“There’s a secret in our life,” Isa told Salwa, “which you ought to know.” They were sitting together on the veranda, the scent of roses and carnations all around them. It was almost sunset; daylight had half-closed its eyelids and the sun was withdrawing its lashes from the mansion rooftops. Spring seemed to be breathing with the pure energy of youth. Susan Hanem had disappeared for a while and left them alone. They were drinking lemonade. A crystal decanter stood on a table of painted rattan.
“A secret?” Salwa whispered inquisitively.
He lifted himself, beginning with his eyebrows, something he always did when he was on the point of speaking. “Yes,” he said. “You may think that I hadn’t seen you before when I asked for your hand. But in fact I loved you tremendously ten years ago; you were ten and I was twenty. We were living in my mother’s house in Al-Wayiliyya48 and your family lived out by the Pyramids. Your father was a lawyer in those days and a close friend of my father and they used to visit each other a lot. You were very beautiful then, as you are now, and I fell in love with you. Don’t you remember those days?”
She stifled a laugh by biting the inside of her lip. “Only a little,” she replied. “I remember seeing rockets on the Prophet’s birthday at your house once, but I don’t remember anything about your loving me…”
He laughed, tossing his head back in a particular way, quite unwittingly copying one of the pashas in the party.
“No one remembers such things,” he said. “But my late father had to restrain me once when I was looking at you in utter infatuation and on another occasion when I kissed you!”
“No!”
“Yes! A pure kiss to match your tender age.”
“But you weren’t a child.”
“No, but you were! It doesn’t matter anyway. Work hard and you’ll marry her, my father told me at the time; make sure you turn out to be a young man who is worthy of her and I’ll see you’re married! I asked what degree of worthiness was required, and my father replied that Ali Bey Sulaiman was his relative and close friend but we needed Susan Hanem’s approval. She was rich and not concerned with wealth; what she wanted for her daughter was a successful young man—a judge, for example. The fact of the matter is that my own rapid promotion has impressed a number of people. I’ve become an important civil servant—no, politician even—at a very early age. But no one knew what the real reasons were for this unusual energy on my part!”
With a graceful gesture, she opened an ivory fan. On its outer edge was a picture of a swimming duck. “All this, and yet you hadn’t been to see me for ten years!” she said with mild irony.
“Don’t forget,” he said earnestly, “that your father was appointed a justice after that, that he worked for years plying between Asyut and Alexandria, and that I myself got heavily involved in politics.”
“How were you to know that ten years hadn’t turned me into something awful?” she asked with a coquettish smile.
“My heart! I trust its feelings. And when I saw you again my confidence in it was doubled. So our betrothal may seem traditional on the surface, but there’s a real love story behind it even though it was all one-sided.”
“Well, at any rate,” she murmured, gazing into the distance, “it’s not that way any longer.”
He took her chin between his fingers, turned her head gently, leaned forward until his hungry mouth met her soft lips in a throbbing kiss, then drew his head back again, smiling with a sense of happiness so deep that as his eyes wandered over the collection of flowerpots on the veranda, they were misted with emotion like a fog-covered windowpane. The tale he’d told her was not a complete fabrication. Not all along the line, in any case. He had often admired her beauty in the past and he really loved her now, even if he’d forgotten her for ten years. So what harm was there in a little white lie, which was a shining example of good sense and which would give their relationship a magical beauty of its own?
His beloved was not ready, however, to be parted from her mother; it was almost as though the midwife had forgotten to sever the umbilical cord. This attachment worried him sometimes. He looked forward eagerly to the day when he would really have her completely as his own and was somewhat disturbed by the way she looked at her mother during breaks in conversation. But his happiness swept all misgivings away, just as a big wave will sweep away the flotsam from a beach and leave it smooth and clean, and he found delight in the fact that she had so appallingly little experience of life’s normal happenings. Her innocence may in fact have flattered his own feelings by simply giving him a sense of superiority. He was also pleased at her love of music and her wide reading of travel literature.
“For me your love is a treasure without price,” he said. “When I came to meet you for the first time, I asked God that I might make a good impression on you.”
“I’d seen you before in the newspapers.”
“If I’d known that at the time, I’d have taken more care getting ready for the photograph!” he replied delightedly.
“That doesn’t matter. But I also heard about your misfortunes in politics.”
As he laughed, he threw his head back once again like the pasha. “I wonder what you make of that?” he asked. “I’m an old friend of police truncheons and prison cells. I’m quite used to being dismissed and expelled. What do you think of that?”
She bit the inside of her lip once more. “Papa says…”
“There’s no need to quote Papa on the subject,” he interrupted quickly. “I know what he thinks already; he belongs to the other side. But don’t you think about anything but music and travel books? From now on, you’re going to have to prepare yourself for the role of a politician’s wife—a politician in every sense of the word.”
Susan Hanem came back into the room. “Everything is as you wish,” she said, sounding like someone announcing that a project had been successfully concluded.
“Thank you, madame,” Isa replied, standing there in his sharkskin suit. They both sat down. “The marriage will be in August, then,” he continued, smoothing his trousers over his knees, “and afterwards we’ll travel directly to Europe.”
Their eyes met in delight. The last ray of the sun had disappeared. “I was telling Salwa that I’ve loved her for ten years!” he told Susan Hanem.
The lady raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Don’t believe everything he tells you,” she warned her daughter. “Your fiancé is a politician and I know all about these politicians!”
All three of them dissolved in laughter.