Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  Sweat broke coldly on my forehead. It occurred to me that I was going to faint, or maybe to vomit.

  I walked quickly away, heading down the ward without any idea where. I passed several nurses who were busy with dressings trays, and another who was sitting at a man’s bedside. She was holding a cigarette to his ragged mouth and he was inhaling as if the smoke were life itself. I pushed blindly through a pair of swing doors into a sluice room, past a row of sinks and into a lavatory cubicle.

  When I came out again, wiping my face with my handkerchief, the cigarette nurse was there rinsing out a kidney bowl at one of the sinks. Her cuffed sleeves revealed pale arms and reddened hands with prominent wrist bones.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ What I felt now was shame for having responded like a swooning Victorian maiden to the spectacle of other people’s suffering.

  The nurse briskly set down her metal bowl, took a glass out of a cupboard and poured water from a jug. She handed the glass to me and I sipped carefully from it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said pointlessly. I meant that I was sorry for taking up her attention when there were so many demands beyond the swing doors.

  To my surprise she smiled.

  ‘It can take people that way at first. You get used to it, though.’ Her voice was attractive, with a distinct Scottish burr. She was a trained nurse, not a VAD like some of my friends, with a crested badge to prove it pinned on her apron next to her watch. ‘Do you want to sit down for a bit? Your friend’s still talking to Corporal Noake.’

  The sluice room was relatively cool. Water groaned in the pipes and dripped from the faucets.

  ‘I’m fine. I will be, in a minute.’

  ‘I’ve seen you around town,’ the nurse said. She was taking packages of dressings out of a box and talking to me over her shoulder.

  ‘Me? How come?’

  She laughed. ‘You’re the kind of person people do notice.’

  I couldn’t remember having seen the nurse at the Gezira Club or Groppi’s, or dancing at Zazie’s. Her starched, folded cap came down low over her forehead and hid her hair.

  She held out her hand, the other still clutching a pack of bandages.

  ‘I’m Ruth Macnamara.’

  ‘Iris Black.’

  We shook.

  ‘If you’re sure you’re all right, I’d better get back to work. Sister’s got a down on me. See you around, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said to her departing back. ‘I hope so.’

  I walked slowly back up the ward. Xan was still talking to his corporal. I went round to the other side of the bed and looked down into the soldier’s eyes.

  ‘Hullo, there. I’m Iris, Xan’s friend.’

  I didn’t know how much was left of the lower part of his face but the man himself was still there. His eyes flickered, moved, then fixed on mine. Just perceptibly, he nodded. I took his hand and sandwiched it between my two and he clung to me with his eyes.

  After a minute, Xan said easily, ‘We’ll be getting along now, Noake. You get some sleep. I’ll look in again tomorrow, if they haven’t packed us off by then.’

  We left him among the other carved men.

  When we reached the car again we sat and lit cigarettes and stared out at the darkening sky.

  ‘Will you really be going tomorrow?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know for sure. It won’t be long, though. There’s the big push coming.’

  We all knew that. The Germans and Italians knew it too, and were waiting.

  ‘What happened to Corporal Noake, exactly?’

  ‘He was shot in the neck and jaw. His lower jawbone was partly blown away.’

  ‘Poor man.’

  ‘He was luckier than Reggie Burke,’ Xan said grimly.

  ‘Yes.’

  We finished our cigarettes and the last of the daylight drained out of the western horizon as if the desert sand were drinking it up.

  ‘Where would you like to have dinner?’

  I didn’t want food, or whisky or dancing. I wanted Xan, and Xan safe, and the end of the war.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

  He leaned forward at once to the ignition and we drove back through the Cairo streets to Garden City.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Will you?’ Xan repeated.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to answer, just that happiness momentarily flooded my throat and turned me mute. White light swelled behind my eyes, spilling inside my skull and half blinding me.

  We were reclining on a rug in the shade of a tree, and the high sun shining through the chinks in the leaves made them black as carved ebony. We had been watching a polo match. As well as Xan’s low voice I could hear shouting and ponies’ hooves drumming on the turf and then the sharp crack of a stick on the ball.

  I turned my dazzled face to his. His head was propped on one hand and he leaned over me, waiting.

  ‘Yes,’ I managed to say. ‘Yes, yes, yes. I will. More than anything. For ever and ever.’

  So, incoherently, I promised to marry Xan Molyneux. The leaves and the chinks of light and all the rest of the world were blotted out as he lowered his head and kissed me.

  Jessie James was the first person we told. He came to meet us still in his white breeches and shirt soaked with sweat from the match, stalking over the grass with his face flushed with exertion and success.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he called.

  ‘No,’ Xan said bluntly.

  ‘But it was the very best goal I’ve ever scored. What kind of friend are you, Molyneux?’

  ‘A very happy one, you oaf. Iris says she’ll marry me. Can you believe that?’

  Jessie stopped in his tracks. A smile split his face, but he pretended to be dismayed. ‘Oh, no. This is a mistake. Iris is going to marry me, once she’s realised what a hopeless apology you are. Tell him that’s so, Iris, won’t you?’

  I put my hands out and grasped his. He was hot and our palms glued together as I danced around him. ‘Wish us luck, Jessie.’

  His smile faded into seriousness then. ‘I do. I wish you both all the happiness and all the good luck in the world.’ There was a tiny beat of silence as he kissed my cheek. ‘You’re a lucky man, Molyneux.’

  ‘D’you think I don’t know it?’

  But I knew that I was the lucky one.

  Later that afternoon Jessie took a photograph of us, using a camera airily borrowed from a man called Gordon Foxbridge who had been watching and taking pictures of the polo match. Major Foxbridge was a staff officer I saw from time to time in the rabbit-warren corridors of GHQ, and he was an enthusiastic amateur photographer. His sombre pictures of Arab tribesmen in the desert were later published as a book.

  ‘Gordon, old chap, I want to record a momentous day,’ Jessie insisted.

  Major Foxbridge offered to take the photograph himself, but Jessie wanted to do it and so the Major obligingly handed over his Leica, and Xan and I stood at the edge of the Gezira Club polo ground where the baked earth had been scraped and scored by ponies’ hooves. With Xan’s arms wrapped round my waist I let my head fall back against his shoulder and laughed into the lens.

  ‘Watch the birdie!’ Jessie sang.

  It was Gordon Foxbridge, though, who developed the picture in his own darkroom and then delivered it to my desk in a brown manila envelope marked ‘The engagement of Miss Iris Black and Captain Molyneux’ as if we were in the Tatler.

  It showed the two of us exactly as we were but it also enlarged us. That day, Xan’s glamour obliterated his assumed anonymity and my dazed happiness lent me a beauty I didn’t really possess.

  Wherever I have travelled since, through all the years, the photograph has come with me.

  And this is the picture that Ruby asked me about.

  What answer did I give? I can’t remember.

  How can I find the words to tell her, my grandchild, all this history? I can’t even catch hold of it myself. If I try to stalk it, it
floats away out of reach and leaves me with the featureless sand, the empty place on the shelf. So I have to be patient and let the memories and the dreams come, then try to distinguish them.

  But I have never been a patient woman.

  Ruby’s quaint offer touched me, and so did the way she set it out with assurances about her shells and beetles. I can imagine her as a smaller child, dark-browed and serious, walled up in a bedroom decorated by Lesley and poring over her collections. Lining up objects, probably in an attempt to fix an unwieldy universe.

  She is an unusual creature. Her coming is an unlooked-for blessing.

  * * *

  That same evening we went back to the Scottish Military Hospital to see Corporal Noake once more. Jessie James wanted us all to go out to dinner, he wanted to set in train one of the long evenings of Cairo celebration, but Xan insisted that first he must go to see his men.

  From the medical staff we learned that the news of the other soldier, Private Ridley, wasn’t good. As a result of his injuries a severe infection had set in and he was in a deeper coma, but Xan didn’t tell Noake about this. He just sat there on the edge of the bed, talking cheerfully about going to the pictures and drinking beer, then laughing about the desert and some place they had been to where the flies swarmed so thickly that they couldn’t put food in their mouths without swallowing dozens of them. Noake’s response was to grasp Xan’s wrist and give the ghost of a nod.

  I saw Ruth Macnamara moving screens and bending over the inanimate men. She didn’t appear to hurry but everything she did looked quick and deft. I wanted to talk to her again so I left Xan to his monologue and followed her the length of the ward.

  At the opposite end from the sluice room was a kind of loggia, open to the air on one long side. Two or three men sat in chairs and there were two beds parked against the wall. Ruth was bending over one of the beds, examining the occupant.

  ‘Hullo, Miss,’ a young man in one of the chairs called out. ‘Looking for me?’

  It was a relief to hear a strong voice.

  ‘Not exactly. But now I’m here, is there anything I can do for you?’

  The man grinned. ‘How about a dance?’

  I was going to say something about finding a gramophone or maybe he could sing, but then my eyes travelled downwards and I saw that the folds of blanket below the humps of his knees were flat and empty.

  The young soldier added softly, ‘Well, perhaps not. Another time, eh?’

  Ruth straightened up. ‘Come on, Doug. They’ll fix you up with some falsies and you’ll be dancing like Fred Astaire. Hello again, Iris.’

  ‘She’s right,’ I said to Doug.

  ‘Medical, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I admitted. I wished I were. I wished I could do something – anything – for these maimed men and for the prone, silent ones who lay in their rows in the ward. I wished I could do anything useful at all, instead of just typing Roddy Boy’s memoranda and placing two custard cream biscuits in his china saucer at precisely eleven every morning.

  ‘Ah. Well, you’re pretty enough just to stand there and be admired.’

  Ruth swung round. ‘That’s enough of that. Iris, can you give me a hand here? Round the other side of the bed.’

  I stood opposite her, with the wounded man’s body between us.

  ‘He needs turning,’ she said. The man’s eyes fixed on her face, then on mine. His chest was heavily bandaged, and curled edges of antiseptic yellow dressing protruded. I concentrated on not imagining the shattered muscle and bone within.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ he gasped.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ruth said briskly and I wasn’t sure whether she was talking to the soldier or me. We slid our forearms under the man’s body and grasped each other’s wrists.

  ‘Now, one two three, lift.’

  He was hot, and quite light. Ruth and I shuffled our arms and as we hoisted him I saw the shadow trapped in the vulnerable hollow beside the crest of his pelvic bone. Gently, we let him down again in a slightly different position.

  ‘Better. Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘Is your assistant coming again tomorrow, Nurse Mac?’ one of Doug’s companions called out.

  ‘I’ll try to,’ I said.

  Ruth raised an eyebrow. ‘Volunteering, are you?’ She was moving on and I was sharply aware that she had a lot to do. She made me feel superfluous and rather clumsy.

  ‘I’ve got a job already.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Typist. GHQ. Very humble.’

  ‘Oh, well. You must get asked out a lot, all those officers. Look, your friend’s coming.’

  Xan was walking towards us along the ward.

  ‘Fiancé.’ The word was out before I considered it, with all the pride and satisfaction that I should have kept to myself.

  Ruth’s glance flicked over me. She was amused. ‘Really? Congratulations. When’s the wedding?’

  ‘Oh, we haven’t fixed that yet. We … we only decided today. Let me introduce you. This is Captain Xan Molyneux. Xan, Ruth Macnamara.’

  They shook hands as a rigid-looking senior nurse in a dark-blue uniform appeared in a doorway.

  ‘Oh God, here’s the old battleaxe. Look, where do you live?’

  I told her and Ruth smiled briefly.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Out on the Heliopolis road. It’s cheap. I’ve got to get a move on now. Leave me your phone number?’

  ‘I’ll come in again. Won’t we, Xan?’

  We. Would I ever get used to the luxury of using one little word?

  ‘Good. ’Bye, then.’ Ruth fled away down the ward.

  ‘You’ve made a friend,’ Xan said.

  ‘I hope so.’ I wanted to know Ruth Macnamara better. And although the hospital was a sad and fearful place it drew me back. It was full of people who were doing what they could, certain in the knowledge that what they did made a difference.

  We did go out to celebrate our engagement. We started with cocktails at Shepheard’s and then dinner on a boat moored on the Nile, where Jessie proposed a toast and a circle of faces glimmered at us over the rims of champagne glasses. Faria was there, with the poet who was looking more mournful and whose clothes were even more crumpled and dusted in cigarette ash than usual. Sarah was still not back from her trip, but there were some of the Cherry Pickers and Xan’s friend the mysterious Major David, and Betty Hopwood in a new dress of some iridescent greeny-black material that Faria whispered made her look like a giant beetle.

  ‘How heavenly for you both,’ Betty shrieked. ‘When’s the wedding?’

  Everything did happen very quickly in Cairo. There was no reason to put anything off even until tomorrow or indeed to deny ourselves any of life’s pleasures, because there was always the likelihood that the war would intervene, but I murmured that we hadn’t decided yet. I wanted to tell my mother, and Xan’s parents would need to hear the news. It was odd to think that there were all the relatives on both sides, and the lives we had lived in other places and our separate histories, as well as just Xan and me and the immediate chaotic present and the way we had fallen in love. But the war and Egypt made a separate realm, and for the time being the world outside was a shadowy place.

  There was another reason too why Xan and I had not talked about a wedding day. He was going back to the desert and we both knew it would be very soon. Perhaps in only a few hours’ time.

  ‘I’ll be in Cairo again by Christmas, darling, at the latest.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Cross my heart. We’re going to drive Rommel all the way out of Africa, I know we are. And after that you and I can make our plans.’ He was optimistic for my sake and I tried to believe him.

  Betty leaned across now and tapped my arm.

  ‘Don’t leave it too long.’ She fluffed up her cottonball hair and winked at me. She had already told me the story of one of her MTC colleagues who carried a crumpled white satin wedding dress at the bottom of her kitbag, so
as to be ready as soon as a husband came into sight.

  ‘James? Where’s that bloody Jessie?’ one of the Cherry Pickers shouted. ‘Some of us haven’t found ourselves a girl yet. Where are we going now?’

  To begin with Jessie obligingly orchestrated the evening, but as the hours went by our party gathered momentum until it rolled under its own impetus through the Cairo nightspots. By two in the morning we were at Zazie’s again. Xan and I danced and I felt the heat of him through my satin dress, but drink and exhilaration distorted the normal sequence of minutes and hours, and we both convinced ourselves that the night was endless. There was time to laugh with our friends and time to dance, and there would still be time and time for one another. Leaving for the desert was no more than a little dark unwinking eye at the vanishing point of a long avenue of happiness.

  Elvira Mursi came on and blew us both a kiss at the end of her spot.

  Sandy Allardyce materialised. He held my hand, rather damply, and sat close to me on one of the little gold seats in a velvet alcove. His round red face was very serious and I realised only belatedly that he was making a confession of love.

  ‘… a good man. Reckless, if you like, but a fine field officer. Yes. Choice. Of course. ‘S what every woman has as her privilege. But, you know, wish it could have been different. Iris. Just wanted to tell you, you know?’

  I shook my head, confusion and sympathy and a shaming desire to laugh mounting in my throat.

  ‘Sandy. I didn’t know, honestly. Had no idea. I never … let you believe anything I shouldn’t have done, did I?’

  ‘No. Never a single thing. Perfect lady, always.’

  I couldn’t speak now. It was the idea of myself as a perfect lady. Sandy took my hand as if it were the Koh-i-noor diamond and pressed his mouth to the knuckles.

  ‘Never a word. Ssssh. Won’t speak of it again. Rest of my life. Promise you, on my honour.’

  From her front-row table Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch glowered at us.

  The night did end, at last, with Xan and me in a taxi going back to his flat. The sun was up and the street sweepers were working, and donkey carts loaded with vegetables plodded to the markets. I was beyond being drunk and I wasn’t tired, and the light had a hard, white, absolute brightness to it that suggested that this day was a crystallisation of everything that had gone before. I already knew that it was one of the days I would remember all my life.