Iris and Ruby (53 page)

Lesley claps her hands and the candle flames waver in the moving air.

‘Bravo,’ she cries. ‘Love triumphs.’

Here is the point, now.

I remember the baby, an inconsolably wailing bundle, and the small child she became, plump in a gingham dress. Did I dream about her in my desert delirium? Waiting, accusing me, refusing to release her rightful hold and let me go.

I gather my breath again. I have talked so much, more than I have done for years. My food lies cold in front of me, almost untouched.

She deserves the truth. It is all I can offer her.

‘I shouldn’t have done it. Shouldn’t have married him.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘I didn’t love him. I loved Xan Molyneux.’

‘But he was dead.’

‘And so was the child I was expecting. I was going to have his baby but I had a miscarriage. I lost them both in the space of two weeks, you might say that I lost everything. But it was wartime, and I wasn’t alone in that.’

Lesley’s gaze wavers and drops from mine. I can see her mind working. Ruby has cupped her chin in her hands. She looks concerned but not very surprised.

Then Lesley lifts her head again. There are spots of high colour on her cheekbones and she is more than half drunk. She is angry, not sympathetic in the least. Not that I am looking for sympathy.

‘So all the time, all those years, when you left Daddy and me behind and went off to look after other women and their children in bloody Africa, you were wanting the family you lost instead of the one you actually had? You discarded us because we made the mistake of being still alive, not a heroic memory?’

She pours herself another glass of wine and drinks deeply. Ruby begins a move to restrain her, but I shake my head. If it takes alcohol to get Lesley to unbutton and say what she feels, instead of smiling with the corners of her mouth and hiding it all, then the headache and the nausea will be worth it.

There is still more that I have to say. My garrulity is startling.

‘No. I have had long enough to think about it and I believe that it isn’t quite as you see it.’

I need a drink myself. I take a mouthful, choking a little as the fumes go to my head.

‘Perhaps if Xan and our son had lived, it wouldn’t have been so very different.’

‘Wha’ d’you mean?’

‘Death preserves an ideal. Ideal love, lover, infant. Can you follow that?
Can
you? No romantic story. No
bravo
, nothing. Just plain, stony reality. Because in the end, Xan, Gordon, your brother or you, I might not have been so different. I might have betrayed them, neglected them too. I did what I did and I am the person I became. Bad, good, flawed. Indifferent. Better alone, preferring to be. I knew that, living in a hut up country, a hospital annexe, Tanganyika, Nyasaland, Namibia. Here, finally, in this house.
I knew that where I was and the way I lived was the best I could do.

‘An ordinary life didn’t mean enough, it wasn’t precious enough, after Xan died. I found the rigour I needed in practising medicine. I was passionate about my work and the detachment in me became an asset, not a shortcoming. You need to be able to stand back a little, when you do work like that. I don’t think, Lesley, I would have lasted in the role of good mother or proper
wife
to anyone. Maybe …’ My voice is beginning to fail me. ‘… Maybe not even Xan Molyneux.’

I raise my hand and let it fall again. I am utterly exhausted by this confession, because that is what it is.

‘Gordon deserved better than I gave him. And so did you, my dear.’

Lesley stares. Then she stands up, the high heel of her shoe catches in the hem of her pretty skirt, and she snatches at the back of her chair to stop herself falling. The chair and she rock dangerously for a second before coming to rights. Ruby sighs heavily, preening her maturity in the face of our messy revelations.

I get to my feet too.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

Lesley’s face swims, then tears begin to slide down her face. She reaches out to me, and we shuffle into an awkward and unpractised embrace.

I don’t know how long we stand there. I am aware of Ruby still sitting at the table, picking the wax runnels from the candles and frowning as she moulds them in her fingers.

‘Iss all right,’ Lesley says in the end. There are black marks under her streaming eyes and she is tending towards maudlin. ‘Got to go on, haven’t we? Life goes on.’

‘Yes.’ But I disagree.

Now Ruby stands. ‘You ought to go to bed,’ she says, into the space between us.

Lesley and I take each other’s arm and we move slowly, unsteadily, towards the
haramlek
stairs.

Ruby started after them, but then she looked back at the candles and the panelling. She leaned across the table, pinching the wicks in turn between her fingers to feel the split-second smoulder as each flame was extinguished.

‘Fucking
families,
’ she said into the smoky dark.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Christmas in England. Christmas with all the re-enactments of family tradition, performed in the same way for as long as Ruby could remember. The difference was that this year she noticed how hard her mother worked to make it look effortless.

Lesley lifted her antique glass tree ornaments out of their cottonwool nests and hung them on the guaranteed-not-to-drop tree. Presents were bought and wrapped and handed over. Will and Fiona and their children came to stay. There was even the diversion of a party given by one of Ruby’s friends, at which Ruby was told that she was looking cool these days.

She participated in all this and even, to her surprise, enjoyed approximately half of it. At the same time she thought constantly about Iris and about Cairo like a parallel world that was waiting for her to slip back into it. The knowledge that she had a separate resort, another place to which to retreat even if it was only in her mind, made it easier to forgive the shortcomings of the present one.

On Boxing Day when Fiona and Lesley took the woundup children out for a walk and Andrew immediately fell
asleep, Will followed her into the kitchen and casually dropped his arm round her shoulders. He tilted her chin in order to gaze into her eyes.

‘How is my special girl?’

Ruby considered, giving herself plenty of time to do so, while Will’s finger traced a line down her neck to her collarbone.

I don’t need to have any kind of weird contract with you, not any more. I’m never going to live in your house again. You can’t confuse me any longer with your creepy blend of authority and sleazy secret advances, was what she was thinking.

‘I am not yours,’ was what she said. She was pleased with the splinters of ice in her voice.

She detached his hand from her shoulder and let it fall, then she added, ‘I don’t want you to touch me ever again. And if you do, I will tell my mother and your wife about it.’

As an afterthought she picked up the tea cloth and pointed to the washing-up.

‘Here.’ She smiled at him, putting the cloth into his empty hand. Will had not cleared up a plate or a glass throughout the whole of Christmas. That was women’s work.

When she came back from the walk Lesley said, ‘Ruby, darling, you’ve done the saucepans. Thank you.’

‘Not me. It was Will,’ Ruby told her.

She couldn’t be sure, but Lesley seemed also have adopted a different attitude to Andrew. She told him once that he and his papers were in the way, and if he really had to work all through Christmas could he perhaps go and do it in the study?

Andrew gave her a look, but he gathered himself up and went.

She didn’t shrink, either, when he told her that those brown
trousers didn’t suit her. ‘Don’t you think so? I am quite pleased with them,’ she said, smoothing the front pleats across her stomach. ‘And they’re taupe, actually.’

Instead of changing into a different pair she wore them all day, and the next day as well.

It wasn’t much, Ruby acknowledged, but it was something.

Lesley seemed to occupy more space. As if she had decided that she deserved as much light and air as everyone else.

‘Thanks for doing all the cooking and shopping and everything,’ Ruby said to her, when Will and his family had at last gone home. Andrew and Ed were watching the football. ‘Everyone enjoyed themselves.’

‘Did they?’ Lesley said eagerly. ‘Did you?’

‘Of course I did. I never thought about it before but Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together, eating the turkey and playing the games and going for the walk. Now we’ve done it and that’s it for another year. But I understand why you wanted me to come home for it and I’m glad I did.’

They looked at each other and a slow smile curved Lesley’s face. She seemed suddenly younger and almost relaxed.

Ruby said, ‘You never got an answer, did you?’

Lesley knew instantly what she was talking about.

‘In a way I did. It wasn’t exactly a revelation that Iris wasn’t a good mother. But it helped, rather, to hear her admit that she probably wouldn’t have been to anyone else either. That it wasn’t just me who had somehow failed to capture her interest, which was what I always felt.’

‘You didn’t know about her great love affair, and the lost baby?’

‘No. Nothing at all. When I was young Iris was either away, or I was visiting her in difficult places where she was
always needed more urgently than I seemed to need her. I was rather afraid of her.’

‘I’m pleased she told us. She must have wanted to, the way it all came out in a great rush.’

‘Did you talk a lot, when you were there together?’

‘She told me a few stories, but they never connected up, not the way they did when she told us about Grandad and the Black Code and the Qattara Depression. Now I come to think about it, most of the time I talked and she listened. I probably moaned about how unfair life was.’

‘Was?’

Ruby grinned. ‘I’m saying nothing more at this stage.’

‘Of course not.’

‘You know? I think Iris had forgotten
how
to talk. She’s been on her own for so long, it’s just not what she does.’

‘I think you are right.’

Abruptly, Ruby asked, ‘When can I go back there?’

It was the last day of the year, a pale glimmering afternoon with raindrops on black twigs and a low English sky folded on the tops of the hills. The world seemed to leak water and to be so exhausted with bearing the weight of it that it heaved itself out of darkness only to sink back into twilight again.

Lesley said, ‘Can you tell me why you want to, so much?’

Ruby considered window-dressing her proposition with more assurances about language courses and pharaonic studies. She was eager to do those things, if she could find a way that wouldn’t make her feel stupid all over again, but she was afraid that concealing the real reason for going back to Cairo would be to deny Iris herself.

‘To be with her. She’s old.’

‘I know that.’

Lesley had been staring out at the smeary lead-grey and russet enclosure of the garden but now she turned to face
Ruby. She had watched her since they had come home, expecting that there would be a bad reaction after her ordeal, but all that had happened was that her daughter had acquired a new stature. Since her days in the desert she had become more measured, she spoke more slowly and gave more thought to what she did say. Even her voice sounded less strident.

But was she old enough for what would come next, Lesley wondered? Did Ruby even understand what was involved?

On the morning they left Cairo, Lesley had a serious headache. Iris was tired and peevish too, and she had waved them off with visible relief. But Lesley noticed that her eyes followed Ruby all the way out of the room.

If Ruby went to Cairo she would be doing what Lesley would have been glad to do herself – but Iris wouldn’t want that. She wouldn’t look for Lesley’s company now, any more than she had done before. But at least Ruby could be there. Ruby would be the thread. And if Iris’s condition worsened – past the point, Lesley secretly calculated, when she would be able to exert her iron will – then it wasn’t so far for Lesley to travel to be there herself.

Lesley beckoned and Ruby took a sideways step, to come under the shelter of her arm. They stood close together, their cheeks touching.

Lesley didn’t say that they should discuss the matter with Ruby’s father, or even with Andrew. This was between the two of them.

‘I think you should go,’ she said at last.

Ruby’s head lifted at once. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said.

This time, she knew exactly how much to pay the taxi driver for the ride in from the airport. The smell of diesel fumes and frying offal, underpinned with the amalgamated spicy, rotting, fermented odours of Cairo itself, was perfectly
familiar. As they sat in the dense pack of freeway traffic Ruby watched the navy-blue skyline jagged with domes and high-rise blocks and sharp minarets, and saw the first faint stars appear above them. The old city drew in around her.

The door in the high wall opened and Mamdooh’s shape was outlined against the dim light within. ‘Miss, you are here again,’ he said. It was impossible to tell whether his gloomy tone was lightened by a briefly welcoming note.

Ruby stepped inside and he took her bag. The quietness of the house struck her again. It was all shadows and arches, shadows within the arched recesses and in the angles of the old walls, muffled with dust, populated by ghosts. Auntie hurried out of the kitchen and grabbed her hands, looking up into her face and talking volubly.

‘How is Mum-reese?’ she asked them.

‘Doctor Nicolas has visited her. She is a little tired, but she waits to see you.’

The door to Iris’s sitting room stood open, letting a slice of light out into the dim breadth of the gallery. Ruby stepped inside.

‘You are here at last,’ Iris greeted her.

The child.

She gives off energy like heat from a fire.

She sits down in her usual place, takes my hand. I think she is talking about England and Christmas and Lesley, but it is too tiring to catch and catalogue the sense of what she is saying. Instead, I watch the way her mouth moves, the lower lip pushing forward to form her words. Her lips are shiny, pinky-red, and her tongue taps her white teeth with a rhythm like music.