Iris and Ruby (39 page)

‘Not bad. Sick, some of the time, but that won’t last more than another three or four weeks. Are you really pleased?’

He kissed my hands and my neck and my mouth.

‘I can’t believe it. Yes, I’m more pleased than you can imagine. Will it be a boy or a girl?’

‘A boy,’ I told him with absolute certainty.

‘Let’s get married. Straightaway. As soon as we can arrange it. Never mind the cathedral and the dress and the guard of honour and all that rubbish. I’ll ask the colonel for two days.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, yes. Now, put your arms round me. Here. Touch me. Take this off. Wait. I’ll undo it …’

There was a tangle of his clothing and my nightgown, and the creak of his Sam Browne belt and a shocking clatter as his service revolver fell onto the floor, and then we were naked and enveloped in each other.

Afterwards he lay with his fingers tangled in my hair, holding my head against his heart.

‘Do you have to go?’ I whispered.

‘In a minute or two, yes.’

‘Where?’

‘Back.’

‘Can’t you tell me anything?’

‘Rommel’s rearmed, he’s going to strike for Tobruk and beyond. He’ll be trying to push the Eighth Army right back, back as far as the frontier and into Egypt.’

This much I knew.

‘Have you heard of the Qattara Depression?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a huge hollow, thousands of square miles of it, scooped out of the desert floor about forty miles south of the coast and the railhead at a place called el Alamein. The northern sides of it are too steep for tanks to descend and the bed is treacherous soft sand. If Rommel advances that far, he’ll be caught in a natural bottleneck between the sea and the Qattara and this will be the last, best place to try and hold him before the frontier.’

‘How is Tellforce involved in this?’

Xan’s mouth came close to my ear, as if even here in my bed we might be overheard. ‘Hassan and I think there is a way through the Qattara. Not an easy way, but I believe it can be done. If we can somehow reconnoitre a route for the heavy armour, without the enemy knowing about it, we can hook around and come in at them from the south where they will never expect to be vulnerable. We’re based at Siwa now and we’re working on it. Solving the Qattara route.’ Against the thin skin beneath my ear his mouth curved in a smile of anticipation, and I shivered.

‘It’s time,’ he murmured now. Then he sat up and began to gather his clothes. I reached to turn on the light beside my bed and lay with my head propped on one hand, memorising the chain of bone that formed his spine, and the lean hips, and the shadow of his ribs showing through tanned skin. None of the men who fought in the desert carried any surplus flesh on them.

When he was dressed, Xan sat down again beside me and picked up my left hand. He kissed the knuckles and pressed his lips to the amethyst, and smiled as he held my face between his hands.

‘’Bye, darling. Will you find out what it takes to get us married with indecent haste?’

‘I will.’

He kissed me on the lips. ‘Look after yourself, and the baby. I love you both. I’ll be back again soon.’

He knelt down and retrieved his revolver from under the bed, slid it back into its holster and stood up. The door opened, closed behind him with a swift click and he was gone.

After numerous thwarted attempts, I finally managed to telephone my mother in Hampshire. She sounded tired, as if just repeating their number cost her an effort, but her voice turned sharp with anxiety when she realised it was me.

‘Iris? Iris, is that you? What’s wrong? Quick, tell me what’s happened …’

They were primed for bad news at home in England; it seemed that it was the only kind. And a telephone call from Cairo was a reasonable cause for alarm.

‘Nothing’s wrong, Mummy, nothing at all, I’ve just got something I want to tell you that won’t wait for a letter.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m going to have a baby.’

‘Oh. Oh dear, are you quite sure?’

I couldn’t help smiling.

‘Certain. And I’m very happy, and so is Xan. It means that we’ll get married right away. I’m just sorry that it will mean not having you and Daddy here, and no trousseau or ambassador or anything like that. Do you mind very much?’

‘Goodness me. Mind? I don’t know. I was so looking forward …’

‘I know you were. But it’s wartime, and Xan and I love each other, and after the war we’ll come home with a grandchild for you. We can’t be the only family in this position.’

‘No. It’s the war, I suppose. Everything is different these days. Evie was only saying last week that at least two of
her friends, you know … It’s all
quite
different from my day. But you can’t think of having the baby in Cairo. You must come home as soon as possible. If you book a passage now …’

‘No, Mummy. I’m staying here with Xan. I have a very good doctor, everything will be arranged.’

‘Iris, really. You are very headstrong.’

‘I don’t know about that. I’m very happy. Shall I speak to Daddy?’

‘Oh, oh dear, I don’t think so. You’d better leave that to me.’

‘All right.’ I smiled again. ‘What about you? How are you?’

‘Darling, don’t worry about me. My chest has been bothering me again, but Doctor Harris has given me some new linctus. I’ll feel better as soon as the summer comes, it’s been so cold.’

‘It’s very hot here. Mummy, I love you.’

My mother sounded so tired and frail.

‘I love you too. Please do take care, Iris.’

We are heading into the desert and I am thinking about my mother. Even hearing her faltering voice, distorted by the long-distance telephone connection.

She was only in her fifties, even though she seemed almost an old woman to me, and I realise that Lesley is now exactly the age that she was then.

The road we are now travelling is unmade, it is a rough single track that draws us on into the dunes and the city seems a long way behind. The car tyres lose their purchase in the sand and the engine whines until they find a grip again.

Xan loved the desert. He knew it and understood it, and in the end it kept him. I don’t know where he lies, but I feel as if this drive brings me closer to him. The hot, dry air
sucks at my skin but I am happy. A snatch of an old song almost works its way out of me.

‘Which way?’ Ruby asked after a while.

Iris didn’t say anything and Ruby drove a little further, wrestling with the wheel without knowing quite what to do when the steering broke away from her. The car’s bonnet slewed disconcertingly across the snout of the dune ahead before she brought it under control again. The effort made her suddenly sweaty and she realised that the sun was hot on the black roof of the old car.

Iris was humming to herself.

It was time to turn back, Ruby decided. She checked automatically in the rear-view mirror and there was nothing there. Not only no other traffic: nothing except the dunes and the sky.

‘Right. Home time.’

She braked and the car slithered. The reassuring road had dwindled into a rough track and even that was almost invisible; there was a wind blowing that sent a fine swirl of sand fuming over the ground and covering everything. Their tyre marks were already fading into twin blurred furrows. Ruby swung the steering wheel hard right and the car ploughed a slow half-circle. She estimated it was a half-circle, and that would mean that they were facing back in the direction they had come. She glanced up at the sun, a whitish disk behind a haze of heat. Was it still in the east, or had it already slid to the south?

She drove another hundred yards, but the track was gone. The veil of blown sand was chased and harried by the wind, and it was getting harder to keep the tyres turning. She would have to stop and get her bearings.

Iris turned her head. She was smiling disconnectedly. ‘Why are we stopping?’

‘I want to take a look, make sure of the way back.’

‘Back?’

‘Yes,’ Ruby said loudly.

She opened the car door and stepped out, and the wind tugged at her. Blown sand stung her ankles. She scrambled to the low crest of the nearest dune, surprised by how steep it was and how deep her feet sank. From the top she had expected that she would see the main road heading out to the oasis, whatever it was called, and the insect progress of trucks and buses. But there was only a vista of close identical dunes, rippled by the rising wind.

She ploughed down the slope and back to the car. The floor and her seat were already thinly coated with sand. She slammed the door and wound up the window, then sat with her hands on the steering wheel.

Ruby said, ‘I don’t know where we are.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The sun was now only visible as a dim eye, pale as wax, behind a thickening veil of greyish umber haze. The wind steadily rose, whipping sand off the crests of the dunes like spray off a breaking wave. The desert was shifting, unleashing itself.

Ruby crawled into the back of the car and yanked on the window winders, forcing them round as far they would go to lock the glass into the frames. The rubber of the seals was perished in places. She leaned across Iris and did the same thing to the passenger window, then checked that all the doors were properly shut. She pulled the handles into the locked position for good measure. The wind was scouring up sand and flinging it against the windscreen and the door panels, making a noise like tiny hailstones drumming on the metal. The floor and the seats were already coated with pale, gritty dust that forced its way through holes in the floor and the cracks in the door and window seals.

‘It’s a sandstorm,’ Iris said wonderingly.

‘Looks like it.’ Ruby’s throat was dry and tight, and her eyeballs still stung just from the quick dash she had made to the crest of the nearby dune. The air inside the car seemed
smoky, thicker than it was comfortable to breathe, irrelevantly reminding her of the way dry ice fumed in a club.

‘A desert sandstorm can be very dangerous, you know. We should turn round and drive straight home.’

Ruby leaned forward in the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel as if that might anchor them. ‘I think it’s too late for that now.’

The sepia-freckled skin stretched over Iris’s temples and cheekbones looked thin enough to tear. Her eyes were very wide and clear, innocent and without comprehension. ‘What did you say?’

Ruby opened her mouth, ready to vent her anxiety as anger, but she stopped herself. Instead, she took one of Iris’s hands and held it. ‘We’ll have to sit here until it blows itself out.’

‘Sit here?’

‘Yes.’ Ruby formed the word crisply, raising her voice a little, lending herself a conviction that she was far from feeling. It might have been her imagination but the car seemed to rock and shudder under the force of the wind. Let’s think, Ruby advised herself. Decide what to do for the best. She tried to be rational, but fear suddenly prickled down her spine.

At the same moment a huge gust of wind sliced the entire top off the nearest dune and flung it against the car and for a second they were in darkness. Then more wind stripped the sand from the car windows. The light when it did come back was clotted, yellow-brown, swirling like soup. There was nothing to think about, she realised, not until this storm was over. Driving even another metre was unthinkable. There was no visibility, no tracks, no sun by which to steer, nothing except gravity even to define up or down.

The air banged and thundered. It couldn’t last, a wind like this, could it?

Surely it would die down as suddenly as it had risen.

‘Are you all right?’

Iris slowly nodded. ‘A desert sandstorm,’ she repeated. ‘The men used to fear them. Even Hassan.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

Inside the partly sealed car it was now uncomfortable to breathe the dust-laden air and Iris coughed, gasped for breath, then coughed some more. Ruby burrowed in her grandmother’s bag, brought out her white headscarf and wrapped it round the lower half of her face for her. She pulled up her own T-shirt to cover her mouth and nostrils.

How had they come to land in this predicament?

She thought back to leaving the house, heading for Giza, bypassing the tourist crowds, following the desert road and deliberately taking the turnings that led away from the oasis traffic. Stupid, all right. But the sequence of turns was clear enough in her head, and to fix them there she forced herself to run them through her mind’s eye again and again. Once the wind had stopped howling and whipping the sand, she could reverse the sequence. When she had got her immediate bearings.

‘Ruby?’ Iris’s voice was very quiet and muffled even further by the folds of her scarf.

‘Yes. Here, give me your hand again. We can talk to pass the time, can’t we?’

‘I’d like a drink of water.’

There was an instant’s panic when Ruby thought
we haven’t got any
, then with relief she remembered the two bottles she had bought at the café. She reached into the back of the car for one, twisted off the cap and handed it to Iris. Iris pulled back her scarf and gulped thirstily, and some of the water ran down her chin and splashed on the front of her dress.

‘That’s better,’ she said, like a child, and handed the bottle back to Ruby.

The car seats creaked as they both sank lower, covering their noses and mouths, and preparing for the wait against the wind.

‘Hassan?’ Ruby prompted, almost automatically now.

‘Yes, Hassan. He was Bedouin. Xan used to say that he knew the desert in every season, every mood. He knew it as well as the smile in his mother’s eyes. Even the Qattara Depression. That was the key to it. The route across. Everyone said it couldn’t be done.’

‘Why not?’

Ruby’s eyes were fixed on the blank that the desert had become, a solid blank, wind-driven, more to be feared than fog, than snow, because it was so unknown. She felt uncomfortably thirsty, the silvery idea of water collecting in the margins of her thoughts wherever she tried to direct them.

‘Soft sand, impassable to tanks. That’s what the generals all thought. Xan showed them.’

‘Did he? How did he do that?’