Iris and Ruby

‘Yes, I am. You are Granny Iris, my mother’s mother, Cairo Granny. Last time I saw you I was ten. You came for a holiday.’

I am tired. The effort of recall is too much. Poor Lesley, I think.

‘Does she know you are here?’

The child blinks. Now I look at her, I can see that she is hardly more than a child. She has made the effort to appear otherwise, with startling face paint and extraordinary metal rings and bolts driven into nose and ears, and with a six-inch slice of pale abdomen revealed between the two halves of her costume, but I would put her age at eighteen or nineteen.

‘Your mother. Does she know?’

‘No, actually.’

Her answer is deadpan but, to my surprise, the way she delivers it makes me want to smile. Mamdooh has picked up the tea glass, tidied the tray. Now he stands over me, a protective mountain.

‘Ma’am Iris, it is late,’ he protests.

‘I know that.’ To the child I say, ‘I don’t know why you are here, Miss. You will go straight back where you came from. I’m tired now, but I will speak to you in the morning.’

‘Shall I send Auntie to you?’ Mamdooh asks me.

‘No.’ I don’t want to be undressed and put to bed. I don’t want to reveal to the child that sometimes this happens. ‘Just get her to make up a bed for, for … what did you say your name is?’

‘Ruby.’

It’s a prostitute’s name, which goes well enough with her appearance. What was Lesley thinking?

‘A bed and some food, if she wants it. Thank you, Mamdooh. Good night, Ruby.’

The girl gives a sudden smile. Without the glower she looks even younger.

I make my way to my own room. When at last I am lying down with the white curtains drawn around the bed, the longing for sleep of course deserts me. I lie staring at the luminous folds of muslin, seeing faces and hearing voices.

Majestically disapproving, Mamdooh led Ruby downstairs again. A little old woman, about five feet tall, with a white shawl wrapped round her head and neck, appeared in the hallway. They spoke rapidly to each other.

‘You would like to eat some food?’ Mamdooh asked stiffly.

‘No, thanks very much. Had some on the plane.’

‘Go with Auntie, then.’

Ruby hoisted her luggage once more and followed the old woman up the enclosed stairs and through the shadowy galleries to a small room with a divan under an arched window. Auntie, if that was the name she went by, showed her a bathroom across the way. There was an overhead cistern with a chain, and the bowl was patterned with swirling blue and white foliage. There was an old-fashioned shower head as big as a dinner plate and a slatted wooden board over the drain, and a blue-painted chair with some folded towels.

‘Thank you,’ Ruby said.

‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ Auntie murmured.

When she had gone, Ruby peeled off her clothes and dropped them on the floor. She got under the thin starched sheet just as she was, and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

‘No, no, don’t worry at all. I just wondered if she and Chloe might be together … Yes, of course. Is she? In Chile? How marvellous. Give her my best wishes, won’t you? Yes, that would be lovely. I’ll give you a call. ’Bye.’

Lesley replaced the receiver. ‘She’s not there either.’

Her neat leather address book lay open on the side table, but there were no more numbers left to try. She had been through them all and none of Ruby’s friends or their parents had seen her recently. None of Ruby’s friends who were also known to her mother, at least. There weren’t all that many of them.

Andrew was sitting in an armchair in a circle of lamplight, a pile of papers on his lap. A vee of wrinkles formed in the centre of his forehead as he stared at her over his reading glasses.

‘She’s nineteen. It’s really time she started taking responsibility for herself. You can’t stand in the firing line for her for ever.’

‘I don’t think I do,’ Lesley answered mildly. ‘Do I?’

Andrew exhaled sharply through his nose, pulling down the corners of his mouth to indicate disagreement without bothering to disagree, and resumed his reading.

Looking away from him, at the pleasant room that was arranged just how she wanted it, with the duck-egg blue shade of the walls that was restful without being cold and the cushion and curtain borders exactly matching it, Lesley felt anxiety fogging the atmosphere. Concern about Ruby distorted the room’s generous proportions and made it loom around her, sharp with threatening edges. The air itself tasted thin, as if she couldn’t draw enough of it into her lungs to make her heart beat steadily. Lesley knew this feeling of old, but familiarity never lessened the impact.

Where was Ruby? What was she doing this time, and who was she with?

One day, Lesley’s inner voice insisted, the unthinkable will happen. She shook her head to drive away the thought.

She never experienced the same anxiety about Edward, Ruby’s half-brother. Edward was always in the right place, doing the right thing. It was only for Ruby that she feared.

Justifiably, Andrew would snap.

Lesley closed her address book and secured it with a woven band. They had eaten dinner and she had cleared it away. The dishwasher was purring in her granite-and-maplewood kitchen, the central heating had come on, the telephone obstinately withheld its chirrup. Ruby had been gone since yesterday afternoon. She had slipped out of the house without a word to anyone.

Just to break the silence she asked, ‘Would you like a drink, darling? A whisky, or anything?’

‘No thanks.’ Andrew didn’t even look up.

‘I’ll go and … see if Ed’s all right with his homework.’

Lesley went slowly up the stairs. At the top she hesitated, then tapped on her son’s door: ‘Hello?’

Ed was sitting at his table. The television was on at the foot of his bed, but he had his back to it and she saw an exercise book and coloured pencils and an encyclopaedia open in front of him.

‘How’s it going?’

‘OK.’ His thick fair hair, the same colour as his father’s, stuck up in a tuft at the front and made him look like a placid bird. He was the opposite of Ruby in every single respect. He rolled a pencil between his thumb and forefinger now and Lesley was aware that he was politely waiting for her to go away and leave him in peace.

‘No word from Ruby,’ she said. ‘I really thought she’d ring this evening.’

Ed nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘You know, I don’t think we should worry. She’s probably staying in town with one of her mates. It’s not like it’s the first time she’s just forgotten to come home, is it?’

For an eleven-year-old, Edward was remarkably well thought-out.

‘No,’ Lesley agreed.

‘Have you tried her mobile again?’

Only a dozen times. ‘Still turned off.’

‘Well, I think we should just tell ourselves that no news is good news. She’ll probably ring you tomorrow.’

‘Yes. All right, darling. I’ll pop in later and say goodnight.’

‘OK.’ He had his nose in his book again before the door closed.

Lesley went along the landing to another door at the far end. The thick sisal matting, expensively rubber-backed, absorbed the sound of her footsteps. She leaned against the handle for a moment, then walked into the room.

It was dark and stuffy, and the room’s close smell had a distinctly brackish quality to it.

Lesley had already looked in here two or three times during the day but the otherness of Ruby’s bedroom, the way it seemed to rebuff her, never failed to take her by surprise. She felt cautiously along the wall for the light switch, then clicked it on.

The smell was from Ruby’s collection of shells. She had lost interest in adding to it at least eight years ago but the cowries and spindles never quite gave up the traces of fish and salt locked in their pearly whorls. The wall cabinets that Lesley had had put up to display them contained a jumbled, teetering mass of sandy jars and broken conches. The collection had never been properly organised or catalogued. Ruby had just wanted to get specimens and keep them, piling up her acquisitions greedily but carelessly, as if she were building a dam.

She moved on to shells after her enthusiasm for collecting autographs had waned, and after shells lost their fascination she became obsessed with beetles. There were boxes and cases of preserved specimens on every flat surface.

Lesley crouched down beside a row of mahogany display cases and peered through the dusty glass fronts. These had cost Ruby all her pocket money and every Christmas and birthday present for years, and the contents still made Lesley smile and suppress a faint shudder at the same time. Some of the beetles were two-inch monsters with stiff jointed legs, minutely articulated antennae and folded wings with an iridescent polish. Lesley had always recognised that they were exquisite as well as interesting, these skewered trophies of Victorian entomologists that had so fascinated her twelve-year-old daughter.

Other items in the collection were just matchboxes containing tiny shrivelled items that Ruby had pounced on in the garden, trapped and kept. Lesley smiled again at the memory of absorbed Ruby crouching beside a bush of artemisia, her latest discovery caught in her cupped hands.

‘What are they all? Do you know?’ Andrew used to ask.

‘Yes,’ Ruby would answer flatly, offering nothing more.

‘Why do you like them?’

‘They’re beautiful. Don’t you think?’ She would turn away then, not looking for an answer, as if she had already said too much.

‘At least it’s not spiders,’ Lesley had said appeasingly to her husband once she was out of earshot.

The beetle passion eventually faded like its precursors, but Ruby would never consider selling any of her acquisitions or even allowing them to be stored up in the loft. Almost everything, including the shoeboxes full of autographs, was in this room.

Lesley kept her eyes averted now from the case containing a single enormous conker-brown insect that looked like a giant cockroach. There was hardly room to place her feet among the boxes and cartons, the scribbled drawings and pages torn from magazines, discarded clothes and spilt tubes of make-up. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, Ruby had taken with her. She stepped gingerly across the floor and sat down on the rucked-up bed. She placed her hand in the hollow of the pillow, but no warmth lingered there.

Every corner of the room, every shelf and cupboard and drawer, spilled hoarded belongings. Nothing was in any order. The collecting seemed to have little to do with quality, only quantity. To having and holding, Lesley guessed, maybe as a way of shoring up a world that might otherwise crumble. But for all the random, chaotic and overwhelming material clutter, the impression that it now held was of emptiness.

Ruby had gone.

Lesley placed her feet together and rested her hands in her lap as if to offer up her own composure in response to the room’s disorder.

Ruby hadn’t gone like her contemporaries were going, on well-planned gap year travels to Asia and South America or amid clouds of A-level glory to good universities. Not mutinous, truanting, dyslexic and serially expelled Ruby. She hadn’t passed any exams, or spent a summer raising money to fund a year’s work with children in Nepal or wildlife in Namibia. Ruby had left the family house in Kent to lodge with Andrew’s brother and his family in central London, supposedly while she was attending sixth-form college. But college hadn’t lasted long and in Camden Town, Ruby had spent her days hanging out with new friends that none of the Ellises approved of. Then, just recently, she had abruptly moved back home again. She passed long hours closeted in her room and when she emerged she spoke only when spoken to. Andrew chivvied her for decisions about a career. Making a contribution to the world, as he called it.

Ruby had lifted her black-painted eyes and stared at him as if he belonged to a species she didn’t recognise.

Nothing could have enraged him more.

And now, she had simply removed herself altogether. The absence of Ruby swelled to fill her bedroom and bled outwards, hollowing the comfortable house.

‘I love you,’ her mother said to the motionless, smelly air.

Tenderness and longing sprang from the marrow in her bones. The feeling was turbulent, baffled, nothing like the calm, sturdy love she had for Edward, or her regularly thwarted affection for Andrew.

Her love for Ruby was the deepest passion in Lesley’s life.

The silence deepened. There was no ready explanation to be found, in this room or anywhere else, for what had gone wrong with her daughter. Or with me, Lesley added meticulously. It wasn’t that she blamed Ruby for being difficult. She took all the responsibility for that on herself, which further irritated Andrew. In their late-night conversations or in the car on the way to deal with another of Ruby’s situations she had asked the same questions over and over: what have I done wrong? Have I been a bad mother?

‘You have lacked a role model,’ Andrew tended to say.

One thing did strike her with peculiar certainty now: this time the departure was final. Wherever she had gone, by her own choice or – please, let it not be that – under compulsion, Ruby wouldn’t be coming back.

Lesley bent her head. She examined her knees in their second skin of smooth nylon mesh. She picked at a loose thread in the grosgrain hem of her skirt and, to her shame even though there was no one to see, tears suddenly ran out of her eyes and dripped on the fabric.

Ruby opened her eyes.

White light poured in through the arched window, filling the bare room until the air seemed almost solid with floating particles of dust. It wasn’t the sunshine that had woken her, however, but a burst of chanting. The words were incomprehensible, delivered in a rich sing-song voice distorted by heavy amplification. She pushed back the sheet and scrambled to look outside. Her eyes widened in amazement.

In the street below, rows of men were kneeling on mats laid over the cobbles, with their foreheads pressed to the ground. They made a patient sea of white- and grey-clad fish backs, the soles of their feet turned innocently upwards like so many pairs of fins.

The city was stilled. Ruby rested her own forehead against the thick greenish glass and tried to hear the prayers.

A few minutes later a wave broke across the sea as the men kneeled upright and then stood up. The mats were casually whisked away and movement flowed back into the street again. Two little boys chased each other up some steps and scuttled through a doorway. A handcart loaded with fruit trundled past, pushed by two men. Realising that she was hungry, Ruby reluctantly turned from the inviting view.

The house was so quiet. The stone walls must be very thick, she thought, as she wandered along the outside corridor. She couldn’t remember which way Auntie had brought her last night and the layout of interconnecting rooms was confusing. Here was a broader corridor with seats facing a carved screen with little hinged trapdoors in it. She peered casually through one of the propped-up hatches and was surprised by the grand double-height space it overlooked. This big hall was almost unfurnished except for a long table and some high-backed chairs pushed against the walls. At the far end was a low dais backed by a wall painting of entwined flowers and fruit and exotic foliage. Huge lamps of iron and glass were suspended on chains from the arched roof. It would be a pretty good space for a party, she reflected. If you half closed your eyes as you peered through the screen you could see the whirling dancers and hear the beat of the drums.

After another full circuit of the gallery Ruby opened a low door and found a staircase. She ran down the steps and peered into the big room from this lower level. From down here the gallery was completely concealed.

She suddenly sensed that there was someone behind her. Whirling round, she came face to top of head with Auntie.

‘Hello,’ Ruby said brightly.

Auntie peered up at her. ‘Sabah il-kheer,’ she murmured. Her face was like a walnut. She didn’t smile, but there were quite kindly-looking creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

‘I’m looking for my grandmother.’

‘Mum-reese,’ Auntie agreed, nodding. She indicated with a small hand movement that Ruby should follow her.

The house wasn’t really as big as it appeared. Just a few steps round a corner brought another surprise.

Ruby said, ‘Oh. It’s lovely.’

At the heart of the old house was a little open courtyard. It was enclosed by terracotta walls pierced by simple rounded arches faced with grass-green and turquoise glazed tiles. In the four corners were big square tubs of trailing greenery and to one side a waterspout splashed into a green glazed bowl. The trickle of water was loud in the small space. A lemon-sharp slice of sunlight obliquely bisected the courtyard and in the shady portion was a padded chair. Iris was sitting there watching her. Her thin grey hair was held up with a pair of combs and she was wearing an elegant silk robe with a faint pearly stripe. She appeared less tired than she had done the night before. But she also looked displeased.

Ruby considered. She wanted to find a way to stay, not just because to come here at all had been a last resort and she had no intention of being sent back home, but because it was so intriguing. Therefore she must say something appropriate, find a way to ingratiate herself. A shadow of a thought passed through her head – an acknowledgement that she was quite out of practice at making herself agreeable. She didn’t even know what to call this disconcerting old lady. She was way too unfamiliar and beady for ‘Granny’, which was how Lesley referred to her at home. Not that Ruby’s mother talked about her own mother very often.

‘Hi,’ she said in the end, shuffling her feet.

Mamdooh had to remind me when he brought my morning tea that we have a visitor. The night was a long one, and it was after dawn when I finally slept. And then, dreams.

Now here is the girl. She wears peculiar, ugly clothes. Are they the same ones as last night? A pair of dusty black trousers, safety-pinned in the front across her plump belly. The legs billow out from the knee like sails, and they are so long that they drag on the ground. The hems are all dusty and torn. When she takes a step I see that her huge shoes have soles four inches thick, so she isn’t quite as tall as she seems. On the top half, or third because the garment is so shrunken that it exposes six inches of white midriff, is a little grey thing with some black motif on the front. She has so many silvery rings on her fingers that they reach up to her knuckles, more rings in her ears, one in her nose, and a silver stud pierces her top lip. She hasn’t washed this morning, there is black stuff smudged round her eyes. Her face is round, pale as the moon, and innocent.

She slouches forward and utters some monosyllable I can’t hear.

Why is she here?

I search the layers, broken layers, of memory. Piecing together.

Lesley’s daughter.

‘Don’t you have any proper clothes?’

She sticks her chin out at me.

‘These are proper.’

‘They are not decent.’

Her eyes meet mine. She scowls, then thinks better of it. Her metal-cased fingers pluck at the bottom of the vest garment.

‘Too short?’

I am already tired of this exchange. There is a white shawl across the arm of my chair and I hold it out to her. She shakes out the folds and twirls it like a matador’s cape, and I am struck by the grace of the sudden movement and, yes, the happy exuberance of it. It’s pretty to see. Then she seems to remember herself. She knots my shawl awkwardly over her breasts so it veils her stomach.

‘Sit down.’

Obediently, she perches on a wooden stool and leans forward.

‘Y’know, I don’t know what to call you. You’re my grandmother and everything, but it doesn’t seem right to say Granny. D’you know what I mean?’

It hardly matters what she calls me. It’s a long time since I have been anything except Mum-reese or Doctor Black. ‘My name is Iris.’

‘Is that what you want me to say?’

I rest my head on the cushions and close my eyes.

After a minute, maybe more, she murmurs, ‘Iris?’

The line of sunlight is creeping towards us. I rouse myself again.

‘Have you told your mother where you are? You’ll have to go back home right away. You do realise that, don’t you? It’s very inconvenient, this … this appearance in my house. You must telephone her at once, tell her where you are, and say I told you, to …’

A shadow crosses the child’s face.

‘Yeah. I know, I know. Thing is …’ she half stands and rummages under the shawl in the tight pocket of her trousers. She produces a small silvery object. ‘My mobile doesn’t work out here.’

‘Is that a telephone? You can use the one here, I suppose. It’s through there. Mamdooh will show you.’

‘Right. OK. Um … I’m really hungry, though. Is there something to eat, maybe, before I call home and tell them everything’s cool?’

‘Auntie is bringing it.’

Auntie and Mamdooh arrive together. Auntie’s quite lively with curiosity now but Mamdooh is offended, I can see from the way he puts down the tray with exaggerated care and doesn’t look at the girl. It doesn’t matter. She’ll be going back where she came from, maybe not today but certainly tomorrow. What was her name?

It comes back to me surprisingly easily. Ruby.

Ruby’s eyes lit up at the sight of breakfast. She was very hungry indeed, and here was a bowl of fat purple figs and – lifting a little beaded cloth that covered a bowl – thick creamy yoghurt. There was a basket of coarse bread, a glass dish of honey and a plate of crumbly, sticky little cakes. There was also a battered silver pot, a tiny wisp of steam rising from the spout.

‘Thank you, Mamdooh. Thank you, Auntie,’ Iris said. ‘We’ll look after ourselves now.’

Ruby drew her stool closer.

‘Pour me some tea, please,’ Iris ordered. Ruby did as she was told and put the glass on the table beside her. The tea smelled of summertime.

‘Mm,’ Ruby said, after a long swallow. ‘That’s so good. What is it?’

‘Don’t you know? Mint tea.’

‘I like it. We don’t have it at home. Well, maybe Mum does. She drinks those herb tea things, but I shouldn’t think they’re like yours. Can I try some of this?’

Iris nodded. She watched as the girl spooned honey onto bread and ate, biting off thick chunks and chewing with strong white teeth. Honey dribbled down her chin and she wiped it off with her fingers before greedily licking them too. After the bread and honey she turned her attention to the figs.

‘How do you eat these?’

Iris showed her, slicing open the skin to reveal the velvet and seed-pearl interior. Ruby ate, her smudged eyes screwed up in a comical spasm of pleasure. She followed the figs with most of the bowl of yoghurt and then drank more tea.

‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’ she asked.

‘I’ll have one of those.’ Iris pointed to the triangles of baklava. Ruby put the pastry on a plate, handling it as if it were burning hot so as to be seen to limit the contact from her own fingers, and set it next to Iris’s glass of tea. Then she stretched out her legs, sighing with satisfaction as she looked around the little courtyard.

‘It’s like another world. Well, it is another world, of course. Glorious Araby.’

‘What did you say?’

‘When? Oh, that. I dunno, it’s from a poem or something, isn’t it? Don’t ask me who wrote it or anything. I suppose I read it or heard it. Probably bloody Radio 4, it’s always on in our house. You know how some things you don’t try to remember, quite weird things like bits of poems or whatever, they just stay in your mind? And other things you’re supposed to remember, however hard you try it’s just like, phhhhht, and they’re gone? Stuff you’re supposed to learn for exams, mainly?’