Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance - Rosie Thomas - Страница 13

There is light sliding into the room and for the moment I am disorientated.

But a second afterwards I realise that I have slept much later than I usually do, and the unfamiliar brightness is mid-morning sunshine. There is an associated feeling that I take longer to identify, but then I look down at my fingers on the bedsheet and I can remember Ruby’s hand curled in mine. She was holding my hand when I fell asleep and I must have slept so deeply that I have hardly stirred all night. The dent in the covers left by her resting elbow is still there. The unfamiliar sensation is happiness.

This morning the chambers of my head all seem to stand open, with their contents reassuringly accessible. I feel weak after the fever, but better than I have done for a long time. I sit up and put my bare feet to the floor.

Ruby is in the inner garden with Auntie. They are looking at the plants together and Auntie is rubbing a scented leaf in the palm of her hand for Ruby to have a sniff. Their backs are turned, but then Ruby looks sideways over her shoulder and sees me and her face breaks into a smile. I think she needs company and a measure of affection. Perhaps we both do.

Auntie brings a tray of tea, and when we are settled in the shade Ruby tells me that she has already had breakfast in the kitchen with Mamdooh and Auntie.

‘And supper last night, as well. Auntie’s been showing me things, she’s been making fruit jelly for you with pomegranates and a special jelly bag. I always thought jelly just came in cubes that you pour boiling water on.’

‘Do you cook at home?’

Ruby considers. ‘A bit, I suppose. Easy stuff. Mum’s a good cook, though. I’ll never be as good as her. She’s brilliant at all those things, like food and gardening, and making elegant Christmas decorations. Well, you know that.’

I don’t, not really. Lesley is my daughter and I don’t know when we last cooked for each other. I didn’t know about her expertise with holly and fir cones, and I have never been to her present house so I haven’t admired the roses. I acknowledge that these failures are my fault and not Lesley’s. Of course I acknowledge it. For her whole life, right from the beginning, I wanted to be somewhere else. It was not because of who she was, but because her presence – and her father’s – intensified such a sense of loss in me. I wished it otherwise, but wishing made no difference.

I thought, and still think, that life is a cruel affair.

‘Iris?’

‘Yes. I am listening.’

But a glance at the child’s face shows that I must have lost track of what she was saying for longer than I realised.

I was thinking, and the train of thought led back to Xan.

‘Ruby, do you remember we talked about you helping me to collect some of my old memories?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think it’s a good idea. I think we should start today.’

‘Right. Yeah, absolutely. But you remember what I said about … you know, not being all that great at spelling et cetera?’

The sound of trickling water fills the garden.

‘What? Yes, you did tell me. We’ll find a way.’

I am eager to begin. Ruby’s idea has thrown me a lifeline.

Hastily, I finish my breakfast. I call for Mamdooh and ask him to bring the key to my study. It is a rather dark little room at the rear of the house, hardly ever used and dignified only by the name of study because it had to be called something.

‘Yes, Mum-reese.’ Without moving he looks from Ruby to me.

‘Ruby is going to help me catalogue some of my papers,’ I say grandly. There are no papers. Or if there are I cannot recall where and what they would be.

‘Yes,’ Mamdooh says again, without conviction, but at least he goes off for the key.

The three of us make our way there and he unlocks the door and stands aside. Ruby and I file in and Mamdooh follows, opening a shutter to let in the daylight.

There is an old desk and a chair that I am sure I have never set eyes on before. But I do remember the typewriter. I take off the cover, blowing away the dust, and there is the Olivetti portable I bought in – where? In Rome, probably, when I was visiting Salvatore. (I have not lived without sex for all these years. Love is a different matter.)

The typewriter. I turn to Ruby. ‘You could use this.’

The child stares at it. Then she prods the q key with her forefinger so it strikes the platen with a dull click. It is as if she has never seen a typewriter in her life before.

‘Can you type?’ I ask her. ‘I can only use three fingers but it always seemed fast enough. You could make some notes while we talk and then perhaps type them up when it’s convenient?’

She looks up from pressing the keys.

‘I did a word-processing course once. You know. Using a computer?’

‘A computer?’

Fifteen years ago, when I retired and left the hospital in Namibia where I worked, computers were just starting to appear. The medical director, a suave young South African, had one of the first. Laurence Austin, that was his name. I’m pleased to retrieve this piece of long-buried data.

Mamdooh says, ‘In Midan Talaat Harb and other places there are cybercafés. I have seen young people using computers there.’

I have no idea what a cybercafé might be, but Ruby is nodding her head in acknowledgement.

‘We could ask Nicolas,’ I suggest.

‘Doctor Nicolas was visiting Mum-reese yesterday, when you were out of the house so many hours,’ Mamdooh explains to Ruby.

The child’s cheeks have flushed and she looks unhappy so I try to reassure her. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t even know what will be worth writing down. Maybe nothing.’

‘I’d like to help,’ she mutters, still eyeing the typewriter like an adversary.

So we find ourselves, later when the day is beginning to cool, sitting in our places in the garden. Ruby has a notebook in her lap and she grips a pencil so tightly that the knuckle of her thumb is white.

Silence stretches between us, then stretches again.

Anyway, now that I have come to it I realise that the whole idea is absurd.

Memory is not a recipe or a shopping list. Memory is the scent of clear water at an oasis, the brush of lips on naked skin, a plangent chord. I cannot capture these things and dictate them to another person. I am a doctor, not a poet. There is nothing I can say.

After more silence Ruby’s eyes meet mine.

‘Are you stuck? What about starting with a day? Just pick a random day that you remember. How old were you?’

‘Twenty-two,’ I say without thinking.

‘What happened?’

Only a week after our dinner overlooking the Pyramids, Xan took me to a fancy dress party. We had seen each other every day, for swimming at the Gezira Club and cocktails at Shepheard’s, and for dinners in restaurants that we both agreed came nowhere near our tent in the desert for food or ambience. We went dancing, and we met one another’s friends who turned out either to know each other already or to know people who knew them. We also sat for hours in quiet corners, holding hands and telling each other our histories.

Everything happened very quickly in those days. We were young and it was wartime. Within a week I was Xan Molyneux’s acknowledged girl.

Sarah Walker-Wilson pursed her lips. ‘Who is he? Does anyone at home know him?’

Sarah’s and Faria’s opinions meant nothing to me. I was in love with Xan and I was drunk with happiness, spinning with it, whirling like a cork caught in an eddy.

Xan and I decided to go to the costume party as Paris and Helen of Troy. Xan went to the toy department at Cicurel’s and acquired a tin breastplate, a shield and a helmet with a stiff red horsehair plume. They were more Roman than Greek and they were far too small for him. The spectacle of the little helmet perched on his black hair, the shield dangling from his wrist and the breastplate barely covering his diaphragm was irresistibly funny. He completed the outfit with sandals, a toga made from a bedsheet and a cavalryman’s dress sword. He put his hands on his hips, striking a pose with the hardware clanking, and demanded to know how classical and heroic he looked.

My costume was a white strapless evening gown borrowed from Faria and accessorised with the long metal pole that Mamdooh used to open the top shutters in our flat. From one end of the pole I hung a little carved wooden ship with the number 1 painted on either side. At the other end was a much bigger model launch, also borrowed via Faria from one of her numerous nephews and labelled 999. I wore a huge hat made of two cardboard cut-outs of the Queen Mary that Xan had spotted in the window of a travel agent’s near Shepheard’s, with 1000 painted on the sides.

Every time we looked at each other we almost collapsed with laughter. Xan collected me from Garden City in a taxi and when he tried to kiss me the Queen Mary knocked off his tin helmet. He pushed the thousandth ship out of the way and our mouths met. His profile was dark and then lit by the street lights, and his hair was standing up in a crest where the helmet had dragged on it. I ran my fingers through it as I pulled him greedily closer.

The party was given by three of his friends in a flat in Zamalek, quite near where Xan himself lived. It was a tall, awkwardly shaped apartment in which the sparse furniture had been pushed back into the corners. The walls were stained where people had leaned or rested their heads against them, and one was almost covered with scribbled names and telephone numbers and cryptic messages. The packed rooms heaved with Caesars and Charlie Chaplins and Clara Bows, there was a lot of drink and, just as at most Cairo parties, there was kissing and shouting, no food at all and very loud music from a gramophone on a sideboard forested with bottles. Xan took my hand as we were swept into the thick of it.

We were surrounded by familiar faces. Sarah was there, dressed as Little Bo Peep with her blonde hair in ringlets and ribbons, and brandishing a shepherd’s crook adorned with a blue satin bow. Sandy Allardyce wore a cardinal’s robes and I wondered whether they were hired or if he had simply borrowed them from a passing monsignor. In Cairo anything was possible. Even Roddy Boy loomed into view, wearing an eyepatch and with one arm tucked inside an admiral’s coat that had probably belonged to his great-grandfather who had almost certainly been with Nelson at Trafalgar.

‘Hello, there,’ my boss greeted me, dodging the shutter pole and the dangling ships, and wedging his telescope down the front of his coat so he could kiss my hand. ‘Most appropriate costume, Miss Black, if I may be so bold.’

‘Thank you, Colonel.’

If I may be so bold was the way my boss actually talked. Xan’s meticulous imitations of him came into my head and I chewed the corners of my mouth to contain the laughter, so unsuccessfully that I choked into my champagne glass and sent froth spilling over Faria’s gown. Roddy Boy was drunk enough not to notice.

‘Are you a friend of David’s?’ he boomed. David was one of our hosts, an associate of Xan’s with a mysterious war job. I had heard about Major David and tonight Xan had briefly introduced us.

‘I’ve only just met him. Xan Molyneux brought me along.’

Roddy Boy’s eyes flicked over me. He wasn’t so very drunk, then. ‘Ah. Yes,’ was all he said.

Jessie James floated up.

From somewhere, somehow, in the middle of Cairo in the midst of a war, he had acquired a choirboy’s white surplice and starched ruff. His pale yellow hair was parted and plastered flat to his head and he was carrying Hymns Ancient and Modern. Looking at him, you could almost hear an English cathedral choir singing the ‘Coventry Carol’.

‘Darling, beautiful Helen of the thousand ships. Can’t we run away together and leave that bastard Molyneux behind? Or at least come and dance with me to this vile music?’

‘Evening, James,’ Roddy Boy said.

‘Hello, there,’ Jessie murmured as he swept me away. We propped my pole of dangling ships in the corner and edged into the throng of dancers.

So Xan and I were surrounded by friends and people we knew, but we were in another place too. It was a small, sweet, vivid and waiting world that contained only the two of us. As the party separated us and then washed us together again, we would catch one another’s eyes and everything else faded into monochrome.

Once, when I had battled my way to the kitchen for a glass of water – the locally made gin and whisky ran like rivers, but quenching your thirst with anything else was more of a problem – Xan came up behind me. His hands slid down on my hips and his breath fanned my neck.

‘I want to touch you all over. I want to taste every inch of you. Are you going to make me wait, Iris?’ He was a little drunk, too.

I turned round to face him, stretching on tiptoe to bring our eyes level. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t wait.’

But we did wait, just a few hours longer, teasing ourselves with the anticipation of what we both knew would happen.

I danced again with Jessie, then with Sandy Allardyce who had forgiven me for the night at Lady Gibson Pasha’s. Faria arrived very late, wearing one of her Paris evening gowns and not the smallest attempt at fancy dress, with her faithful poet in tow. At the end of the evening we sat in the kitchen with the soldiers and the Cairene beauties and the men from the British Council, drinking whisky and playing silly games as if nothing mattered in the world.

This was what Xan and the other officers wanted: to wipe out one existence for just a few days or hours, and substitute another that was ripe with noisy laughter and perfume and girls.

Xan and I were almost the last to leave. We emerged into the short-lived, dewy cool of pre-dawn and walked hand in hand through the deserted streets to his flat. The place was empty and silent. It was the first time I had been there and I took in its temporary, makeshift atmosphere. It was a staging post; somewhere to take a brief respite, not to settle in. There were boots in the hallway with the shape of strangers’ feet in them, a handgun on a shelf in the living room.

‘Except for Jessie, everyone is away at the moment,’ Xan said.

We touched our fingertips together, briefly, superstitiously.

Then he took me in his arms.

His bedroom was bare, almost monastic, the bed itself narrow and hard.

He knelt above me and I smiled up at him.

‘It’s not the first time, is it?’

‘No,’ I said.

His tongue traced a course from my mouth to the hollow of my collarbone, lingered there and then moved downwards. ‘That’s good.’

I had had several lovers, Xan more than several, but for both of us this was a first of its own kind.

The last first time, the first of many. That was how certain we both were of what we wanted and believed. And for me what followed was nothing like sex with the polite, awkward boys I had half enjoyed in London. It was unlike anything I had ever known, and it was wonderful. I didn’t know you could laugh and cry at the same time, and feel that strangeness of another body within yours and yet love and trust every fibre of it.

Afterwards Xan gathered me against him and we looked a long way into each other’s eyes. We were sweaty, exhausted, and my whole body felt as if a hundred thousand new nerve endings had just been connected.

‘I love you, Iris Black,’ he said.

‘Xan Molyneux, I love you too.’

‘Is it too soon for us to say that? If it’s the truth?’

‘It’s not too soon and I know it’s the truth because I feel the same way.’

Neither of us said so, but we both knew that if we left it too long to speak of it, that might be too late. I laughed, to hide a shiver.

‘Anyway, how can you work out how many days would be proper? Is there a formula? Twenty or fifty?’

‘I have known you for more than twenty days. It’s thirty-eight, to be precise.’

The precision touched my heart. I had totalled up the days too, like pearls.

I put my hand to his face and drew his head to rest against my shoulder. ‘We will be happy,’ I whispered.

I could see, through the uncurtained window, that dawn was breaking.

The memory flashes through my head, as richly textured and vivid as my fever dreams, and just as evanescent.

What I begin falteringly to describe to my granddaughter is a shop window in a Cairo street. The shop was called Sidiq Travel, the name painted across the chocolate-brown fascia in faded art nouveau lettering. In the window were two posters, one of the Eiffel Tower and the other of an improbably golden Beirut beach complete with waving palms and a white-jacketed waiter with a silver tray of cocktails balanced at shoulder height. There was also a propped-up double-sided cut-out of the Queen Mary. Everything was coated with the grey-white gritty dust of Cairo.

Ruby’s head is bent and she is writing in her notebook. I can’t see her face.

‘Mr Sidiq sold me the ship from his window display,’ I say. ‘To make a hat.’

Ruby’s shoulders hunch and it now seems that there is desperation in her posture. My voice trails away until the silence is broken only by the tiny splash of the fountain.

What am I trying to say?

‘Go on,’ Ruby says at last, miserably. ‘About the Queen Mary.’

I can’t catch the memory. A moment ago it was there, I’m sure of it, and now I’m left with its absence. What were we talking about?

‘It doesn’t matter.’ My forgetfulness seeds a sudden rage in me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say again, much louder.

She is still writing, then crossing something out and rewriting it. The pencil seems to gouge the page.

‘Let me have a look.’

‘No.’ The notebook snapped shut and held against her chest.

What have I said, that’s now being withheld?

‘Hand it over.’

‘I won’t fucking hand it over,’ she yelps at me, jumps to her feet and looks around the garden for an escape route. There’s nowhere to run to.

I lever myself to my feet, painfully, and we confront each other.

My anger fades; what is the point of it? I hold out my arms instead and Ruby hesitates, chewing her bottom lip, then shuffles forward with her head hanging. I put my arm round her, seeing how smooth and lustrous the skin of her forearm is. I have forgotten the silky charge of young flesh. Gently, I take the notebook out of her hands and when I look at her face again I see that she is on the point of tears.

‘Ruby?’ ‘What?’ she wails.

I put my hand out to the arm of my chair, searching for some support, and lower myself again. Then I open the notebook and look at what she has written. It is only a few sentences and I can hardly decipher them.

The letters are childishly formed, the words uneven and the letters jumbled. She has written qunen for queen.

‘I told you, didn’t I, but you didn’t fucking listen.’

‘Don’t swear like that. It’s monotonous, apart from anything else.’

She did tell me she was dyslexic, and I heard her but I wasn’t listening. I am so wound up in my own history, in my frailty and fear.

I feel ashamed of myself. ‘Come here.’

She stoops down by the chair and tries to take back the notebook, but I keep a firm hold on it.

‘I am very sorry, Ruby. You wanted to do something for me, and you were honest about what you thought you could do. Whereas I was impatient and thoroughly selfish. Will you forgive me?’

A sigh. ‘Yeah.’

‘I spend too much time thinking about myself. It happens, when you’ve been alone for a long time. Can you understand that?’

‘Yeah, I s’pose.’

The mulishness is melting out of her.

There is something else I should say, while I am being honest.

‘I am very glad you came,’ I tell her. Then the absurdity of what we have just tried to do strikes me all over again and I start to laugh. ‘It’s very funny. I am the memoirist who can’t remember.’

‘And I’m the am … the ama … shit. The writer who can’t write.’

Her eyes are still bright with tears but she begins to laugh too. The laughter is spiked with sadness for both of us, but it fills the garden and drowns out the trickle of water.

Mamdooh appears in the archway that leads into the house and stares at us in mystification. I have to blow my nose and wipe my eyes.

‘Mum-reese, there is a visitor.’

‘Who can that be? Doctor Nicolas?’

‘It is a visitor for Miss.’ He tells Ruby frostily, ‘He is your friend you are seeing yesterday.’

I tell Ruby, ‘Go on, then, don’t keep your friend waiting, whoever he is.’

She skips away.

I have been the focus of Mamdooh’s censure myself. ‘My granddaughter is a young girl,’ I remind him.

‘Indeed.’

Ruby opened the front door, which had been firmly closed by Mamdooh, and found Ash and Nafouz waiting at the foot of the house steps. They were wearing their white shirts and new-looking trainers.

‘Ruby, hello.’

‘Hi.’

Ash walked up the steps like a suitor. ‘We come with my brother’s car. We take you for a tour, you know?’

‘We-ell …’ Ruby longed to go, but then she thought of leaving Iris sitting in the garden on her own and reluctantly shook her head. ‘I can’t. My grandmother kind of needs me right now.’

‘I am sorry. Your grandmother is ill today also?’

‘No, she’s much better. But she should have some company.’

Ash smiled. He really was good-looking, Ruby thought again.

‘Then this is not a problem. Nafouz?’ He beckoned his brother forward. ‘Nafouz and I, we like to take you and the lady for a nice ride.’

Ruby blinked at this. It was certainly the first time any of her boyfriends had offered to double-date with her grandmother.

‘We-ell,’ she said again.

‘Please to ask her,’ Nafouz joined in.

‘OK, then. Hang on here. I’ll go and find out if she wants to.’

Iris was sitting with the closed notebook still on her lap.

‘You probably won’t want to do this,’ Ruby began, but Iris tilted her head and looked sharply at her.

‘Whatever it is, I think you should let me decide for myself.’

Ruby told her about Ash and Nafouz and the taxi. Iris listened carefully and then her face split into a smile. When she smiled like that her wrinkles seemed to vanish and she could have been any age, even the same age as Ruby herself.

‘A very good idea,’ she said briskly. ‘I shall certainly come. Will you call Auntie for me?’

Five minutes later, with her head swathed in a white scarf and a pair of black sunglasses hiding half her face, Iris declared that she was ready.

‘You look like somebody,’ Ruby said, meaning a face or a style that she had seen maybe in a magazine, but couldn’t place.

‘I am somebody,’ Iris retorted. The prospect of the outing had noticeably lifted her spirits. She was almost giggly.

Auntie and Mamdooh came out with them. Auntie mumbled to herself and tugged at Iris’s clothes and scarf, settling them around her. Mamdooh had put his tarboosh on his head to walk down the steps, and was trying to get Iris to lean on him for support.

‘I can walk,’ Iris insisted.

Ash and Nafouz had been lounging against the wall opposite, but when they saw Iris and her retinue they stood respectfully upright. Mamdooh loomed over them.

‘How do you do?’ Iris said clearly, sounding rather like the Queen and making Ruby begin a cringe. But the two boys bowed and murmured their names and pointed to the black-and-white taxi.

‘Please to come this way, Madam,’ Nafouz said.

‘We shall be back later, Mamdooh, thank you,’ Iris said. She let Nafouz escort her to the car. She sat up in the front seat beside him, without seeming to notice the splits in the plastic upholstery and the way tongues of decayed sponge stuffing stuck out. Ash and Ruby scrambled into the back seat, where Ash raked his hands through his wing of black hair and gave Ruby a half-wink.

‘Where would you like to go?’ Nafouz asked Iris.

‘Downtown, I think,’ she answered. She settled back in her seat and drew her scarf round her throat.

The traffic, Ruby noted, was just about as bad as always.

Iris craned her head at the shop windows and the towering buildings. She was talking Arabic to Nafouz, and laughing and pointing. Ash’s hand crept across the seat and took hold of Ruby’s.

‘Cairo has changed very much,’ Iris said in English after a while.

Ash nodded vigorously. ‘Now modern city,’ he agreed.

I do leave the house of course, once in a while, but this time feels different. There is the charming but no doubt opportunist brother beside me, Ruby and her beau whispering in the back seat, the air thick with the speculative negotiations of youthful sexual activity. This should make me feel old, but it has the opposite effect.

As we turn into Sharia el Bustan I am thinking that I must discuss contraception with Ruby. I never had such a conversation with Lesley. Or if I did I have forgotten it, along with everything else. Maybe I can be a better grandmother than I was a mother.

Maybe it is the recognition that there is still something I can learn how to be that makes me suddenly feel so buoyant.

The shop windows glitter with clothes and furnishings exactly like those in shopping streets in every other city in the world. These boys – what were they called? – are proud of Cairo’s modernity, but I miss the horse-drawn caleches, the plodding donkeys, old smells of animal dung and diesel fumes and dust roughly laid with water. Just down the next street was Sidiq Travel. Xan and I carried our Queen Mary trophy along this road.

As we pass out into Talaat Harb the lights are coming on in the government buildings. Avoiding the feeder road for the Tahrir Bridge the boy swings the car left down the Corniche and a minute later we pass in front of the walls of the embassy. Once, the gardens stretched down to the bank of the Nile. Here are the trees that shaded the afternoon tea parties of my childhood. I half turn to tell Ruby this but she and the boy are murmuring together, deaf to everything else.

Now we turn left again. I know these shuttered, curving streets so well.

The boy raises one eyebrow at me and I nod.

He has me neatly pigeon-holed. He knows Garden City is where I lived, it is where most of us British lived in those days. Tended gardens, elaborate wrought-iron gates and grilles, ceiling fans turning the humid air in the afternoons. The car rolls slowly past the ghosts, past the blind windows that shield more recent histories.

I am glad when we emerge again into Qasr el Aini and this time head over the bridge. The sun is going down, and coloured lights glimmer in the river water as we reach the island.

The big trees still shade the club grounds, and the racetrack and the polo ground, but now the branches only partly obscure the light-pocked cubes and rectangles of drab apartment blocks on the western bank. Sixty years ago there were fields and canals on the far side, with ploughs drawn by gaunt buffalo, and villages of mud houses. Now the sprawl reaches almost all the way to Giza.

‘I have forgotten your name. Forgive me?’ I say to the driver.

He flips me a smile. A flirtatious smile, for God’s sake. ‘Nafouz. What is yours?’

‘Doctor Black.’

‘You are medical doctor?’

‘I was. I am retired now.’

Nafouz purses his lips to show me that he is impressed. ‘I am taxi driver only but my brother Ash is working in hospital, operating switchboard.’

‘You both speak good English.’

‘We try,’ Nafouz agrees. ‘We learn.’

The layout of these Gezira streets is familiar, the buildings less so. The ugly lattice of the Cairo Tower looms on one side, on the other is the wall of lush trees that shade the club grounds. Nafouz turns left and we approach the gates. Sixty years drop away and I am in a taxi on my way to meet Xan.

‘Stop. I want to get out for a minute.’

I step out into the dusk. The gates are the same but there is a gatekeeper in a kiosk now and a striped pole to be raised and lowered. A long line of cars stretches back from the barrier, mostly shiny German-made cars; members of today’s Gezira Club are queueing up for admission. I remember cotton sundresses and shady hats, uniforms and cocktails and the plock of tennis balls, Xan waiting for me in the bar as I arrived from a day’s work at my desk in Roddy Boy’s outer office.

Xan saying, ‘Darling, let’s have a drink. I’ve got to go away again tomorrow. It’s a bit of a bore, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Madam?’

The gatekeeper calls out to me, and a man in a dark business suit raises the electric window of his BMW as it glides through the gates. The next car in line rolls forward.

‘Yes, Madam?’

‘I … nothing. I’m sorry. A mistake.’

What was I looking for? All the businessmen and chic women and obedient children in these cars are Egyptian. The enclave of empire that I knew, the shady mown-grass sanctuary of British assumptions and attitudes, vanished long ago. The people are all dead. I am still here but I am as much of an anachronism as tea dances and air raid warnings.

I am still here.

Instead of making me sad, the thought fills me with a sudden reckless appetite. Through the window of the taxi I can see the white oval of Ruby’s face, watching me.

It’s getting dark. I pull off my sunglasses and settle myself back in my seat.

‘Let’s go to Groppi’s,’ I say, slapping my hands on the plastic dashboard so that everybody jumps.

Nafouz asks, ‘Are you sure, Doctor?’

I insist, very brightly, ‘Certainly I am sure.’

So the four of us find ourselves sitting at a table in the little café garden of Groppi’s.

Once, everyone in Cairo who could afford it came here. Vine tendrils smothering the walls and strings of coloured lights made it seem far removed from the city’s white glare. Ladies in furs sat at these little round tables drinking tea with men with silky moustaches, and officers ordered cream cakes for their girls.

It’s dusty and neglected now, with an unswept floor and waiters in dirty jackets. The two boys are hungry and Ruby looks bored.

‘What would you all like? What shall we order?’ I say encouragingly, but no one seems to know. We make a strange foursome. ‘We must have ice cream.’ I remember the ice creams, mint-green and luscious pink with stripes of coffee-brown, all with tiny crystals of ice bedded in them. They were served in cut-glass coupes, decorated with furled wafers.

Ruby is eyeing me. No one seems to want ice cream.

‘I’m sorry. It’s different.’ I can feel the suck and swirl of time past, rocking and pulling at my feet like a vicious current. I’m looking at the menu, a dreary plastic-laminated affair sticky with fingerprints. The two boys are smoking, giving each other looks out of the corners of their liquid eyes. Ruby leans forward to help herself from one of the packs on the table.

‘Does Lesley let you do that?’

She gives a sharp cough of laughter and smoke pours from between her teeth. Her odd mixture of childishness and bravado tickles me, and I find myself laughing too. The atmosphere changes and we order toasted sandwiches, far too many, and coffees and pastries and bottles of Coca-Cola. It is after sundown so the boys break their Ramadan fast with gusto and the strange meal somehow becomes what I wanted, a celebration.

‘Go on,’ I urge them, over the plates of food that the waiters slap down on the table. ‘Go on, eat up.’

They tell me about their family. Father dead, several younger siblings whom they must help their mother to support. Ruby’s beau is the clever one, the one they are banking on. He looks very young to carry such a weight of responsibility.

‘I learn to speak English, and also some computer studies. But it is not easy to pay for teaching.’

And he meets my eyes. They have seen where I live and they probably think I am rich. In fact I am poor, certainly by European standards. I murmur in Arabic, a conventional piety. Ruby is looking away, thinking her own thoughts.

The table top is pooled with coffee and there are still sandwiches and little cakes glistening with fat and sugar to be eaten but Nafouz is tapping his watch.

‘Time for work. We are both night shift.’

Ash wraps a sandwich in a paper napkin and holds it out to me. ‘You have eaten nothing.’

‘I don’t want it. Take it with you, for later.’

‘I may?’

‘Of course.’

I call for, and pay, the enormous bill. It is a long time since I have been to a café, much longer since I have paid for four people at once. Before everyone stands up I say, ‘Thank you for this evening, Nafouz. Thank you, Ash. I enjoyed it very much.’

This is the truth. It has helped me to see the today versions of yesterday’s places. Memory is a little like découpage, I think, a harmless activity that I was encouraged to practise when I was ill as a child, involving pasting cut-out views and scenes to build up a picture in layers. The build-up creates a kind of depth. It adds perspective. Of course the base layers are fading and partially obscured. The old Groppi’s I knew, like Cairo itself, has been overlaid by the present version. Because I am here, seeing it as it is now, I realise that there is nothing mysterious or fearful in this. Of course I can’t catch and keep everything. I can only strive for what is important; my memories of Xan.

Ruby is standing up, looking at me, a little perplexed. ‘Iris?’

I collect myself. ‘Yes? What is it?’

‘We’ve got to go. Ash is late.’

They are waiting in the doorway. On the way back to the taxi the boys take my arms, as if I am their own grandmother. I am glad of the support because I am very tired. On the way home, I look out at the lights and the thick crowds in the streets. Nafouz has yet another cigarette clenched between his teeth.

Behind me, I can hear Ruby and Ash whispering on the back seat. When we reach the house they say goodbye to each other offhandedly, in the way that the young do, not making another arrangement because they don’t need to. It’s understood that they will meet again just as soon as possible. I feel a thin stab of envy, and then amusement at the nonsense of this.

Mamdooh and Auntie seem actually to have been waiting in the hallway for our return. At any rate, they spring from nowhere as soon as Ruby and I come in.

With the afternoon’s change of perspective I notice how we have become interdependent, the three of us, over the years. I need them and they need me to need them.

‘We have had an excellent outing. A drive, then Groppi’s.’

An idea has just formed in my head and I keep it fixed there as I unpin my headscarf and hand it to Auntie. ‘We’ll have some tea later, upstairs. Ruby, Mamdooh, will you come with me?’

Ruby shuffled in their wake back down the passageway to Iris’s study. Mamdooh was trying to insist that Mum-reese should rest, Iris sailed ahead with the absent but intent look on her face that Ruby was beginning to recognise.

‘I think there is a box in there.’ Iris pointed to a pair of cupboard doors painted with faded white birds and garlands of leaves.

‘A box?’ Mamdooh frowned.

‘Exactly. If you open the doors for me?’

Ruby yawned. It had been OK, going out in the car with Iris, but now Ash had gone to work and she wouldn’t see him until tomorrow. She would have liked to spend a bit more time on her own with him.

‘There it is.’ Iris pointed.

Mamdooh lifted a pile of dusty books, some sheaves of printed music and an old-fashioned clothes brush off the lid of a dark-green tin box. It had handles on the sides and he stooped and puffed a little as he hauled it off the shelf. The dust that rose when he dumped it on the desk next to the old typewriter indicated that it hadn’t been disturbed for a very long time.

Iris undid a bolt and threw back the lid. Ruby glanced at the disappointing jumble inside. Among brittle newspapers and tattered books here were some playing cards and a box of dice, a couple of tarnished metal cups, a big bunch of keys and a brown envelope. There was a musty smell of forgotten times.

‘Can you carry it upstairs, or is it too heavy?’ Iris asked, turning her face up to Mamdooh.

‘I can carry,’ he said at once.

Mamdooh put the box on a low wooden table in Iris’s sitting room and closed the shutters, then turned to see that Iris was already burrowing through the contents. He gave Ruby a look that suggested she was responsible for all this disruption and backed out through the door.

Ruby settled herself among the cushions on the divan and picked up the manila envelope. A handful of curling black-and-white snapshots fell out and she examined them eagerly. This was more like it. They weren’t very interesting, though. In one, a group of white men stood in front of a low mud-brick building. In another some black men were putting a roof on what looked like the same building. In a third, two men wearing long baggy shorts with knee-length socks were shaking hands. Ruby looked a little more carefully at a picture of a young Iris in a cotton sundress. She was sitting on a low wall in front of some stone carvings with a man in an open-necked shirt. The skirt of her dress billowed over his knee, not quite hiding their linked hands.

‘Who’s this?’ Ruby asked.

‘That’s the Trevi Fountain. In Rome.’

‘Who is he?’

‘His name is Doctor Salvatore Andreotti. We worked together many years ago on a medical project in Africa.’

‘Just good friends.’ Ruby smirked.

Iris glanced up from her excavations in the box. ‘We were lovers for a time.’

‘Oh. Right. Were you? Um, what are all these others?’

‘Let me have a look. That is Nyasaland in, I suppose, nineteen fifty-eight. That building is a clinic, and those two men are the district commissioner and the regional medical director. I worked in the clinic for five, maybe six years.’

‘Lesley was four. She told me.’

Iris collected up the scattered pack of cards, snapped them with a practised hand. ‘Yes. She was born in fifty-four.’

Ruby had heard Lesley talk about how she was brought up by her father and nannies, while her mother ‘looked after black kids in Africa’. When she mentioned her childhood, which wasn’t very often, Lesley tended to look brave and cheerful.

Ruby felt suddenly curious about an aspect of her family history that had never interested her before. ‘Why did you go to work in Africa when you had a husband and a daughter in England?’

‘It was my job,’ Iris said. ‘A job that I felt very privileged to have. And I believe that I was good at it.’

‘But didn’t you miss them?’

‘I had home leave. And once she was old enough Lesley would come out to stay with me in the school holidays.’

‘She told me about that. She said her friends would be going to like Cornwall, or maybe Brittany, while she would have to make this huge journey with about three changes of plane and at the end there would be a bush village and terrible heat and bugs, and not much to do.’

‘That sounds like it, yes.’

It occurred to Ruby then that there was an unbending quality about Iris that being old hadn’t mellowed at all. She would always have been like this. Uncompromising, was that the word?

‘You remember everything,’ Ruby said, softly but accusingly.

Iris seemed to have found whatever it was she had been looking for in the depths of the tin box. She pounced and her fingers closed over something. Then she lifted her head and Ruby saw the distant expression that meant she was looking inside herself. Her pale blue eyes were foggy.

‘Do I?’

‘Nyasaland, the what’ sit fountain, men and dates, everything.’

Now Ruby saw in her grandmother’s face the grey shadow of fear.

‘Those things are only … Like so many plain cups or plates, on shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don’t matter, like what I remember of those photographs. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to pieces, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity.

‘Then you reach for a cup or a bowl that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.

‘That’s the way the important memory feels, the one you don’t want to lose. And it’s the fragment of your past that explains why you have lived your life the way you have done.’

When she spoke again Iris’s voice had sunk so low that Ruby could hardly hear her. ‘And made the mistakes that you have made. Do you understand any of this?’

Ruby hesitated. ‘A little. Maybe.’

‘You are very young. There’s not much on your shelves and you don’t know what’s going to be precious. It’s not until you’re old that you find yourself hugging the bowl all day long. Afraid to put it down.’

That’s what she’s doing, Ruby thought, when she goes into a trance and doesn’t hear what you’re saying to her.

She’s holding on to the precious bowl, in case it’s not there the next time she goes to look for it.

‘Yes,’ Iris said to herself. Her voice was no more than a whisper now.

Ruby suddenly stood up. She left the room, and Iris seemed too wrapped in her own reverie even to notice. Her head lifted in surprise when Ruby came noisily back, as if she had actually forgotten she had ever been there.

Ruby held out the framed photograph that she had taken from its place beside Iris’s bed. ‘Who is this?’

She was half expecting another reprimand or at least an evasion, because whoever he was, the man in the photograph was important. Most definitely he wasn’t Iris’s husband, Ruby’s grandfather Gordon.

Instead, something remarkable happened. Iris’s face completely changed. When she thought about it later Ruby described it to herself as melting. All the little lines round her grandmother’s mouth loosened, and the fog in her eyes vanished and left them clear blue and as sharp as a girl’s. Warm colour swelled under her crêpey skin and flushed her throat as she held out one hand for the picture. The other fist was still closed round whatever she had taken from the tin box.

Very carefully, so that there was no chance of either of them letting it fall, Ruby passed the photograph to her. Iris gazed down into the man’s face.

A long minute passed.

‘Who?’ Ruby persisted.

‘His name?’

‘Yes, you could start by telling me his name.’

Iris said nothing.

‘Do you want me to help?’

Instead of answering Iris opened her hand, the one that didn’t hold the picture. In the palm lay a toy ship carved from some dark wood. On the side a white numeral 1 was painted.

‘The first of a thousand ships.’ Iris smiled. Now even her voice sounded softer and younger, with the vinegary snap gone out of it.

Ruby had no idea what she was talking about. She knelt down and examined the ship as it lay in her grandmother’s palm. It was old, but it didn’t look remarkable. She picked it up and placed it carefully on the arm of Iris’s chair. Then she took the photograph back, noticing how Iris gave it up with infinite reluctance. She studied the two young faces and saw that they were dazzled with happiness.

Iris said slowly, in her different voice, ‘His name was Alexander Napier Molyneux, Captain in the Third Hussars, on secondment to Tell force. That picture was taken in October 1941, on the day that Xan asked me to marry him.’

Ruby was delighted with this information.

‘Really? Did he? Did you say yes?’

‘I did.’

She waited for more, but Iris was silent. Gently Ruby put the photograph aside and folded Iris’s hands in hers. The old fingers were like twigs, the tendons rigid against Ruby’s smooth palms.

‘Are you afraid of forgetting him?’

‘I never kept diaries, you see. I was so certain of my mind. And now it’s going. Sometimes I reach and there is nothing there. In the accustomed place. Most of the pieces don’t matter. But if this one breaks, there will be nothing left.’

Ruby understood that she meant nothing of value. If the precious bowl was missing or shattered, what remained was rendered worthless.

She tightened her grip on Iris’s hands, suddenly understanding what they must do together.

‘You can remember. I know you can, because of the photographs and the fountain and the ship and the travel agents. You told me about those without even thinking. You’ve just told me about Xan Molyneux, haven’t you? It’s there, Iris, I know it is. And I know what we have to do. It’s just talking. You have to tell me the stories and I will remember them for you. I’m really good at that, my friend Jas told me. I remembered all kinds of things about people we used to know back in London, and he was always amazed. But I did it automatically. I told him it was like collecting anything. I used to have these collections, you know, when I was a kid. Shells, insects. Hundreds of them. I used to know exactly what they all were and where to find them in my room, although Lesley was always going on about mess. All you have to do is tell me.

‘I’ll keep it all in my mind. And then, if you do forget, I can tell your memories back to you, like a story.’

She massaged Iris’s cold hands, trying to rub warmth and certainty into them.

‘Do you see?’

Iris’s colour had faded and the tight lines pursed her mouth again. ‘Maybe,’ she said uncertainly.

Ruby smiled. Confidence and an idea of her own value swept through her, and she leaned up to kiss her grandmother’s cheek.

‘Definitely,’ she insisted.