Iris and Ruby (54 page)

After a while she stops talking and looks at me, with a question that I haven’t heard left hanging in the air. I have no idea how to answer it.

‘I don’t know,’ I sigh. My eyes are closing.

Tonight, it is Ruby who helps me to bed. The determination that has gripped me ever since they left eases, suddenly mutating into drowsiness.

Sleep.

In her own room, Ruby sat on her bed and stared into the darkness outside her window. Just in the space of a month Iris had become much smaller, frailer, except for her eyes which appeared huge in her shrunken face. Ruby didn’t even know if she had been able to conceal her shock at the sight of her.

She would have to talk to Doctor Nicolas, find out from him what treatment or medicine Iris could have that would make her better. And even as she resolved to do this, the recognition of its futility crawled up her spine to grasp the nape of her neck.

Iris wasn’t going to get better and there was no medicine she could take. She was dying.

No …

I won’t
let
her die, was Ruby’s first reaction. It isn’t fair. I didn’t let it happen in the desert and I won’t now.

Then she bowed her head. The splintered old floorboards were dull with dust, her feet were placed on the familiar garnet-and-maroon pattern of a frayed piece of Persian carpet. She traced the lozenges and interlockings with her eyes, until tears blurred the geometry.

‘You like pomegranate,’ Iris announced as triumphantly as a child.

‘Yes, I do.’ Ruby gnawed the seeds from their caul of pith and burst them between her teeth.

The light in Cairo even in January was bright after the English murk, and the sun was gentle on the tops of their
heads. Iris blinked in the warmth, her eyes watering, and Ruby picked up her hat from where it lay and placed it on Iris’s head.

‘Is that better?’

‘Thank you.’ She smiled vaguely.

‘Have you finished your coffee? Would you like some yoghurt, look, with some of this honey? You haven’t eaten anything, hardly,’ Ruby insisted.

‘I’m quite happy.’ Iris smiled again.

It was true, she did seem happy. They sat in the garden together as they had done before, and if Iris wasn’t too tired they talked.

‘Tell me more about Xan Molyneux?’

Sixty years ago there were soldiers in these streets. Officers and men in their dusty khaki, Xan among them. The war was just another layer of history in the making.

‘Ah, Ruby. If you had only known him. He was an extraordinary man.’

‘How did you meet him?’

That was the question that Lesley had asked about her father when they were having dinner on the last night. Ruby remembered that she had cringed a little, thinking that her mother was too direct, but Iris had come straight out with the story.

In Lady Gibson Pasha’s garden. Dancing with Xan and then falling and spraining my ankle. I had been drunk on whisky and champagne, and then drunk on Xan himself.

The child’s eyes as I talk, rounded in surprise.

She thinks as all the young do – as I thought myself, when I was her age – that passion is their own invention.

I find that I am laughing because I remember the night and the joy of it, when it was the loss of memory I feared more than anything else.

And I talk and talk. The words come easily now, bringing relief. Ruby sits and listens, her hand linked in mine, her eyes on my face.

‘How is your grandmother today?’

Ash and Ruby were sitting on the old car seat. The door of the garage stood open and a bar of white light lay across the oily floor, slicing across their ankles.

‘She’s weak. She doesn’t eat anything, so that’s not so surprising. But she’s full of memories. I’ve heard about how she met her great love, when they lived here during the war. You’d think it was all tennis parties and chaperones, but it wasn’t like that a bit. They were quite wild. They slept together. Iris said it was because they didn’t know if the men would be alive the next week, or even the next day, sometimes. You had to live for the minute, so what point was there in being good?’

Ash looked startled. ‘You are discussing such things with your grandmother?’

Ruby laughed. ‘Yes. We sit there with our coffee cups and she tells me about it; and while I’m listening it’s as if we’re the same age. She’s talking all the time, as if she’s suddenly discovered that she
can
.’

‘It must have been quite near where we got lost.’

The child’s face turns anxious. ‘I don’t like thinking about it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, obviously, because of what might have happened.’

‘Not because of what did happen?’

She thinks about this. ‘It was horrible. I was afraid and I was drowning in sand and burning up with heat and thirst. I kept thinking about how I didn’t want to die and how precious everything is.’

‘You are right,’ I tell her. ‘Life is precious. That’s what to think about.’

‘All right.’ She shifts in her seat, looking at me. ‘Go on, about Xan driving you into the desert.’

Hassan at the wheel and Xan in the back beside me. Holding my hand in the creased coral pink silk folds of my dress.

The Bedouin tent pitched in the shelter of the dunes, the view of the Pyramids and champagne frothing into tin mugs. The first time I understood the split in Xan, and Jessie James and all the others like them, who had to confront the unthinkable every day in the desert and who only wanted to laugh and get drunk and make love when they left it behind.

‘Was that the first time you and Xan made love?’

‘No, not that night. That came a little later.’

And I can remember it as if I have just stepped out of his arms. The joy of it.

Ruby is still looking at me, with a strange expression now.

‘The cup on the shelf,’ she says again.

‘That’s right,’ I tell her. I have the sudden certainty that when I can no longer hold it, when it has slipped out of my hands, it will not be smashed into a thousand pieces.

Ruby will be holding it for me.

The car seat creaked as Ash moved closer. He put his mouth against Ruby’s neck and she shivered, arching her back with pleasure at the heat of his breath.

‘My grandmother had a good life. She knew what it was like to love and to be loved. It was tragic that he was killed, her lover, but that doesn’t take away from the meaning of it, does it?’

‘It does not.’

His hand slid between the tired plastic of the seat and Ruby’s smooth back.

* * *

I was thinking of the oasis that I never found again, in all the years. It might have been a mirage that only existed for Xan and me. And then the other faces of the desert: Private Ridley, Jessie James, Gus Wainwright. The Italian planes coming out of the sky in their tight formation and fire springing from them. I was thinking of them, searching for all those lost places, in my old car with the child at the wheel. Of course I couldn’t find them. The desert is full of bones.

I tell Ruby, ‘It’s all gone. Blown away.’

Her face puckers with determination. ‘No it hasn’t. It’s here. Go on, tell me some more.’

Gordon with his camera. Elvira Mursi, dancing in her sequins. Ash Wednesday, when we burned all the GHQ files. Faria’s wedding, Roddy Boy coming across the marble floor to tell me that Xan was dead. Ruth and Daphne and how I wanted to be like them, instead of a girl on the cocktail circuit.

Ruby sits beside me and holds my hand, her eyes on my face.

Ruby
is
the cup.

The thought makes me feel so happy that I am light, ready to float. The first warmth of the year is in my bones. Soon the heat will flood back, like the Nile itself.

Nicolas has come, he is leaning over to examine me, but his investigations are painful and I don’t want to be interrupted. I turn back, searching for Ruby again, and she is here.

‘Good,’ I say. ‘That’s good. I like you to sit where I can see you. Can you hear me?’

‘Yes. I can hear every word.’

‘How is she?’ Ruby demanded of Doctor Nicolas as he put on his coat.

‘In good spirits.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘I know.’

‘Well?’

‘You want me to tell you that she is going to live for another twenty years and I can’t do that.’

‘No, but …’

‘She is not ill, Ruby. Old age is not a viral infection, or some acute condition that I can treat with medicine.’

‘Of course not,’ she said fiercely.

Mamdooh appeared. ‘Excuse me, Sir. Madam Iris would like to speak with you again for a short moment in private.’

Nicolas followed him, and came back again ten minutes later to where Ruby was still sitting under the lantern in the hallway. He patted her on the shoulder. ‘She could be with us for a long time yet.’ He smiled.

When Iris was resting in bed, Ash and Ruby resumed their long walks.

They explored the city in trajectories that looped outwards from the clogged arteries of downtown. They passed cavernous art deco apartment buildings where the doorman sat sunning himself on the steps. In the medieval lanes of the Islamic quarters Ruby wrapped a scarf over her hair and stepped meekly at Ash’s side through the donkey shit and rotting vegetables and running water from burst pipes. Beggars hunched in the shade of latticed balconies pulled at her skirt as she passed and muttered their imploring ‘
Ya Mohannin, ya Rabb
’. Or they went southwards to the Coptic quarter and slipped between the ancient, dark, inward-looking Christian churches and the ruined stones of the Roman walls. Once, close to the river, Ash pointed out the great stone-built aqueduct that for a thousand years had carried water from the river to the Citadel and they peered into the slots that had held water wheels turned by teams of oxen.

They went further, to the ordinary suburbs of Helwan and Ma’adi, and walked sunny residential streets that Ash had never seen before, peering up at shuttered windows and into gardens where lawn sprinklers pattered on thick leaves. But the areas that Ruby liked best were ordinary inner suburbs, where Cairo crowded into the polluted isthmuses between tall concrete apartment blocks and modern mosques and clattering railway lines. There were no tourists or grand sights here, only shoe shops and cafés and electrical stores and the blare and tumult of everyday life. It was the ordinariness itself, and the sheer momentum of it, that she found reassuring.

When she returned to the old house, the unbreathing silence seemed to unfurl within her head. She would almost run through to the garden or up the stairs, her chest tight with anxiety, looking for Iris.

‘Here you are,’ Iris would murmur. ‘Sit down, don’t loom over me.’

At other times she didn’t even notice that Ruby had been away. She would pick up on an anecdote that she had lost her way in yesterday, or begin in an entirely new place, with a birdlike peck of her head towards Ruby to indicate
listen
.

Ruby did.

It was like making two different sets of excursions, she thought, the one imperfectly superimposed on the other. There were her explorations with Ash, and these were matched with the khaki-flooded streets of Iris’s much more confined Cairo. Iris never went much beyond Garden City and Zamalek, but those dust-lined roads and party-scarred apartments, and the nightclubs and horse-drawn gharrys and all the sights of wartime Egypt in her grandmother’s fading memory became almost as real to Ruby as the modern city outside the shuttered windows.

Iris backtracked, repeated herself, dropped into a doze in mid sentence, but the impetus of telling her story seemed
enough to rouse her again. Sometimes the narrative drifted away to Swakopmund, or Blantyre or some other African town, but she always came back again to Cairo.

‘You love this place,’ Ruby said.

Iris opened her eyes. ‘Do I? I don’t know. Maybe I should have gone somewhere else, while I still could.’

‘But where?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Not England?’

‘No, not England, thank you.’

‘How is she?’ Lesley asked. She telephoned every other day.

‘Mum, she’s OK. Doctor Nicolas says she could be around for a long time yet. She sleeps a lot, and wakes up and tells me about Captain Molyneux taking her to a nightclub and then going to bed with him. People seemed to have quite a lot of fun in those days, even though there was a war on.’

Lesley laughed. ‘I’ve heard that.’

‘They all got pregnant. Her friend Sarah went to Beirut for an abortion.’

‘You sound shocked.’

‘No. Well, you know. She is my grandmother.’

Lesley laughed again. ‘Everyone was young once. When I was twenty …’

‘Mum, please. I so don’t want to hear what you got up to in the sixties.’

‘All right. Ruby?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m glad you and Granny are talking. I’m glad you’re listening.’

‘Yeah. It’s OK.’

A few days later Ash came for Ruby and instead of letting her go outside to join him Iris ordered her to bring him inside.
They had been sitting in the garden, and Ash came awkwardly through the summer rooms and stood in the slice of shade that sheltered Iris’s chair. He was never very comfortable inside the house and Ruby blamed Mamdooh’s attitude for that.

Iris tilted her head to look up at Ash. ‘How are you today?’

‘I am well, thank you, Madam. How are you?’

‘Give me your arm,’ she said.

‘What? You are going somewhere?’

‘Give me your
arm
, please.’

Between them, Ash and Ruby helped her to her feet. Fastened tight on their forearms, her hands looked like the claws of a rooster, but Iris still managed an imperious air. She indicated that they were to walk her round the little garden, and they made a slow circuit that allowed her to look closely at the fountain water trickling into its bowl and the crisp green folds of the new geranium leaves, and the cool submarine glimmer of the green and turquoise tiles.

Next they negotiated the worn stone step that led through an arch into the house. The summer rooms were bare; even the kelim cushions on the divans had been put away by Auntie for the winter, and there were velvety cobwebs draped in the high corners. Iris stopped in an inner door and looked back to see the garden framed by its arch. From this perspective it shone like a little green jewel in the heart of the old stone house.