French House, where I will live out my ruined life in peace.”

“I’ve made a plan,” she said, “I’ve written to Janet already. I’ll pay Sally’s passage. Yes. I will send her away. I will send Sally Naldrett back to England.”

And Omar? What did he say? He said nothing. But he would find a way to change my Lady’s mind. “I will find a way to keep you in Egypt,” he said, as he held me in his arms in the French House, after having told me that my Lady was determined to send me away.

I SPENT LONG HOURS ALONE IN MY ROOM WITH ABDULLAH, WORRYING.
Long hours—pacing with anxiety or sunk into myself, despairing. For Omar’s sake, I tried to keep a brave face, but it was difficult. To tell the truth, I felt as though I was twelve years old, I felt as though my parents had only just died, I felt as though I had been abandoned all over again. Abdullah distracted me, with his warm little body, with his hunger, his need, and Omar would come to see me late at night. But I always ended up prodding him for information, wanting him to tell me it was going to be all right, willing him to say once and for all, “Listen. Everything is fine.” But he did not. He could not. And after an hour or two with me and Abdullah, he’d show his impatience with my questions and slink away, back to my Lady.

I COULD SEE HER IN MY MIND’S EYE, ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE FRENCH
House. Omar told me she was unwell, although in fact her health was much improved from what it had been on the
dahabieh
before Christmas. “She’s not well,” he said, and I took that to mean she’d gone a little bit crazy, like me; it seemed I couldn’t stop myself from sharing things with my Lady. I could picture her, with great clarity, lying back on her divan, next to her writing table. Her papers are in disarray, and she has spilled ink across her stack of clean note-paper. She can’t get on with anything or anyone; she is making no progress with the preface for her book of letters—the book that is due to be published in just a few weeks—and she must send something to her mother as soon as possible. Her head hurts and her side aches, but worse than that, she is annoyed. Very annoyed. The shutters are open; she wants them closed. The fire in her room needs stoking. She is hungry and cold and thirsty and uncomfortable. Nothing is as it should be, not in the French House, not in all of Egypt.

“She calls you ‘That wretched girl and her bawling baby,’” Omar told me. “‘Omar!’” he mimics her.” ‘Omar!’ she says, ‘Come here.’ I go to her. Of course I go, I am loyal. But then I ask her when we will be allowed to marry.”

My Lady was surprised to find Omar so obstinate, so determined, on the subject of our marriage. “Why?” she asked him. “Why persist with this foolishness? You are risking everything you have worked for. You cannot marry without my permission. And I will not give it.”

“She will be my wife. Abdullah is my child,” Omar replied.

“You have made a promise to her,” my Lady said, “and it’s beneath your dignity to break it. You are afraid you will lose face. This is Sally’s cleverness at work,” she said. “She has you trapped, we both know it. This was her plan from the very beginning.”

Omar told me he did not reply to this. She spoke of his dignity, but it was beneath his dignity to argue with his mistress. She could batter him with words, but he would not bend. I loved him all the more when I saw the truth in that. It did not occur to me that he might see marriage to me as useful in any way, as part of his plans for his future, an addition to his lengthy list of skills and accomplishments in life.

I DID NOT DARE TO HOPE. I HAD NOT BEEN RAISED TO DARE TO HOPE
for anything beyond my fated lot in life. I could have become sour and dour and long-faced but for Abdullah; he lifted my spirits over and over again each and every day. I had never thought I would have a child; even when I was pregnant I had not understood what having a child would mean to me. I loved Omar with an unexpected passion that opened the world, but I loved Abdullah in a way that was larger, fiercer, more complete than the world itself could ever be. Lady Duff Gordon’s decree—that I was to give up Abdullah to Omar’s first wife and take myself off to England—was like a death sentence to me.

And then one day at the end of January Omar entered my room and said, “Sally, my love. Tomorrow. We will be married!” His words sent me swirling around the room with Abdullah; we did a little dance together before I passed him to his father and the three of us did a quick turn. Married, at last: a small victory. Perhaps this was the first step towards finding a way to ward off my fate as determined by my Lady.

On the day itself there were no musicians and there was no singing, no procession through the village, no sisters and cousins to paint my hands and feet with henna, to help me hold up my veil. Sheikh Yusuf performed the ceremony in the front room of the French House, Lady Duff Gordon our reluctant witness. I wore a red shawl that I had draped over my head, copied from the country weddings that my Lady and I had attended together. Afterwards Omar served the meal himself. He had filled one corner of the salon with cushions for the baby and me; Sheikh Yusuf and my Lady sat and conversed on the other side of the room.

Sheikh Yusuf, though unfailingly polite, was clearly puzzled by the lack of ceremony. “Why has no one else been invited?” he asked my Lady, and he smiled across the room at me. I, of course, did not dare to speak.

“This was what they wanted,” my Lady replied, “given the inauspicious arrival of the child prior to the wedding day.”

I was shocked by how easily she lied. Sheikh Yusuf took his cue and asked no further questions. I continued to sit in silence and my Lady did her best not to look at me while she discussed village matters with the young sheikh.

Later that day Mustafa Agha arrived with his gift of a slaughtered lamb, prepared, cooked, and displayed most beautifully, but by that time I had retreated to my room with the baby, and Omar served tea to my Lady and her friend as though nothing had taken place, as though it was not his wedding day.

“The baby will go and live with Omar’s wife Mabrouka,” my Lady informed Mustafa Agha, who puffed on the
narguile
comfortably.

He nodded. “And Sally will also be welcomed into the house of Omar’s father.”

“No,” my Lady said. “She will leave the child in Cairo and return to England.”

“No no no,” Mustafa clucked as though they were having a minor misunderstanding. “Omar’s first wife will welcome the second: the mothers of my children have done the same. The Egyptian household is expansive. They’ll be fine.”

“It is not fine,” my Lady replied.

Omar told me that Mustafa Agha put down his pipe as my Lady continued to speak.

“Sally has disgraced herself; she has disgraced her family; she will not be allowed to ruin Omar as well. She will return to England.”

Mustafa Agha shrugged. He gave her a look, a look that meant that Mustafa Agha thought the
Frangi
were beyond understanding, even those as sympathetic as Lady Duff Gordon. He resumed smoking. She laughed lightly and tried to pretend it was all precisely as it should be. Omar took himself back to the kitchen.

After Mustafa Agha was gone, my Lady spoke to Omar one more time. “I agreed to your marriage in an effort to ward off further scandal in the village. I will continue to live here and I do not intend Sally Naldrett’s disgrace to become my own.”

Omar had no reply. But that night, our wedding night, he came to my room immediately after settling my Lady and did not leave again until after sunrise.

My Lady did her utmost to make sure my marriage day was as penitential and joyless as possible, but she did not succeed. My heart flew that day, and uncontainable joy bubbled up inside me. Truth be told, I could not have cared less about the ceremony and its trappings, Egyptian or English. Omar and I were married! He took my hand in marriage, we made our vows, and I believed those vows would be cherished. I had no idea what shape our marriage would take, nor what our future together could possibly hold, but we were married. Me, Sally Naldrett, spinster Lady’s maid no longer; all the sun in Egypt poured down on me. On that day I believed I would never be cold again.

THE DAYS DRIPPED BY. THE BABY THRIVED, WHILE WE ADULTS WITHERED
and twisted. On my Lady’s insistence I remained in my room with the child. We were not to venture from the French House; we were not to show our faces in the village. At night, again at my Lady’s bidding, Omar slept on the floor outside her room, the door open, in case he was needed. She seemed to fear the night now—she had never been afraid at night before, not even at her most racked with illness—and she often woke and called out for her dragoman, and he went to her quickly. She was ill once again, weakening daily, the familiar symptoms returning one after the other, but she would not allow Omar to fetch me to help treat her. When the baby cried, the sound muffled by the distance between our rooms, she railed against it, “What
is
that caterwauling? Will someone
please
restore my quiet?” No effort on Omar’s behalf to tempt her into wanting to see and hold the child made any difference to her hardness of feeling.

IT WAS AN AWFUL THING, HER DISEASE. OF COURSE THIS GOES WITH
-out saying. But the fact that it came and went at its own pace had always made it seem especially cruel to me. She’d been battling it for years now; she would weaken and weaken and get more and more ill, coughing up blood, rapidly losing weight, her lungs rattling in her chest like two bricks of splintered wood, slipping further and further away, until we all thought surely she must die, surely she must be almost dead already, and then it would retreat. A few months’ recovery, wrapped up in a blanket in the sunshine, her color gradually returning along with her appetite, and then she would be almost well once again, she’d be almost hale and hearty and robust, or rather, she’d be able to do a passable impression of feeling that way. And this was how it went, in an endless cycle. After each round she’d emerge a little more frail, her recovery would be slightly less complete. But there was no telling how long or how tough each bout would be; at times it was as though she was on the edge of becoming seriously ill, then she’d rally. And on and on it went. It was gradual, it was unpredictable, and it was nasty. And there can be no underestimating the toll that it took on her. Sometimes now I think that perhaps the disease was more responsible than my Lady herself for what she did to me. But the fact is that I had too much at stake to be quite that forgiving.

ONE AFTERNOON, MY LADY RETURNED TO THE HOUSE EARLY, AFTER
an excursion to visit Mustafa Agha at his home across the Nile. Her arrival was not preceded, as was usual, by a breathless Ahmed, who liked to be first to arrive anywhere as well as first to leave; he’d been distracted in the village and had fallen behind the small procession. My Lady found the baby asleep in his basket in the middle of the salon; she must have known at once that Omar was with me. The first thing we heard was her annoyed exclamation. Omar threw on his clothes and rushed out to greet her, his shirt not tucked in completely. I stood in the doorway of my room, listening.

My Lady was standing over the baby’s basket, staring down at him. “An ugly child,” she announced. “He doesn’t even look like you, Omar. Are you sure he is your son?”

My gasp was audible to them both.

Omar paused for a long moment; then he said, “Are you ready for a cup of tea?”

I closed the door of my room. Any hope I had conjured after my wedding receded rapidly.