like these the differences between them were most apparent. His was the
caution of age, while hers was the impetuosity of youth.
'You do not understand,' he said. It always annoyed her when he said
that, when he treated her as the Arabs treated their women in a totally
masculine world. She had known the other world where women demanded and
received the right to be treated as equals. She was a creature caught
between those worlds, the Western world and the Arab world.
Royan's mother was an English woman who had worked at the British
Embassy in Cairo in the troubled times after World War II. She had met
and married Royan's father, who had been a young Egyptian officer on the
staff of Colonel Nasser. It was an unlikely union and had not persisted
into Royan's adolescence.
Her mother had insisted upon returning to England, to her home town of
York, for Royan's birth. She wanted her child to have British
citizenship. After her parents had separated, Royan, again at her
mother's insistence, had been sent back to England for her schooling,
but all her holidays had been spent with her father in Cairo. Her
father's career had prospered exceedingly, and in the end he had
attained ministerial rank in the Mubarak government. Through her love
for him she came to look upon herself as more Egyptian than English.
It was her father who had arranged her marriage to Duraid Al Simma. It
was the last thing that he had done for her before his death. She had
known he was dying at the time, and she had not found it in her heart to
defy him. All her modern training made her want to resist the
old-fashioned Coptic tradition of the arranged marriage, but her
breeding and her family and her Church were against her. She had
acquiesced.
Her marriage to Duraid had not proved as insufferable as she had dreaded
it might be. It might even have been entirely comfortable and satisfying
if she had never been introduced to romantic love. However, there had
been her liaison with David while she was up at university. He had swept
her up in the hurly-burly, in the heady delirium, and, in the end, the
heartache, when he had left her to marry a blonde English rose approved
of by his parents.
She respected and liked Duraid, but sometimes in the night she still
burned for the feel of a body as firm and young as her own on top of
hers.
Duraid was still speaking and she had not been listening to him. She
gave him her full attention once more. 'I have spoken to the minister
again, but I do not think he believes in me. I think that Nahoot has
convinced him that I am a little mad.' He smiled sadly. Nahoot Guddabi
was his ambitious and well-connected deputy. 'At any rate the minister
says that there are no government funds available, and that I will have
to seek outside finance.
So, I have been over the list of possible sponsors again, and have
narrowed it down to four. There is the Getty Museum of course, but I
never like to work with a big impersonal institution. I prefer to have a
single man to answer to.
Decisions are always easier to reach.'None of this was new to her, but
