by Rosie Thomas
My second pregnancy was unplanned. Gordon was overjoyed and we bought a house outside London in a hurry.
Lesley was born in 1950.
I shift my legs in the sand and my head rolls against the metal flank of the car. I want to sleep, to slide under the surface of consciousness, but a hand holds me back. The clutch torments me even more than thirst and the white eye of the sun.
My daughter clings on to me. I try to creep backwards, like a hermit crab pulling into its shell, but it is Lesley who follows me into my refuge. She stands there with her hands on her hips, in the middle of the space in my life, staring at me as if she is waiting for something.
There is still more to be done.
Andrew went out to see the police.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Lesley said, but he insisted that she should stay in the house in case there was any news.
‘I’m going to meet a senior officer. It’s nearly three days since Ruby and your mother disappeared, and they are taking it seriously. After that I am going to the British embassy.’
Even though it was quite cool inside the house, sweat broke out on his forehead whenever he moved and strands of his sandy hair were pasted to his skull.
‘When will you be back?’
‘How can I tell? I have no idea what it will be like dealing with these people.’
There was nothing for Lesley to do but sit and wait.
The gaunt, dusty house was quite unlike the Moroccan fantasy she had dreamed up. It was impressive in its way but uncompromisingly austere; Lesley tried and failed to imagine the solitary existence that her mother must lead here. It was as if she were speculating about a stranger, not the woman who had given birth to her, yet Ruby had made a connection with her at once.
The manservant’s presence was disconcerting. He moved through the rooms like an airship, stately and silent, squeezing his bulk through the doorways and round tight corners. Whenever his helper, the little old woman with a face like a walnut, saw Lesley she started to cry, mopping her eyes with a corner of her white headdress. Lesley had learned from Mamdooh that Auntie – she didn’t know whose aunt – had been the last person to see Ruby, two mornings ago, but Ruby hadn’t told her anything about where she and Iris were going. Auntie seemed to think that Lesley might still blame her in some way for what had happened and Lesley’s attempts at reassurance only made her more upset. The minutes of waiting dragged by.
Whenever the telephone rang Mamdooh answered it. He spoke Arabic, and after the call was finished he pursed his lips and shook his head.
‘I am afraid no news, Madam.’
Lesley was in Iris’s sitting room when someone came to the door. She heard Mamdooh bringing him up one of the house’s several confusing sets of stairs and jumped up to see who it was.
‘Good evening,’ a suave little man said. ‘I am Nicolas Grosseteste.’
‘I’m so pleased you have come. My husband’s gone to the police and the embassy. I’m so worried and sitting here is making it worse.’
The doctor shook her hand. ‘I understand that you will be worried. It is a matter for concern. But they may be found safe and well, we must not lose sight of that. The police will do everything they can, I assure you.’
Lesley pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to think coherently.
‘Have they been kidnapped?’
‘I think that must be considered as one possibility. But myself, I believe it is more likely that they have got lost, or stranded in some local difficulty. That seems to me to fit more with the two people I know.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Doctor Grosseteste considered for a moment. He was the kind of person who would not say anything without weighing it up first.
‘Your mother has been ill.’ He left a delicate, interrogative pause that Lesley did not try to break. ‘But since your daughter arrived in Cairo I have noted a great improvement in her health and her state of mind. She has rediscovered some of the enthusiasm for the world that marked her out when it was my privilege first to meet her. The two of them appeared to share a remarkable rapport and it is my guess – my hope – that they have embarked on some excursion together. This may have gone wrong, but your daughter is a young lady of considerable energy and resource. I would place trust in her.’
‘I see,’ Lesley said.
She was on the point of asking the doctor whether he would like a drink, but Mamdooh was already at the door with a silver tray and a small glass of wine. Obviously Nicolas Grosseteste was a regular visitor. The two men murmured in Arabic while Lesley looked on. A pulse beat in her neck. It was her role always to be excluded, she thought. Andrew was the master at it; now her daughter and her mother had established a remarkable rapport.
It didn’t matter. She would volunteer at this moment for an entire lifetime of physical and emotional isolation, so long as Ruby could be found safe.
Mamdooh left them together again and Nicolas sat down with his glass of wine in a chair that was obviously the one he always took. There was nothing to do except wait and the silence pressed in on them. But then a moment later Mamdooh was back and this time he was showing a young man into the room. He was thin, with slicked-back black hair and smooth skin. He looked from one to the other and burst into a torrent of words.
‘This man Mamdooh tell me the police look for me. I don’t hide. Ruby is my friend,’ Ash said hotly.
‘I am Ruby’s mother. Who are you?’
‘Umm Ruby,’ the young man said. He bowed to her and Lesley understood that this was a polite greeting. ‘My name is Ashraf. Ruby is my friend and I show her Cairo and we speak English together. I would not do to her any thing that would harm one hair of her head. I take her to meet my own mother.’
Lesley saw that the boy was on the verge of tears.
‘It’s all right. We are friends here. You had better sit down, Ashraf, and tell us whatever you know.’
They were an incongruous group, sitting in Iris’s under-furnished room.
Andrew found them there when he came back to the house. He told them that the police had talked to a café owner on the road to Giza, who said that Iris and Ruby had stopped there for breakfast two days ago at dawn. Another roadside vendor reported that he had seen the old Beetle a little later, beyond Giza, heading out on the desert road.
It would soon be dark again.
In the morning, a police search would start. But the officer had warned him that the desert was very big.
Ruby no longer had any idea what she was doing.
She moved slowly, dragging up the ridges and sometimes falling down the other side. After the falls she took longer each time to stand up, but she always did get to her feet again and stumble on. The words had stopped beating in her head and she was too exhausted to think about the world that had slipped away from her. All she was left with was a dull awareness that she must keep going or Iris would die. As the day drew on, drying and shrinking her until she felt no bigger than a toktok beetle, even that certainty began to fade. She couldn’t go much further. Her body was shrinking but her tongue had swollen. Soon it would fill her mouth and throat and choke her.
Soon it would be dark again.
She reached the top of another dune, slid down the other side. From this hollow she could see off to the right, where the shoulders of the dunes overlapped in a series of leaves like a deep stage set. The way between them looked almost like a track and she began to hurry along it with hope clicking on like a bright light. But only a few steps showed her that there was no track, only the illusion of one.
The despair that followed was complete. Ruby stopped walking. She sat down in the sand and her head dropped to her knees.
A rest. She would just rest for a while, staring at the infinity of sand between her feet.
When she did look up again she saw a camel.
It paced between the dunes ahead, close enough for her to hear the small jingle of its harness bells. There was a man in a kuffiyeh on i
ts back. Behind the first camel came another, its haughty head up, rolling with its steady camel gait through the solid waves.
Ruby staggered to her feet.
Now she saw that there was a string of camels, some with riders and others carrying baggage, passing between the dunes a hundred feet ahead of her.
She shouted, but no sound came out of her scorched throat.
She began to run, waving her arms, zigzagging through the sand with the breath like a razor-blade in her lungs.
The camels and their riders were real. The animals at the rear of the train slowed and turned their heads to inspect her. She could hear voices.
‘Stop. Someone’s coming.’
‘Lindy, wait …’
‘What’s happening?’
They had seen her. It was all right.
Ruby stopped running and her arms dropped to her sides. Her head was pounding as if it would explode, but there was also a whoosh inside her as colour and possibility and the future flooded back to her.
‘Help,’ she managed to say. ‘Help my grandmother.’
She dropped to her knees in the sand.
The camel train came to a halt. It seemed neither likely nor particularly improbable that the riders were speaking English, or even that they sounded like her mother. There were five women and they were all dressed like Lesley, talked like Lesley. The nearest one slid down from her saddle and came towards her.
‘What’s wrong? Are you in trouble?’
She was wearing a water bottle in a kind of woven holster on a shoulder strap. Wordlessly, Ruby held out her hand for it.
The water dripped on her tongue and then flowed. She huddled in the sand and drank and drank until the bottle was empty.
The Lesley-voices were babbling. ‘Hammid, I think she’s lost.’
The Arab man in the kuffiyeh knelt down in front of Ruby, blocking out the sinking sun. ‘Where have you been?’ he demanded. ‘Where are you going?’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They formed a circle round her. One of the women told the others to give her some space and air, another said here, she had some more water in her bottle.
Ruby grasped the man’s arm. ‘My grandmother. Help us. You have to find her.’
The camels and camel boys made a subsidiary circle. Ruby felt crowded by so many faces hanging over her and she rolled her head against a wave of panic. Everyone except the man in the kuffiyeh fell back a step.
‘Where is your grandmother?’
She pointed to her tracks emerging between the dunes.
‘Where? How long have you been walking?’
With a struggle, she put the words together. ‘All day. I left her in our car early this morning. We have been lost for three days. She’s got no water.’
‘All right.’
The man pushed back his head covering, reached inside his blue robes and pulled out a mobile phone.
The women closed in on her again.
It hadn’t been a hallucination: they were speaking English, and they did look and sound like her mother. As she listened to the guide’s rapid Arabic, Ruby took in the women’s linens and khakis, their broad-brimmed hats and sunglasses and pearl ear studs, and on the camels’ backs saw their baggage with the words Ideal Desert Safaris in white stencil lettering, decorated with a palm tree.
There followed a perfectly still, crystalline moment when Ruby knew that she understood everything.
The stitching on the pockets of the nearest woman’s combat trousers, the jingle of bells when one of the camels shifted its feet, the oblique shadows cast by the setting sun, these were vivid and as significant as if they had just been created. The world was still beautiful and after all it behaved as it was supposed to do. She was safe again, she was going to live.
She saw the man fold his little silver mobile and tuck it back inside his robes, and she registered the incongruity of it. The guide was dressed up as a Bedouin tribesman and the tourists were dressed up for the dune safari, and they all had mobile phones and expensive watches. A gust of laughter surprised Ruby and she almost choked, then sanity caught up with her again and she remembered that Iris was still lost and maybe dead.
Her face changed and a sob broke out. She jammed her knuckles against her teeth, her face contorting as the sobs came faster.
‘Help is coming,’ the guide said. His phone rang, a tinny jingle, and he busily took it out.
The women clustered round her, stroking her hair and trying to hold her hands and murmuring reassurance and pressing their bottles of water on her. They were a collective force of motherliness. Ruby drank some more water and rubbed the silky remainder all over her face. Dust scraped under her hands, and she realised that her skin was burning and her lips were swollen and cracked.
‘Hammid is a wonderful guide. He’ll find her,’ said the woman who was holding Ruby’s hands. She wore perfume, as Lesley did, a heavy cloud of it wafting around her and catching in Ruby’s throat.
If only her mother were here. Ruby wanted her mother all the more because of the resemblance in these camel trekkers. She blinked through her tears.
‘How far is it? How far are we from the road?’ Ruby mumbled.
Hammid looked up. ‘From here? Maybe three kilometres.’
‘That’s quite close.’
‘But you were walking away from it.’
The tourists wanted to stay to see the rest of the drama, but Hammid told them there was nothing to wait for and they were to go on with the camels and the boys to the oasis hotel where dinner would be laid out for them as planned. They were to take Ruby and look after her, and he would stay here to meet the rescue party, which would then move out into the dunes to search for the lady. He clicked his fingers and beckoned, and the camels came jingling forward. They went down on their knees in a chorus line, ready to be mounted.
‘No,’ Ruby said loudly.
They all looked at her.
‘I’m not going to any bloody oasis. I am going to find my grandmother.’
The perfumed woman squeezed her hand. There was a short argument but Ruby won it because she shouted at them all, surprising even herself with the violence of her determination.
‘Very well.’ Hammid frowned. ‘But I assure you that you will be in the way and you will make matters difficult for us.’
‘I won’t, she said wearily.
The safari women hugged her, and put a warm shawl round her shoulders and gave her more bottles of water. Then the camel boys helped them to climb onto the kneeling beasts, the boys gave low whistles of encouragement to the camels, who rose to their feet and swayed in a line to the ridge of the first dune, heading in a direction that left Ruby disorientated again. The sun was now a lemon-yellow ball tumbling towards the western horizon.
Hammid was talking into his phone again. Exhausted, Ruby lay down on the sand and pulled the shawl round her.
Lesley stands there with her hands on her hips. Her feet are planted in the sand and her face is screwed up with childish accusation.
I shake my head to clear the image, but she is still there when I look again.
I try to close my eyes. I want to sleep and not to feel the various forms of pain as my body slowly shuts down, but I can’t do it with Lesley’s glare burning into me.
‘What do you want?’
I must have mumbled the words. Small stabs of pain radiate from my cracked lips, a flash of agony explodes beneath my cranium and subsides in a series of throbbing waves. At the periphery of my mind I know that I am experiencing the effects of extreme dehydration. Quite soon, if I am lucky, delirium will be succeeded by unconsciousness.
I am lying in the sand. It is in my mouth, in my throat, scraping in my lungs.
I am apart and looking down at myself, an old woman lying in the sand, bits of clothing pulled round gaunt legs, thin hair spread like the wing feathers of a dead bird.
Lesley is still there, sturdy legs and sandalled feet, a gingham summer dress too tight for her. She’s growing, e
very holiday when I see her she seems an inch taller.
She doesn’t answer me.
Lesley and Andrew and Doctor Grosseteste were still waiting.
Ash had explained that he must go to his switchboard night shift at the hospital and when Andrew demanded to know where he was to be found if they or the police needed to ask him more questions he answered politely that he would come straight back to the house in the morning, as soon as he had finished work.
If they would allow him, he added.
‘All right,’ Andrew said.
‘Thank you for coming.’ Lesley tried to smile. Mamdooh appeared and escorted Ash down to the front door.
Andrew turned to Nicolas. ‘How on earth do you deal with this place on a daily basis?’ he asked.
‘Cairo?’ The doctor looked at him, then gave a delicate shrug. ‘One learns the technique.’
‘I’m glad I don’t have to.’ It was Andrew’s way to respond to pressure by becoming more critical. They lapsed into silence again.
‘I had better talk to her father,’ Lesley said at length.
Sebastian was about to leave his office.
‘Lesley, Lesley,’ he sighed. ‘Don’t panic yet. It’s not the first time Ruby’s gone missing, is it?’
‘Not like this. This is different.’ The heavy receiver of Iris’s old-fashioned telephone was slippery in her sweaty hand.
‘Well, let’s just hope it will turn out to be the same. Keep in touch, all right? Let me know as soon as there’s any news. Try not to worry.’
Lesley replaced the receiver. Ruby was his child, she thought. How had Sebastian developed such a degree of detachment? With an effort, she steered her thoughts away from making the same old speculation about Iris.
She had resumed her seat when Andrew’s mobile rang. Lesley and Nicolas stared at each other in equal hope and dread as Andrew took the call.