I walked to the Museum and I went to see the paintings. I cannot pretend to a wholly untroubled mind - nor would it be proper now to have one - but I was able, once more, to take pleasure in the wondrous colours, the tranquillity, the contentment with which they are infused. And I wondered, as I had wondered before, is that a world which truly exists?

5.

Something there is moves me to love, and I

Do know I love, but know not how, nor why.

Alexander Brome, c. 1645 New York City, March 1997

How can it strike so suddenly? Without warning, without preparation? Should it not grow on you, taking its time, so that when the moment comes when you think 'I love', you know - or at least you imagine you know - what it is you love? How can it be that a set of the shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?

Which had come first, the gentle lurch as her heart missed a beat or the sight of him in the doorway? Isabel had looked down at the table: her knife and spoon lay at attention, solid and still. Drooping elegantly over the edge of the crested white plate, the corner of her folded pink napkin barely touched the shining, silver-plated steel. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. When she looked up my brother was halfway across the restaurant, his hand raised in greeting - then his coat and briefcase were in the third chair and the menu was in his hands.

'Have you ordered? Have you been here long? I'm not late, am I? What is the time?' He glanced at his watch. 'I am, I guess. A few minutes. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I couldn't get away. What will you have? Are you hungry? I hope you are. I am.'

His hands holding the menu. One hand reaching across the table to pat hers, briefly.

'You know -' he had leaned back in his seat, wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin - 'I feel as if I know you from somewhere - before I mean.'

Watching him, her head to one side, she had smiled.

'No, seriously.' He waved his hand, a brief gesture of dismissal, as though to say, This is not a line, I am not flirting with you. 'There's something, I don't know what it is -'

'A previous life?'

He spread his hands, smiled, but the puzzled look stayed in his eyes.

My brother. As Isabel talks I can see him. She doesn't have to describe the way he walks into a room, the energy crackling off him, the heads turning to look. He walks into every room the way he walks down that long aisle through the stalls, striding, headlong, not a moment to lose. Even at the podium he gives the house the briefest of bows before turning to his orchestra: to work. And it is only at the end, when the stillness has erupted into a roar of applause and he has turned semi-dazed to face them that - after a moment - he seems to see the audience, and then there comes the big smile that catches at the heart, the sweeping bow, the great expansive gesture taking in both the orchestra and the house, the hands clasped above the head. My brother, who can make you feel special simply by recognising you across a room and who flew over at the sound of my voice on the telephone, and sat with me and held me through that long night and helped me see what I had to do; helped me be my better self.

Isabel is in love with him. And I don't blame her. She can't help it. Lots of women couldn't. And as far as I can see, it never did them any harm.

'Do you ever go back?' she asked over coffee, after he had given her names, addresses, telephone numbers.

'Where? To Egypt? Yes, of course. Not as often as I would wish. But ...' Again the expressive hands, the rueful smile.

'Do you think of yourself as Egyptian? I'm sorry, this is personal.' She had surprised herself with the question but he answered easily.

'Yes. And American. And Palestinian. I have no problem with ident.i.ty.'

'You're lucky.'

Or unlucky. Look, I have to go.' The hand raised, this time to get the bill.

'May I ...?' she offers, hesitant because he - and indeed: 'No, no. Of course not. Absolutely not.'

'After all, I have been picking your brains.'

'So what? You want to pay for my brains?' This somewhat sharply - and then the smile: 'No. That's all right, my dear. It was a pleasure.'

'Well, you must let me ...'

'What? Let you what?' he asks as she hesitates.

'Perhaps another time I could take you out.'

A pause.

'Would you like to do that?'

'Yes,' she says quietly. 'Yes, I would.'

He looks at her, then nods his head briefly, deciding. 'Fine. Good. I'll call you.'

When she leaves the restaurant that Tuesday afternoon in March, she ties the belt of her long camel coat tight around her waist, turns up the collar, thrusts her hands into her pockets, and walks. The entrance of MOMA is lit and welcoming. She turns into the doorway and walks around aimlessly. You can do that in a museum. Not thinking, just being. When she comes to, she is standing in front of a Miro. It makes sense. The vivid blue, the bright one-eyed creatures floating, darting, alert, untethered. Out in the museum shop she buys a postcard. And now the h.e.l.l of waiting for him to call.

'Mother, I've met someone. A man ...'

Isabel is uneasy. She can't get used to seeing her mother here, in this room. There is nothing wrong with the room - except that it is completely different from any room Jasmine would ever have chosen to inhabit: no flowers, no cushions, no music, no paintings, no small nonsensical bits of silver and crystal to catch the light and beam it back on to veined marble or polished wood. Nothing. Not even a photograph in a gilt frame to speak of a life beyond this place. And Jasmine is still and quiet, in a faded blue housecoat with an edge of nightdress showing white below the hem.

'I like him a lot', Isabel says. 'You know, I think you'd like him too. You probably know him - he's famous. I just wanted to tell you. He's older than me. Well, quite a lot older. He's actually in his fifties but you'd think he was forty. He looks forty. He's tall, and he's got black hair, greying at the temples, very distinguished. And dark, dark eyes, so dark that you think they're deep-set, but they're not.'

Jasmine's soft white hair is cut short in a boyish brush. It makes Isabel think of a new-hatched chick, she can't imagine why. She scans her memory searching for a moment when she might have seen a new-hatched chick, and comes up with a television image: an ad for - she can't remember what. They say Jasmine had got hold of some scissors and had cut off great chunks of what had become an incongruously full head of hair, and then they had tidied it up. We thought it would be better this way, they said. Isabel doesn't know whether to believe them - about her mother's cutting it off. Jasmine had always been proud of her hair. This would be easier to keep clean and tidy; no more brushing, no more fiddling with grips. She had been angry, then sad. Jasmine is even further now from the mother she knows. She wonders whether the hair feels soft or spiky. But if she should try to touch it - if she comes at all close - her mother gets fidgety, worried, frightened. Better to leave things as they are: Jasmine sitting calm and smiling in the grey leather armchair, Isabel on the edge of the bed facing her.

'Mother.' Isabel leans forward. 'Mother, dear, are you all right?'

A shadow of uncertainty pa.s.ses over Jasmine's face. Her hands unfold themselves from her lap and hover above the armrests as though preparing to descend, to lever her up and away. Fine hands still, despite the sprinkling of liver spots. Jonathan, Isabel's father, had had liver spots too in his last years. The wedding band is on the left hand, the other rings are gone, the nails cut short and square. Isabel leans back and the hands touch down but the eyes are still uncertain.

'This is a lovely room,' says Isabel, trying to sound bright and rea.s.suring. She does not add 'isn't it?' which would have thrown her mother back into confusion.

'Jonathan never really liked it here,' says Jasmine. She starts to stroke the arm of her chair.

And now it is Isabel who is confused. 'He didn't?' she asks cautiously.

'No.' An emphatic shake of the head. 'No, he didn't. Oh, he did his job. He did what he had to do. He always did that. But he never felt comfortable. He never really liked the British. He thought they rather despised Americans. He never made friends. Apart from me. But that was different, he said, since I was only a quarter British. I'm not so sure, though. He once said that he could never tell what I was thinking.'

'Was that true?'

'What?'

'That he - that Jonathan could never tell what you were thinking?'

'Oh, yes. Yes, it was true.'

'Could you tell what he was thinking?'

'Mostly, but then he was American - and a man.'

For a moment the old smile lights up the faded violet eyes and the ghost of vanished beauty breathes over Jasmine's face. The hand does not stop its rhythmic caress of the chair arm. Isabel feels her heart contract and turns to the window. The Hudson lies steel grey in the chill March sunshine.

'I wanted to tell you about this man. Mother?' she starts again. 'I met him at a dinner party and I've only seen him once since. He's divorced. His kids are grown-up. He's a musician - a conductor. World cla.s.s. The Philharmonic and everything. He has wonderful hands. And he writes books. I think I'm in love with him.'

Jasmine is smiling. Looking at her. Does she see her? What does she see?

Oh, I wish Daddy was here!' Isabel buries her face in her hands. Her mother's hand strokes the chair.

Old people are starved of touch: no husband, no lover, no child to slip a hand into a hand, to plant sticky kisses on nose and cheek and mouth, to snuggle and fit into the curves of the body. I watched my grandmother - my mother's mother - in her last years: her hand, the skin drawn parchmentlike over the bones, stroking, stroking, the chairs, the table, the bedspread.

'Anyway -' Isabel collects herself, shakes out her hair, runs her fingers through it - 'I don't know what he feels about me. When I'm with him I feel all his attention concentrated on me. I feel this - this energy between us. But I don't know if he even thinks about me when I'm not there.' She looks sadly at her mother. 'I'm not sure what I should do.'

'I've given him up, of course,' Jasmine says. 'It was the only thing to do. He's very young, you see. Such eyes! He reminds me of Valentine, of course. I don't need to be told that; I've known it all along, from the moment I saw him. Maybe that's why I took him in. I don't remember what it was, Algeria or CND or something - there were so many demonstrations that summer. But he was hurt. He was in danger and I took him in. No one could touch him then; he was on American territory - although he didn't know it. Jonathan was away and I took him in and I dressed the cut on his head. It was already swelling up into a horrid bruise. And he was so fired up with the state of the world and how he was going to change it all - he and his friends. He was so young. I sat by his bed, and later, when he was asleep, I got in next to him. I couldn't help myself. Well. There we are. I went to his place later, twice. But then I knew I had to give him up. But it's been hard. It's been like losing Valentine all over again.'

'Mother?' Isabel is sitting upright now. Jasmine sounded like herself again: chatty, regretful, resigned. But - an affair? Her mother had had an affair? When? Who? Had her father known? She looks at the dimmed eyes, the cropped white hair.

'Did my father - did Jonathan know?' she asks.

'Such a sweet man!' Jasmine shakes her head. 'Such a sweet, sweet man! And so terribly in love with me.' Shakily, she pushes herself up out of her armchair, pushes her feet into pink slippers. 'I have to go now.'

'Mother,' says Isabel, sitting up straight, afraid to reach out and catch hold of a frail arm, afraid to hold on to her, 'Mother, when was this? Who was he? Did Daddy know?'

A faded copy of the old, bright smile is turned on Isabel. 'Goodbye,' Jasmine says. 'It's been so pleasant talking to you.'

6.

Do you not know that Egypt is a copy of heaven and the temple of the whole world?

Egyptian scribe, c. 1400 BC By an odd - and, I hope, propitious - chance, we have arrived at Alexandria on the same day as the new Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church - a church which has its seat in this city. A Mr James Barrington, who h.o.a.rded as soon as we had docked and introduced himself as having been commissioned to meet me and bring me to Cairo safely (a courtesy for which I have to thank Sir Charles's letters to the Agency), kindly suggested that I might like to witness the celebrations, and the formalities of disembarkation duly dispatched, we soon found ourselves in a funny little carriage, not unlike a phaeton, with our luggage following behind and Mr Barrington perched on the box with the driver, with whom he appeared to converse most cheerfully. The two somewhat indifferent horses seemed to know their way, and responded only with a toss of their decorated heads to the occasional flick of the whip, delivered in almost desultory fashion and - I felt - more for form's sake than from any true necessity. In this manner we arrived at a tea-house (rather more in the, Viennese style, I'm afraid, than the Oriental) and, the two carriages having been told to wait (I later saw our driver standing by his horse's head and most tenderly feeding him some green stuff which Mr Barrington tells me is known as 'bersim' and is similar to our clover), we settled ourselves at a window table, ordered tea and English cake (which turned out to be a plain but perfectly well-made sandcake), and waited for the parades.

I observed that there were a great many decorations about: flags and strips of gaily coloured cloth and banners - to say nothing of the red and white rosettes decorating the carriage horses' heads and harnesses - and upon enquiring whether it was the custom to deck out the town so profusely for a Christian occasion, I learned that the Khedive (having returned from Europe) is spending the rest of his summer at Ras el-Tin Palace here in Alexandria, and His Highness having attained his twenty-sixth year three days previously, the town has been so decked out to honour him, the new Patriarch merely benefiting - as it were - from the coincidence of dates. It was a most interesting and picturesque procession that accompanied him (the Patriarch) from the Port to his Cathedral with much costume and carriages and horses and uniforms, and I could not but wonder what Emily made of it all - but she kept her usual stolid stance, moving her chair a little distance from the table we were sharing and turning it to an angle away from us. Later, when we were installed in our Pension, I made a small attempt to explain to her the oddity of Egypt's position, the country having won its independence in all but name from the Ottoman Sultan some sixty years ago though still nominally a part of his Empire, and now being ruled by the British through their Agency, and she said, 'To be sure, ma'am, three rulers instead of one, that's very odd.' In any case, she is bustlingly happy for this is a very decent Pension, belonging to a Greek widow lady who, Mr Barrington a.s.sures me, is perfectly respectable but has been left to make her own (and her little girl's) way in the world, her husband having died in some tragic circ.u.mstance which he seemed unwilling to expand upon and I cannot as yet ascertain.

I have a bedroom and a sitting room, both looking out to the sea, and both tolerably well furnished although a little dark and ponderous for my taste. Nothing would please the landlady but she must give me the grandest room with the 'letto matrimoniale', in which she clearly invests much pride. I said that, my condition being in one essential respect similar to hers, I would not have much use for it, but she was determined. It is a rather hideous affair, all bra.s.s k.n.o.bs and foliage, but very firm and clean and well fortified by curtains and hangings and draperies against any mosquito or - what I find the thought of infinitely more alarming - the flying c.o.c.kroaches that Captain Bourke so kindly warned me were a standard feature of life in Africa. However, I fancy I am not really in Africa yet, for certainly this place, from what I have seen so far, seems to have more of the Europe of the Mediterranean in it than anything else, and were it not for the costume of the native Arabs and the signs in their language, you might fancy yourself in some Greek or Italian town.

I must not run on any longer, dear Caroline, but I have so many impressions of this, my first day here, and none of them as yet anything like what I had - through my own reading or through the reports of others - been led to expect that I cannot, it seems, quite feel I have captured the day on paper, and so put down my pen.

I have just read this letter once before consigning it to the post and find that I have mentioned Mr James Barrington four times (this is the fifth!) and knowing my dear friend as I do, and being sensible that her wishes for my happiness may steer her thoughts along a particular course, I take the occasion to state here that the gentleman, though certainly a gentleman (Winchester and Cambridge) and an entertaining guide, is extremely young, no more than twenty-four or five years of age, and though he may in time prove a fine friend, that is all that you must now hope for your etc. etc.

And so Anna arrives in Egypt and this, it seems, is her first letter; a little self-conscious perhaps, a little aware of the genre - Letters from Egypt, A Nile Voyage, More Letters from Egypt. I a.s.sume that what I have is a copy of the letter she sent to Caroline. Perhaps she was thinking of a future publication. In any case, I forgive her the mannered approach as she feels her way into my home. What else does she know - yet? And I am glad that she has broken away - that the brown leather journal is put gently aside. She did not draw a thick line under the last entry. She did not tear out and use any of the remaining pages. I flick through them, half expecting a note - a comment from later years on that early grief. But there is nothing. She simply left them blank.

I find myself curious, as I would have been with a foreign friend coming to visit: wondering what she will make of Egypt, how much she will see - really see. And I wish I were there to welcome her, take her in, show her around. Show her around? I, who have placed myself more or less under house arrest, moving from my living room to my bedroom to the kitchen - avoiding my children's rooms. Angry with the city - with the country - to which I had returned to find so much had changed.

Now I find myself once again in the thick of traffic, of bureaucracy and procedure, as I try to see for myself the country that Anna came to. I try to reimagine it, to re-create it for Isabel. In the gla.s.s and concrete edifice that now houses the newspaper (though the letters spelling out its name still stand on top of the ruined, gracious building that used to be its home) I go through the archives of al-Ahram, cranking the blurred microfilm through the reader while three women in bonnets with crochet tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs watch me from behind one desk.

I find that pride of place, on 29 September 1900, is given to the arrival the day before of the new archbishop, Fotios, to his patriarchal seat in Alexandria. The article mentions the welcoming speeches delivered to the Archbishop while still on board his ship in the harbour and details the procession which carried him through the streets of Alexandria: the Cavalry, the Patriarchal Ceremonial Carriage, the Carriages of the Bishops and the Clerics, the Consuls of the Powers and the Foreign Nations, the People of Official Rank, the Lower Ranks of Clerics, the Leaders of the Orthodox Community and Representatives of the Community from the Regions of Egypt, Representatives of the a.s.sociations and Brotherhoods, the Learned Sheikhs of al-Azhar, Men of Letters, Professionals, Financiers and Merchants ... all these pa.s.sed in pageant in front of the teashop where a young widow fresh from England sat with her maid and the consular attache, while her luggage waited in a hired carriage round the corner and the driver held a fistful of barsim to his horse's munching mouth and raised his head to watch the notables go by.

Alexandria

29 September 1900

Dear Sir Charles,

You have been much in my thoughts (that is to say much more than the usual much!) since the cry was heard and we all hurried on deck to peer into the horizon and make out that low-lying grey-blue sh.o.r.e you first saw in such unfortunate circ.u.mstances eighteen years ago.