by Rosie Thomas
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Iris?’
This was the first time he had spoken my name, rather than teasingly calling me Miss Black.
‘Mm.’
‘Talk to me. Tell me. Let me listen to your voice.’
This moment was a part of Xan’s dreams. Perhaps when he lay in a scraped shelter in the desert, hungry and cold and suspended between remembered horrors and stalking danger, with a pair of boots for a pillow and the butt of his handgun close against his ribs, this was what he had allowed himself to imagine. It was the intimacy of talking with nothing held back, the sharp pang of desire mingled with the sweetness of trust. It was a dream that had become real tonight for both of us.
I reached up and touched his temple. A thin blue vein was just visible beneath the sun-darkened skin.
I told him about growing up as a diplomat’s daughter, shuttled between embassies around the world with loving but distant parents who insisted, when the time came, that boarding school back home was best for me and that homesickness – for a home that I couldn’t quite locate – was to be overcome by people like us, never yielded to.
In his turn, Xan told me about his father who had been a distinguished and decorated commander in the first war. In the years afterwards he had come out to Egypt to expand the family textiles empire, but business had never been his strong point and the Molyneux family set-up had been an eccentric one. Xan had spent much of his boyhood playing with the children of the family servants.
‘So that’s how you know Arabic so well.’
‘Kitchen Arabic, yes. Then I was sent home to school, and after that on to Sandhurst. My father insisted that I was going to be a regular soldier and I was commissioned in 1938. Until I was eighteen or so I used to come out to Alexandria or Cairo for summer holidays. My family weren’t nearly enough the thing to be invited to embassy parties, but maybe you and I saw each other somewhere else? Maybe I sat at the next table to you at Groppi’s one afternoon and envied your ice cream.’
‘You wouldn’t have spared me a glance. I was a plump child and my mother made me wear tussore pinafore dresses and hair ribbons.’
Xan spluttered with laughter. ‘And look at you now.’
‘Where d’you call home?’ I asked.
It was a question that I asked myself often enough, without ever being able to supply a proper answer. It wasn’t the Hampshire village where my parents had lived since my father was invalided out of the Diplomatic Service, or the London that I hardly knew and which in any case was now being flattened by the Luftwaffe. Nor was it the Middle East, and the starchy embassy compounds of my childhood.
Home was a strange, evanescent complex of spicy cooking smells and my mother’s French perfume, the brown arms of my nursemaids, shimmering heat hazes, and jacaranda blooms outlined against a sun-bleached sky.
It was dreams, mostly.
‘Home?’ Xan mused. The candle flames were reflected in his eyes. ‘It’s here,’ he said at length.
‘Cairo?’
‘No, here.’
I understood that he meant our tent with its coloured hangings, the starry night outside and the two of us. I explored the significance of this, allowing it to swell and flower in my mind. I wanted the exact same thing but I was afraid that it was too much to ask. I had lived all my life effectively alone and the prospect of not being alone, the luxury of it, made me feel giddy.
‘Why?’ I ventured to ask and hated the break in my voice. A burning log broke up in the brazier and a shower of powdery sparks flew into the air.
Xan propped himself on one elbow, his face just two inches from mine. ‘Don’t you know why, Iris?’
‘I am not sure. I want to hear you say it.’
He smiled then, lazily confident of us. ‘I saw you walking under the trees at that party, with Sandy Allardyce. I looked at you and I thought that I would give anything to be in Sandy’s place. Then Faria Amman brought you across to our table and I felt so damned triumphant, as if it was the sheer force of my will-power that had brought you there.
‘When I heard your voice, it was exactly how I knew it would be. Your smile was familiar too. It’s not that I think I know you – that would be presumptuous – it’s more that I have dreamed you. You have stepped straight out of a fantasy and become real. Does that sound idiotic? I expect every man who takes you out to dinner says the same thing.’
‘No, they don’t.’
I wanted to tell him that I understood what he meant, if I could have found a way of saying it that didn’t sound conceited. And I wanted to be Xan’s dream.
The night was so perfect, I even believed that I could be.
‘And now I see you aren’t a phantom. It turns out that you have warm skin, and eyes brighter than stars. Your hair’ – he twisted a lock of it round his finger – ‘smells of flowers. So this is where I want to be. This is what I want home to mean.’
His mouth was almost touching mine. As I closed my eyes, I heard several sets of footsteps scuffing through the sand outside the tent.
Xan sat up, grinning, and poured more champagne into the tin mugs.
‘Sayyid Xan?’ a voice said, and Hassan’s head appeared at the tent flap. I sat up straighter and smoothed my skirt over the cushions.
Two young boys followed Hassan into the tent, and they began setting out dishes and bowls. Hassan lifted the earthenware lid of the biggest pot and a cloud of fragrant steam escaped.
‘Are you hungry?’ Xan asked me and I remembered that I was ravenous.
After the men had withdrawn again, bowing and smiling, Xan put a bowl into my hands and ladled out the food. It was a thick stew of lamb with beans and tomato, and we sat turned towards each other on our bank of cushions and devoured it. I tore up chunks of bread and mopped the spicy sauce, then Xan took hold of my wrist and licked my fingers clean for me. He kissed each knuckle in turn and I noticed how his hair grew in different directions at the crown of his head. This tiny detail, more than anything else, made me want to touch him. And want him to touch me. I was almost frightened by how much I wanted it.
‘Who is Hassan?’ I asked. ‘What is this place?’
‘We played together when we were boys. His father taught me to ride. Now we work together, if you understand what I mean. Hassan knows the desert better than anyone else in
Egypt.’
One of Xan’s eyebrows lifted as he told me this.
‘Work’, I guessed, would probably be for one of the secret commando raiding groups that operated between and behind enemy lines. In my months with Roddy Boy I had glimpsed a few reports of their missions.
‘That’s very dangerous, isn’t it?’
‘This is a war.’
Both statements were true. There was nothing either of us could add, so we just looked at each other in the candlelight.
Then Xan leaned forward. ‘I’m here now,’ he whispered. ‘We are here.’
I put my hand to his head as he kissed me, drawing him closer, and the whorl of unruly hair felt springy under the flat of my hand.
‘We weren’t going to talk about the war,’ I said at last.
‘It would be a mistake to do so. It would be a mistake of profound dimensions. It would even be a blunder of historic proportion and therefore I candidly advise against it. Most certainly I advise against it.’
I spluttered with surprised laughter. The voice was Roddy Boy’s, his plump circumlocutions captured to perfection.
‘And I concur. What’s more, the ambassador agrees with me.’
This time it was Sandy Allardyce’s faintly self-important drawl. I laughed even harder. Xan was an excellent mimic.
‘Good.’ Xan smiled. ‘That’s better.’ He knelt upright and rummaged among the dishes. ‘What have we got here?’
There was a glazed bowl of dates, and a little dish of plump shelled almonds. He made me open my mouth and popped the food in piece by piece.
‘Stop. I’ll explode.’
In an old Thermos
flask there was strong black coffee, and when everything else was finished we drank that from our tin mugs. I saw Xan glance at his watch and I felt a cold draught at the back of my neck. I shivered a little and immediately he put his arm round me.
‘Hassan and I have to leave again very early in the morning. I’ll take you home now.’
I smiled at him, pushing the meaning of tomorrow out of my thoughts, then leaned forward and gave him a lingering kiss. It took a serious effort of will to pull back again.
‘That was the very best evening of my life,’ I said.
‘Was it? Do you mean that?’
Once again, his eagerness touched my heart.
‘I do.’
‘There will be more,’ he promised. ‘Hundreds, no, thousands more. A lifetime of evenings, and mornings and nights.’
I touched my fingers to his lips, stalling him for now. I couldn’t ask where he was going, or when he would be back. All I could do was to send him off with the certainty that I would wait for him.
We blew out the candles together and untied the tent flap. We stood side by side and looked across to the Pyramids. And then we turned away from the tent and the view, and walked back hand in hand to the tiny oasis. The men who had been sitting around the fire were gone and the fire itself had burned down to a heap of ash with a heart of dull red embers. Hassan was waiting for us, sitting with his back against the trunk of a palm tree.
We drove back into the City. At the door to the apartment Xan touched my face. ‘I will be back soon,’ he promised.
‘I will be here,’ I said.
My eyes hurt from staring into the darkness.
My body aches, deep in the bones, and I am shivering as if with a fever. A little while ago I heard the child wandering about, but the street outside and the house are silent now. She must have fallen asleep. I long for the same but instead there is the patchy, piebald mockery of recall, and fear of losing even that much.
Always fear. Not of death, but of the other, a living death.
I think of Ruby’s offer to help me, innocent and calculating, and instead of finding her interesting I am suddenly overwhelmed with irritation, discomfort at the invasion of my solitude, longing for peace and silence.
The shivering makes my teeth rattle.
CHAPTER FOUR
When Ruby woke, her low mood of the previous night had lifted.
She swung her legs out of bed at once and went to the window. The view of the street was already becoming familiar.
Humming as she turned back again, she picked up a T-shirt and a pair of trousers from yesterday’s heap that she had tipped out of her rucksack. She pulled on the clothes, then opened a drawer and scooped the remaining garments into it. The absolute bareness of the room was beginning to appeal to her; it looked much better without a bird’s nest of belongings occupying the floor. She even straightened the covers on the bed before hurrying down the passageway to her grandmother’s room. Her head was full of how she would start helping Iris to record her memories. Maybe after all she could try to write them down for her. The way they were written wouldn’t matter, surely? No one would be marking them or anything like that, not like school or college.
They could start talking this morning, while they were eating their breakfast.
Ruby was looking forward to figs and yoghurt and honey.
The door to Iris’s room stood open. She skipped up to it, ready to call out a greeting, then stopped in her tracks. The window was shuttered and the only light came from a lamp beside the bed. Iris was lying on her back and Auntie was reaching over her to mop her forehead with a cloth. The air smelled sour, with a strong tang of disinfectant. When Auntie moved aside Ruby saw that Iris’s face was wax-pale, and the cheeks were sunken. Her nose looked too big for the rest of her face and her eyes were closed. It was as if she had died in the night.
Ruby’s cheerful words dried up. She hovered in the doorway until Auntie half turned and saw her. At once she came at Ruby, making a shooing movement with her hands. Iris lay motionless.
‘What’s the matter? What’s happened? Is she ill?’
The answer was a few mumbled words in Arabic and a push away from the door. Ruby could only retreat and head downstairs in search of Mamdooh. She found him in the kitchen at the back of the house.
‘Is my grandmother very ill?’
Mamdooh pressed his fig-coloured lips together. ‘Mum-reese has fever.’
‘What does that mean?’
They glared at each other.
‘Fever,’ he repeated. And then, making a concession by way of further information, ‘Doctor is coming. Now she must sleep.’ He didn’t actually push her, but he made it as clear as Auntie had done that Ruby was in the way.
‘Will she be all right?’
‘Inshallah,’ Mamdooh murmured, flicking his eyes towards the ceiling.
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘Nothing, Miss.’
Ruby glanced around the kitchen. The walls were painted a shiny, old-fashioned cream colour and the cupboards had perforated metal doors. There was a table covered with an oilcloth, an old-fashioned metal draining board at the side of the chipped enamel sink. There was a smell of paraffin and boiled laundry.
‘All right.’ She sighed. She knew something about sudden death but she had no idea about illness; it had never played any part in her life.
Iris wasn’t going to die right now, was she? What would happen to her, Ruby, if she did?
There was no answer to this. She would just have to wait for the doctor to come.
She wandered out into the courtyard and sat for a few minutes on the stool next to Iris’s empty chair, watching the way that sunlight turned the trickling water into a rivulet of diamonds. Soon she realised that she was very hungry indeed, and decided that it would be simpler to go out and buy herself something to eat rather than trying to negotiate Mamdooh and the kitchen. She checked that she had money in her trouser pocket and let herself out of the front door.
As soon as she started walking the heat enveloped her, and sweat prickled at the nape of her neck and in the hollow of her back. She kept to the shady side of the alleyway. There was an exhausted dog panting in a patch of deeper shade beside a flight of stone steps. He lifted his head as she passed and showed his pink tongue, and Ruby unthinkingly stooped to pet him. The dog cringed, lifting his legs at the same time to reveal a mass of sores on his belly. Flies rose in a buzzing black squadron.
Ruby shuddered and snatched her hand away.
She marched onwards, following the route to the busy street that Mamdooh had taken the day before. She had noticed plenty of little bakery and coffee shops in the bazaar, she would buy some breakfast there.
The underpass led her to the edge of the maze. She hesitated, looking back over her shoulder as if someone might be tailing her, then hurried into the nearest alley where coffee was one of the stronger elements in the thick tangle of smells. But the narrow shops and piled barrows here were all crammed with plastic toys and knick-knacks. Dolls’ pink faces leered at her and dented boxes containing teasets and miniature cars were piled in teetering pyramids. Two men had a tray of toy dogs that yapped and turned somersaults and emitted tinny barking noises. As Ruby tried to squeeze past, two of the toys fell off the tray and landed on their backs with their plastic feet still pawing the air. A trio of small boys bobbed in front of her, shouting hello and holding up fistfuls of biros. ‘Very good, nice pens,’ they insisted, jumping in front of her when she tried to dodge them. The crowd was dense, choking the alley in both directions. The stallholders began calling out and holding up their goods for her attention.
A man blocked her path. ‘This way. Just looking, very cheap.’ When she tried to edge past him he caught her elbow and she had to shake him off. He yelled after her, ‘Just looking, why not?’
She felt like shouting back that she didn’t want a plastic teaset, that was why not, but the effort seemed too great. Music pulsing from a t
ier of plastic and gilt transistor radios was so loud it was like walking into a solid wall. She pushed past the people immediately in front and a wave of protests washed after her. She turned hastily right and then just as quickly left, at random, trying to get away from the toy vendors and the people she had just trampled.
In this area of the market the stallholders and shopkeepers were selling clothes and shoes. Barrows were stacked high with Adidas nylon tracksuits and white trainers, and the walls were festooned with racks of shiny blouses and pairs of huge pink knickers and bras with bucket-sized cups. There were more women shoppers now, all with their heads and throats swathed in grey or white scarves, all with long-sleeved tops and skirts that hid their legs. The tourists she had noticed yesterday were conspicuously absent. Ruby was sure that everyone was staring at her. She felt increasingly grotesque. Her hair obscenely sprouted and frizzed in the damp heat and her arms and breasts seemed to swell and bulge out of her tight T-shirt and her sweaty trousers bit into her waist and hips. She was too tall. Her skin was too pale and she was clammy with heat and rising panic.
She was also very thirsty but there was nothing as far as the eye could see except mounds of shirts and shoes, and bolts of synthetic fabric that made her drip with sweat just to look at them. She pushed forward, telling herself that somewhere not too far away there would be someone selling bottles of water. The shouts of the vendors and chipped quarter-tones of loud fuzzy music banged in her head.
She was gasping for breath as she stumbled out into a square that looked familiar. It was familiar – it was where Mamdooh had come yesterday, to meet his friends. There was the same coarse, dusty foliage and a pair of sun umbrellas rooted in pitted concrete cubes.
A group of men was gathered at an empty tin table. They weren’t eating or drinking – that was because of Ramadan, Ruby knew that now. But they weren’t talking either. They just sat in a horseshoe, looking out into the hot white light. Looking at her.
She walked forward, thinking she could ask for help because they had seen her with Mamdooh. But none of the faces betrayed even a flicker of recognition. She hesitated, not sure now whether these really were Mamdooh’s friends. Maybe it wasn’t even the same square. She detoured a few steps to the murky door of the café, intent on buying some water, but when she peered inside she saw only men’s faces turning blankly towards her. A waiter wearing an apron looked on, absolutely unwelcoming.