Chapter Three Hannah
September 1951
Cairo, Egypt
The flowers stood in their vase on the corner of Hannah’s desk—white stargazer lilies with delicate pink centers, pink English roses, purpling phlox. The nurse had carried them to her room nine days ago, when Hannah arrived home from the hospital.
Miss Britton had been referred by Mr. Beck, the assistant manager at Shepheard’s Hotel, who seemed to have the solution to any dilemma you might pose to him. She was an elderly British woman, like a great-aunt, with short bluish-white hair and a narrow, lined, no-nonsense face. She and Hannah had had a pleasant conversation about snakes on the second day, when Hannah was feeling better. Miss Britton had propped her up on some pillows and fetched more coffee and cataloged all the snakebites she’d known. This took some time. You’re lucky you was wearing them gloves, she’d told Hannah, in conclusion, and the serpent didn’t have the chance to bite deep. That’s the difference, mind you. How much venom gets into you. How on earth did you manage to save yourself like that?
Hannah had explained how she hadn’t saved herself at all. How the hotel’s assistant manager had happened by the pavilion at the vital instant.
Well, then, you’ve got a guardian angel, that’s what, Miss Britton had said.
A guardian angel. The words recoiled in Hannah’s head as she gazed at the extravagant flowers in their vase, smelled the extravagant scent of them. Inside her desk drawer, she kept the card that had arrived with the flowers.
At the top, the words Shepheard’s Hotel in raised black ink. Underneath, some quick, small handwriting—
Wishing you the speediest possible recovery, so that we may once more enjoy the charm of your company here at Shepheard’s.
J. Beck
The irony was, they’d come to Egypt for Alistair’s health.
A bad bout of pneumonia one winter, followed by a flare-up of the rheumatism that had plagued him since the war—that’s how it went, for a man of Alistair’s age, who’d devoted himself to the service of empire, long hours in beastly climates, two world wars and all the dustups and crises and economic depressions in between. Summer in the English countryside hadn’t helped—one gray, drizzling day after another. Another dreary London winter of coal smoke seasoned with bitter damp and labor strikes would have just about done him in.
What you require is a hot, dry climate, Mr. Ainsworth, the doctor said sternly, removing his stethoscope, or I can’t answer for the consequences.
So Alistair had spoken to the foreign secretary, an old friend, and arranged for a secondment as a kind of political liaison to the ambassador in Cairo, nothing too strenuous, a desk in the consulate and a pleasant apartment in a British neighborhood.
He’d told Hannah the news at the beginning of July, once it was all arranged. They were in the bedroom. Hannah remembered how Alistair sat in his armchair with the footstool and the lap blanket of Scotch plaid, while Hannah stood in the middle of the rug with the tea tray and tried to gather her thoughts around the idea, the word even—Egypt.
She didn’t know much about the political situation there, except that the Egyptians weren’t amused by the new state of Israel and even less pleased by the British, whom they’d been trying for years to boot out of Egypt altogether—the Suez Canal included. Well, that was for Alistair to worry about, wasn’t it? Hannah did not concern herself with politics, not anymore. She’d set down the tea tray and picked up the teapot.
Alistair said, You’ll be happy to make all the arrangements and so on, won’t you, darling?
Hannah had handed Alistair his tea and said that sounded splendid.
Alistair had sipped his tea and leaned back in his armchair. Do you know what I think I’ll do, he said. I think I’ll start that book I’ve been talking about. What do you think? You can help with the typing and research and so on. Give you something to do with yourself, won’t it?
He’d reached for a cucumber sandwich. Hannah had stared at his hand—pale, long-fingered.
Yes, dear, she’d said.
The apartment building overlooked the vast green polo fields of the Gezira Sporting Club, so you could pretend you had never left England at all, except for the heat and the bawab, the Egyptian porter. His name was Salah and he had a wife and three children who lived across the river in the Bulaq district. The oldest was a boy of nineteen who had attended the Royal Military Academy and had just been commissioned second lieutenant. Salah was anxiously awaiting news of his first posting.
“Good day, Mrs. Ainsworth,” said Salah. “Do you need the car this morning?”
“No, thank you. I think I’ll walk today. Have you heard from Abdel lately?”
Salah’s face burst into sunshine. “He’s at the barracks in Ismailia, a very prestigious assignment.”
“That sounds wonderful. Ismailia’s in the east, isn’t it?”
“Yes, along the canal. So if the bloody Jews try to cross the Sinai, he’ll be right there to stop them, inshallah.”
Hannah’s hand closed around her handbag. “Well,” she said, “I certainly hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Already the air was growing hot, the dusty pandemonium of Cairo’s streets was building to its daily crescendo. When they arrived here five weeks ago, Hannah had taken in this spectacle and felt something overturn in her middle. It wasn’t just the crowds—the men in their robes, the donkeys pulling their carts, the beggars, the prayers, the smell of fruit and spice and sunshine and dirt and excrement. It was the edge of chaos. It was the misery existing alongside the indifferent affluence. It was the rage you felt roiling beneath the skin of everything—buildings, streets, people—until you thought it must certainly burst.
Cairo was as unlike England as it could be—as unlike her married life as she could fathom—the tall, narrow house on Cheyne Place; the chill, damp Lincolnshire countryside where Alistair’s family home brooded over a moor. And yet everywhere you looked in this hot, mad city, you saw the stamp of Western civilization. The sporting club with its polo fields and racetrack and clubhouse. The orderly neighborhoods and suburbs of Cairo, embellished like the arrondissements of Paris. The cafés, the hotels, the Turf Club. The men and women in their fashionable clothes, their hats, speaking French and Italian and English as you walked past on your way to eat ice cream at Groppi’s.
You sometimes had the feeling that the ordinary Egyptians themselves were only spectators to all this, the throbbing civic life of Cairo and of Egypt itself—their own country.
Like me, Hannah thought, as she crossed the bridge into downtown Cairo. A spectator to my own life.
The perspiration streamed down Hannah’s back and arms and through her white gloves. She hurried along the sidewalks, down the bustling streets, not catching a single eye, closing her ears to the voices that clamored around her. Some days, walking or driving through the city, she had to stop and sit somewhere—anywhere, a café or a department store—and swallow back the panic in her throat, force back this blackness like a spill of oil in her head.
Some days she could simply block it all out, like a woman with no past at all, no past and no future.
Keep walking, she thought.
She walked and walked, heels clacking the sidewalk, hot traffic streaming around her, until the veranda of Shepheard’s Hotel appeared around the corner.
Shepheard’s, the most British establishment of all.
Hannah walked past the front doors and the porters, through the lobby, and right up to the front desk, where she asked for Mr. Beck, the assistant manager.
The clerk gave her a knowing look and picked up the house telephone.
Hannah was introduced to Mr. Beck in the dining room at Shepheard’s, over a month ago.
She’d been in Cairo for four days, and a few of the Foreign Office wives had invited her to join them for tea. Three of them stood waiting in the lobby when she’d swept inside, six minutes late, flushed and frazzled, having taken a wrong turn and wound up in some street she couldn’t discover on her map. Everyone wore pale colors and pearls and the kind of gaze that searched out imperfections. Hannah always felt she should straighten her hat or her hair or her skirt. They were women who inhabited their lives as the wife of somebody—Mrs. Bertrand Beverley, Mrs. Colin Hill, Mrs. Stanley Marlow—so Hannah sometimes had trouble remembering their first names.
The tea salon was ornate and lofty, full of fluttering women and the clink of china and the perfume of orange pekoe. At first Hannah hadn’t taken much note of the man who came to stand by the ma?tred’ at his desk. He wore a suit of pale linen and bent over the desk, presumably to consult the reservation book. He was trim and perhaps a touch above medium height—an inch or two below six feet—and really not that remarkable, until he turned his head to consider some table a few yards to the right of Hannah, and the movement caught her notice for some reason. She couldn’t say why. She was in the middle of an exchange with Helen Hill and simply lost the thread.
Hannah had jerked her gaze back. “I beg your pardon, what did you say?”
“I said”—Helen laid a smile on the word said—“it’s a shame you weren’t in Cairo during the war. Parties every night. Everybody passed through at some point. Do you remember, Lillian?”
Lillian Beverley shook her head. “We didn’t arrive until ’48.”
“Shame. Were you in Cairo during the war, Mr. Beck?”
Hannah startled. A man stood at her shoulder, between her and Lillian.
“Naturally,” he said.
He was, of course, the man in the linen suit who had been speaking to the ma?tre d’. He had a slight accent, possibly French, though you couldn’t say for certain. He smiled at each one of them—a table of four ladies, Hannah and Helen and the other two—and came to Hannah last. Turned his face toward her and the two of them stared at each other, starstruck.
Those eyes, she remembered thinking. The color of hope.
“This is our newcomer,” said Lillian. “Mrs. Ainsworth. You’ve seen Alistair Ainsworth around the place, haven’t you? With my Bertie? Back in Cairo from England? His wife.”
Mr. Beck picked up Hannah’s hand and kissed it. “Welcome to Cairo, Mrs. Ainsworth.”
She must have looked amazed, because Helen had laughed. “Mr. Beck takes a personal interest in all his guests. It’s his job. Isn’t it, Lucien?”
“It is my pleasure,” he said, making a small bow.
After he left, Helen leaned forward and lowered her voice. “They say he had to do with special operations, during the war.”
“Special operations?”
“Intelligence and that kind of thing. Sabotage. Can you imagine?”
Over at the next table, Mr. Beck shared a friendly chuckle with a pair of women in white dresses, one about forty and beautifully polished, one a long-limbed teenager hunched over her plate—amother and daughter, maybe.
Helen continued. “I asked him about it once, point-blank, but he just laughed at me and changed the subject. They’re not allowed to say anything about it, you know. Official Secrets Act.”
Hannah had allowed a last glance at Mr. Beck, who had stepped away from the other table and now walked briskly toward the french doors at the side of the dining room. She’d thought what it might be like, if you had once lived in the desert engaged in perilous sabotage operations against a ruthless enemy, to manage the dining room of an elegant hotel.
Flirting with the wives of British diplomats who came to take tea and gossip in the afternoon.
Mr. Beck’s office was small and tidy. Not a stray paper existed anywhere, not a scrap of the usual flotsam. Everything in its place. He left the door decorously ajar and pulled out a chair for Hannah. She sat and arranged herself, handbag on her lap.
“You are well, Mrs. Ainsworth?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Your hand?”
“It’s healing well. The snake wasn’t able to inject much venom, the doctors say.”
“It’s true—the less venom, the better.”
Hannah had all these phrases planned. Eloquent, polished, just the right degree of careless élan. She’d worked out the whole conversation, so she didn’t have time to think—just to speak. She’d rehearsed it in her head a hundred times, lying in her hospital bed, in her bed at home. Now she tried to remember some scrap of this dialogue.
“Thank you so much for the lovely flowers,” she said. “And the card.”
He waved his hand. “That was nothing. The nurse who looked after you at home—the one we recommended—she took proper care of you?”
“Very much. In the end she attended more to Alistair than to me, really.”
A quiver came and went at the corner of his lips. “Then we shall have to ensure she remains at her post, won’t we?”
Hannah looked down at her lap. “I came to thank you.”
“Thank me?”
“You saved my life.”
“But this was nothing. In Egypt, the snakebite is a regular misfortune. Shepheard’s keeps its own stock of antivenom.”
“If you hadn’t taken such quick action—the bite could have been much worse—the way you flung the snake—the last instant—”
“Mrs. Ainsworth, you are not to give this incident another thought, I assure you. It was my honor to have been fortunate enough to perform this service for you.”
All this time, she’d been staring at the handbag on her lap. Now she looked up. “But why?”
“Why?”
“Why were you there? You should have been attending to the dinner guests.”
At last, he sat on the corner of the desk. The leg of his trouser stretched tight.
The office had no windows, like a cell in a prison. Behind the desk, some volumes crammed the shelves of a small bookcase. Hannah smelled the leather of the books, the tobacco of an earlier cigarette. A fan circled the ceiling over their heads. The room was so tiny, his shoe nearly brushed her shin.
“I think you understand the answer to that question, Mrs. Ainsworth,” he said softly, sliding into French.
“You followed me.”
“Yes. I was concerned for you. I thought perhaps you were unhappy, and an unhappy woman…” His voice trailed away.
“Yes? An unhappy woman is what?”
How strange it was, to speak to Mr. Beck in French. Because Shepheard’s was so resolutely English, you mostly conversed in English there. But outside the walls of establishments like this, educated Egyptians spoke French. They preferred French culture to British. They read French books, watched French movies, admired French fashion and decoration. As for Hannah, she spoke French as fluently as English. So when Mr. Beck spoke to her in French, she opened her mouth and the French words came out, and somehow this changed the air between them. In English they were hotel manager and guest; in French they became something else.
Mr. Beck tapped one finger against his knee. “Is unhappy,” he said.
“And this is a problem for you? My unhappiness?”
“For me? For you, madame. For you it is a terrible problem. It’s a travesty. It makes me angry.”
“You should call me Hannah,” she said.
“Hannah.” He held out his hand to her. “Lucien.”
She clasped his palm and tasted the word on her tongue. “Lucien.”
Instead of releasing her hand, he removed the glove and examined the scar near her wrist. “Forgive me,” he said.
“Forgive you?”
“For not arriving an instant sooner.”
He kissed the two small livid marks and replaced the glove on her hand. It seemed to Hannah that the wound burned more than it did when the snake’s fangs were inside her, but that was just her imagination, naturally.
When he looked up, his eyes shone briefly as the light caught them. “Have you visited the pyramids across the river, Hannah?”
“No. We were supposed to go, but with one thing and another—Alistair’s already seen them, during the war, so he wasn’t that keen—and then the snake.”
“What if I said I should like to take you there myself?”
Hannah imagined what it would have been like if she had toured Giza with her husband. They would probably have hired a dragoman with a pair of camels and spent a couple of hours riding around the plateau, viewing the pyramids and the Sphinx from various angles while the dragoman supplied them with facts. At one point she would have asked if she could climb down from the camel and explore on her own. The dragoman would have been shocked. He would have looked helplessly at Alistair and Alistair would have spoken to her in a conciliatory voice. It isn’t suitable, Hannah.
“Do you think that’s wise?” Hannah said.
Lucien shrugged. “I don’t especially care if it’s wise or not.”
Hannah met his gaze. The fatal blow, those eyes of his. A startling true green. He must have seen the capitulation in her face because he rose from the desk and opened his palm to her.
“Let’s go,” he said.