Chapter One Hannah
August 1951
Cairo, Egypt
The cobra probably took refuge in the pavilion when the sun fell behind the hotel roof. Now it flared its hood indignantly at Hannah. Its eyes were like beads of oil. It flicked its tongue to taste the air and struck.
Hannah couldn’t blame the cobra. How do you condemn a snake for being a snake?
Alistair had warned her about the cobras when they first arrived in Cairo. He’d been posted there during the war, so he felt himself a real expert. Your Egyptian cobra grows to about four or five feet in length—in his voice of empire, holding two pompous arms apart—and venomous as the devil. Bugger’ll crawl directly into your house or tent or trouser leg, so you’d bloody well better watch your step.
Hannah had listened attentively and watched her step. When she and Alistair had taken that trip to Luxor last week, she’d seen them among the rocks from time to time, scorpions too, but they always slithered away. Alistair was probably disappointed. All day he’d carried a machete at his belt and cherished the idea of lopping off some cobra’s head at the vital instant. What a capital story that would be!
Hannah didn’t have a machete now. She didn’t have so much as a nail file—she’d simply picked up her pocketbook and left the table. An impulse, that was all. Alistair holding forth about Indian partition, the Beverleys nodding along numbly, Alistair’s smothering remark when she tried to interject a light observation—Don’t be silly, Hannah.
She’d mumbled something about a cigarette and stalked through the packed, yammering dining room, through the Arab Hall to the gardens.
The air still hung thick and warm from the late-summer sun. The mosquitoes stirred. The smell of jasmine made her drunk. She’d heard some laughter near the loggia and crept into the shelter of the pavilion, surprising a cobra who was just settling down for a nice quiet nap.
Of all the places to die! When you thought about it, it was almost funny. All those ways she might have met her end—those accidents and objects that might have killed her, the waves of bombs, the German soldiers followed by the Soviet soldiers, to say nothing of weather and germs and a hundred other things—all those fatal moments she’d survived by miracle or force of will or some capricious God she no longer believed in—and now this?
The back garden of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. A dull, predictable evening in August.
What a joke, a colossal joke.
Who would have thought it would end like this, when she’d woken this morning in the plump, narrow bed in the bedroom she shared with her husband? When the soft-footed servant knocked on the door with Alistair’s tea and the first of several cups of sweet, strong Turkish coffee that would punctuate Hannah’s hours until lunch—why, who would have told Hannah to enjoy those coffees to the utmost, because they were her last on earth?
Who would have thought she would be dead by midnight, as she read aloud to Alistair from the newspaper while they ate the breakfast that was brought up on the tray?
When this morning, as usual, she’d straightened Alistair’s necktie and pecked his dry cheek goodbye? When she’d taken the papers he had left on the corner of the desk the night before and typed them up on the typewriter, correcting the mistakes as she went along? (Alistair was a careless speller.) When, precisely as usual, she’d allowed herself the cigarette during the drive to the club, followed by the lunch, followed by the tennis with the Foreign Office wives, followed by the gin and tonic, followed by the drive home and the long bath and the second cigarette?
Who would have thought she would never experience those things again?
And when Alistair had returned from the consulate and taken up his books and his pen, as he always did, while she settled on the sofa to read the English novel and stopped to watch a lizard scurry this way and that across the floor and up the wall to disappear into the crack near the ceiling? Who would imagine she would never learn what happened to the man who loved the woman who was married to the other man?
When six o’clock struck and she rose from the sofa and poured her husband the Scotch and soda and helped him dress for dinner?
When she put on the long black dress that suited her figure and the pearls and the elbow gloves?
When she drank the second gin and tonic with lime?
Then the silent drive across the river to the hotel. The champagne cocktail. The second champagne cocktail. The prawn cocktail followed by the chilled tomato soup.
The conversation about the king—that ass Farouk, Alistair had called him.
The orchestra that had slid into the waltz as the waiters whisked away the soup and served the fish. Then the meat and vegetables. Then the salad. Then the dessert and the cheese and the nice Yquem and Indian partition and Don’t be silly, Hannah.
Who would have whispered in her ear—when she leaned back in her seat and finished the Yquem and thought, I shall scream—Well, don’t worry, old Hannah, you’ve only got fifteen minutes left to live?
That her final seconds were ticking down as Hannah rose from her chair, mumbled about the cigarette, and stumbled her way from the dining room through the Arab Hall to the doors that opened to the gardens, where Mr. Beck, the assistant hotel manager, appeared out of thin air and asked her if she required anything.
Oh, Mr. Beck. What a shame about him! Now she’d never see Mr. Beck again.
He was Swiss, according to one of the other Foreign Office wives. All the hoteliers abroad were Swiss. Somehow the profession was bred into them, the woman didn’t understand how. Maybe it was something to do with neutrality. Or a tradition of mountain hospitality. To Hannah, though, the only thing Swiss about Mr. Beck was his surname. He had large, cool green eyes below straight black eyebrows, and long black eyelashes for good measure. His features were almost delicate, except for the strong jaw anchoring the bottom of his face. Like any good hotel manager, he was invisible, voiceless, except when you needed him.
Then he appeared like a djinn.
Is there anything you require, Mrs. Ainsworth? he’d asked her, not five minutes ago, and stupidly she had said No, thank you and continued on her way.
Haughty, they called her. She’d overheard that once. Haughty bitch, that wife of Ainsie’s. You know how he found her. God knows where she came from. Who her people are. Damned lucky old Ainsie took a fancy to her.
Oh, she’d overheard them, all right. As they intended. The English were so polite—they’d never say these things to her face.
No, thank you, she’d said to Mr. Beck, the hotel manager with the green eyes, and continued into the gardens, alone, a little drunk, but then she was always a little drunk by evening—that was the only way you got through the day without picking up one of those slim, elegant silver knives they laid out in the dining room and murdering somebody.
Or yourself.
Now this damn cobra.
In Egypt, the cobra was sometimes called an asp, which made you think of Cleopatra. According to legend, she had her servants smuggle an asp inside a basket to her private chambers, where she was confined by Caesar or somebody.
Hannah doubted this story. An Egyptian cobra was a large snake and would almost certainly object to being stuffed inside a basket—especially a basket small enough to smuggle into Cleopatra’s chambers without raising anyone’s suspicions. But Ptolemy said so; therefore, it must be true. Anyway, did it really matter how Cleopatra got the snake into her bedchamber? The point was, she died of snakebite. Unless the whole incident was a metaphor—the snake in the lady’s bedchamber administering the lethal dose of venom. You get the idea.
Hannah’s snake—cobra, asp, whatever you wanted to call it—was certainly real. Its tiny scales were speckled brown and its hood made a perfect arc. It lay along the railing so that when she’d sat down, a second ago, her face was only a yard away from the cobra’s face—close enough, anyway, so that in the light that spilled from the hotel windows behind her, every detail was sharp.
They say time slows down at the moment of danger, and Hannah would have agreed. She’d had all the time in the world to admire the snake’s beauty, the perfect hood, the infinite brown-speckled scales. All the time in the world to smell the jasmine, to hear the faint lilt of the orchestra that would sing her to sleep.
She noticed the exquisite pattern of mosaic tiles in the pavilion.
She imagined Alistair’s red face, pinched in horror—what a shock this would be, who on earth would pour his Scotch and soda the way he liked it. But this lasted only an instant. Another face replaced Alistair’s red, pinched one; then more faces, each one by itself yet all at once, hitting her in the gut so she couldn’t breathe.
Rage.
Grief.
All this commotion she hadn’t been able to feel in years. All this in the oil-drop eyes of the cobra that lunged for her neck. How stupid.
Hannah flung up her arm. The fangs sank into the back of her hand. As she fell, the world turned white, too bright to bear. The pair of arms that caught her was part of the dream.
Is there anything you require, Mrs. Ainsworth?
Yes, Mr. Beck. I require everything. I require you.