Iris and Ruby (20 page)
Evie was the much younger wife of my father’s younger brother, who was away on active service. She had three children under six and had brought them down to live in a little house in the same village as my parents.
Michael and Eleanor are still in London, I don’t know how on earth they manage but of course Michael’s job keeps him there. Every night the bombs, and the blackout all the time, and everyone so careworn and anxious and exhausted
.
Eleanor was my mother’s oldest friend and her husband was something important in the Ministry of Supply. My mother was not an ambitious letter writer and didn’t go in either for elaborate descriptions or – of course not – complaints, but these sparse words conjured up for me a London disfigured with smoke and rubble, trembling under the Blitz and yet still populated by determined people who were quietly and bravely doing their best. In Cairo, too much rich food and drink was taken for granted, we danced in frocks run up by local dressmakers and congratulated ourselves on being thrifty, and bought our silk stockings over the counter in Cicurel’s. This contrast made me feel my champagne headache even more sharply.
My mother signed off, as she always did,
God bless, darling. From your loving Ma
I checked the date before I refolded the blue paper. The letter had been written six weeks earlier and had come by ship the long way, round the Cape and through the Suez Canal to Port Said, the same way that I had travelled out to Cairo myself more than six months ago. I finished my tea and biscuits, and resumed typing.
It was a long day. When I emerged at eight o’clock there was the usual crowd of boyfriends and hopefuls waiting to meet their girls. To my delight, Xan’s black head was among them. I ran and he caught me in his arms and whirled me off the ground.
‘Come with me?’ he begged, after we had kissed.
I asked where, expecting that he would say Shepheard’s or another bar for a cocktail before I went home to change for dinner. But he tucked my hand under his arm and led me to the car, the same one in which Hassan had driven us out to Giza. He handed me into the passenger seat.
As we drove out into Qasr el Aini, Xan said, ‘I’m going to look in at the Scottish Hospital to see one of the men I brought in yesterday. Is that all right?’
‘Of course it is.’
The Scottish Military was just one of the places where wounded men were taken when the hospital trains and ambulance convoys finally reached Cairo. Xan parked the car and ran up the steps, and I hurried behind him. The hallways and stairwells were crowded with soldiers, bandaged and on crutches or in wheelchairs, and the wards we passed were crammed with long rows of beds. On the first floor we found a ward where most of the occupants lay prone, what was visible of their faces like sections of pale carved masks, as motionless as if they were already dead.
Xan stopped beside a bed in the middle of a row, then leaned over the man who lay in it. ‘Hullo, old chap. You look quite a bit better than you did this morning,’ I heard him say.
There was no answer. There could hardly have been, because the lower half of the soldier’s face and his neck were a white carapace of dressings. A tube led from where his mouth would have been. Xan sat down on the edge of the bed and talked in his ordinary voice, about how another soldier called Ridley had made it too, and how there was a cinema just down the road from the hospital that was air-conditioned, cool as a winter morning Xan said, with padded seats, and they would go and see a picture, the three of them, and have a gallon of iced beer afterwards.
I don’t know if the soldier understood or even heard him, because he gave no sign. Xan just went on talking.
I looked at the chipped cream paint on the metal-framed bed, and the floor that was made of mottled stone with pink and brown slabs in it like a slice of veal-and-ham pie. There was a strong, sweetish smell in the ward with a whiff of suppuration in it. At the far end of the line of beds a man began moaning, a sound that rose and fell, and seemed to drown out the rattle of metal trolleys and the swish of footsteps.
Sweat broke coldly on my forehead. It occurred to me that I was going to faint, or maybe to vomit.
I walked quickly away, heading down the ward without any idea where. I passed several nurses who were busy with dressings trays, and another who was sitting at a man’s bedside. She was holding a cigarette to his ragged mouth and he was inhaling as if the smoke were life itself. I pushed blindly through a pair of swing doors into a sluice room, past a row of sinks and into a lavatory cubicle.
When I came out again, wiping my face with my handkerchief, the cigarette nurse was there rinsing out a kidney bowl at one of the sinks. Her cuffed sleeves revealed pale arms and reddened hands with prominent wrist bones.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Thank you.’ What I felt now was shame for having responded like a swooning Victorian maiden to the spectacle of other people’s suffering.
The nurse briskly set down her metal bowl, took a glass out of a cupboard and poured water from a jug. She handed the glass to me and I sipped carefully from it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said pointlessly. I meant that I was sorry for taking up her attention when there were so many demands beyond the swing doors.
To my surprise she smiled.
‘It can take people that way at first. You get used to it, though.’ Her voice was attractive, with a distinct Scottish burr. She was a trained nurse, not a VAD like some of my friends, with a crested badge to prove it pinned on her apron next to her watch. ‘Do you want to sit down for a bit? Your friend’s still talking to Corporal Noake.’
The sluice room was relatively cool. Water groaned in the pipes and dripped from the faucets.
‘I’m fine. I will be, in a minute.’
‘I’ve seen you around town,’ the nurse said. She was taking packages of dressings out of a box and talking to me over her shoulder.
‘Me? How come?’
She laughed. ‘You’re the kind of person people do notice.’
I couldn’t remember having seen the nurse at the Gezira Club or Groppi’s, or dancing at Zazie’s. Her starched, folded cap came down low over her forehead and hid her hair.
She held out her hand, the other still clutching a pack of bandages.
‘I’m Ruth Macnamara.’
‘Iris Black.’
We shook.
‘If you’re sure you’re all right, I’d better get back to work. Sister’s got a down on me. See you around, eh?’
‘Yes,’ I said to her departing back. ‘I hope so.’
I walked slowly back up the ward. Xan was still talking to his corporal. I went round to the other side of the bed and looked down into the soldier’s eyes.
‘Hullo, there. I’m Iris, Xan’s friend.’
I didn’t know how much was left of the lower part of his face but the man himself was still there. His eyes flickered, moved, then fixed on mine. Just perceptibly, he nodded. I took his hand and sandwiched it between my two and he clung to me with his eyes.
After a minute, Xan said easily, ‘We’ll be getting along now, Noake. You get some sleep. I’ll look in again tomorrow, if they haven’t packed us off by then.’
We left him among the other carved men.
When we reached the car again we sat and lit cigarettes and stared out at the darkening sky.
‘Will you really be going tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know for sure. It won’t be long, though. There’s the big push coming.’
We all knew that. The Germans and Italians knew it too, and were waiting.
‘What happened to Corporal Noake, exactly?’
‘He was shot in the neck and jaw. His lower jawbone was partly blown away.’
‘Poor man.’
‘He was luckier than Reggie Burke,’ Xan said grimly.
‘Yes.’
We finished our cigarettes and the last of the daylight drained out of the western horizon as if the desert sand were drinking it up.
‘Where would you like to have dinner?’
I didn’t want food, or whisky or dancing. I wanted Xan, and Xan safe, and the end of the war.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
He leaned forward at once to the ignition and we drove back through the Cairo streets to Garden City.
‘Will you?’ Xan repeated.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to answer, just that happiness momentarily flooded my throat and turned me mute. White light swelled behind my eyes, spilling inside my skull and half blinding me.
We were reclining on a rug in the shade of a tree, and the high sun shining through the chinks in the leaves made them black as carved ebony. We had been watching a polo match. As well as Xan’s low voice I could hear shouting and ponies’ hooves drumming on the turf and then the sharp crack of a stick on the ball.
I turned my dazzled face to his. His head was propped on one hand and he leaned over me, waiting.
‘Yes,’ I managed to say. ‘Yes, yes, yes. I will. More than anything. For ever and ever.’
So, incoherently, I promised to marry Xan Molyneux. The leaves and the chinks of light and all the rest of the world were blotted out as he lowered his head and kissed me.
Jessie James was the first person we told. He came to meet us still in his white breeches and shirt soaked with sweat
from the match, stalking over the grass with his face flushed with exertion and success.
‘Did you see that?’ he called.
‘No,’ Xan said bluntly.
‘But it was the very best goal I’ve ever scored. What kind of friend are you, Molyneux?’
‘A very happy one, you oaf. Iris says she’ll marry me. Can you believe that?’
Jessie stopped in his tracks. A smile split his face, but he pretended to be dismayed. ‘Oh, no. This is a mistake. Iris is going to marry
me
, once she’s realised what a hopeless apology you are. Tell him that’s so, Iris, won’t you?’
I put my hands out and grasped his. He was hot and our palms glued together as I danced around him. ‘Wish us luck, Jessie.’
His smile faded into seriousness then. ‘I do. I wish you both all the happiness and all the good luck in the world.’ There was a tiny beat of silence as he kissed my cheek. ‘You’re a lucky man, Molyneux.’
‘D’you think I don’t know it?’
But I knew that I was the lucky one.
Later that afternoon Jessie took a photograph of us, using a camera airily borrowed from a man called Gordon Foxbridge who had been watching and taking pictures of the polo match. Major Foxbridge was a staff officer I saw from time to time in the rabbit-warren corridors of GHQ, and he was an enthusiastic amateur photographer. His sombre pictures of Arab tribesmen in the desert were later published as a book.
‘Gordon, old chap, I want to record a momentous day,’ Jessie insisted.
Major Foxbridge offered to take the photograph himself, but Jessie wanted to do it and so the Major obligingly handed over his Leica, and Xan and I stood at the edge of the Gezira
Club polo ground where the baked earth had been scraped and scored by ponies’ hooves. With Xan’s arms wrapped round my waist I let my head fall back against his shoulder and laughed into the lens.
‘Watch the birdie!’ Jessie sang.
It was Gordon Foxbridge, though, who developed the picture in his own darkroom and then delivered it to my desk in a brown manila envelope marked ‘
The engagement of Miss Iris Black and Captain Molyneux
’ as if we were in the
Tatler
.
It showed the two of us exactly as we were but it also enlarged us. That day, Xan’s glamour obliterated his assumed anonymity and my dazed happiness lent me a beauty I didn’t really possess.
Wherever I have travelled since, through all the years, the photograph has come with me.
And this is the picture that Ruby asked me about.
What answer did I give? I can’t remember.
How can I find the words to tell her, my grandchild, all this history? I can’t even catch hold of it myself. If I try to stalk it, it floats away out of reach and leaves me with the featureless sand, the empty place on the shelf. So I have to be patient and let the memories and the dreams come, then try to distinguish them.
But I have never been a patient woman.
Ruby’s quaint offer touched me, and so did the way she set it out with assurances about her shells and beetles. I can imagine her as a smaller child, dark-browed and serious, walled up in a bedroom decorated by Lesley and poring over her collections. Lining up objects, probably in an attempt to fix an unwieldy universe.
She is an unusual creature. Her coming is an unlooked-for blessing.
* * *
That same evening we went back to the Scottish Military Hospital to see Corporal Noake once more. Jessie James wanted us all to go out to dinner, he wanted to set in train one of the long evenings of Cairo celebration, but Xan insisted that first he must go to see his men.
From the medical staff we learned that the news of the other soldier, Private Ridley, wasn’t good. As a result of his injuries a severe infection had set in and he was in a deeper coma, but Xan didn’t tell Noake about this. He just sat there on the edge of the bed, talking cheerfully about going to the pictures and drinking beer, then laughing about the desert and some place they had been to where the flies swarmed so thickly that they couldn’t put food in their mouths without swallowing dozens of them. Noake’s response was to grasp Xan’s wrist and give the ghost of a nod.
I saw Ruth Macnamara moving screens and bending over the inanimate men. She didn’t appear to hurry but everything she did looked quick and deft. I wanted to talk to her again so I left Xan to his monologue and followed her the length of the ward.
At the opposite end from the sluice room was a kind of loggia, open to the air on one long side. Two or three men sat in chairs and there were two beds parked against the wall. Ruth was bending over one of the beds, examining the occupant.
‘Hullo, Miss,’ a young man in one of the chairs called out. ‘Looking for me?’
It was a relief to hear a strong voice.
‘Not exactly. But now I’m here, is there anything I can do for you?’