We, however, sailed peaceably into the harbour, and I was met straight away by a young gentleman by the name of James Barrington, who had been detailed by Lord Cromer himself to find me and offer me every a.s.sistance. I know I have to thank your letters for this and I am most grateful for your kindness, for not only was the transition from ship to land achieved quite without pain, but my guide pointing out that the Court, the Government and all the Consuls - in short everybody - was still in Alexandria for the end of summer, I agreed to stay in this city for a while and see the sights. And, lest you imagine I am no longer the daughter you know but am grown fond of Society and Show, I will a.s.sure you that I felt that by insisting on continuing immediately to Cairo I would cause some inconvenience to Mr Barrington and to such others - as yet unknown - who feel it their duty to a.s.sist and chaperone an unprotected female in a strange land.

We are, therefore, lodged in the Pension Miramar, in the care of an excellent respectable Greek widow lady with a young child: a pretty little girl of about four who has taken to Emily and is constantly chattering to her in Greek, and begging her, with the most winning gestures, to dress her hair in braids and bows - a service which Emily is glad to render, since she does not consider she does enough of it where it would be most proper!

I wrote of our arrival yesterday to Caroline Bourke, and since I am sure you will be given an account of my letter, I will not say more, save that today further Jubilations were in evidence on the streets as His Highness the Khedive has been blessed with the arrival of a new baby Princess.

Alexandria seems, on the face of it, a rather jolly place and today I ventured out for a short walk on my own along the seafront, within sight of the Pension. I could see no trace of your famous 'bombardment' and - receiving nothing but smiles and kind looks from the Natives and doffed boaters from the Europeans - was hard put to imagine scenes of fanatical wickedness. But I am yet new to this place and know nothing of it save what can be seen by the most superficial eye.

Mr Barrington says that as I am in Alexandria I must see the sights: Pompei's Pillar, the Mohammedan Cemetery, the Museum and the Catacombs - he is arranging some expeditions to these. He mentioned that Alexandria had boasted two fine Cleopatra's Needles and commented on the oddity of Egypt's rulers giving them away - one to us and the other to the Americans. Then he said that he supposed if they had not given them away they would have been taken in any case, and muttered something about 'Budge and Morgan'? He knows a great deal about the country and cares for it very much, I think. It appears he is an excellent speaker of the native Arabic and I count myself most fortunate in having him for my guide and interpreter.

My thoughts turn often towards you, my dearest friend and parent. How I wish I could have prevailed upon you to undertake this journey with me! I have, however, the comfort of knowing that I am here with your encouragement and blessing - indeed, I would not have gone without - and that the purpose for which we decided I should travel is even now being achieved; for I am better in health and spirits than I have been for a long time. You must tell Mr Winthrop that. Poor man, what a hard time he has had with us these last eighteen months! I will search out the herbs he mentioned when I find my way to the souks of Cairo - although Alexandria must have souks too, for all that it looks so like a European city, but I doubt I shall have the time to find them; besides, I imagine he will want them as fresh as possible.

Dearest Sir Charles, I am rambling, but that is because I miss your company and our conversations. When you are next on the Embankment, pray look at Cleopatra's Needle and remember me in the land of Tuthmosis III. May it please G.o.d that you remain well and that I find you so when I return - and that you will be pleased to welcome back your loving daughter ...

Sir Charles stays in his rooms on Mount Street. The house he had left to his son and his son's bride stands empty. The gardener comes in once a week to keep the flowers in order.

And Anna starts another journal; a handsome, thick volume in dark green with a navy spine: 28 September

My thoughts tonight keep turning to my dear Edward, for four years ago he made this very journey and saw the same sh.o.r.e that I have seen today and disembarked at the very port. The waves breaking against the sea wall beneath my window are not the waves he listened to, but their sound cannot be too dissimilar and I find myself wondering, as I sit here in the shadow of my great bed, whether we would have shared it, had we come here together - whether being thrown together in travel might not have broken down some of that reserve that featured so large in our marriage - and so immovably. Idle thoughts ...

7.

In his first interview with the Governor of St Helena, Napoleon said emphatically: 'Egypt is the most important country in the world.'

Lord Cromer, 1908 I can see her now, my heroine: she sits at the window of her bedroom in the Greek widow's pension, her letters neatly folded, her new journal open on the table towards which she leans to command as wide a view as she can of the Eastern Harbour; two arms of the city stretching out to encircle a portion of the Mediterranean. Did Anna see, as she looked to her left, the lights of the Fort of Sultan Qaytbay? Her edition of Cook's Tourist Handbook does not mention the old fort at all. Did James Barrington tell her that this, more than anything, perhaps, is an exemplar of that tired phrase, 'the palimpsest that is Egypt'? For here the Pharos - the great lighthouse of Greek Alexandria - once stood, and from its ruins and with its stones the Mameluke Sultan Qaytbay built his fort in 1480 against the Crusaders coming from the north, and within that fort a mosque was later built, and the minaret of that mosque was destroyed by Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour in the bombardment of 1882.

Isabel talks of making a film of Anna's life, the opening credits rolling across a long shot of the old fort. I say, 'It's a military museum now, I don't know if you'd get permission.'

'Sure I would,' she says confidently. 'The guidebook says at dawn its stones look like they're made of b.u.t.ter. It would be a great shot: a fairy-tale cake of a fort, creamy against the blue sea. You could even see it from the sea to begin with, then swing around as the boat docks -'

'It would have docked in the Western Harbour -'

'Then the camera pulls back and back and back until we're with Anna in her window, seeing what she sees.'

'It was night-time,' I say, literally, stubbornly. I want to keep Anna for myself; I don't want her taken over by some actress.

'That's a detail,' says Isabel.

Anna looks out of her window. It is night-time. I insist that it is night-time, and between the lights of the fort and the lights of Silsila the Mediterranean is a black, blank expanse ahead of her. Her hair is brushed and lies soft on her neck and shoulders. She wears a peignoir (is it a peignoir? I like the word; tasting of the nineteenth century, of fashion and a certain type of woman, of Europe and the novel. Anna Karenina might have worn a peignoir as she prepared for bed; certainly several of Colette's heroines did, but my English Anna seems worlds away from Coline and Rezi who are her contemporaries) - a peignoir gathered at her shoulders and falling over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in silken folds. Perhaps it has a tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of soft fur around the neck and at the end of the long, loose sleeves. It is in a pale, pale grey shading into blue. The card propped up on my dressing table calls this colour 'Drifter'. This colour card has been of no use to me for years, and yet I cannot bring myself to throw it away; it startles me that an object of such beauty should be held in such low esteem - and yet there they were in every B&Q, Salisbury's HomeBase, etc., not to mention the specialised paint stores and hardware stores: hundreds of cards, stacked, inviting the most casual pa.s.ser-by to pick one up, glance at it, and throw it into the nearest bin. But look what it does with the seven basic colours; it lobs you gently into the heart of the rainbow, and turns you loose into blue; allows you to wander at will from one end of blue to the other: seas and skies and cornflower eyes, the tiles of Isfahan and the robes of the Madonna and the cold glint of a sapphire in the handle of a Yemeni dagger. Lie on the line between blue and green - where is the line between blue and green? You can say with certainty 'this is blue, and that is green' but these cards show you the fade, the dissolve, the transformation - the impossibility of fixing a finger and proclaiming, 'At this point blue stops and green begins.' Lie, lie in the area of transformation - stretch your arms out to either side. Now: your right hand is in blue, your left hand is in green. And you? You are in between; in the area of transformations. Enough. Enough. And yet, I imagine that Anna would have had these same thoughts about whatever version of the colour card there was in her day, for she was a woman who was arrested by small things, by shades of colour.

Cairo

8 November 1900

Dear Sir Charles,

It is now a week that we have been in Grand Cairo and I have met with the greatest consideration and kindness from everybody here. I have been to dinner at the Residency, where Nina Baring has kept house for her uncle these two years. I am told Lord Cromer is a changed man since his bereavement and that the gentlemen of Chancery were much relieved when Miss Baring came, for she is lively and vivacious and teases her uncle and makes him smile. She has presented him with a complete set of silver brushes inscribed 'Mina', which occasioned a certain amount of perplexity at the Agency until she recounted a family tale according to which the Earl used, as a child, to pick up any object he could carry and cry 'mine-a, mine-a' till that became his childhood name. You can imagine how I thought of you upon hearing this, and I imagined you throw back your head and laugh - as you used to - then say, 'That accounts for his att.i.tude to Egypt, then.'

I find myself seeing many things here through your eyes, imagining that I know what you would think of them. I know you would be interested to learn - if you do not know already - that there is a newspaper, newly started here, that speaks against the Occupation. I learned this when someone mentioned at dinner that the paper, al-Liwa, is stirring up the people by writing against the Boer War and describing the methods used by the British army there. My ears p.r.i.c.ked up at this - on your account - but to my questions Lord Cromer merely said it was a publication of no significance, paid for by the French and read only by the 'talking cla.s.ses'. After this the subject was dropped by tacit agreement and replaced by discussion of a Baron Empain and a French company that has bought a great tract of land in the desert North-East of Cairo and is planning to build a city there along French lines. When I questioned Mr Barrington later about the paper, though, he said that he believed it was paid for by subscriptions - although the French may have helped to begin with - and that it prints ten thousand copies a day. That seems a great many in a country where most people cannot read. I must see if I cannot get a copy and send it to you, although of course it will be in Arabic.

I must tell you, dearest Sir Charles, that your views are well known here, but the respect you command is such that no one has shown me anything but solicitude and kindness.

We are staying, as I told you in my telegram, at Shepheard's Hotel, which is poised between the old and the new Cairo, and I have been once to the Bazaar with Emily. It is exactly as I have pictured it; the merchandise so abundant, the colours so bold, the smells so distinct - no, I had not pictured the smells - indeed could not have - but they are so of a piece with the whole scene: the shelves and shelves of aromatic oils, the sacks of herbs and spices, their necks rolled down to reveal small hills of smooth red henna, lumpy ginger stems, shiny black carob sticks, all letting off their spicy, incensy perfume into the air. It is quite overwhelming. I had not, however, imagined the streets to be so narrow or the shops so small - some of them are hardly shops at all but mere openings in the wall where one man sits cross-legged working at some exquisite piece of bra.s.s or copper. It is difficult, though, to examine the place at leisure as people are constantly calling out to you and urging you to buy their wares. I hear you tell me that those people are there to make their livelihood and indeed I know it is so, and I would buy, only I do not know the proper price of things and I have heard that you have to bargain and I have no experience in conducting that transaction. No doubt I will learn. Emily was much relieved to get back to the Hotel for she constantly feared we would be abducted and dragged into one of the dark, narrow alleys we sometimes came upon between shop and shop - and when I asked to what purpose, she said we should be sold as slaves, for it is well known that Cairo is a great centre for that trade. My a.s.surances have proved of no avail and she is determined that neither she nor I will venture again into Old Cairo except under British guard! So you may be a.s.sured that all will be well with me and that I am most scrupulously looked after here in Cairo. Your loving ...

And what of Emily? Anna's references to her sketch out the portrait we have come to expect of a lady's maid of the period: Emily 'chides' Anna into going out into the garden; Emily wishes to be allowed to dress Anna's hair in a more elaborate style; she distances herself from the spectacle of the parade in Alexandria; she is fearful in the Bazaar. I try to focus on her as she waits on the sidelines, guarding the picnic basket, the rugs and the first-aid box. How old is she? What does she want for herself? Is she saving up to start a milliner's business? Does she have an illegitimate child lodged with a foster mother in Bournemouth? Does she want something for herself? Or is Anna her whole life and occupation? Can she yet do what Hesther Stanhope's maid did, who in Palmyra caught the fancy of a pa.s.sing sheikh but was denied permission to marry him? Would she do what Lucy Duff Gordon's Sally did and melt into the back streets of Alexandria, pregnant with the child of her mistress's favourite servant, Omar al-Halawani? I don't know; so far, nothing in Anna's papers gives me any clue.

Cairo

14 November 1900

Dear Caroline,

I have been in Cairo for close on two weeks now and I have seen a great many curious sights - the most curious of all perhaps being the sky, which is perpetually blue in the daytime and innocent of any wisp of cloud. How different it is here from November in England. I would so like it if you were to come out, for I am certain you would enjoy it. I dined at the Agency last night (the second time since I have been here) and I fancied myself exchanging glances with you across the dinner table when the conversation turned to the Khedive's visit to England last summer and what a success it had been and how honoured 'the boy' ought to feel (this from Lord Cromer) at the Queen's giving him the Victorian Order. I remembered you bringing over the Ill.u.s.trated London News (indeed I have kept the copy) and how we read it in the garden -

- and there on the cover is the Toast to His Highness: a long table loaded with candleholders, flowers, epergnes and fruit bowls. Ranged behind it - the caption tells me - are the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Duke of York, the Marquess of Salisbury, the Lord Mayor of London and the Gaikwar of Baroda. The company raise their gla.s.ses. In the centre, tilting slightly to his right, towards the upright, tiaraed figure of the Princess, the Khedive - easily the youngest man there by thirty years - bows and leans with both hands on the table as though for support. As a Muslim, he should not drink alcohol. Looking in from the right of the picture is another fez-wearing head: the elderly Turkish amba.s.sador, holding his winegla.s.s uneasily by its stem, looks in a concerned manner at the young Khedive. Above 'Abbas Hilmi's head hangs a heavy-looking instrument with a ta.s.sel on its end - - and Sir Charles came in and looked at the cover and the mace hanging from the wall of the Guildhall above the Khedive's head and said, 'That's to pop him on the fez if he steps out of line.' I believe that was the first time I had laughed since Edward's death.

I am sure that Sir Charles's opinions are well known here - indeed they must be, for, far from making a secret of them, he has published and declared them whenever possible - and I cannot imagine they are regarded with any sympathy by this company. No one speaks of this in front of me of course, partly out of natural courtesy, and partly because of the consideration they feel is due to me for Edward's sake. But I hear them mention Mr Blunt, who holds views identical to those of my beau-pere, and whom they regard as a crank who chooses to live in the desert, and they use of him the phrase 'gone over' by which I a.s.sume they mean he sees matters from a different point of view. I own I am curious to see Mr Blunt but he does not come into Cairo Society and I cannot call on him unless I am invited by Lady Anne. Nothing, it seems to me, could be further from the spirit of the desert than life at the Agency - indeed, while you were there you would not know you were not in Cadogan Square with the Park a stone's throw away instead of almost paddling in the waters of the Nile.

It must be so hard to come to a country so different, a people so different, to take control and insist that everything be done your way. To believe that everything can only be done your way. I read Anna's descriptions, and I read the memoirs and the accounts of these long-gone Englishmen, and I think of the officials of the American emba.s.sy and agencies today, driving through Cairo in their locked limousines with the smoked-gla.s.s windows, opening their doors only when they are safe inside their Marine-guarded compounds.

Lord Cromer himself (or 'el-Lord' as I am told he is commonly known throughout the country - a t.i.tle, they say here, that denotes both affection and respect) is a large, commanding man with sad, hooded eyes and thinning white hair. I cannot pretend to know him at all well, of course, but I have observed him at the head of the dinner table, where he sits and exudes a quiet strength. He is a man of very decided opinions, to which the conversation in his presence always defers. I suspect you would not be able to work with him for long if you did not subscribe wholeheartedly to his views. He is sunounded by his gentlemen, chief of whom is Mr Harry Boyle, the Oriental Secretary. He is most interesting as a character (Mr Boyle) and I think makes something of a point of a certain eccentric untidiness or even shabbiness of dress and unruliness of moustache, but Mr Barrington tells me it is said that he has a very sound understanding of the native character and he does speak the language - although Mr Barrington stressed that his knowledge was only of the vernacular - and it is this understanding that has made him so useful to Lord Cromer and brought the two men so close that Mr Boyle has earned the nickname 'Enoch' (for walking with the Lord!). Lord Cromer himself speaks no Arabic at all - except for 'imshi', which is the first word everybody learns here and means 'go away', and of course 'baksheesh'.

I am hoping to learn a little more of native life here, although I must say I have no idea how to put that hope into actual form. But I feel it would be a little odd to come all the way to Egypt and learn nothing except more about your own compatriots. I believe if Sir Charles were here he would be able to show me things I cannot yet see on my own. In any case I am very sensible that I know very little of the country and must be content to try to educate myself until such time as I am equipped to form my own views.

In that same issue of the Ill.u.s.trated London News, there is what we call today 'an artist's impression' of the Triumphal Entry into the Transvaal: lots of little people line a wide, dusty road. Some wave thin sticks fluttering with forked Union Jacks. In the centre of the road a man in uniform rides ahead of his troops. But in the foreground, closest to us, the artist has placed an old bearded man (a Boer?) who turns away from Lord Roberts and his prancing horse. He faces us, the readers, with furious eyes, his left fist clenched and raised to his chest.

8.

A woman like her

Should bear children

Many children,

So she can afford to have

One or two die.

Ama Ata Aidoo, 1970 Cairo, May 1997

The loud buzz of the intercom sounds through the corridor. I'd been in my bedroom, working, as is usual with me now, on my Anna project, reading on the period, looking at pictures, trying to imagine. I've always liked working in bedrooms, moving from the desk to the bed to the dressing table and back to the desk. At one stage of my life it had been necessary; now I ignore the empty rooms and spend my days and nights in this one corner of my flat. I think of the table by the window as 'Anna's table' and it is covered with her papers. I've arranged them chronologically as much as I could; the undated sheets I've compared to dated ones and matched the paper. They stand in twelve piles, one for each year - some years are more substantial than others. The journals stand alone. I have tried not to read through them, to read only one year at a time. But then I know how the story ends. I don't think that matters. We always know how the story ends. What we don't know is what happens along the way.

Anna's objects I keep wrapped as I found them, in the trunk which now stands by the wall next to my dressing table.

I was expecting Isabel and I had stopped work and was standing at the window, vaguely watching a woman hang out laundry. She must have done a white wash for she hangs out vests, white vests, one after the other: big ones, medium ones, little ones. She bends down and vanishes for a moment behind the wall of her balcony, then straightens up with a vest in her hand and a clothespeg in her mouth. She shakes out the vest and pegs it by the shoulder next to its brother. When she has finished and picked up the green plastic tub and gone inside, the vests hang in the still air shoulder to shoulder.

And to think that there were times when I grumbled at their washing. But there were also times when I stood still, one wet sock in my hand, struck by a premonition of what it would feel like when there would be no more socks to wash, no more games kits to hang up to dry on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when all my time would be my own to do with as I wished. What do I wish? That I was still with my husband? That my children lived next door? No one lives next door any more. That woman there across the road - who knows where her children will go when they grow up? Canada, Dubai, the moon. Maybe she'll be lucky and one of them will settle here, in Cairo, close enough to give her grandchildren to hold and talk to in her old age.

I looked down at the trees in the garden below. I wondered, if they were washed, if someone just washed them down with a hose, how long would it take for the dust to settle again? I wondered how old the trees were: were they left over from the time when this part of the city was all green, planted fields? Or had they started their lives as town trees? Unlikely, I think. In this city trees are torn up, not planted. The great avenue of giant eucalyptus at the beginning of the Upper Egypt road in Giza, destroyed. Trees that soared up to sixty metres, reached to the sky, planted by Muhammad 'Ali close to two hundred years ago, torn up by the roots to make a wider road for the cars and trucks heading for Upper Egypt.

When the buzzer went I thought it was Isabel come early. I walked to the door and picked up the handset, and Tahiyya's voice rang in my ear: 'Daktora! Ya Daktora!'

'Aywa,' I shouted back, 'yes,' holding the handset away from my ear.

'Can I come up to you for two bits?' she shouts.

'Of course,' I say, 'Itfaddali.'

'Now?'

'Yes,' I say. 'Come.'

Tahiyya is the doorman's wife - and my friend. She asks after me and sends her children to see if I need the washing-up done or my clothes taken to the ironing shop. Now she comes in smiling, with her littlest - his leg still encased in plaster - on her hip.

'Please G.o.d you weren't asleep?'

'No, no,' I say, crossing the room to close the balcony doors as she puts the child down on the floor. 'But that thing is so loud; it startles me every time.'