Iris and Ruby (16 page)

It’s getting dark. I pull off my sunglasses and settle myself back in my seat.

‘Let’s go to Groppi’s,’ I say, slapping my hands on the plastic dashboard so that everybody jumps.

Nafouz asks, ‘Are you sure, Doctor?’

I insist, very brightly, ‘Certainly I am sure.’

So the four of us find ourselves sitting at a table in the little café garden of Groppi’s.

Once, everyone in Cairo who could afford it came here. Vine tendrils smothering the walls and strings of coloured lights made it seem far removed from the city’s white glare. Ladies in furs sat at these little round tables drinking tea with men with silky moustaches, and officers ordered cream cakes for their girls.

It’s dusty and neglected now, with an unswept floor and waiters in dirty jackets. The two boys are hungry and Ruby looks bored.

‘What would you all like? What shall we order?’ I say encouragingly, but no one seems to know. We make a strange foursome. ‘We must have ice cream.’ I remember the ice creams, mint-green and luscious pink with stripes of coffee-brown, all with tiny crystals of ice bedded in them. They were served in cut-glass coupes, decorated with furled wafers.

Ruby is eyeing me. No one seems to want ice cream.

‘I’m sorry. It’s different.’ I can feel the suck and swirl of time past, rocking and pulling at my feet like a vicious current. I’m looking at the menu, a dreary plastic-laminated affair sticky with fingerprints. The two boys are smoking, giving each other looks out of the corners of their liquid eyes. Ruby leans forward to help herself from one of the packs on the table.

‘Does Lesley let you do that?’

She gives a sharp cough of laughter and smoke pours from between her teeth. Her odd mixture of childishness and bravado tickles me, and I find myself laughing too. The atmosphere changes and we order toasted sandwiches, far too many, and coffees and pastries and bottles of Coca-Cola. It is after sundown so the boys break their Ramadan fast with gusto and the strange meal somehow becomes what I wanted, a celebration.

‘Go on,’ I urge them, over the plates of food that the waiters slap down on the table. ‘Go on, eat up.’

They tell me about their family. Father dead, several younger siblings whom they must help their mother to support. Ruby’s beau is the clever one, the one they are banking on. He looks very young to carry such a weight of responsibility.

‘I learn to speak English, and also some computer studies. But it is not easy to pay for teaching.’

And he meets my eyes. They have seen where I live and they probably think I am rich. In fact I am poor, certainly by European standards. I murmur in Arabic, a conventional piety. Ruby is looking away, thinking her own thoughts.

The table top is pooled with coffee and there are still sandwiches and little cakes glistening with fat and sugar to be eaten but Nafouz is tapping his watch.

‘Time for work. We are both night shift.’

Ash wraps a sandwich in a paper napkin and holds it out to me. ‘You have eaten nothing.’

‘I don’t want it. Take it with you, for later.’

‘I may?’

‘Of course.’

I call for, and pay, the enormous bill. It is a long time since I have been to a café, much longer since I have paid for four people at once. Before everyone stands up I say, ‘Thank you for this evening, Nafouz. Thank you, Ash. I enjoyed it very much.’

This is the truth. It has helped me to see the today versions of yesterday’s places. Memory is a little like découpage, I think, a harmless activity that I was encouraged to practise when I was ill as a child, involving pasting cut-out views and scenes to build up a picture in layers. The build-up creates a kind of depth. It adds perspective. Of course the base layers are fading and partially obscured. The old Groppi’s I knew, like Cairo itself, has been overlaid by the present version. Because I am here, seeing it as it is now, I realise that there is nothing mysterious or fearful in this. Of course I can’t catch and keep everything. I can only strive for what is important; my memories of Xan.

Ruby is standing up, looking at me, a little perplexed. ‘Iris?’

I collect myself. ‘Yes? What is it?’

‘We’ve got to go. Ash is late.’

They are waiting in the doorway. On the way back to the taxi the boys take my arms, as if I am their own grandmother. I am glad of the support because I am very tired. On the way home, I look out at the lights and the thick crowds in the streets. Nafouz has yet another cigarette clenched between his teeth.

Behind me, I can hear Ruby and Ash whispering on the back seat. When we reach the house they say goodbye to each other offhandedly, in the way that the young do, not making another arrangement because they don’t need to. It’s understood that they will meet again just as soon as possible. I feel a thin stab of envy, and then amusement at the nonsense of this.

Mamdooh and Auntie seem actually to have been waiting in the hallway for our return. At any rate, they spring from nowhere as soon as Ruby and I come in.

With the afternoon’s change of perspective I notice how we have become interdependent, the three of us, over the years. I need them and they need me to need them.

‘We have had an excellent outing. A drive, then Groppi’s.’

An idea has just formed in my head and I keep it fixed there as I unpin my headscarf and hand it to Auntie. ‘We’ll have some tea later, upstairs. Ruby, Mamdooh, will you come with me?’

Ruby shuffled in their wake back down the passageway to Iris’s study. Mamdooh was trying to insist that Mum-reese should rest, Iris sailed ahead with the absent but intent look on her face that Ruby was beginning to recognise.

‘I think there is a box in there.’ Iris pointed to a pair of cupboard doors painted with faded white birds and garlands of leaves.

‘A box?’ Mamdooh frowned.

‘Exactly. If you open the doors for me?’

Ruby yawned. It had been OK, going out in the car with Iris, but now Ash had gone to work and she wouldn’t see him until tomorrow. She would have liked to spend a bit more time on her own with him.

‘There it is.’ Iris pointed.

Mamdooh lifted a pile of dusty books, some sheaves of printed music and an old-fashioned clothes brush off the lid of a dark-green tin box. It had handles on the sides and he stooped and puffed a little as he hauled it off the shelf. The dust that rose when he dumped it on the desk next to the old typewriter indicated that it hadn’t been disturbed for a very long time.

Iris undid a bolt and threw back the lid. Ruby glanced at the disappointing jumble inside. Among brittle newspapers and tattered books here were some playing cards and a box of dice, a couple of tarnished metal cups, a big bunch of keys and a brown envelope. There was a musty smell of forgotten times.

‘Can you carry it upstairs, or is it too heavy?’ Iris asked, turning her face up to Mamdooh.

‘I can carry,’ he said at once.

Mamdooh put the box on a low wooden table in Iris’s sitting room and closed the shutters, then turned to see that Iris was already burrowing through the contents. He gave Ruby a look that suggested she was responsible for all this disruption and backed out through the door.

Ruby settled herself among the cushions on the divan and picked up the manila envelope. A handful of curling black-and-white snapshots fell out and she examined them eagerly. This was more like it. They weren’t very interesting, though. In one, a group of white men stood in front of a low mud-brick building. In another some black men were putting a roof on what looked like the same building. In a third, two men wearing long baggy shorts with knee-length socks were
shaking hands. Ruby looked a little more carefully at a picture of a young Iris in a cotton sundress. She was sitting on a low wall in front of some stone carvings with a man in an open-necked shirt. The skirt of her dress billowed over his knee, not quite hiding their linked hands.

‘Who’s this?’ Ruby asked.

‘That’s the Trevi Fountain. In Rome.’

‘Who is
he?
’

‘His name is Doctor Salvatore Andreotti. We worked together many years ago on a medical project in Africa.’

‘Just good friends.’ Ruby smirked.

Iris glanced up from her excavations in the box. ‘We were lovers for a time.’

‘Oh. Right. Were you? Um, what are all these others?’

‘Let me have a look. That is Nyasaland in, I suppose, nineteen fifty-eight. That building is a clinic, and those two men are the district commissioner and the regional medical director. I worked in the clinic for five, maybe six years.’

‘Lesley was four. She told me.’

Iris collected up the scattered pack of cards, snapped them with a practised hand. ‘Yes. She was born in fifty-four.’

Ruby had heard Lesley talk about how she was brought up by her father and nannies, while her mother ‘looked after black kids in Africa’. When she mentioned her childhood, which wasn’t very often, Lesley tended to look brave and cheerful.

Ruby felt suddenly curious about an aspect of her family history that had never interested her before. ‘Why did you go to work in Africa when you had a husband and a daughter in England?’

‘It was my job,’ Iris said. ‘A job that I felt very privileged to have. And I believe that I was good at it.’

‘But didn’t you miss them?’

‘I had home leave. And once she was old enough Lesley
would come out to stay with me in the school holidays.’

‘She told me about that. She said her friends would be going to like Cornwall, or maybe Brittany, while she would have to make this huge journey with about three changes of plane and at the end there would be a bush village and terrible heat and bugs, and not much to do.’

‘That sounds like it, yes.’

It occurred to Ruby then that there was an unbending quality about Iris that being old hadn’t mellowed at all. She would always have been like this. Uncompromising, was that the word?

‘You remember everything,’ Ruby said, softly but accusingly.

Iris seemed to have found whatever it was she had been looking for in the depths of the tin box. She pounced and her fingers closed over something. Then she lifted her head and Ruby saw the distant expression that meant she was looking inside herself. Her pale blue eyes were foggy.

‘Do I?’

‘Nyasaland, the what’ sit fountain, men and dates, everything.’

Now Ruby saw in her grandmother’s face the grey shadow of fear.

‘Those things are only … Like so many plain cups or plates, on shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don’t matter, like what I remember of those photographs. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to pieces, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity.

‘Then you reach for a cup or a bowl that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that
you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.

‘That’s the way the important memory feels, the one you don’t want to lose. And it’s the fragment of your past that explains why you have lived your life the way you have done.’

When she spoke again Iris’s voice had sunk so low that Ruby could hardly hear her. ‘And made the mistakes that you have made. Do you understand any of this?’

Ruby hesitated. ‘A little. Maybe.’

‘You are very young. There’s not much on your shelves and you don’t know what’s going to be precious. It’s not until you’re old that you find yourself hugging the bowl all day long. Afraid to put it down.’

That’s what she’s doing, Ruby thought, when she goes into a trance and doesn’t hear what you’re saying to her.

She’s holding on to the precious bowl, in case it’s not there the next time she goes to look for it.

‘Yes,’ Iris said to herself. Her voice was no more than a whisper now.

Ruby suddenly stood up. She left the room, and Iris seemed too wrapped in her own reverie even to notice. Her head lifted in surprise when Ruby came noisily back, as if she had actually forgotten she had ever been there.

Ruby held out the framed photograph that she had taken from its place beside Iris’s bed. ‘Who is this?’

She was half expecting another reprimand or at least an evasion, because whoever he was, the man in the photograph was important. Most definitely he wasn’t Iris’s husband, Ruby’s grandfather Gordon.

Instead, something remarkable happened. Iris’s face completely changed. When she thought about it later Ruby described it to herself as melting. All the little lines round her grandmother’s mouth loosened, and the fog in her eyes vanished and left them clear blue and as sharp as a girl’s.
Warm colour swelled under her crêpey skin and flushed her throat as she held out one hand for the picture. The other fist was still closed round whatever she had taken from the tin box.

Very carefully, so that there was no chance of either of them letting it fall, Ruby passed the photograph to her. Iris gazed down into the man’s face.

A long minute passed.

‘Who?’ Ruby persisted.

‘His name?’

‘Yes, you could start by telling me his name.’

Iris said nothing.

‘Do you want me to help?’

Instead of answering Iris opened her hand, the one that didn’t hold the picture. In the palm lay a toy ship carved from some dark wood. On the side a white numeral 1 was painted.

‘The first of a thousand ships.’ Iris smiled. Now even her voice sounded softer and younger, with the vinegary snap gone out of it.

Ruby had no idea what she was talking about. She knelt down and examined the ship as it lay in her grandmother’s palm. It was old, but it didn’t look remarkable. She picked it up and placed it carefully on the arm of Iris’s chair. Then she took the photograph back, noticing how Iris gave it up with infinite reluctance. She studied the two young faces and saw that they were dazzled with happiness.

Iris said slowly, in her different voice, ‘His name was Alexander Napier Molyneux, Captain in the Third Hussars, on secondment to Tell force. That picture was taken in October 1941, on the day that Xan asked me to marry him.’