Iris and Ruby

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.’

‘I would rather be here with you, looking at the Pyramids and drinking champagne from a tin mug, than anywhere else in the world.’

‘Really?’ His face suddenly glowed in the candlelight.

‘Yes.’

I was amazed that Xan had taken such pains to surprise me, and that this evening was so important to him. He had planned it so that we stepped straight from the Cairo cocktail circuit into another world, and in my limited experience no one had ever done anything so deft, or so perfectly judged. At the same time he was as eager for my approval as a young boy.

In actual years Xan couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or -six, just three or four years older than me, and I guessed that in other important ways we were contemporaries.

He was probably more experienced with women than I was with men, but neither of us had ever felt anything as dazzling, as momentous as this.

We were not-quite children together. And we were also immortal.

How could we not be?

I lifted the tin mug to my lips. ‘Here’s to us,’ I said and drank my champagne.

‘Here’s to us,’ he echoed.

He took my arm and drew me to the heap of cushions next to the brazier. ‘Are you warm enough? Are you comfortable?’

Ripples of coral-pink silk were crushed between us. I rested my head partly against the cushions and partly against Xan’s shoulder, and saw how the Great Pyramid of Cheops sliced an angle of pitch blackness out of the desert sky.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Iris?’

This was the first time he had spoken my name, rather than teasingly calling me Miss Black.

‘Mm.’

‘Talk to me. Tell me. Let me listen to your voice.’

This moment was a part of Xan’s dreams. Perhaps when he lay in a scraped shelter in the desert, hungry and cold and suspended between remembered horrors and stalking danger, with a pair of boots for a pillow and the butt of his handgun close against his ribs, this was what he had allowed himself to imagine. It was the intimacy of talking with nothing held back, the sharp pang of desire mingled with the sweetness of trust. It was a dream that had become real tonight for both of us.

I reached up and touched his temple. A thin blue vein was just visible beneath the sun-darkened skin.

I told him about growing up as a diplomat’s daughter, shuttled between embassies around the world with loving but distant parents who insisted, when the time came, that boarding school back home was best for me and that homesickness – for a home that I couldn’t quite locate – was to be overcome by people like us, never yielded to.

In his turn, Xan told me about his father who had been a distinguished and decorated commander in the first war. In the years afterwards he had come out to Egypt to expand the family textiles empire, but business had never been his strong point and the Molyneux family set-up had been an eccentric one. Xan had spent much of his boyhood playing with the children of the family servants.

‘So that’s how you know Arabic so well.’

‘Kitchen Arabic, yes. Then I was sent home to school, and after that on to Sandhurst. My father insisted that I was going to be a regular soldier and I was commissioned in 1938. Until I was eighteen or so I used to come out to Alexandria or Cairo for summer holidays. My family weren’t nearly enough the thing to be invited to embassy parties, but maybe you and I saw each other somewhere else? Maybe I sat at the next table to you at Groppi’s one afternoon and envied your ice cream.’

‘You wouldn’t have spared me a glance. I was a plump child and my mother made me wear tussore pinafore dresses and hair ribbons.’

Xan spluttered with laughter. ‘And look at you now.’

‘Where d’you call home?’ I asked.

It was a question that I asked myself often enough, without ever being able to supply a proper answer. It wasn’t the Hampshire village where my parents had lived since my father was invalided out of the Diplomatic Service, or the London that I hardly knew and which in any case was now being flattened by the Luftwaffe. Nor was it the Middle East, and the starchy embassy compounds of my childhood.

Home was a strange, evanescent complex of spicy cooking smells and my mother’s French perfume, the brown arms of my nursemaids, shimmering heat hazes, and jacaranda blooms outlined against a sun-bleached sky.

It was dreams, mostly.

‘Home?’ Xan mused. The candle flames were reflected in his eyes. ‘It’s here,’ he said at length.

‘Cairo?’

‘No, here.’

I understood that he meant our tent with its coloured hangings, the starry night outside and the two of us. I explored the significance of this, allowing it to swell and flower in my mind. I wanted the exact same thing but I was afraid that it was too much to ask. I had lived all my life effectively alone and the prospect of not being alone, the luxury of it, made me feel giddy.

‘Why?’ I ventured to ask and hated the break in my voice. A burning log broke up in the brazier and a shower of powdery sparks flew into the air.

Xan propped himself on one elbow, his face just two inches from mine. ‘Don’t you know why, Iris?’

‘I am not sure. I want to hear you say it.’

He smiled then, lazily confident of us. ‘I saw you walking under the trees at that party, with Sandy Allardyce. I looked at you and I thought that I would give anything to be in Sandy’s place. Then Faria Amman brought you across to our table and I felt so damned triumphant, as if it was the sheer force of my will-power that had brought you there.

‘When I heard your voice, it was exactly how I knew it would be. Your smile was familiar too. It’s not that I think I know you – that would be presumptuous – it’s more that I have dreamed you. You have stepped straight out of a fantasy and become real. Does that sound idiotic? I expect every man who takes you out to dinner says the same thing.’

‘No, they don’t.’

I wanted to tell him that I understood what he meant, if I could have found a way of saying it that didn’t sound conceited. And I wanted to be Xan’s dream.

The night was so perfect, I even believed that I could be.

‘And now I see you aren’t a phantom. It turns out that you have warm skin, and eyes brighter than stars. Your hair’ – he twisted a lock of it round his finger – ‘smells of flowers. So this is where I want to be. This is what I want home to mean.’

His mouth was almost touching mine. As I closed my eyes, I heard several sets of footsteps scuffing through the sand outside the tent.

Xan sat up, grinning, and poured more champagne into the tin mugs.

‘Sayyid Xan?’ a voice said, and Hassan’s head appeared at the tent flap. I sat up straighter and smoothed my skirt over the cushions.

Two young boys followed Hassan into the tent, and they began setting out dishes and bowls. Hassan lifted the earthenware lid of the biggest pot and a cloud of fragrant steam escaped.

‘Are you hungry?’ Xan asked me and I remembered that I was ravenous.

After the men had withdrawn again, bowing and smiling, Xan put a bowl into my hands and ladled out the food. It was a thick stew of lamb with beans and tomato, and we sat turned towards each other on our bank of cushions and devoured it. I tore up chunks of bread and mopped the spicy sauce, then Xan took hold of my wrist and licked my fingers clean for me. He kissed each knuckle in turn and I noticed how his hair grew in different directions at the crown of his head. This tiny detail, more than anything else, made me want to touch him. And want him to touch me. I was almost frightened by how much I wanted it.

‘Who is Hassan?’ I asked. ‘What is this place?’

‘We played together when we were boys. His father taught me to ride. Now we work together, if you understand what I mean. Hassan knows the desert better than anyone else in

Egypt.’

One of Xan’s eyebrows lifted as he told me this.

‘Work’, I guessed, would probably be for one of the secret commando raiding groups that operated between and behind enemy lines. In my months with Roddy Boy I had glimpsed a few reports of their missions.

‘That’s very dangerous, isn’t it?’

‘This is a war.’

Both statements were true. There was nothing either of us could add, so we just looked at each other in the candlelight.

Then Xan leaned forward. ‘I’m here now,’ he whispered. ‘We are here.’

I put my hand to his head as he kissed me, drawing him closer, and the whorl of unruly hair felt springy under the flat of my hand.

‘We weren’t going to talk about the war,’ I said at last.

‘It would be a mistake to do so. It would be a mistake of profound dimensions. It would even be a blunder of historic proportion and therefore I candidly advise against it. Most certainly I advise against it.’

I spluttered with surprised laughter. The voice was Roddy Boy’s, his plump circumlocutions captured to perfection.

‘And I concur. What’s more, the ambassador agrees with me.’

This time it was Sandy Allardyce’s faintly self-important drawl. I laughed even harder. Xan was an excellent mimic.

‘Good.’ Xan smiled. ‘That’s better.’ He knelt upright and rummaged among the dishes. ‘What have we got here?’

There was a glazed bowl of dates, and a little dish of plump shelled almonds. He made me open my mouth and popped the food in piece by piece.

‘Stop. I’ll explode.’

In an old Thermos flask there was strong black coffee, and when everything else was finished we drank that from our tin mugs. I saw Xan glance at his watch and I felt a cold draught at the back of my neck. I shivered a little and immediately he put his arm round me.

‘Hassan and I have to leave again very early in the morning. I’ll take you home now.’

I smiled at him, pushing the meaning of tomorrow out of my thoughts, then leaned forward and gave him a lingering kiss. It took a serious effort of will to pull back again.

‘That was the very best evening of my life,’ I said.

‘Was it? Do you mean that?’

Once again, his eagerness touched my heart.

‘I do.’

‘There will be more,’ he promised. ‘Hundreds, no, thousands more. A lifetime of evenings, and mornings and nights.’

I touched my fingers to his lips, stalling him for now. I couldn’t ask where he was going, or when he would be back. All I could do was to send him off with the certainty that I would wait for him.

We blew out the candles together and untied the tent flap. We stood side by side and looked across to the Pyramids. And then we turned away from the tent and the view, and walked back hand in hand to the tiny oasis. The men who had been sitting around the fire were gone and the fire itself had burned down to a heap of ash with a heart of dull red embers. Hassan was waiting for us, sitting with his back against the trunk of a palm tree.

We drove back into the City. At the door to the apartment Xan touched my face. ‘I will be back soon,’ he promised.

‘I will be here,’ I said.

My eyes hurt from staring into the darkness.

My body aches, deep in the bones, and I am shivering as if with a fever. A little while ago I heard the child wandering about, but the street outside and the house are silent now. She must have fallen asleep. I long for the same but instead there is the patchy, piebald mockery of recall, and fear of losing even that much.

Always fear. Not of death, but of the other, a living death.

I think of Ruby’s offer to help me, innocent and calculating, and instead of finding her interesting I am suddenly overwhelmed with irritation, discomfort at the invasion of my solitude, longing for peace and silence.

The shivering makes my teeth rattle.

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