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Iris and Ruby: A gripping, exotic historical novel
Rosie Thomas
A gripping, exotic and epic tale for fans of Dinah Jeffries and Victoria HislopThe unexpected arrival of her willful teenage granddaughter, Ruby, brings life and disorder to 82-year-old Iris Black’s old house in Cairo. Ruby, driven away from England by her fraught relationship with her own mother, is seeking refuge with the grandmother she hasn’t seen for years.An unlikely bond develops as Ruby helps Iris document her fading memories of the glittering, cosmopolitan Cairo of World War Two, and of her one true love – the enigmatic Captain Xan Molyneux – whom she lost to the ravages of war.This lost love shaped Iris’s past – and will affect Ruby’s future in ways they could not have imagined…
Iris and Ruby
Rosie Thomas
Copyright (#ulink_94babc08-4aaf-5fe5-9efe-020cfae5d54e)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 2006
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016 Jacket photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007173549
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007460106
Version: 2016-04-28
Praise for Rosie Thomas: (#ulink_16fccd64-2bf5-5519-ae35-f6e89a01f0a1)
‘Rosie Thomas writes with beautiful, effortless prose, and shows a rare compassion and a real understanding of the nature of love’
The Times
‘Honest and absorbing, Rosie Thomas mixes the bitter and the hopeful with the knowledge that the human heart is far more complicated than any rule suggests’
Mail on Sunday
‘A master storyteller’
Cosmopolitan
‘Thomas’s novels are beautifully written. This one is a treat’
Marie Claire
‘A lush and sweeping voyage of self-discovery’
Eithne Farry, Daily Mail
‘Prepare to be dazzled … an epic tale of sisterhood and betrayal’
Company
‘Heart-rending and beautifully written … I read it in one delicious go, tears pouring down my face. You cannot fail to be moved’
Emma Lee-Potter, Express
‘A terrific book, beautifully written … questions about identity, belonging, infidelity, dying and forgiveness make this a very moving study of the human heart’
Australian Women’s Weekly
Dedication (#ulink_ac43adcc-234a-5050-b849-e3c8e012c67a)
For Louis, Solomon and Misty. The new generation
Contents
Cover (#uc89ed1a6-3244-53b3-b7d3-273354dc4f77)
Title Page (#uf7517e48-a26b-5140-8bce-21abf6dbf035)
Copyright (#u6119881d-eac3-51d0-9a63-c537d977c15c)
Praise for Rosie Thomas (#u3c524b37-dbc0-5208-ba04-416000079737)
Dedication (#ud39cee40-b153-5edf-86ac-f517aec90ca8)
Chapter One (#u51af5d77-77b0-5deb-874f-878123c0f5c1)
Chapter Two (#u0d0dbc68-4a2a-56b2-b3ee-22f7cf468365)
Chapter Three (#uf4887fa5-f2ec-5dff-9ca5-f11b0ef4b1cc)
Chapter Four (#uc8eb20fe-fb77-5214-abba-eff76f284ac4)
Chapter Five (#u24783afe-5f82-57d0-85a2-6ce48a4f137a)
Chapter Six (#u3b845af3-864b-5e28-9d5f-4e626b360e7a)
Chapter Seven (#u20cdab45-7a87-567b-b02e-f31760531d2f)
Chapter Eight (#uec172894-8205-5853-86d7-2b33fc982e8e)
Chapter Nine (#u28464868-040a-56b0-9e49-03c31ea631fd)
Chapter Ten (#u2e24cec4-eeb1-5be0-a584-b3cea16b6a96)
Chapter Eleven (#u688671f9-1a2c-545c-8101-227356d32d52)
Chapter Twelve (#u8ca260d8-454c-5d5d-88f3-8e5cb5c96055)
Chapter Thirteen (#u392355e8-06ea-5414-816e-c0cd32ffacf5)
Chapter Fourteen (#uc382bb35-bfb9-516b-b6ee-8d8638face62)
Chapter Fifteen (#u92abcf2e-6669-520f-8e25-aa9f869fd41a)
Chapter Sixteen (#u5f6000e5-16cf-5a98-9826-5a3a0a001fa4)
Chapter Seventeen (#u4439a414-b834-5694-b433-c356e59752a6)
Keep Reading: Daughter of the House (#ub8b4fe49-cdba-5815-8f53-18fdeb32ed4e)
About the Author (#u7278c3bf-a846-5035-9bbe-02a444f326bb)
Also by Rosie Thomas (#ueb8b60b5-1809-56e9-a0d0-3a8815b0fba4)
About the Publisher (#u833f0e09-b85e-59b0-b1c8-e652e09c97d2)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_e72b13ef-7f4f-5860-987c-ef490b11b258)
I remember.
And even as I say the words aloud in the silent room and hear the whisper dying away in the shadows of the house, I realise that it’s not true.
Because I don’t, I can’t remember.
I am old, and I am beginning to forget things.
Sometimes I’m aware that great tracts of memory have gone, slipping and melting away out of my reach. When I try to recall a particular day, or an entire year, even a damned decade, if I’m lucky there are the bare facts unadorned with colour. More often than otherwise there’s nothing at all. A blank.
And when I can remember where I have lived, and who I was living with and why, if I try to conjure up what it was like to be there, the texture of my life and what impelled me to wake up every morning and pace out the journey of the day, I cannot do it. Familiar and even beloved faces have silently melted away, their names and the dates of precious initiations and fond anniversaries and events that once seemed momentous, all collapsed and buried beyond reach.
The disappearing is like the desert itself. Sand blows from the four corners of the earth and it builds up in slow drifts and dun ripples, and it blurs the sharpest, proudest structures, and in the end obliterates them.
This is what’s happening to me. The sands of time. (It is a no less accurate image for being a cliché.)
I am eighty-two. I am not afraid of death, which after all can’t be far away.
Nor do I fear complete oblivion, because to be oblivious means what it says.
What does frighten me is the halfway stage. I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime’s independence – yes, selfish independence as my daughter would rightly claim – I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals.
I don’t want to sit in my chair and be fed spoonfuls of pap by Mamdooh or by Auntie; much less do I want to be handed over to medical professionals who will subject me to well-intentioned geriatric care.
I know what that will be like. I am a doctor myself and as well as remembering too little, I have seen too much.
Now Mamdooh is coming. His leather slippers make a soft swish on the boards of the women’s stairway. There is nothing wrong with my hearing. The door creaks open, heavy on its hinges, so that I can see a corner of the pierced screen that hides the gallery from the celebration hall. A light shining through the screen stipples the floor and walls with crescents and stars.
‘Good evening, Ma’am Iris,’ Mamdooh softly says. The deferential form of address has become so elided, so rubbed with usage that it is a pet name now, Mum-reese. ‘Have you been sleeping perhaps?’
‘No,’ I tell him.
I have been thinking. Turning matters over in my mind.
Mamdooh puts down a tray. A glass of mint tea, sweet and fragrant. A linen napkin, some triangles of sweet pastry that I do not want. I eat very little now.
The shiny coffee-brown dome of Mamdooh’s bald head is blotched with darker patches and big brown irregular moles. Out of doors in the harsh white sun I know he always wears his tarboosh. To see him lifting it in two hands and firmly settling it on his head before going out to the market is to be taken back to the time when the red flowerpot fez was essential wear for every effendi in the city.
Mamdooh is holding out my glass of tea. I take it from him, hooking my fingers through the worn silver hoops of the holder and poking my head forward to breathe in the scent.
‘Auntie has made baklava,’ he says, encouraging me by turning back the napkin on the plate.
‘Later. Go on now, Mamdooh. You must have some food yourself.’
Mamdooh will not have eaten a mouthful or taken even a sip of water since before sunrise. It is Ramadan.
When I am alone again, I drink my tea and listen to the sounds of the city. The cobbled street outside my screened windows is narrow, barely wide enough for a single car to pass, and beyond the angle of wall that shelters my doorway there are only the steps of the great mosque. The traffic that pours off concrete ribbon roads and submerges the modern city like a tidal wave is no more than a dull rumble here. Much closer at hand are shouts and laughter as families prepare their evening meal and gather to eat in the cool dusk. There’s a rattle of wheels on the stones and a hoarse cry of warning as a donkey cart passes by, and then a few liquid notes of music as somewhere a door opens and shuts. Hearing this, it might be the same Cairo of sixty years ago.
Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise, what do I have left?
I close my eyes. The glass tips in my fingers, spilling the last drops of liquid on the worn cushions.
Sixty years ago there were soldiers in these streets. Swarms of British officers and men, New Zealanders and Australians, French, Canadians, Indians and Greeks and South Africans and Poles, all in their dusty khaki. The city was a sun-baked magnet for the troops who flooded into it, whenever the war in the desert briefly released them, in search of bars and brothels. Turning their backs on the prospect of death in the sand, they drank and fucked with all the energy of youth, and Cairo absorbed them with its own ancient indifference.
After all, this war was just another layer of history in the making, contributing its dust and debris to lie on top of thousands of years of ruins. There is more history buried along this fertile strip of Nile valley than there is anywhere else in the world.
One of those soldiers from sixty years ago was my lover. The only man I have ever loved.
His name was Captain Alexander Napier Molyneux. Xan.
He wore the same khaki bush shirt and baggy shorts as all the others, distinguished only by badges of rank and regiment, but there was a further anonymity about Xan. He was neither flamboyant nor mysterious. You wouldn’t have singled him out in a crowd of officers at the bar in Shepheard’s Hotel, or at any of the raucous parties we all went to in Garden City or Zamalek, simply because he seemed so ordinary.
The absence of peculiar characteristics was intentional. Xan worked deep in the desert and it was one of his talents to blend into the scenery wherever he happened to be. He rode a horse like the cavalry officer he really was, but if you saw him on a camel with a white kuffiyeh swathed over his head and face, you would take him for an Arab. At the Gezira Club he played tennis and fooled around beside the pool like any other ornament of the Cairo cocktail circuit, but then he would disappear for days or a week at a time, and even in the hothouse of Anglo-Egyptian smart society there would be no whisper of news or even gossip about where he might have gone. He vanished into the desert like a lizard darting under a rock.
I loved him from the moment I first set eyes on him.
I remember.
New roads and concrete tower blocks and shopping streets have obliterated much of the Cairo we knew then, but in this evening’s reverie every detail of it – and of that first evening – comes back to me. I have revisited it so many thousands of times, it seems more real than my eighty-two-year-old reality.
At least I haven’t lost this, thank God, not yet.
