The Cairo House. Samia Serageldin

stopped twirling, she saw him gazing at her, and she pinched his cheek.

      

      That night she dreamed that Yussef was coming down the beach towards her, but all she could see of him were his bare feet. He had black hairs on the toes. She turned and started running away. But suddenly something surfaced in front of her, terrifying eyes in pools of black ink.

      Gigi fought off the clutches of the nightmare to find herself staring into the fierce, kohl-ringed eyes of Om Khalil. Om Khalil applied a lot of kohl before going to bed and washed it off in the morning. This morning she had apparently not yet done so, and the kohl was smeared all around her eyes.

      ‘Sitt Gigi, are you going to sleep all day? What time do you want lunch? What time is your company coming?’

      Gigi looked at her watch on the bedside table. ‘Nine o’clock! I’d better hurry. Yussef said he’d come early. We’ll have lunch at two, Om Khalil, does that give you enough time? Just a simple lunch. I’ll come down and see about the menu. Where’s Tamer?’

      ‘Sleeping on the slope of the roof; if he slips down and breaks his neck it’ll teach him a lesson.’

      Gigi yanked on her dressing gown and went out on the roof terrace. Her cousin was still half-asleep in the morning sun, his curly dark hair rumpled, a blanket over his shoulders. He didn’t turn in her direction. Gigi leaned against the sun-warmed wall. She wanted to ask him if he missed his father, if he wished his mother would come back from Lebanon. But the eyebrows drawn down like shades over the eyes warned her off. She touched his shoulder.

      ‘Come on, Tamer, we’d better get dressed. Yussef will be here any minute. Will you find Domino and chain him up?’

      ‘Whatever for?’

      ‘Yussef doesn’t like dogs.’ She sighed.

      Tamer looked at her as if he were about to say something, then changed his mind. He went off to find the dog.

      Gigi went downstairs to check on the preparations for lunch. She stopped short in her tracks when she saw Yussef standing in the middle of the foyer. ‘Oh! When did you get here?’

      He smiled. ‘Just now. Your governess went to look for you.’

      Involuntarily, Gigi’s eyes dropped to his feet. He was wearing canvas espadrilles. She couldn’t tell if his feet looked anything like those in her dream.

      ‘Excuse me a minute, I just have to dress.’

      She ran back upstairs. Before the mirror she surveyed her messy hair and childish dressing gown in despair. This day was not getting off to a good start.

      A few minutes later she came down, wearing the new apricot dress. They went for a walk on the beach. She carried her thin-strapped sandals and waded ankle deep in the water. He kept his espadrilles on and walked on the sand, a foot or two up from the water’s edge.

      ‘Father says I’d better be flying back to London as soon as I get back to Cairo.’

      ‘Oh, so soon?’

      ‘My thesis supervisor threw out all the data I’d collected over the past two months, he insists that I redo the experiments. Just because I took a shortcut! He just likes to give me a hard time, the old stick-in-the-mud.’

      They walked along, Gigi swinging her sandals by the straps. She tried to imagine what life would be like for her in London. ‘Do you have to study all the time?’

      ‘Oh, no, London’s lots of fun! Parties, discos on the King’s Road.’

      ‘You have a lot of friends?’

      ‘Quite a few. Many of them are foreign graduate students like me. The one thing we all miss is home cooking. My mother is having a dozen stuffed pigeons, a leg of lamb and I don’t know what else prepared for me to take back to London. Then as soon as I get there I’ll call everybody to come over and we’ll have a big dinner.’

      He sounded eager to go back, Gigi thought. She couldn’t see herself in the picture he was painting. Maybe she could put off making the decision till later, maybe they would have another chance to get to know each other better. ‘When do you think you might be coming back to Egypt?’

      ‘I don’t know, it depends on what my father decides. I doubt I can come back before summer next year. But I think he said a day or two before the wedding would be plenty of time. That is, of course, assuming…’ He trailed off a little awkwardly. Gigi too was embarrassed. It seemed bizarre to be discussing wedding plans with a man with whom she had not exchanged an intimate word. It occurred to her that he had not asked her a single personal question, about her likes or dislikes, her hopes or her dreams. Disappointment formed a lump in her chest. She knew she was hopelessly romantic, waiting for some intrepid explorer to discover her like some uncharted island; like the woman languishing dreamily on a deserted tropical isle in the advertisement for Fidgi perfume: ‘Toute femme est une île’ – every woman is an island.

      Just then Domino appeared at the top of the dune, barking frantically as he ran towards them. Yussef stiffened and Gigi rushed to head off the dog.

      ‘I’m sorry, I can’t imagine how he got loose.’ It could only be Tamer, she thought grimly, as she caught Domino’s collar and dragged him back towards the chalet.

      

      Om Khalil cleared the lunch table and set down a tray of baklava and a basket of the earliest mangoes of the summer: green, comma-shaped Hindi; sweet, round, orange Alphonse; huge ‘calf’s egg’. Gigi regretfully decided to skip the mangoes – no matter how careful she was, there was no way to eat a whole mango without risking a stain on her new dress or at least getting her fingers all sticky. At home Mama would have made sure the mango was served peeled and diced in a bowl. Gigi started to serve the baklava to Yussef and Madame Hélène.

      Tamer chose a round, fleshy Alphonse. He held it upright in his fist, stuck a knife into the middle and cut about an inch deep all the way round. ‘Aren’t you going to have a mango, Gigi? You like them so.’ He twisted the top half off, ending up with one half like a cup and the other with the large pit still attached, protruding. The sticky, indelible, bright-orange juice ran down his hands. Gigi watched with horror out of the corner of her eye while trying to make conversation with Yussef.

      ‘So what was the weather like in London when you left?’

      ‘Wet and cold, as usual. But you get used to it. There aren’t many days in the year you’d get a chance to wear a dress like the one you have on.’ He glanced at her bare shoulders, lightly tinged with pink from the sun.

      Gigi blushed, she wasn’t sure why. She tried to think of something to say but every topic seemed fraught with implications of one sort or another. She was a little resentful that Yussef seemed to be making no effort, while she felt it was incumbent upon her, as hostess, to keep up the conversation. For his part, he seemed perfectly at ease answering questions but devoid of curiosity himself. She wondered if it simply meant that he had already made up his mind. But based on what? Her looks and her pedigree? She was disappointed rather than flattered. But she tried to put herself in his shoes: it must be awkward to be the suitor, waiting to be accepted or rejected; perhaps that explained why he didn’t want to appear to be trying too hard.

      ‘Did you find it hard to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road in England?’ she hazarded.

      ‘A little at first. Not that I drive much there, I don’t have a car. But one time, I borrowed a friend’s car and found myself going the wrong way down a one-way street.’

      Gigi’s attention was distracted. Tamer had acquitted himself of the first half of the mango easily enough, scooping out the flesh with his spoon, but when he came to the half with the pit he abandoned all decorum and simply sucked on the pit like a dog worrying a bone, juice coating the incipient down on his upper lip and dribbling down his chin. He picked at a mango fibre stuck between his teeth.

      When they left the dining room Gigi pointed Yussef to the washroom and, as soon as his back was turned,