There was no compunction or urgency. Sébastien and I whiled away hot hours kissing each other’s hands, mouths, necks. There was a small arrowhead of a scar on his thumb, an accident with a fishhook on Lake Mareotis when he was a boy. Just one of his hands was more beautiful than my entire body.

I told him so one afternoon and he said, “Ah, beauty’s overrated. Look at Celia. She’s like an Alp in one of those pictures at the Swiss Club. A snowy peak. You admire her from all sides, give her ten out of ten, tick her off in your guidebook. La Célia.”

“Sébastien, t’es affreux.” Sébastien, you’re terrible. “Do you think of me when we’re apart?”

He smiled. “Every waking moment, chérie. You know that.”

Then he reached for me and once more I slid into a hot original world that was still new to me, where continents and islands were forged in the heat haze out of salt water and magma.

Not long after he suggested spreading a blanket out in the rustling depths of the plantation, where the sun flared between the palm fronds.

“No, Sébastien. We would be seen.”

He laughed. “Who by?”

“The boy that drives the buffalo.” This boy, who couldn’t have been older than nine, had taken to leering up at the open window of the cab. Even the buffalo gave us a stare.

“I’ll pay him to go the long way round.”

Still I demurred.

Autumn came, and the Second Battle of El-Alamein. When they opened the bombardment, the sea jumped in the bay. Célia and I stood weeping at the noise and the unholy glare to the west, a dawn rising on the wrong side of the earth. The enemy lost its footing in Egypt at last, fell back, and the town went mad. The streets were lit up for a gala every night, gharries galloped along the promenade. December came, then the New Year, and Sébastien told me he had a little apartment, very simple, very tucked away.

“There’s no obligation, darling,” he said, the next time we drove out in the lorry together. “Although it goes without saying that I’m dying a slow death for you.”

I’d never seen a man less in danger of dying any kind of death, let alone a slow one, than Sébastien Khoury.

—

At the end of January the blow fell. The phone rang, Célia answered, and began to scream. I took the receiver from her. “Please try to keep calm, Mrs. Ingram,” a male voice was saying in English. “We have every hope of saving the left eye.” Peter was in a hospital in Cairo, I managed to establish, scribbling the address as Célia continued shrieking. The Fifteenth Scottish General, I wrote, pressing so hard that I broke the pencil point halfway through the word General.