‘Leila loved him.’ In the silence of his own mind Mountolive could never think the words without mentally shrieking them like a parrot. How could she? He had asked himself over and over again. How could she?
As he heard the hooves of the horses on the cobbles of the courtyard, the husband urged his wheel—chair forward to the balcony’s edge, calling testily: ‘Leila, is that you?’ in the voice of an old child ready to be hurt by the warmth of her smile thrown upwards to him from the ground and the deep sweet contralto in which she answered him, mixing oriental submissiveness with the kind of comfort which only a child could understand. ‘Darling’.
And running up the long wooden flights of stairs to embrace him, calling out ‘We are all safely back.’ Mountolive slowly dismounted in the courtyard, hearing the sick man’s sigh of relief. He busied himself with an unnecessary tightening of a girth rather than see them embrace. He was not jealous, but his incredulity pierced and wounded him. It was hateful to be young, to be maladroit, to feel carried out of one’s depth. How had all this come about?
He felt a million miles away from England; his past had sloughed from him like a skin. The warm night was fragrant with jasmine and roses. Later if she came to his room he would become as still as a needle, speechless and thoughtless, taking that strangely youthful body in his arms almost without desire or regrets; his eyes closed then, like a man standing under an icy waterfall. He climbed the stairs slowly; she had made him aware that he was tall, upright and handsome.
‘Did you like it, Mountolive?’ croaked the invalid, with a voice in which floated (like oil in water) pride and suspicion. A tall negro servant wheeled a small table forward on which the decanter of whisky stood — a world of anomalies: to drink ‘sundowners’ like colonials in this old rambling house full of magnificent carpets, walls covered with assegais captured at Omdurman, and weird Second Empire furniture of a Turkish cast. ‘Sit’ he said, and Mountolive, smiling at him, sat, noticing that even here in the reception rooms there were books and periodicals lying about — symbols of the unsatisfied hunger for thought which Leila had never allowed to master her. Normally, she kept her books and papers in the harim, but they always overflowed into the house.
Her husband had no share of this world. She tried as far as possible not to make him conscious of it, dreading his jealousy which had become troublesome as his physical incapacity increased.
His sons were washing — somewhere Mountolive heard the sound of pouring water. Soon he would excuse himself and retire to change into a white suit for dinner. He drank and talked to the crumpled man in the wheel—chair in his low melodious voice. It seemed to him terrifying and improper to be the lover of his wife; and yet he was always breathless with surprise to see how naturally and simply Leila carried off the whole deception. (Her cool honeyed voice, etc.; he should try not to think of her too much.)
He frowned and sipped his drink.
It had been quite difficult to find his way out to the lands to present his letter of introduction: the motor road still only ran as far as the ford, after which horses had to be used to reach the house among the canals. He had been marooned for nearly an hour before a kindly passer-by had offered him a horse on which he reached his destination. That day there had been nobody at home save the invalid. Mountolive noticed with some amusement that in reading the letter of introduction, couched in the flowery high style of Arabic, the invalid muttered aloud the conventional politenesses of reciprocity to the compliments he was reading just as if the writer of the letter had himself been present. Then at once he looked up tenderly into the face of the young Englishman and spoke, and Mountolive softly answered. ‘You will come and stay with us — it is the only way to improve your Arabic. For two months if you wish. My sons know English and will be delighted to converse with you; my wife also. It would be a blessing to them to have a new face, a stranger in the house. And my dear Nessim, though still so young, is in his last year at Oxford.’ Pride and pleasure glowed in his sunken eyes for a minute and flickered out to give place to the customary look of pain and chagrin. Illness invites contempt. A sick man knows it.
Mountolive had accepted, and by renouncing both home and local leave had obtained permission to stay for two months in the house of this Coptic squire. It was a complete departure from everything he had known to be thus included in the pattern of a family life based in and nourished by the unconscious pageantry of a feudalism which stretched back certainly as far as the Middle Ages, and perhaps beyond. The world of Burton, Beckford, Lady Hester…. Did they then still exist? But here, seen from the vantage point of someone inside the canvas his own imagination had painted, he had suddenly found the exotic becoming completely normal. Its poetry was irradiated by the unconsciousness with which it was lived. Mountolive who had already found the open sesame of language ready to hand, suddenly began to feel himself really penetrating a foreign country, foreign moeurs, for the first time. He felt as one always feels in such a case, namely the vertiginous pleasure of losing an old self and growing a new one to replace it. He felt he was slipping, losing so to speak the contours of himself. Is this the real meaning of education? He had begun transplanting a whole huge intact world from his imagination into the soil of his new life.
The Hosnani family itself was oddly assorted. The graceful Nessim and his mother were familiars of the spirit, belonging to the same intense world of intelligence and sensibility. He, the eldest son, was always on the watch to serve his mother, should she need a door opened or a handkerchief recovered from the ground. His English and French were perfect, impeccable as his manners, graceful and strong as his physique. Then, facing them across the candlelight, sat the other two: the invalid in his rugs, and the younger son, tough and brutish as a mastiff and with an indefinable air of being ready at any moment to answer a call to arms. Heavily built and ugly, he was nevertheless gentle; but you could see from the loving way he drank in each word uttered by his father where his love-allegiance lay. His simplicity shone in his eyes, and he too was ready to be of service, and indeed, when the work of the lands did not take him from the house, was always quick to dismiss the silent boy-servant who stood behind the wheel—chair and to serve his father with a glowing pride, glad even to pick him up bodily and take him tenderly, almost gloatingly to the lavatory. He regarded his mother with something like the pride and childish sadness which shone in the eyes of the cripple.
Yet, though the brothers were divided in this way like twigs of olive, there was no breach between them — they were of the same branch and felt it, and they loved one another dearly, for they were in truth complementaries, the one being strong where the other was weak. Nessim feared bloodshed, manual work and bad manners: Narouz rejoiced in them all. And Leila? Mountolive of course found her a beautiful enigma when he might, had he been more experienced, have recognized in her naturalness a perfect simplicity of spirit and in her extravagant nature a temperament which had been denied its true unfolding, had fallen back with good grace among compromises. This marriage, for example, to a man so much older than herself had been one of arrangement — this was still Egypt. The fortunes of her family had been matched against the fortunes of the Hosnanis — it resembled, as all such unions do, a merger between two great companies. Whether she was happy or unhappy she herself had never thought to consider. She was hungry, that was all, hungry for the world of books and meetings which lay forever outside this old house and the heavy charges of the land which supported their fortunes. She was obedient and pliant, loyal as a finely-bred animal. Only a disorienting monotony beset her. When young she had completed her studies in Cairo brilliantly and for a few years nourished the hope of going to Europe to continue them. She had wanted to be a doctor. But at this time the women of Egypt were lucky if they could escape the black veil — let alone the narrow confines of Egyptian thought and society. Europe for the Egyptians was simply a shopping centre for the rich to visit.