by Rosie Thomas
Apart from army lorries pouring in from the desert and staff cars with preoccupied brass fuming behind their drivers, most of the cars belonged to ordinary Egyptians. They were packed with people, families and grandmothers and tiny children, and laden with possessions of all kinds. Suitcases and furniture and baskets of provisions were strapped onto the roofs, and many of the people had tied mattresses on top of all that, to offer some protection against flying debris. It seemed that the whole of Cairo was flooding out into the delta before the war could reach it.
In the street before Qasr el Aini a thick line of people wound from the steps of the Bank of Egypt all the way back down to the next corner. The people who still remained in town wanted to withdraw their money while they could. I passed the queue and walked on to the entrance to GHQ, as automatically as if it were an ordinary day.
I didn’t have my entry pass, but the guard sergeant at the perimeter hut recognised me.
‘Morning, Miss. Business as usual for some of us, isn’t it?’
The dingy, rabbit-warren corridors smelled of burning. Staff officers were dashing up and down the stairs and telephones rang behind closed doors. I found Roddy sitting at his desk behind a pile of ‘Most Secret’ folders that were normally kept under lock and key in our filing cabinets. He got up as soon as he saw me, concern fighting embarrassment in his face.
‘Miss Black, what’s this? Are you well enough to be here?’
Very few people had known that I was pregnant. As far as Roddy was concerned I had just had a stomach upset.
I was at a loss myself and I didn’t know where else to be.
‘I’m well enough. Can’t I do something for an hour or two?’ I begged.
I liked Roddy more than I had done. He had said nothing after Xan died except that he was sorry, but he had given me work to do and he hadn’t treated me as though bereavement made an outcast of me.
He rubbed his jaw now. He was pink and well-shaven, and his service dress was as impeccable as always. ‘Ah. Yes, yes, all right then, plenty to do. Today of all days.’
I made him his mid-morning cup of tea and put the two custard creams in his saucer.
‘What’s going to happen here?’ I asked.
‘If our lines hold at el Alamein, nothing. If not’ – he snapped a biscuit in two – ‘we had all better be ready to evacuate. Half of the GHQ sections and Special Operations are already moving to Jerusalem for safety. And General Corbett has ordered the most sensitive documents to be burned, in case they fall into enemy hands. If you are sure you are able, you could take this lot down for me now. Out to the back of the building, you’ll see when you get there.’
I took the pile of folders off his desk and went downstairs. Several of the offices I passed were empty of their colonels and brigadiers, dusty shelves swept bare, metal filing cabinets gaping open. The smell of burning had grown much stronger.
Out on a bare patch of ground stood a line of blazing forty-gallon oil drums. Sweating men, their faces blackened with smoke, were dashing up to them and tossing huge sheaves of classified documents into the flames. Captain Frobisher was supervising the operation.
‘Hullo, Martin.’
He greeted me respectfully. Since Xan’s death I had become an awkward figure, no longer someone to be joked or flirted with.
‘This is a bit of a show, isn’t it?’ He took the folders out of my arms and consigned them to the waiting heap.
I stood beside him for a few minutes, watching the columns of black smoke rising over the rooftops of GHQ. The updraught carried flakes of singed paper with it and they swirled down again like gingery snow.
I went home to the flat that evening with my clothes reeking of smoke. Roddy and I had cleared our files of anything remotely sensitive and the oil drum fires were still burning brightly.
Mamdooh was full of the news. He told Sarah and me that shopkeepers had started putting up pictures of Mussolini in their windows. Indignantly he muttered, ‘British not so very bad in Egypt, whatever these ignorant people think, and Germans and Italians much worse, hear my words.’ His little boy sat on a stool, watching and listening.
Sarah’s job was in the embassy, and her contribution was that the ambassador had made a great show of normality all day and had now taken his lady out to dinner. But Sandy Allardyce, the embassy’s best German speaker, had been told that he would have to stay behind to liaise with the Germans once the ambassador and the rest of the staff had travelled to safety. Remembering the rumours about Sandy being a spy, we looked at each other and laughed.
It was bedtime, but I couldn’t sleep. The drama of the day had kept my mind busy but now that I was alone I felt empty and despairing. I stood at my window for a long time, staring at the outlines of my jacaranda tree. If the Germans came or if they did not, it seemed hardly to matter. At last I sat down at my table and wrote a letter to my mother and father, telling them the news about Xan and the baby.
* * *
As soon as they stepped out of the air-conditioned order of the airport, Lesley and Andrew were assaulted by Cairo. Taxi drivers and touts mobbed them and tried to yank the suitcases out of their hands. Andrew pulled away from the insistent grasp of one man, only to be seized from another direction and when Lesley shrank behind him for protection he trampled over her feet when he staggered backwards. They both almost fell over.
‘Sir! Lady! Coming with me, please!’
‘This way, with me, very good ride.’
When they finally reached the taxi park it turned out that they had somehow promised their custom to two different drivers and the two men were bitter enemies. A storm of threats and yelling broke out, with each driver seizing one suitcase and locking it into the boot of his taxi. In the end Andrew had to bribe one driver to leave them in the clutches of the other, and the loser drove away with a torrent of abuse and a volley of hooting. Sweating, they sank into the winner’s cab and he celebrated by accelerating at reckless speed across a swathe of oncoming traffic. Lesley gave a little yelp and covered her eyes.
‘It’s Cairo, isn’t it? This is what it’s going to be like,’ Andrew said through clenched teeth.
By some miracle they avoided a collision with an oncoming bus. The cab swept past huge concrete apartment blocks and up on to an elevated section of motorway that gave them a glimpse of the city’s dust-shawled grey extent. Lesley sat forward and stared at it.
‘It’s so big. How will we find them? Where will we even begin?’
Andrew’s forehead and his broad nose were pearled with sweat. He hated the unpredictable and he hated being caught off balance, and Egypt threatened to deliver the worst possible circumstances.
‘That’s a job for the police,’ he snapped, masking his uncertainty with brusqueness.
Lesley turned her head away from him and looked at the black windows in the concrete faces of buildings stretching away in a dust haze as far as the eye could see. Ruby could be behind any one of those windows. She could be ill, kidnapped, assaulted. Lesley’s heart was pounding with adrenalin. She wanted to jump out of the cab and run or climb or tear down walls, anything that might bring her closer to her child, but all she could do was sit on the sticky brown plastic seat of the cab and clench her sweating hands into tight fists.
The cab driver looked back over his shoulder. ‘Holiday in Cairo? Nice tour for you, maybe, good price?’
After a long time in dense traffic, they arrived in a cobbled alley that became too narrow for the car to pass. Three minarets rose behind a high wall. The affronted driver pointed ahead to a shabby unmarked door.
After he had reversed away Andrew and Lesley stood in the street with their bags at their feet. The high walls trapped the polluted air and there was rubbish silted in the corners. Ruby had come all this way alone, Lesley thought, and she must have stood here in this same decaying cul-de-sac wondering if she had come to the right place, and yet she had made nothing of it. What kind of a child was she, to do such things? Where was she now?
She followed him to the door, and they stood on the hollowed step and waited for someone to answer their knocking.
Ruby was lost by the time she had climbed up and skidded down the first two or three dune ridges. From down in the shadowed hollows the swelling mountains of sand were foreshortened, and it always took her much longer than she anticipated to climb to the summit. It was too disheartening to look upwards to the sizzling light line where sand met sky because it never seemed to come any closer, so she trudged upwards with her head hanging, listening to the wheeze of her own breathing. Jagged pain shot through her cranium and down into her spine. Her mouth and throat cracked with drought and her lungs burned, but she kept on putting one foot in front of the other.
When she did crawl up to the summit, there was only ever another dune rising beyond it.
After she had been going for two hours she stopped and tried to take her bearings, although it was pointless trying to memorise the features of the landscape because there were none. Only her tracks stretched backwards, looking like irrelevant wrinkles in the wind-fluted landscape. But they were at least still visible. There was only a light breeze blowing, puffing a little veil of sepia dust off the exposed slopes.
Steering by the sun was much harder than she had anticipated. It had risen fast and she couldn’t gauge whether it was now more in the south than the east. It would be a bad mistake to head too far south, she reckoned, because that would simply lead to more desert, although she had only the sketchiest idea of the geography beyond the delta. There was no point now in being angry with herself about that. The only thing to do was keep walking.
Keep walking. Leave the sun more or less on her right cheek now.
She plodded on. Help, help, hurt, hurt, home, home. The words drummed meaninglessly in her burning head. It was too much effort even to think. It was better to be somewhere else, outside her own body. She could be separate from the little beetle figure that was Ruby Sawyer as she toiled up and down the sand slopes.
I am tired. I would like to surrender and sleep, but I know that I can’t because there is more to be done. The child was right when we talked about an empty place at the centre.
I try to swallow on a throat full of sand and the parade of memories starts up again.
The line held at el Alamein.
After twenty-eight days of almost continuous fighting the battle ended in a stalemate, but the Panzer Divisions had been halted and the enemy forces never reached Alexandria or Cairo.
The curfew was lifted and the city streets filled up with soldiers once more. People slowly filtered back from their refuges in the delta, and the pictures of Mussolini and the bunting disappeared from the shop windows as quickly as they had appeared. At GHQ Roddy Boy and the remaining top brass bewailed the loss of all their classified files.
I remember the exhausted sense of anticlimax that descended after the days of the flap, and the terrible July heat that weighted every movement. My second summer in Cairo was long and painful.
Sarah’s French diplomat boyfriend was posted to Baghdad and she decided that she would follow him.
‘Why not?’ She shrugged. ‘What else should I do?’
Jeremy had left Cairo for Palestine at the height of the crisis, without taking the time to say goodbye to her.
Faria came back from her honeymoon and settled into Ali’s opulent house. She spent much of her time shopping for linen and upholstery fabrics. I went once or twice to dinner with the newlyweds, but the other guests were mostly business associates of Ali’s and Faria herself was uncommunicative.
‘That is very sad,’ she sighed, when I told her about the baby. ‘But maybe in the end, you know, it is for the best?’
I began to look for somewhere else to live, without having any heart for it. And then one day at work, Roddy Boy put his head out of his office and announced through tight lips that my father was on the telephone and wished to speak urgently to me. I took the receiver and in the familiar dingy office environment of spilling folders and metal cupboards I heard my father saying that my mother was ill and maybe I should consider returning to England as soon as possible. I knew he wouldn’t suggest such a thing unless it was serious.
‘I’ll be sorry to lose you, Miss Black. But your family must take precedence,’ Roddy told me. And apart from Ruth, Daphne and my inessential voluntary work there was nothing else to keep me in Egypt.
I booked my passage home on a ship sailing via the Cape and then, when my belongings were packed and I was waiting out the last few hours in the empty Garden City apartment, Mamdooh came to tell me that I had a visitor.
‘Who is it?’
In the dim hallway with its over-elaborate furniture, a tall dark-faced man was standing.
It was Hassan, who I believed had been killed beside Xan in the Qattara Depression.
For a moment I didn’t know whether I should turn and run away from this apparition. Shock rooted me to the ground and my voice dried in my throat, but Hassan slowly extended his hand to me and I reached out and grasped it. I hung on to him as if he were a connection direct to Xan, and Hassan bent his head and touched his fingers to his forehead in greeting.
‘You are alive,’ I croaked. ‘How? Wait, don’t stand here. Come in, sit, let me give you some tea. Mamdooh, will you bring some?’
If it seemed foolish to welcome a man back from the dead with a glass of mint tea, but I didn’t know how else it should be done. I took Hassan into the drawing room where the furniture was already partially shrouded in dust sheets and we faced each other across an inlaid table. Hassan sat upright, his hands folded, as if he could not make himself comfortable in this Westernised setting.
‘I come to pay respect, Madam,’ Hassan said. ‘The Captain my friend. From a boy, Bedouin and British man, friend.’
‘I know. You must have known Xan better than anyone else. Will you tell me what happened?’
Hassan described how the planes had come from nowhere, out of an empty sky, straight at them. Xan’s driver had jinked and swerved, trying to avoid the fire, and they had fired back at the aircraft, but they had stood no chance. The truck hit a patch of soft sand and sank down to the wheel arches, and Hassan dived out and began to run. When he looked again he saw that Xan was trying to pull the driver, who had been shot in the back, out of the burning truck. He shouted at him to run, but Xan wouldn’t leave the wounded man. Then the ammunition and the fuel stored in jerrycans in the back of the truck had exploded in a huge fireball.
Hassan had turned from the scene of his friend’s death and melted into the moonscape. It had taken him many days to make his way back, walking at night and hiding during the day in case the planes came again.
‘I should have stayed by his side.’
‘No. What good would that have done?’
‘I did not know if to come here,’ he explained at the end.
‘I am so glad you did. I’m happy to see that you are alive. Thank you.’
He stood up then and bowed his head once more. ‘You go back to England?’
‘Yes, my mother is ill.’
‘I am sorry for that.’
‘What will you do now, Hassan?’
His eyes met mine. I remembered the desert oasis and the men gathered round a fire, just as they must have done for hundreds of years. He said quietly, ‘Like you, I believe I will continue my path, but I will keep a memory always.’
He stood up then and bowed his head once more.
Hassan had brought me a connection to Xan that I longed for and now I knew how bravely he had died. When we reached the door I caught his arm once more.
‘Hassan, I would like you to keep this. Xan gave it to me when he asked me to marry him, and I would be happy to think that it will stay here in Egypt with you.’
I took the amethyst off my engagement finger and put it into his hand. He held it in the cup of his palm and we both looked at
it. I felt an unfamiliar movement in me like a bird’s wings and realised that it was a beat of happiness.
‘Madam?’
‘Please take it. It will be a link between us, you and me and him.’
Hassan touched his lips to the ring. Slowly, he took a worn leather pouch out of a fold of his clothing and put the ring into it. Then he pulled the strings to close the pouch and tucked it away next to his ribcage.
‘Goodbye, Madam,’ he said. ‘May God be with you.’
‘And with you,’ I answered.
The next day, my goodbyes already said, I left Cairo by train for Suez. It was Major Gordon Foxbridge, the photographer, who drove me and my luggage to the station. It happened that he had the morning free, he told me, and he had a staff car at his disposal. As we parted he asked if he might have my address and, grateful for his assistance, I gave him my parents’ address in Hampshire because I had no other.
It was thirty-five years before I saw Cairo again.
My mother recovered from her illness and I spent a few months nursing her. But she died suddenly a year later, in September 1943, from bronchial pneumonia.
Under the terms of her will I inherited a share of her family trust and with this money to live on, I began the long battle to get into medical school. Daphne Erdall, who was by then living in Athens with Ruth, sent me to see a one-time colleague of hers at the medical school of St Bart’s. In the end, probably because it was easier to offer me a place than to continue to refuse me, I was accepted.
I kept in touch with Daphne and Ruth, and from time to time I also heard from Sandy Allardyce. He married Gerti Kimmig-Gertsch and they moved between Cairo, Italy and Zurich.
My father died in 1946, and not long afterwards I agreed to marry Gordon Foxbridge. I didn’t love him but I liked and respected him, and I didn’t expect ever to fall in love again. I had had my great passion and that was more than many people would ever know. I had my memories and I continually returned to them. For sixty years I reached up to the shelf and took the familiar cup down, wrapping my fingers round it and letting the warmth nourish me.