Iris and Ruby (21 page)

The man grinned. ‘How about a dance?’

I was going to say something about finding a gramophone or maybe he could sing, but then my eyes travelled downwards
and I saw that the folds of blanket below the humps of his knees were flat and empty.

The young soldier added softly, ‘Well, perhaps not. Another time, eh?’

Ruth straightened up. ‘Come on, Doug. They’ll fix you up with some falsies and you’ll be dancing like Fred Astaire. Hello again, Iris.’

‘She’s right,’ I said to Doug.

‘Medical, are you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I admitted. I wished I were. I wished I could do something – anything – for these maimed men and for the prone, silent ones who lay in their rows in the ward. I wished I could do anything useful at all, instead of just typing Roddy Boy’s memoranda and placing two custard cream biscuits in his china saucer at precisely eleven every morning.

‘Ah. Well, you’re pretty enough just to stand there and be admired.’

Ruth swung round. ‘That’s enough of that. Iris, can you give me a hand here? Round the other side of the bed.’

I stood opposite her, with the wounded man’s body between us.

‘He needs turning,’ she said. The man’s eyes fixed on her face, then on mine. His chest was heavily bandaged, and curled edges of antiseptic yellow dressing protruded. I concentrated on not imagining the shattered muscle and bone within.

‘Sorry about this,’ he gasped.

‘It’s all right,’ Ruth said briskly and I wasn’t sure whether she was talking to the soldier or me. We slid our forearms under the man’s body and grasped each other’s wrists.

‘Now, one two three, lift.’

He was hot, and quite light. Ruth and I shuffled our arms and as we hoisted him I saw the shadow trapped in the vulnerable hollow beside the crest of his pelvic bone. Gently, we let him down again in a slightly different position.

‘Better. Thanks,’ he said.

‘Is your assistant coming again tomorrow, Nurse Mac?’ one of Doug’s companions called out.

‘I’ll try to,’ I said.

Ruth raised an eyebrow. ‘Volunteering, are you?’ She was moving on and I was sharply aware that she had a lot to do. She made me feel superfluous and rather clumsy.

‘I’ve got a job already.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Typist. GHQ. Very humble.’

‘Oh, well. You must get asked out a lot, all those officers. Look, your friend’s coming.’

Xan was walking towards us along the ward.

‘Fiancé.’ The word was out before I considered it, with all the pride and satisfaction that I should have kept to myself.

Ruth’s glance flicked over me. She was amused. ‘Really? Congratulations. When’s the wedding?’

‘Oh, we haven’t fixed that yet. We … we only decided today. Let me introduce you. This is Captain Xan Molyneux. Xan, Ruth Macnamara.’

They shook hands as a rigid-looking senior nurse in a dark-blue uniform appeared in a doorway.

‘Oh God, here’s the old battleaxe. Look, where do you live?’

I told her and Ruth smiled briefly.

‘What about you?’

‘Out on the Heliopolis road. It’s cheap. I’ve got to get a move on now. Leave me your phone number?’

‘I’ll come in again. Won’t we, Xan?’

We. Would I ever get used to the luxury of using one little word?

‘Good. ’Bye, then.’ Ruth fled away down the ward.

‘You’ve made a friend,’ Xan said.

‘I hope so.’ I wanted to know Ruth Macnamara better.
And although the hospital was a sad and fearful place it drew me back. It was full of people who were doing what they could, certain in the knowledge that what they did made a difference.

We did go out to celebrate our engagement. We started with cocktails at Shepheard’s and then dinner on a boat moored on the Nile, where Jessie proposed a toast and a circle of faces glimmered at us over the rims of champagne glasses. Faria was there, with the poet who was looking more mournful and whose clothes were even more crumpled and dusted in cigarette ash than usual. Sarah was still not back from her trip, but there were some of the Cherry Pickers and Xan’s friend the mysterious Major David, and Betty Hopwood in a new dress of some iridescent greeny-black material that Faria whispered made her look like a giant beetle.

‘How heavenly for you both,’ Betty shrieked. ‘When’s the wedding?’

Everything did happen very quickly in Cairo. There was no reason to put anything off even until tomorrow or indeed to deny ourselves any of life’s pleasures, because there was always the likelihood that the war would intervene, but I murmured that we hadn’t decided yet. I wanted to tell my mother, and Xan’s parents would need to hear the news. It was odd to think that there were all the relatives on both sides, and the lives we had lived in other places and our separate histories, as well as just Xan and me and the immediate chaotic present and the way we had fallen in love. But the war and Egypt made a separate realm, and for the time being the world outside was a shadowy place.

There was another reason too why Xan and I had not talked about a wedding day. He was going back to the desert and we both knew it would be very soon. Perhaps in only a few hours’ time.

‘I’ll be in Cairo again by Christmas, darling, at the latest.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart. We’re going to drive Rommel all the way out of Africa, I know we are. And after that you and I can make our plans.’ He was optimistic for my sake and I tried to believe him.

Betty leaned across now and tapped my arm.

‘Don’t leave it too long.’ She fluffed up her cottonball hair and winked at me. She had already told me the story of one of her MTC colleagues who carried a crumpled white satin wedding dress at the bottom of her kitbag, so as to be ready as soon as a husband came into sight.

‘James? Where’s that bloody Jessie?’ one of the Cherry Pickers shouted. ‘Some of us haven’t found ourselves a girl yet. Where are we going now?’

To begin with Jessie obligingly orchestrated the evening, but as the hours went by our party gathered momentum until it rolled under its own impetus through the Cairo nightspots. By two in the morning we were at Zazie’s again. Xan and I danced and I felt the heat of him through my satin dress, but drink and exhilaration distorted the normal sequence of minutes and hours, and we both convinced ourselves that the night was endless. There was time to laugh with our friends and time to dance, and there would still be time and time for one another. Leaving for the desert was no more than a little dark unwinking eye at the vanishing point of a long avenue of happiness.

Elvira Mursi came on and blew us both a kiss at the end of her spot.

Sandy Allardyce materialised. He held my hand, rather damply, and sat close to me on one of the little gold seats in a velvet alcove. His round red face was very serious and I realised only belatedly that he was making a confession of love.

‘… a good man. Reckless, if you like, but a fine field officer. Yes. Choice. Of course. ‘S what every woman has as her
privilege
. But, you know, wish it could have been different. Iris. Just wanted to tell you, you know?’

I shook my head, confusion and sympathy and a shaming desire to laugh mounting in my throat.

‘Sandy. I
didn’t
know, honestly. Had no idea. I never … let you believe anything I shouldn’t have done, did I?’

‘No. Never a single thing. Perfect lady, always.’

I couldn’t speak now. It was the idea of myself as a perfect lady. Sandy took my hand as if it were the Koh-i-noor diamond and pressed his mouth to the knuckles.

‘Never a word. Ssssh. Won’t speak of it again. Rest of my life. Promise you, on my honour.’

From her front-row table Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch glowered at us.

The night did end, at last, with Xan and me in a taxi going back to his flat. The sun was up and the street sweepers were working, and donkey carts loaded with vegetables plodded to the markets. I was beyond being drunk and I wasn’t tired, and the light had a hard, white, absolute brightness to it that suggested that this day was a crystallisation of everything that had gone before. I already knew that it was one of the days I would remember all my life.

Try to remember. Holding it, cupping my hands to mould the shape of it.

There was a cavalry officer in boots complete with spurs asleep on the dingy sofa.

The kitchen was a swamp of bottles and spilled drink.

The door to one of the bathrooms was jammed. I squeezed into the other, regarded my face for an instant in the clouded mirror, then hastily brushed my teeth with Xan’s toothbrush. He was already unfastening the satin-covered buttons and loops down the back of my dress.

It is the memory of making love on that airless Cairo morning, when we had drunk and danced ourselves sober again, that I hold most close. We were so sweet and shameless, and so powerful in our innocence.

Even now, when I am eighty-two and losing my mind, the recollection of it can catch me unawares and turn my limbs to water.

Xan fell asleep in the end, and I lay and watched the impression of his dreams. He twitched and winced a little and to soothe him I put my hand over the bony place where his ribs fused, feeling the slow rise and fall of his breath.

I didn’t go to work. I called Roddy Boy and told him I had Gyppy tummy, and bore the sarcastic slice in his voice when he told me that he hoped I would feel very much better before too long, and that he also hoped Captain Molyneux was taking good care of me.

In the afternoon, after we had eaten some recuperative pastries and drunk coffee in the shady garden at Groppi’s, Xan took me to a jeweller’s in the old quarter to buy a ring.

‘There is a rather pompous family diamond, actually, that belongs to my mother. I’m the only son so she’ll want you to wear it. D’you think you can bear that? But I want you to have something in the meantime. What would you like?’

We wandered hand in hand past the tiny doorways of the gem merchants. Copts and Jews called out to us, trying to urge us inside their shops. We reached an angle of a cobbled street where the way was too narrow for us to walk abreast, and Xan glanced up at a sign.

‘This is the place.’

‘I don’t need a ring, Xan. I’ve got you.’

‘It’s only a symbol, darling. But I want you to wear it.’

The merchant unlocked the safe and brought out his velvet trays for us and we let the raw stones trickle in cold droplets through our fingers. In the end, under duress, I chose a smoky
purple amethyst and ordered a plain claw setting for it. Xan led me out of the shop again and tucked my hand under his arm.

‘There. Now, what would you like to do?’

‘Where is Hassan?’

‘At home with his family, I should think. Why?’

We hadn’t spoken of it but we both suspected that this might be our last day and night together before Xan was called away again. In our Garden City apartment Mamdooh would be performing some domestic routine with polishing cloths or caustic soda and at Xan’s there would be hung-over officers and the same debris of hard living that we had escaped three hours ago. We could have tried to find a hotel room, but with the endless flux of visitors and diplomats and officers washing through Cairo these were hard to come by. And I thought how perfect it would be to go out to the Pyramids again, and watch the sun setting behind Hassan’s hidden oasis.

As soon as I told Xan he smiled at me.

‘You have only to command. But I’ll have to go and beg for a car.’

We walked back towards GHQ through baked afternoon streets. We passed a crowd of Australian soldiers with huge thighs and meaty fists, sweating under full packs, and a smaller band of British squaddies who looked undersized and pale in comparison with their Antipodean counterparts. They were all recently arrived because they gazed in bewilderment at the tide of refuse and dung in the gutters, and the unreadable street signs, and the old men in rags sleeping in the shade of peeling walls. The city was full of men in transit, on their way to camps in advance of the big battle. I only knew that it was coming, I had no idea where or when. Xan almost certainly knew much more.

We came to a tall, anonymous house in a neglected street that ran westwards towards el Rhoda. I was just reaching
the conclusion that this must be a headquarters of some kind for Tellforce when a figure detached itself from the shadow of the broken buildings opposite and ran towards Xan. A brown hand caught Xan’s khaki shirtsleeve and some quick words of Arabic followed. It was Hassan.

Xan gave me a glance and then moved a little to one side, listening to what Hassan had to tell him. I waited, feeling the sun burning the top of my head, knowing that whatever was to come would not be good news. Hassan stepped back again, briefly inclining his head towards me.

I could already tell from Xan’s face what was coming.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘Now. I’ve got to be in place beside the road out of el Agheila with my patrol, tonight.’

By my half-informed reckoning this was about four hundred miles west behind the enemy front line, which was then on the Libyan border.

‘
Tonight?
How? Isn’t it … a long way?’

‘Wainwright’s here with the WACO.’

Tellforce had a small two-seater aircraft, usually piloted by the Tellforce commander himself, Lieutenant-Colonel Gus Wainwright.

‘He’s waiting at the airfield.’ Xan took my face between his hands. Hassan had turned away and stood like a stone statue, guarding the steps and the dingy house and – I saw – Xan himself. I also saw that a glitter of excited anticipation had kindled behind Xan’s eyes. Now it was here he was ready to go. He
wanted
to go, he was already rushing towards the adventure, whatever was waiting for him. I felt cold, even with the afternoon’s humid weight pressing against the nape of my neck. But somehow I smiled, my mouth curling against his as he kissed me.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured.

Against all the impulses, which were to cling to him like an importunate child and beg him to stay, I pressed the flat of my hands against his shirt. Somehow, as the kiss ended I stepped out of his arms and put a tiny distance between us. Hassan edged closer by the same amount. First and most importantly it was the two of them now, and Xan’s Yeomanry patrol, and the desert; not Xan and me. I would have plenty of time in the coming weeks to get used to that order of priority, before he came back to Cairo again.