something about it, I know it’ll be my fault and they’ll tell me I can never have a baby…I just know it.’ Her eyes glazed over, her mind off in some faraway place.
‘Ladies, we’re going. The bus is here.’ Flora’s crisp, clear voice startled them and they realized that the other people from the tour were collecting their belongings and wandering out of the restaurant, clutching the inevitable plastic bottles of mineral water.
Hannah waved the waiter over and quickly paid for the wine, shaking off Leonie’s suggestion of going halves. Emma didn’t say a word.
A subdued trio climbed back on the bus, Emma red-eyed and Hannah staring blankly out into the night. What was wrong with her, she wondered. Why didn’t she want children with the same blinding intensity as Emma? Was she abnormal? They’d simply never been a part of her life-plan, a plan that revolved around one facet: security. Making her way in life and being secure so that she’d never have to rely on a man again, the way her mother had had to rely on that feckless lump of a father of hers. Those years with Harry had been a fatal blip in her mission, years when she’d gone all cosy, practically married and ambitionless, and had forgotten that when you most needed them, men had a habit of failing you. Well, never again. She’d build her career up and make sure she never needed a man ever again.
Flings with men like Jeff Williams were allowed: simple physical relationships with people who wouldn’t dare to mess with her life. And as for children, they didn’t feature in her plans either. Maybe she was heartless, but she didn’t think she’d make a very good mother. She still pitied Emma though. She knew how destructive it was to long for something you simply couldn’t have. She knew too damn well. Harry’s fault, again. Bugger Harry.
Leonie, Emma and Hannah sat on the upper deck in the late afternoon as the boat sailed up the river towards Luxor. With three weak cocktails in front of them, they watched the golden, glowing disc of the sun set on the left-hand side. The rays turned the mountains to the right a deep, mysterious rose gold. Palm trees clustered around the banks, as if planted by a clever gardener who knew how to achieve that artistically pleasing random effect.
‘I half expect to see elephants charging from out of the trees, like in Africa,’ said Emma dreamily.
‘You are in Africa,’ said Leonie with a grin.
‘Oh no, the sun’s finally affected my brain,’ Emma groaned.
‘Sun my ass, it’s all those Fuzzy Navels you’ve been guzzling,’ Hannah pointed out. ‘I know they’re weak ones, but you’ve had two.’
It was a perfect time of day to sit quietly and watch the valley pass by. The air was cooler than in the early afternoon and as the boat sailed north along the Nile, a refreshing breeze blew against them, rippling Emma’s loose hair like a hairdryer.
It was the second last day of their holiday and they were all eager to take in every single detail of the country, determined not to forget a thing. The next day they were going to be busy the whole time, visiting the Valley of the Kings and Queens in the morning, and Karnak in the afternoon. There wouldn’t be a spare moment in their exhausting itinerary, Flora had warned, advising everyone to take advantage of their afternoon off.
The girls had been only too pleased to comply. Emma’s parents had decided to join in the card game in the inner bar after lunch and Jimmy O’Brien had done his best to get Emma on their team. But she’d refused.
‘I’m going to sunbathe, Dad,’ she’d said firmly.
He looked genuinely surprised. ‘But wouldn’t you rather be with me and your mother?’
Hannah and Leonie finished their coffee and began to leave the lunch table discreetly, not wanting to embarrass Emma by being present for what seemed like an inevitable spat with her father. But Emma took strength in their presence. She couldn’t imagine either Hannah or Leonie being browbeaten by their father.
‘Dad,’ Emma said pleasantly, with an unaccustomed hint of steel in her voice, ‘of course I like being with you and Mum, but we’re not joined at the hip. I want to sunbathe and I don’t want to play cards. Enjoy yourself.’ She got up and kissed him lightly on the cheek, hoping to defuse her words with the gesture. It worked. Her father remained uncharacteristically silent.
Or plain old shocked because Emma had stood up to him, Hannah guessed shrewdly. If she’d been a psychiatrist, she could have written an entire thesis on Jimmy O’Brien. After five days of watching him, she’d decided he was a horrible man with an inflated opinion of himself.
On Wednesday, he’d insulted the pretty young belly dancer who’d arrived on the boat with a band of musicians by telling her loudly that she ‘should put some clothes on and not strut around with everything hanging out like some common floozie’. Only Flora’s immediate interference had prevented an international incident, because the lead musician looked as if he was ready to smash his electric keyboard down on Jimmy’s head.
‘Let’s not be hasty,’ Flora had said soothingly, placating all around her and gently leading Jimmy and Anne-Marie off to another part of the bar where she had to listen to ten minutes of a lecture on ‘Why It Was A Shame These People Weren’t Respectable Catholics’. Emma had been crimson with shame and had barely been able to look the belly dancer in the eye.
Somebody as self-effacing as Emma didn’t stand a chance of standing up to her father, Hannah realized, taking another sip of her cocktail. Her mother was plain odd. Chatty one minute, she’d lapse into silence the next, staring off into the middle distance with a vacant expression on her face.
‘She’s not normally like that,’ Emma had said worriedly one day when Anne-Marie had broken off what she was saying mid-sentence and begun humming. ‘Dad insists the heat is affecting her badly, but she’s normally so alert. I can’t imagine what’s wrong.’
The three women had spent a blissful afternoon sunning themselves on the top deck, reading, chatting, sipping mineral water and listening to the endlessly replayed disco classics record that emanated from the boat’s speakers. Whoever was in charge of the music on the boat had a limited selection and veered between seventies disco hits and songs from old musicals.
‘If I hear “Disco Inferno” one more time, I’ll kill someone,’ Leonie said, finishing her Fuzzy Navel and wondering if she’d have another before dinner.
‘At least they’ve lowered the volume,’ Emma interjected.
‘Only because it was frightening the cows,’ Leonie pointed out.
In places where the river widened, there were isolated grass banks surrounded by water, where cows grazed serenely, none of them appearing concerned that there was no obvious way back to the land.
‘There must be strips of land back to the bank, a pathway we can’t see,’ Hannah said, peering at the latest batch of cows on a marshy island, her eyes peeled for a walkway. ‘They couldn’t swim, surely? The crocodiles would get them.’
‘Sobeks would get them – descendants of the crocodile god, Sobek,’ said Leonie, who loved hearing about the Egyptian gods and studied her guide book every night to learn more about the sights they were going to see the next day.
‘Teacher’s pet,’ teased Hannah, lobbing her drink’s cocktail umbrella over at her.
‘You’re just jealous,’ retorted Leonie good-humouredly, throwing the little umbrella back. It bounced on the table and flew off over
