Iris and Ruby (40 page)

It was difficult to talk through the face coverings and harder still to hear what was said. The cracks and gaps in the old car were mouthpieces for the wind, and it sighed and blared and moaned across them. Iris didn’t try to answer. Her chin drooped on her chest and after a little while Ruby saw that she had fallen asleep.

Ruby sat and stared at the opaque world. Her eyes still stung, and although she tried not to she couldn’t stop swallowing and catching the dusty rasp in her throat. She made some mental calculations about the two bottles of water and the fruit that Auntie had pressed on her. That already seemed ages ago. How long would these minimal supplies last?

A day, two days at the very most.

But they wouldn’t be here for anything like that long. Once the wind dropped, they would be on their way again.

It was a good thing that Iris was asleep, although in this
gale Ruby couldn’t imagine how she did it. The sandstorm was beating against the car, trying to get inside, sending in the hot fingers of dust that clawed all over them. She shuddered and rubbed her face to dispel the image, finding that her fingers and cheeks and eyelids were painfully gritty.

Ignore this. Think about something else.

She began with Ash. His face, white teeth flashing in a smile, the way his eyes slanted, all came easily. But he was saying that it was not a good idea for her to take Iris out in the Beetle. And in the end agreeing the compromise –
Well, then, just so far as Giza
.

Ash thought they were visiting the Pyramids. He wouldn’t guess that they had come all the way out here. But this was not a helpful line of thought, so she pictured the museum instead. It was comforting to recall the filtered light and the sepulchral halls. She took herself past the lines of wooden display cases and the fantastical assemblages of pots, shards, papyrus, scarabs, stone carvings and huge golden ornaments. Ancient civilisation. Much of it too remote for her to begin to comprehend, but it was still commanding the desert margin and drawing the tourist tides, and the durable bits and pieces of it were washed up in glass cases, labelled and left for her to speculate about.

This was the perspective she needed as a counter to the bald, threatening desert.

People had lived here for thousands of years. Hassan, whoever he was, had known it like he knew his mother’s smile. Captain Molyneux had heroically plotted a way across some particularly treacherous stretch of it. Was that where he had been killed?

This was not a useful speculation either. Ruby drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms round them to contain her anxiety, doing it quietly so as not to disturb Iris.

The museum. Go on thinking about the museum.

The Mummy Room and the quiet rows of long-dead pharaohs. Desiccated by time, and wind and sand …

No.

Collections. Inanimate objects, lined up, order among disorder, that was more like it. The glass cases. Her own bedroom at home, for that matter. Shoeboxes full of the scribbled names of pop stars and children’s TV personalities. Shells, with grains of sand still trapped in their pearly crevices …

No
.

The fucking wind. If only it would let up for a second she could think straight. Just let the car stop rocking and howling like some demented musical instrument.

Home. Matchboxes and polished wooden frames, giant cockchafer beetles and tiny spotted ladybirds, her best collection of all. Lesley had hated them.

And now Ruby was suddenly and deeply frightened, the fear coming at her like another gust of wind. The thought of home and Lesley made her almost double up, stabbed with the longing to be there, to be safe, to hear her mother telling her not to do something.

Lesley was a thousand miles away.

Iris was so old, and she didn’t know what was happening half the time.

She couldn’t look to Iris for help: the only person who could save them was herself.

But I can’t save anyone, Ruby’s voice yelled inside her head. I’m only a
child
, what am I supposed to do?

She rocked in her seat, clenching her fists until her fingernails dug so hard into the palms that the pain almost distracted her.

You’re not a kid.

Stop it! What’s the matter with you?

It’s just a sandstorm. It will die down in the end, it has to. What would Jas do?

Probably roll one, smoke it and then fall asleep. Like Iris, except for the rolling and smoking part. Ruby realised that she was laughing only when her lower lip painfully cracked open. She ran the tip of her tongue over the raw place and tasted a tiny drop of blood.

Jas, think about Jas and his Garden of Eden cut out of magazines and pasted on the walls of his room, fat green leaves and wide-eyed daisies and trees and roses and dark pointed firs.

That’s better.

When Ruby looked at her watch she was startled to see that it was two o’clock.

It was important to keep track of time, wasn’t it? Maybe the violence of the wind was diminishing at last. Through the pall of driven sand she caught a glimpse of the dune she had climbed earlier, only it had shifted so it was now ahead of them instead of out to the left. No, that couldn’t be right. Surely it was the car that must have been blown sideways, so that it had ended up facing in a slightly different direction?

But that was impossible too. They had been sitting in it all the time, sitting for so long that her legs and back ached. It must have been the dune that had moved. The wind had carved it into a different shape. This one, and its neighbours as well, probably. How different would the new landscape look from the one she had been fixing all morning in her mind’s eye?

Ruby turned her head to look at Iris. Her eyes were open and she was also looking at the ghosts of the dunes as they swam in the hanging dust.

‘You’re awake,’ Ruby murmured.

‘Have I been asleep?’

* * *

We were going to look for Xan, driving deep into the desert in search of him: we had to hurry or he would be gone and I would never see him again. The anxiety was intense and my eyes stung and burned with the effort of searching the monotony for the smallest sign of him.

Either I imagined this, or I dreamed it. And now I am awake again and I remember that I am with the child, and we are caught in a sandstorm.

‘Ruby, how much water have we got?’

Wide-eyed, she studies my face. ‘Two litres, minus what you drank earlier. Some fresh fruit, some dried apricots.’

‘You had better drink some. Go on. Let me see you do it.’

She opens the bottle and tilts it to her mouth. I see the muscles convulsively clutch in her pretty throat, and the effort it costs her to lower the bottle long before her thirst is quenched. She holds the bottle out to me and I take a few swallows. When I hand it back she screws the cap on very carefully and stows the bottle out of our sight on the back seat.

‘Are we in trouble?’ she asks in a flat voice.

‘I don’t think so.’ I peer out of the windscreen. There is nothing to see but yellowish murk, but it seems to me that this is now dust hanging in the air rather than sand torn off the dune backs. In time it will settle. ‘Mamdooh and Auntie will send someone to look for us.’

‘But they don’t know where we are. I avoided seeing Mamdooh this morning, I didn’t want the hassle. You know? I talked to Auntie in the kitchen and she talked to me, but she didn’t know what I was saying. She doesn’t, does she? And I told Ash that we were just going to the Pyramids.’ Her voice rises. ‘No one knows we’ve come out here.’

I try to remember how we reached this place, but it has gone.

I can recall the exact layout of the rooms in our Garden
City apartment, remember how the sequins on the costume of Elvira Mursi the belly-dancer glittered under the spotlights at Zazie’s, but to save my life I cannot remember this morning.

I’m very tired. I rest my head against the window and see how everything is coated in dust. The backs of my hands are grey, my lap, my knees, the metal curve of the dashboard.

If no one knows where we are, no one will be coming to look for us. There is an inevitability in this that does not particularly disturb me.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say.

After Xan slipped into my room that night and then slipped away again, I began making preparations for our wedding. From the proper department at the embassy I found out what it would take to obtain a special licence for two British nationals to marry at short notice and made the application. Sandy Allardyce helped me with the formalities.

‘Are you happy, Iris?’

‘Happier than I have ever been in my whole life.’ I was becoming almost used to saying this. But that it was true was still startling, and miraculous.

Just briefly a shadow of regret, or perhaps envy, showed in his plump, pink face. In all the times that we had met at parties or embassy functions we had never again referred to Sandy’s feelings for me, real or imagined.

‘What about you?’ I asked. Even this conversation was a long way beyond the boundaries of our usual exchanges.

‘Me?’ He coughed and shuffled a little. ‘It seems possible, ah, likely that Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch and I may make some, ah, formal arrangement.’

‘How marvellous. That’s wonderful. I hope you will both be very happy.’

The shadow was still in his face. ‘I am sure that it will be
useful for us.’ I thought that useful was an odd word in the context. ‘But happiness … I don’t know. And now when I look at you, Iris, at your face at this minute, happy seems too mundane a concept to use for you.
Transfigured
is closer.’

There was a little silence. Outside the window of Sandy’s office the tall trees of the embassy garden made an oasis of shade in the exhausting afternoon heat. He came round his desk and planted an awkward kiss on my cheek, then patted my shoulder to dismiss me.

Xan was in a camp at the fringe of the Qattara, although I deduced this by guesswork rather than from anything he told me. We communicated by letters. His scribbled, creased pages reached me erratically, dropped off by the Tellforce plane whenever it touched down in Cairo or carried by the infrequent messengers who travelled between GHQ and his patrol. The smart Indian NCO called at Garden City to deliver them, and there was always a batch of my letters waiting to be taken away. So Xan and I planned our wedding.

We would be married by an English chaplain in a side chapel at the cathedral, with a tiny handful of friends to witness the ceremony. Xan wanted Jessie to be his best man. Although I knew that the Cherry Pickers were up at the Gazala Line, Xan did not seem particularly concerned about this. Ruth and Sarah would be my attendants; Daphne was unlikely to be able to take the time off from the hospital and Faria would be on her honeymoon. It was comical that Xan’s and my minimal preparations were being made neck and neck with the final elaborate arrangements for Faria’s and Ali’s huge wedding. Our marriage would take place just five days after theirs.

I would wear a simple white silk suit and a hat with a spotted tulle veil. We would have lunch with our little group of friends after the ceremony and give a drinks party for everyone we knew in the evening at the Garden City
apartment. Faria’s parents had told Sarah and me that we could stay there until we had made other arrangments.

Gus Wainwright has promised me at least twenty-four hours’ leave
, Xan wrote.
It may only be a short honeymoon, darling – but we will have a whole life together afterwards
.

A whole life. A very long time and it is no wonder that I am tired.

The child is twisting in her seat.

‘It’s four o’clock.’

‘Is it?’

‘Mamdooh and Auntie will be going mad.’

‘Yes, they probably will.’

‘It’s going to be
dark
in an hour or so.’

‘Yes.’

‘You know that means we’re probably going to have to spend the night here?’

The desert night; the sky a bowl of darkness, stars dimmed by the dust from the storm. Very cold at this time of year and as silent as space.

Xan’s resting place.

‘
Iris?
’

‘Yes. I am listening.’ Although her insistence irritates me.

‘I can’t just sit here. I’m going to have a look.’

‘To see what?’

She clicks her tongue and pushes the door open. Cooler air swirls in, bringing rolling clouds of dust with it, but the wind has died down. Only an hour ago the force of it would have snatched the door away from her and slammed it against the car.

‘To see how to get us out.’

Ruby’s feet sank deep into the sand. The surface was cool, with warmth embedded further down. She started to run
towards the face of the altered dune, the blood in her head urgently pounding with the need for action after so many hours cooped up in the stuffy sealed car. But the blown sand swallowed her feet up to the ankles, and her knees had seized up with sitting for so long. She stumbled and fell forward, her hands plunging in the sand up to the wrists. She stood upright and began trudging more slowly up the steep brown slope. The dune was only twenty-five feet high, but the sand slid away from under her feet and she was carried back one step for every two of upward progress. Her tongue was swollen and coated with thirst, and her stomach distantly rumbled. The dune’s face turned concave and the angle became still steeper. She couldn’t get up this way.

Ruby plunged back down again in ten giant’s strides that set off little avalanches of sand slipping all around her. She half ran to the arm of the dune and began to climb the ridge. This was easier, but she was still gasping for breath and her throat was burning as she laboured up to the summit.

The sky was leaden overhead and away to the left, what must be eastwards – where Cairo lay – it was the colour of an old bruise. In the west the sun was declining somewhere behind a smeared palette of orange and umber and purple cloud. Ruby took her bearings quickly, but it wasn’t the sky she was looking at. Hunching her shoulders against the wind and protecting her eyes with cupped hands, she turned in a breathless circle to see what lay beyond the dune.