by Rosie Thomas
They settled themselves in their seats and Mamdooh planted himself a foot from the rear bumper, legs apart and fists on his hips.
‘Are you going to run him over?’ Ruby murmured.
‘I shall try not to.’ The Beetle’s engine coughed and then roared, there was a scream from the gearbox as Iris attempted to find reverse gear without engaging the clutch, but then she seemed to remember something of what driving involved and began to back out of the garage. She rolled down her window and nodded to Mamdooh as he jumped aside. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ she said breezily.
They almost slammed into the opposite wall of the alley. Ruby’s head jerked as Iris stamped on the brakes just in time.
‘Mamdooh’s pissed off with me. He found me and Ash up in my room just now. We weren’t doing anything.’
Iris clicked her tongue as they drove off. ‘Really, Ruby. You have no idea how to behave. What you do is your business, but if you try not to offend people you will find life much simpler.’
Ruby shrank lower in her seat. ‘Sorry,’ she said humbly. ‘Look out!’
A headscarfed matron on a Vespa was crossing ahead of them as Iris shot straight out of a junction. The scooter wobbled as Iris braked and then accelerated, making a gesture of apology as she turned across a hooting stream of traffic.
‘These people always were crazy drivers,’ she said, heading downtown. She was looking at the crowds with curiosity and apparent enjoyment.
Ruby unclenched her fists and told herself that at least it was the end of the day and every street was jammed with vehicles. When the collision came, they wouldn’t be travelling at anything more than a walking pace.
But Iris’s embedded motor responses seemed to fire up again, erratically at first and then more reliably. Her hands loosened on the wheel and she accelerated and changed gear and braked in the right order, apparently without thinking about it. After a few more angry blasts from trucks and taxis she even began to use the indicators.
The traffic heaved and shuddered around them, carrying the Beetle forward like a pebble churning in a wave, then freezing again in a collective hiss of hydraulic brakes, bleating horns, tinny music from the open windows of mud-grey Fiats. Traffic lights suspended in a cat’s-cradle of wires changed from green to red. Ruby looked out at the tall advertisment hoardings wedged between peeling concrete buildings, bright-lit little shops, and the press of people dashing for home or into the mouth of the nearest metro station.
It was the twilight half-hour when the flat sky took on a sudden dark-blue depth. In another half an hour the stars would begin to show. The women with mop buckets would be washing the day’s last eddy of visitors towards the doors of the museum and then the statues and carvings would lie in silence for the night.
After a few minutes she roused herself, aware that she had been daydreaming. Iris had been taking a series of left and right turns further and further away from the main stream of traffic and now they were in a quiet street lined with mimosas and oleander. The lights of apartments were beginning to blink on.
‘Where are we?’ Ruby asked unthinkingly.
Then she saw that Iris was staring ahead through the windscreen. She let the car drift to the side of the road and the tyres struck the kerb at an angle. The car behind them hooted and swept past.
‘Iris? Are you all right?’
There was no answer and Ruby put her hand over her grandmother’s where it rested on the wheel. Iris turned off the ignition and there was silence broken only by the little ticks of cooling metal.
‘It’s all different.’ She shook her head as if she was trying to clear it, and then turned towards Ruby. The street lamp five yards away had just come on and the pale acid glare shone into her face. ‘I don’t know where I’m going.’
‘I’m not surprised; of course it’s all different,’ Ruby began.
But Iris was staring through her. Her mouth trembled and her eyes had lost their focus. She looked shocked, as if she were seeing the faded streets of sixty years ago and was disorientated by the brutal superimposition of modern buildings and the unfamiliar breadth of teeming new roads.
They sat for a moment in silence. A pair of men walking by in smart suits with camelhair coats slung over their shoulders glanced into the car with brief curiosity. At least they weren’t in a dodgy area, Ruby thought. It even seemed vaguely familiar, now she looked at it. The apartment blocks looked prosperous and there were guard houses at some of the tall gates.
She squeezed Iris’s hand in her own. ‘Let’s go home. Can you drive?’
But Iris was soundlessly weeping.
‘Don’t cry. It’s all right, look, here.’ From the pocket of her jeans Ruby produced a Kleenex and tried to dry her tears.
‘It has all gone.’ Iris’s voice was like an abandoned child’s, plangent with a terrible despair.
‘No, it’s still here, it’s still Cairo. It’s just time, doing what it does.’
‘Doing what it does,’ Iris forlornly echoed, the words themselves seeming to make no sense to her however much she longed to find comfort in them.
‘That’s right,’ Ruby confirmed. The obvious thing to do was take Iris back home, to the reassurance of familiar surroundings. She detached her hand from Iris’s although Iris tried to hang on to it, climbed out of the car and came round to the driver’s side. Then she gently helped her out and into the passenger seat, Iris doing as she was prompted with childlike trust. The tears had stopped and she just looked smaller and frailer.
Ruby took the wheel and started up the car. If she could drive the taxi back from Muqattam, she reasoned, she could equally well find their way home from here. Given time.
The streets were curved, seeming to loop around gardens crammed with leafy darkness. She drove slowly, ignoring impatient hooting, searching for a clue to where they might be. There was a tall brown block on the next corner, projecting metal balconies outlined against the glare of light from a busier street and Ruby slowed even further as they came to the junction, craning left and right.
Iris stirred. ‘What are you doing? Turn right,’ she said suddenly, in a louder voice quite unlike the lost child’s.
Ruby did as she was told. The traffic was lighter now and they swept past gaudy shop windows. She darted a glance at Iris. ‘You know, you could direct me. I’m not very sure of the way.’
With a touch of irritation Iris pointed ahead. ‘Carry on until the end of Sharia Mawardi, then turn left.’
‘OK’.
They rattled over tramlines and then in the distance Ruby saw the outline of the Citadel, two solid shades darker than the opaque eastern sky. Now she had a reference point. After a minute or two, they were out in the blare and rush of Sharia Port Said and she could almost relax. They had been in Iris’s old neighbourhood, Garden City.
‘Soon be home,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Iris agreed. ‘Are you all right, driving this car?’
‘I think so.’
Ten minutes later they nosed into the cobbled alleyway. Ruby left the engine running and got out to open the heavy wooden doors, then eased the Beetle into its space. She let her hands fall into her lap with a silent gasp of relief. Her hair was glued to her damp forehead.
‘I am sorry,’ Iris mumbled.
‘What for?’
‘For crying.’
‘Because we were lost?’
There was a pause. ‘I suppose that was the reason.’
Ruby had no idea how much of the past Iris actually remembered and could only guess at the terror that the periodic blankness must bring. She reached for the knob that controlled the headlights and darkness rushed around them as they blinked out.
She said firmly, ‘We’re not lost. We’re in Cairo and we’ve got each other, haven’t we?’
Iris gathered herself, pulling her coat round her and arranging her limbs ready for the effort of climbing out of the car. She was very tired. ‘We’ve got each other.’ The words were repeated in the same wondering
way.
It struck Ruby afresh that her grandmother was lonely as well as confused. She said, ‘Come on, let’s go inside.’
‘I wanted to go for a drive.’ That it hadn’t been a comfortable excursion didn’t diminish the original longing.
‘I know. And we can go for plenty more, whenever you like.’ The memory project seemed to have come to nothing; she could do this much if that was what Iris wanted.
‘Don’t say anything,’ Iris begged.
‘‘Course not. What about, anyway?’
They entered the house through the back door, conspirators.
In the hall, there was a coat folded over the back of one of the gaunt chairs. Iris saw it and stopped, turning to Ruby with the silent question. Ruby only shrugged; evidently there was a visitor, but she had no idea who it might be.
He was waiting in Iris’s sitting room. He had been reading a paper, but he stood up when he heard them coming up the stairs.
‘Bon soir. Excusez-moi. Iris, how are you?’
The man was compact, dark-haired and olive-skinned, dressed conventionally enough but with a touch of flamboyance in the extra-bright blue of his shirt and the silky handkerchief trailing out of his side pocket.
‘Nicolas.’
‘I was making a visit to a patient nearby and I thought I would call in. Maybe it is not convenient?’ His dark eyes rested on Ruby. ‘We haven’t met.’
‘Nicolas, this is my granddaughter Ruby. Ruby, this my friend Doctor Nicolas Grosseteste. My physician.’
Mamdooh’s called him in, Ruby thought.
‘Hi.’
He smiled. ‘How do you do? Mamdooh so kindly gave me a drink. I have been enjoying five minutes with the newspaper while I waited.’
He was very charming and good-looking.
‘Will you stay another five minutes?’
‘If I may, Iris. It’s too long since we saw each other.’
‘Ruby …’
‘I’ll go and tell Mamdooh and Auntie we’re back.’
Ruby went down through the house and found the old people in the kitchen. Auntie was chopping vegetables, as usual, and Mamdooh was sitting in his chair beside the stove.
‘We had a nice drive,’ she told him. ‘Mum-reese is with the doctor now.’
‘Very good,’ he answered flatly. Mamdooh wouldn’t give any ground. Auntie set Iris’s glass in its worn silver holder on a small tray, poured boiling water to make tea, wrapped some bread in a napkin and put it beside a little dish of honey. With her head on one side, like a little brown bird’s, she asked Ruby a question in Arabic and Ruby said, ‘Yes, thanks, Auntie, I’ll take it up.’ This was their way of talking to each other, through and across the languages.
From the upper hallway Ruby heard the doctor’s voice and Iris’s response followed, then they both laughed and Iris made another rejoinder.
‘But that was long before you were born,’ she was saying.
They looked up when Ruby came in with her tray.
Doctor Nicolas stayed to drink another glass of tea and then said he must be on his way. He bent over Iris and kissed her hand, and she patted his arm affectionately. Ruby led the way down the stairs to show him out. As he put on his overcoat in the hall the doctor said, ‘Your grandmother seems well.’
‘Does she?’
‘You sound as though you disagree.’ Again, the doctor’s dark eyes rested on her.
Ruby hesitated, unsure of how much to say. ‘She’s forgetful. It worries her. I want to help but it’s hard when she can only tell me little bits about her life, all disconnected. Sometimes she’ll only say a word or two, and they’re meaningless, but she’ll look at me and I know she expects and wants them to say much more.’
Nicolas studied her for a moment, then he smiled. ‘Iris is a very strong woman and has been so all her life. She fears a loss of control, in particular of herself or her faculties.’
Ruby nodded. For some reason a picture of her mother came into her mind, Lesley in the ordered, humming space of the kitchen at home. White mugs on the glass shelves. Ranks of jars and tins in the cupboards.
Guardedly, she said, ‘She doesn’t want to forget her history. I don’t blame her. Your memories must be so precious, when you are old. They’re what you’ve saved up, aren’t they? More precious than money or houses or fame. Iris doesn’t want to lose hers because once they’ve gone you’ve got nothing. You are nothing.’
‘You know, I am not sure I entirely agree with that. A human being doesn’t exist simply in his or her own consciousness. Each of us has an effect on those around us, and we have our being in their estimation also. In their appreciation or otherwise. In their memories as well as our own.’
Ruby nodded eagerly. ‘We’ve talked about that. I had this idea I could kind of store up her memories for her, you know, like an oral history project. But it doesn’t seem to happen. She can’t get it into words.’
‘Memory is complex, as well as fragile. It isn’t just a list of dates and events. You might argue that it is much more to do with scents and textures, and less tangible elements even than those. The cadence of a voice uttering a single word. A bird’s song at dawn on one significant day. All these things compact, as in a great poem. I don’t know how you might set about capturing and then translating them for another, but then I am only a doctor, not a poet.’
Ruby decided that she liked Doctor Nicolas. ‘I’m neither. Just Iris’s granddaughter. I want to help, that’s all.’
‘I believe you are doing that already, Ruby. May I call you that?’
‘Sure. How am I helping?’
Nicolas considered. ‘Iris has been living alone for many years, and as she has become more physically frail and less able to go out into the world I think she has become isolated. As a result of that isolation a moderate depression has taken hold. It happens that some of the symptoms of depression mimic those of the early phases of dementia, and I think that her confusion and anxiety are attributable to the former. Quite possibly she is confusing the two afflictions herself, and this is increasing her anxiety.’
‘Have you told her this?’
‘Of course I have tried to. But as you know, Iris does not welcome what she regards as intrusion into her privacy. I can treat her physical ailments, but her mind is still her own. However, since your arrival I have noticed a change in her. She is much more alert, more positive in her responses to stimuli, her blood pressure is lower, she seems to eat and sleep better. You have lifted her spirits.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Most definitely.’
Ruby’s smile lit up her face. ‘Result, then. So you think I should stay?’
The doctor picked up his medical bag. ‘Can you? You are very young and you will have calls on your time.’
‘I think you could say I’m at a crossroads. Iris and I went out for a drive today, by the way. Did Mamdooh tell you that’s where we were? We’ve got her old Beetle back on the road.’
‘Excellent. I should think going out is precisely what she needs. I’ll call back again in a few days, Ruby. You can tell me how you both are.’
Nicolas held out his dry, cool hand and Ruby shook it. She went with him to the door and after he had walked briskly away she stood on the top step and breathed in the thick night scents. Animals, diesel fumes, spices, pee.
It came to her that she liked Cairo.
When she went back upstairs she found that Iris had fallen asleep in her chair. She unfolded a shawl and tucked it carefully round her grandmother’s shoulders.
After the battles for Sidi Rezegh and Rommel’s withdrawal to the line at Mersa el Brega, there came a lull in the desert fighting. Many of the officers and men of the Eighth Army came back to Cairo on leave, and for Xan and me and our friends Christmas 1941 turned into a series of wild parties, mostly impromptu and held in someone’s apartment where we danced to the gramophone and drank whatever we could lay our hands on.
Sometimes it would have been easy to forget the
re was a war on at all. Some days were officially meatless, even in the smart restaurants, because enemy control of the Mediterranean meant that meat could no longer be imported and local supplies were rationed, so we just ordered shellfish or cheese soufflé instead. Grain shortages drove the poor in Cairo to attack the bakeries in attempts to steal what they could no longer buy, while Faria’s Coptic Christian parents gave a party in their house for two hundred guests with a jazz band, French champagne and a five-course dinner served by gloved servants at tables decorated with garlands of fresh flowers flown up from Southern Africa. I still enjoyed these pleasures, but the city was full of contrasts that seemed to grow sharper every day. I was beginning to see the world, and my privileged place in it, through Ruth’s and Daphne’s eyes.
At her parents’ party Faria told me that her father and Ali’s father had insisted on finalising a wedding date. We were repairing our make-up at the dressing-table glass in her girlhood bedroom.
‘The 28th of May,’ she said, painting her lips in an unsmiling dark-red slash. Her black hair was as smooth and shiny as if coated in shellac and her oval face was expressionless.
Over her head I glanced at my own overexcited pink-and-white reflection.
‘Are you happy?’ I asked.
‘Happy? Darling, I have no idea. Should one be? Would you be?’
Thinking of Ali, and the contrast he made with Xan, I guessed not – but I wasn’t Faria.
‘Anyway, life will go on, won’t it?’ Faria snapped her lipstick back into its case and turned her head from side to side so her diamond earrings caught the light. ‘What about you and Xan?’
‘My mother wants to come out here.’
‘Ah. The English church, the ambassador to read the lesson, a regimental guard of honour.’
‘I suppose so.’
Faria leaned close to me and I breathed in her heavy perfume. Shalimar. ‘If I were you, I would elope. Don’t waste another hour.’ She winked, put her arm through mine and led me back down to the dance floor where Xan was waiting.
He put his mouth to my ear and a shiver of pleasure ran all the way down my spine. ‘You are beautiful, Iris Black, and I love you. Are we going to stay all night at this pompous party, or shall we go home to bed?’