Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  She nods, eating pomegranate off the blade of the fruit knife. Five minutes later she jumps up and kisses the top of my head and five minutes after that she has gone out. Silence seeps slowly through the house, filling the corners and the dark angles of stairways.

  The sharp ringing of the telephone makes me jump. I receive very few calls nowadays; sometimes Doctor Nicolas telephones to ask if I am well or to pass on some snippet of local news that he thinks might interest me, otherwise it is just tradesmen or people trying to sell things, and once or twice an impertinent developer who wants to buy my house from me. And of course, just lately, I have been answering the telephone to Lesley.

  ‘Mummy, is that you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I am very well. I’m afraid you’ve just missed Ruby, she went out about five minutes ago.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  The disappointment in her voice comes through like the wind sighing in bare trees. I think Lesley adores the child, and her adoration scratches at Ruby like a barbed-wire vest. I also remember what Ruby told me about not taking a boy to visit her mother because Lesley will only allow a regiment of perfectly aligned white mugs to adorn her kitchen. Lesley needs to exert a serious measure of control over her environment because she fears what lies beyond the defended perimeters. All her curtains and hedges and roses and Christmas rituals and crockery arrangements are about creating a safe place within a threatening world.

  And of course, that longing for security is what her ever-absent mother has bred in her. As always, my meditations about Lesley tread the same circuit of guilt.

  ‘She’ll be back later. She’s gone to the Egyptian Museum, she seems to have developed a great interest in Egyptology.’

  ‘Really? She always did have odd enthusiasms.’

  A silence between us contains the minute crepitations of distance and technology.

  ‘I wanted to ask you … do you think you could send her back home, please?’

  I consider this. ‘Truthfully, I don’t think I can send her anywhere. Ruby is an adult as far as I am concerned. Only she can decide when she is ready to leave. Of course, as her mother you could try to order her back to England, but I’m not sure that would have the desired result.’

  ‘She is staying with you. It’s your house.’

  ‘Yes. And it will always be open to her, if here is where she chooses to be.’

  Lesley’s voice rises; like a change in pressure in my inner ear I can almost feel the whoosh of her anger as it ignites.

  ‘You’re conspiring with her, against me.’

  ‘No, I am not.’

  But maybe I am.

  ‘What has she actually been doing there, all this time?’ The fluttery edge in Lesley’s voice betrays just how close she is to tears.

  ‘I’ve told you. Going to the museum, learning a little Arabic, sightseeing, making friends. There is a nice young man called Ashraf, I have met him two or three times. Ruby won’t come to any harm with him.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Lesley’s disbelief suggests what I have already realised, that Ruby can’t have been an easy child to try to bring up.

  ‘By trusting her? Have you tried that?’

  ‘Believe me. I’ve tried everything.’

  My sympathy for Lesley turns out to be short-lived, because what I now feel is exasperation. ‘What do you actually want for her?’

  ‘I want her to come home. Or to go travelling properly with a plan, a goal in mind. Then to go to university, or at least decide what she wants to do with her life. Not always to be at the back of the class, bunking off, running away, sticking up two fingers at authority and expectation and her parents.’

  ‘In other words you want her to be exactly like your friends’ children?’

  My voice is perhaps drier than it might have been.

  ‘What’s wrong with that? Is it a bad thing to want? I am doing the best I can for her, the only way I know how. I asked her father to get involved for once and his only suggestion was a bloody shopping trip to New York.’

  That’s the previous husband, Alan or Colin or whatever his name is, not the one she’s married to now. Lesley is shouting at me and I have to hold the receiver away from my ear until she stops.

  In the end I say, ‘I don’t know exactly what Ruby was running away from when she left London but she wasn’t running to me, because she didn’t know me. Now she’s here I’d give her the opportunity to work matters out for herself. She’s safe and she seems happy. I’m happy to have her here.’

  I can hear Lesley’s agitated breathing. ‘What’s she living on? I give her a monthly allowance, maybe I should stop that and see how she likes it.’

  ‘My guess is that she will be resourceful enough to get money from somewhere else.’

  ‘From you.’

  ‘Not if you insist otherwise. But she doesn’t need much to live here.’

  ‘Maybe I should just fly out.’

  We have reached the real point of the conversation.

  I let the following pause build up while Lesley explores the possibility, now that she has given voice to it, and it goes on for so long that I wonder if she has hung up.

  ‘No,’ she whispers at last, finally. ‘I won’t do that.’

  We are left with a stale sadness hanging between us. The truth that I don’t quite confront is that I would like to see Lesley. I would like to talk to her, perhaps – this new development that we can’t explore because it’s locked behind barriers of suspicion and jealousy – even share something of Ruby with her. But Lesley doesn’t want to see me.

  Well, that is my pay-off.

  ‘There is plenty of room here,’ I say.

  ‘There wasn’t always.’ The retort comes on a long, exhaled breath that has turned impatient. Lesley is recovering already, this has been a painful conversation but she will put it behind her and carry on.

  ‘No,’ I humbly agree.

  ‘Tell her I called, won’t you? And ask her to give me a ring back when she comes in. Reverse the charges, of course.’

  ‘All right.’ I happen to have overheard one of these conversations. Ruby sounds evasive, non-committal, murmuring fine and not much and OK, whatever.

  ‘’Bye, then,’ Lesley says.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  I feel cold now, and the sky beyond the lattice screen has clouded over. I go back and sit in my chair, and pick up another thread.

  After the visit to Albie Noake I went home to Garden City. As I turned the corner into the quiet, cocoa-brown street I was almost knocked over by Jeremy the poet, who was dashing through the twilight in the opposite direction.

  ‘Sorry. Uh, I’m so sorry. Oh, hello, Iris, it’s you.’

  He was wearing his linen suit, which shone at the elbows and down the margins of the lapels, and a British Council tie with a shirt whose collar points tipped upwards like the ears of some small rodent.

  ‘Hello, Jeremy. Have you been at the flat?’

  His gaze flicked sideways, then he raked his hair off his sweaty forehead and looked longingly over my shoulder.

  ‘Um, no, not really. Just popped in, you know.’

  ‘Faria’s at home, is she?’

  ‘No, actually. I, er, just on the off-chance …’

  Clearly I wasn’t going to get any more information, and in any case I wasn’t particularly interested in Jeremy’s comings and goings.

  ‘Well, nice to see you. I must go.’

  ‘’Bye, Iris.’ He was off round the corner before I could call goodnight.

  I let myself into the flat. It was quiet and I thought everyone must be out, but then the door to the drawing room opened and I saw Sarah standing in a shaft of lamplight. She was wearing her old cashmere cardigan pulled tightly round her and her fine hair was scraped back from her face and tied with a scarf.

  ‘I thought it was Faria.’

  ‘No. It’s me.’

  She went back to her usual corner of the sofa an
d I noticed there were two empty glasses on the drinks tray.

  ‘I met the poet downstairs.’

  ‘Did you? Yes, he dropped in.’ Sarah didn’t look at me. She pulled the ends of her scarf tighter and tucked them in, tucking in the corners of her mouth to match.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Me? Yes. Fine.’

  The front door opened and closed again, and a moment later Faria appeared. Her dark slanting eyes were heavily outlined with kohl and she was wearing her diamond earrings and a little suit in jade-green soft tweed. She undid the wrist buttons of her kid gloves and peeled them off, then stalked across to the gin bottle waiting on the drinks tray. She said into the heavy atmosphere, ‘I’ve been at an endless reception for some business people of Ali’s. I don’t know why I have to go to these things, smiling and talking nonsense. I thought I would die of boredom.’

  Sarah was pale and quiet, and Faria was often irritable these days. The flat wasn’t as much fun as it had been when I first came back to Cairo.

  Faria flung herself into a chair. ‘Well, you two, tell me. Have you both got divine dates lined up for tonight?’

  ‘Not me,’ Sarah murmured.

  ‘I’m going to dinner with a nurse I met at the Scottish Military, and her flatmate who’s a doctor.’

  Faria yawned. This sounded almost as dull to her as the afternoon she had just endured, but Sarah looked up eagerly. ‘A doctor? Is he nice?’

  ‘She’s a woman. I made exactly the same assumption.’ I laughed, but Sarah didn’t join in. She wasn’t interested in women; Faria and I were both engaged and what Sarah wanted now was to bag a husband of her own. ‘By the way, Iris, a package came for you. It must be something important, Mamdooh said the messenger made him sign a chit for it. It’s on the hall tray.’

  ‘Thanks. I’d better go and change if I’m not going to be late. Ruth and Daphne live halfway to Heliopolis.’

  I knew what was in the package, but I didn’t want to open it in front of Sarah and Faria. Faria would have held up the stone to judge the quality, wondering why it wasn’t a diamond, and Sarah would have bitten her lip and told me that it was so beautiful, and I was terribly lucky to have met someone like Xan.

  I took the little square box into my bedroom and closed the door. The window was open and I stood for a moment with my hand on the sill, looking out at the outline of my jacaranda and the thick leaves of a rubber tree splashed with light from the apartments overlooking the gardens. In the autumn the cocktail hour was cool, and scented with late jasmine and charcoal smoke and spices from the street food vendors. A pale-green line marked a sliver of the western horizon visible between two apartment blocks.

  Xan’s amethyst was opulent in its simple claw setting. I slipped it on to my third finger and held my hand up in happy amazement.

  I was an engaged woman; I was going to marry Xan Molyneux. I wanted nothing else in the world.

  When I had finished admiring my ring I pressed my forehead against the window frame and stared towards the west and the desert. I prayed wordlessly for Xan and whatever road he was watching, wherever he was hiding from the enemy convoys and spotter planes.

  A knock on my door shook me back to earth.

  Faria called, ‘Daddy’s car is here. Can we drop you off anywhere?’

  I imagined pulling up outside Ruth’s flat in Amman Pasha’s enormous black limousine with the chauffeur in his pale-fawn livery opening the door and bowing as I stepped out.

  ‘No, thanks. I haven’t changed yet.’

  ‘Have a lovely time,’ her voice floated back to me.

  I caught the Heliopolis bus. It was packed like a sardine can and smelled of tired bodies, and when we finally reached Ruth’s stop I clambered down with a puff of relief. The main road was busy with trucks and troop carriers and civilian cars but when I turned a corner, following Ruth’s directions, I found myself in a nondescript enclave of low modern houses with concrete balconies and outside staircases. The upper windows of Ruth’s house stood wide open and loud dance music boomed out. I stared in surprise, then realised that the concrete stairs led up to a separate apartment. Strips of yellow light shone between the drawn curtains downstairs. As I tapped the door knocker there was a crash and a bellow of laughter from above.

  Ruth’s face appeared. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured, opening the door wider. ‘Some French officers live up there, they make a terrible racket at all hours. Come on in.’

  Ruth was wearing loose khaki trousers and a white shirt. I had never seen her out of her nurse’s uniform and she looked younger with her dark-red hair undone and pushed back over one shoulder.

  Their sitting room was small, but they had made it look beautiful with handwoven rugs and Bedouin cushions in the colours of the desert, and unframed abstract paintings on the white walls. The calm simplicity made a sharp contrast with the oversized, carved and inlaid furnishings of our flat in Garden City.

  ‘Hello,’ a voice said from behind Ruth’s shoulder. ‘I’m Daphne Erdall.’

  I shook hands with Daphne. She was older than I had expected, perhaps in her early forties. She had a tanned face with broad cheekbones, a wide mouth and clear grey eyes, and her fair hair was so thick it stood out almost horizontally from the crown of her head. She was one of those people you look at and think, this is someone.

  I had brought a bottle of whisky, a real Scottish malt that had been a present to me from Sandy Allardyce who had access to such luxuries through the embassy, and now I gave it to Ruth.

  Her face lit up. ‘My God, Daph, look at this. Nectar from the god of the glens. Can we drink some, Iris?’

  ‘That’s pretty much what I brought it for.’

  ‘You’re very generous. We’ve only got local gutrot,’ Daphne said. She poured us each a measure and we held up our glasses. ‘To friendship,’ Daphne proposed in her direct way. Pleased, I echoed the toast.

  ‘It’s a nice flat,’ I said, looking around. Another crash sounded from above.

  Daphne laughed. ‘Apart from Gaston and his cronies, that is. Actually they’re all right. Our hours don’t overlap much. I’m going to see to the food for a minute; Ruth’ll take care of you.’

  ‘I’ll show you the rest of the flat,’ Ruth offered.

  There wasn’t much to see. In the kitchen a square table was already laid with three places and Daphne was at the stove stirring a pan of couscous. There was a narrow bathroom with a hip bath, and a bedroom with shuttered windows. And there was one double bed, smooth under a white cotton coverlet.

  Belatedly, the penny dropped.

  Ruth was leaning in the doorway. ‘Are you surprised?’

  I was, but I tried not to show it. ‘No. Well, yes, a bit. I haven’t met … But actually, it’s none of my business, is it?’

  She raised one eyebrow. ‘You’d be surprised at how many people think it is their business. Either to be nosy or comical about.’

  But her hand lightly grasped my arm as I passed, a gesture simply expressing warmth without sexual import. I understood that for some reason I was going to be accepted by Ruth and Daphne, and the realisation gave me a shock of satisfaction. The two of them seemed very glamorous to me, and free of all the conventions of upbringing and social expectation that held me in my place. I found myself wanting to be more like them and less like my conventional self.

  ‘It’s ready,’ Daphne called from the kitchen.

  When we sat down at the table with the candles lit and Daphne poured from a jug of dark-red Lebanese wine, there was an air of celebration.

  ‘It’s a special occasion. You are here, and Ruth and I hardly ever get a chance to sit down and eat a proper dinner together,’ she explained.

  We drank the raisin-flavoured wine, ate roast chicken and couscous spiked with fresh herbs, and we talked. My hosts were good company, but they were serious-minded. I quickly realised that I couldn’t rely on the superficial cocktail chatter that did for the rest of my social circuit.

  As at e
very cocktail party and around every dinner table in Cairo that night, we discussed the war. But even the familiar assumption that the war itself was right and justifiable, made automatically by all my circle, was called into question here. Although Ruth and Daphne didn’t call themselves pacifists, that is effectively what they were. Every day they saw the damage that combat did to men like Albie Noake and Private Ridley, and they spent their working hours trying to repair it.

  It was easy to understand why they were sceptical about the big battle that everyone else was waiting for with nervous anticipation that sometimes tipped into excitement.

  ‘You’ve seen my ward,’ Ruth said quietly. ‘In a week’s time, or whenever the push for Tobruk comes, we’ll be caring for twice as many severely wounded. Or three, four, five times as many. The corridors will be full of stretchers. And it will be the same in Daphne’s and every other hospital in Cairo. The trains and ambulances will come flooding in from the desert, packed to the roofs with maimed men from both sides. Is any strategic gain, any military advantage whatsoever, worth that amount of loss and suffering?’

  ‘You think we should surrender to the fascists?’

  ‘I think the generals should consider what it is they are likely to achieve, beyond a few hundred miles of empty desert, that is to be bought with so many men’s lives.’

  ‘If we don’t attack, the Axis forces will push across the western desert and on to Cairo. We have to defend Egypt,’ I said.

  Daphne’s clear eyes rested on my face. ‘For our own ends, not Egypt’s.’

  From my father, who had worked for many years with the high commission towards the final goal of Egyptian independence, I had inherited the belief that British involvement in Egypt was largely benign.

  Daphne leaned forward, pouring more wine into my glass. ‘Your father was a diplomat? Iris, don’t be offended, but we British don’t have a legacy here to be proud of, do we? This isn’t our country, yet we behave exactly as if it were and as if the people are our servants and inferiors. Farouk is the King of Egypt, but our ambassador is the ruler. Given our history and our attitude, why should any Egyptian, from Farouk right down to the fellahin, have any regard for us?’