by Rosie Thomas
‘Yes, come with us,’ he said warmly.
She lifted one hand and twisted the strand of pearls she always wore.
‘Thanks, that’s sweet of you. I won’t, not tonight. I still feel a bit rotten.’
Her cheeks looked hollow and the rusty-looking dry ends of her hair spiked round her face.
‘Are you sure?’
‘‘Course. And I’ve already eaten. Mamdooh made me boiled eggs and soldiers.’
‘Ah.’ We smiled at each other, without needing to acknowledge that eggs in Egypt were small and had an odd, musty flavour.
‘Xan, you’re just back?’
Just back was what we all said. As if the men had strolled into a Cairo drawing room from a day’s hunting or golf.
‘Yes.’
‘The news is good, isn’t it? General Auchinleck’s going to relieve Tobruk and take back Cyrenaica. Any day now, that’s what I hear.’
Cairo was full of rumours of an imminent Allied attack under the new C.-in-C. Middle East. The besieged garrison at Tobruk would certainly be relieved. Sarah gazed imploringly at Xan, her face full of longing for a victory, for fresh news, or just for a change that would help her out of the heat and the social round and her stubborn illness. I wondered where all the eager men were who had swarmed round her when she was well.
‘Maybe,’ Xan said.
‘Are you certain you won’t come?’ I repeated.
Sarah nodded quickly, biting her lip. ‘Have a good time.’
In the hallway, on the silver salver that stood on top of a hideous carved wood and inlay-work chest, I saw a thin blue airmail letter addressed to me in my mother’s handwriting. I took it quickly and folded it into my bag to read later. Xan found a taxi to take us to Zazie’s.
The nightclub was packed, as it always was. Xan had to slip several notes into the palm of the maître d’ to secure us a table. We chose our food from the elaborate menu that came in a leather folder complete with silk tassels, and Xan ordered a bottle of champagne. French champagne was getting scarce in Cairo now, and it was brought to the table in a silver ice bucket and served with a considerable flourish. We lifted our glasses to each other in a toast that contained no words, only wishes. A pianist had been playing through the din of the club, but now he crashed out a final chord and the lights dimmed even further.
A single spot came up on the stage in the corner of the room, the dusty red velvet curtains parted and the floor show belly-dancer shimmered between them. Everyone clapped and whistled as she began a slow gyration that set her sequins flashing. The lower half of her face was veiled but her enormous almond-shaped eyes were instantly recognisable, as were the lustrous expanses of dark honey-coloured skin revealed by her diaphanous chiffon costume. Elvira Mursi was the most famous dancer in the city. She kept her real identity secret but there was a rumour that she had been born in Croydon, and was as English as Sarah Walker-Wilson.
Xan watched the dance, occasionally turning to me with a flash of amusement. When the champagne was finished we started drinking whisky. He was determined to enjoy the evening to the utmost. He clapped Elvira to the last rippling bow, then kept up a flow of talk that made me laugh so much that I forgot the day. That was his intention for both of us.
By 1 a.m. the club was a hot, smoky mass of people who had come in from dinners and other more sedate parties. Xan and I shuffled in the crowd packed onto the tiny dance floor. I spotted Sandy Allardyce at a table with a handsome much older woman. She fitted a cigarette into a long holder and as he lit it for her her heavily ringed fingers rested on the sleeve of his coat.
‘Who is that with Sandy?’ I murmured in Xan’s ear.
‘Haven’t you met her? That’s Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch. She is Swiss, or claims to be. A widow. Her husband was in armaments, I believe.’
‘What does she do in Cairo?’
‘Oh, she lives here. She has a lovely house in the old city, right beside the al-Azhar mosque.’
‘And what is she doing with Sandy?’
Xan grinned.
There was a small commotion in the crowd at my shoulder and a girl’s loud laughter. I turned in Xan’s arms and saw Betty Hopwood. She had fallen over and was now being helped to her feet by her partner, who was one of Jessie’s fellow Cherry Pickers. Betty caught sight of me, tottered back to the more or less vertical on her high heels and waved extravagantly.
‘Cooeee, Iris. Hello, Xan. Come and join us.’
Betty was an immensely tall South African girl with cotton-ball white-blonde hair. She was an ambulance driver with the Motorised Transport Corps. After these women drivers had worked five consecutive days of twenty-four-hour shifts meeting ambulance trains and transporting wounded men, they were entitled to one precious day off. And all they wanted on that day, after they had slept and been to the hairdresser’s, was to cram in as much fun as possible. Xan and I found ourselves being hustled to Betty’s table where our glasses were refilled with whisky. The Cherry Picker Major winked at Xan.
‘What a scream,’ Betty yelled at me. ‘Look at my dress.’
She was wearing a tight sheath of silver lamé and she swivelled to show me the back of it where a long rent in the fabric was roughly fastened with safety pins. The MTC girls were required to live in barracks, and as late passes were impossible to obtain they were all experts at breaking and entering.
‘I hitched my frock up under my khaki, but the barbed wire came down so low that I had to take off my coat to squirm underneath and then rrrrip!’
Betty found this so funny that we all dissolved into laughter in sympathy with her. Another bottle of local whisky materialised on the table. While the men were talking Betty leaned over and rested a hot hand on my arm. ‘He’s rather heaven, isn’t he?’
I looked in slight surprise at the Major, but Betty nudged me sharply.
‘No, I mean your Captain Molyneux.’
‘Yes, he is,’ was all I could think of to say.
Those endless hot, scented Cairo nights. The men never wanted the parties to end. For them, going to sleep just meant that the desert was one day closer. Betty and I and all the women we knew had learned to keep dancing and laughing long past the moment when we should have dropped with exhaustion.
At 2 a.m., when we emerged from Zazie’s, the night air was full of the reedy smell of the Nile. Taxi and caleche drivers jostled for a fare. My head spun and I leaned on Xan’s arm, watching the reflections of lights swaying in the black water. We were now part of a big, laughing group of people that contained Sandy Allardyce and his widowed lady, and it soon became apparent that we were heading back to the widow’s house to continue the party. Betty and the Major and Xan and I squeezed up in the back of a taxi and we sped through the dark streets. When we stepped out again I looked up and saw three fine minarets like black needles against the stars.
We streamed up some worn stone steps, following behind Sandy and Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch. An anonymous door in a blank wall swung open and an immense Nubian in a snow-white galabiyeh with a royal-blue sash bowed to us as we marched in.
Xan had been right, the house was beautiful.
Most of the rich people’s houses I had visited in Cairo belonged to people like Faria’s family, or to British and French hostesses like Lady Gibson. They tended either to be decorated with heavy, dark family antiques, or to be theatrically done up in the modern style with white carpets and grand pianos and too much Venetian glass. But Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch’s house was left to speak for itself.
It was very old. The windows were set in deep embrasures that revealed the thickness of the walls, and the stone floors were gently hollowed by centuries of slippered footfalls. We were shown by bowing servants into a grand double-height hall, panelled in wood. Between the arched roof beams, the ceiling was painted dark blue with silver and gold suns and moons and signs of the Zodiac scattered across it. A huge wrought-metal and crimson glass lamp in the Moorish style hung on chains from the central boss of the roof. Way above our heads a gallery
circled the upper part of the hall, with exquisitely carved and pierced hinged wooden screens that would have shielded the women of the household from the eyes of male visitors. The room was simply furnished with low carved tables and divans piled with kelims and embroidered velvet cushions.
The party spread itself out and settled on the cushions, with Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch sitting in a slightly higher chair at the end of the room. Someone found a gramophone behind a door in the panelling and put on a recording of a plaintive Arabic love song that rose and fell as a background to the talk and laughter. The servants brought in silver pots of mint tea and little brass cylinders of Turkish coffee, and set them out beside crystal decanters of whisky and brandy.
Sandy led me across to Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch and formally introduced me.
‘How do you do, Miss Black?’
She held out her hand for me to shake, the diamond and sapphire rings cold and sharp against my fingers. In perfect English with a heavy Swiss-German accent she told me that I was very welcome and I must make myself at home in her house.
Her eyes were hooded, but her gaze was very sharp and quick. I didn’t think Sandy’s friend missed much.
I thanked her and went back to my seat next to Xan.
After a while, I wandered out of the room in search of a bathroom. None of the servants was in sight so I chose a likely doorway, but found that it led out into a little loggia that gave in turn onto a courtyard garden. There was a scent of flowers and damp earth, and the sound of trickling water. By the light from the open doorway behind me I could just see the turquoise and emerald tiles lining the walls. Above was a quadrilateral of dark velvet sky, and the triple towers of the mosque. It was the most perfect and peaceful little garden I had ever seen.
I stood there, admiring and – yes – coveting it, until one of the servants coughed discreetly behind me and asked in Arabic if I was in need of anything. I murmured my request and was shown the way.
When I returned to the party, cards had been brought out. Xan and I were commanded to make up a four for bridge with Sandy and our hostess.
My head was swimming with champagne followed by too much whisky, and I wanted to go to bed with Xan much more than I wanted to play any card game, let alone bridge. As we played I answered gently probing questions about what I did, who I was acquainted with in Cairo. I didn’t distinguish myself either in the conversation or at cards, and Sandy and Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch won ten shillings from us. Judging by the final glance that the widow gave me from under her heavy eyelids, I had been weighed up and dismissed.
It was four in the morning when the Nubian major-domo ushered Xan and me out into the grey pre-dawn. I didn’t think about the time; I just wanted to get home again to the apartment and lie down with my lover.
Xan slept for just an hour, then slid away from me. ‘Go back to sleep. I’ll telephone you later,’ he whispered.
At seven thirty I was making myself a cup of tea and swallowing aspirin for my headache when Faria appeared in her cream silk robe, grimacing at the earliness of the hour. She did a little voluntary work for her mother, who with two other Cairo society ladies ran a charitable club for servicemen. This must have been one of Faria’s mornings for buttering toast or distributing tickets for the ENSA concert. She took the aspirin bottle out of my hand and shook two pills into her mouth, but she wasn’t too exhausted to ask questions about where I had been the night before.
I told her and she raised her eyebrows.
‘What did you think of Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch?’
‘Formidable.’
‘There is a rumour that she is a German spy.’
‘Why is Sandy running around with her?’
Faria gave me a look. ‘He is a British spy. Didn’t you know that?’
In spite of our headaches we both laughed. The idea of the two of them, an incongruous couple locked in a steely pas de deux of espionage and counter-espionage over cocktails and card tables, was irresistibly funny.
On my way out of the flat I met Sarah. She had a small suitcase in her hand and she told me that she was going to Beirut for the weekend. I said that I was pleased she was feeling better, ordered her to have a good time and kissed her goodbye. Then I walked to work with the hundreds of soldiers and civilians heading to their desks in GHQ.
It was eleven o’clock before I remembered my mother’s letter.
I had just made Roddy Boy a cup of tea and taken it in to him with two Huntley & Palmers custard creams placed in the saucer, which was exactly what he required every morning. I swallowed another aspirin with my own tea, then carefully slit open the thin folder.
My dear Iris,
I hope so much that you are well and that the heat has not been too disagreeable. By the time this reaches you there should be some relief from it.
During all my father’s Middle Eastern and African postings my mother had suffered badly from the heat. She had thin, pale skin lightly dusted with tiny freckles and hair the colour of unripened apricots, and she lived in huge hats and layers of muslin veiling and linen drapes. Then in the mid thirties they were posted to Finland, and in the middle of the first harsh winter there she developed bronchial pneumonia and nearly died. The first I heard of it was when my housemistress at school called me into her study and told me that it had been touch and go, but the doctors were now almost certain that she would pull through.
I begged them to let me go straight to Helsinki but everyone including my father declared that would not be necessary, and so it had turned out.
After that, though, my mother’s health was always fragile.
There is so little news to tell you, darling. I had a nasty cold that lingered stupidly on and on, but now I am quite well and I have been doing a little work in the garden. The day lilies were quite heavenly this year, I so wish you could have seen them.
There followed some details about our cats, and the neighbours, then about the shortages.
No eggs or sugar, and butter and meat hardly exist. Your father and I don’t find it so bad but it is very hard for young families like Evie’s.
Evie was the much younger wife of my father’s younger brother, who was away on active service. She had three children under six and had brought them down to live in a little house in the same village as my parents.
Michael and Eleanor are still in London, I don’t know how on earth they manage but of course Michael’s job keeps him there. Every night the bombs, and the blackout all the time, and everyone so careworn and anxious and exhausted.
Eleanor was my mother’s oldest friend and her husband was something important in the Ministry of Supply. My mother was not an ambitious letter writer and didn’t go in either for elaborate descriptions or – of course not – complaints, but these sparse words conjured up for me a London disfigured with smoke and rubble, trembling under the Blitz and yet still populated by determined people who were quietly and bravely doing their best. In Cairo, too much rich food and drink was taken for granted, we danced in frocks run up by local dressmakers and congratulated ourselves on being thrifty, and bought our silk stockings over the counter in Cicurel’s. This contrast made me feel my champagne headache even more sharply.
My mother signed off, as she always did,
God bless, darling. From your loving Ma
I checked the date before I refolded the blue paper. The letter had been written six weeks earlier and had come by ship the long way, round the Cape and through the Suez Canal to Port Said, the same way that I had travelled out to Cairo myself more than six months ago. I finished my tea and biscuits, and resumed typing.
It was a long day. When I emerged at eight o’clock there was the usual crowd of boyfriends and hopefuls waiting to meet their girls. To my delight, Xan’s black head was among them. I ran and he caught me in his arms and whirled me off the ground.
‘Come with me?’ he begged, after we had kissed.
I asked where, expecting that he would say Shepheard’s or another bar for a cocktail before I went home
to change for dinner. But he tucked my hand under his arm and led me to the car, the same one in which Hassan had driven us out to Giza. He handed me into the passenger seat.
As we drove out into Qasr el Aini, Xan said, ‘I’m going to look in at the Scottish Hospital to see one of the men I brought in yesterday. Is that all right?’
‘Of course it is.’
The Scottish Military was just one of the places where wounded men were taken when the hospital trains and ambulance convoys finally reached Cairo. Xan parked the car and ran up the steps, and I hurried behind him. The hallways and stairwells were crowded with soldiers, bandaged and on crutches or in wheelchairs, and the wards we passed were crammed with long rows of beds. On the first floor we found a ward where most of the occupants lay prone, what was visible of their faces like sections of pale carved masks, as motionless as if they were already dead.
Xan stopped beside a bed in the middle of a row, then leaned over the man who lay in it. ‘Hullo, old chap. You look quite a bit better than you did this morning,’ I heard him say.
There was no answer. There could hardly have been, because the lower half of the soldier’s face and his neck were a white carapace of dressings. A tube led from where his mouth would have been. Xan sat down on the edge of the bed and talked in his ordinary voice, about how another soldier called Ridley had made it too, and how there was a cinema just down the road from the hospital that was air-conditioned, cool as a winter morning Xan said, with padded seats, and they would go and see a picture, the three of them, and have a gallon of iced beer afterwards.
I don’t know if the soldier understood or even heard him, because he gave no sign. Xan just went on talking.
I looked at the chipped cream paint on the metal-framed bed, and the floor that was made of mottled stone with pink and brown slabs in it like a slice of veal-and-ham pie. There was a strong, sweetish smell in the ward with a whiff of suppuration in it. At the far end of the line of beds a man began moaning, a sound that rose and fell, and seemed to drown out the rattle of metal trolleys and the swish of footsteps.