by Rosie Thomas
She is still writing, then crossing something out and rewriting it. The pencil seems to gouge the page.
‘Let me have a look.’
‘No.’ The notebook snapped shut and held against her chest.
What have I said, that’s now being withheld?
‘Hand it over.’
‘I won’t fucking hand it over,’ she yelps at me, jumps to her feet and looks around the garden for an escape route. There’s nowhere to run to.
I lever myself to my feet, painfully, and we confront each other.
My anger fades; what is the point of it? I hold out my arms instead and Ruby hesitates, chewing her bottom lip, then shuffles forward with her head hanging. I put my arm round her, seeing how smooth and lustrous the skin of her forearm is. I have forgotten the silky charge of young flesh. Gently, I take the notebook out of her hands and when I look at her face again I see that she is on the point of tears.
‘Ruby?’ ‘What?’ she wails.
I put my hand out to the arm of my chair, searching for some support, and lower myself again. Then I open the notebook and look at what she has written. It is only a few sentences and I can hardly decipher them.
The letters are childishly formed, the words uneven and the letters jumbled. She has written qunen for queen.
‘I told you, didn’t I, but you didn’t fucking listen.’
‘Don’t swear like that. It’s monotonous, apart from anything else.’
She did tell me she was dyslexic, and I heard her but I wasn’t listening. I am so wound up in my own history, in my frailty and fear.
I feel ashamed of myself. ‘Come here.’
She stoops down by the chair and tries to take back the notebook, but I keep a firm hold on it.
‘I am very sorry, Ruby. You wanted to do something for me, and you were honest about what you thought you could do. Whereas I was impatient and thoroughly selfish. Will you forgive me?’
A sigh. ‘Yeah.’
‘I spend too much time thinking about myself. It happens, when you’ve been alone for a long time. Can you understand that?’
‘Yeah, I s’pose.’
The mulishness is melting out of her.
There is something else I should say, while I am being honest.
‘I am very glad you came,’ I tell her. Then the absurdity of what we have just tried to do strikes me all over again and I start to laugh. ‘It’s very funny. I am the memoirist who can’t remember.’
‘And I’m the am … the ama … shit. The writer who can’t write.’
Her eyes are still bright with tears but she begins to laugh too. The laughter is spiked with sadness for both of us, but it fills the garden and drowns out the trickle of water.
Mamdooh appears in the archway that leads into the house and stares at us in mystification. I have to blow my nose and wipe my eyes.
‘Mum-reese, there is a visitor.’
‘Who can that be? Doctor Nicolas?’
‘It is a visitor for Miss.’ He tells Ruby frostily, ‘He is your friend you are seeing yesterday.’
I tell Ruby, ‘Go on, then, don’t keep your friend waiting, whoever he is.’
She skips away.
I have been the focus of Mamdooh’s censure myself. ‘My granddaughter is a young girl,’ I remind him.
‘Indeed.’
Ruby opened the front door, which had been firmly closed by Mamdooh, and found Ash and Nafouz waiting at the foot of the house steps. They were wearing their white shirts and new-looking trainers.
‘Ruby, hello.’
‘Hi.’
Ash walked up the steps like a suitor. ‘We come with my brother’s car. We take you for a tour, you know?’
‘We-ell …’ Ruby longed to go, but then she thought of leaving Iris sitting in the garden on her own and reluctantly shook her head. ‘I can’t. My grandmother kind of needs me right now.’
‘I am sorry. Your grandmother is ill today also?’
‘No, she’s much better. But she should have some company.’
Ash smiled. He really was good-looking, Ruby thought again.
‘Then this is not a problem. Nafouz?’ He beckoned his brother forward. ‘Nafouz and I, we like to take you and the lady for a nice ride.’
Ruby blinked at this. It was certainly the first time any of her boyfriends had offered to double-date with her grandmother.
‘We-ell,’ she said again.
‘Please to ask her,’ Nafouz joined in.
‘OK, then. Hang on here. I’ll go and find out if she wants to.’
Iris was sitting with the closed notebook still on her lap.
‘You probably won’t want to do this,’ Ruby began, but Iris tilted her head and looked sharply at her.
‘Whatever it is, I think you should let me decide for myself.’
Ruby told her about Ash and Nafouz and the taxi. Iris listened carefully and then her face split into a smile. When she smiled like that her wrinkles seemed to vanish and she could have been any age, even the same age as Ruby herself.
‘A very good idea,’ she said briskly. ‘I shall certainly come. Will you call Auntie for me?’
Five minutes later, with her head swathed in a white scarf and a pair of black sunglasses hiding half her face, Iris declared that she was ready.
‘You look like somebody,’ Ruby said, meaning a face or a style that she had seen maybe in a magazine, but couldn’t place.
‘I am somebody,’ Iris retorted. The prospect of the outing had noticeably lifted her spirits. She was almost giggly.
Auntie and Mamdooh came out with them. Auntie mumbled to herself and tugged at Iris’s clothes and scarf, settling them around her. Mamdooh had put his tarboosh on his head to walk down the steps, and was trying to get Iris to lean on him for support.
‘I can walk,’ Iris insisted.
Ash and Nafouz had been lounging against the wall opposite, but when they saw Iris and her retinue they stood respectfully upright. Mamdooh loomed over them.
‘How do you do?’ Iris said clearly, sounding rather like the Queen and making Ruby begin a cringe. But the two boys bowed and murmured their names and pointed to the black-and-white taxi.
‘Please to come this way, Madam,’ Nafouz said.
‘We shall be back later, Mamdooh, thank you,’ Iris said. She let Nafouz escort her to the car. She sat up in the front seat beside him, without seeming to notice the splits in the plastic upholstery and the way tongues of decayed sponge stuffing stuck out. Ash and Ruby scrambled into the back seat, where Ash raked his hands through his wing of black hair and gave Ruby a half-wink.
‘Where would you like to go?’ Nafouz asked Iris.
‘Downtown, I think,’ she answered. She settled back in her seat and drew her scarf round her throat.
The traffic, Ruby noted, was just about as bad as always.
Iris craned her head at the shop windows and the towering buildings. She was talking Arabic to Nafouz, and laughing and pointing. Ash’s hand crept across the seat and took hold of Ruby’s.
‘Cairo has changed very much,’ Iris said in English after a while.
Ash nodded vigorously. ‘Now modern city,’ he agreed.
I do leave the house of course, once in a while, but this time feels different. There is the charming but no doubt opportunist brother beside me, Ruby and her beau whispering in the back seat, the air thick with the speculative negotiations of youthful sexual activity. This should make me feel old, but it has the opposite effect.
As we turn into Sharia el Bustan I am thinking that I must discuss contraception with Ruby. I never had such a conversation with Lesley. Or if I did I have forgotten it, along with everything else. Maybe I can be a better grandmother than I was a mother.
Maybe it is the recognition that there is still something I can learn how to be that makes me suddenly feel so buoyant.
The shop windows glitter with clothes and furnishings exactly like those in shopping streets in every other city in the world. These boys
– what were they called? – are proud of Cairo’s modernity, but I miss the horse-drawn caleches, the plodding donkeys, old smells of animal dung and diesel fumes and dust roughly laid with water. Just down the next street was Sidiq Travel. Xan and I carried our Queen Mary trophy along this road.
As we pass out into Talaat Harb the lights are coming on in the government buildings. Avoiding the feeder road for the Tahrir Bridge the boy swings the car left down the Corniche and a minute later we pass in front of the walls of the embassy. Once, the gardens stretched down to the bank of the Nile. Here are the trees that shaded the afternoon tea parties of my childhood. I half turn to tell Ruby this but she and the boy are murmuring together, deaf to everything else.
Now we turn left again. I know these shuttered, curving streets so well.
The boy raises one eyebrow at me and I nod.
He has me neatly pigeon-holed. He knows Garden City is where I lived, it is where most of us British lived in those days. Tended gardens, elaborate wrought-iron gates and grilles, ceiling fans turning the humid air in the afternoons. The car rolls slowly past the ghosts, past the blind windows that shield more recent histories.
I am glad when we emerge again into Qasr el Aini and this time head over the bridge. The sun is going down, and coloured lights glimmer in the river water as we reach the island.
The big trees still shade the club grounds, and the racetrack and the polo ground, but now the branches only partly obscure the light-pocked cubes and rectangles of drab apartment blocks on the western bank. Sixty years ago there were fields and canals on the far side, with ploughs drawn by gaunt buffalo, and villages of mud houses. Now the sprawl reaches almost all the way to Giza.
‘I have forgotten your name. Forgive me?’ I say to the driver.
He flips me a smile. A flirtatious smile, for God’s sake. ‘Nafouz. What is yours?’
‘Doctor Black.’
‘You are medical doctor?’
‘I was. I am retired now.’
Nafouz purses his lips to show me that he is impressed. ‘I am taxi driver only but my brother Ash is working in hospital, operating switchboard.’
‘You both speak good English.’
‘We try,’ Nafouz agrees. ‘We learn.’
The layout of these Gezira streets is familiar, the buildings less so. The ugly lattice of the Cairo Tower looms on one side, on the other is the wall of lush trees that shade the club grounds. Nafouz turns left and we approach the gates. Sixty years drop away and I am in a taxi on my way to meet Xan.
‘Stop. I want to get out for a minute.’
I step out into the dusk. The gates are the same but there is a gatekeeper in a kiosk now and a striped pole to be raised and lowered. A long line of cars stretches back from the barrier, mostly shiny German-made cars; members of today’s Gezira Club are queueing up for admission. I remember cotton sundresses and shady hats, uniforms and cocktails and the plock of tennis balls, Xan waiting for me in the bar as I arrived from a day’s work at my desk in Roddy Boy’s outer office.
Xan saying, ‘Darling, let’s have a drink. I’ve got to go away again tomorrow. It’s a bit of a bore, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Madam?’
The gatekeeper calls out to me, and a man in a dark business suit raises the electric window of his BMW as it glides through the gates. The next car in line rolls forward.
‘Yes, Madam?’
‘I … nothing. I’m sorry. A mistake.’
What was I looking for? All the businessmen and chic women and obedient children in these cars are Egyptian. The enclave of empire that I knew, the shady mown-grass sanctuary of British assumptions and attitudes, vanished long ago. The people are all dead. I am still here but I am as much of an anachronism as tea dances and air raid warnings.
I am still here.
Instead of making me sad, the thought fills me with a sudden reckless appetite. Through the window of the taxi I can see the white oval of Ruby’s face, watching me.
It’s getting dark. I pull off my sunglasses and settle myself back in my seat.
‘Let’s go to Groppi’s,’ I say, slapping my hands on the plastic dashboard so that everybody jumps.
Nafouz asks, ‘Are you sure, Doctor?’
I insist, very brightly, ‘Certainly I am sure.’
So the four of us find ourselves sitting at a table in the little café garden of Groppi’s.
Once, everyone in Cairo who could afford it came here. Vine tendrils smothering the walls and strings of coloured lights made it seem far removed from the city’s white glare. Ladies in furs sat at these little round tables drinking tea with men with silky moustaches, and officers ordered cream cakes for their girls.
It’s dusty and neglected now, with an unswept floor and waiters in dirty jackets. The two boys are hungry and Ruby looks bored.
‘What would you all like? What shall we order?’ I say encouragingly, but no one seems to know. We make a strange foursome. ‘We must have ice cream.’ I remember the ice creams, mint-green and luscious pink with stripes of coffee-brown, all with tiny crystals of ice bedded in them. They were served in cut-glass coupes, decorated with furled wafers.
Ruby is eyeing me. No one seems to want ice cream.
‘I’m sorry. It’s different.’ I can feel the suck and swirl of time past, rocking and pulling at my feet like a vicious current. I’m looking at the menu, a dreary plastic-laminated affair sticky with fingerprints. The two boys are smoking, giving each other looks out of the corners of their liquid eyes. Ruby leans forward to help herself from one of the packs on the table.
‘Does Lesley let you do that?’
She gives a sharp cough of laughter and smoke pours from between her teeth. Her odd mixture of childishness and bravado tickles me, and I find myself laughing too. The atmosphere changes and we order toasted sandwiches, far too many, and coffees and pastries and bottles of Coca-Cola. It is after sundown so the boys break their Ramadan fast with gusto and the strange meal somehow becomes what I wanted, a celebration.
‘Go on,’ I urge them, over the plates of food that the waiters slap down on the table. ‘Go on, eat up.’
They tell me about their family. Father dead, several younger siblings whom they must help their mother to support. Ruby’s beau is the clever one, the one they are banking on. He looks very young to carry such a weight of responsibility.
‘I learn to speak English, and also some computer studies. But it is not easy to pay for teaching.’
And he meets my eyes. They have seen where I live and they probably think I am rich. In fact I am poor, certainly by European standards. I murmur in Arabic, a conventional piety. Ruby is looking away, thinking her own thoughts.
The table top is pooled with coffee and there are still sandwiches and little cakes glistening with fat and sugar to be eaten but Nafouz is tapping his watch.
‘Time for work. We are both night shift.’
Ash wraps a sandwich in a paper napkin and holds it out to me. ‘You have eaten nothing.’
‘I don’t want it. Take it with you, for later.’
‘I may?’
‘Of course.’
I call for, and pay, the enormous bill. It is a long time since I have been to a café, much longer since I have paid for four people at once. Before everyone stands up I say, ‘Thank you for this evening, Nafouz. Thank you, Ash. I enjoyed it very much.’
This is the truth. It has helped me to see the today versions of yesterday’s places. Memory is a little like découpage, I think, a harmless activity that I was encouraged to practise when I was ill as a child, involving pasting cut-out views and scenes to build up a picture in layers. The build-up creates a kind of depth. It adds perspective. Of course the base layers are fading and partially obscured. The old Groppi’s I knew, like Cairo itself, has been overlaid by the present version. Because I am here, seeing it as it is now, I realise that there is nothing mysterious or fearful in this. Of course I can’t catch and keep everything. I can only strive for what
is important; my memories of Xan.
Ruby is standing up, looking at me, a little perplexed. ‘Iris?’
I collect myself. ‘Yes? What is it?’
‘We’ve got to go. Ash is late.’
They are waiting in the doorway. On the way back to the taxi the boys take my arms, as if I am their own grandmother. I am glad of the support because I am very tired. On the way home, I look out at the lights and the thick crowds in the streets. Nafouz has yet another cigarette clenched between his teeth.
Behind me, I can hear Ruby and Ash whispering on the back seat. When we reach the house they say goodbye to each other offhandedly, in the way that the young do, not making another arrangement because they don’t need to. It’s understood that they will meet again just as soon as possible. I feel a thin stab of envy, and then amusement at the nonsense of this.
Mamdooh and Auntie seem actually to have been waiting in the hallway for our return. At any rate, they spring from nowhere as soon as Ruby and I come in.
With the afternoon’s change of perspective I notice how we have become interdependent, the three of us, over the years. I need them and they need me to need them.
‘We have had an excellent outing. A drive, then Groppi’s.’
An idea has just formed in my head and I keep it fixed there as I unpin my headscarf and hand it to Auntie. ‘We’ll have some tea later, upstairs. Ruby, Mamdooh, will you come with me?’
Ruby shuffled in their wake back down the passageway to Iris’s study. Mamdooh was trying to insist that Mum-reese should rest, Iris sailed ahead with the absent but intent look on her face that Ruby was beginning to recognise.
‘I think there is a box in there.’ Iris pointed to a pair of cupboard doors painted with faded white birds and garlands of leaves.
‘A box?’ Mamdooh frowned.
‘Exactly. If you open the doors for me?’
Ruby yawned. It had been OK, going out in the car with Iris, but now Ash had gone to work and she wouldn’t see him until tomorrow. She would have liked to spend a bit more time on her own with him.
‘There it is.’ Iris pointed.
Mamdooh lifted a pile of dusty books, some sheaves of printed music and an old-fashioned clothes brush off the lid of a dark-green tin box. It had handles on the sides and he stooped and puffed a little as he hauled it off the shelf. The dust that rose when he dumped it on the desk next to the old typewriter indicated that it hadn’t been disturbed for a very long time.