Iris and Ruby (43 page)

Or she could set out again, as she had done this morning, and this time instead of losing her nerve and turning back she would have to keep on and on walking until she found help or until she dropped.

Either or. The richness of the whole world reduced to a choice that was not a choice at all, but a sentence.

All right. Wait till the morning. Think.

Ruby now couldn’t think of anything but the few drops of moisture held in the pomegranate seeds. She had to clench her fists to stop herself reaching for the fruit and cramming it into her mouth. Then she relaxed her hands again and continued to stroke Iris’s hair, concentrating on the slow rhythm, trying to subdue all her love and longing for the world into the caress.

Mamdooh walked through Qarafa with the folds of his
galabiyeh
drawn up round his ankles, following the ragged boy who dashed ahead of him, and at the same time trying to avoid the heaps of rubbish and scattered animal dung. It was the point of the day at which the light faded and the sky turned indigo. In the City of the Dead the flat brown tombs and the colourless dust darkened, and their sharp edges were picked out with the silver-bright tracery of rising moonlight, so that the arid daytime scenery was transformed by exotic twilight.

Mamdooh did not linger even for a glance at the Mamluk tombs in the moonlight. He kept his eye on his skinny little guide instead, who was ducking between the low tomb houses of the ordinary dead. The alleys were apparently deserted but they contained a sense of watchfulness. A few more turns brought them to a closed door and the child wordlessly pointed to it. He held out a hand and pulled at Mamdooh’s sleeve until Mamdooh tipped a couple of coins into his palm.
Then the child skipped over a broken pillar and vanished into the dusk.

Mamdooh banged hard on the door. It opened by a crack and Nafouz’s face was revealed. Mamdooh reached in and grasped him by the collar of his leather jacket. With unsuspected strength he hauled him out into the open and in the crack in the doorway the faces of Nafouz’s mother and his grandmother immediately appeared instead.

Mamdooh shook Nafouz and poured out a stream of questions, and Nafouz twisted his shoulders and tried to break out of his grasp.

He shrilly insisted that Ashraf was at his work at the Bab al-Futuh hospital, and had been at work the night before too, as usual, and he had not seen Ruby for two whole days.

The two women emerged from the protection of the tomb house and now they all stood in a little circle in the indigo dusk. Mamdooh turned on them and demanded to know if this was the truth.

It was, Ash’s mother protested. Several times Ashraf had brought the young girl to this place, but not in the last two days. And yesterday afternoon he had said that he would go to meet her but he had come back and told his family that the girl was not in the usual place at the agreed time. Today, the same thing.

What was Ashraf to do about that, she demanded? Was her son to blame if an English girl was not reliable?

Mamdooh retorted that what her son should now do was tell the truth to the police.

The two women pressed closer to Nafouz and murmured anxiously to each other, and Nafouz stepped in front of them and loudly insisted that his brother and the police had no business together.

‘That we shall see,’ Mamdooh warned.

He told them that the police were now looking for Miss
and for Doctor Black, her grandmother, who was missing also. The young girl’s mother and father were coming from England to take charge of the search. They would all want to speak to Ashraf, and to the rest of his family too, and it would be advisable if they remembered every smallest thing and spoke nothing but the purest truth.

Ash’s grandmother covered her face with her headscarf and began to wail.

Mamdooh walked away, back in the direction he had come.

Ruth is stroking my hair.

After Xan died I went through the motions of living, although I felt hardly alive myself. On what would have been our wedding day and for two weeks afterwards I did my job for Roddy Boy, went to the hospital for my voluntary shift and came home again to Garden City. It was a meaningless triangle and at each point of it I longed to be at either of the others because surely the pain there would be more bearable than at the present one. But it never was and so there was nothing to do but continue.

I told Roddy Boy and Sarah and Daphne and Ruth that I was all right.

By the middle of June Rommel was once more within reach of Tobruk, and after days of fierce fighting and huge losses on both sides the city fell to the Germans. The Panzer Army moved on towards el Alamein and the Egyptian frontier, driving the tattered remains of the Eighth Army ahead of it. The threat to Alexandria was imminent and Cairo was in uproar. It seemed inevitable that Axis forces would reach the delta within days.

Ruth and Daphne did their best to look after me. Daphne drove me out to the flat on the Heliopolis road one evening, and I sat in the same chair as on my first visit and accepted
the last of the malt whisky that I had brought them as a present. I tried to think back to the happiness that had suffused everything then, but I couldn’t grasp it. All that remained was darkness.

‘Come on,’ Daphne insisted. ‘Try to eat some of this.’

I took the plate of their good food and lifted a forkful to my mouth.

When I set out for the evening I had not bothered to distinguish one pain from another, but now I realised that I was ill.

I reached across and caught Daphne’s arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

My friends looked at me, then at each other. A belt of pain tightened round my middle.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I heard myself mumble as I put my head down and tried to assimilate the pain.

Ruth and Daphne were talking in low voices. Daphne put one hand to my forehead and held my wrist in the other. When I could stand up, I went into the bathroom and found blood. There was a thin seam of blood running down the inside of my leg and dark droplets on the tile floor.

My friends made me lie down on their bed. I was very thirsty, burning up with thirst.

Ruth sits beside me and strokes my hair again, but there is nothing to drink and I am too parched to ask for water. The stroking soothes me, but I am cold, shivering. It’s dark and my arms and legs are bent and hooked in a narrow space.

Ruby did not sleep. Between wishing for and dreading the dawn it was the longest night she had ever known. The moon set and in the darkest hours there were not even any planes to offer a link with the friendly world.

At last the stars began to fade and a pearl-grey line touched the horizon. As the light came again Iris stirred and moaned.
Ruby helped her to sit up, then held her face between her two hands.

‘Iris, listen. Look at me. I’ve got to go for help, otherwise we are going to die.’

Iris’s cracked lips twitched as she tried to speak. No sound came out, but her eyes held Ruby’s and she seemed to understand what she was saying.

‘I don’t want to leave you, but I don’t know what else to do.’

Then Iris nodded, very slowly but definitely.

‘I’m going to set out as soon as it’s properly light.’

Again the nod.

‘Let’s share this,’ Ruby said. The hoarded pomegranate half was dull with dust. She tore the peel, careful in case of spilling even a drop of juice, but the fruit was almost dry. She gave two-thirds to Iris and dug her teeth into the remaining third. There was an ecstatic second as the seeds split on her tongue and yielded a few drops of liquid, but then it was gone and she chewed on the stiff pulp that was left. Iris did the same.

The sun was not yet up and the air was still cold, but it was light. Ruby climbed out of the car and sank up to her ankles in chilly sand.

‘Let me make you comfortable before I go.’

She took Iris’s hands and helped her from the car to sit in the sand beside it, putting one arm round her waist and lowering her gently. Iris was very weak now. Ruby knew that if she didn’t go immediately, she would not be able to leave her. She leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I love you,’ she told her. ‘I’ll be back very soon. Just wait for me, all right?’

She was straightening up when Iris grasped her wrist. Ruby had to bend down again with her ear close to her grandmother’s mouth to catch the words.

‘Just go. Don’t worry.’

She knew what Iris was telling her.

‘I’ll be back,’ she repeated angrily. She pulled herself away and began to walk.

She didn’t look back until she reached the crest of the nearest dune. The Beetle looked even more like a chunk of the desert than it had done yesterday.

Only
yesterday
.

She did her best to memorise the shape of the surrounding dunes, searching for a single feature anywhere in the landscape that would help her to fix this place and lead the rescuers back again. But the dun-coloured curves and hollows were all the same, implacable.

Ruby turned her back on the car and her grandmother, and trudged eastwards through the sliding sand, as fast as she could, while the sun still told her which way to go.

Daphne called a taxi, and she and Ruth took me to the Cairo Hospital for Women and Children, run by the nuns. In a shuttered white room there I miscarried my sixteen-week pregnancy, Xan’s son.

The placid, smooth-faced nuns nursed me. For two days I wouldn’t see anyone except Ruth, who came after she finished work and sat with me for a few silent minutes. I lay and stared at the white walls and waited to die.

Xan was dead and now I had lost the precious link to him. I remembered his delight when I told him that I was pregnant and I grieved twice over, for myself and for Xan too because it was his child as well as mine that was lost. It seemed beyond bearing that I could not share my desolation with him. It was incomprehensible that I would never share anything else with him, and I lay and wept until no more tears would come. Death would have been a welcome solution but my body refused to oblige; rather than letting
me sink into oblivion it began obstinately to recover.

On the third day one of the sisters made me sit up and wash my face and comb my hair.

‘There’s a different visitor to see you,’ she said.

‘I don’t want a visitor.’

‘Yes, you do,’ she told me. The door opened and Sarah came in. She had a bunch of marigolds and cosmos in her hand, flowers that made me think of my mother’s garden.

‘Oh, darling,’ she cried. ‘I’m so sorry.’

She put the flowers in a toothmug, then sat down in the chair beside my bed and took my hand.

I stared at her as if she had walked in from another world. A minute passed in silence, but then I squeezed her hand in mine.

To see Sarah made me feel, for the first time since I had lost the baby, that there was a chink of light in the world. As well as the flowers, her pale complexion and pale eyebrows and even the neat collar of her starched blouse all seemed to stand for Englishness, and a distant, quiet normality separate from this present agony. The continuity that she represented gave me an inkling that I might be able to go on living.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ I whispered finally. Her fingers tightened on mine.

Sarah let me weep again, and in the end I shouted and sobbed at her, ‘If I can’t have him, why couldn’t I at least have had his son?’

Sarah bent her head. ‘It’s cruel,’ she agreed.

I thought she couldn’t possibly know how cruel it felt. Sobs of self-pity racked me, until she raised her head and looked me in the eye.

‘Listen to me, Iris. It’s hard, but you do know that Xan loved you. You have that memory and the certainty will always stay with you.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

‘The tragedy is that he was killed. The double tragedy is that you lost the baby too. That’s terrible, almost unbearable, but in some ways you are lucky.’

I stared at her, wondering where this was leading.

‘In what ways?’

‘You were loved. Loved passionately and with all his being, by a man you deeply loved and admired in return. You may only have had a few months, but you did have that much. You conceived a child together, out of love and hope, and now it’s ended you can at least mourn them both without feeling ashamed.’

The grief that had blinded me shifted a little and I was able to take a glance beyond it.

It was suddenly plain to me that she had suffered a loss too, although I had never seen as much before now. ‘What happened?’

‘I wasn’t loved,’ she said simply.

‘Who didn’t?’

‘Jeremy.’

Jeremy the poet, shabby and blinking, Faria’s helpless and hopeless admirer.

‘But he was in love with Faria …’

‘I know that. It didn’t make any difference. When she was too busy for him, didn’t require him as an escort – well, then there I was. It was much better than nothing, for me. Iris, can you understand that?’

I hesitated. ‘In a way.’

‘Faria wouldn’t sleep with him, of course. But I did. That was better than nothing for
him
, do you see?’

Her sadness cut my heart. ‘You love him.’

‘Yes. Terribly. And then, I was pregnant.’

The white coif of one of the nuns nodded at the little observation window in the door of my room, then passed
on down the corridor. The marigolds in the glass mug bled their colour into the dim room. The louvred shutters were closed but I knew that outside the afternoon heat would be at its white, blinding height. Cairo was a cruel city.

‘What did you do?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

‘I told him, of course.’

Her hand that was not holding mine tapped out the words on the folded bedsheet.

‘What was I hoping for? That he would say to me that this changed everything, ask me to marry him, announce the glad tidings to all our friends, as you and Xan did?’

Your friends would have greeted the news with frank disbelief, I thought and immediately felt ashamed of myself.

‘He didn’t, in any case. Of course. He just said that he was very sorry and he would do everything he could to help me. So I had an abortion. I went to Beirut, do you remember? Jeremy gave me some money towards it. Not much, because he doesn’t have much. I had some savings, luckily.’