Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  They went further, to the ordinary suburbs of Helwan and Ma’adi, and walked sunny residential streets that Ash had never seen before, peering up at shuttered windows and into gardens where lawn sprinklers pattered on thick leaves. But the areas that Ruby liked best were ordinary inner suburbs, where Cairo crowded into the polluted isthmuses between tall concrete apartment blocks and modern mosques and clattering railway lines. There were no tourists or grand sights here, only shoe shops and cafés and electrical stores and the blare and tumult of everyday life. It was the ordinariness itself, and the sheer momentum of it, that she found reassuring.

  When she returned to the old house, the unbreathing silence seemed to unfurl within her head. She would almost run through to the garden or up the stairs, her chest tight with anxiety, looking for Iris.

  ‘Here you are,’ Iris would murmur. ‘Sit down, don’t loom over me.’

  At other times she didn’t even notice that Ruby had been away. She would pick up on an anecdote that she had lost her way in yesterday, or begin in an entirely new place, with a birdlike peck of her head towards Ruby to indicate listen.

  Ruby did.

  It was like making two different sets of excursions, she thought, the one imperfectly superimposed on the other. There were her explorations with Ash, and these were matched with the khaki-flooded streets of Iris’s much more confined Cairo. Iris never went much beyond Garden City and Zamalek, but those dust-lined roads and party-scarred apartments, and the nightclubs and horse-drawn gharrys and all the sights of wartime Egypt in her grandmother’s fading memory became almost as real to Ruby as the modern city outside the shuttered windows.

  Iris backtracked, repeated herself, dropped into a doze in mid sentence, but the impetus of telling her story seemed enough to rouse her again. Sometimes the narrative drifted away to Swakopmund, or Blantyre or some other African town, but she always came back again to Cairo.

  ‘You love this place,’ Ruby said.

  Iris opened her eyes. ‘Do I? I don’t know. Maybe I should have gone somewhere else, while I still could.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Not England?’

  ‘No, not England, thank you.’

  ‘How is she?’ Lesley asked. She telephoned every other day.

  ‘Mum, she’s OK. Doctor Nicolas says she could be around for a long time yet. She sleeps a lot, and wakes up and tells me about Captain Molyneux taking her to a nightclub and then going to bed with him. People seemed to have quite a lot of fun in those days, even though there was a war on.’

  Lesley laughed. ‘I’ve heard that.’

  ‘They all got pregnant. Her friend Sarah went to Beirut for an abortion.’

  ‘You sound shocked.’

  ‘No. Well, you know. She is my grandmother.’

  Lesley laughed again. ‘Everyone was young once. When I was twenty …’

  ‘Mum, please. I so don’t want to hear what you got up to in the sixties.’

  ‘All right. Ruby?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m glad you and Granny are talking. I’m glad you’re listening.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s OK.’

  A few days later Ash came for Ruby and instead of letting her go outside to join him Iris ordered her to bring him inside. They had been sitting in the garden, and Ash came awkwardly through the summer rooms and stood in the slice of shade that sheltered Iris’s chair. He was never very comfortable inside the house and Ruby blamed Mamdooh’s attitude for that.

  Iris tilted her head to look up at Ash. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘I am well, thank you, Madam. How are you?’

  ‘Give me your arm,’ she said.

  ‘What? You are going somewhere?’

  ‘Give me your arm, please.’

  Between them, Ash and Ruby helped her to her feet. Fastened tight on their forearms, her hands looked like the claws of a rooster, but Iris still managed an imperious air. She indicated that they were to walk her round the little garden, and they made a slow circuit that allowed her to look closely at the fountain water trickling into its bowl and the crisp green folds of the new geranium leaves, and the cool submarine glimmer of the green and turquoise tiles.

  Next they negotiated the worn stone step that led through an arch into the house. The summer rooms were bare; even the kelim cushions on the divans had been put away by Auntie for the winter, and there were velvety cobwebs draped in the high corners. Iris stopped in an inner door and looked back to see the garden framed by its arch. From this perspective it shone like a little green jewel in the heart of the old stone house.

  When they slowly processed into the celebration hall she said, ‘Wait. Stand still, please.’

  Ash and Ruby glanced at each other. Silently, they surveyed the dark panelling and the intricate patterns of the mashrabiya screens. Overhead, hanging from the apex of the painted dome, the lantern was slowly acquiring a fresh mantle of dust.

  Iris nodded, as if confirming something for herself. Her hands twitched, to indicate that they were to move on again, through the empty rooms that led off the hall. There were a few tattered books on the shelves of the gloomy wooden cabinets, pewter jugs or a cracked blue Chinese vase positioned between them. Looking at it, Ruby was struck all over again by how minimal an attempt Iris had made to impose her personality on the old house. Now she was withdrawing even further, leaving it to its shadows and history. In the alcove where she and Iris and Lesley had eaten their last dinner, the table was still pooled with grey wax.

  They reached the salamlek stairs and began painfully to climb them. Even though Ash and Ruby were supporting most of her weight, Iris drew up one foot with a great effort, then placed the next beside it and paused to catch her breath before attempting the next step. They came to the sharp angle in the stairs where a screened window projected into a side alley beneath the looming walls of the mosque and Ash couldn’t stop himself, while Iris was resting again, from darting to the window and pressing his face to the screen. From here, the house was almost part of the mosque itself and the shadow from the nearest minaret fell across it like a warning finger.

  When he turned back, his eyes were shining. ‘Your house. It is beautiful, it is like a house for a sultan of old Cairo.’

  Iris’s hand settled on his sleeve again. ‘It is a beautiful house,’ she agreed. ‘I have been fortunate to occupy it.’

  They climbed the remaining stairs, shuffled along the corridors with their wide floorboards and came to the gallery. They made one circuit and Ash broke away once or twice to gaze down through the screens into the hall, as if he could clearly see the men and the musicians and the jingling dancers below.

  At the door of Iris’s room she stood up a little straighter, looking Ash in the eye.

  ‘Thank you,’ he murmured, meaning for letting him see the inner rooms.

  Iris nodded. ‘Good. I will go to bed for a rest now, Ruby, if you will send Auntie up to me.’

  The next day Iris stayed in her bed. Auntie took up a tray and brought it down again, untouched. Ruby sat beside the bed, opposite the photograph of Xan and its attendant wooden boat with the shaky numeral 1 painted on the side.

  ‘Are you sleepy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want to talk, then? Or are you too tired?’

  Iris swallowed. Under the tissue-thin skin Ruby could see the muscles working in her throat.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘You never told me how you came by this house.’

  ‘It was a legacy.’

  ‘From whom?’

  Poor Sandy Allardyce. Never had children, with Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch or anyone else. Lived here alone the last ten years of his life and died in his sixties. He inherited the house from Gerti Kimmig-Gertsch, then left it to me, of all people, in his will; a letter from his solicitor reached me months afterwards, me in my rented two rooms next to the clinic in Namibia. I hadn’t seen Sandy since I left Cairo in 1942, but we exchanged letters o
nce in a while.

  So I came back here, to live alone for the last years of my life, just like Sandy. It has been a good house for me, there have always been the shadows of people and the echoes of their voices. Always, until recently.

  Now there is only the silence.

  ‘I wasn’t lonely,’ I say, just to break it, not because it is the truth.

  Ruby smiles at me. She is so vital, with a bloom on her like a fresh peach.

  ‘Good. Who was it who left you the house?’

  ‘Sandy,’ I say.

  I can’t tell the story. Too much effort. ‘He was in love with me,’ I offer.

  ‘He was in love with me,’ Iris said.

  Ruby caught a sudden sideways glance, darting under her grandmother’s colourless lashes, a look of coquetry, utterly knowing and triumphant.

  Iris remembered how she had once been. Maybe, Ruby thought, she even felt today as she had once done. Capable of rousing men to passion. Eager, with the man she loved, to return it.

  ‘What was it like, the first time with Xan?’

  ‘Like …?’

  Iris gave a small sigh, her chest just perceptibly rising and falling under the covers.

  ‘It was like going to heaven.’

  The short-lived, dewy cool of pre-dawn. Xan’s flat, a staging post shared with unnumbered officers who passed through Cairo. A gun on a shelf, boots with the shape of stranger’s feet in them, discarded in the hallway.

  I didn’t know that you could laugh and cry at the same time. I loved his body and I loved Xan. Then and now.

  Iris had fallen asleep. Ruby stood up, very carefully, so as not to disturb her, and slipped out of the room.

  Now I am alone. That’s right. Silence rests on my head, reaches into the ear, swelling in the chambers and pressing against the delicate bones.

  Malleus. Incus. Stapes.

  Nicolas. Nicolas witnessed my scrap of a will.

  I have nothing to leave, only this house with its serene Ottoman arches and the garden where it is cool even in the summer’s heat, and I have taken my leave of it.

  I do not want my Ruby, my precious gem of a Ruby, to retreat here, to be caught here, with second-hand memories for company.

  The house will be sold.

  And whatever money it realises, a great deal of money I think, because people have tried to persuade me to sell it, will be divided into three.

  … Groppi’s garden, shabby and tawdry and not the way I remembered it. Those two boys, the taxi driver with his quick way to make a pound and his brother, Ruby’s beau, shy and intelligent. Ice cream. Yawning waiters. Ruby herself, pushing her lips out and tossing her head, caught between me and her friends, anxious and defiant at the same time and the three of them so young, which I had forgotten …

  Three ways.

  One-third for Mamdooh and Auntie.

  One-third for Ruby, which will be something but not too much.

  One-third for Ashraf, so that he can go and study.

  Two-thirds for Egypt, one-third for England.

  That’s good, I think.

  And Lesley, my poor Lesley …

  She will not want my legacy. Let it pass on to Ruby, who has love from both of us. Who is more like me than Lesley ever was.

  More like me. Miss Iris Black, Mrs Xan Molyneux as never was, Mrs Gordon Foxbridge, returned to Doctor Black again.

  * * *

  ‘Hi,’ Ash said and Ruby pressed her mouth to his.

  ‘Let’s go to the garage,’ she whispered urgently.

  It was dark, and when Ash groped for and pressed the switch there was still no light. Nafouz had disconnected it, or it had fused, or there was a local power failure.

  ‘We cannot play music,’ he grumbled.

  ‘We’ll have to think of something else to do.’

  Ruby slid closer to him, winding her arms round his neck.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked, as she ran the tip of her tongue from the corner of his mouth to the angle of his jaw, and buried her nose in the warm cleft behind his ear. She breathed in the scent of him. Spearmint gum, cigarettes and skin.

  ‘I want to,’ Ruby said simply. More than wanting to, it had become an imperative. She needed to be joined to him, just as she needed to breathe and eat. Like Iris with Captain Xan Molyneux. She slipped her hands inside the creaking leather of his jacket, running her fingers downwards over the span of his ribs.

  ‘Ruby …’

  ‘You said you love me.’

  ‘Yes. It is true.’

  Her fingers reached the buckle of his belt.

  ‘Well, then …’

  It was too dark to see anything but the faintest outline of his face.

  ‘It is not a right thing to do.’ He was struggling to maintain control.

  ‘Ash. You have to trust me when I say that it is the right thing.’ Her fingers worked and she punctuated her words with little darts of her tongue. ‘It’s right and natural if we both want to, and I do and I know you do too. Life’s precious, Ash. We won’t always be here. We’ll end up just bones, like in the Cities of the Dead.’

  He bent his head. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ he whispered at last.

  He locked his arms round her and pulled her off her feet, and in the black, oil-reeking darkness Ruby laughed. They staggered backwards together, the old car seat catching them in the backs of the knees as they fell. They landed in a tangle of limbs on the sagging plastic. Ash caught her wrists and pinned them above her head.

  ‘Now you are mine.’

  ‘Now, yes,’ she breathed back.

  Iris exaggerated, she thought. It wasn’t like going to heaven. But it was pretty good.

  Ash had to be at his hospital switchboard by midnight. At twenty minutes to they left their car seat and stepped out into the blue night, Ash twitching at his shirt to straighten it and Ruby raking her hair with her fingers. They linked hands and ran to the moby, and Ruby circled his waist with her arms and rested her cheek against his back as they raced back to the house.

  They kissed in the hidden angle of a wall. It was hard to pull apart again.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Ash begged.

  ‘Tomorrow. Same time, same place.’ Ruby stretched luxuriously. Life was precious; it promised a chain of tomorrows. She stood back to let him go. He wheeled the moby in a tight circle and roared away.

  On her way to bed, Ruby looked into Iris’s room. She was asleep, lying on her side, facing towards the photograph.

  In the morning she was gone.

  Ruby woke very early with a cold premonition in her heart. She blinked in the dim light, trying to identify what was wrong. Then in one movement she sat up and pushed back the covers. She ran down the corridor, her warm feet leaving faint prints on the bare floor.

  Iris was still lying on her side, facing the photograph.

  Ruby hesitated in the doorway. When at the beginning of her time here Iris had fallen ill, she looked into the room to see Auntie sponging her waxy forehead and had feared for a moment that her grandmother had died in the night.

  It was not like this.

  Without taking a breath Ruby crossed to the side of the bed.

  She touched her hand to Iris’s arm and it was cold.

  When she saw Jas’s poor body she knew at once that he was dead; the person who had been was no longer there. She thought of him now, with her warm hand resting on Iris’s cold skin. Her head was pounding until she remembered to take a breath that started as a gasp and ended as a sob.

  Iris was gone, just as conclusively as Jas.

  Ruby slipped down to her knees and put her arm round Iris’s shoulders.

  She had left in her sleep, alone. As if she had chosen to do it that way.

  Gently, Ruby leaned forward and kissed her cold temple, where the blue veins showed under the skin. She knelt there for a few minutes, holding her, then she stood painfully upright again with all her body aching. The absence was complete.

  In the kitchen, Mamdooh stood up from his chair
by the oven as soon as he saw her face.

  Ruby took both his hands. ‘My grandmother died in her sleep,’ she said.

  Auntie was standing beside the sink. A rising wail of grief broke out of her, loud as the first call of the muezzin. Ruby briefly hugged her, then she turned away. She would have to telephone Doctor Nicolas, Lesley; she would have to perform the tasks that those who were left behind always had to perform, in one way or another.

  But not yet, first she wanted some time to be alone and to think about Iris.

  Ruby left the house. She turned the opposite way from the front door and walked the few steps to the ziyada that led into the courtyard of the great mosque. She had only looked inside a handful of times, peeking at the sea of praying men who pressed their foreheads to the holy ground. But now the great space was deserted. She walked slowly, under a sky heavy with rain, the pebbles sharp under the thin soles of her slippers. The court was surrounded by arcades: the court was as vast as the desert and the smooth rhythm of the arches was like a rolling sea. Ruby tipped her head back and the first raindrops needled her face.

  She wanted to hear Iris’s voice, but she couldn’t summon it up. Not yet. The image of the empty shell that she had left behind was too clear.

  The three minarets topped with crescent moons soared towards the sky.

  It was like going to heaven, Iris had said. Suddenly Ruby glimpsed the look that Iris had shot at her. The knowing, confident, amused look of a passionate woman. Maybe that’s what it was like, Ruby thought.

  She hoped so.

  A sudden gust of wind swept across the open court, bringing rain from the north, down from the reeds and water of the delta.

  The rain on the pebbles smelled strangely, yet familiarly, of England.

  Read on for a sample of Rosie’s compelling new novel The Kashmir Shawl

  The Kashmir Shawl

  Chapter 1

  Mair made the discovery on the last day at home in the old house.

  The three of them were upstairs in their father’s bedroom. They had come together for the melancholy business of sorting and clearing their parents’ furniture and possessions, before closing up the house for the last time and handing over the keys to the estate agent. It was the end of May and the lambs had just been taken away to market. Out on the hill the sheep were bleating wildly, loud, incessant and bewildered cries that were carried in with the scent of spring grass.