The Cairo House. Samia Serageldin

bill.’

      Several other tables with young women in their party were following suit. The king had a reputation for forcing unwelcome attentions on any woman who happened to catch his eye. As a preliminary, he would send a bottle of champagne, with his compliments, to the woman’s table. If his overtures were repulsed, disagreeable incidents ensued. Faruk could be dangerous; it was widely believed that he had arranged for the ‘accidental’ death of a young officer, the fiancé of a woman Faruk was currently besotted with.

      By the time Shamel joined Gina and Ali in the car, the incident with the king had had the effect of completely dismissing from his mind his earlier misgivings about having introduced them.

      

      That summer, as every summer, there was a mass migration of households to escape the heat of Cairo during the mosquito-infested months of the Nile flood. Those families that were not vacationing in Europe sent the staff ahead to air and clean their summer homes in Alexandria. A few days later the entire household would follow. Shamel shuttled between the seaside and his new duties on the estate in the Delta. Ali Tobia came up from Cairo every weekend that he could get away from hospital assignments.

      The days were spent at cabanas on the private beaches. At around ten in the morning the beach boys unlocked the cabanas and set up the parasols and chairs on the sand. By noon the beach would be busy.

      ‘Fresca! Ritza! Granita! “Life”!’

      All day long the vendors walked up and down, hawking tiny honey and nut pastries, raw sea urchins, water ices and magazines in four languages. The waiters from the cafeteria on the pier hurried back and forth in their embroidered caftans, carrying pitchers of frothy yellow-green lemonade the color of the foamy waves that lapped at their feet.

      At two o’clock in the afternoon the Corniche was clogged with chauffeur-driven cars bearing full-course hot lunches which would be served on folding tables in the cabanas. Reluctant, brown children were called out of the water by nurses with large towels at the ready. In swimsuits and burnouses, families sat down to lemon sole and sweet sticky mangoes. Lunch invitations were passed along from cabana to cabana.

      By sundown the beach boys folded the parasols and pulled the light wooden paddle boards up the sand and stacked them. The beaches were deserted for the night spots.

      All through that long, lazy summer the photographers trudged up and down the shore with their pant legs rolled up, their equipment slung over their shoulders, looking for likely prospects. They snapped the photos and came back with a print the next day. Shamel had a photograph with Gina and Ali sitting on either side of him, at a table in the garden of the Beau Rivage hotel at night; wrapped around Gina’s wrist was a string of jasmine blossoms that Ali had bought from a street vendor. Looking at the photograph, later, Shamel wondered how he could have been so blind.

      

      It was late August when the three of them were having dinner on the terrace of the Beau Rivage. There was an end-of-summer air about the folded parasols and the black flags fluttering on the beaches. The strings of lights suspended from the trees swayed in the breeze and Gina drew her wrap around her bare shoulders. Shamel got up to use the washroom.

      When he came back to the nearly deserted restaurant, Gina and Ali had their heads together, whispering urgently. She shook her head and turned away. He reached for her hand. She laid her forearm flat on the table between them and turned her palm up. He covered her hand with his and pressed her fingers apart. She closed her eyes.

      When they heard Shamel coming they jumped apart. He sat down between them.

      ‘How long has this been going on?’ He put up a hand. ‘Never mind. I tell you one thing. It stops right here, or else you speak to Gina’s father tonight.’

      ‘Do you think I haven’t tried?’ Ali burst out. ‘I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve wanted to ask for her hand from her father, for weeks now. But Gina won’t let me. We were arguing about that again just now.’

      ‘He doesn’t know Papa,’ she pleaded. ‘You know what he’s like, Uncle Shamel. We don’t stand a chance. Give us some time. Maybe if I can talk Mama around to our side first –’

      ‘No.’ Shamel had seen enough. He was not going to be responsible for what might happen between them. ‘You talk to your father tonight, Gina. I’ll come with you, I’ll do my best to convince him. But if the answer is no, then that’s that. Ali?’

      ‘Of course,’ Ali nodded miserably. ‘You have my word. You should know me better than to ask.’

      

      Gina’s father, Makhlouf Pasha, never felt as out of place as he did in his wife Zohra’s boudoir. He was not sure what grated most on his sensibilities: the uncomfortable preciousness of her Louis XVI-style bergères or the feminine froufrou of the chiffon skirt of her dressing table. It reminded him that he lived in a household of women.

      A few minutes in his wife’s boudoir were enough to make Makhlouf Pasha long to be on horseback in the country, touring some corner of his land. In the freshness of the dawn he would ride out to the white pigeon towers of the Bani Khidr village, wheel his mare around and whip her into a flat gallop all the way home. They said of Makhlouf Pasha that he rode his peasants as hard as he rode his horses, but he only really felt at home among them. He was proud of not being an absentee landlord, like most of his wife’s citified, Europeanized brothers.

      His cousin Zohra had been barely sixteen when he married her, but even then Makhlouf realized that he could never completely cow her. Had she born him a son, she would have been intolerable. But every time she had been pregnant with a boy, she had miscarried in her last term. Allah knew Makhlouf had indulged her every whim during her pregnancies. She could not suffer his presence in the first months: she claimed the sight of his thick, red lips made her ill, it reminded her of raw meat. Baffled and humiliated, he would take off for the country and return after the months of morning sickness were over. But his sons had been still-born. Only the four girls survived.

      Allah had not seen fit to give Makhlouf the sons who should bear his name and inherit his land. But his brothers had sons, many of them, and his daughters would marry their cousins. His grandchildren would bear his name, and the land of their great-grandfathers would not be parceled out to the sons of strangers.

      Makhlouf Pasha had always made clear his expectations in that respect. So he was astonished and annoyed as he sat in his wife’s boudoir and listened to his young kinsman and brother-in-law, Shamel, intercede on behalf of some fortune-hunting suitor for Gihan.

      ‘Ali is no fortune-hunter,’ Shamel objected, ‘and you know as well as I do that the Tobia family goes back a long way.’

      ‘Much good that does them!’ Makhlouf was stung by the hint at his own parvenu status. ‘All I know is that they’ve run through their fortune. Oh, they live well, vacations in Europe every summer and all that. But there won’t be one fedan left for that boy to inherit by the time his father is done selling off their property. And even if he owned half the Sharkia province, I wouldn’t marry a daughter of mine into a family with such “modern” notions. It’s a scandal how his sisters drive their own cars and smoke in public. I ask you!’ He threw his hands up in exasperation. ‘No, Gihan will marry one of her cousins, that was decided a long time ago. Now I’m not an unreasonable man. I’m not imposing my choice on her. My brother Hussein has three boys and Zulfikar has four. She can pick and choose.’

      Makhlouf Pasha leaned back and closed his eyes. He stopped listening to Shamel’s arguments and Gihan’s pleading, he ignored Zohra’s interjections. He took a deep breath and tried to control his rising temper. His blood pressure was dangerously high, the doctor had warned him repeatedly not to get worked up. He opened his eyes.

      ‘Listen. I’ve been very patient, but enough is enough.’ For once even Zohra was silenced. She knew him well enough to know when he could not be budged.

      ‘Gihan will get engaged to one of her cousins within the month. I don’t want to hear any more about Ali Tobia. If you ever see him again, Gihan, I will disown you.’