Iris and Ruby (9 page)

In her own bedroom she knelt at the window and pressed her face to the glass. Down in the darkness she thought she saw a figure looking up, but she didn’t like the idea of anyone being able to see into her room and moved hastily aside. She sat down on the edge of the bed instead and took stock.

The upside was that she had got away, from home and Lesley and Andrew, and from London and Will and all that, and from thinking about Jas all the time. She could stay here and chill out and there would be nobody to ask her every five minutes what her plans were. She wouldn’t have to pretend that she was fine about not having any.

The downside was being here.

The house was intriguing, in its way, but it was also quite creepy. It was weird to be on her own with just three old people: one who didn’t like her, one who didn’t seem to speak a word of English, and her disconcerting grandmother who must be kept happy or she’d get sent home.

The city outside was like nowhere she’d ever been. She’d go out and see more of it when she’d consolidated herself in the house, but at this minute its crowds and its strangeness were intimidating.

Tomorrow, she told herself. It’ll feel different tomorrow.

Ruby picked absently at the piercing in her nose that was itching and weeping a little. To flatten a wave of loneliness, she went out and prowled along the corridor and looked down into the hallway through the screens that protected the
haramlek
. There was nothing to see except that in a bookcase against the opposite wall there was a row of books. She lifted them out one by one. They were about history and they smelled musty.

After a while she went back to her room and took out her Walkman. She found the CD that Nafouz had brought back, the one that Jas had made for her, put in her earphones and lay down on the bed.

I lie still, watching the various textures of the darkness. If I turn my head, I can just see the glint of reflected moonlight on the corner of the silver picture frame.

On the evening of his first telephone call, I scrambled to finish dressing for dinner before he arrived to pick me up. The dress was one I had had in London before the war, dark coral-pink silk with a full skirt and a low bodice. I had just enough time to pin up my hair and paint my mouth before the doorbell clanged. I looked at myself in the dressing-table mirror as Mamdooh went to answer it. My eyes looked wide and startled.

The most important time in my life was about to begin. I knew that, even if I didn’t know anything else.

Mamdooh had shown him into the dimly lit drawing room. Xan was standing with one hand on the back of a sofa, staring through the part-open shutters into the fading sunlight. He was wearing uniform, his face was deeply sunburned. He turned round when he heard me come in.

He said, ‘I came as soon as I could.’

‘I’m glad.’

Then he took my hand and led me to the window so we could see each other’s faces. I remember a Cairo sunset, a grey-green sky fading into apricot barred with indigo and gold. My heart was banging like a drum. There was a second’s silence when everything in the world seemed to stop and wait. Xan very slowly lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed it.

As I looked at him his eyebrows drew up into amused peaks. ‘Where shall we begin, Miss Black?’

I had thought I remembered everything, every single thing about him, but the fun in him struck me afresh.

I pretended to consider. ‘Let’s think. You have to ask me whether I would prefer dinner at Le Petit Coin de France or Fleurent’s. Um … then you say something about maybe looking in afterwards at the Kit Kat Club.’

‘Of course. Out in the desert, one forgets these essentials.’

‘So we might have a drink here first, while I try to make up my mind. I’ll probably decide to change my outfit at least once before we leave.’

Xan grinned. ‘I am at your service.’

I mixed gin and tonics from the tray Mamdooh always left ready for the three of us and our dates. We sat down together on the sofa and I raised my glass.

‘To wherever it is you have been, and to having come back.’

His face clouded for a moment and he took a long swallow of the gin.

‘I will tell you about it, but not this evening. Do you mind?’

‘No, don’t let’s talk about the war this evening.’

I knew nothing, then, about what he had seen or had to do, but even in my naïveté I understood that what Xan needed tonight was to forget, to be made to laugh, to put down the weight of wartime.

I said, ‘So. What will happen is that by the time I am dressed, and have decided on Fleurent’s, and we have got there in a taxi, they will have given our table away to a brigadier. Of course it’s now the only place at which I can bear to think of eating, but in any case there will be at least two tables packed with people we know, and so we will squeeze up with them. There will be a lot of laughing and even more drinking, and then we will all decide that we are having so much fun that we must go on somewhere else. We
will pile into taxis with all sorts of people, losing half of the party and joining up with half of another, and in the confusion you will be in the taxi behind. When we arrive at wherever it is we are going we will be unable to find each other for at least an hour. By which time I shall be very tired and will probably insist on being taken straight home as soon as we do stumble across each other.’

Xan laughed. ‘You lead a rackety life, Miss Black. It’s not a very convincing plan of action in any case. I shall not let you get into a taxi without me, and I will not let you out of my sight for one minute, let alone a whole hour. And we are not going to Fleurent’s, or anywhere near the bloody Kit Kat Club. Why should I share you with every soldier in Cairo?’

‘Then where are we going?’

He took the glass out of my hand and set it on the red and black marble table top. ‘Wait and see.’

Mamdooh brought my Indian shawl and wished us a very good evening as we went out together.

The sky was almost dark, a heavy velvet blue with the first stars showing. I stood on the familiar Garden City street, under the thick canopy of dusty rubber leaves, and let Xan lead me. There was a car waiting a few steps away, with a driver who got out quickly and opened the door for us. He was tall and hawk-faced, dressed in Western clothes but still looking like one of the Bedouin tribesmen who lived in the desert.

‘This is my friend Hassan,’ Xan said quietly.

‘Good evening, Hassan.’

The man nodded at me.

We sat in the back of the car and I watched the shuttered streets gliding by. Excitement and anticipation chased through me and I found that I had to remind myself to breathe. But it was easy to be with Xan; he didn’t talk for the sake of it and he didn’t make me feel that I should
chatter and gossip in an attempt to be entertaining.

‘I live there,’ Xan said, pointing up at some balconied windows.

I craned my neck in an effort to see more. ‘Alone?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘With some other men. You never know quite who’s going to be there. When someone comes back from a picnic in the desert it’s a matter of taking a look around to see if there’s a bed that looks more or less unoccupied. You dump your kitbag and hope for the best. It’s pretty empty at the moment, actually. Not all that surprising, if you know what I mean.’

I knew what he meant by a picnic. We were both quiet as we thought about the recent Allied defeats in Crete and Greece as well as Cyrenaica.

‘Does Jessie James live there too?’

I had liked Captain James and wanted to know what was happening to him.

‘Jess? Yes, when he’s in town. But the Cherry Pickers are away now.’

Jessie’s famous cavalry regiment had charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Now, with armoured vehicles instead of horses and cannon, they were in the line east of Tobruk.

I nodded.

Xan glanced at me as we crossed the English Bridge. We were heading towards Giza and the desert.

‘You’re at GHQ, aren’t you? Who do you work for?’

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Boyce.’

Xan’s smile broadened. ‘Small world, the army. May I drop in and see you in the office one of these days?’

‘I’ll make you a cup of HQ tea. It’s a treat not to be missed.’

His finger rested on my wrist for a second. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

We were passing through the fields and scrubby mud-brick settlements and lines of palms that marked the western edge of the delta. There was almost no traffic out here, and ahead lay the flat pans and low wind-blown dunes of the desert’s margin. Even at the height of summer the desert nights are bitterly cold, and thinking about it made me draw my shawl closer round my shoulders.

‘Don’t worry,’ Xan said.

I had thought perhaps we were heading for the Mena House Hotel, a popular destination near the Pyramids, but then the car turned in an unfamiliar direction down a narrow unmade track. There were no lights here at all and we drove with only the headlights slicing through the soft darkness. I gave up trying to work out what our destination might be and sat back instead, watching Xan’s dark head outlined against the darkness outside and letting the currents of happiness wash through me.

After a while Xan leaned forward and murmured something in Arabic to Hassan. I was surprised that he knew the language, and yet not surprised.

‘We’re nearly there.’

Directly ahead of us I could make out the smoky glow of a fire, and the black silhouettes of a handful of palm trees. There were some tents and a few people moving between us and the fire. Camels were tethered in a line. We were coming to a tiny oasis.

Hassan brought the car to a halt. Xan and I stepped out where the shingle-and-sand camel track petered out in a sea of fine, soft ripples.

‘Welcome,’ Hassan said to me. ‘
Mahubbah
. These are my people.’

A circle of men sat close to the fire on upturned oil drums. Through the smoke I could smell the rich scent of food and realised that I was hungrier than I had ever been on arriving
at Fleurent’s. One of the men stood up and came towards us. He was old and had a white beard. He was wrapped in a coarse woven blanket.

‘
Mahubbah,
’ he murmured. He touched his forehead to Xan who returned the salute, then the two men embraced each other.

‘Abu Hassan,’ Xan said respectfully.

I stood in the sand, and fine cool trickles ran into my shoes. I felt strange in my coral-pink silk evening dress with the chill desert breeze blowing strands of hair across my face.

The old man bowed to me and Xan took my arm. He murmured in my ear, ‘Hassan and his father welcome you. They would like you to know that their house is your house, and they are your servants.’

I didn’t know the proper phrases to offer in return for this formal welcome and I tightened my grip on Xan’s arm.

‘Will you tell them I am unworthy of their generosity, but I am proud to be their guest?’

‘Exactly,’ he said warmly, and I listened again to the clicking of unfamiliar Arabic.

Hassan and his father bowed once more and retreated towards the circle of seats and the firelight, leaving Xan and me standing alone.

‘This way,’ he said, pointing away into the darkness. ‘Wait a minute, though.’

He reached into the boot of the car and produced a bag that he slung over his shoulder, and an army greatcoat which he held out to me.

‘Wear this for a moment or two, in case the cold gets too much. Will you take my hand?’

I did so and the warmth of his fingers enveloped mine.

The ghost of a path curved round a swelling dune, the path’s margin marked by low thorny bushes. I stumbled a little in my dancing shoes, but Xan held me tightly. After a
few more yards I saw a dark smudge ahead of us, then the glow of lights caught within it.

The shape resolved itself into a tent, a little square structure made of some kind of woven animal hair. There were long tassels hanging from the four corner poles, their filaments lifting in the breeze. We plunged hand in hand through the heavy sand, and Xan drew back the tent flap and stood aside to let me in. The tent was lined with hangings in broad strips of green, black, cream and maroon, and the floor was covered with rugs and piled with embroidered cushions. Lit candles on flat stones burned everywhere, and in the centre of the little room, under a hole in the roof, stood a rough metal brazier full of glowing embers. It was as warm inside the tent as in Lady Gibson Pasha’s ballroom, and in the flickering candlelight it was a hundred times more beautiful.

I caught my breath in a sharp
oh
of surprise and delight, but then Xan came close behind me and put his big hands over my eyes.

‘Are you ready?’ he murmured, and his breath was warm against my ear. He turned me through a half-circle again, so that I was facing the way we had come in.

‘Ready,’ I answered and his hands lifted.

I blinked, and stared. Ahead of us, framed and cut off from the rest of the world by the dunes, lay the Pyramids. I had never seen them from this viewpoint and it was as if the three great tombs with the prickling sky unrolled behind them were ours alone. Their mass, pinned between the stars and the shapeless desert, was rendered two-dimensional and even more mysterious by the darkness. Silence shrouded the desert as time slipped out of gear and the great wheels of the universe spun free around us. I tilted my head to try to catch a whisper beyond audible range, but all I could hear was the camels coughing as they shifted in their line.

Xan took the greatcoat from my shoulders. The fire was warm on my ankles and bare arms.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

I turned my head from the view, meeting his eyes, trying to find a word. ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

He undid the canvas bag he had brought with him and took out a bottle of champagne tied up in an ice bag. He peeled off the foil and eased the cork. Then he burrowed in the bag again, produced two tin mugs and handed them to me. I held them out as he popped the cork and the silvery froth ran into the mugs. We clinked them together.

‘I’m sorry about the glasses. But this
is
the desert, not Shepheard’s Hotel.’