by Rosie Thomas
‘I’d like to stay here, you know.’
‘To do what, darling?’
‘Look, Mum. You’ve got to go back home soon, haven’t you? Ed needs you, and so does Andrew.’
Andrew had returned to England four days earlier. Ed had insisted that he was fine, he came home from school and made himself some cereal and did his homework, and then Andrew came in and they had supper together. Takeaway, sometimes, he had added with satisfaction.
But she would have to go back soon, whatever Ed might say. Christmas was coming. She had a lot to do.
Ruby continued in a voice of calm reason, ‘On the other hand we can’t leave Iris here on her own. She’ll be out of hospital in a day or so, and I can’t really see her packing up and coming back to Kent with us. Can you?’
‘No,’ Lesley conceded, although that was more or less what she had been anticipating.
‘So I thought, like, the best thing would be for me to stay on. Seeing as it’s what I want to do anyway. I could maybe study Egyptology? Or something like that,’ she added.
Carefully, Lesley said, ‘You want to stay here, look after Iris, and be a student?’
Ruby met her eye. ‘Yeah. That’s it, pretty well.’
‘I know you want to be with Iris. That’s good. But she could live for a long time yet, you know.’
‘She will do,’ Ruby insisted.
‘Then tell me something else,’ Lesley continued.
A big tourist group led by a man holding up a striped wand passed through the crowd, the tourists flowing intently behind the wand as if it were a religious icon. They were mostly grey-haired women with broad hips and flat shoes, and a few men in short-sleeved shirts with little knapsacks on their backs. Dutch, perhaps, Lesley thought.
‘How much is this to do with Ash?’
‘Not all that much.’
Lesley’s back and feet ached.
‘Let’s sit down.’ She pointed to a bench against a wall, out of the stream of visitors. Ruby followed her and they sat, identically puffing with relief, Ruby shuffling herself sideways a little so that she could go on looking beyond a pillar at the Akhenaten statue.
They had spent four days almost alone together. They had established a routine of breakfast in the inner garden, visits to Iris, small excursions and suppers eaten together after Ruby came back from her afternoon walks with Ash. They had mild conversations about Iris’s progress and Ash’s family and the geography of Cairo. Ruby had been almost meek; Lesley understood now that she had been working out this idea.
She’s my daughter, the refrain started up. I love her and I don’t want to lose her to Cairo and Iris and pharaohs. What will she get up to if I am not there to restrain her? The thought of the desert and what had nearly happened blew a hot blast of fear straight into her head.
‘It’s certainly worth thinking about,’ she temporised.
Rather to her surprise, Ruby nodded instead of launching into a further attack.
Ros Carpenter and the others had given Lesley a picture of a different Ruby, one who had been notably brave and who had only thought about rescuing Iris. What if it was this other Ruby who had been the real one all along, Lesley speculated, while as her mother she had kept a deficient version of her in her heart for her own purposes?
To fortify herself, by seeming strong in comparison?
To convince herself that she was needed?
And if this was possible maybe something similar, some other faulty construct, might also be at the heart of her relationship with Iris?
‘Do you think I have been a good mother?’ Lesley asked abruptly.
The question was out before she could stop it or even edit it and she disliked the imploring note it sounded.
She had never asked such a thing before. Lesley tried always to do what was right without expecting outside validation, however much she hoped for it. That was, she supposed now, a pattern that she had learned from her own mother.
Ruby stretched her thin arms and sat on her hands, revealing her discomfort.
‘Do you?’
‘Mum, I don’t know. You gave me plenty to kick against. Well, yes, of course you’ve been a good mother, like you came out here to rescue me. You’ve always been there, doing the right thing.’
Ruby made the same judgement as she did herself.
Doing the right thing: how dull it made her seem.
Ruby added seriously, ‘There are all the good people in the world, and you are one of them. Then there are all the other people, and they’re Iris and me. D’you think that’s true?’
Iris and Ruby on one bank, herself on the other, and the river of opportunity and experience flowing between them. She was stricken with a sense of absolute isolation.
‘Maybe,’ she whispered.
Ruby turned from Akhenaten and saw her mother’s face. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’
Lesley shook her head. Not here, she pleaded with herself. Don’t cry in front of a hundred Dutch tourists and a haughty statue of Nefertiti.
Ruby slid back along the bench and put her arm round her shoulders. ‘What is it? Is it about Iris?’
Lesley pressed her lips together, then retrieved a tissue from her bag and blew her nose. ‘In a way it is.’
‘What way is that?’
‘I haven’t ever understood why she was never there.’
Ruby chewed the corner of her lip; the cracks and fissures had healed, and the swelling had gone down days ago. Her face was smooth and her mouth was her own again. Lesley saw her making the connections as clearly as if the chain of thoughts were projected on a screen.
‘You wanted to do it differently for Ed and me. You wanted to be there every hour of the day.’
‘Yes.’
She nodded. ‘I understand. Haven’t you ever asked her why?’
‘No.’
‘Then you must. Before she forgets everything. Will you?’
‘I will try,’ Lesley said. The tiny, leaf-light figure in the hospital bed was awkwardly, painfully dear, and even though she had tried to tell her so she remained as remote as ever.
‘Good. Come on. Let’s go.’
They walked out of the museum into the winter twilight. Lesley was glad to get out of the gloomy halls, even though the low clouds spat rain on them. Ruby marched past the line of taxis and led them through the churning traffic of Midan Tahrir to a local bus. She grasped Lesley by the wrist and expertly dragged her through the press of people trying to climb on board.
It is as if she already lives here, Lesley thought.
Iris came home. They went to the hospital together and brought her back in a private ambulance. Iris tried to insist that there was no need for such a thing, but she was shaky on her feet and she walked very slowly with the aid of a stick. Her wrists and ankles looked like twigs.
Mamdooh and Auntie were waiting for her in the hallway, under the traffic-light red glass of the big lantern. They swooped on her and tried to take her arms as if she was going to be lifted up between the four of them and carried up the haramlek stairs.
But Iris held up her hand. ‘Wait.’
She stood still instead, propped on her stick. Her head rotated, then her chin lifted as she gazed upwards into the painted rafters.
She’s going to notice the lantern, Lesley thought.
But she did not.
She has gone much further away, Ruby thought. She’s looking at Mum and me as if we’re other people.
They all hovered, watching, ready to dash forward if she fell.
‘I love this house,’ Iris said.
Then she consented to be helped upstairs and put to bed.
The house was quiet. It was as if they were waiting, the three of them, for one of the others to choose a direction. The shuffle of Mamdooh’s slippers was amplified in the stillness.
Lesley tried nervously to make plans.
‘Christmas?’ Iris said in response. ‘I don’t celebrate Christmas. Neither does Mamdooh, or
Auntie. They are Muslim, you see. Doctor Nicolas sometimes calls. He brought his young friend with him once and we played canasta and got rather drunk.’
It was a winter’s day. The parallelogram of sky overhead was pewter grey, but the garden offered shelter from the cold as well as the heat of summer. Iris sat wrapped in blankets, her stick laid beside her chair.
Lesley bowed her head. ‘I understand. But you see, Mummy, I have to go home to Andrew and Ed because we do have Christmas; Ed’s still a little boy, really. But I am torn because I don’t want to go and leave you when you are not strong, and I don’t want you to be lonely.’
Ruby looked quickly away, up at the needle points of the minarets that now seemed almost to pierce the heavy clouds.
‘Lonely,’ Iris repeated, in a voice that sounded as cold as frost.
Lesley persisted, unwisely. ‘Yes.’
Iris’s fingers tapped on the wooden arm of her chair. ‘It takes some initial determination to be alone. After that it is easy.’
‘But …’
‘Perhaps you are the one who is lonely.’
Ruby drew in a sharp breath and stole a look at her mother. Lesley sat very still. There were tight lines drawn from her nose to the corners of her mouth. ‘Perhaps,’ she agreed.
No one said anything else and raindrops suddenly scattered on the tiles.
‘Let’s see you indoors,’ Lesley murmured and went to help Iris to her feet.
* * *
‘It’s weird and uncomfortable,’ Ruby complained to Ash.
They were in what had come to be their place. It was a single-storey concrete building at the side of the yard where Nafouz kept and serviced his taxi, a lock-up space containing bald tyres and empty oil drums and a few tools. There was also a brown plastic bench seat taken from a car, on which they sat with their legs splayed to smoke and drink Coca-Cola. Ash had a cassette player, and a selection of Michael Jackson and Madonna tapes. They belonged to Nafouz, really, he had protested. Ruby promised to get him some good music.
‘There we are in that house, the three of us, mother, daughter, mother, daughter. There’s a lot to talk about but no one says anything. Iris is so old and so locked up in herself and her memories. When there was just the two of us it didn’t matter, she talked or she didn’t, it made sense or it didn’t. I didn’t expect anything, why would I? I hardly knew Iris before. But with my mother, she’s all tucked-in, she smiles all the time and you know she’s really close to crying. She still wants Iris to be her mother. Even though she’s fifty-whatever herself, she still wants a mum.
‘That’s what’s really surprised me, you know? That you don’t get to some point in your life where, right, you’ve joined the mother crew and fully left the daughter one and it’s all fine because you’re grown up.
‘And I’ve never really noticed before that it’s made my mum unhappy. Never noticed it. That’s really bad, isn’t it?’
Ash sighed. ‘I do not understand. You are rich people, you have a fine house and money for everything you need.’
‘I know. And your gran and your mum and your little sisters don’t, and they get on fine.’
‘It is family.’ He shrugged.
As if that contained everything, instead of next to nothing, Ruby thought.
Ash slid closer and hooked one leg over hers. ‘Let us talk about something else. I would like you to know that I love you. You have ideas that I do not understand but I love you anyway. I do not say this lightly.’
Ruby slid closer. She pressed her nose to his, flattening the tips, then found his mouth.
‘I know,’ she murmured.
Two weeks before Christmas, Lesley remarked that she had booked flights home for herself and for Ruby.
‘I am not coming,’ Ruby said immediately.
It was a chilly, grey afternoon but the three of them were in the garden. Iris had grown stronger since coming home and she liked to sit out there until the winter twilight fell, when Mamdooh would help her back up the stairs to her sitting room. Sometimes she seemed to be dozing, but a second later she would be wide awake. Her head had fallen back against the chair cushions now and her mouth sagged open. Ruby was reading her book and Lesley had been writing notes and making lists.
‘It’s Christmas,’ Lesley repeated.
‘You and Ed and Andrew can have Christmas. You don’t need me.’
‘Yes, we do. I do.’
‘I don’t want to leave Iris. Iris doesn’t want to leave Cairo.’
In the following silence the fountain insistently splashed.
Iris opened her eyes. ‘You will do as your mother tells you,’ she said precisely.
‘But …’
‘You heard what I said. Remember, you stay in this house only at my invitation.’
‘Well, yes, I know, but …’
‘That is enough. You will go back to England for Christmas, because that is what Lesley wants you to do. Will you call Mamdooh, please? I would like to go inside.’
Later, Ruby slipped into Iris’s bedroom. Auntie had put Iris to bed and she was lying back against pillows with the sheet folded across her chest. The picture of her and Xan Molyneux stood on the bedside table, as always, with the little wooden ship with the numeral 1 painted on it placed alongside.
‘Can I talk to you?’ Ruby asked.
‘Yes.’
‘We were quite happy before I got us lost in the desert, weren’t we?’
‘You did not lose us. If anyone was responsible it was me because I know the country and the desert and you do not, and I should have taken proper precautions instead of letting you joyride into nowhere. I can’t even remember how it happened.’ Iris gave an exasperated sigh. ‘In any case, no harm was done. We are both here now.’
‘No harm? No harm? We could both be dead. You were in hospital for days. You could easily be dead instead of lying here.’ Ruby’s face turned crimson and she twisted in her chair, unable to sit still while thinking about what had almost happened.
‘The shame is rather that I am not. Death is not an unthinkable prospect for me, remember.’
Ruby shouted, ‘How can you say that? What about Lesley? What about me? I’ve only just found you. I’ve only just begun to know what you are like and I’ve hardly found out anything about your life, and yet you say that it’s a shame that you aren’t dead?’ She clenched her fists and angrily pounded her own thighs.
Iris stared at her. ‘I am sorry,’ she said in the end, through pale lips.
‘Don’t say it ever again.’
‘But I am old. Death will come as a relief.’
‘Not to us left behind.’
‘Don’t shout. It is my life and the end of it is mine also. I am selfish, but you are the same.’
Ruby considered this. ‘Am I? Actually yes, I suppose so.’ There were the good people, like Lesley, and then there were the others. ‘It’s quite funny, isn’t it?’
They looked at each other and suddenly it was funny. They laughed, Iris wheezing and runny-eyed and Ruby uninhibitedly, showing her white teeth and with her hair springing back from her face.
‘It’s weird that we’re alike, since we hardly met until a few weeks ago.’
‘Not so very strange, really. There is the matter of genetic connection.’
‘But Mum’s so different.’
‘That’s true.’
Their amusement subsided.
‘Have I got to go home for Christmas? Won’t you let me stay here with you?’
‘No, I won’t let you. I prefer to spend Christmas as I always have done in this house. Maybe I will play some canasta with Doctor Nicolas. And I have a lot to remember.’
‘The cup on the shelf?’
‘Yes, something like that.’
Iris spoke very softly. Ruby worked out the truth, that she probably would have liked her company, might even have liked it very much, but her insistence on her going home was for Lesley’s sake. Her grandmother was not so very selfish after all.
‘Won’t you come to Kent? There’s underfloor heating and power showers.’
‘I have no idea what either of those might be. No, I will not.’
‘All right. I’ll go. Can I come back in the new year?’
‘That’s for you and Lesley to settle between you.’
‘But if Mum does agree?’
The skin round Iris’s eyes and mouth was now so papery that Ruby could see the tiny muscles move beneath. There was a hesitation, a twitch of conflict between habit and desire, all plain in the widening of her grandmother’s watery eyes and the pursing of her lips.
Then Iris said, ‘You may. I would like that, if you are sure.’
‘I’m certain,’ Ruby said firmly. She grasped Iris’s hand and held it. ‘There’s something else, as well.’
‘Oh dear,’ Iris sighed.
‘It’s Mum herself.’
The muscles tensed once more. ‘Yes?’
‘She wants something, I don’t even really know what it is but it’s to do with you and her and the past.’
‘I know.’
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Can you give it to her?’
There was a silence compounded of reluctance and denial and apprehension. Deliberately, Ruby let it stretch.
‘When is it you are supposed to go back to England?’
Iris never referred to England as home. Obviously she would not, Ruby thought.
‘In two days’ time.’
‘That’s sooner than I expected. I might give you and Lesley a farewell party. A dinner,’ Iris said grandly. ‘I could ask Doctor Nicolas and his friend. And your two young men. I like them.’
Ruby gently stroked her hand, feeling the rigid tendons beneath the skin.
‘A dinner’s a very good idea. I think, though, it should be for just two guests. Me and Mum.’
‘You do? That doesn’t sound very festive, does it?’
‘I think we can make it festive, if that’s what we want.’
Ruby and Lesley confirmed their flights, and Ruby collected a few belongings and stuffed them into a rucksack. Most of her possessions she left as they were, tidied away in her spartan bedroom. The more she left behind, she reasoned, the more certain her return would be.