The Mistress of Nothing (7 page)

“Sitti
Duff Gordon misses her family,” he said.

“She does. Most keenly. Her baby girl is only four years old.”

Mr. Abu Halaweh shook his head. “Why isn’t she here with the
Sitti?”

I looked at our dragoman then and realized how enormous the gap was between my Lady’s life and his. “It’s better for her to stay in England.”

He nodded. “My baby daughter, Yasmina, is six months now,” he said. “She stays with her mother, Mabrouka, and my parents in Cairo.”

“You must miss her too. All of them.”

“See?” he said, as though he had read my thoughts. “We are alike, my Lady and me, far away from our families.”

“I thought I’d be near my sister, Ellen, now that we are both living in Egypt. But Alexandria seems almost as far from Luxor as England.”

“But you aren’t lonely,” he said.

I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I can see,” he said, “you are not lonely. You like your life here. You have
Sitti
Duff Gordon to care for. You have the household to run. You have me. You are happy.”

I was a little startled by the intimacy of our conversation. I took a breath and smelled lemon and jasmine in the air. “You’re right,” I said.

He raised the plate of cakes he had brought down to the garden and offered them to me. “Happy Christmas, Miss Naldrett,” he said.

“Insha allah,”
I replied.

MR. ABU HALAWEH RECRUITED AN ARABIC TUTOR FROM THE VILLAGE
for my Lady; he said he felt that she would benefit from lessons in conversation with a man more learned than himself. Even after only a few weeks in Luxor, we were already accustomed to receiving guests, and Mr. Abu Halaweh had taken to introducing newcomers with a flourish before rushing into the kitchen to prepare tea. When he brought the tutor into the salon, I was sitting by the window sewing, and my Lady was stretched out on a divan working at her portable writing table. I didn’t hear them on the stairs, and then, suddenly, they were in the room: “Sheikh Yusuf,” Mr. Abu Halaweh announced, and he bowed to the sheikh while the sheikh himself bowed to my Lady.
“Sitti
Duff Gordon,” he pronounced solemnly. “But I’m not sitting!” she’d whisper to me sometimes, but not today; the presence of Sheikh Yusuf, a straight-backed young man, an
alim
or learned Islamic scholar, was sobering.

At first we were skeptical about Mr. Abu Halaweh’s choice: the sheikh was, without question, a learned man, educated at the great mosque El-Azhar in Cairo; but one so devout, and one who speaks not a word of English? But when Sheikh Yusuf enters the room, he radiates sweetness and a kind of holy light. He is very handsome, tall with refined features, and he carries himself gracefully. After he departed on that first afternoon, my Lady, “godless” and pragmatic as ever, turned to me and said, “You can feel his holiness, can’t you, Sally? I am quite in awe of my new tutor.”

Now Sheikh Yusuf comes to the French House every afternoon, except the Muslim Sabbath, and he and my Lady sit and converse for an hour or so. I am to serve tea at the beginning of the lesson but after that they are not to be interrupted. The only book he allows my Lady to read with him—and my Lady’s first question, when it comes to learning, is always, “What can I read?”—is the Quran, which he can recite, in its entirety, from memory. My Lady said that at first it was hard going—Sheikh Yusuf insisted on teaching her in a methodical and thorough manner, quite different from the kind of instruction I am gaining through Mr. Abu Halaweh—and some days as we get ready for his visit she closes her eyes, grips my hand, and whispers, “Give me strength, Sally!” But as with any language she turns her attention to, she progresses rapidly, moving from the basics to discussing religious and philosophical issues. I hear my Lady’s Arabic becoming increasingly fluid and classical, whilst mine remains of a more practical nature. Mr. Abu Halaweh doesn’t like me to mimic the accent of the Luxor
fellahin,
but the Arabic they speak has a directness and efficiency I admire.

My Lady has begun to pass on to me some of what she has learned of Arabic as it is written; I memorized the alphabet, which I thought a considerable achievement, by copying the letters onto a sheet of writing paper, only to discover that when the letters are joined together to form words, they change shape depending on where in the word they are located; some letters have three or four quite separate manifestations. “And that,” says my Lady, “is only the beginning. Wait until we get to the vowels!” All of this is backwards, of course, from right to left. It’s so complicated that we spend half our time completely baffled and the other half laughing.

The government consuls my Lady met while we were traveling have provided a series of useful introductions throughout Egypt. Now that we have set up camp here in Luxor, my Lady has made the acquaintance of all the more prominent men in the village, including Mustafa Agha Ayat, the consul we met on our first day, who acts in Luxor for Britain, Belgium, and Russia. They say he is the richest man in Luxor. My Lady has already created for herself the kind of salon she held so regularly in the Gordon Arms, but instead of arguments in English with Mr. Thackeray and Mr. Carlyle, the debate takes place in Arabic with my Lady holding her own with the men, only occasionally requesting clarification from Mr. Abu Halaweh, who is almost always at work in the kitchen next door, watching over the company like a sentinel. The claret and port drunk in Esher have been replaced by tea and, on special occasions, the thick black coffee that Mr. Abu Halaweh has shown me how to make, and my Lady’s cigar has been replaced by the bubbling
narguile.
I surprise myself by how much I understand of the conversation, which I attempt to follow as I move from room to room in the French House. Mostly I work in the kitchen with Mr. Abu Halaweh, though I have relinquished all cooking duties to him; there really is no point in my attempting to cook unfamiliar food with unfamiliar ingredients, when everything Mr. Abu Halaweh makes is so delicious. Neither my Lady nor I miss the eggy soldiers and suet pudding that Cook used to make in Esher.

These men treat my Lady with great respect and courtesy, despite the fact that we are well aware of what an odd figure she is in Luxor society, if village life can warrant such a grand word: a woman—married but with no husband present, no children with her either; an invalid who is an adventurer at the same time, possessed of an avid intelligence and a hunger for debate. Several times a week the men—Sheikh Yusuf, Mustafa Agha, the magistrate Saleem Effendi, and others—gather in my Lady’s salon to recline on the divans and cushions and talk. Sometimes they stay on until late in the evening and Mr. Abu Halaweh and I hover in the kitchen, waiting for my Lady to request our help, refreshing the pipe, serving the trays of sweets that Mr. Abu Halaweh will have prepared earlier in the day.

“Sally, come here,” my Lady calls out from time to time, summoning me to help her make a point. “The kings and queens of England are not divine beings, are they?” She turns back to the men. “They are flesh and blood, like you and me, aren’t they, Sally?” she says over her shoulder.

I smile and say, “Yes, ma’am, just like you and me,” and laugh and the men laugh, and I return to the kitchen.

Luckily for me, whenever my Lady asks me to confirm a point, something the Egyptians really cannot believe can possibly be true or, at least for the sake of the argument, are pretending wholeheartedly not to believe, I always do agree. But then again, what kind of servant would disagree with her mistress, in front of esteemed company?

ONE MORNING I ENTERED MY LADY’S ROOM AND FOUND HER ALREADY
up; we had adopted the Egyptian custom of rising before dawn long since. This morning she had dressed already.

“This is it,” my Lady said with a flourish, spinning herself around, “this is the new à la mode.”

“Lady Duff Gordon!” I said, unable to say more.

“What do you think?” she asked, and spun around again. She was wearing the most extraordinary outfit I had ever seen. She had on a pair of Egyptian trousers (men’s trousers, brown cotton, loose flowing, tied at the ankles) and a long white cotton tunic on top (a man’s tunic, plain) and sandals on her bare feet. That was it.

I couldn’t think what to say.

“Come on, Sally. How do I look?”

I had to say something. “You look like a learned Egyptian sheikh,” I said.

My Lady pressed her hands together and bowed solemnly.
“Insha allah,”
she replied. Then she picked up her shawl and placed it over her hair, looping it around her neck: “For propriety’s sake.” She looked at me. “You can laugh. It’s quite all right.”

I let out a laugh then, one brief yap was all I allowed myself for fear of being unable to stop. “It’s so … practical,” I said. We had given up our stockings and underskirts while we traveled up the Nile, but it would never have occurred to me to go any further, no matter how high the temperature rose.

“It’s comfortable,” my Lady replied. “But here is the real revelation.” She picked up her stays from the divan where she had discarded them and waggled them at me.

“Your stays!” I said, bowled over by shock; I would have sat down if it had been appropriate.

My Lady opened her traveling trunk, threw the heavy-boned garment down into it, and slammed the lid shut. “My stays are staying in there, my dear, from this day forward. I’ve had enough of them. The object of this exile of mine is for me to breathe more freely. That thing,” she said, pointing, “was not helping.”

And that was it; from then on that was how my Lady dressed, like an Egyptian man, a peasant, mind you, a
fellah,
with a dash of Bedouin tribesman thrown in when she felt inspired.

We had argued about stays in the past; whenever my Lady was ill I would try to dissuade her from wearing them, but with her it had been a point of principle—mustn’t let the illness have its way, mustn’t let the illness force compromise. Now she’d found a way to get rid of them. “I’ve journeyed this far,” she said to me, “and I’m not dead yet, and the time has come for me to wear whatever I wish. Don’t you agree, my dear Sally?”

That moment marked a change in my life, a change more profound than a new wardrobe, however wild. My Lady cast off her English clothes and it was as though in that moment our relationship shifted as well, in some unspoken, unpredicted way. I was not her equal; I was part of her routine, part of her life, my care for her so intimate that it was as though I was part of her body—a hand, perhaps. A foot. Something indispensable, to which you do not give much thought. But from that moment hence, things shifted between us, and life changed.

LATER THAT MORNING, AFTER MY LADY HAD BREAKFASTED, I WENT
into my room and closed the door. I remembered when my Lady had purchased the trousers and tunic in Cairo; both Mr. Abu Halaweh and I had assumed she was buying gifts for her husband. I had even imagined Sir Alick thus clad; he would laugh at himself and allow her to coax him into wearing the outfit for one of their supper parties. But now that my Lady had cast aside her European clothes, I longed to do the same. I undressed, taking off the brown muslin, faded now from being put out to dry in the sun repeatedly. I took off my layers of undergarments. I unlaced my stays. Like my Lady’s, they had remained remarkably intact, as though they were a form of indestructible armor. Stained, yes, the edging slightly frayed, but intact. I folded the garment into accordion pleats. For a moment I thought about taking it into the kitchen and placing it on the fire, but I knew there might come a time when I would need it again. So, instead, I took a strip of cloth from my trunk and wrapped the stays carefully, and tucked them at the bottom, out of sight.

I ventured out to the village market with Mr. Abu Halaweh the next day. I had not gone without stays since I was a child. The first time I wore them was at my parents’ funeral and, at the time, I’d felt pulled together, held up and supported by the garment, and I’d relied on it ever since. But now, in Luxor, without it, I felt entirely unwrapped and as though everyone was looking at me. My back and arms seemed loosened and free, even with the stiff brown muslin on once again. I felt odd, as though, along with the stays, I’d removed my spine and become a kind of jelly creature, supple, porous. I couldn’t help but smile as I walked beside Mr. Abu Halaweh. We always did the marketing together, sometimes accompanied by Ahmed, who ran along in front of us. It was during these excursions that we enjoyed some of our most illuminating language exchanges; we had progressed from words for food and objects towards greater subtleties: religious rituals, cultural observations, and local customs. We took it in turns: Arabic on the way to market, English on the way back. It was not a long walk—modern Luxor was a tiny place, much smaller than it had been in ancient times—but we made steady progress. On this day, stayless, I felt ready to discuss anything and, once again, it was as though Mr. Abu Halaweh could read my mind.

“Why are you not married, Miss Naldrett?”

I found myself blushing. I hated blushing, which made me blush even more. “I’ve been in my Lady’s household for many years.”