Iris and Ruby (17 page)

Ruby was delighted with this information.

‘Really? Did he? Did you say yes?’

‘I did.’

She waited for more, but Iris was silent. Gently Ruby put the photograph aside and folded Iris’s hands in hers. The old fingers were like twigs, the tendons rigid against Ruby’s smooth palms.

‘Are you afraid of forgetting him?’

‘I never kept diaries, you see. I was so certain of my mind. And now it’s going. Sometimes I reach and there is nothing there. In the accustomed place. Most of the pieces don’t matter. But if this one breaks, there will be nothing left.’

Ruby understood that she meant nothing of value. If the precious bowl was missing or shattered, what remained was rendered worthless.

She tightened her grip on Iris’s hands, suddenly understanding what they must do together.

‘You
can
remember. I know you can, because of the photographs and the fountain and the ship and the travel agents. You told me about those without even thinking. You’ve just told me about Xan Molyneux, haven’t you? It’s there, Iris, I know it is. And I know what we have to do. It’s just
talking
. You have to tell me the stories and I will remember them for you. I’m really good at that, my friend Jas told me. I remembered all kinds of things about people we used to know back in London, and he was always amazed. But I did it automatically. I told him it was like collecting anything. I used to have these collections, you know, when I was a kid. Shells, insects. Hundreds of them. I used to know exactly what they all were and where to find them in my room, although Lesley was always going on about mess. All you have to do is tell me.

‘I’ll keep it all in my mind. And then, if you do forget, I can tell your memories back to you, like a story.’

She massaged Iris’s cold hands, trying to rub warmth and certainty into them.

‘Do you see?’

Iris’s colour had faded and the tight lines pursed her mouth again. ‘Maybe,’ she said uncertainly.

Ruby smiled. Confidence and an idea of her own value swept through her, and she leaned up to kiss her grandmother’s cheek.

‘Definitely,’ she insisted.

CHAPTER SIX

Before the war Colonel Boyce’s office at GHQ had been a spacious bedroom in a substantial villa. By the time I came to work there the room had been partitioned into three cubbyholes, each with one-third of a window giving a thin vertical view of the untended gardens and a checkpoint where a couple of soldiers guarded a gate in the perimeter fencing. Roddy Boy had one cubbyhole, and as his typist I occupied a walled-off slice of the corridor outside the bedroom. My desk was wedged between a pair of tall tin cabinets in which I filed the endless succession of pinks generated by interdepartmental communications.

Roddy’s head poked out of his office. ‘Miss Black? Could you take this along to Brigadier Denselow?’

I took the sealed folder marked
Secret
and walked down two sets of stairs and through a pair of temporary doors into what had once been the villa’s kitchens. The GHQ buildings were a warren of stairways and cramped offices, packed with sweating staff officers who ploughed through mounds of paperwork and vied with each other for access to bigger fiefdoms. It was a swamp of bureaucracy, rumour and competitiveness as Headquarters expanded and the
prospect of fast-track promotions encouraged ambitious officers to try to outsmart each other. Roddy Boy was always in the thick of some piece of intrigue designed to thwart his rivals.

Brigadier Denselow and his staff had four adjacent offices that opened through the servants’ back door into the villa garden, so there was daylight and fresh air. This empire was jealously guarded against all comers. Denselow’s assistant, Captain Martin Frobisher, was sitting with his feet on his desk reading a novel from the Anglo-Egyptian Club library.

‘Hullo, light of my life,’ he greeted me routinely.

I handed over the folder and Martin signed the docket for it. In answer to his entreaty I told him that no, I wasn’t free for dinner.

‘You never are,’ he sighed. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘Nothing. But I am in love with another man.’ Whom I had not seen, nor even heard from, in seventeen and a half days. Each of those days was a glassy structure of routine within which I contained – as patiently as I could – my longing for Xan and my constant fears for his safety. I was only one of millions of women in similar circumstances.

‘He’s a lucky devil. Lunch, then?’

I had a pile of memos composed in Roddy’s trademark verbose style to type and circulate. I shook my head, smiling at him. I liked Martin. He had been welcoming when I first arrived in the military maze of Headquarters. ‘Pressure of work,’ I explained and threaded my way back past the first-floor salon where shifts of cipherenes worked twenty-four hours a day, to my own office.

When I reached my desk I saw that Roddy’s door was firmly closed and the hand-made ‘Do not disturb’ sign hanging from the knob indicated that he was busy.

There was no window in my segment of corridor, so I worked under a metal-shaded desk lamp that gave off an
acrid smell of burning dust. I switched it on and took the cover off my typewriter.

I had been painstakingly typing for perhaps half an hour before Roddy’s door opened again. I saw my boss’s knife-creased trousers emerge first. Even in the hottest weather Roddy always wore immaculate service dress, including tunic, Sam Browne, tie and long trousers.

‘Matter of morale,’ he would mutter. ‘This is GHQ. Notwithstanding, some chaps around here are reprehensibly sloppy.’

He was followed by a pair of sunburned legs in khaki shorts, very stained and dusty.

My heart lurched in my chest. I looked up at the owner of the legs and Xan smiled down at me. Behind the smile he looked exhausted.

‘You promised me a cup of GHQ tea, remember?’

‘So I did. Milk and sugar?’ I laughed because I knew perfectly well how he took his tea.

‘Let me think. Do you know, maybe it isn’t tea I want at all? Perhaps a drink instead? At Shepheard’s?’

Roddy gave us his pop-eyed stare. ‘Ah, yes. You two know each other, don’t you?’

‘We have met,’ I said demurely. The last time I had seen Xan was as he was leaving my bed, at dawn, before heading away into the desert on one of his mysterious sorties. After the first relief at seeing him alive and unhurt, I could hardly think of anything except how much I wanted us to be back in bed together.

‘It is lunchtime,’ Xan said, consulting his watch. ‘Colonel Boyce, may I take Miss Black away from you for an hour?’

Roddy could hardly say no, although it was obvious that he would have preferred to do so.

‘Hurrrmph. Well, yes, all right. Only an hour. We are extremely pressed at the moment, you know.’ He turned to
me, eyes bulging. ‘Have you heard from your father lately, by the way?’

This was a not very oblique reminder that, through his acquaintance with my father, Roddy considered himself to have a paternal role to play.

‘Yes, I had a letter about two weeks ago. He’s living very quietly these days, down in Hampshire. My mother hasn’t been very well lately. He did ask to be remembered to you. I think he’s quite envious of you, Sir, being so much in the thick of the war out here.’

A reminder of his importance never went amiss with the Colonel. He tipped his head back and the shiny flesh of his jowls wobbled. ‘Yes. Please give him my regards, won’t you?’ The green telephone on his desk rang. ‘Ahhhm. The Brigadier. Excuse me, please.’

The door closed behind him and Xan immediately seized my hands and kissed the knuckles. ‘Christ. Come on, let’s get out of here.’

We went out into the thick, hot blanket of the afternoon heat. It was the beginning of October 1941, but there was no sign as yet of cooler weather. The buildings of Garden City looked dark, cut out in two dimensions against the blazing sky.

‘Xan …’

He held me back a little. ‘Wait. Are you free this evening?’

I pretended to consider. ‘Let me think. I was planning to go to the cinema with Faria …’

‘Oh, in that case …’

‘But maybe I could chuck her. What do you suggest instead?’

He raised one eyebrow. ‘Bed. Followed by dinner, and then bed again.’

‘Do you know what? I find that I am free tonight, tomorrow night and every evening for the rest of the year.’

We had been walking in a flood-tide of khaki. Fore-and-aft caps bobbed all around us, with a sprinkling of Australian broad-brimmed hats and French kepis. Xan took my elbow and we stopped at the kerbside, letting the current flow past. My apartment was only a few minutes’ walk from here and it would be empty except for Mamdooh taking his siesta in his room next to the front door.

We looked the immediate question at each other, but now I could see a haze of something like suffering as well as weariness in Xan’s eyes.

‘Let’s do what you suggested. Let’s go to Shepheard’s,’ I said.

‘Good,’ he said softly. ‘I only got in about two hours ago and I’d like a beer after dealing with GHQ.’

A horse-drawn caleche came plodding up behind us. The horse was a bag of bones, its coat dark with sweat and foam-flecked under the ancient harness. Its blinkered head drooped in a nosebag. The driver spotted us and whipped up the horse to bring him alongside.

‘Sir, lady? Nice ride. Very private, no seeing, eh?’ A curtain could be drawn across the front of the carriage to make a little hideaway from the seething streets. The vehicles were known as love taxis.

‘Thanks. No,’ Xan said, but he gave the driver a coin. The man returned a broad wink and a wave of his whip as the horse clopped onwards. We walked on to Shepheard’s, past the beggars and amputees and ragged children who held out their hands to the Cairo grandees passing up and down the steps of the hotel.

Shepheard’s was out of bounds to other ranks. The bars and terraces swarmed with a lunchtime crowd of fashionably dressed civilians and officers of all the nations who had forces in Egypt. We found a table on the veranda overlooking the street and ordered buffalo steak sandwiches and Stella beer
from one of the waiters, then sat back in our wicker chairs without immediate expectation. The service at Shepheard’s was even slower than the bureaucratic processes at GHQ.

From two tables away Martin Frobisher lifted his hand to us in an ironic greeting. Xan gave him a nod and I studied Xan’s face from behind the shield of my sunglasses. He had shaved this morning, but he had missed several patches and the stubble glinted in the sun. I imagined him in the dawn light, somewhere between here and the wire, with a tin bowl of warm water and a tiny mirror balanced on the bonnet of a truck. The faint white rims of old sweat stains marked his khaki shirt and dust caked in the eyelets of his boots. When he took off his socks and underclothes, a miniature sand shower would patter round his feet. I had seen that happen.

It felt strange to be sitting on the veranda at Shepheard’s with him, patiently waiting for our beer, when only an hour ago I had no way of knowing even if he was alive or dead.

And if it was strange for me, I reflected, how much more disorientating must it be for him?

I said quietly, ‘Am I allowed to ask where you have been?’

He jumped, as if his thoughts had been a long way off. He did smile at me, then rubbed his jaw with one hand. ‘On a patrol.’

‘Was it bad?’

‘I have had better experiences.’ He spoke lightly but the taut muscles round his mouth revealed his distress.

Surprisingly, the waiter was back with us. He put the beers down and Xan’s had hardly touched the table before he swept it up and finished it in two long gulps. The desert left your mouth parched and your skin so leached of moisture that it felt as stiff as paper. And yet here was Xan now, surrounded by chic French and Egyptian women, and the pink-faced, well-fed officers from GHQ who directed the background to war operations from behind their desks.

I couldn’t know what he had seen in the course of the last seventeen days but the likely images gnawed at me, jarring with the cosmopolitan scenes on the veranda.

‘Sorry,’ Xan said after a moment. ‘I promise I’ll liven up once I’ve had something to eat.’

I leaned forward and touched his hand. ‘It’s all right.’

He did revive when he had eaten his sandwich and most of mine. He sat back again in his chair and grinned at me. ‘Now all I need is a bath and some sleep, and you.’

‘All three shall be yours. Xan, it wasn’t a social call you were paying on Roddy Boy this morning, was it?’

In the weeks that I had known him I had tried not to press Xan with too many questions. Up until now we had done our best to live in the present, and the present was always parties and joking and a blind determination to have fun. But today I found it very hard to accept that I should know so little. I also knew that he wasn’t volunteering any more information because he didn’t want to make me afraid for him.

He looked around at the nearest tables before answering. Everyone was talking and gesticulating or trying to catch the attention of the waiters. No one was taking any notice of us.

‘No, it wasn’t.’ And then, after a pause, ‘How much do you actually know about what he does?’

In theory, I was only supposed to handle routine typing, filing and administration. All confidential signals and memos were dealt with by army personnel, and collected and delivered by me in sealed folders marked
Secret
. But Roddy had long ago decided that I was trustworthy and he also liked to impress me by letting drop how key his role was. Quite often, he asked me to collect or deliver signals in clear to the cipher clerks because the junior staff officer whose job it should have been was inclined to be too busy for this menial task.

I had lately started reading everything that passed through my hands, greedy for the smallest crumb of information, good or bad, that might have anything to do with Xan. So I now knew the names and quite often the general whereabouts of most of the commando forces who supplied us with intelligence from deep behind enemy lines. I was almost certain that he was with one of these highly secret groups, criss-crossing the remote desert in order to pick up information on enemy troop and supply movements.