by Rosie Thomas
We would be married by an English chaplain in a side chapel at the cathedral, with a tiny handful of friends to witness the ceremony. Xan wanted Jessie to be his best man. Although I knew that the Cherry Pickers were up at the Gazala Line, Xan did not seem particularly concerned about this. Ruth and Sarah would be my attendants; Daphne was unlikely to be able to take the time off from the hospital and Faria would be on her honeymoon. It was comical that Xan’s and my minimal preparations were being made neck and neck with the final elaborate arrangements for Faria’s and Ali’s huge wedding. Our marriage would take place just five days after theirs.
I would wear a simple white silk suit and a hat with a spotted tulle veil. We would have lunch with our little group of friends after the ceremony and give a drinks party for everyone we knew in the evening at the Garden City apartment. Faria’s parents had told Sarah and me that we could stay there until we had made other arrangments.
Gus Wainwright has promised me at least twenty-four hours’ leave, Xan wrote. It may only be a short honeymoon, darling – but we will have a whole life together afterwards.
A whole life. A very long time and it is no wonder that I am tired.
The child is twisting in her seat.
‘It’s four o’clock.’
‘Is it?’
‘Mamdooh and Auntie will be going mad.’
‘Yes, they probably will.’
‘It’s going to be dark in an hour or so.’
‘Yes.’
‘You know that means we’re probably going to have to spend the night here?’
The desert night; the sky a bowl of darkness, stars dimmed by the dust from the storm. Very cold at this time of year and as silent as space.
Xan’s resting place.
‘Iris?’
‘Yes. I am listening.’ Although her insistence irritates me.
‘I can’t just sit here. I’m going to have a look.’
‘To see what?’
She clicks her tongue and pushes the door open. Cooler air swirls in, bringing rolling clouds of dust with it, but the wind has died down. Only an hour ago the force of it would have snatched the door away from her and slammed it against the car.
‘To see how to get us out.’
Ruby’s feet sank deep into the sand. The surface was cool, with warmth embedded further down. She started to run towards the face of the altered dune, the blood in her head urgently pounding with the need for action after so many hours cooped up in the stuffy sealed car. But the blown sand swallowed her feet up to the ankles, and her knees had seized up with sitting for so long. She stumbled and fell forward, her hands plunging in the sand up to the wrists. She stood upright and began trudging more slowly up the steep brown slope. The dune was only twenty-five feet high, but the sand slid away from under her feet and she was carried back one step for every two of upward progress. Her tongue was swollen and coated with thirst, and her stomach distantly rumbled. The dune’s face turned concave and the angle became still steeper. She couldn’t get up this way.
Ruby plunged back down again in ten giant’s strides that set off little avalanches of sand slipping all around her. She half ran to the arm of the dune and began to climb the ridge. This was easier, but she was still gasping for breath and her throat was burning as she laboured up to the summit.
The sky was leaden overhead and away to the left, what must be eastwards – where Cairo lay – it was the colour of an old bruise. In the west the sun was declining somewhere behind a smeared palette of orange and umber and purple cloud. Ruby took her bearings quickly, but it wasn’t the sky she was looking at. Hunching her shoulders against the wind and protecting her eyes with cupped hands, she turned in a breathless circle to see what lay beyond the dune.
Nothing. It was still a landscape of monotonous undulations, dunes rolling away into the distance, rippled or blasted smooth by the force of the wind, but otherwise unmarked. There was no track, no vestige of tyre marks, no sign of a road or a moving creature. The horizon was darkening, but there wasn’t the faintest glow of light over where the city should be. It was a completely empty world.
Down in its hollow the car looked like some pharaonic relic. Grey with dust and bedded in the sand on the windward side up to its wheel arches, it might have been there for centuries. Ruby could just see the pale, floating oval of Iris’s face, turned up to look at her.
The wind up on the ridge was sharp, and Ruby listened to its faint whistling and sighing over the nearby crests. It was a hostile sound and she was shivering.
She jumped and slid back down the steep face to the car. Just in the time that she had been away the sun must have set and now the desert darkness fell like a blanket extinguishing a candle. Twelve hours of a winter night before daylight would flood the world again.
‘Well?’ Iris demanded.
‘I can’t see anything. It can’t be all that far to the road, can it? I mean, how long were we driving along that track? But there’s nothing to see from up there. In the morning, as soon as it’s light, I’ll go a bit further and I’m sure to see it. Then we can head out of here. But we’ll just have to make ourselves as comfortable as we can for tonight.’
Ruby sat in her seat again, telling herself that she must think straight. Her tongue seemed to cleave to the roof of her mouth.
‘It’s time for some more water.’ The bottle was dusty, beaded with condensation inside. When they had both had what seemed like only a tiny drink, it was empty. She reached for the basket that she had impatiently grabbed in the kitchen this morning, aeons ago. ‘And some fruit.’
They each ate an orange, sucking every drop of the juice, and gnawed at some dried apricots although the sweetness only made them more thirsty.
When they had finished they sat in the hollow darkness.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ruby said. ‘It’s my fault.’
‘It’s nothing of the kind. This is my car, my country and I promised your mother that I would take appropriate care of you.’ After a moment Iris added, ‘I wish I hadn’t finally let her down in that, as well as everything else.’
‘It’s not finally. It’s not. It’s just a night in the bloody car, tomorrow we’ll be out of here, all right?’ Ruby pounded her fist on the steering wheel. She was angry at how stupid and how easy it had been to travel in a straight line from this morning’s safety to tonight’s jeopardy.
‘Yes,’ Iris sighed. Ruby couldn’t tell whether she believed this or not, or even whether she really wanted it. She resisted the urge to shake her grandmother and shout at her, this is about our lives. If we can’t find a way out of this desert and nobody knows where the fuck we are, we could die right here …
She didn’t say anything, though. To give voice to her fears would only lend them more substance.
It was steadily getting colder. They had no warm clothes to put on and as the time crept by the chill night air seeped into the car until they were both shivering.
‘Let’s get into the back seat. We can cuddle up,’ Ruby said at last.
They moved into the cramped space and pressed close together. It was a comfort to hold her grandmother’s light-boned body in her arms and hear her breathing. Ruby rested her cheek on the top of Iris’s head and watched the slice of black sky visible through the rear window. The red and white lights of a jet descending to Cairo airport blinked in the distance and this vision of normality made Ruby forget their predicament for a second, but then it dawned again with renewed intensity. The planes were too high; to the crew and the passengers strapped in their seats ready for landing the Beetle would be just a speck in the limitless sand.
But she could see them and that meant the sky was clearing. Even as the thought came to her, she saw a pale prickle of stars.
Iris was dozing. Although her limbs ached with cramp and her throat and mouth were parched, eventually Ruby fell asleep too.
She woke up with a thirst like a high fever and shivering uncontrollably as if her bones would crack. Iris had been stirring an
d mumbling; it was the sound of her voice that woke Ruby.
‘What did you say? Are you all right?’
‘That was the day.’
‘Never mind. God, your feet and hands and freezing. I’ll rub them a bit.’
It was bitterly cold. She chafed Iris’s icy claws between her own but she couldn’t work any warmth into them.
‘I’m going to turn the engine on and run the heater for a few minutes to warm us up. I should have thought of it before. Sit still.’
In the driver’s seat, Ruby groped for the ignition key and turned it. There was a grinding noise, the strangled wail of the starter motor clogged with sand, then silence. Ruby let her hand fall into her lap. The silence spread, rippling away from the immobilised car. The Beetle might as well have been a pharaonic relic, she thought, or just a lump of rock sticking up out of the sand, for all the use it was going to be in getting them out of here. The only way that they were going to survive was by walking, or by waiting to be rescued.
What were the odds, either way, she wondered?
Then a flash of hot, white certainty shot through her brain. She didn’t want to die. Life was too good, too precious and too untasted. It was clear to her that she loved everything about it. The garden at home, with all those dumb plants that used to yield her beetles. The girls she had been at school with, even though they were nearly all bitches. Camden Town and the music scene, Ed and Simon and even Andrew and Will, and especially Lesley. There were uncounted things that she still wanted to do, an incoherent mass of them like fucking Ash and going to Ayers Rock and to that Inca place in Peru, and most of all saying to her mother that she was sorry they always quarrelled. Weirdly but definitely, most of all that.
‘Are you awake?’ she whispered into Iris’s hair.
Iris nodded her head, but she didn’t say anything and Ruby wasn’t sure if she had really heard.
‘I love you,’ she said.
It was simple. In the morning she would go for help.
The rapid dawn briefly raised their spirits. After the darkness, even in the monochrome light, even the empty dunes were reassuring. Soon the sun would flood warmth into the world.
They drank some of the second litre of water, trying to hold the blessing of it in their mouths for as long as possible. Then they clambered stiffly out of the car and eased their joints by stretching out in the sand. Iris looked frighteningly pale and shaky, and Ruby peeled an orange for her, placing the segments one by one into her mouth as if she were feeding a child. The sun came up, spreading a film of colour over the sand. On the crests of the dunes it turned to pale sparkling gold, and on the cheeks and flanks it was beige and terracotta and khaki. The air had already lost its chilling bite. Iris sat propped up against the shaded side of the car with her mottled bare legs stretched out in front of her. Ruby took one last gulp of water, then half buried the bottle in the sand beside Iris and put the basket containing the rest of the fruit and the dried apricots within reach. She made sure that her grandmother had her hat and her scarf, then she squatted down directly in front of her, looking into her eyes to see if she took in what she was telling her.
‘I’m going for help. I’ll be as quick as I can. Stay here in the shade, don’t move away from the car. Drink a sip of water once in a while, and – look – here are two oranges and two pomegranates. Iris?’
‘I am not deaf. You will promise to look where you’re going, Lesley, won’t you?’
Where was she, in her unreadable confusion? ‘Yes.’
Ruby leaned forward and quickly kissed her. Her feet and head felt heavy, but her heart was racing with adrenalin. The sooner she went, she reasoned, the quicker she would be back again.
She began walking, towards the flaming ball of the sun. From the crest of the first dune she looked back. All she could see were Iris’s feet sticking out beyond the car and her own footprints leading away, already fading, like a betrayal.
She scrambled up a dune, down into the hollow beyond and up again, always heading into the sun. It was hard work and she was soon out of breath. The next dune was higher and she had it in her mind that once she was on the summit of this one the road would be there in the distance, with trucks and tourist buses catching the sunlight and winking rescue at her.
As she laboriously climbed, the sand carried her backwards. Sweat ran into her eyes, and she flopped onto her hands and knees to crawl the last few metres.
She poked her head over the ridge. There was no road in sight. Only more dunes, in every direction, identical.
On her knees Ruby shuffled in a circle. A breeze fanned her face but it also stirred the sand. The tracks leading backwards and linking her to Iris were blurred hollows trapping a fingernail of shadow, becoming less distinct with every puff of wind. As soon as they were rubbed out Iris would be lost to her.
It was unbearable, unthinkable to leave her lying there alone.
Ruby staggered to her feet and began running back the way she had come. Already it was hard to distinguish the footprints from the natural dimples worn by the wind.
Oh please, let me find her. Please, please let me.
Faria’s wedding was exquisite. Every opulent detail proclaimed the wealth of both families and their satisfaction at this dynastic amalgamation.
The medieval Coptic church was lit entirely by candles. Along with the whole of fashionable Cairo, Sarah and I sat under the branched golden candelabra and watched Ali waiting to receive his bride. He stood with his father and brother beside him, all three of them in pearl-grey cutaway coats, expressionless, dark-faced, massively convinced of their collective power.
Faria was almost half an hour late. I remember thinking that this was her very last gesture of independence. From now on, Ali would require her to behave like a good and pliant Egyptian wife. She came down the aisle at a slow pace with the huge pearl-embroidered train of her dress swishing over the floor. Her waist looked tiny. The diet and some punishing French corsetry had done the trick.
When Ali stepped to her side she allowed him to take her arm but her face was turned aside, as if he were merely an usher or a major-domo who had hurried forward to help her out of her limousine. I glanced at Sarah, to see if she was also wondering how this marriage could work, but her head was bowed and she was picking at the hem of her kid glove.
Faria would find a way to arrange her life to her own satisfaction, I decided.
In five days’ time I would be Xan’s wife. The dozens of candle flames shivered in the incense-heavy air of the packed church as I listened to the Coptic liturgy.
* * *
The wedding feast was held at Faria’s parents’ mansion. The bride and groom led the way from the church on foot, accompanied by the zaffa – a long parade of drummers and belly-dancers who played and sang and danced around them. The enormous reception hall of the house was decorated with tall sheaves of green wheat, representing fertility, tied with ribbons of gold representing – I supposed – money. Ali and Faria, king and queen of the day, sat between the wheat-sheaves under a golden canopy to receive their guests. The real King and Queen of Egypt were among them.
There were no field officers from any of the Allied armies. Rommel’s long-awaited attack had begun two days earlier.
Out in the desert, after an Italian feint towards the north of the Gazala Line, the Panzer Army had hooked south around Bir Hacheim and were now fighting their way up through General Ritchie’s armoured brigades towards Tobruk. The armoured cars and infantry of the German Ninetieth Light, meanwhile, ploughed into the exposed communication lines of the Allied rearguard.
I wandered through the glittering rooms. There were lilies everywhere, overpoweringly scented, and drifts of rose petals, and white-gloved servants, and more jewels than I had ever seen in one place. A little group of people I knew from the embassy appeared and I went with them into the supper room. The tables heaped with food stretched into the distance; much more food than the hundreds of guests could ever eat or even make much of an i
mpression upon. There was enough to feed an army. The waistband of my best silk dress was much too tight. I turned aside from a swan sculpted in ice that lifted a crystal trough of Beluga caviar between its wings, and saw Roddy Boy coming towards me.
He took my arm, standing too close so that I made an awkward step to one side. My hip bumped against the edge of the table and the swan’s beak seemed to peck at the scented air.
‘Iris, come with me.’
‘Where?’
My companions had fallen back and Roddy and I were standing in an empty space.
‘I have something to tell you.’
I knew. I already knew.
There was a niche at the far side of the supper room. I sat down on a gilt empire sofa and Roddy Boy put his hand on my arm.
‘Please tell me at once,’ I said.
‘I have some very bad news. I am afraid that Captain Molyneux was killed in action two days ago, in the Qattara.’
I must have asked for more information.
A few feet away from us, Ali’s and Faria’s guests were scooping lobster and caviar on to white-and-gold porcelain plates. There was singing and dancing and loud applause in a neighbouring room. The wedding banquet was in full swing.
I listened to Roddy Boy’s words as if I had already heard them.
He told me that Xan and his Arab scout had been leading a small exploratory detachment over the route that their patrol had devised as a means of bringing Allied armour in on the southern flank of the Eighth Army. It was a highly secret operation, known to very few people outside Special Operations Executive. But as the little column wound its way through the wind-sculpted buttes and mesas of the Qattara, a formation of six Italian Macchi aircraft had appeared and homed in on them with a level of accuracy that ruled out coincidence. Most of the men had been mortally wounded by machine-gun and cannon fire, and several of the vehicles had burst into flames.
The heavy armoured trucks and cars had been drawn from the Eleventh Hussars, the Cherry Pickers, and their second-in-command was Captain James. Captain James had been very seriously injured but he had been brought in from the desert and was now in the Queen Mary Hospital. It was Jessie James who had given an account of the skirmish, and of Xan’s death, to a staff officer from GHQ.