Phares chose his words carefullly. ‘And you think, after the accusation she made against you, she would welcome a proposal from me?’
The pasha’s face darkened. ‘She was young and in shock. That was a long time ago. It is all forgotten.’
Phares raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, Father, it was a long time ago. Aida might be married by now or engaged. She must be in her mid-twenties and—’
‘She is neither married nor engaged, I have checked,’ Kamel cut in. ‘You are my only son. Your sister will probably remarry one day, and move away from home.’
Phares crossed his arms. ‘Camelia would never want to be far away from Hathor. She loves it here.’
‘Anyhow, the esba and refinery are too big a load for a woman to carry,’ Kamel continued. ‘You are the one hope for our family business to survive and be handed down to the next generation. I know you are a medical man, but you have always loved the land. Happily, you have built your hospital nearby in Luxor, making your life here in Upper Egypt so you can commit yourself to both. All this will be under your control one day. If you and Aida El Masri were finally married, it would double the size of our estate and both families would benefit. She is alone in the world – we can support her. Anyhow, you are thirty-four and it’s high time that you were married. I was already a father of two at your age. As we say in Egypt, Baytun bila mra atin ka annahu maqbaratun, a house without a woman is like a graveyard.’
Jaw tensing, Phares felt suddenly that he was a child of ten again but before he could offer a retort, Daoud appeared with a chilled glass of karkadeeh on a tray. Phares nodded his thanks and took a slow sip.
Once the servant had left, two pairs of eyes – so alike – met and measured each other. Phares knew that Kamel had the advantage of age: an expectation of subservience and obedience from his son was traditionally his right.
‘Times have changed, Father. You can’t force people into marriage nowadays,’ he argued, trying to control the tone of his voice. Never one to be easily bullied, even when younger, now he was a man for whom, he knew, even his powerful father felt a healthy respect. The older man could, and did from time to time, lay certain commands upon him which he obeyed, but they had never concerned his private life. Phares knew that he wasn’t prepared to tolerate interference in what he considered to be the most important decision he would ever make.
Kamel changed tactics. He smiled at his son, a mollifying smile whereupon the young doctor’s eyes became warier still. Phares was very fond of his father, but he knew him well enough to be careful when he displayed this smooth blandness.
‘You are right, my son,’ the pasha conceded. ‘Times have changed. There is no rush. I don’t think the girl is going anywhere for the time being. I am told she had a hard time of it in the war. And now that she’s come back to Luxor to take over her estate …’ There was a hiatus in his speech, before he added pensively: ‘… she’ll have her work cut out for her. This is the Said, Upper Egypt. It has never been easy for a woman in these parts to take on the management of an estate, let alone one as large as the Ayoub esba, which now of course is in a rather bad condition.’
Phares thought back to the rebellious teenager and wondered what kind of woman Aida had become. He had always found himself drawn to her unrestrained nature; she certainly knew her own mind and as such was a stimulating challenge, though he had never admitted that to anyone. ‘From what I remember of Aida El Masri – if anyone can, she can,’ he said. Perhaps her infuriating stubbornness would finally prove useful, he thought privately.
Kamel’s look brightened. ‘In that case, you and she would indeed make a strong partnership.’
Phares shot him a wry look. ‘We would never agree on anything.’
Kamel frowned and took a sip from his glass of kardadeeh. ‘You and I will discuss this matter again when I come back from my trip. I am leaving early tomorrow morning.’
‘You needn’t have come down to Luxor to tell me this,’ Phares answered, endeavouring to keep the impatience from his voice. ‘We could have talked over the telephone, or it might have waited. All this toing and froing is not good for your heart, Father. You know that.’
‘Tut, tut, tut … you’re a great worrier. I feel perfectly well. Never felt better, in fact. There is a flight from Luxor tomorrow morning to Cairo which I’ll be taking and Camelia will come with me. She has a fitting with Madame Salha, who is making her dress for Princess Nazek’s charity ball. Have you received an invitation?’
‘Yes, I have. It arrived yesterday.’
‘I presume that you will be going to it?’
‘I’m not sure yet, but most probably. I am due a visit to the Anglo-American Hospital as I’ve an operation scheduled and the dates tie in nicely.’
‘Very good, let me know as Camelia would like to attend the ball, and if you’re not going to be there, I will ask your cousins Sélim or Amir to accompany her.’
‘You can count on Sélim and his wife, I’m sure, if they’re free, but I doubt very much that Amir will accept. You know how he feels about that sort of party. I’d be surprised if he’s even received an invitation.’
The pasha shook his head. ‘You are right. Well, in shah Allah, God willing, you’ll be attending. If not, I will have to take your sister and forgo my game of bridge that evening.’ Thereupon he stood up. ‘I’ll be in my study for an hour before dinner. I have some letters to write.’
‘I’ll see you at dinner then.’
* * *
After his father left, Phares remained on the terrace, traces of the earlier frown still lingering on his brow. He moved towards the balustrade and let his gaze drift over the landscape, wanting to shake off his feeling of claustrophobia. The ornamental gardens were as large and spacious as if they were a whole estate in themselves, and of the three family houses that the Pharaonys owned in Egypt, this was the one he loved best, especially at this hour. The grounds were dotted with terraces and gazebos, marble balustrades and flights of steps, carved fountains and statues of nymphs, dryads, fauns and representations of those mythical figures and incidents from the songs of the bards. In many places, pergolas of vine, jasmine or mimosa shaded the lawns. Gardeners had been watering the beds and the air was laden with the heady scent of flowers. A whiff of woodsmoke stole towards him, mingling with the breath of the roses, and with it the gusts of fragrance from the flowering beans, the sweet and acrid scent that for so many spelt Egypt.
Beyond the gardens flowed the Nile, the waters of time, and further off slept the pyramids, silent witnesses of a great civilisation and the lonely immensity of the golden sands.
Now, in the distance, where the clear sky came down to the dunes, the crimson light of a desert sunset lay upon the horizon and the gold of evening was beginning to spread along the heavens. The palm trees rustled with the inevitable breeze that blew in stronger from the great river now that the day was done. The last green tint of twilight still lingered in the west, and standing out sharply against its strange clarity a train of camels rested for the night near the ancient caravan route through northern Africa.
Phares had always felt there was something almost ethereal about the desert evening. It was as if it helped those who knew to draw on its refreshing power to live through the breathless day. The thought came to him again as he watched a young gardener still drifting slowly hither and thither among the flower beds, armed with a huge watering can, from which came a gentle drizzling oddly at variance with its large proportions. The man’s feet made no sound on the paths of beaten sand, and beneath his turban, his face looked calm, placid, like the face of a dreamy child. From somewhere in the orange grove close at hand came the impudent twitter of a flute, with now and then a strangely interpolated phrase of exquisite tenderness; and from farther away, nasal voices singing some weird chant resounded in the evening dusk. To someone unaccustomed to all things Eastern, these musical strains might have seemed bizarre to their ears, but because they were so familiar to Phares he found them sweet
.
Even as a child, when he was not yet allowed to go far into the desert unaccompanied, Phares had dreamed of its exquisite silence. He had replayed in his mind the songs of the Bedouins that he had heard one night when out riding with his father. And once he was old enough to realise his dream, he discovered that the desert of his imagination had been but a pallid reflection of its true glory. As a teenager he would ride out into it alone and one night he stumbled upon a Bedouin tribe who had welcomed him in, taught him how to ride bareback and allowed him to help rear one of their foals, which he named Zein el Sahara, Prince of the Desert. From then on, Phares had been equally at home in the wilderness of burning sands as he was in the bustling metropolis of Cairo.
The Pharaonys owned twenty-two thousand acres in Upper Egypt in eighty-two villages in the Governorate of Qena. Most of the land was planted with sugarcane and cotton. Kamel had built a cotton ginning factory and talked about acquiring an oil refinery that he’d heard was for sale in Minieh. The marriage to Aida El Masri would connect two flourishing estates, adding many more acres to the Pharaony land holdings.
‘All this will be under your control one day,’ his father had said. It had always been understood that this would be the case, but hearing it was different – there was a finality to the words that made him feel trapped. There was a price to pay for such wealth and suddenly this reality was all too apparent. It was as if the matter was now cast in stone, and he would never be able to escape his fate.
Part of Phares longed to be free. Free of society’s constraints, free of his filial duties, free of a job he loved but which took over most of his life – and above all, free of his large inheritance, which he viewed as a great weight and responsibility. He yearned to roam the world, his dream world, the world of the desert to which he felt so attuned.
Yet Phares was also part of a dynasty that had been built through hard work. He had obligations he could not ignore. Standing here looking out at the gardens, he thought of his grandfather, the man who had laid the first stone in the founding of the Pharaony wealth. Gamil Pharaony was Coptic, an ancient Christian community which prided itself on its aspirational values, and so Gamil, unlike some of the merchant class, had been educated as a boy before being apprenticed to a trader in Luxor who had taught him the business of freighting goods by felucca and barge between Cairo and Upper Egypt. In the 1860s and 1870s, Gamil Pharaony had seen the drive of Ismail Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, to modernise the country and the young Gamil had understood the vast debts accumulated by the government to build the Suez Canal and other huge projects. With great pity Phares’s grandfather had watched the fellahin who worked the land, who were squeezed with new taxes every year to service the government debt, and he had quietly blessed his father for pushing him into trade rather than working the land. He had therefore witnessed with some joy the year of dual control in 1880, when the English and French creditors established a commission sweeping away many of those taxes that had made land ownership such an unattractive business. By the early 1880s he had established his own trading business buying local crops for shipment to Cairo. Though not rich, he was liquid, and that was not all: he understood the potential of basin land. While it commonly yielded one crop because it flooded every year, he knew that if it could be kept drained with dykes and protective banks, it would be good for three.
Phares had been brought up to appreciate the courage of this quiet Coptic merchant who had gambled his trading profits to buy land being sold off by a government desperate to pay its debts. This was an opportunity. His grandfather had understood that the transition from the feudal control of the land by the aristocracy to a more modern system of freehold ownership by the population would be irreversible. His decision to invest was brave but right, and the family’s fortune was established.
Still, his grandfather had not stopped there. He was not tempted to embrace all the modernism and foreign ideas that started to flow into his town in the suitcases of American missionaries and Thomas Cook’s tourists. He brought up his son Kamel to know the value of money, and above all to love the rich Nile Valley soils that yielded their wealth to the family coffers. His last and strongest act to secure the family’s position was to arrange his son’s marriage to the daughter of another Coptic landowner, which resulted in a combined holding, insuring the Pharaonys’ dominance in the region. This was the Egyptian way.
Although Phares enjoyed life to the full and was reluctant to change his chosen mode of existence, he understood all too well his own position. His Western education as a doctor, his hospital and research projects were all paid for by two generations who had committed to grindingly hard work. He understood even more clearly that his career path had run in a direction contrary to his father’s instincts, yet Kamel had allowed him to follow it. Because of Kamel’s generosity in encouraging him to forge a new direction, Phares now felt a deep sense of obligation to conform to his father’s wishes. To secure more land with the marriage to Ayoub El Masri’s daughter was the expression of a fundamental instinct that Kamel himself had learnt from Gamil Pharaony. How could Phares deny his father?
Aida El Masri. It had been years since he’d seen her. Evidently, she had decided there was still something for her in Egypt, though he’d privately thought she would stay in England for good. Phares had wondered about her surprisingly often over the last eight years, hoping her grief had subsided along with her anger at Ayoub’s death. She had been almost hysterical, screaming out the most horrendous accusations about his father, and when he had tried to visit Aida – in part to soothe her fury, in part to defend Kamel – she had refused to see him. Would she really want to tie herself to the Pharaonys after damning them so emphatically before she left for England?
Phares sighed. He missed her father, Ayoub, too. He had greatly admired his father’s friend and had hung about Karawan House as a boy, asking endless questions of the eminent archaeologist. Their conversations ranged widely over all kinds of subjects – Egypt’s ancient past, politics, history, and particularly their shared fascination for the desert and the secrets it held. In fact, his genuine fondness for the El Masris had tempered any reluctance he might have felt in joining the two family estates through marriage one day to Ayoub’s impetuous daughter. Then the terrible tragedy of Ayoub’s death had seemed to break the bond between them, and while Phares continued to further his career and build El Amal hospital, all talk of marriage had largely ceased … to the El Masri girl, that is. Gossip and speculation had simply moved on to a match with his old friend and anaesthetist colleague, Isis Geratly, but Phares’s heart had never been truly engaged in that direction. Now that Aida El Masri was back in Luxor, his father was clearly intent on reviving the old family ‘understanding’ and had lost no time in appealing to Phares’s sense of duty.
Still, although he had always known that he would marry eventually, and with time he would have committed to act upon the course he knew to be right, this morning had thrown him off balance. The sight of the prettiest and most delicious creature his eyes had ever seen had unsettled him deeply, and he was determined to find out who she was before she returned to her country. Of course he was realistic enough to know that nothing serious could come of a liaison with a foreigner, but more than ever, he was aware there was more to life than the blind obedience to convention.
Eyelids shut, Phares let his mind gently drift back to his earlier encounter with the beautiful stranger. He could still picture her so clearly. It was the young woman’s hair that had struck him most: the thickest waves that glinted in the sunlight with almost the yellow of pure gold. It was drawn back from her wide, delicately curved forehead – in fact, her whole face was delicately curved, as was the shapely line of her eyebrows. He wondered at the colour of her eyes, hidden by her sunglasses, as she had stared back at him defiantly. Although she was fair, her complexion was not the pale pinkness of the many blonde Western and Scandinavian girls he met in Cairo, but the warm colour of honey with the perfect bloom and shin
y quality of youth. An image of her sensuous mouth floated before his closed eyes and he felt a stir in his gut … Those lips, gentle in their fullness, would be sublime to kiss. Her features were delicate, clear-cut and perfectly balanced; her body beautifully formed and proportioned. Goldilocks, he could tell, had the sophistication of a girl from a Swiss finishing school – she had clearly been brought up in luxury – and yet he thought, despite her spirited air of independence, there was about her the untouched look of an unawakened girl. She wore that combination of innocence and pride so easily and it chased around in his mind, intriguing and arousing him – a feeling which, now that he thought about it, was entirely new to him.
Whoever she was, she was exquisite, and the young doctor’s heart, untouched until now, had instantly lost itself to this alluring stranger whom he feared he would never set eyes upon again.
Now, night lay over the desert. Not the thick, heavy night of Western climes, but the brilliant bejewelled night of Upper Egypt. From a background of blue velvet shone the great silver stars, almost barbaric in their radiance, and although the moon had not yet risen, there was little need for a lamp. No wonder starlight held such significance for the people of Egypt. Beneath its shine, Luxor lay in the distance, peaceful and quiet now that the toil of the day was over and the fellahin had departed for their huddled mud huts in the little villages close by.
All was still, save the whispering of hundreds of trees and the croaking of frogs on the shores of the Nile and its surrounding ponds. The great white Pharaony house lay apparently hushed in slumber.
Phares glanced at his watch: eight o’clock already. He’d better get ready for dinner; he shouldn’t be keeping his father and sister waiting. As he set off along the veranda in the direction of his room, the animated smile of the beautiful stranger shimmered through his thoughts. He sighed. The return of Aida El Masri couldn’t have come at a worse time.
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