by Rosie Thomas
Iris conferred briefly with Mamdooh and Auntie. Mamdooh nodded heavily, put on his tarboosh and went out to the market.
‘Do you think it will be too much for her, this dinner?’ Lesley worried to Ruby.
‘No. It’s giving her something to think about. She’s been much livelier since she had the idea. And she wants to do it for you.’
Lesley didn’t say anything, but Ruby could see how this notion pleased her.
The day before their departure was dark and windy. Rain swept in from the north in unpredictable gusts and the garden became an unwelcoming space of dripping water and slippery glazed tiles. Auntie dusted the table in the domed room that led off the hallway and put fresh candles in the branched candlesticks, Mamdooh took deliveries from local shopkeepers, and the two old people retreated into the kitchen. Auntie shooed both Ruby and Lesley away when they tried to insinuate themselves.
At breakfast time, Iris told them that they were to join her for drinks at 6 p.m. She spent the rest of the day in her room.
At six o’clock precisely, Ruby and Lesley were both waiting under the lantern in the hall. Mamdooh had climbed the stepladder and placed tea lights in the crimson glass lights, and a smoky reddish glow now suffused the bare space. Ruby put on a plain black T-shirt, pulled well down to cover her midriff, and made up her face with not too much black eyeliner. Lesley thought how pretty she looked, the daughter that the trekkers had pointed out to her. Lesley herself wore heels with a blue embroidered skirt, and elaborate turquoise and silver drop earrings bought on an expedition to the jewellers’ quarter of the bazaar.
Iris came slowly along the gallery. They caught a glimpse of her as she passed an open screen. A moment later she turned the corner of the stairs, descending one step at a time, leaning on her stick. Ruby moved forward instinctively, but she held up her hand.
‘Thank you,’ Iris said. ‘I can manage.’
She had put on a white lace blouse dotted with rust spots, and a full skirt made of some rustling greenish black material. It was too big for her now and she had bunched up the folds and knotted a silk scarf round her middle to hold it up. She had powdered her face and her sparse hair was brushed upwards and held with ivory combs on either side of her head. She came to stand between them, upright even with the stick, but her gaze slid past them to the other end of the room. There was a long pause.
Iris was looking at the spot where a mule wearing a sable wrap and an orchid corsage had defecated on Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch’s rug in the first minutes of 1942.
‘Mummy?’ Lesley said softly.
Iris turned her head, very slowly. Her eyes finally settled on Lesley’s face. She looked startled.
‘I was thinking of something else. Something reminded me …’ It was the candlelight. With an effort she came back to the present. ‘We are going to drink a toast,’ she announced.
Wearing his tarboosh and a red cummerbund stretched round his waist, Mamdooh brought in a tray and three glasses and a bottle of French champagne. He extracted the cork with a little difficulty.
Iris raised her glass. There was another long pause while she searched her mind. Ruby looked away, concentrating hard on the Ottoman harmony of arches and domes.
‘To the future,’ Iris managed, commendably. They echoed the word, and drank with eager smiles and murmurs and little shrugs of relief.
There was nowhere comfortable to sit and the occasion seemed too formal to allow them to go upstairs to Iris’s sitting room. Iris soon tired of standing and so they led her through to the dining space where the candles flickered in the faint draught. She clapped her hands at the sight of the napkins and glasses and polished cutlery.
‘How pretty. Isn’t it pretty? Now, you here, Lesley.’ Iris took the head of the table and Lesley the foot, with Ruby in the centre of the long space between them. Lesley quickly finished her champagne and drank a second glass, the rim clinking faintly against her teeth and betraying that her hand was shaking.
Mamdooh brought in an earthenware dish and served with great formality. Auntie had made chicken stew. He uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured that for them too, then he withdrew.
Ruby thought, God, what are we going to talk about?
‘I’m sorry I have to go back,’ Lesley began. She lifted her glass of red wine.
Iris answered, ‘I’m grateful that you came.’
Fuck, this isn’t going to work at all. I should have encouraged her to ask Nicolas and his boyfriend. Even Ash and Nafouz.
‘Well, here we are,’ Lesley added brightly, looking around as if to admire the setting for the first time.
Iris picked very neatly at her chicken, then touched her napkin to her lips. The candle flames shivered and sent up thin trails of smoke.
Lesley made a bold effort. ‘Do you know, Mummy, I was thinking about this while you were in the hospital. You’ve never told me how you and Daddy first met. Was it during the war?’
Iris’s cutlery clinked as she laid it down. Don’t say anything mean to her, Ruby silently begged. But to her surprise Iris suddenly smiled.
‘He was a major, working in Intelligence here at GHQ Cairo. We knew him a little in those days. Then, after the war, I met him again in England.’
Lesley smiled back over her glass. ‘Go on.’
I can remember the day, almost the exact date.
It was in Hampshire, to be precise, at the end of June 1946. My father had died a few weeks earlier and was buried next to my mother in the village churchyard.
I was at medical school, living in a rented flat in Southwark with a fellow student and his sister. I worked very hard, spending long hours in lecture halls and dissecting rooms, then coming home on the bus to sit with my textbooks until bedtime. I didn’t find the course easy but I was keeping up, and my marks in that year’s exams were adequate. One weekend, telling myself I must make the time sooner or later, I took the train down to Hampshire, intending to begin the job of clearing my parents’ house. Among the post that had accumulated there I found a letter addressed to me. It was from Major Foxbridge.
‘He had your address, then?’
‘I gave it to him as I was leaving Cairo. Your grandmother was very ill and I was rushing home to be with her. The world was upside down; it was the middle of the war. We didn’t automatically expect to see people again.’
‘You don’t have to make excuses for giving your address to a handsome major,’ Lesley teases.
I look at my daughter through the candle glow. She has her tremulous look, accentuated by smudgy colour rubbed onto her eyelids. The child watches us both.
‘I don’t know about excusing myself. It was a hot afternoon and there were roses, Albertine, growing over a wall in the garden. I saw that Gordon’s address was not very far away from your grandparents’, so I poured myself a glass of lemonade and sat down at my father’s desk to telephone him. It was a Saturday and he was at home. The result was that he drove over, perhaps twenty miles, and we had a drink in the garden and then he took me out to dinner.’
‘The rest is history,’ Lesley says.
I am surprised to find myself talking so much.
‘History?’
‘Tell us some more,’ Ruby says quickly.
I am a little dizzy with champagne, but suddenly I can find the words.
‘The Qattara Depression.’
‘What’s that?’ Lesley asks.
‘Mum, just let her tell it in her own way.’
My poor daughter. Gordon’s daughter. I look straight at her as I recall.
‘When I lived here during the war, Lesley, I met a soldier and I fell deeply in love with him. We were going to be married. His name was Xan Molyneux and he was killed in 1942 in the desert, a few days before our wedding, in a place called the Qattara Depression. He was on a special operation with his commando group and five Italian aircraft came out of the sky and shot them to pieces. Only two members of the group survived. One died three days later in hospital, the other was an Arab scou
t who escaped by walking across the desert.
‘Before he went out there Xan told me that the enemy forces had developed an uncanny ability to pinpoint Allied movements in the desert. He suspected that there must have been some large-scale signals Intelligence leak.’
Gordon was by that time out of the army and working in the City.
I remember that he took me to the restaurant of a local hotel, where we sat at a table next to some open french windows overlooking the garden. Moths swept towards the lights, and the heat and the scent of stocks and jasmine made the night seem exotic, more Egypt than Hampshire. It didn’t matter that the food was terrible and there was no wine. We drank beer, and talked and talked about the war and Cairo and people we knew. It was a joy to be with someone who shared those memories. And we talked about Xan, of course.
During that talk, Gordon told me what I could not have learned as an ordinary civilian, that the US military attaché in Cairo had been responsible for allowing a stream of top-secret information to fall into Italian and then German hands.
Xan’s suspicion had been correct.
Every night, between September 1941 and the middle of 1942, Colonel Bonner Fellers used a code called the Black Code to relay information about the Allied movements in North Africa to Military Intelligence in Washington. It was the Colonel’s bad luck that the Italians had broken into the US embassy in Rome, stolen the black notebook in which the code was written, copied and returned it before anyone noticed it was missing. The Italians wouldn’t share their prize with the Germans, but they did pass over decoded transcripts of early messages and Fellers’s encryptions, always starting off and ending in the same way, meant that the German cryptographers soon cracked the code for themselves.
Rommel referred to these priceless bulletins as ‘my little Fellers’.
After Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war, Fellers had access to even more sensitive material from GHQ. Among countless other pieces of information the intercepts would have revealed the covert movements of Tellforce, plotting their surprise route by which heavy armour might strike northwards towards el Alamein. And so the Italians had been able to direct their air attack straight at them.
Gordon’s light hazel eyes met mine across the dinner plates. He had a tidy moustache, slightly receding dark hair, well brushed. In a nearby room I could hear someone playing dance music on a gramophone. The dining room had emptied out and we were alone.
Slowly but very deliberately he reached for my hand. ‘Has it upset you, to know more about why Xan died?’
I thought about it for a moment. ‘No. Anything that makes it easier to understand makes it a little easier to bear.’
He went on holding my hand, looking into my eyes. ‘Do you have a lover, Iris?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’
It was true. I had medical studies, my father’s brother and his wife Evie and their children, a handful of friends. When Gordon asked if he might see me again I agreed, almost eagerly. I longed to talk again about Cairo and remember the places and people we had both known.
Lesley and Ruby are both gazing at me. Lesley looks rapturous. She fills her glass again, sketches a toast to me, and drinks. ‘That’s so romantic,’ she breathes.
From that night onwards, Gordon Foxbridge pursued me with single-minded determination. He told me he had loved me even when he took Xan’s and my photograph on that breathless afternoon at the Gezira Club, and after Xan died he resolved that if he couldn’t have me he didn’t want anyone.
‘Why?’ I was amused and rather impressed.
‘Why do we love one person rather than another? There is no recipe, only certainty that has its own logic.’
True, I thought.
At length, after more than two years during which I readily became his lover but always refused his proposals, Gordon’s kindness and considerateness wore me down. Exhausted with the end of my training that meant long hospital hours, and vulnerable to the stability and security he offered, I finally agreed to marry him.
Lesley claps her hands and the candle flames waver in the moving air.
‘Bravo,’ she cries. ‘Love triumphs.’
Here is the point, now.
I remember the baby, an inconsolably wailing bundle, and the small child she became, plump in a gingham dress. Did I dream about her in my desert delirium? Waiting, accusing me, refusing to release her rightful hold and let me go.
I gather my breath again. I have talked so much, more than I have done for years. My food lies cold in front of me, almost untouched.
She deserves the truth. It is all I can offer her.
‘I shouldn’t have done it. Shouldn’t have married him.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I didn’t love him. I loved Xan Molyneux.’
‘But he was dead.’
‘And so was the child I was expecting. I was going to have his baby but I had a miscarriage. I lost them both in the space of two weeks, you might say that I lost everything. But it was wartime, and I wasn’t alone in that.’
Lesley’s gaze wavers and drops from mine. I can see her mind working. Ruby has cupped her chin in her hands. She looks concerned but not very surprised.
Then Lesley lifts her head again. There are spots of high colour on her cheekbones and she is more than half drunk. She is angry, not sympathetic in the least. Not that I am looking for sympathy.
‘So all the time, all those years, when you left Daddy and me behind and went off to look after other women and their children in bloody Africa, you were wanting the family you lost instead of the one you actually had? You discarded us because we made the mistake of being still alive, not a heroic memory?’
She pours herself another glass of wine and drinks deeply. Ruby begins a move to restrain her, but I shake my head. If it takes alcohol to get Lesley to unbutton and say what she feels, instead of smiling with the corners of her mouth and hiding it all, then the headache and the nausea will be worth it.
There is still more that I have to say. My garrulity is startling.
‘No. I have had long enough to think about it and I believe that it isn’t quite as you see it.’
I need a drink myself. I take a mouthful, choking a little as the fumes go to my head.
‘Perhaps if Xan and our son had lived, it wouldn’t have been so very different.’
‘Wha’ d’you mean?’
‘Death preserves an ideal. Ideal love, lover, infant. Can you follow that? Can you? No romantic story. No bravo, nothing. Just plain, stony reality. Because in the end, Xan, Gordon, your brother or you, I might not have been so different. I might have betrayed them, neglected them too. I did what I did and I am the person I became. Bad, good, flawed. Indifferent. Better alone, preferring to be. I knew that, living in a hut up country, a hospital annexe, Tanganyika, Nyasaland, Namibia. Here, finally, in this house. I knew that where I was and the way I lived was the best I could do.
‘An ordinary life didn’t mean enough, it wasn’t precious enough, after Xan died. I found the rigour I needed in practising medicine. I was passionate about my work and the detachment in me became an asset, not a shortcoming. You need to be able to stand back a little, when you do work like that. I don’t think, Lesley, I would have lasted in the role of good mother or proper wife to anyone. Maybe …’ My voice is beginning to fail me. ‘… Maybe not even Xan Molyneux.’
I raise my hand and let it fall again. I am utterly exhausted by this confession, because that is what it is.
‘Gordon deserved better than I gave him. And so did you, my dear.’
Lesley stares. Then she stands up, the high heel of her shoe catches in the hem of her pretty skirt, and she snatches at the back of her chair to stop herself falling. The chair and she rock dangerously for a second before coming to rights. Ruby sighs heavily, preening her maturity in the face of our messy revelations.
I get to my feet too.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
Lesley’s face swims, t
hen tears begin to slide down her face. She reaches out to me, and we shuffle into an awkward and unpractised embrace.
I don’t know how long we stand there. I am aware of Ruby still sitting at the table, picking the wax runnels from the candles and frowning as she moulds them in her fingers.
‘Iss all right,’ Lesley says in the end. There are black marks under her streaming eyes and she is tending towards maudlin. ‘Got to go on, haven’t we? Life goes on.’
‘Yes.’ But I disagree.
Now Ruby stands. ‘You ought to go to bed,’ she says, into the space between us.
Lesley and I take each other’s arm and we move slowly, unsteadily, towards the haramlek stairs.
Ruby started after them, but then she looked back at the candles and the panelling. She leaned across the table, pinching the wicks in turn between her fingers to feel the split-second smoulder as each flame was extinguished.
‘Fucking families,’ she said into the smoky dark.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Christmas in England. Christmas with all the re-enactments of family tradition, performed in the same way for as long as Ruby could remember. The difference was that this year she noticed how hard her mother worked to make it look effortless.
Lesley lifted her antique glass tree ornaments out of their cottonwool nests and hung them on the guaranteed-not-to-drop tree. Presents were bought and wrapped and handed over. Will and Fiona and their children came to stay. There was even the diversion of a party given by one of Ruby’s friends, at which Ruby was told that she was looking cool these days.
She participated in all this and even, to her surprise, enjoyed approximately half of it. At the same time she thought constantly about Iris and about Cairo like a parallel world that was waiting for her to slip back into it. The knowledge that she had a separate resort, another place to which to retreat even if it was only in her mind, made it easier to forgive the shortcomings of the present one.
On Boxing Day when Fiona and Lesley took the woundup children out for a walk and Andrew immediately fell asleep, Will followed her into the kitchen and casually dropped his arm round her shoulders. He tilted her chin in order to gaze into her eyes.