Authors: Ahdaf Soueif
The Map of Love (5 page)
The papers are full of it: an army of 7,000 British and 20,000 Egyptian soldiers loses 48 men and kills 11,000 of the Dervishes and wounds 16,000 in the space of six hours.
Winston Churchill promises to publish a book that tells how General Kitchener ordered all the wounded killed and how he (Churchill) had seen the 21st Lancers spearing the wounded where they lay and leaning with their whole weight on their lances to pierce through the clothes of the dying men and how Kitchener let the British and Egyptian soldiers loose upon the town for three days of rape and pillage.
The Honourable Algernon Bourke, Lady Caroline’s kinsman, tells Sir Charles a heavy ‘butchers bill’ was ordered for that day and communications with London were cut on a pretext so that no tempering word might find its way to the General.
Oh, I do so completely fear for my husband now, for if it is true and if he took part in those terrible deeds, he who puts honour above all else and truly thought that in embarking on this expedition he embarked on a brave and honourable task, I cannot now see how he can put it behind him — most particularly when he is so ill in body and at the mercy of the fever which burns him up for hours and leaves him, when it does, limp and so weakened that he can barely take the water that we put to his lips.
Edward Winterbourne died on 20 March 1899.
He had stood on the plain of Umm Durman and the thought that had hovered around him in
Atbara, in Sawakin, in the officers’ mess — the thought that he had for weeks held at bay — rose out of the dust of the battlefield and hurled itself full in his face in its blinding light. And once that thought had revealed itself and taken hold, the fanatical dervishes transformed themselves in front of his eyes into men — men, with their sorry encampments, with their ragtag followers of women and children and goats, with their months of hunger upon their bodies, and their foolish spears and rifles in their hands, and their tattered banners fluttering above their heads. Men impassioned by an idea of freedom and justice in their own land. But still they planted their standard and still they rushed forward with their spears and it was too late, too late to do anything but stand and fire.
I
have told Sir Charles that I believe that in his heart Edward was just and honourable to the end. And that I believe that, at the end, he stood closer to his father in his convictions than he was able to say. I trust this may — in time — provide him with some comfort.
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Walt Whitman
And what comfort was there for Anna?
There was the funeral. There was the memorial service. There were the practicalities: the solicitors to be seen, the papers to be signed. All these are chronicled in a flat, matter-of-fact manner as though by setting them down meticulously with dates and names Anna was doing her duty — what was left to her of her duty — towards her husband and her marriage.
And there was the grief, the questioning, the regrets. For months the journal in the brown leather binding is a medley of statements of fact, of fragments, exclamations —
If only he had died contented … If only he had died at peace …
There are no children to be comforted, no memoirs or letters to be sorted and wept over, no heartening story to be told. There are no rituals of mourning. In the twenty-odd years I lived in England, I never found out how the English mourn. There seems to be a funeral and then — nothing. Just an emptiness. No friends and relatives filling the house. No Thursday nights. No Fortieth Day. Nothing.
The house is already silenced through her husband’s long absence and illness. I see Anna wandering through it. I see her sitting in the library, her tea untouched, a book unopened on her knee —
If he had died contented …
There is Sir Charles’s sorrow —
Sir Charles comes to see me almost every day. We sit together, mostly in silence …
Friends come to call. Emily, her maid, chides Anna into at least going out into the garden —
I sat in the garden for an hour today. I had not even been able to persuade him to take the air. If I had understood him better — if I had been able to make him speak to me —
Day after day she relives each scene: he sits in the library, he sits in his room, he lies in his bed. His face is pale and drawn and his eyes look past her and the words she uses are never the right words, the touch she offers is never the right touch.
If I had been able to make him speak to me —
Anna can speak to no one, can give no voice to the thoughts that weigh so much on her mind. In the early days of their grief she had asked Sir Charles, ‘What should I have done?’ and he had said, ‘Nothing. You did everything you could, my dear.’ And there it was left. For she does not wish to rouse Sir Charles’s sorrow. There is Sir Charles’s sorrow and his anger. Thank God for his anger; it keeps his back straight and his step strong.
Sir Charles comes to see me often. We sit together, mostly in silence, except when he is moved to a tirade against the Empire — or rather, the spirit of Empire, for he is angered equally by the doings of Kitchener in South Africa, the King of the Belgians in the Congo, the Americans in the Filipines and all the nations of Europe in China. It is very hard, listening to him, not to feel
caught up in a terrible time of brutality and even he is helpless — save for letters to
The Times —
to do any thing but wait for history to run its course. But underneath all the anger, I can hear the thought, again and again: And to think that I have lost my son to this.
On a Monday evening, early in June, he tells her how Arthur Balfour had persuaded the House to reward Kitchener for the campaign; how they voted him a peerage and £30,000 and then his fellow peers left the Chamber without speaking to him. ‘It’s damn hard, my dear, forgive me. Damn hard,’ I hear him say, when he feels he has run on too much, too vehemently, the large, rough hand resting for a moment on the thin, pale one; the narrow edge of grief the old English soldier will permit himself to show. And then his concern for this unhappy daughter he is left with.
Today I walked — as I had walked so many times during his illness — to the South Kensington Museum. I found when I got there, however, that I was unable to look at the Lewis paintings I had grown to love so much —
I watch and listen, helpless to help. There is no point in saying ‘This, too, shall pass.’ For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.
She must have gone into black, although she makes no mention of fittings or dressmakers. But in January 1900 she is persuaded to accompany Lady Caroline Bourke to Rome:
13 January
Caroline, musing over what we are to wear at the Costanzi tomorrow, shook her head sadly over my weeds, and wondered whether they might not be brightened by a corsage or some jewels. I gently reminded her that it has not yet been a year since Edward’s passing and she somewhat reluctantly agreed that such
Ornament would be unbecoming. I did say that I would not mind if she went without me, but she would not hear of it and has resigned herself to my forlorn appearance at her side. I was most sincere in my offer, for truly all the noise and glitter only serves to make me feel more — not more sad precisely, but more apart, more set aside — and the thought of relieving my mourning, even slightly, for a moment filled me with a kind of fear —
A fear that she would fail him in death as she had in life. For she had failed — there is no doubt in her mind about that. A happy man would not leave his home and go seeking death in the desert. A well-loved man would not die with horrors eating silently, secretly at his mind. If she had loved him better, perhaps he would not have needed to go to the Sudan. If she had understood him better, perhaps she could have nursed him back to health.
If I could believe that he died for a noble cause. If I could believe that he died contented —
There is the occasional kindness of friends, the silent house, and the emptiness; the absence of him who had been absent for so long. But this is a different absence. A definitive absence. No longer can she seek to draw closer, no longer can she hope for something to happen, for new life to breathe into her world. The questions that so trouble her mind are fruitless, the answers for which her heart yearns are now for ever out of reach.
A terrible thought: that in this grief I have no thought for myself I have not once found myself thinking: what shall I do without him —
‘But she’s been without him all along,’ says Isabel. She sits on the red Bedouin rug on my living-room floor, her great-grandmother’s papers on the floor around her, the brown journal in her hand. The light of the lamp falls softly on the
old paper, catches the glints of her streaked blonde hair. ‘Not just when he went to the Sudan. Even when he was at home, with her —’
If I had loved him better. If I had needed him more — perhaps then I would have found the key — when he was so ill — so desperate —
‘That’s the trap,’ says Isabel, ‘we’re trained, conditioned to blame ourselves. This guy was inadequate, and somehow she, the woman, ends up taking the responsibility …’
Later, I put more ice into our Baraka Perrier. The night air is cool and pleasant on my balcony and the darkness obscures the rubble on the roofs of the neighbouring houses. I sip my Baraka and say, ‘There used to be gardens on the roofs here in Cairo. There would be trellises and pergolas and vines and Indian jasmine. Rugs and cushions on the floor, and dovecotes. And after sunset people would sit out on the roofs — imagine,’ girls and boys would exchange glances across the rooftops and children would play in the cool of the evening and in the daytime the washing would be hung out on the lines, and when it came down all folded in the big baskets you could bury your face in the linen sheets and smell the sunshine …
‘It must have been something,’ Isabel says.
Yes. Yes, it was. On the bonnets of the cars parked on the street, young men sit in groups, chatting, watching, waiting for action. The latest ‘Amr Dyab song, the tune vaguely Spanish, spirals up at us from the still open general store below where my children used to buy ‘bombas’ in the summer holidays, practising their Arabic, running up the stairs to drop them down into the street from this balcony: Beloved, light of my eyes/Who dwells in my imagination/I’ve loved you for many years —
‘My mother is dying, I think,’ says Isabel.
I look at her. I need a moment to bring myself into sync.
Isabel’s mother, Jasmine, in the tiny space allotted to her in my mind, is a baby. My father had told me that story: Anna’s daughter had given birth to a baby girl, in Paris, and had named her Jasmine. And now Isabel tells me that baby is dying.
‘She has Alzheimer’s. She had to go into a home. I moved in with her for a while after my father died. Then it got too bad.’
‘But you go to see her?’ I ask, rather anxiously.
‘Yes. Sure I do. But mostly she doesn’t know me.’
‘That must be terrible.’
‘She doesn’t even know herself — mostly.’
‘That must be — God! I don’t know what that must be like.’
‘I think … sometimes I think it’s what she wants.’
‘What? To be rid of herself?’
‘She was always so worried. And when she wasn’t worried, she was sad. I watched her once — she didn’t know I was there, she was sitting in the living room, on the eau-de-Nil sofa, and her face … she just looked so sad.’
‘Why didn’t you go in and throw your arms round her? Couldn’t you make her happy?’
‘She never got over losing my brother.’
‘But were you close?’
‘So-so. Maybe. I was closer to my father. My mother was so intense. You could never just relax around her.’
I was standing at the window today when Sir Charles came to call, and for a moment, before I realised it was he, I saw an old man, minding where he stepped. And I was filled — God forgive me — with a wicked anger against Edward — that he should have been more careful of himself, for his father’s sake —
I got to know Anna as though she were my best friend — or better; for I heard the worst and the best of her thoughts, and I had her life whole in front of me, here in the box Isabel has brought me. I smoothed out her papers, I touched the objects
she had touched and treasured. I read what others wrote of her and she became so present to me that I could almost swear she sits quietly by as I try to write down her story.
If I could believe that he died for a noble cause —
What’s done is done, I want to tell her. How can you reach someone who does not want to be reached? That door we spend lifetimes battering ourselves against — turn away, go out, go riding, go driving, eat, do charity work, take a tonic, travel …
And it is in Rome, at the Teatro Costanzi, on 14 January, that Anna, gripped by the soaring notes and by Floria’s bewildered and impassioned grief, feels the answering sorrow swell and rise within her and presses her handkerchief to her mouth as the terrible emptiness fills mercifully with pain: