Read The Map of Love for Free Online

no point in saying ‘This, too, shall pass.’ For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.
    She must have gone into black, although she makes no mention of fittings or dressmakers. But in January 1900 she is persuaded to accompany Lady Caroline Bourke to Rome:
    13 January
    Caroline, musing over what we are to wear at the Costanzi tomorrow, shook her head sadly over my weeds, and wondered whether they might not be brightened by a corsage or some jewels. I gently reminded her that it has not yet been a year since Edward’s passing and she somewhat reluctantly agreed that suchOrnament would be unbecoming. I did say that I would not mind if she went without me, but she would not hear of it and has resigned herself to my forlorn appearance at her side. I was most sincere in my offer, for truly all the noise and glitter only serves to make me feel more — not more sad precisely, but more apart, more set aside — and the thought of relieving my mourning, even slightly, for a moment filled me with a kind of fear —
    A fear that she would fail him in death as she had in life. For she had failed — there is no doubt in her mind about that. A happy man would not leave his home and go seeking death in the desert. A well-loved man would not die with horrors eating silently, secretly at his mind. If she had loved him better, perhaps he would not have needed to go to the Sudan. If she had understood him better, perhaps she could have nursed him back to health.
    If I could believe that he died for a noble cause. If I could believe that he died contented —
    There is the occasional kindness of friends, the silent house, and the emptiness; the absence of him who had been absent for so long. But this is a different absence. A definitive absence. No longer can she seek to draw closer, no longer can she hope for something to happen, for new life to breathe into her world. The questions that so trouble her mind are fruitless, the answers for which her heart yearns are now for ever out of reach.
    A terrible thought: that in this grief I have no thought for myself I have not once found myself thinking: what shall I do without him —
    ‘But she’s been without him all along,’ says Isabel. She sits on the red Bedouin rug on my living-room floor, her great-grandmother’s papers on the floor around her, the brown journal in her hand. The light of the lamp falls softly on theold paper, catches the glints of her streaked blonde hair. ‘Not just when he went to the Sudan. Even when he was at home, with her —’
    If I had loved him better. If I had needed him more — perhaps then I would have found the key — when he was so ill — so desperate —
    ‘That’s the trap,’ says Isabel, ‘we’re trained, conditioned to blame ourselves. This guy was inadequate, and somehow she, the woman, ends up taking the responsibility …’
    Later, I put more ice into our Baraka Perrier. The night air is cool and pleasant on my balcony and the darkness obscures the rubble on the roofs of the neighbouring houses. I sip my Baraka and say, ‘There used to be gardens on the roofs here in Cairo. There would be trellises and pergolas and vines and Indian jasmine. Rugs and cushions on the floor, and dovecotes. And after sunset people would sit out on the roofs — imagine,’ girls and boys would exchange glances across the rooftops and children would play in the cool of the evening and in the daytime the washing would be hung out on the lines, and when it came down all folded in the big baskets you could bury your face in the linen sheets and smell the sunshine …
    ‘It must have been something,’ Isabel says.
    Yes. Yes, it was. On the bonnets of the cars parked on the street, young men sit in groups, chatting, watching, waiting for action. The latest ‘Amr Dyab song, the tune vaguely Spanish, spirals up at us from the still open general store below where my children used to buy