by Rosie Thomas
‘How is my special girl?’
Ruby considered, giving herself plenty of time to do so, while Will’s finger traced a line down her neck to her collarbone.
I don’t need to have any kind of weird contract with you, not any more. I’m never going to live in your house again. You can’t confuse me any longer with your creepy blend of authority and sleazy secret advances, was what she was thinking.
‘I am not yours,’ was what she said. She was pleased with the splinters of ice in her voice.
She detached his hand from her shoulder and let it fall, then she added, ‘I don’t want you to touch me ever again. And if you do, I will tell my mother and your wife about it.’
As an afterthought she picked up the tea cloth and pointed to the washing-up.
‘Here.’ She smiled at him, putting the cloth into his empty hand. Will had not cleared up a plate or a glass throughout the whole of Christmas. That was women’s work.
When she came back from the walk Lesley said, ‘Ruby, darling, you’ve done the saucepans. Thank you.’
‘Not me. It was Will,’ Ruby told her.
She couldn’t be sure, but Lesley seemed also have adopted a different attitude to Andrew. She told him once that he and his papers were in the way, and if he really had to work all through Christmas could he perhaps go and do it in the study?
Andrew gave her a look, but he gathered himself up and went.
She didn’t shrink, either, when he told her that those brown trousers didn’t suit her. ‘Don’t you think so? I am quite pleased with them,’ she said, smoothing the front pleats across her stomach. ‘And they’re taupe, actually.’
Instead of changing into a different pair she wore them all day, and the next day as well.
It wasn’t much, Ruby acknowledged, but it was something.
Lesley seemed to occupy more space. As if she had decided that she deserved as much light and air as everyone else.
‘Thanks for doing all the cooking and shopping and everything,’ Ruby said to her, when Will and his family had at last gone home. Andrew and Ed were watching the football. ‘Everyone enjoyed themselves.’
‘Did they?’ Lesley said eagerly. ‘Did you?’
‘Of course I did. I never thought about it before but Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together, eating the turkey and playing the games and going for the walk. Now we’ve done it and that’s it for another year. But I understand why you wanted me to come home for it and I’m glad I did.’
They looked at each other and a slow smile curved Lesley’s face. She seemed suddenly younger and almost relaxed.
Ruby said, ‘You never got an answer, did you?’
Lesley knew instantly what she was talking about.
‘In a way I did. It wasn’t exactly a revelation that Iris wasn’t a good mother. But it helped, rather, to hear her admit that she probably wouldn’t have been to anyone else either. That it wasn’t just me who had somehow failed to capture her interest, which was what I always felt.’
‘You didn’t know about her great love affair, and the lost baby?’
‘No. Nothing at all. When I was young Iris was either away, or I was visiting her in difficult places where she was always needed more urgently than I seemed to need her. I was rather afraid of her.’
‘I’m pleased she told us. She must have wanted to, the way it all came out in a great rush.’
‘Did you talk a lot, when you were there together?’
‘She told me a few stories, but they never connected up, not the way they did when she told us about Grandad and the Black Code and the Qattara Depression. Now I come to think about it, most of the time I talked and she listened. I probably moaned about how unfair life was.’
‘Was?’
Ruby grinned. ‘I’m saying nothing more at this stage.’
‘Of course not.’
‘You know? I think Iris had forgotten how to talk. She’s been on her own for so long, it’s just not what she does.’
‘I think you are right.’
Abruptly, Ruby asked, ‘When can I go back there?’
It was the last day of the year, a pale glimmering afternoon with raindrops on black twigs and a low English sky folded on the tops of the hills. The world seemed to leak water and to be so exhausted with bearing the weight of it that it heaved itself out of darkness only to sink back into twilight again.
Lesley said, ‘Can you tell me why you want to, so much?’
Ruby considered window-dressing her proposition with more assurances about language courses and pharaonic studies. She was eager to do those things, if she could find a way that wouldn’t make her feel stupid all over again, but she was afraid that concealing the real reason for going back to Cairo would be to deny Iris herself.
‘To be with her. She’s old.’
‘I know that.’
Lesley had been staring out at the smeary lead-grey and russet enclosure of the garden but now she turned to face Ruby. She had watched her since they had come home, expecting that there would be a bad reaction after her ordeal, but all that had happened was that her daughter had acquired a new stature. Since her days in the desert she had become more measured, she spoke more slowly and gave more thought to what she did say. Even her voice sounded less strident.
But was she old enough for what would come next, Lesley wondered? Did Ruby even understand what was involved?
On the morning they left Cairo, Lesley had a serious headache. Iris was tired and peevish too, and she had waved them off with visible relief. But Lesley noticed that her eyes followed Ruby all the way out of the room.
If Ruby went to Cairo she would be doing what Lesley would have been glad to do herself – but Iris wouldn’t want that. She wouldn’t look for Lesley’s company now, any more than she had done before. But at least Ruby could be there. Ruby would be the thread. And if Iris’s condition worsened – past the point, Lesley secretly calculated, when she would be able to exert her iron will – then it wasn’t so far for Lesley to travel to be there herself.
Lesley beckoned and Ruby took a sideways step, to come under the shelter of her arm. They stood close together, their cheeks touching.
Lesley didn’t say that they should discuss the matter with Ruby’s father, or even with Andrew. This was between the two of them.
‘I think you should go,’ she said at last.
Ruby’s head lifted at once. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said.
This time, she knew exactly how much to pay the taxi driver for the ride in from the airport. The smell of diesel fumes and frying offal, underpinned with the amalgamated spicy, rotting, fermented odours of Cairo itself, was perfectly familiar. As they sat in the dense pack of freeway traffic Ruby watched the navy-blue skyline jagged with domes and high-rise blocks and sharp minarets, and saw the first faint stars appear above them. The old city drew in around her.
The door in the high wall opened and Mamdooh’s shape was outlined against the dim light within. ‘Miss, you are here again,’ he said. It was impossible to tell whether his gloomy tone was lightened by a briefly welcoming note.
Ruby stepped inside and he took her bag. The quietness of the house struck her again. It was all shadows and arches, shadows within the arched recesses and in the angles of the old walls, muffled with dust, populated by ghosts. Auntie hurried out of the kitchen and grabbed her hands, looking up into her face and talking volubly.
‘How is Mum-reese?’ she asked them.
‘Doctor Nicolas has visited her. She is a little tired, but she waits to see you.’
The door to Iris’s sitting room stood open, letting a slice of light out into the dim breadth of the gallery. Ruby stepped inside.
‘You are here at last,’ Iris greeted her.
The child.
She gives off energy like heat from a fire.
She sits down in her usual place, takes my hand. I think she is talking about England and Christmas and Lesley, but it is too tiring to catch and catalogu
e the sense of what she is saying. Instead, I watch the way her mouth moves, the lower lip pushing forward to form her words. Her lips are shiny, pinky-red, and her tongue taps her white teeth with a rhythm like music.
After a while she stops talking and looks at me, with a question that I haven’t heard left hanging in the air. I have no idea how to answer it.
‘I don’t know,’ I sigh. My eyes are closing.
Tonight, it is Ruby who helps me to bed. The determination that has gripped me ever since they left eases, suddenly mutating into drowsiness.
Sleep.
In her own room, Ruby sat on her bed and stared into the darkness outside her window. Just in the space of a month Iris had become much smaller, frailer, except for her eyes which appeared huge in her shrunken face. Ruby didn’t even know if she had been able to conceal her shock at the sight of her.
She would have to talk to Doctor Nicolas, find out from him what treatment or medicine Iris could have that would make her better. And even as she resolved to do this, the recognition of its futility crawled up her spine to grasp the nape of her neck.
Iris wasn’t going to get better and there was no medicine she could take. She was dying.
No …
I won’t let her die, was Ruby’s first reaction. It isn’t fair. I didn’t let it happen in the desert and I won’t now.
Then she bowed her head. The splintered old floorboards were dull with dust, her feet were placed on the familiar garnet-and-maroon pattern of a frayed piece of Persian carpet. She traced the lozenges and interlockings with her eyes, until tears blurred the geometry.
‘You like pomegranate,’ Iris announced as triumphantly as a child.
‘Yes, I do.’ Ruby gnawed the seeds from their caul of pith and burst them between her teeth.
The light in Cairo even in January was bright after the English murk, and the sun was gentle on the tops of their heads. Iris blinked in the warmth, her eyes watering, and Ruby picked up her hat from where it lay and placed it on Iris’s head.
‘Is that better?’
‘Thank you.’ She smiled vaguely.
‘Have you finished your coffee? Would you like some yoghurt, look, with some of this honey? You haven’t eaten anything, hardly,’ Ruby insisted.
‘I’m quite happy.’ Iris smiled again.
It was true, she did seem happy. They sat in the garden together as they had done before, and if Iris wasn’t too tired they talked.
‘Tell me more about Xan Molyneux?’
Sixty years ago there were soldiers in these streets. Officers and men in their dusty khaki, Xan among them. The war was just another layer of history in the making.
‘Ah, Ruby. If you had only known him. He was an extraordinary man.’
‘How did you meet him?’
That was the question that Lesley had asked about her father when they were having dinner on the last night. Ruby remembered that she had cringed a little, thinking that her mother was too direct, but Iris had come straight out with the story.
In Lady Gibson Pasha’s garden. Dancing with Xan and then falling and spraining my ankle. I had been drunk on whisky and champagne, and then drunk on Xan himself.
The child’s eyes as I talk, rounded in surprise.
She thinks as all the young do – as I thought myself, when I was her age – that passion is their own invention.
I find that I am laughing because I remember the night and the joy of it, when it was the loss of memory I feared more than anything else.
And I talk and talk. The words come easily now, bringing relief. Ruby sits and listens, her hand linked in mine, her eyes on my face.
‘How is your grandmother today?’
Ash and Ruby were sitting on the old car seat. The door of the garage stood open and a bar of white light lay across the oily floor, slicing across their ankles.
‘She’s weak. She doesn’t eat anything, so that’s not so surprising. But she’s full of memories. I’ve heard about how she met her great love, when they lived here during the war. You’d think it was all tennis parties and chaperones, but it wasn’t like that a bit. They were quite wild. They slept together. Iris said it was because they didn’t know if the men would be alive the next week, or even the next day, sometimes. You had to live for the minute, so what point was there in being good?’
Ash looked startled. ‘You are discussing such things with your grandmother?’
Ruby laughed. ‘Yes. We sit there with our coffee cups and she tells me about it; and while I’m listening it’s as if we’re the same age. She’s talking all the time, as if she’s suddenly discovered that she can.’
‘It must have been quite near where we got lost.’
The child’s face turns anxious. ‘I don’t like thinking about it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, obviously, because of what might have happened.’
‘Not because of what did happen?’
She thinks about this. ‘It was horrible. I was afraid and I was drowning in sand and burning up with heat and thirst. I kept thinking about how I didn’t want to die and how precious everything is.’
‘You are right,’ I tell her. ‘Life is precious. That’s what to think about.’
‘All right.’ She shifts in her seat, looking at me. ‘Go on, about Xan driving you into the desert.’
Hassan at the wheel and Xan in the back beside me. Holding my hand in the creased coral pink silk folds of my dress.
The Bedouin tent pitched in the shelter of the dunes, the view of the Pyramids and champagne frothing into tin mugs. The first time I understood the split in Xan, and Jessie James and all the others like them, who had to confront the unthinkable every day in the desert and who only wanted to laugh and get drunk and make love when they left it behind.
‘Was that the first time you and Xan made love?’
‘No, not that night. That came a little later.’
And I can remember it as if I have just stepped out of his arms. The joy of it.
Ruby is still looking at me, with a strange expression now.
‘The cup on the shelf,’ she says again.
‘That’s right,’ I tell her. I have the sudden certainty that when I can no longer hold it, when it has slipped out of my hands, it will not be smashed into a thousand pieces.
Ruby will be holding it for me.
The car seat creaked as Ash moved closer. He put his mouth against Ruby’s neck and she shivered, arching her back with pleasure at the heat of his breath.
‘My grandmother had a good life. She knew what it was like to love and to be loved. It was tragic that he was killed, her lover, but that doesn’t take away from the meaning of it, does it?’
‘It does not.’
His hand slid between the tired plastic of the seat and Ruby’s smooth back.
* * *
I was thinking of the oasis that I never found again, in all the years. It might have been a mirage that only existed for Xan and me. And then the other faces of the desert: Private Ridley, Jessie James, Gus Wainwright. The Italian planes coming out of the sky in their tight formation and fire springing from them. I was thinking of them, searching for all those lost places, in my old car with the child at the wheel. Of course I couldn’t find them. The desert is full of bones.
I tell Ruby, ‘It’s all gone. Blown away.’
Her face puckers with determination. ‘No it hasn’t. It’s here. Go on, tell me some more.’
Gordon with his camera. Elvira Mursi, dancing in her sequins. Ash Wednesday, when we burned all the GHQ files. Faria’s wedding, Roddy Boy coming across the marble floor to tell me that Xan was dead. Ruth and Daphne and how I wanted to be like them, instead of a girl on the cocktail circuit.
Ruby sits beside me and holds my hand, her eyes on my face.
Ruby is the cup.
The thought makes me feel so happy that I am light, ready to float. The first warmth of the year is in my bones. Soon the heat will flood back, like the Nile itself.
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Nicolas has come, he is leaning over to examine me, but his investigations are painful and I don’t want to be interrupted. I turn back, searching for Ruby again, and she is here.
‘Good,’ I say. ‘That’s good. I like you to sit where I can see you. Can you hear me?’
‘Yes. I can hear every word.’
‘How is she?’ Ruby demanded of Doctor Nicolas as he put on his coat.
‘In good spirits.’
‘I don’t mean that.’
‘I know.’
‘Well?’
‘You want me to tell you that she is going to live for another twenty years and I can’t do that.’
‘No, but …’
‘She is not ill, Ruby. Old age is not a viral infection, or some acute condition that I can treat with medicine.’
‘Of course not,’ she said fiercely.
Mamdooh appeared. ‘Excuse me, Sir. Madam Iris would like to speak with you again for a short moment in private.’
Nicolas followed him, and came back again ten minutes later to where Ruby was still sitting under the lantern in the hallway. He patted her on the shoulder. ‘She could be with us for a long time yet.’ He smiled.
When Iris was resting in bed, Ash and Ruby resumed their long walks.
They explored the city in trajectories that looped outwards from the clogged arteries of downtown. They passed cavernous art deco apartment buildings where the doorman sat sunning himself on the steps. In the medieval lanes of the Islamic quarters Ruby wrapped a scarf over her hair and stepped meekly at Ash’s side through the donkey shit and rotting vegetables and running water from burst pipes. Beggars hunched in the shade of latticed balconies pulled at her skirt as she passed and muttered their imploring ‘Ya Mohannin, ya Rabb’. Or they went southwards to the Coptic quarter and slipped between the ancient, dark, inward-looking Christian churches and the ruined stones of the Roman walls. Once, close to the river, Ash pointed out the great stone-built aqueduct that for a thousand years had carried water from the river to the Citadel and they peered into the slots that had held water wheels turned by teams of oxen.