“I’m a useless old woman, I can do nothing for you,” my mother whispered at me when she got into the car for the airport. “Your love is enough,” I said. I wanted to go with them in the car: James was driving, and I didn’t want to be left at home alone. But long journeys at that time were too inconvenient, the amount of blood I was still losing.

Célia stood in front of me clutching her suitcase, eyes hollow, nostrils flaring.

“I can’t say anything, Yvette, I really can’t.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She looked at Maman and Papa. “They’re moving to Nice, you know.”

“I do know.” Thinking: Maman will be destroyed if she leaves Alexandria, but saying nothing, being frankly unequal to this sort of conversation.

—

The cedarwood chest sits on the bedroom bookshelf. Catherine rests among our novels and biographies. If I turn my head I can see her, but from James’s side of the bed the chest is out of view. I watch over her, and James . . . James watches over me. We’ve never told Tom about her, and we make Tom himself the excuse. First he was too young to understand. Then he was older but very sensitive and impressionable. And now? Well, this is hardly the moment. But it isn’t really because of Tom, it’s because of James.

And I will come to that, but not now. I’m at the end of La Géographie. How neat my writing is. English children use ruled pages, so Tom’s handwriting sprawls along the line like uncoiling springs. French squared paper is more exacting. One is compelled to put one letter in each square, join them up correctly. Tom refuses to entertain this idea, saying he’s not going to squash his letters into boxes. English people, he kindly explains, like to show their individuality in their handwriting. But darling, I say to him, if I have to come and find you, to ask you what your message says, because your writing is so individual that you’re the only person who can read it—then, we might as well be in the Stone Age.

Oh, Mum. He groans. Stop being so Frenchified.

I’m more English than he knows. Perhaps my handwriting is the only Alexandrian thing left. The words I write come from the adult woman, formed and nourished by her beloved England that welcomed her when Egypt no longer could. A woman whose heart was broken in England but is all the stronger for being broken. Tom is too young to understand what I owe to his country. To England, and to James.

ELEVEN

Mr. Acton! I’m so glad to have finally caught you!”

It’s eight o’clock in the morning on the second Friday in November, just over a month since the flood. The voice on the telephone is instantly recognizable.