Iris and Ruby (35 page)

‘Nicolas, this is my granddaughter Ruby. Ruby, this my friend Doctor Nicolas Grosseteste. My physician.’

Mamdooh’s called him in, Ruby thought.

‘Hi.’

He smiled. ‘How do you do? Mamdooh so kindly gave me a drink. I have been enjoying five minutes with the newspaper while I waited.’

He was very charming and good-looking.

‘Will you stay another five minutes?’

‘If I may, Iris. It’s too long since we saw each other.’

‘Ruby …’

‘I’ll go and tell Mamdooh and Auntie we’re back.’

Ruby went down through the house and found the old people in the kitchen. Auntie was chopping vegetables, as usual, and Mamdooh was sitting in his chair beside the stove.

‘We had a nice drive,’ she told him. ‘Mum-reese is with the doctor now.’

‘Very good,’ he answered flatly. Mamdooh wouldn’t give any ground. Auntie set Iris’s glass in its worn silver holder on a small tray, poured boiling water to make tea, wrapped some bread in a napkin and put it beside a little dish of honey. With her head on one side, like a little brown bird’s, she asked Ruby a question in Arabic and Ruby said, ‘Yes, thanks, Auntie, I’ll take it up.’ This was their way of talking to each other, through and across the languages.

From the upper hallway Ruby heard the doctor’s voice and Iris’s response followed, then they both laughed and Iris made another rejoinder.

‘But that was long before you were born,’ she was saying.

They looked up when Ruby came in with her tray.

Doctor Nicolas stayed to drink another glass of tea and then said he must be on his way. He bent over Iris and kissed her hand, and she patted his arm affectionately. Ruby led the way down the stairs to show him out. As he put on his overcoat in the hall the doctor said, ‘Your grandmother seems well.’

‘Does she?’

‘You sound as though you disagree.’ Again, the doctor’s dark eyes rested on her.

Ruby hesitated, unsure of how much to say. ‘She’s forgetful. It worries her. I want to help but it’s hard when she can only tell me little bits about her life, all disconnected. Sometimes she’ll only say a word or two, and they’re meaningless, but she’ll look at me and I know she expects and wants them to say much more.’

Nicolas studied her for a moment, then he smiled. ‘Iris is a very strong woman and has been so all her life. She fears a loss of control, in particular of herself or her faculties.’

Ruby nodded. For some reason a picture of her mother came into her mind, Lesley in the ordered, humming space of the kitchen at home. White mugs on the glass shelves. Ranks of jars and tins in the cupboards.

Guardedly, she said, ‘She doesn’t want to forget her history. I don’t blame her. Your memories must be so precious, when you are old. They’re what you’ve saved up, aren’t they? More precious than money or houses or fame. Iris doesn’t want to lose hers because once they’ve gone you’ve got nothing. You are nothing.’

‘You know, I am not sure I entirely agree with that. A human being doesn’t exist simply in his or her own consciousness. Each of us has an effect on those around us, and we have our being in their estimation also. In their appreciation or otherwise. In their memories as well as our own.’

Ruby nodded eagerly. ‘We’ve talked about that. I had this idea I could kind of store up her memories for her, you know, like an oral history project. But it doesn’t seem to happen. She can’t get it into words.’

‘Memory is complex, as well as fragile. It isn’t just a list of dates and events. You might argue that it is much more to do with scents and textures, and less tangible elements even than those. The cadence of a voice uttering a single
word. A bird’s song at dawn on one significant day. All these things compact, as in a great poem. I don’t know how you might set about capturing and then translating them for another, but then I am only a doctor, not a poet.’

Ruby decided that she liked Doctor Nicolas. ‘I’m neither. Just Iris’s granddaughter. I want to help, that’s all.’

‘I believe you are doing that already, Ruby. May I call you that?’

‘Sure. How am I helping?’

Nicolas considered. ‘Iris has been living alone for many years, and as she has become more physically frail and less able to go out into the world I think she has become isolated. As a result of that isolation a moderate depression has taken hold. It happens that some of the symptoms of depression mimic those of the early phases of dementia, and I think that her confusion and anxiety are attributable to the former. Quite possibly she is confusing the two afflictions herself, and this is increasing her anxiety.’

‘Have you told her this?’

‘Of course I have tried to. But as you know, Iris does not welcome what she regards as intrusion into her privacy. I can treat her physical ailments, but her mind is still her own. However, since your arrival I have noticed a change in her. She is much more alert, more positive in her responses to stimuli, her blood pressure is lower, she seems to eat and sleep better. You have lifted her spirits.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Most definitely.’

Ruby’s smile lit up her face. ‘Result, then. So you think I should stay?’

The doctor picked up his medical bag. ‘Can you? You are very young and you will have calls on your time.’

‘I think you could say I’m at a crossroads. Iris and I went out for a drive today, by the way. Did Mamdooh tell you
that’s where we were? We’ve got her old Beetle back on the road.’

‘Excellent. I should think going out is precisely what she needs. I’ll call back again in a few days, Ruby. You can tell me how you both are.’

Nicolas held out his dry, cool hand and Ruby shook it. She went with him to the door and after he had walked briskly away she stood on the top step and breathed in the thick night scents. Animals, diesel fumes, spices, pee.

It came to her that she liked Cairo.

When she went back upstairs she found that Iris had fallen asleep in her chair. She unfolded a shawl and tucked it carefully round her grandmother’s shoulders.

After the battles for Sidi Rezegh and Rommel’s withdrawal to the line at Mersa el Brega, there came a lull in the desert fighting. Many of the officers and men of the Eighth Army came back to Cairo on leave, and for Xan and me and our friends Christmas 1941 turned into a series of wild parties, mostly impromptu and held in someone’s apartment where we danced to the gramophone and drank whatever we could lay our hands on.

Sometimes it would have been easy to forget there was a war on at all. Some days were officially meatless, even in the smart restaurants, because enemy control of the Mediterranean meant that meat could no longer be imported and local supplies were rationed, so we just ordered shellfish or cheese soufflé instead. Grain shortages drove the poor in Cairo to attack the bakeries in attempts to steal what they could no longer buy, while Faria’s Coptic Christian parents gave a party in their house for two hundred guests with a jazz band, French champagne and a five-course dinner served by gloved servants at tables decorated with garlands of fresh flowers flown up from Southern Africa. I still enjoyed these
pleasures, but the city was full of contrasts that seemed to grow sharper every day. I was beginning to see the world, and my privileged place in it, through Ruth’s and Daphne’s eyes.

At her parents’ party Faria told me that her father and Ali’s father had insisted on finalising a wedding date. We were repairing our make-up at the dressing-table glass in her girlhood bedroom.

‘The 28th of May,’ she said, painting her lips in an unsmiling dark-red slash. Her black hair was as smooth and shiny as if coated in shellac and her oval face was expressionless.

Over her head I glanced at my own overexcited pink-and-white reflection.

‘Are you happy?’ I asked.

‘Happy? Darling, I have no idea. Should one be? Would you be?’

Thinking of Ali, and the contrast he made with Xan, I guessed not – but I wasn’t Faria.

‘Anyway, life will go on, won’t it?’ Faria snapped her lipstick back into its case and turned her head from side to side so her diamond earrings caught the light. ‘What about you and Xan?’

‘My mother wants to come out here.’

‘Ah. The English church, the ambassador to read the lesson, a regimental guard of honour.’

‘I suppose so.’

Faria leaned close to me and I breathed in her heavy perfume. Shalimar. ‘If I were you, I would elope. Don’t waste another hour.’ She winked, put her arm through mine and led me back down to the dance floor where Xan was waiting.

He put his mouth to my ear and a shiver of pleasure ran all the way down my spine. ‘You are beautiful, Iris Black, and I love you. Are we going to stay all night at this pompous party, or shall we go home to bed?’

‘Bed,’ I answered composedly. I would never have guessed, nor would the boys I had briefly encountered in London, that I could ever like sex as much as I did with Xan.

As she had promised, Daphne Erdall found me volunteer work at her hospital. It wasn’t nursing, which was what I had naïvely hoped for, but at least it was something. For three evening sessions a week I sat at a desk in the almoner’s office and filled in forms with the details of British casualties; name, number, rank, regiment, injuries, date of arrival, supervising MO, ward, notification of next of kin. I typed letters addressed to wives in the Home Counties and mothers in the Midlands and Yorkshire and Scotland, and passed them on to the proper authority for signature. My boss was Christina Tsatsas, a good-natured Greek woman whose forearms and upper lip were shadowed with soft dark hair. When I took my short break we would stand on the small concrete terrace outside the window and smoke a cigarette, looking down into the dark of the hospital garden.

‘You want to be a nurse?’ Christina asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You have to train.’

‘Of course.’

But I couldn’t afford to give up my job at GHQ and if I embarked on part-time training I would see even less of Xan than I did now.

‘After the war,’ I said, giving voice to an intention that had hardly begun to form itself in my mind. I could tell that Christina thought I lacked the proper degree of determination ever to make a useful nurse.

I saw Daphne sometimes, and although at first I was a little in awe of her we slowly began to be friends. When I met her around the hospital, by accident or by arrangement, she was usually alone but she trailed a distinct glamour in
her wake. She was always pressed for time but she never seemed too busy to speak to whoever stopped her in a corridor, giving them her full, serious attention. She was friendly with her all-male surgical team, but it was an arm’s-length friendliness that fell well short of intimacy. People glanced after her as she passed them, either wondering who she was or, like me when we first met, acknowledging that here was Someone. Daphne herself was quite unaware of the effect she created.

If I was early for work and she was finishing a shift, we would have a cup of tea together in the medical staff canteen. Daphne would tell me about her day’s list of operations and if they had lost a badly wounded soldier on the table her eyes would darken with sadness and frustration. Once or twice we talked about Ruth. Daphne was affectionate, but I suspected that she might be too self-contained to acknowledge – perhaps even experience – love in the frank way that Ruth did.

I tried inviting them both to some of the parties we all went to that Christmas, but they were rarely off duty at the same time and when they were they preferred to be alone together.

But then, oddly enough, they appeared at Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch’s New Year’s Eve party.

The lovely panelled hall where we had once played cards was decorated with a pine tree that must have been fifteen feet tall. I have no idea where it came from; as we waited in a line to greet out hostess, Xan and I amused ourselves by imagining the tortuous route that it would have followed from a Swiss mountainside, across occupied Europe to some eastern Mediterranean seaport, and through the German naval blockades to the docks at Alexandria.

‘Or maybe she just had it flown in. Perhaps Sandy arranged a convenient airdrop with the RAF,’ Xan suggested.

The tree blazed with dozens of real wax candles and its sharp, resinous scent perfumed the whole house. Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch herself stood in front of it, shaking hands with an impressive turn-out of Cairo society. The ambassador and his lady were in Luxor for their Christmas break, but everyone else seemed to be present. Sir Guy and Lady Gibson Pasha were in the crowd of arrivals just ahead of Xan and me, and there was even a rumour that the King himself might put in an appearance.

Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch inclined her head to us when we reached her. She was wearing a white Grecian-style evening dress swathed and draped across her stately bosom, and a diamond and sapphire cross rather larger than the Star of the Garter. ‘Have you planned a wedding day?’ she demanded, her eyes on my amethyst. She liked to know everything.

‘Not yet,’ we murmured.

‘Don’t leave it too long,’ she ordered, echoing Faria’s advice. Xan bowed just a shade too theatrically and I concentrated very hard on not giggling, at least until her unwinking stare moved on to the people behind us.

Xan put his hand under my arm as we turned into the room. ‘Look at this,’ he whispered. There were jewels and furs, pale or sun-flayed European faces and haughty, sallow Levantine ones, medals and moustaches and feathers and coiffures mixing with the dress uniforms of a dozen armies. ‘And we are in the middle of a war.’

It was hard to believe.

Sandy Allardyce stood a little further on, smoking a cigarette in a jade holder and narrowly watching the servants as they circulated with trays of drinks. He was wearing new evening clothes of a slightly florid, non-European cut. We waved to him through the throng.

‘How will he fit in at his London club in those?’ Xan wondered.

‘I shouldn’t think he’ll need to. His club would seem very faded after all this.’

It was then that I saw Ruth and Daphne. The screens of the upper gallery had all been opened up for the party and they were leaning side by side over the carved partition and looking down on the heads of the crowd.