Louisa Young - Desiring Cairo

Introduction Contents Cover Title Page DESIRING CAIRO The Angeline Gower Trilogy Louisa Young Copyright Praise Dedication Epigraph ‘I do believe that, with all its drawbacks, Egypt is the most interesting and convenient country that a lady can travel over’ ELIOT WARBURTON, 1845 Introduction Chapter One: Hakim Chapter Two: Luxor Chapter Three: Talking about Gary Cooper Chapter Four: Hakim’s Business, Harry’s News Chapter Five: Next Chapter Six: Tell Mama Chapter Seven: Brighton Chapter Eight: Harry Cooks Dinner Chapter Nine: Sunday Night Chapter Ten: Sa’id Chapter Eleven: The Funeral Chapter Twelve: Dinner with Sa’id Chapter Thirteen: Tell Your Own Mama Chapter Fourteen: Chrissie, Get Out of My Bath Chapter Fifteen: Sunday Night Coming Down Again Chapter Sixteen: ‘You are dearer than my days, you are more beautiful than my dreams’ Chapter Seventeen: I Wish I Was in Egypt Chapter Eighteen: What Harry Knows Chapter Nineteen: The Madness Sets In Chapter Twenty: Cairo Chapter Twenty-One: Family Life Chapter Twenty-Two: Let’s Go to the Bank Chapter Twenty-Three: Give Me Your Hands Chapter Twenty-Four: Semiramis Chapter Twenty-Five: God, when he created the world, put a great sea between the Muslims and the Christians, ‘for a reason’ Chapter Twenty-Six: The End, and the Beginning Acknowledgements About the Author Also by Louisa Young About the Publisher

I wrote these novels a long time ago. I spent my days correcting the grammar at the Sunday Times, and my nights writing. I could no longer travel the world doing features about born-again Christian bike gangs in New Jersey, or women salt-miners in Gujarat, or the Mr and Mrs Perfect Couple of America Pageant in Galveston, Texas, which was the sort of thing I had been doing up until then. I had to stay still. I had a baby. Babies focus the mind admirably: any speck of time free has to be made the most of.

I had £300 saved up, so I put the baby and the manuscript in the back of a small car and drove to Italy, where we lived in some rooms attached to a tiny church in a village which was largely abandoned, other than for some horses and some aristocrats. A nice girl groom took the baby to the sea each day in my car while I stared at the pages thinking: ‘If I don’t demonstrate some belief in this whole notion of novels, and me as a novelist, then why should anyone else?’

Re-reading these books now, I think, ‘Christ! Such energy!’ I was so young – so full of beans. I described the plot to my father, who wrote novels and was briefly, in his day, the new Virginia Woolf. After about five minutes he said, ‘Yes, that all sounds good’ – and I said, ‘Dad, that’s just chapter one’.

It was only about twenty years ago, and a different world. Answerphones not mobiles, no internet. Tickets and conductors on the bus. And it was before 9/11, and the mass collapse of international innocence which 9/11 and George Bush’s reaction to it dragged in their miserable, brutalising wake. Could I write a story now, where an English girl and her Egyptian lover meet at the surface of the water? Yes, of course – but it could not be this story.

Anyway, I have grown up too thoughtful to write like this now. I exhaust myself even reading it.

I see too that these, my first novels, were the first pressing of thoughts and obsessions which have cropped up again and again in things I’ve written since. It seems I only really care about love and death and surgery and history and motorbikes and music and damage and babies, and the man I was in love with most of my life, who has appeared in various guises in every book I have ever written. I realise I continue to plagiarise myself all the time, emotionally and subject-wise. And I see the roots of other patterns – Baby Love, my first novel, turned into a trilogy all of its own accord. Since then, I’ve written another two novels that accidentally turned into trilogies – and one of those trilogies is showing signs of becoming a quartet.

People ask, oh, are they autobiographical? I do see, in these pages, my old friends when we were younger, their jokes and habits, places I used to live, lives I used to live. I glimpse, with a slight shock, garments I owned, a bed, a phrase … To be honest I made myself cry once or twice.

But, though much is undigested and autobiographical, in the way of a young person’s writing, I can say this: be careful what you write. When I started these novels I was not a single mother, I didn’t live in Shepherds Bush, I didn’t have a bad leg and I wasn’t going out with a policeman. By the time they were finished, all these things had come about. However as god is my witness to this day I never have never belly danced, nor hit anyone over the head with a poker.

Louisa Young

London 2015

When Hakim ibn Ismail el Araby turned up on my doorstep, trailing clouds of chaos in his wake, I naturally assumed that the anonymous letters had something to do with him. Not that they were from him – like the rest of his family, the boy could haggle in ten languages and convert currencies, to his own advantage, faster than I could find a calculator, but writing in English was not one of his accomplishments. No, I rather thought they might be to him.