Iris and Ruby (10 page)

‘I would rather be here with you, looking at the Pyramids and drinking champagne from a tin mug, than anywhere else in the world.’

‘Really?’ His face suddenly glowed in the candlelight.

‘Yes.’

I was amazed that Xan had taken such pains to surprise me, and that this evening was so important to him. He had planned it so that we stepped straight from the Cairo cocktail circuit into another world, and in my limited experience no one had ever done anything so deft, or so perfectly judged. At the same time he was as eager for my approval as a young boy.

In actual years Xan couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or -six, just three or four years older than me, and I guessed that in other important ways we were contemporaries.

He was probably more experienced with women than I was with men, but neither of us had ever felt anything as dazzling, as momentous as this.

We were not-quite children together. And we were also immortal.

How could we not be?

I lifted the tin mug to my lips. ‘Here’s to us,’ I said and drank my champagne.

‘Here’s to us,’ he echoed.

He took my arm and drew me to the heap of cushions next to the brazier. ‘Are you warm enough? Are you comfortable?’

Ripples of coral-pink silk were crushed between us. I rested my head partly against the cushions and partly against Xan’s shoulder, and saw how the Great Pyramid of Cheops sliced an angle of pitch blackness out of the desert sky.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Iris?’

This was the first time he had spoken my name, rather than teasingly calling me Miss Black.

‘Mm.’

‘Talk to me. Tell me. Let me listen to your voice.’

This moment was a part of Xan’s dreams. Perhaps when he lay in a scraped shelter in the desert, hungry and cold and suspended between remembered horrors and stalking danger, with a pair of boots for a pillow and the butt of his handgun close against his ribs, this was what he had allowed himself to imagine. It was the intimacy of talking with nothing held back, the sharp pang of desire mingled with the sweetness of trust. It was a dream that had become real tonight for both of us.

I reached up and touched his temple. A thin blue vein was just visible beneath the sun-darkened skin.

I told him about growing up as a diplomat’s daughter, shuttled between embassies around the world with loving but distant parents who insisted, when the time came, that boarding school back home was best for me and that homesickness – for a home that I couldn’t quite locate – was to be overcome by people like us, never yielded to.

In his turn, Xan told me about his father who had been a distinguished and decorated commander in the first war. In the years afterwards he had come out to Egypt to expand the family textiles empire, but business had never been his strong point and the Molyneux family set-up had been an eccentric one. Xan had spent much of his boyhood playing with the children of the family servants.

‘So that’s how you know Arabic so well.’

‘Kitchen Arabic, yes. Then I was sent home to school, and after that on to Sandhurst. My father insisted that I was going to be a regular soldier and I was commissioned in 1938. Until I was eighteen or so I used to come out to Alexandria or Cairo for summer holidays. My family weren’t nearly enough the thing to be invited to embassy parties, but maybe you and I saw each other somewhere else? Maybe I sat at the next table to you at Groppi’s one afternoon and envied your ice cream.’

‘You wouldn’t have spared me a glance. I was a plump child and my mother made me wear tussore pinafore dresses and hair ribbons.’

Xan spluttered with laughter. ‘And look at you now.’

‘Where d’you call home?’ I asked.

It was a question that I asked myself often enough, without ever being able to supply a proper answer. It wasn’t the Hampshire village where my parents had lived since my father was invalided out of the Diplomatic Service, or the London that I hardly knew and which in any case was now being flattened by the
Luftwaffe
. Nor was it the Middle East, and the starchy embassy compounds of my childhood.

Home was a strange, evanescent complex of spicy cooking smells and my mother’s French perfume, the brown arms of my nursemaids, shimmering heat hazes, and jacaranda blooms outlined against a sun-bleached sky.

It was dreams, mostly.

‘Home?’ Xan mused. The candle flames were reflected in his eyes. ‘It’s here,’ he said at length.

‘Cairo?’

‘No,
here.
’

I understood that he meant our tent with its coloured hangings, the starry night outside and the two of us. I explored the significance of this, allowing it to swell and flower in my mind. I wanted the exact same thing but I was afraid that it was too much to ask. I had lived all my life effectively alone and the prospect of not being alone, the
luxury
of it, made me feel giddy.

‘Why?’ I ventured to ask and hated the break in my voice. A burning log broke up in the brazier and a shower of powdery sparks flew into the air.

Xan propped himself on one elbow, his face just two inches from mine. ‘Don’t you know why, Iris?’

‘I am not sure. I want to hear you say it.’

He smiled then, lazily confident of us. ‘I saw you walking under the trees at that party, with Sandy Allardyce. I looked at you and I thought that I would give anything to be in Sandy’s place. Then Faria Amman brought you across to our table and I felt so damned triumphant, as if it was the sheer force of my will-power that had brought you there.

‘When I heard your voice, it was exactly how I knew it would be. Your smile was familiar too. It’s not that I think I know you – that would be presumptuous – it’s more that I have dreamed you. You have stepped straight out of a fantasy and become real. Does that sound idiotic? I expect every man who takes you out to dinner says the same thing.’

‘No, they don’t.’

I wanted to tell him that I understood what he meant, if I could have found a way of saying it that didn’t sound conceited. And I wanted to be Xan’s dream.

The night was so perfect, I even believed that I could be.

‘And now I see you aren’t a phantom. It turns out that you have warm skin, and eyes brighter than stars. Your hair’ – he twisted a lock of it round his finger – ‘smells of flowers. So this is where I want to be. This is what I want home to mean.’

His mouth was almost touching mine. As I closed my eyes, I heard several sets of footsteps scuffing through the sand outside the tent.

Xan sat up, grinning, and poured more champagne into the tin mugs.

‘Sayyid Xan?’ a voice said, and Hassan’s head appeared at the tent flap. I sat up straighter and smoothed my skirt over the cushions.

Two young boys followed Hassan into the tent, and they began setting out dishes and bowls. Hassan lifted the earthenware lid of the biggest pot and a cloud of fragrant steam escaped.

‘Are you hungry?’ Xan asked me and I remembered that I was ravenous.

After the men had withdrawn again, bowing and smiling, Xan put a bowl into my hands and ladled out the food. It was a thick stew of lamb with beans and tomato, and we sat turned towards each other on our bank of cushions and devoured it. I tore up chunks of bread and mopped the spicy sauce, then Xan took hold of my wrist and licked my fingers clean for me. He kissed each knuckle in turn and I noticed how his hair grew in different directions at the crown of his head. This tiny detail, more than anything else, made me want to touch him. And want him to touch me. I was almost frightened by how much I wanted it.

‘Who is Hassan?’ I asked. ‘What is this place?’

‘We played together when we were boys. His father taught me to ride. Now we work together, if you understand what I mean. Hassan knows the desert better than anyone else in

Egypt.’

One of Xan’s eyebrows lifted as he told me this.

‘Work’, I guessed, would probably be for one of the secret commando raiding groups that operated between and behind enemy lines. In my months with Roddy Boy I had glimpsed a few reports of their missions.

‘That’s very dangerous, isn’t it?’

‘This is a war.’

Both statements were true. There was nothing either of us could add, so we just looked at each other in the candlelight.

Then Xan leaned forward. ‘I’m here now,’ he whispered. ‘We are here.’

I put my hand to his head as he kissed me, drawing him closer, and the whorl of unruly hair felt springy under the flat of my hand.

‘We weren’t going to talk about the war,’ I said at last.

‘It would be a mistake to do so. It would be a mistake of profound dimensions. It would even be a blunder of historic proportion and therefore I candidly advise against it. Most certainly I advise against it.’

I spluttered with surprised laughter. The voice was Roddy Boy’s, his plump circumlocutions captured to perfection.

‘And I concur. What’s more, the ambassador agrees with me.’

This time it was Sandy Allardyce’s faintly self-important drawl. I laughed even harder. Xan was an excellent mimic.

‘Good.’ Xan smiled. ‘That’s better.’ He knelt upright and rummaged among the dishes. ‘What have we got here?’

There was a glazed bowl of dates, and a little dish of plump shelled almonds. He made me open my mouth and popped the food in piece by piece.

‘Stop. I’ll explode.’

In an old Thermos flask there was strong black coffee, and when everything else was finished we drank that from
our tin mugs. I saw Xan glance at his watch and I felt a cold draught at the back of my neck. I shivered a little and immediately he put his arm round me.

‘Hassan and I have to leave again very early in the morning. I’ll take you home now.’

I smiled at him, pushing the meaning of tomorrow out of my thoughts, then leaned forward and gave him a lingering kiss. It took a serious effort of will to pull back again.

‘That was the very best evening of my life,’ I said.

‘Was it? Do you mean that?’

Once again, his eagerness touched my heart.

‘I do.’

‘There will be more,’ he promised. ‘Hundreds, no, thousands more. A lifetime of evenings, and mornings and nights.’

I touched my fingers to his lips, stalling him for now. I couldn’t ask where he was going, or when he would be back. All I could do was to send him off with the certainty that I would wait for him.

We blew out the candles together and untied the tent flap. We stood side by side and looked across to the Pyramids. And then we turned away from the tent and the view, and walked back hand in hand to the tiny oasis. The men who had been sitting around the fire were gone and the fire itself had burned down to a heap of ash with a heart of dull red embers. Hassan was waiting for us, sitting with his back against the trunk of a palm tree.

We drove back into the City. At the door to the apartment Xan touched my face. ‘I will be back soon,’ he promised.

‘I will be here,’ I said.

My eyes hurt from staring into the darkness.

My body aches, deep in the bones, and I am shivering as if with a fever. A little while ago I heard the child wandering
about, but the street outside and the house are silent now. She must have fallen asleep. I long for the same but instead there is the patchy, piebald mockery of recall, and fear of losing even that much.

Always fear. Not of death, but of the other, a living death.

I think of Ruby’s offer to help me, innocent and calculating, and instead of finding her interesting I am suddenly overwhelmed with irritation, discomfort at the invasion of my solitude, longing for peace and silence.

The shivering makes my teeth rattle.

CHAPTER FOUR

When Ruby woke, her low mood of the previous night had lifted.

She swung her legs out of bed at once and went to the window. The view of the street was already becoming familiar.

Humming as she turned back again, she picked up a T-shirt and a pair of trousers from yesterday’s heap that she had tipped out of her rucksack. She pulled on the clothes, then opened a drawer and scooped the remaining garments into it. The absolute bareness of the room was beginning to appeal to her; it looked much better without a bird’s nest of belongings occupying the floor. She even straightened the covers on the bed before hurrying down the passageway to her grandmother’s room. Her head was full of how she would start helping Iris to record her memories. Maybe after all she could try to write them down for her. The
way
they were written wouldn’t matter, surely? No one would be marking them or anything like that, not like school or college.

They could start talking this morning, while they were eating their breakfast.

Ruby was looking forward to figs and yoghurt and honey.

The door to Iris’s room stood open. She skipped up to it, ready to call out a greeting, then stopped in her tracks. The window was shuttered and the only light came from a lamp beside the bed. Iris was lying on her back and Auntie was reaching over her to mop her forehead with a cloth. The air smelled sour, with a strong tang of disinfectant. When Auntie moved aside Ruby saw that Iris’s face was wax-pale, and the cheeks were sunken. Her nose looked too big for the rest of her face and her eyes were closed. It was as if she had died in the night.

Ruby’s cheerful words dried up. She hovered in the doorway until Auntie half turned and saw her. At once she came at Ruby, making a shooing movement with her hands. Iris lay motionless.

‘What’s the matter? What’s happened? Is she ill?’

The answer was a few mumbled words in Arabic and a push away from the door. Ruby could only retreat and head downstairs in search of Mamdooh. She found him in the kitchen at the back of the house.

‘Is my grandmother very ill?’

Mamdooh pressed his fig-coloured lips together. ‘Mum-reese has fever.’

‘What does that mean?’

They glared at each other.

‘Fever,’ he repeated. And then, making a concession by way of further information, ‘Doctor is coming. Now she must sleep.’ He didn’t actually push her, but he made it as clear as Auntie had done that Ruby was in the way.