DESIRING CAIRO
The Angeline Gower Trilogy
Louisa Young
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by The Borough Press 2015
First published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Louisa Young 1999
Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007577996
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007397013
Version: 2015-09-07
Praise for The Angeline Gower Trilogy:
‘Funny, sexy and tender’ ESTHER FREUD
‘Spectacularly worth reading’ The Times
‘A stylishly literate thriller’ Marie Claire
‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else’ LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
‘Exciting, compelling and tense’ Time Out
‘Funny and scary. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style’ Mail on Sunday
‘Wry, perky, entertaining’ Observer
‘Engaging, wise-cracking, likeable, brilliantly sustained … funny, humane and utterly readable’ Good Housekeeping
For Isabel Adomakoh Young, the lovely daughter
‘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
Contents
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
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