Susan Hanem laughed. “I hope you’ll remember what you’ve just said in the future,” she said. “People say that we mothers-in-law get to hear nice things like that only on this one occasion!”

Salwa gave a gentle laugh and Isa felt even happier. Suddenly he felt the urge to show off. “I wonder if you’ll dislike living abroad,” he asked, “if circumstances make it necessary in the future to work in the diplomatic service?”

“Salwa graduated from a German school,” Susan Hanem replied for her daughter.

He smiled to show how pleased he was. “Let’s hope our life will be happy,” he murmured. “We’ve seen real suffering and I hope our happiness will be real too.”

FIVE

“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.”