The Map of Love Read Online Free
Author: Ahdaf Soueif
higher and higher with each thrust, a chant had formed in her headIsa — Bella, Isa — Bella …’
Keeping time with small splashes in the water, Isabel drifts into memories of her father, her small hand secure in his big, warm grasp, their feet kicking up the spray as they paddle on the beach in Maine — her mother slightly apart, anxious, holding her breath almost, fearing that if she relaxed for a moment, if she let go, this child would be snatched from her as the other had been. Jasmine Chirol Cabot had never stopped mourning her son; she had held on to the birthdays, the Buddy Holly singles, the photographs. Isabel had grown up with a brother sixteen years her senior who was forever fourteen and turning for a second from the fish in his hand, from the ball in the air, from the snow-covered slope ahead, to squint into the camera. An absent brother.
Would tomorrow be too soon to call him?
She slips all the way down into the bath, butterfly clip and all, until the water closes over her face and she feels the tingle in her scalp as it penetrates her hair.
3
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
Hilaire Belloc, 1898
Cairo, May 1997
I am obsessed with Anna Winterbourne’s brown journal. She has become as real to me as Dorothea Brooke. I need to fill in the gaps, to know who the people are of whom she speaks, to paint in the backdrop against which she is living her life here, on the page in front of me.
I go to the British Council Library, to Dar al-Kutub, to the second-hand bookstalls even though they’ve been moved from Sur el-Azbakiyya up to Darrasa and browsing among them is no longer so pleasant. I even write to my son in London and ask for cuttings from old issues of
The Times.
And I piece a story together.
London, October 1898 to March 1899
The light is like nothing Anna has ever seen before. Day after day it draws her back. Day after day it scatters itself on the rich carpets, on the stone or marble floors, on the straw matting. It streams through the latticed woodwork, tracing its patterns on mosaic walls and inlaid doors and layered fabrics, illuminating flowers and faces and outstretched or folded hands.
Anna looks down at her own hands, folded tight in her lap: her wedding band gleaming dull against the pale skin, her knuckles raised ridges of paler white. She unclenches her hands, stretches out the fingers and replaces the hands gently, open, on her knees.
He is not himself. I have heard this phrase before, and now it falls to me to use it. Edward, my husband, is not himself.
For seven months I followed, with Sir Charles, all news of the events in the Soudan. For seven months I prayed for his safety and for his return unharmed. And now he is back I hardly know him. He is grown thin, and though his face is flushed with the sun of the south, it is as though a pallor lurks beneath.
Mr Winthrop has seen him and says he has caught some infection of the tropics and shall be well again with tranquillity and nourishing food and, later, exercise. Upon his insistence (Mr Winthrop’s) I go out for a walk in the air each day. And I have taken to walking to the South Kensington Museum, which is a most beautiful and calming place and where I have come upon some paintings by Mr Frederick Lewis. They are possessed of such luminous beauty that I feel in their presence as though a gentle hand caressed my very soul.
On a low bed, pressed into a pile of silken cushions, a woman lies sleeping. Above her, a vast curtain hangs, through the brilliant billowing green of which the fluid shadows of the lattice shutters can be made out, and beyond them, the light. One wedge of sunshine — from the open window above her head — picks out the sleeper’s face and neck, the cream-coloured chemise revealed by the open buttons of her tight bodice. A small amulet shines at her throat. Anna glances at her watch: she has ten more minutes.
Today I found Sir William Harcourt in the hall, taking his
Keeping time with small splashes in the water, Isabel drifts into memories of her father, her small hand secure in his big, warm grasp, their feet kicking up the spray as they paddle on the beach in Maine — her mother slightly apart, anxious, holding her breath almost, fearing that if she relaxed for a moment, if she let go, this child would be snatched from her as the other had been. Jasmine Chirol Cabot had never stopped mourning her son; she had held on to the birthdays, the Buddy Holly singles, the photographs. Isabel had grown up with a brother sixteen years her senior who was forever fourteen and turning for a second from the fish in his hand, from the ball in the air, from the snow-covered slope ahead, to squint into the camera. An absent brother.
Would tomorrow be too soon to call him?
She slips all the way down into the bath, butterfly clip and all, until the water closes over her face and she feels the tingle in her scalp as it penetrates her hair.
3
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
Hilaire Belloc, 1898
Cairo, May 1997
I am obsessed with Anna Winterbourne’s brown journal. She has become as real to me as Dorothea Brooke. I need to fill in the gaps, to know who the people are of whom she speaks, to paint in the backdrop against which she is living her life here, on the page in front of me.
I go to the British Council Library, to Dar al-Kutub, to the second-hand bookstalls even though they’ve been moved from Sur el-Azbakiyya up to Darrasa and browsing among them is no longer so pleasant. I even write to my son in London and ask for cuttings from old issues of
The Times.
And I piece a story together.
London, October 1898 to March 1899
The light is like nothing Anna has ever seen before. Day after day it draws her back. Day after day it scatters itself on the rich carpets, on the stone or marble floors, on the straw matting. It streams through the latticed woodwork, tracing its patterns on mosaic walls and inlaid doors and layered fabrics, illuminating flowers and faces and outstretched or folded hands.
Anna looks down at her own hands, folded tight in her lap: her wedding band gleaming dull against the pale skin, her knuckles raised ridges of paler white. She unclenches her hands, stretches out the fingers and replaces the hands gently, open, on her knees.
He is not himself. I have heard this phrase before, and now it falls to me to use it. Edward, my husband, is not himself.
For seven months I followed, with Sir Charles, all news of the events in the Soudan. For seven months I prayed for his safety and for his return unharmed. And now he is back I hardly know him. He is grown thin, and though his face is flushed with the sun of the south, it is as though a pallor lurks beneath.
Mr Winthrop has seen him and says he has caught some infection of the tropics and shall be well again with tranquillity and nourishing food and, later, exercise. Upon his insistence (Mr Winthrop’s) I go out for a walk in the air each day. And I have taken to walking to the South Kensington Museum, which is a most beautiful and calming place and where I have come upon some paintings by Mr Frederick Lewis. They are possessed of such luminous beauty that I feel in their presence as though a gentle hand caressed my very soul.
On a low bed, pressed into a pile of silken cushions, a woman lies sleeping. Above her, a vast curtain hangs, through the brilliant billowing green of which the fluid shadows of the lattice shutters can be made out, and beyond them, the light. One wedge of sunshine — from the open window above her head — picks out the sleeper’s face and neck, the cream-coloured chemise revealed by the open buttons of her tight bodice. A small amulet shines at her throat. Anna glances at her watch: she has ten more minutes.
Today I found Sir William Harcourt in the hall, taking his
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