Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘It’s quite a long story. If I could stay here with you for a while, I could maybe tell you …’

  ‘That is not possible.’

  Ruby bent her head. The sonorous, amplified chanting that had woken her this morning suddenly filled the room again. ‘What is that?’

  ‘The call to prayer.’

  ‘Oh. All right, I’ll ring Mum and tell her where I am and there’ll be a mega fuss and outcry, and I’ll go home. But if I could stay here, just for a few days or so, not a lifetime or a year or anything, then maybe I could help you.’

  There was again the steady gaze. ‘This morning, with my shawl. You did a little … almost a dance. I liked that.’ Iris smiled at the remembered image. ‘Did I?’

  ‘How do you think you can help me?’

  Now it was Ruby who made a small unconscious gesture with her hands, as if trying to catch darting fish. ‘You told me you are sometimes forgetful.’

  ‘Yes. So?’ Sharply.

  ‘I walked round the house this afternoon, and you don’t seem to have any belongings, the kind that help you to remember the past.’

  ‘I have lived a long life, in different places. Most of them primitive. I have learned that so many material possessions are just that, material.’

  She was saying almost the same as Jas; it’s just stuff, baby. There were connections here, twining around herself and Iris and the old house and even Mamdooh, and Nafouz and his brother, and the old men in the café. Ruby wanted to stay, more than she had wanted anything in a long time.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I thought, I wondered, if you told me what you want to … to capture, maybe I could be the keeper of it for you. I could be the collector of your memories. I could write them down, even. I could be your am … what’s the word?’

  ‘Amanuensis.’

  Ruby’s pale face had been animated, but now a heavy mask descended. She turned her head and looked out of the corner of her eyes. Iris hadn’t seen her look sullen before.

  ‘Not that, maybe. I’m dyslexic, you know. Bit of a drawback.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘It’s not the same as being thick. But sometimes it might as well be. To all intents and purposes.’

  ‘Thank you for making that clear. You don’t seem thick to me.’

  ‘But maybe we could tape-record you? Like an oral history project. We did one at school, with the old ladies from the drop-in centre, about the Blitz.’

  Iris laughed at that. Her hands loosened in her lap, her face lost its taut lines and her eyes shone. Ruby suddenly saw a young girl in her, and she beamed back, pleased with the effect her company was having.

  ‘How useful to have previous experience.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to compare you.’

  ‘Why not? I remember the Blitz. The beginning of it, anyway. Then I came out here, to Cairo, to work.’

  ‘Did you? How come?’

  ‘That’s the beginning of another long story.’

  They looked at each other then, as the last notes of the muezzin crackled and died away.

  It was Iris who finally broke the silence: ‘Go and talk to your mother. You may use my telephone, in the room through there. And when you have finished I will speak to her myself.’

  Ruby stood up and went through the interconnecting door to Iris’s bedroom. It was very bare, containing nothing more than a bed swathed in white curtains and a couple of wooden chests. A telephone stood on the table on one side of the bed, and on the other there actually was a framed photograph of a man and a woman. Managing not to stare at it, she walked deliberately round to the opposite side and picked up the receiver. After two or three attempts, she was listening to her mother’s mobile ringing.

  Lesley answered immediately, of course.

  ‘Ruby? Ruby, are you all right? Thank God you’ve called. Tell me, what’s happened? Where are you?’

  Ruby spoke, briefly.

  Her mother’s voice rose. ‘You are where?’

  She closed her eyes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When I replace the receiver I see that my hands are shaking.

  I return to the other room where the child is waiting for me.

  ‘What did she say?’ she asks.

  The anxiety in her round face tells me how much she does not want to be packed off back to England. I sit down to collect my thoughts and she fidgets with impatience, twisting her legs and picking at the stud in her nose.

  I can give her the gist of my conversation with Lesley, but there is so much else that I would find harder to put into words.

  ‘Leave your nose alone or you will set up an infection. Your mother has been worried about you. I told her that I thought you would be safe enough here.’

  At once, the anxious expression breaks up into a smile that contains glee and satisfaction and a measure of triumph.

  I am beginning to understand that Ruby’s innocence is shot through with calculation. Maybe the innocence itself is calculated. And I realise that the notion interests me more than anything has done for quite a long time.

  ‘So I can stay for a bit?’

  Our separate conversations with Lesley have had a further curious effect, of course. That she is in opposition to both of us makes partial allies out of Ruby and me.

  ‘I would like a drink. A proper drink, I mean. Will you call Mamdooh?’ I say.

  I am stalling for time because with part of myself I fear the loss of privacy that having her here will inevitably mean. I want to be alone to concentrate on the past, in order to hold on to it for as long as I can. Yet maybe the offer of help that Ruby made is less naïve than it sounded; maybe there is something in her idea.

  Wearing his disapproval like an extra robe, Mamdooh brings in a tray with two glasses, a jug of water and a decanter with a couple of fingers of whisky in the bottom. I have no idea when I last drank Scotch.

  ‘Mum-reese, you will have plenty water with this?’

  ‘No, thank you, I’ll take it neat. And a decent measure, please. That’s better.’

  Ruby accepts her glass with small enthusiasm. ‘I don’t really like whisky.’

  ‘What do you drink?’

  ‘Depends. Vodka and Red Bull?’

  ‘What’s that? I’m sure it’s disgusting. I don’t have anything of the kind anyway, so you’ll have to make do with Scotch.’

  We both laugh and Mamdooh peers at us in surprise.

  When we are alone again she draws up a stool and sits close to my chair. The sun has set, the street outside is noisy once again with shouts and music as people prepare the iftar. It is already twenty-four hours since Ruby arrived.

  As I taste my drink – rolling the unaccustomed spirit in my mouth – I am thinking about Lesley.

  It is some time since I have spoken to my daughter, I can’t remember how long exactly, but it must be months. Whenever we do talk there are always polite words that fail to build a bridge. And the space between us, that has always been there. From the very beginning.

  Lesley was born in the middle of a grey, sad English winter. My pregnancy had been unplanned, my husband and I hastily bought a house to be a home for our unexpected family. From the windows there were views of sodden fields, and ponds mirroring the weeping skies. In this house, the baby and I spent long days alone together while my husband was working in the City.

  Lesley cried unceasingly, for no reason that I could discern. I had completed my medical training by that time, and raw as I was as a doctor I knew for certain that she was not ill or even failing to thrive. I couldn’t feed her myself, although I persevered for almost a month, but she accepted a bottle. She gained weight and passed the developmental milestones at the right times, but she was never a placid or contented baby.

  I don’t deny the probability that she absorbed my unhappiness and reflected it back at me. I tried to hold the infant close, tried to soothe her yelling by rocking her in my arms as I paced through the silent house, but she would not be pacified. Her tiny bo
dy went rigid and her screams were like scalpel blades slitting my skin. When Gordon came home he would take her from me and she would whimper and nuzzle and then fall asleep, exhausted. The silence came like a blessing.

  As soon as I could, I found a nurse for her and took a job at the local hospital.

  And from there we have gone on.

  ‘Well?’ Ruby demands. ‘Can I stay?’

  I turn my glass, looking at the dimples of light trapped within it.

  ‘Can I?’ she repeats.

  ‘What did your mother say to you?’

  An exasperated sigh and a shrug. ‘She said she was about to call the police and report me missing. She said I am irresponsible, and thoughtless, and if I can’t think of her I could perhaps consider my little brother, who was worried sick about me. I don’t think he was, by the way. Worrying about people’s so not Ed’s thing. She said I should go home and behave better and get a job and dah dahdah, be a different person. Get a personality transplant maybe. I’ve heard it all before, about five zillion times.’

  ‘She was worried,’ I repeat.

  I’m on unsafe ground here, caught between what I know I ought to say and what I feel. Which is recognition and a certain amount of sympathy.

  We look at each other over our whisky glasses.

  ‘You see, the trouble is that I’m crap at everything,’ Ruby quietly says. ‘At least, all the things that Lesley and Andrew rate. Not that I’d admit that to very many people, actually.’

  ‘I don’t think you are,’ I tell her.

  ‘Thanks.’ Her tone is dismissive but her eyes implore me.

  ‘All right,’ I say slowly, because it is dawning on me that I do rather want her to stay. At least, I don’t want her to go right now. It’s not that I am lonely, but I would like to hear her talk some more. ‘I will telephone Lesley again, and ask if you may have her permission to spend a few days with me.’

  She hugs her knees and rocks on the stool. ‘Fantastic.’ She grins.

  I finish my whisky first. My hands are steady now.

  Lesley answers the telephone. ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s Iris,’ I repeat.

  ‘Mummy, tell me what’s really going on?’

  I never felt comfortable with mummy; it was Lesley who always insisted on it.

  Into the space I say careful sentences about it being a pleasure to meet Ruby, how Lesley would be doing a favour to me if she were to allow her to stay for a few days in Cairo. Now that she’s here, I say, we might as well turn it to advantage. The Egyptian Museum. An outing to the Pyramids at Giza. Maybe even further afield, ancient history, archaeology. And so on.

  Although nowadays I hardly leave the house, I find myself almost believing that Ruby and I will make these excursions together.

  ‘If you agree, that is, Lesley. You and …’

  Her husband; second husband, not Ruby’s father. I have met this one two or three times but I find that I can remember nothing about him, not even his name. It’s impossible to work out whether it is my forgetfulness that is to blame, or his unmemorableness.

  ‘Mummy, what are you laughing at?’

  ‘I’m not laughing.’

  She sounds uncertain. ‘Are you sure it won’t be too much for you, having Ruby there?’

  ‘I don’t think so. If it turns out to be, I promise I’ll say so.’

  ‘Well … it’s kind of you to do this for her. Thank you. After she’s just turned up like that, uninvited. Andrew and I had no idea, one minute she was here and the next she’d vanished. It never occurred to me … she bought an air ticket, just like that, took her passport …’

  ‘Enterprising of her. But she’s not a baby, is she? Young people skip around all over the world these days. And as I said, she’ll come to no harm here. Boredom will set in before too long and then you’ll have her home again.’

  ‘I expect so. We’ll see.’ I can hear that Lesley badly wants Ruby to go home, but she knows better than to insist on it. I find myself admiring her adroitness. ‘Thanks again for taking her in.’

  ‘What else would I have done?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mummy.’

  The bridge of careful words begins to creak and sway, and we both step hastily backwards.

  ‘I’ll make sure she behaves herself,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll call again tomorrow,’ Lesley insists.

  We quickly end the conversation. Now, and for the next few days, I am responsible for Ruby. When I return to the other room she is holding up the bottle that Mamdooh left on the tray.

  ‘Top-up?’ she asks.

  Lesley looked around the quiet, lamplit room. Andrew was working on his laptop, Ed was upstairs in his bedroom.

  ‘She said Ruby’s not a baby anymore.’

  ‘Quite right.’

  She wanted to explain to him something about how, in one corner of her mother’s heart, Ruby would always be an infant. That was how mothers functioned. She believed, too, that in some recess deep within themselves, daughters also yearned for childhood again.

  But Andrew would not be interested in her theories about mother love. He might put his work aside to discuss the new electronic chart plotter to be installed in his boat, but not much else.

  ‘Are we going down to the Hamble at the weekend?’ she asked.

  ‘Depends on whether I get this report finished.’

  Lesley put down her unopened book and wandered into the kitchen. She polished two water glasses that had been left on the sink drainer and put them away in the glassfronted cupboard. She checked the fridge to make sure there was enough juice and milk for breakfast, and glanced at Ed’s homework diary pinned to the noticeboard. The kitchen was a warm, ordered space which she had planned and laid out in every detail.

  Yet she felt superfluous in it.

  She wondered where Iris and Ruby were sitting now, trying to imagine the room and its decoration. It took on a Moroccan flavour, inevitably. Lesley had never been to Cairo, but in the 1970s she had run a business that imported fabrics and furniture from North Africa, mostly from Marrakesh. In those days, however, Iris had been working elsewhere and when the two of them met it was during Iris’s brief visits to England, or once or twice elsewhere in Europe. Iris travelled wherever and whenever she could, usually alone, usually with the minimum of luggage and complete disregard for her own comfort. She didn’t mind sleeping on airport benches and riding in the backs of trucks. Living as she did, in African villages where she provided basic medical care for the poorest women and children, being comfortable didn’t have as many complicated factors as it did for most people.

  Lesley remembered how they had once met up in a hotel in Rome. The doorman had looked askance at Iris when she walked into the lobby. Her clothes were not dirty, but they were worn and unmatching. She carried a couple of African woven bags, her face was bare and her feet were splayed in flat leather sandals. She walked straight across the marble floor to where Lesley was waiting, and the smartly dressed Italian crowd fell back to make way for her. Nobody knew who she was, but everyone knew she was somebody.

  And it was Lesley, in her Armani and Ferragamo, who felt overdressed.

  On a whim, she had ordered champagne cocktails for them both. Iris seized and drank hers with such delight (‘how heavenly! Oh, what a taste of the lovely wicked world’) that Lesley suddenly understood why her mother chose a life in which a drink in a hotel bar could deliver so much pleasure.

  Of course, her imagined Moroccan-style interior was probably much too elaborate and over-designed to come anywhere close to reality. Iris’s actual house would be bare, verging on uncomfortable.

  Now Ruby was there with her. They had taken a distinct liking to each other, the two of them. Lesley had understood that from the telephone conversations, although no one had mentioned it.

  What were they talking about? What were they telling each other?

  Jealousy fluttered in her, and she did her best to ignore it.

  The quiet of her own house was
oppressive. It was a long time since she had spoken to Ruby’s father, Lesley realised. She resolved to give him a call.

  Iris and Ruby ate dinner together, in a small room through an archway off the double-height hall. Auntie rubbed a grey veil of dust off the table and Mamdooh lit a pair of tall candles, so Ruby understood that this was an occasion. As she gazed upwards into the dim, cobwebbed heights Iris briefly explained to her that the celebration hall was where important male guests would have been entertained. The musicians would have taken their places on the dais at the end and there might also have been a belly-dancer. The women of the household would have watched the party from the upper gallery, hidden from the men’s view behind the pierced screens.

  ‘Why?’

  Iris frowned. ‘Do you know nothing about Islamic culture?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘The women occupy the haramlek, a part of the house reserved for them, where men may enter only by invitation. There is a separate staircase, a whole suite of rooms including the one where you sleep. And the other half, where the men may move freely, where visitors come, is the salamlek. Respectable women and men do not mingle as they do in the West.’

  Ruby wondered, is she talking about then – the past – or today?

  She listened, and ate hungrily. The meal was a simple affair of flat bread and spiced beans cooked with tomatoes and onions, of which Iris hardly touched anything. Ruby noted that her skin was stretched like paper tissue over her wrists, with tea-coloured stains spilt all over the knobs and cords of her hands. She wore no rings.

  Mamdooh and Auntie came softly back to remove the remains of the meal.

  ‘Ya, Mamdooh, Auntie. We have decided that Ruby will be staying here with us for a few days, before she goes back to her mother in England. We must make her welcome to Cairo.’

  Mamdooh’s expression did not change as he nodded his head, but Auntie’s walnut face cracked into a smile that revealed inches of bare gum and a few isolated teeth.

  After the shuffle of their slippers had died away Ruby sighed. ‘Mamdooh’s got a problem with me, hasn’t he?’