The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (25 page)

Flo was disappointed. She wondered why the crew could not shop for him and suspected other reasons were at play. (Brothels immediately came to mind.) Also, he made no more mention of making squeezes together. Had he formed no attachment to her, no special affection after their talk yesterday? Did he not at least pity her? Perhaps he did, and that was the problem.

She pushed these questions from her mind and decided to resume work on the long letter she had started to Parthe. Another diversion presented itself later in the morning when Charles announced that he and Selina had been invited to dinner at Mahatta, a village on the eastern bank of the river, a short ride by boat from Philae. Flo could come along if she wished.

She
did
wish. If she stayed busy, she might keep at bay her desolate thoughts as well as new fantasies of Gustave—brief flashes intense
as lightning. (Gustave leaning forward to wipe dust from her brow; the two of them rambling hand in hand; removing a smudge from his earlobe after licking her finger . . .) The word
lover
glittered in her mind, like a stage marquee. Richard had never been a candidate for anything but wedlock. In retrospect, she found his frivolity and his determination never to feel dejection, except as it could be conveyed in rhyme, limiting.

That was unkind. Surely he’d felt miserable the day she refused him, a bright afternoon the previous October sharply etched in her mind. They’d been chatting in the parlor at Embley. Curled up in a corner of the sofa, Richard was paging through a sheaf of poems, preparing to read to her. She loved the way he lolled and lounged against the furnishings. He was no taller than she, and she theorized that he adopted these postures partly to prevent easy comparison. Whatever the motive, the way he dispensed with the strict horizontals and verticals of his surroundings was catlike and comforting.

He stood and walked to the fireplace, leaning on the mantel, one foot braced against the wall.

She often listened with pleasure to his poetry as well as drafts of his biography of Keats. He read without histrionics, his voice smooth and intimate, completely different from the voice he used in Parliament, which was quavering and too effusive for the setting. She’d heard him speak there several times, dismayed once to observe an opponent parodying his florid diction.

“This one is called ‘Familiar Love,’” he announced.

She sat on the sofa in front of him, attentive if somewhat alarmed by the title. A proposal had been in the air for weeks. Had he come to demand an answer at last? He was thirty-nine and she was twenty-nine. She’d known him for seven years.

“Familiar Love,” he repeated, clearing his throat.

We read together, reading the same book

Our heads bent forward in a half embrace . . .

Her mind wandered, taking stock again of how she felt, preparing what she might say (nothing came to mind!) if he asked. By any logical measure, her equivocation was irrational, for from the beginning they had a natural affinity for each other. She’d been considering him for years, because his asking seemed inevitably keyed to the rhythm of life, like bird migration or the falling of leaves.

Their backgrounds couldn’t have been more similar unless they were siblings. Both came from privilege, the Milnes having made their fortune in the wool trade in the previous century. Like her, he was one of two children. Both came from Dissenter Unitarian families and had been educated at home, she because women were not permitted to attend the public schools and because the academies for girls weren’t intellectually rigorous enough to meet WEN’s standards; and Richard because he was a frail child, prone to lung ailments. They’d both sojourned during their youth in Italy with their families.

Her parents had made it clear that they found Richard an ideal match for either sister, with charm enough to impress Parthe, and a wit that passed muster with Flo. He was a pleasant-looking man, with an open gaze, fair brown hair, and a broad forehead. He had published several volumes of verse and was an important figure in Mayfair. The lively breakfasts he threw at 26 Pall Mall when Parliament was in session attracted everyone of note—politicians, scientists, artists, writers, and socialites.

Had he ever seriously considered Parthe? At first, Fanny had set both daughters on display like auction items in the cunningly appointed public rooms at Embley: propped up like costumed dolls upon the horsehair sofa, their skirts arranged just so, their feet clad in glove-leather slippers; or ranged around the dining table along with the silver epergnes overflowing with flowers and fruit. Parthenope needed no persuasion to enter the fray. She ached for a life spent in the service of a husband and children. She was perfectly happy en famille, while Florence was utterly downcast to the point of madness at home. Had her family been Mahometans, Florence thought grimly now, they could have offered a bargain—two wives for the price of one.

“We had experience of a blissful state,” Richard read. She remembered the line; it was stiff and airless, not like Richard at all. She forced her attention back to the poem. He’d be expecting her to comment on it.

Richard’s voice rose with pride as he continued.

The beauty of the Spirit-Bride,

Who guided the rapt Florentine . . .

Oh, the Spirit-Bride! She couldn’t bear it. Yet, she thought she loved Richard. She couldn’t imagine a more empathetic soul; he was more like her than any man she had met. Only WEN had treated her with such equality and gaiety.

She loved to hear him describe his years at Cambridge, where he was a member of the exclusive Apostles society, though he’d never taken his exams, his nerves being inflamed. He had let her read the journal he kept during the three years he spent in Europe after university. In Italy he’d read poetry and soaked up the Mediterranean until it had tinged his soul with sunlight. He often spoke with Flo of his plan to make prolonged visits there, and when she returned from her trip to Italy with the Bracebridges, he’d been her keenest listener.

Once, he’d taken her (chaperoned by WEN) to Cambridge. The library was splendid, with its black-and-white checkered floor, its busts of great thinkers, and portrait medallions on the walls. Oriel windows spilled morning sun on row after row of bookshelves. A strange thought had occurred to her there, which she had whispered to him: “If I began reading now,” she lamented, “I would not live long enough to read all these books.” Richard had wiped away a tear from her cheek and guided her back outside.

He arranged for tea that afternoon in the dormitory of a friend who kept a tame bear cub. For Flo, the main attraction had been the room itself. What she would have given for a place she didn’t have to share, a room that was a shrine to learning, with walnut bookshelves
surrounding a sturdy old desk on whose scarred top a ream of white foolscap lay like a pool of cream.

She’d tried to mesmerize the cub, but it waved its paws at her. Richard had intervened, tenderly returning the animal to its cage, where, after a few moments, she succeeded and the bear lay down, purring like a cat. What other man would have trusted her with the creature, or come to her aid more gallantly without making her feel foolish? Since that visit, the dorm room at New College had appeared, altered, in her dreams, furnished with a globe, a fur throw (the bear, she wondered, made docile?), and three young men listening raptly to her.

Yes, she admired him. Surely that was part of love.

She sensed from the slight rise and crackle of Richard’s voice that the poem was ending:

To braid Life’s thorns into a regal crown,

We passed into the outer world, to prove

The strength miraculous of united Love.

Still clutching the sheaf of paper, he lunged toward the sofa and dropped down on one knee, a worried expression on his face. “Marry me, Florence?”

“I do love you, Richard,” she said, taking his hand and pressing it to her cheek.

“So you say.” He was staring at the Aubusson carpet on the floor. “Repeatedly.”

“If I cannot agree, it is not a judgment on you, my dear friend,” she told him. “Please trust me and try to understand.”

“You can’t spare my feelings, even if you want to,” he replied, his voice low, more hiss than whisper. “If you refuse me, so be it.” He sat back on his haunches, letting his hand slip from her grasp. He looked like a child who had been slapped.

“I am not certain it is
you
I am refusing.” As soon as she said it, a contradictory image came to mind: Richard’s monogram embroidered
on every towel, tablecloth, pillowcase, shirt, and bathrobe, the graceful M’s like so many waves rushing toward her in a storm of Milnes-ness. Her own initials would vanish except on lawn handkerchiefs with which she might dab away a tear on difficult days, days when the M’s dictated every moment, even if Richard did not plan it to be so.

“Not
me
?” His face had gone a deep crimson.

It was a ridiculous thing to have said. She stumbled on. “I couldn’t bear to lose our friendship.”

“But you don’t care for me enough to marry me. I don’t understand.” He rested his head on his knees. Was he weeping?

Had she any doubts before of her monstrosity, there could be none in that instant. “I am not sure I shall ever marry. I think I should be lost as a wife. To any man.”

“No winters in Rome for you, then?” He rose and retrieved the glass of wine he’d set on the mantel and drained it, his back to her.

If only she could have spared him this pain. Perhaps more candor would soften the wound. “Darling Richard,” she said, “please wait here a moment. I must show you something.” She rushed up to the bedroom to retrieve her diary. When she returned, she thrust it into his hands, a book no other eyes had seen. “I beg you, Richard, read this. You have been generous to share your journal with me.”

As in the poem he’d just recited, they bent their heads over Flo’s neat handwriting and read together silently:

I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in Richard. I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have an active moral nature which requires satisfaction, and that would
not
find it in his life. . . . I could not satisfy this nature by making society and arranging domestic things. . . . To be nailed to a continuation and exaggeration of my present life would be intolerable. Voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.

Richard gasped and took a step back from her. “I am your
suicide
?” he shouted. He turned and walked from the room, glaring at her from the hallway. That his sadness had flared into fury, Flo thought, was probably better for him because it left him with the satisfactions of indignation, while despair held no satisfactions at all.

Every day that had passed since, she’d missed his company. And though they’d never done more than peck on the lips or place a hand on the other’s arm, she sensed he, too, had a passionate nature, a molten core just waiting to be ignited by the right partner. Now she’d never know the pleasure of that unbridled warmth.

After her refusal, Richard stopped coming to visit, his absence as palpable as his presence had been. In company together, he avoided her, gliding casually to the other side of the room, dining, by conspiracy with his hosts, out of earshot at the other end of the table, dancing at the opposite side of the ballroom. And always refusing her glance, as if she were invisible. It made her weep to think how much he must loathe her for rejecting him.

• • •

That afternoon, she continued writing to Parthe about Philae. There was no one she liked writing to more than Parthe, for the two of them shared so much that it was easy, almost like writing in her diary. Like the earlier letter about Abu Simbel, this one threatened to stretch into a religious tract. She’d spent many hours in the chamber of Osiris, whose life shared much with Old and New Testament stories. Osiris’s jealous brother, Set, had chopped him into thirteen pieces and scattered them in the Nile. But Isis, Osiris’s wife, aided by crocodiles, found all the pieces but one—her husband’s penis. So she fashioned him a penis of gold that allowed him to father their son, Horus. Afterward, Osiris descended to the infernal river of the underworld. There, in the seventh room of the night, he judged the worthiness of souls to pass to the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian heaven. Hieroglyphs in the chamber depicted Osiris’s severed body parts in caskets and containers of all shapes—here a foot, there an arm, his
entire trunk and legs in a shallow drawer. A Nilometer that measured the height of the river bore his severed head. In another panel, he lay fully assembled on a cow-legged bed. Was it not resurrection, piece by bodily piece? As for the penis—a word Flo had never spoken that made her color to see it on the page—perhaps it stood for nature’s regenerative powers. Or male resolve. She’d never seen an adult human penis. Those of the donkeys she rode were embarrassing when they emerged, the length of their bellies, red and slick. It was distressing to imagine WEN naked, and impossible to picture how the organ produced her and Parthe. Better to focus on the face and hands of a man; that was her policy.

She decided to omit the golden penis from her letter.

• • •

John Frederick Lewis was a friend of the Bracebridges who had lived and painted in Egypt for nearly a decade, most of it in Cairo. Now he and Mrs. Lewis (he had recently married) had set up housekeeping on the Upper Nile, in Mahatta. “Mr. Lewis is a world traveler,” Selina had told her that morning. “He has hardly lived in England since coming of age.”

“How I envy him that,” said Flo. She fancied traveling to India and the Holy Land, but without a husband, future tours were unlikely. The Bracebridges were not as adventuresome or energetic as she was. The Egypt trip would probably be the most daring and the last of her life.