The Remarkable Miss Digby

Following the Arab agent across the old town of Damascus, in search of a house, Jane is conscious of a growing sense of defeat. Memories from her past scratch like a hair shirt and she must force herself to keep going and not give up on her plans, vague as they are.

She walks down narrow curving alleyways, walled in on either side with high blank walls, interrupted only by heavy wooden doorways shut tight against the filth and hubbub of the town. Upper floor rooms float like frail timber boats across the street to meet their neighbours on the other side and the only light in the street comes from a narrow bar of sky.

Jane unwinds the scarf from around her neck and covers her nose and mouth with it for protection against the dust and the squalor. She trips over a pile of rotting rubbish and almost steps into a heap of dung. Barefooted children kick a ball about in the dirt. Skinny cats roam, and somewhere a donkey brays, the sound as forlorn as convicts’ chains.

The agent, a lean man with black oiled hair and eyes that gleam with good humour, turns and calls out to her. ‘All is arranged, Miss Digby, you will see, next house is good.’

He walks faster and Jane hurries after him, keeping a watchful eye on where she places her feet and at the same time on the yellow braided hem of the agent’s robe, so as not to lose sight of him. She wraps her own coat more closely around her.

It’s a relief to arrive at the main thoroughfare where the merchants take pride in their shops and the smells are of coffee and spices and sweetmeats. Jane’s spirits lift a little but she’s tired and more than ready to return to her rooms at Dimitri’s Hotel. Straight Street is a press of people, mules, donkeys and camels, and she must twist and turn constantly to avoid being jostled. This is the third day of her hunt for a suitable house. She tells herself she is looking for somewhere to settle, refusing stubbornly to admit that what she really seeks is a place to hide. As she trudges along that street called Straight, she begins to doubt she’ll ever find it.

It’s late afternoon. The temperature has dropped and the sky turned to slate when they step through the Bab al-Salam, an imposing stone portal that separates the old town of Damascus from a sparsely populated neighbourhood of wider streets and a reviving abundance of trees.

Ten minutes later they reach a solid wooden gate near the Bab Menzel Khassabb. The agent beams at Jane as he produces a bunch of keys and with a flourish releases the padlock and pushes open the gate. For the first time that day, he lets Jane enter first, as if he is already distracted by the size of the commission he’ll earn from the wealthy English lady.

Jane’s first view through the gate is of an airy courtyard and, straight ahead, the main door into the house. Next to that is the liwan, a room with only three walls, the fourth side open to the courtyard, a cool place to sit and entertain when the days are too hot to be inside. To her right is a second, larger gate through which she glimpses a tangled garden curling in unruly frolic around the house.

‘More than three acres, maybe five,’ says the Arab. He waves his right arm in a wide sweep to show off the property, as proud of the place as if it were his own.

He unlocks the door to the house and follows Jane casually at a distance as she explores the rooms. She opens every window and pushes back the shutters, letting in gusts of wintry air and light which falls in mote-speckled bands across the floors. There is an atmosphere of neglect; everywhere she looks there are spider webs and the chitinous remains of bugs. Downstairs it’s impossible to ignore the pungent odour of cat pee and large mottled patches of mildew.

Jane is not deterred. The more she sees of the place, the more she likes it.

Upstairs, halfway along an enclosed terrace, she lingers to take in the view. Damascus is spread out before her, an appealing muddle of flat grey roofs, glistening white domes and minarets, winter gardens hidden behind walls, and, less than a mile from where she stands, the icy meandering of the Barada River. From this vantage point, she can see south past the towers of the great Umayyad Mosque towards the Christian quarter on the other side of town.

Immediately behind her to the north is an oasis of olive and citrus groves, and apricot and apple orchards, a valley of green that stops in a severe line where it meets the desert. There, the land is bleached to the colour of bone, arid and interminable all the way to the horizon.

The local muezzin begins his call for evening prayer: ‘God is great. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. Let us kneel before him.’ The chant fills the air, binding the neighbourhood, and Jane returns downstairs, half expecting the agent to excuse himself for ten minutes to visit the nearby mosque. He makes no sign, content instead to wait while Jane finishes exploring the property.

A late burst of sunshine has dropped to a low flaxen seam by the time she enters the garden where a volery of tiny birds rises from one tree and flits over her head to settle in another. She watches them disappear like nebulae into the leaves and shadows.

Jane pauses. She feels in that gathering dusk like the birthday girl at a party no one deigns to attend. The future frightens her. She is forty-six and for the first time in her life fully conscious of how alone she is in the world. Her family don’t want her, her children are either dead or in someone else’s care, and society mocks her. She knows what people used to say about her, that ‘the Lady Ellenborough keeps as many men as she does horses, so she may ride astride in the evenings and side-saddle in the mornings’. More than twenty years have passed since she left London and its malicious gossips, yet their barbs still sting.

Why suffer past insults with so many new ones to support? Jane concedes the latest injury may have driven her finally and for ever from Europe.

The agent appears at her side. ‘Miss Digby, you like this place?’

Oh yes, she likes it. She shakes off her memories, clears her mind of regrets and scans the garden again. She sees the perfect site for stables and wonders she hadn’t noticed it the moment she entered the garden.

The agent jangles his keys like a lure. It’s time to go, but yes, she wants this place and is impatient to get back to the hotel and begin the process of acquiring it.

As the agent shuts up the house and locks the door, Jane feels a little of her old optimism creeping back. Syria will be a new beginning. She will make a home for herself here, reconcile herself to a quiet life. Better to be alone and unhappy than have others make a fool of her.

Before the agent closes the gate, she takes a last look across the courtyard and notices a slab of Aleppo pine on the lintel over the front door. There is a name carved in it, so worn with time as to be almost indecipherable: الملاذ الآمن. Jane asks the agent what it means.

He smiles and his face is transformed by its sweetness. ‘This is Almaladh Alaman. The English, I do not know . . .’ He murmurs to himself, searching for the correct translation. ‘Maybe you say shelter, or refuge.’

‘Or sanctuary.’ The word is a bonbon, soft and fragrant in her mouth. She repeats the Arabic words quietly to herself, like a mantra: Almaladh Alaman. It is surely a sign. This house is meant to be hers and she will keep that name.

Jane fancies she can hear the gossips again, tuning their forked tongues. To hell with them. A wrong decision is better than no decision and where would she be now if she’d done only what society deigns suitable? Sitting among starchy matrons, no doubt, pretending to be amused by games of cribbage when all they ever promised was boredom.

2

At Dimitri’s Hotel, Eugénie entertains herself by trying on one of Miss Digby’s dresses. It’s one of the small perquisites she feels entitled to as a lady’s maid and for being obliged to spend countless hours tending to a wardrobe so much more fetching than her own. The gown is far too long for her, the silky fabric puddles around her shoes, but it’s the same colour as her eyes, a sort of burned hazel, and she is cheered by how tolerable she looks in it.

There are tasks to be getting on with — making Miss Digby’s bed, washing her linen, cleaning out the wash bowl and replenishing its jug — but Eugénie is worn out and every day a little more dispirited. She hopes her mistress has more success today in finding them somewhere to live. Eugénie is fed up with living in the hotel. She concedes the place is comfortable enough, but it’s run-down, the proprietor fawns indecently over Miss Digby, and Eugénie never knows where to look when she must walk past Arab guests reclining in the salon, smoking their narghiles, their eyes following her with reptilian stares.

What she loathes most is her room. It’s a damp cubicle adjoining Miss Digby’s suite, and her bed is an old army stretcher, its narrow canvas so taxed and slack that her back now aches. Each night she lies sleepless as Scheherazade, tracing cracks on the ceiling and listening to the incessant barking of the neighbourhood’s dogs. Long before dawn a rooster will start crowing, setting off every other rooster in town and when they finally stop their racket and she at last drifts into a fitful sleep, the whining entreaties of the local muezzin begin.

Eugénie looks out the window, across flat roofs and spiky minarets, to Marja Square and its mad swarm of people and animals. A light breeze has come up and palm trees in the garden below cast shadows like blades against the hotel wall. A boy sweeping the tiled steps at the entrance struggles to keep up with the dust and rubbish blowing in constantly from the street.

She removes the gown, hangs it in the wardrobe and puts on her old grey work dress, cinched at the waist with a narrow black belt. She attaches a clean white collar and cuffs, clicking her tongue at the loss of a button on the collar. She slowly brushes her hair, a coppery mane cascading down her back until she pins it up and tucks it out of sight under a white cap.

In Athens one day, when Miss Digby’s fiancé, the General Hadji-Petros, had turned up, striding through Jane’s house as if already master of it, he’d found Eugénie alone there. She was in the hallway outside the kitchen with brush in hand and her hair unrestrained. She saw the desire in his eye and did not look away. He’d lifted the heavy hank of her hair, twined it through his fingers, held it against his face and sniffed it like a hungry dog. He nuzzled her neck, breathed in her ear. Eugénie had not resisted, no more immune to the strength of his personality than Miss Digby.

The General had put his hand on her back, then her thigh, finally bunching up the fabric in his fists to expose her legs. He was intent, but Eugénie felt at the time, and still believes this, that if she’d insisted, he would have left her alone. Instead, she gave him what he wanted and found pleasure in it. After that, he sought her out from time to time and she was willing. What did it signify if now and then they indulged in a little mutual gratification? It had nothing to do with anybody else.

Eugénie had believed she was doing her mistress a service by disillusioning her of the General’s true character and was unprepared for the violence of her employer’s reaction. They’d had a dreadful row.

‘How could Cristodoulos feel anything for you?’ Miss Digby had cried, her voice shrill with hurt and disbelief.

‘He didn’t. It meant nothing.’

‘Get out of my sight.’

‘Why do you care so much? The old fool is seventy if he’s a day.’ And you’re hardly the Virgin Mary, she might have added, but kept that thought to herself.

‘Pack your things, Eugénie, and leave.’

Ça alors, Madame. It’s not as if it hasn’t happened before. And why should you be the only one with appetites?’ She’d snapped those words at Miss Digby and wanted immediately to bite them back.

Miss Digby picked up a vase and threw it at her, then retreated in cold silence to her bedroom and locked the door.

Eugénie, blubbering, had swept up the shards of china. If she could undo the events of the past few months by stabbing out her own eyes, she might have done so. For the next three days, she’d cried and snivelled, left trays of food outside Miss Digby’s door, and crept around the house as if creeping barefoot over sharp stones.

Her bags remained unpacked and she didn’t leave. She’d been with Miss Digby for decades; if dismissed, where would she go? Back to Paris, to the poor house or begging on the steps of the Église Saint-Gervais? These were prospects that filled her with horror. And still do. She’s thirty-eight years old and dependent on her employer for occupation, the roof over her head and a respectable income of seventeen English pounds a year.

After five days, Miss Digby had emerged from her bedroom only to leave Athens in a fit of pique, without saying where she was going or when she would return. Four months went by before Eugénie received a letter, instructing her to pack up the house, and informing her they were moving again, this time to Syria.

Miss Digby never again referred to the General.

Somewhere on the lower floor of the hotel, a door bangs shut. Eugénie banishes memories of Athens and sets herself to her work. She makes the bed, folds Miss Digby’s night clothes, wipes out the wash bowl and takes its pitcher into the hotel kitchen to refill it. The cook pushes a plate of pastries across the table, urging her cheerfully to try them, and she realises how hungry she is. She inspects the pastries with a suspicious eye, tries one. It’s filled with soft cheese and basil and is delicious. She eats two more, and drinks a glass of dark sweet mint tea.

Back in Miss Digby’s room, a gust of cold wind blows in through the windows. Eugénie puts the pitcher down, closes the windows and restrains the curtains behind green braided ties. Outside a fat grey rat runs across the roof, stops and glances at her with cunning eyes, and she swears at it.

She’d kept her job under sufferance. Even if Miss Digby had the grace not to mention it again, that infamy with the General is still between them. Eugénie feels it every day, like a small weeping sore.

3

There is talk of unrest among the Druze in Lebanon and the British Consul, Richard Wood, hopes it won’t spill over into his patch in Syria. There is enough already on his plate. Last month he’d been granted an audience with Abdulmejid, a rare honour given the Sultan’s current preoccupations with his decaying empire. Richard likes the Sultan, who is intent on modernising his empire and appears capable of doing so. The young ruler is savvy, and generous, having earlier donated a thousand Turkish pounds to help the Irish during their years of famine.

Richard hopes Abdulmejid will do the same for the Druze, for hunger is part of their problem. Floods and blight have begun destroying their crops at home and it’s only a matter of time before they begin drifting, like unfettered livestock, across the border into Syria in search of food.

Richard puts down his pen. A more worrying problem is growing Druze resentment at Jews and Christians cutting them out of new business opening up as trade with the West grows. He rubs his hands vigorously up and down his face as if to wipe away fatigue and, for a moment’s respite, closes his brown, discerning eyes. He has a strong face only mildly marred by a small cleft in his chin. His greying hair has thinned to almost nothing on his pate. As if to compensate for this, he has let the hair on the sides of his head grow long and curl over his ears, and he wears a full moustache that like a soft lid perfectly fits his upper lip.

He turns back to his work and tries to concentrate. It has taken longer than usual to write this latest report and he knows his superiors in London are impatient for it. In an unwelcome display of hubris, the Sultan has declared war on Russia and Richard suspects Britain will soon be drawn in to the fight. Within the year, he is sure, he’ll be back at Topkapı Palace, listening to Abdulmejid plead for British protection. Being party to negotiations of an alliance with the Ottoman Empire promises to be one of the most challenging tasks of Richard’s career and he needs to prepare for it; any intrusions that don’t immediately serve this purpose are irritating as a mist of fleas.