‘So,’ I said, ‘I’ve decided. I’m coming with you to England.’ Clever Robert painted pictures. He was having an exhibition in Soho. I had arranged with God to go regularly to Mass if we could sell a lot of these pictures. Robert said it was too short notice and we couldn’t afford it. I said, ‘I will sell some jewellery.’ Robert said I hadn’t got any left. I had. I had some new golden things that my aunt had given me only a short while before. They were an investment. My father, as was the Egyptian custom, had kept all the women of his family, continuing to feel responsible for even the sisters who had married. As a result, whenever my aunts made money—as they frequently did by buying and selling—they thought of it as family money and gave me some. They always wanted to invest it for me, to buy a little villa in Portugal, or a share in a little ship, but I would tell them I’d invest it myself in something English and they never felt they could argue with me for my mother had been the Anglaise and that made me a little different, not quite like them. And then I would spend it, confident that my astute relations would make and give me some more. I seldom had to ask, and never twice. Robert wasn’t rich so the extra money was necessary. I said, ‘My aunt gave me a parterre...’ Robert interrupted to remind me, briefly, that he wished I wouldn’t take money from my aunts. I said, it wasn’t money, it was gold things, but we both knew they were things to sell. Robert could not rid himself of the idea that accepting money from anybody was ‘sponging’. I could see his point, for I had been a pupil at the English school in Alexandria and there I had learned that many English people felt this way. Monica had felt that way even when she was a little girl. Nevertheless I couldn’t really understand it, for was not family family? And was not the good of the family the good of all its members? Robert often made me feel alien—oriental and exotic. In the salons of my aunts I became languid and pale like a lily and with Robert I could feel my skin grow darker, my body smaller and my eyes glowing. I went barefoot. I suppose that was why I had married him.