Iris and Ruby (15 page)

Afterwards Xan gathered me against him and we looked
a long way into each other’s eyes. We were sweaty, exhausted, and my whole body felt as if a hundred thousand new nerve endings had just been connected.

‘I love you, Iris Black,’ he said.

‘Xan Molyneux, I love you too.’

‘Is it too soon for us to say that? If it’s the truth?’

‘It’s not too soon and I know it’s the truth because I feel the same way.’

Neither of us said so, but we both knew that if we left it too long to speak of it, that might be too late. I laughed, to hide a shiver.

‘Anyway, how can you work out how many days would be proper? Is there a formula? Twenty or fifty?’

‘I have known you for more than twenty days. It’s thirty-eight, to be precise.’

The precision touched my heart. I had totalled up the days too, like pearls.

I put my hand to his face and drew his head to rest against my shoulder. ‘We will be happy,’ I whispered.

I could see, through the uncurtained window, that dawn was breaking.

The memory flashes through my head, as richly textured and vivid as my fever dreams, and just as evanescent.

What I begin falteringly to describe to my granddaughter is a shop window in a Cairo street. The shop was called Sidiq Travel, the name painted across the chocolate-brown fascia in faded art nouveau lettering. In the window were two posters, one of the Eiffel Tower and the other of an improbably golden Beirut beach complete with waving palms and a white-jacketed waiter with a silver tray of cocktails balanced at shoulder height. There was also a propped-up double-sided cut-out of the
Queen Mary
. Everything was coated with the grey-white gritty dust of Cairo.

Ruby’s head is bent and she is writing in her notebook. I can’t see her face.

‘Mr Sidiq sold me the ship from his window display,’ I say. ‘To make a hat.’

Ruby’s shoulders hunch and it now seems that there is desperation in her posture. My voice trails away until the silence is broken only by the tiny splash of the fountain.

What am I trying to say?

‘Go on,’ Ruby says at last, miserably. ‘About the
Queen Mary.
’

I can’t catch the memory. A moment ago it was there, I’m sure of it, and now I’m left with its absence. What were we talking about?

‘It doesn’t matter.’ My forgetfulness seeds a sudden rage in me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say again, much louder.

She is still writing, then crossing something out and rewriting it. The pencil seems to gouge the page.

‘Let me have a look.’

‘No.’ The notebook snapped shut and held against her chest.

What have I said, that’s now being withheld?

‘Hand it over.’

‘I won’t fucking hand it over,’ she yelps at me, jumps to her feet and looks around the garden for an escape route. There’s nowhere to run to.

I lever myself to my feet, painfully, and we confront each other.

My anger fades; what is the point of it? I hold out my arms instead and Ruby hesitates, chewing her bottom lip, then shuffles forward with her head hanging. I put my arm round her, seeing how smooth and lustrous the skin of her forearm is. I have forgotten the silky charge of young flesh. Gently, I take the notebook out of her hands and when I look at her face again I see that she is on the point of tears.

‘Ruby?’
‘What?’ she wails.

I put my hand out to the arm of my chair, searching for some support, and lower myself again. Then I open the notebook and look at what she has written. It is only a few sentences and I can hardly decipher them.

The letters are childishly formed, the words uneven and the letters jumbled. She has written
qunen
for
queen
.

‘I told you, didn’t I, but you didn’t fucking listen.’

‘Don’t swear like that. It’s monotonous, apart from anything else.’

She did tell me she was dyslexic, and I heard her but I wasn’t listening. I am so wound up in my own history, in my frailty and fear.

I feel ashamed of myself. ‘Come here.’

She stoops down by the chair and tries to take back the notebook, but I keep a firm hold on it.

‘I am very sorry, Ruby. You wanted to do something for me, and you were honest about what you thought you could do. Whereas I was impatient and thoroughly selfish. Will you forgive me?’

A sigh. ‘Yeah.’

‘I spend too much time thinking about myself. It happens, when you’ve been alone for a long time. Can you understand that?’

‘Yeah, I s’pose.’

The mulishness is melting out of her.

There is something else I should say, while I am being honest.

‘I am very glad you came,’ I tell her. Then the absurdity of what we have just tried to do strikes me all over again and I start to laugh. ‘It’s very funny. I am the memoirist who can’t remember.’

‘And I’m the am … the ama …
shit
. The writer who can’t write.’

Her eyes are still bright with tears but she begins to laugh too. The laughter is spiked with sadness for both of us, but it fills the garden and drowns out the trickle of water.

Mamdooh appears in the archway that leads into the house and stares at us in mystification. I have to blow my nose and wipe my eyes.

‘Mum-reese, there is a visitor.’

‘Who can that be? Doctor Nicolas?’

‘It is a visitor for Miss.’ He tells Ruby frostily, ‘He is your friend you are seeing yesterday.’

I tell Ruby, ‘Go on, then, don’t keep your friend waiting, whoever he is.’

She skips away.

I have been the focus of Mamdooh’s censure myself. ‘My granddaughter is a young girl,’ I remind him.

‘Indeed.’

Ruby opened the front door, which had been firmly closed by Mamdooh, and found Ash and Nafouz waiting at the foot of the house steps. They were wearing their white shirts and new-looking trainers.

‘Ruby, hello.’

‘Hi.’

Ash walked up the steps like a suitor. ‘We come with my brother’s car. We take you for a tour, you know?’

‘We-ell …’ Ruby longed to go, but then she thought of leaving Iris sitting in the garden on her own and reluctantly shook her head. ‘I can’t. My grandmother kind of needs me right now.’

‘I am sorry. Your grandmother is ill today also?’

‘No, she’s much better. But she should have some company.’

Ash smiled. He really was good-looking, Ruby thought again.

‘Then this is not a problem. Nafouz?’ He beckoned his brother forward. ‘Nafouz and I, we like to take you
and
the lady for a nice ride.’

Ruby blinked at this. It was certainly the first time any of her boyfriends had offered to double-date with her grandmother.

‘We-ell,’ she said again.

‘Please to ask her,’ Nafouz joined in.

‘OK, then. Hang on here. I’ll go and find out if she wants to.’

Iris was sitting with the closed notebook still on her lap.

‘You probably won’t want to do this,’ Ruby began, but Iris tilted her head and looked sharply at her.

‘Whatever it is, I think you should let me decide for myself.’

Ruby told her about Ash and Nafouz and the taxi. Iris listened carefully and then her face split into a smile. When she smiled like that her wrinkles seemed to vanish and she could have been any age, even the same age as Ruby herself.

‘A very good idea,’ she said briskly. ‘I shall certainly come. Will you call Auntie for me?’

Five minutes later, with her head swathed in a white scarf and a pair of black sunglasses hiding half her face, Iris declared that she was ready.

‘You look like somebody,’ Ruby said, meaning a face or a style that she had seen maybe in a magazine, but couldn’t place.

‘I am somebody,’ Iris retorted. The prospect of the outing had noticeably lifted her spirits. She was almost giggly.

Auntie and Mamdooh came out with them. Auntie mumbled to herself and tugged at Iris’s clothes and scarf, settling them around her. Mamdooh had put his tarboosh on his head to walk down the steps, and was trying to get Iris to lean on him for support.

‘I can walk,’ Iris insisted.

Ash and Nafouz had been lounging against the wall opposite, but when they saw Iris and her retinue they stood respectfully upright. Mamdooh loomed over them.

‘How do you do?’ Iris said clearly, sounding rather like the Queen and making Ruby begin a cringe. But the two boys bowed and murmured their names and pointed to the black-and-white taxi.

‘Please to come this way, Madam,’ Nafouz said.

‘We shall be back later, Mamdooh, thank you,’ Iris said. She let Nafouz escort her to the car. She sat up in the front seat beside him, without seeming to notice the splits in the plastic upholstery and the way tongues of decayed sponge stuffing stuck out. Ash and Ruby scrambled into the back seat, where Ash raked his hands through his wing of black hair and gave Ruby a half-wink.

‘Where would you like to go?’ Nafouz asked Iris.

‘Downtown, I think,’ she answered. She settled back in her seat and drew her scarf round her throat.

The traffic, Ruby noted, was just about as bad as always.

Iris craned her head at the shop windows and the towering buildings. She was talking Arabic to Nafouz, and laughing and pointing. Ash’s hand crept across the seat and took hold of Ruby’s.

‘Cairo has changed very much,’ Iris said in English after a while.

Ash nodded vigorously. ‘Now modern city,’ he agreed.

I do leave the house of course, once in a while, but this time feels different. There is the charming but no doubt opportunist brother beside me, Ruby and her beau whispering in the back seat, the air thick with the speculative negotiations of youthful sexual activity. This should make me feel old, but it has the opposite effect.

As we turn into Sharia el Bustan I am thinking that I must
discuss contraception with Ruby. I never had such a conversation with Lesley. Or if I did I have forgotten it, along with everything else. Maybe I can be a better grandmother than I was a mother.

Maybe it is the recognition that there is still something I can learn how to be that makes me suddenly feel so buoyant.

The shop windows glitter with clothes and furnishings exactly like those in shopping streets in every other city in the world. These boys – what were they called? – are proud of Cairo’s modernity, but I miss the horse-drawn caleches, the plodding donkeys, old smells of animal dung and diesel fumes and dust roughly laid with water. Just down the next street was Sidiq Travel. Xan and I carried our
Queen Mary
trophy along this road.

As we pass out into Talaat Harb the lights are coming on in the government buildings. Avoiding the feeder road for the Tahrir Bridge the boy swings the car left down the Corniche and a minute later we pass in front of the walls of the embassy. Once, the gardens stretched down to the bank of the Nile. Here are the trees that shaded the afternoon tea parties of my childhood. I half turn to tell Ruby this but she and the boy are murmuring together, deaf to everything else.

Now we turn left again. I know these shuttered, curving streets so well.

The boy raises one eyebrow at me and I nod.

He has me neatly pigeon-holed. He knows Garden City is where I lived, it is where most of us British lived in those days. Tended gardens, elaborate wrought-iron gates and grilles, ceiling fans turning the humid air in the afternoons. The car rolls slowly past the ghosts, past the blind windows that shield more recent histories.

I am glad when we emerge again into Qasr el Aini and this time head over the bridge. The sun is going down, and
coloured lights glimmer in the river water as we reach the island.

The big trees still shade the club grounds, and the racetrack and the polo ground, but now the branches only partly obscure the light-pocked cubes and rectangles of drab apartment blocks on the western bank. Sixty years ago there were fields and canals on the far side, with ploughs drawn by gaunt buffalo, and villages of mud houses. Now the sprawl reaches almost all the way to Giza.

‘I have forgotten your name. Forgive me?’ I say to the driver.

He flips me a smile. A flirtatious smile, for God’s sake. ‘Nafouz. What is yours?’

‘Doctor Black.’

‘You are medical doctor?’

‘I was. I am retired now.’

Nafouz purses his lips to show me that he is impressed. ‘I am taxi driver only but my brother Ash is working in hospital, operating switchboard.’

‘You both speak good English.’

‘We try,’ Nafouz agrees. ‘We learn.’

The layout of these Gezira streets is familiar, the buildings less so. The ugly lattice of the Cairo Tower looms on one side, on the other is the wall of lush trees that shade the club grounds. Nafouz turns left and we approach the gates. Sixty years drop away and I am in a taxi on my way to meet Xan.

‘Stop. I want to get out for a minute.’

I step out into the dusk. The gates are the same but there is a gatekeeper in a kiosk now and a striped pole to be raised and lowered. A long line of cars stretches back from the barrier, mostly shiny German-made cars; members of today’s Gezira Club are queueing up for admission. I remember cotton sundresses and shady hats, uniforms and cocktails and the
plock
of tennis balls, Xan waiting for me in the bar as I arrived from a day’s work at my desk in Roddy Boy’s outer office.

Xan saying, ‘Darling, let’s have a drink. I’ve got to go away again tomorrow. It’s a bit of a bore, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Madam?’

The gatekeeper calls out to me, and a man in a dark business suit raises the electric window of his BMW as it glides through the gates. The next car in line rolls forward.

‘Yes, Madam?’

‘I … nothing. I’m sorry. A mistake.’

What was I looking for? All the businessmen and chic women and obedient children in these cars are Egyptian. The enclave of empire that I knew, the shady mown-grass sanctuary of British assumptions and attitudes, vanished long ago. The people are all dead. I am still here but I am as much of an anachronism as tea dances and air raid warnings.

I am still here.

Instead of making me sad, the thought fills me with a sudden reckless appetite. Through the window of the taxi I can see the white oval of Ruby’s face, watching me.