Iris and Ruby (30 page)

‘Is that ironic?’

‘No, what I mean is, I wanted to, I mean I would, but Ash doesn’t. He says I am more precious than rubies, and it’s not what you do. It’s religion, or culture, or something.’ Now, without looking at me, she is confiding. ‘And he said maybe he loves me.’

I can hear the whisper of sand, whistling, shifting.

‘Good,’ I say quietly.

‘Iris?’

‘Yes, I’m listening.’

‘I really like being here with you. I loved the museum. I
like the way you’re easy to talk to, as if there’s nothing between us, as if we’re just ordinary friends.’

Her hand is smooth, brown, with dirty fingers. Mine surprises me with its knotty veins and ugly liver spots.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

We are settled in our routine now, Ruby and me, and although the rhythm of my days is not much changed the house has a new life beating in it.

In the mornings when the sun has risen high enough to warm the air we sit in the garden and drink coffee together. Ruby cuts up fruit and passes the pieces to me one by one, or breaks off strips of flat bread and dips them in honey before arranging them on my plate. As if I am the child, she the attentive parent.

When she is at home I hear her moving about, her feet on the stairs and the small creaks and scraping of her bedroom furniture, or the snatches of song as she takes up some inaudible chorus through her headphones. Then there is the bleat of a motorcycle horn from down in the street and she is off with her friend. I don’t insist on knowing where, although quite often she comes back and tells me anyway.

Ashraf took her out to see the Pyramids and she came home comically disappointed. So many people, she frowned, and queues and dusty souvenir shops and tour guides holding up umbrellas. As if the Pyramids themselves are somehow diminished by the surf of tourism lapping around their skirts.

‘Was it like that in your day?’

‘Not quite, it was wartime. But all the soldiers went out there to take a look, you could get a gharry at sunset when it was cooler, and there were young boys selling picture postcards and camel rides. The British Army had padded the Sphinx’s head with sandbags to protect it.’

‘I wish I could have gone then instead of now. You were allowed to climb the Great Pyramid in those days. Did you?’

‘No. But I know people who did.’

Ruby has also started making solitary visits to the museum, spending hours there at a time. She comes home to relate her discoveries, and to ask questions I can’t always answer.

‘Queen Nefertiti, right?’

‘Yes?’

‘She and the Pharaoh Akhenaten decreed a new religion, and built a whole new capital city at Amarna dedicated to one god, the Aten.’

‘I think that’s it.’

‘There are huge statues of the god in the museum, with a sloping head and thick curving lips, but he’s got a round stomach and thighs like a woman’s. Maybe they were really worshipping a goddess, an earth-goddess, what do you think?’

‘Ruby, I don’t know. I’ve forgotten, even if I ever knew. You could find a book about it.’

Then she is off again, speculating about Nefertiti’s beauty, wondering about the significance of the sphinxes, and telling me that a metre-long piece of the beard of the Sphinx at Giza is in the British Museum.

‘I think we ought to give it back. Don’t you think that would be satisfying, fitting it back on his chin like putting a piece in a puzzle?’

‘Yes, it would, rather.’

We discuss the case of the Elgin Marbles, of which she has never heard. Lesley might even be pleased, I think, with the cultural content of some of our debates.

The child is also picking up some Arabic – a slow but steady accretion of basic words,
bread, water, scarf
and so on, and the phrases of polite greeting and thanks and blessing. When I compliment her on her quickness she looks surprised and pleased.

‘Thanks. Ash teaches me, you know? I try to learn something new in Arabic each time to say to his mother, to keep on the right side of her. She asked me to stay and eat some food with them last night so it must be working.’

‘Ruby …’

Her face changes, ‘I know, I know. It’s rude to say no, and hospitality means that even if they haven’t got much they try to give everything to the guest and go hungry themselves. So I just had a mouthful or two and chewed for a really, really long time.’

She mimes the effort of registering delighted appetite and at the same time swallowing next to nothing, and I laugh.

‘I like being able to say a few words to Auntie, as well. I come out with something in Arabic and it cracks her up, she goes
tee hee hee
as if it’s the best joke she’s ever heard instead of just me asking for more soup.’

‘Auntie’s very reserved and she doesn’t take readily to strangers, but she liked you straightaway.’

‘Yeah? Did she? Pity about Mamdooh, then.’

‘Mamdooh is just doing what he sees as his duty, which is to look after us. He is the protective male in a house full of weak and feeble women.’

‘And that is such crap. You’re not feeble, and neither am I. Nor is Auntie, come to that. She does all the real work in the house, you know.’

‘Ruby, you don’t have to take issue with every single thing. Mamdooh is the way he is, just accept that and try not to outrage him.’

She looks as if she is about to take issue with me, but she bites her tongue and sighs instead. ‘Mamdooh’s OK. Hey, you know your car?’

The sudden changes of conversational direction used to irritate me because I thought she lacked mental discipline,
but now I accept that her mind leapfrogs faster than mine. There is so much she wants to absorb and make use of; just to watch and listen to her makes my blood surge. My feet and hands tingle as if I am about to jump up and chase off into a world that I have hardly considered for years. I catch myself looking to the window, and the floating fragments of delft-blue sky visible through the latticework of the
mashrabiya
screen.

‘My car?’

‘I was telling Ash about it, Ash and Nafouz. You know, about how it’s just sitting there in the garage falling to pieces among the cobwebs, and Nafouz said he’s got a friend who’s a brilliant mechanic who could maybe look at it and get it going again? Then we could go out for drives together, what do you think? We could go to Alexandria or … or on a dune safari.’

She loves pomegranates and has been peeling one as we talk. The skin falls away in a neat coil to uncover pith that she slits to get at the glowing heart. I shake my head in answer to her silent offer; the seeds stick in my teeth.

‘I have been to Alexandria, and into the desert. I’m sure they haven’t improved lately. And of course Nafouz has a friend who will be interested in somehow turning my car into a few pounds of profit for himself. What did you expect?’

‘It was just an idea.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

She nods, eating pomegranate off the blade of the fruit knife. Five minutes later she jumps up and kisses the top of my head and five minutes after that she has gone out. Silence seeps slowly through the house, filling the corners and the dark angles of stairways.

The sharp ringing of the telephone makes me jump. I receive very few calls nowadays; sometimes Doctor Nicolas telephones to ask if I am well or to pass on some snippet of local news
that he thinks might interest me, otherwise it is just tradesmen or people trying to sell things, and once or twice an impertinent developer who wants to buy my house from me. And of course, just lately, I have been answering the telephone to Lesley.

‘Mummy, is that you?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are you?’

‘I am very well. I’m afraid you’ve just missed Ruby, she went out about five minutes ago.’

‘Oh, I see.’

The disappointment in her voice comes through like the wind sighing in bare trees. I think Lesley adores the child, and her adoration scratches at Ruby like a barbed-wire vest. I also remember what Ruby told me about not taking a boy to visit her mother because Lesley will only allow a regiment of perfectly aligned white mugs to adorn her kitchen. Lesley needs to exert a serious measure of control over her environment because she fears what lies beyond the defended perimeters. All her curtains and hedges and roses and Christmas rituals and crockery arrangements are about creating a safe place within a threatening world.

And of course, that longing for security is what her ever-absent mother has bred in her. As always, my meditations about Lesley tread the same circuit of guilt.

‘She’ll be back later. She’s gone to the Egyptian Museum, she seems to have developed a great interest in Egyptology.’

‘Really? She always did have odd enthusiasms.’

A silence between us contains the minute crepitations of distance and technology.

‘I wanted to ask you … do you think you could send her back home, please?’

I consider this. ‘Truthfully, I don’t think I can send her anywhere. Ruby is an adult as far as I am concerned. Only she can decide when she is ready to leave. Of course, as her
mother you could try to order her back to England, but I’m not sure that would have the desired result.’

‘She is staying with you. It’s
your
house.’

‘Yes. And it will always be open to her, if here is where she chooses to be.’

Lesley’s voice rises; like a change in pressure in my inner ear I can almost feel the
whoosh
of her anger as it ignites.

‘You’re conspiring with her, against me.’

‘No, I am not.’

But maybe I am.

‘What has she actually been doing there, all this time?’ The fluttery edge in Lesley’s voice betrays just how close she is to tears.

‘I’ve told you. Going to the museum, learning a little Arabic, sightseeing, making friends. There is a nice young man called Ashraf, I have met him two or three times. Ruby won’t come to any harm with him.’

‘How do you know?’ Lesley’s disbelief suggests what I have already realised, that Ruby can’t have been an easy child to try to bring up.

‘By trusting her? Have you tried that?’

‘Believe me. I’ve tried everything.’

My sympathy for Lesley turns out to be short-lived, because what I now feel is exasperation. ‘What do you actually want for her?’

‘I want her to come home. Or to go travelling properly with a plan, a goal in mind. Then to go to university, or at least decide what she wants to do with her life. Not always to be at the back of the class, bunking off, running away, sticking up two fingers at authority and expectation and her parents.’

‘In other words you want her to be exactly like your friends’ children?’

My voice is perhaps drier than it might have been.

‘What’s wrong with that? Is it a bad thing to want? I am
doing the best I can for her, the only way I know how. I asked her father to get involved for once and his only suggestion was a bloody shopping trip to New York.’

That’s the previous husband, Alan or Colin or whatever his name is, not the one she’s married to now. Lesley is shouting at me and I have to hold the receiver away from my ear until she stops.

In the end I say, ‘I don’t know exactly what Ruby was running away from when she left London but she wasn’t running to me, because she didn’t know me. Now she’s here I’d give her the opportunity to work matters out for herself. She’s safe and she seems happy. I’m happy to have her here.’

I can hear Lesley’s agitated breathing. ‘What’s she living on? I give her a monthly allowance, maybe I should stop that and see how she likes it.’

‘My guess is that she will be resourceful enough to get money from somewhere else.’

‘From you.’

‘Not if you insist otherwise. But she doesn’t need much to live here.’

‘Maybe I should just fly out.’

We have reached the real point of the conversation.

I let the following pause build up while Lesley explores the possibility, now that she has given voice to it, and it goes on for so long that I wonder if she has hung up.

‘No,’ she whispers at last, finally. ‘I won’t do that.’

We are left with a stale sadness hanging between us. The truth that I don’t quite confront is that I
would
like to see Lesley. I would like to talk to her, perhaps – this new development that we can’t explore because it’s locked behind barriers of suspicion and jealousy – even share something of Ruby with her. But Lesley doesn’t want to see me.

Well, that is my pay-off.

‘There is plenty of room here,’ I say.

‘There wasn’t always.’ The retort comes on a long, exhaled breath that has turned impatient. Lesley is recovering already, this has been a painful conversation but she will put it behind her and carry on.

‘No,’ I humbly agree.

‘Tell her I called, won’t you? And ask her to give me a ring back when she comes in. Reverse the charges, of course.’

‘All right.’ I happen to have overheard one of these conversations. Ruby sounds evasive, non-committal, murmuring
fine
and
not much
and
OK, whatever
.

‘’Bye, then,’ Lesley says.

‘Goodbye.’

I feel cold now, and the sky beyond the lattice screen has clouded over. I go back and sit in my chair, and pick up another thread.

After the visit to Albie Noake I went home to Garden City. As I turned the corner into the quiet, cocoa-brown street I was almost knocked over by Jeremy the poet, who was dashing through the twilight in the opposite direction.

‘Sorry. Uh, I’m so sorry. Oh, hello, Iris, it’s you.’

He was wearing his linen suit, which shone at the elbows and down the margins of the lapels, and a British Council tie with a shirt whose collar points tipped upwards like the ears of some small rodent.

‘Hello, Jeremy. Have you been at the flat?’

His gaze flicked sideways, then he raked his hair off his sweaty forehead and looked longingly over my shoulder.

‘Um, no, not really. Just popped in, you know.’

‘Faria’s at home, is she?’

‘No, actually. I, er, just on the off-chance …’

Clearly I wasn’t going to get any more information, and in any case I wasn’t particularly interested in Jeremy’s comings and goings.