Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘It’s fine. What can happen?’

  ‘Going to Giza only, I suppose nothing. You will take Cairo taxi?’

  ‘I’m going to drive the Beetle, seeing that Nafouz got it all fixed up for us.’

  ‘This is not a good idea, I think.’

  Ruby laughed. ‘Where’ve I heard that before? And it’s better for me to drive than to let my grandmother do it, I can tell you.’

  ‘Well, then, just so far as Giza.’

  Ruby got up in the dark and went barefoot to knock on Iris’s bedroom door.

  Iris was already out of bed, standing in the middle of the room in her vest and waist slip. She looked at Ruby with the shadow of confusion in her eyes. ‘I don’t know what to wear. What do you think?’

  ‘Put on a dress and a warm cardigan, and your flat leather sandals. Here they are.’ Ruby found the shoes and Iris sat down heavily on her bed while Ruby lifted first one foot and then the other. Knotted blue veins and the hard ridges of tendons bulged under the flaking skin and Ruby cupped each heel in turn, protectively, before she slid on the shoes. It made her throat tighten to see that Iris’s toenails needed cutting and she blinked quickly to clear her blurred vision. She decided that she would ask her later if she could do it.

  ‘There. Bring your hat and some sunglasses as well.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Iris said sharply. When she didn’t happen to need help she hated any suggestion that she might. ‘Why don’t you go round and get the car ready, and I will meet you at the front of the house?’

  ‘All right. See you in five minutes.’ Ruby went downstairs through the dark hallway. It was early, but she was disconcerted to discover that the lights were already on in the kitchen. She had planned to ease herself and Iris out of the house before Mamdooh could interrupt, and luckily it was only Auntie who was carrying a pan of water across to the old stove. Mamdooh’s chair was empty; Ruby guessed that he wouldn’t be stirring himself for an hour or so yet.

  Auntie put down the pan and hurried across to seize Ruby’s arm, peering up into her face and asking quick questions. Ruby picked out shai and ‘aish, tea and bread – Auntie was asking if she wanted breakfast.

  ‘Don’t worry, Auntie, thanks very much. We’re just, like going out for a bit of a drive. Just to see the sunrise, you know? We’ll be back.’

  There was another rattle of Arabic with a sprinking of words that she knew, all to do with food.

  ‘I’ll just take some fruit, OK?’ Ruby helped herself to a couple of pomegranates and put them with some oranges into a straw bag that she lifted off a hook. Auntie beamed and added a tight package of dried apricots, chattering vehemently as she did so.

  ‘Shukran, Auntie. Whoa, that’s plenty. We’ll see you later.’ She lifted her free hand in a quick wave as she slid through the door that led towards the back alley.

  ‘Inshallah.’

  ‘Inshallah,’ Ruby cheerfully echoed over her shoulder. She latched the kitchen door behind her.

  The pungent alley was almost pitch dark. Ruby trod with care, trying not to hear the rustlings among the debris in the central gutter. She groped for the big padlock, found its cold weight and slid in the key. Once she was inside the car she threw the basket onto the back seat, the Beetle started up at once and the headlights cut a welcome yellow wedge in the blackness. Just on the margin, very briefly, there was the glimmer of several pairs of eyes.

  Ruby drove round to the point where the street narrowed to become impassable to cars.

  Iris was waiting for her. ‘You took your time,’ she said, as she settled into the passenger seat.

  ‘Auntie was already up.’ They rolled towards the river and the Giza road.

  * * *

  Now they sat at the roadside café watching the morning traffic build up. Iris finished her coffee and drank some water, dabbing her mouth afterwards with a folded handkerchief as Ruby chewed her way through bread and hard-boiled egg chopped up with onion.

  ‘Have some breakfast.’ She pushed the bowl of bread an inch closer but Iris ignored her. ‘Or tell me about Daphne Erdall.’

  Surprisingly, Iris responded at once. ‘She was a doctor. A very good doctor, a surgical anaesthetist here in Cairo, and her friend Ruth Macnamara was a nurse. I was very young and silly but I learned a lot from the two of them. It was because of Daphne’s example that I decided to study medicine myself, once the war was over. I married your father when I was coming to the end of my clinical practice at St Bartholomew’s.’

  ‘My grandfather, you mean.’

  Iris glared at her. Her lips were pale, and compressed into a thin line emphasised by radiating creases. ‘Don’t tell me what I mean. Yes, your grandfather.’

  Ruby thought of the soldier in the framed photograph beside Iris’s bed, the only photograph on display in the whole house, the soldier who was definitely not Grandfather Gordon. Remembering the name that Iris had mentioned she asked, ‘What happened to Captain Molyneux?’

  Iris considered for a moment before answering. Then she cleared her throat and said precisely, ‘He was killed in the desert. In May 1942.’

  In the following silence Ruby did the arithmetic. Sixty-three years ago; remote history, almost. ‘That’s sad,’ she said.

  ‘Sad. Yes.’

  Iris sat with her hands folded, looking straight ahead of her at what Ruby could not see. There was something practised and impenetrable about her absolute stillness.

  As Ruby tried to think what to say next she noticed that the world had acquired colour. The walls of the café shack were sunflower yellow, the crops in the field across the road a pale, watered-down green. Somewhere behind them, beyond the Suez Canal, the sun had risen.

  The opportunity for saying something, anything at all, seemed to have passed. Ruby shifted on her tin chair and stirred a small cloud of greyish dust. She put her hand out and covered Iris’s folded ones.

  ‘Would you like some more coffee? Or shall we move on?’

  In the absence of any response she beckoned the surly café owner and asked for the bill. Then she followed him into the dingy interior and took two litre bottles of water out of the chiller cabinet, fumbling with worn and dirty pound notes as she paid for everything. Outside again, she took Iris by the arm and led her back to the car. They drove on towards Giza in what was now a steady flood of taxis and buses that hooted and slewed through flocks of brown and white sheep and plodding buffalo. By this time it was much too late for seeing the sunrise at the Pyramids, but they headed on anyway towards the dun-coloured jumble of wire fences and loop roads and coach parks that surrounded the Giza complex.

  Then Ruby glanced at Iris and saw that she was weeping again.

  Tears ran down her face and over her nose and into the seams round her mouth.

  Ruby pulled in to the side of the road once more, causing further hooting. She stuck her fist out of the window in an angry gesture, then she put her arms round her grandmother and tried awkwardly to draw her close. The handbrake and gearstick got in the way.

  ‘Iris, stop. Please stop. I don’t know what to do when you cry like this.’

  Iris felt so fragile, too small and brittle to contain such grief. Ruby could do nothing except hold her with the old car’s workings prodding in between them, and wait for the tears to stop. She stroked her thin hair and murmured pointless words that were intended to be comforting, and at the same time she thought about Jas. He was often in her mind but she hadn’t cried for him, hardly at all.

  At last Iris’s shuddering sobs petered out and she was quiet. Ruby propped her up by the shoulders and looked into her eyes, and Iris jerked up her chin and pressed the heels of her hands to her face. ‘Ridiculous.’ She sniffed. ‘Give me a handkerchief, will you?’

  Ruby didn’t go in for keeping handkerchiefs tucked into her sleeve or folded into a pocket, the way Iris did, but after some rummaging she found Iris’s own for her and put it into her hand. While Iris dried her eyes and blew her nose, Ruby stared ahead through the windscree
n.

  With Jas still in her thoughts, she asked, ‘Were you crying because Captain Molyneux died?’

  ‘After sixty years? No, I don’t believe so. I’ve grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It’s weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.’

  ‘That sounds a bit … what’s the word? Grandiose, is that it?’

  ‘Does it?’

  To Ruby’s relief, Iris laughed. ‘Yes, you are probably right. On the other hand, wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate, and we are so frail in the face of it that it’s hard to do anything other than mourn. But you’re young, Ruby. You are invincible, and for you everything carries a twin charge of novelty and infinite possibility. Whatever novelty I shall experience is unlikely to be pleasant and the possibilities that remain are more or less limited to various rates of decay.’

  Ruby considered. ‘Well, I turned up, didn’t I? That was a novelty, and you said you were pleased about it.’

  ‘Yes, Ruby. You did, and I am.’

  ‘Thanks. Doctor Nicolas told me he thought you might be sort of depressed.’

  ‘That is his theory, yes.’

  ‘You don’t believe it?’

  Iris sighed. ‘I have had a long life and I have been useful. I enjoyed my work, very much, for many years. I have a home and people to care for me, and I could have more company if I wished for it. I am afraid of losing what I have always valued …’

  ‘The cup on the shelf?’

  Iris looked startled. ‘Did I say that to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I had forgotten. You see? Yes, there is that, and there is also the sense that I have had a hole at the centre of my life. It has been there for a very long time. But I don’t know that these various anxieties and shortcomings constitute depression. It’s a catch-all term, in my opinion. Modern medical thinking, you know.’

  Ruby pressed the flat of her hands against the steering wheel and arched her back. She was still looking at the road. ‘This hole in the centre? It’s not really Captain Molyneux, is it? Would I be right in thinking it’s actually Mum?’

  There was a pause. ‘Lesley.’

  ‘Yeah. Your daughter, my mother.’

  Ruby was thinking, she’s not going to answer and she won’t say anything else.

  But Iris did nod her head, very slowly, as if it hurt. ‘Maybe.’ She took a long breath, raised her chin again and glared out at the file of traffic. ‘Where are we going?’

  If she didn’t want to talk, Ruby couldn’t make her. ‘To the bloody Pyramids, supposedly. Do you still want to?’

  ‘I … would like to go for a drive. Out into the desert a little way. Can we do that instead?’

  ‘Of course we can.’

  They rejoined the column of traffic, but instead of being drawn with it towards the three triangles magnetically pasted against the whitish southern sky, they broke free and headed on, westwards, with the sun rising higher at their backs. The pale-green ribbon of irrigated fields that threaded along beside the Nile had been left far behind and out here there were only low sand dunes that glittered where the sun caught them and trapped broad scoops of donkey-brown shadow within their concave arms.

  Ruby took a series of turnings at random, deliberately trying to leave behind what remained of the thinning traffic. Cairo and the suburbs were so crowded, it was a pleasure to shake off the hooting and screeching of brakes, and creep forward into space and emptiness. The road narrowed and took a southerly direction, and in places it was submerged under a thin layer of wind-blown sand.

  ‘There is a tiny oasis out here somewhere,’ Iris said. ‘With a view of the Pyramids that you don’t get from anywhere else.’ She looked back over her shoulder, searching for a glimpse of it.

  Ruby was watching the humpbacks of the dunes. They were like pieces of architecture, seeming too perfectly smooth and sculpted to be natural. The sudden empty monotony of the slow-motion scenery was hypnotic. The occasional vehicle darted along a distant road that skirted the dunes, looking like an angry insect against the vast tawny flanks.

  ‘Do you want to turn back and try to find it?’ she murmured.

  ‘I only went there once.’

  The Beetle hummed along, its tyres swishing through the skim of sand on tarmac. Ruby and Iris both fell into a contented silence, watching the endless rise and fall of the empty landscape.

  For the first three months of 1942 I worked at my GHQ job in Roddy Boy’s office and spent whatever time I had to spare at the Queen Mary. I saw how the medical services dealt with the constant stream of casualties brought back from the front as Rommel recaptured Benghazi and pushed eastwards again, and my admiration for Daphne and the others who worked with her steadily grew. When we met outside working hours, I began to ask her and Ruth more and more questions about medical and nursing techniques.

  Ruth used to tease me about it. ‘Is this medical school? Why do you want to know all these details about barrier nursing and antisepsis and bone-setting?’

  ‘It’s interesting.’

  Daphne agreed, in her brisk way. ‘Acute medicine is more interesting than anything else.’

  We had become friends, but however well I felt I was getting to know them, their company sometimes made me feel like an outsider. Daphne was absorbed in her work and Ruth was absorbed in Daphne, and I skirted between them. So I didn’t confide to them what I had begun to plan for the future, although I did talk about it to Xan.

  ‘After the war, when we’re married and back in England …’

  ‘Yes, darling. I’m going to buy myself out of the army and find a job. What do you think I could do? Stockbroking? Bowler hat, golf, Surrey, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I can just see it.’

  ‘No? What about being a farmer? Some jolly pink pigs to fatten up. Would you like to be a farmer’s wife? Or … I know, insurance salesman. I’m sure I could persuade people to buy lots of lovely life insurance. Anyway, whatever I do won’t matter, will it, because we’ll have each other?’

  ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘Have babies. Dozens of ‘em.’

  ‘Well, yes, but there’s something else. I want to train to be a doctor.’

  ‘Do you?’ He stretched out his arm and hooked me closer to him, smoothing the corners of my mouth with his thumbs. ‘My clever, ambitious wife-to-be. In that case I won’t need a job at all.’

  ‘Xan, be serious.’

  Some of the playfulness faded out of his eyes. ‘I don’t want to be serious.’

  I could have bitten my tongue. I had seen very little of him since New Year’s Eve and when he did appear in Cairo, with Hassan or on occasional flying visits with Colonel Wainwright in the WACO, he was filthy and exhausted and he flatly deflected all my questions about what he had been doing or how difficult and dangerous it had been. Even more than when I had first known him, when he was away from the desert Xan wanted to laugh and make love and forget everything else.

  We held each other tightly. After a moment he said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s hard, and it’s getting harder, to move between … war and being with you. It’s like walking a tightrope between hell and heaven.’

  ‘I can only try to imagine.’

  ‘Don’t. I don’t want you even to begin to imagine it. Iris, if you want to study medicine after the war, then of course you shall. We’ll make it our priority.’

  ‘Good.’ I smiled at him. ‘I like getting my own way, right from the beginning.’

  ‘That’s settled, then. What’s the news from GHQ?’

  ‘GHQ is the same as ever.’

  ‘Unfortunately.’

  Intelligence gathered by Roddy Boy’s section had in the past been employed to assure field commanders that the enemy had not been reinforced with men or arms, and then the opposite had turned out to be true. As I well knew, last year Xan’s patrol had run into a
detachment of Panzers that was theoretically nowhere in the vicinity, and Captain Burke and Private Ridley and the others had died, and Albie Noake had lost half his face. Now, as Rommel advanced once more, the First Armoured Division fatally met a Panzer force that – it turned out – had been augmented by tanks brought in by German naval convoy to Tripoli. Even though the men on the ground had seen the armour with their own eyes, GHQ had difficulty believing what our Intelligence could not actually confirm.

  ‘We can only know what we bloody well do know,’ I overheard Roddy protest in exasperation.

  Now I heard from Xan that there was more concern. Xan’s Tellforce and some of the other commando groups were discovering that the enemy had developed an uncanny ability to predict when and where their raids were to take place. The commandos would be parachuted in over their secret objectives, the supply dumps or enemy airfields, or dropped off by Tellforce patrols on intricate sabotage missions, and time and again they would find enemy ground or air forces apparently lying in wait for them.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked, although I knew the answer.

  ‘A security leak.’

  ‘From GHQ? That’s not possible, surely?’ Officers in the field routinely complained that there were too many pampered senior staff officers with too little to do, but I couldn’t imagine that Roddy Boy or anyone like him was guilty of breaching security, even accidentally.

  ‘Maybe not. But who can say for certain? Or maybe it’s the Americans. It seems only to have been happening since they came in.’

  ‘How?’

  Xan sighed. ‘If I knew, it would be simpler, wouldn’t it? I’m just a patrol commander working out in the desert and doing what I’m told, but it seems to me that it’s more than unfortunate coincidence.’

  We were sitting together on a rug spread under a mimosa tree at the club. I drew up my knees and wrapped my arms round them, and that small movement seemed to release a thick drift of the dry, potent scent of mimosa blossom into the hot air.

  ‘Maybe it’s Sandy Allardyce.’

  ‘Trading military secrets while locked in the arms of Mrs K-G?’