by Rosie Thomas
Sandy turned away from them and muttered to me, ‘C’mon, s’get another drink. Be all right.’
Faria clicked her tongue. ‘No it won’t. I’m taking Iris home. Can’t you see she’s hurt?’
The band started playing again and the other dancers turned away, losing interest.
The next minute I was hobbling into the hallway, supported on one side by Faria and with Sandy weaving on the other. A huge crystal chandelier dripped diamonds of light over our heads. I felt rather than saw Xan and Jessie at the back of our ungainly procession as Lady Gibson Pasha came surging towards us, both hands outstretched as if to catch me. Our hostess wore a gold turban and a collar of egg-sized emeralds.
‘My dear, my dear girl, you poor thing. You must put your foot up, we need an ice pack.’
She was clapping her hands, calling at a passing servant to bring ice. I wanted to stay near Xan and to get as far away from Sandy as possible. I was also longing to get home and lie in a dark room to disentangle the chaos and amazement of the evening.
‘It’s nothing, really. I’m so sorry, Lady Gibson. Just a silly sprain.’
‘Daddy’s car and driver are here,’ Faria said. ‘We’ll go home. I’ll make sure Iris is looked after.’
Sandy vehemently nodded his head. He had gone pale now. Another servant was at hand with Faria’s little swansdown bolero and my mother’s Indian shawl, which was my evening wrap. With Lady Gibson’s instructions floating after us we hobbled out of the front door. Amman Pasha’s chauffeur was waiting at the steps with the big black car. He opened the door and I was handed into the expanse of cream-coloured leather. Sandy collapsed beside me, gasping and tugging at the ends of his tie to undo the bow. Faria slipped in on the other side.
The car began to roll over the gravel. I twisted round to see through the rear window and caught a last glimpse of Xan and Jessie standing side by side at the foot of the steps, black head and blond, watching us go. I couldn’t really see Xan’s face, but I thought he was still smiling.
‘God,’ Sandy groaned. ‘Bloody hell.’ He screwed his black tie into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket before letting his head fall back against the seat cushions.
‘We’ll drop you at the embassy,’ Faria said coolly and leaned forward to give the driver instructions in Arabic. We swept over the Bulaq Bridge and I saw the broken mosaic of yellow and white lights reflected in black water as we turned south past the cathedral.
Faria yawned. ‘Oh dear. I completely forgot to tell the poet we were leaving. Whatever will he think?’
It wasn’t a question that required an answer. Jeremy – known as the poet – was the most fervent of Faria’s admirers, a thin and mournful young man who worked for the British Council. Ali was away and Jeremy had been her escort for the evening. He would think what he presumably always thought: that the exquisite and careless Faria had given him the slip again.
Sandy had passed out. I could hear the breath catching thickly in the back of his throat. Whisky fumes and Faria’s perfume mingled with the smell of leather and the uniquely Cairene stink of kerosene and incense and animal dung. Faria took a Turkish cigarette out of her bag, clicked her gold lighter and inhaled deeply. I shook my head when she held it out to me. The pain in my ankle was intense and the faint nausea it engendered made my senses keener. I let every turn of the route print itself in my mind, the black silhouette of each dome against the fractionally paler sky, the hooked profile of an old beggar patiently sitting on a step. Every detail was significant and precious. I wanted to absorb each tiny impression and hold it and keep it, because tonight was so important. I never doubted that.
We stopped near the embassy gates and shook Sandy awake. He groaned again and muttered incoherently as he flopped out into the road. The car swept on. Over the top of the embassy building, behind the flagpole with the limp folds of the Union flag, I could see the tops of huge trees shading lawns where I had been paraded for tea parties as a child. I liked to slip away and gaze at the Nile beyond, slow olive-green, flagged with the sails of feluccas.
Later I lay in bed with the wooden shutters latched open and watched the sky. My bandaged ankle throbbed but I didn’t mind that it kept me awake. All I could think of was Xan, whom Faria had hardly noticed and who had left me stricken with desire from the moment I saw him. Shivers of laughter and longing and anticipation ran through me as I lay there, slick with sweat, under my thin cotton sheet. On that first sleepless night I never doubted that Xan and I would meet again. I would tell him I wasn’t and never had been Sandy Allardyce’s girl, and we would claim each other. That was exactly how it was meant to be.
How simple, how innocent it seems. And how joyful.
Garden City was set beside the Nile, an enclave of curving streets with tall cocoa-brown and dirty cream houses and apartment blocks deep in gardens of thick, dusty greenery. Our apartment belonged to Faria’s parents who lived in a grand house nearby. There were wood-block floors and heavy furniture, and every room had a ceiling fan that lazily circulated the scalding air. There were big metal-finned radiators too, that occasionally emitted hollow clanking noises and dribbled rusty water. Faria never noticed the heat and her black hair stayed like a glossy wing instead of frizzing in the humid blast as mine did, but she was afraid of feeling cold. When she was going out at night she always slipped a little bolero of white feathers or a silk velvet cape over her bare shoulders.
My room was a narrow, high-ceilinged box at the end of a corridor away from the main part of the flat. The furniture was on a humbler scale and there was a view from the window of a jacaranda tree in the next-door garden. I didn’t know Faria and Sarah very well but they were lively company, and I was pleased to have such a comfortable place to live. It was even conveniently close to where I worked, at British Army GHQ, just off Sharia Qasr el Aini. I was clerical and administrative assistant to a lieutenant-colonel in Intelligence called Roderick Boyce, known to everyone as Roddy Boy. Colonel Boyce and my father belonged to the same London club and had hunted together before the war. A letter from my father, and an interview during which my prospective boss reminisced about my father taking a fence on his big bay mare, were enough to gain me the job.
The morning after Xan and I met I got up early to go to work, as I had done on every ordinary day since I had come back to Cairo.
In the stifling mid afternoons the streets cowered under the hammer blow of the sun out of a white sky, but at 8 a.m. it was cool enough to walk the few streets between the flat and the office. That day, with my heavily bandaged ankle, I had to take a taxi. Roddy Boy looked at me as I half hopped to my desk, supported by a walking stick belonging to Faria’s father.
‘Oh dear. Tennis? Camel racing? Or something more strenuous?’
‘Dancing,’ I replied.
‘Ah. Of course.’ Roddy Boy chose to believe that my social life was much more hectic and glamorous than it really was. ‘But I hope your injury will not impede your typing?’
‘Not at all,’ I said. I rolled a sandwich of requisition forms and carbon paper into my machine and forced myself to concentrate.
When at last I came home again Mamdooh, the suffragi who looked after us and the apartment, greeted me in his stately way: ‘Good afternoon, Miss Iris. These were delivered for you an hour ago.’
‘Oh, beautiful.’
There was a big bunch of white lilies, gardenias and tuberoses. I buried my face in the cool blooms. The intense perfume brought back last night even more vividly, candlelight and music and cigars and Xan’s face. Mamdooh beamed. He was pleased for me; usually the bouquets were for Sarah.
I sat down awkwardly and opened the envelope that came with them. There was a plain white card with the words I hope your ankle will mend soon. It was signed simply X. That was all.
Mamdooh was still standing there in his white galabiyeh, waiting for more. Faria complained that he was too familiar and that what time she came in at night was none of his business, but I liked the big man and his b
road smiles that were always accompanied by a shrewd glance. Mamdooh missed nothing. Faria’s mother was probably aware of that too.
‘Just from a friend,’ I said.
‘Of course, Miss. I will put in water for you.’
The flat often looked like a florist’s shop. Sarah and Faria didn’t even ask who my bouquet was from.
I admired my flowers and waited, but a week and then another went by. The whole month of June 1941 crawled past and I heard nothing more from Xan.
In my outer office at GHQ I typed reports and delivered signals for Roddy Boy, and chatted to the staff officers who hurried in and out to see him. As a civilian I was on the lowest level of clearance, but because of my family I was judged to be safe and many of the secret plans that flew in and out of Roddy Boy’s office crossed my desk first.
The Allied troops, except for those besieged in Tobruk, had withdrawn into Egypt and the Germans were at the Libyan border. In an attempt to dislodge them, in a brief flurry of GHQ activity during which Roddy Boy didn’t withdraw for his usual long afternoon at the Turf Club, Operation Battleaxe was launched.
‘We can’t match their bloody firepower,’ Roddy groaned from behind his desk.
Almost one hundred of our armoured tanks were lost to German anti-tank guns, their smouldering wrecks lying abandoned in a thick pall of dust and smoke. Many of their crews were dead or wounded.
As July approached I began accepting every invitation that came my way. I went to cocktail parties and tennis tournaments, fancy dress balls, and poetry readings at the British Council, scanning the crowds for a glimpse of Xan. I sat beside the pool at the Gezira Club every lunchtime, always in the hope of hearing news of him.
Just once, I met one of the other officers who had been at his table at Lady Gibson Pasha’s party.
‘Xan?’ he said vaguely. ‘I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to be around, does he?’
He had simply vanished, and Jessie James with him. My certainty about us ebbed away. Maybe he had been posted elsewhere. Maybe he was married. Maybe – could that be possible? – he really did prefer other diversions.
Maybe he was dead.
I kept my fears to myself. What I felt seemed too significant and also too equivocal, too fragile, to share with Faria and Sarah.
‘You’re very sociable these days,’ Faria said with a raised eyebrow.
‘It’s as easy to go out as to stay in.’ I shrugged.
Then, at the end of the first week of July, on an evening when the heat made it an effort to dress to go out, even to move, the telephone rang in the hallway and I heard Mamdooh answer it. His big round head appeared in the doorway.
‘For you, Miss.’
‘Hello?’ I said into the receiver.
‘This is Xan,’ he said. ‘May I come and see you?’
I laid my head against the door frame, electric shocks of relief and delight chasing up my spine. I managed to answer, ‘Yes. Now?’
‘Right now.’
‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘Yes, please come.’
That was how it was.
I open my eyes on the dim, silent room. There is spilt tea on the cushions, some sticky drops dark on my front. I am overwhelmed with sleep now, too tired to sit up and tidy myself. It doesn’t matter. Who will see, except Mamdooh and Auntie?
Sleep. Dream. Always the dreams.
Shit. Double shit and fuck, Ruby said to herself as she caught a glimpse of what lay beyond the doors. Is this what it’s like?
It was dark outside. Beyond a barrier there was a heaving wall of heads and waving arms and shouting faces, harshly lit and shadowed by sickly overhead neon lights. The airport was clammily air-conditioned, but she could already feel the heat rolling towards her through the doors as they slid open and hissed shut again. The crowd of arriving passengers pushed her forward, catching her rucksack with the protruberances of their own baggage, jerking her from side to side. The doors opened once more and this time she was part of the gout of humanity they disgorged.
Hot, humid air rushed into her lungs. Sweat immediately prickled under her arms and in her hairline.
A chorus of yelling rose around her. Hands grabbed at her arms, tried to hoist the pack off her back.
‘Lady! Taxi, very good, cheap.’
‘Hotel, lady. Nice hotel.’
‘Stop it,’ Ruby shouted. ‘Leave me alone.’ She hadn’t bargained for this onslaught. Alarmed, she wrenched herself free of the clutching hands but another dozen pairs replaced them, tried to propel her in different directions.
‘Taxi here! Lady, I show you.’
She became aware of a stream of honking cars beyond the immediate crowd, a fringe of palm trees with ragged leaves outlined against a sky dimly peppered with stars, a snake of headlights along an elevated road. The noise and the heat were overwhelming. Ruby glared into the boiling sea of dark faces, moustaches, open mouths. At the back of the throng was a younger face, imploringly watching her.
She dragged an arm free, pointed at him.
‘You. Taxi?’
Instantly he dived through the scrum of bodies, grabbed her wrist with one hand and snatched her rucksack with the other. Ruby kept her smaller nylon sack tightly pressed to her side. They scuttled through the mass together and emerged into a clearer space beyond.
‘Come,’ the man shouted, pointing over the roofs of a hundred hooting black-and-white taxis. A packed bus roared in front of them, missing them by inches.
The driver’s taxi was parked under one of the palm trees. Two ragged children were sitting propped against it. The driver gave them a coin, threw her rucksack into the boot and opened the passenger door. With relief Ruby sank into the back seat. The springs had collapsed and stained foam padding bulged through a split in the brown plastic seat cover. The interior of the car smelled strongly of cigarettes and cheap air freshener.
The driver thrust the car into gear and they roared forward, then jerked to an almost immediate halt in a queue for the exit road. Even though it was dark, the heat was intense. Ruby had never encountered this phenomenon before. She closed her eyes, noticing that even her eyelids were sticky with sweat, then forced them open again. She mustn’t switch off, not yet. The driver flashed her a smile over his shoulder. His teeth were cartoon-white in his brown face. He did look young, not much older than herself.
‘Where you go?’
She unfolded the sheet of paper that she had kept in her jeans pocket all through the flight and read out the address.
‘Why you go there? I know nice hotel, very clean, cheap. I take you there instead.’
‘We’re going where I told you,’ Ruby insisted. ‘No arguing. Got that?’
This amused him. He laughed and slapped his hands on the steering wheel.
The traffic began to move. There were roads everywhere, the sodium-lit elevated sections crazily perched over complex intersections, all hemmed in by drab concrete tower blocks and hung about with giant advertisement hoardings. The faces of huge women with black eyebrows and cows’ eyelashes mooned at each other over the street lamps. Every foot of road was clogged with hooting cars and trucks and big blue buses. The road signs were written in a code of squiggles and dots.
Ruby lounged in the sagging seat and stared at it all. Her face was expressionless but inwardly she was fighting to maintain the defiance that had buoyed her up since leaving home. Now that she was actually here, she realised that she had hardly considered her destination. To get away and to stay away, that was what she had fixed on. But now all kinds of other problems reared up, competing with each other for her attention. She didn’t know how to handle this place, not at all. And nobody knew where she was; no one was looking out for her arrival. It was far from the first time in her life that she had been in the same situation, but never in quite such an alien setting.
She felt a long way from home, but she bundled up that thought and pushed it aside.
‘How much?’ she demanded. She had changed the rest of her money into Egy
ptian pounds at the airport exchange. It made a reassuringly thick wad, which was why she had decided to splash out on a taxi. The thought of trying to find a bus had been too much to contemplate.
The driver swung the wheel to overtake a donkey cart laden with saucepans and tin bowls that was plodding along the inner lane of the motorway. He shot the smile at her again.
‘Ah, money, no broblem. Where you from?’
‘London.’
‘Very nice place. David Beckham.’
‘Yeah. Or no. Whatever.’ At least they were moving now, presumably towards the city centre, wherever that might be. Airports were always miles away in the outer bloody suburbs, weren’t they?
‘My name Nafouz.’
‘Right.’
There was a pause. Nafouz reached under the dash and produced a pack of Marlboro, half turned to offer it to her. Ruby hesitated. She had run out and she was longing for one.
‘Thanks.’ She lit it with her own Bic, ignoring his.
‘You have boyfriend in Cairo?’
Ruby gave a snort of derisive laughter. ‘I’ve never been here in my life.’
‘I be your boyfriend.’
She had hardly looked at him, except to notice his teeth, but now she saw the creases in the collar of his white shirt, and the way the inside of his black leather jacket dirtied the fabric in crooked ribs. His black hair was long, combed back from his face. Quite nice, really.
She lifted her head. This, at least, was familiar territory. ‘In. Your. Dreams,’ she said clearly.
Nafouz’s delighted laughter filled the car. He drummed his hands on the wheel as if this was the funniest joke he had ever heard.
‘I dream always. Dreaming cheap. Cost nothing at all.’
‘Just watch the road, all right?’
She huddled in her corner, smoking and looking out at the wilderness. She had been abroad before, of course, with Lesley and Andrew to places like Tuscany and Kos and the Loire valley (how dull that one had been), but she had never seen anything like this steaming mess of concrete and metal. As they got nearer to what must be the middle of the city the traffic jam got even worse. There were long stationary intervals during which she peered down the side streets. There were tiny open-fronted shops with men sitting smoking at tin tables. Shafts of light came out of open doorways, shining on women with black shawls over their heads who sat on stone steps with children squirming around them. There were crates of globular shiny vegetables and crooked towers of coke cans, a thick litter of rubbish in the gutters, scrawny dogs nosing at it all. Men selling things from trays yelled on the street corners, other bent old men pushed hand barrows through the traffic. Neon lights blinked everywhere and there was the endless honking of horns.