Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance - Rosie Thomas - Страница 14

Before the war Colonel Boyce’s office at GHQ had been a spacious bedroom in a substantial villa. By the time I came to work there the room had been partitioned into three cubbyholes, each with one-third of a window giving a thin vertical view of the untended gardens and a checkpoint where a couple of soldiers guarded a gate in the perimeter fencing. Roddy Boy had one cubbyhole, and as his typist I occupied a walled-off slice of the corridor outside the bedroom. My desk was wedged between a pair of tall tin cabinets in which I filed the endless succession of pinks generated by interdepartmental communications.

Roddy’s head poked out of his office. ‘Miss Black? Could you take this along to Brigadier Denselow?’

I took the sealed folder marked Secret and walked down two sets of stairs and through a pair of temporary doors into what had once been the villa’s kitchens. The GHQ buildings were a warren of stairways and cramped offices, packed with sweating staff officers who ploughed through mounds of paperwork and vied with each other for access to bigger fiefdoms. It was a swamp of bureaucracy, rumour and competitiveness as Headquarters expanded and the prospect of fast-track promotions encouraged ambitious officers to try to outsmart each other. Roddy Boy was always in the thick of some piece of intrigue designed to thwart his rivals.

Brigadier Denselow and his staff had four adjacent offices that opened through the servants’ back door into the villa garden, so there was daylight and fresh air. This empire was jealously guarded against all comers. Denselow’s assistant, Captain Martin Frobisher, was sitting with his feet on his desk reading a novel from the Anglo-Egyptian Club library.

‘Hullo, light of my life,’ he greeted me routinely.

I handed over the folder and Martin signed the docket for it. In answer to his entreaty I told him that no, I wasn’t free for dinner.

‘You never are,’ he sighed. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘Nothing. But I am in love with another man.’ Whom I had not seen, nor even heard from, in seventeen and a half days. Each of those days was a glassy structure of routine within which I contained – as patiently as I could – my longing for Xan and my constant fears for his safety. I was only one of millions of women in similar circumstances.

‘He’s a lucky devil. Lunch, then?’

I had a pile of memos composed in Roddy’s trademark verbose style to type and circulate. I shook my head, smiling at him. I liked Martin. He had been welcoming when I first arrived in the military maze of Headquarters. ‘Pressure of work,’ I explained and threaded my way back past the first-floor salon where shifts of cipherenes worked twenty-four hours a day, to my own office.

When I reached my desk I saw that Roddy’s door was firmly closed and the hand-made ‘Do not disturb’ sign hanging from the knob indicated that he was busy.

There was no window in my segment of corridor, so I worked under a metal-shaded desk lamp that gave off an acrid smell of burning dust. I switched it on and took the cover off my typewriter.

I had been painstakingly typing for perhaps half an hour before Roddy’s door opened again. I saw my boss’s knife-creased trousers emerge first. Even in the hottest weather Roddy always wore immaculate service dress, including tunic, Sam Browne, tie and long trousers.

‘Matter of morale,’ he would mutter. ‘This is GHQ. Notwithstanding, some chaps around here are reprehensibly sloppy.’

He was followed by a pair of sunburned legs in khaki shorts, very stained and dusty.

My heart lurched in my chest. I looked up at the owner of the legs and Xan smiled down at me. Behind the smile he looked exhausted.

‘You promised me a cup of GHQ tea, remember?’

‘So I did. Milk and sugar?’ I laughed because I knew perfectly well how he took his tea.

‘Let me think. Do you know, maybe it isn’t tea I want at all? Perhaps a drink instead? At Shepheard’s?’

Roddy gave us his pop-eyed stare. ‘Ah, yes. You two know each other, don’t you?’

‘We have met,’ I said demurely. The last time I had seen Xan was as he was leaving my bed, at dawn, before heading away into the desert on one of his mysterious sorties. After the first relief at seeing him alive and unhurt, I could hardly think of anything except how much I wanted us to be back in bed together.

‘It is lunchtime,’ Xan said, consulting his watch. ‘Colonel Boyce, may I take Miss Black away from you for an hour?’

Roddy could hardly say no, although it was obvious that he would have preferred to do so.

‘Hurrrmph. Well, yes, all right. Only an hour. We are extremely pressed at the moment, you know.’ He turned to me, eyes bulging. ‘Have you heard from your father lately, by the way?’

This was a not very oblique reminder that, through his acquaintance with my father, Roddy considered himself to have a paternal role to play.

‘Yes, I had a letter about two weeks ago. He’s living very quietly these days, down in Hampshire. My mother hasn’t been very well lately. He did ask to be remembered to you. I think he’s quite envious of you, Sir, being so much in the thick of the war out here.’

A reminder of his importance never went amiss with the Colonel. He tipped his head back and the shiny flesh of his jowls wobbled. ‘Yes. Please give him my regards, won’t you?’ The green telephone on his desk rang. ‘Ahhhm. The Brigadier. Excuse me, please.’

The door closed behind him and Xan immediately seized my hands and kissed the knuckles. ‘Christ. Come on, let’s get out of here.’

We went out into the thick, hot blanket of the afternoon heat. It was the beginning of October 1941, but there was no sign as yet of cooler weather. The buildings of Garden City looked dark, cut out in two dimensions against the blazing sky.

‘Xan …’

He held me back a little. ‘Wait. Are you free this evening?’

I pretended to consider. ‘Let me think. I was planning to go to the cinema with Faria …’

‘Oh, in that case …’

‘But maybe I could chuck her. What do you suggest instead?’

He raised one eyebrow. ‘Bed. Followed by dinner, and then bed again.’

‘Do you know what? I find that I am free tonight, tomorrow night and every evening for the rest of the year.’

We had been walking in a flood-tide of khaki. Fore-and-aft caps bobbed all around us, with a sprinkling of Australian broad-brimmed hats and French kepis. Xan took my elbow and we stopped at the kerbside, letting the current flow past. My apartment was only a few minutes’ walk from here and it would be empty except for Mamdooh taking his siesta in his room next to the front door.

We looked the immediate question at each other, but now I could see a haze of something like suffering as well as weariness in Xan’s eyes.

‘Let’s do what you suggested. Let’s go to Shepheard’s,’ I said.

‘Good,’ he said softly. ‘I only got in about two hours ago and I’d like a beer after dealing with GHQ.’

A horse-drawn caleche came plodding up behind us. The horse was a bag of bones, its coat dark with sweat and foam-flecked under the ancient harness. Its blinkered head drooped in a nosebag. The driver spotted us and whipped up the horse to bring him alongside.

‘Sir, lady? Nice ride. Very private, no seeing, eh?’ A curtain could be drawn across the front of the carriage to make a little hideaway from the seething streets. The vehicles were known as love taxis.

‘Thanks. No,’ Xan said, but he gave the driver a coin. The man returned a broad wink and a wave of his whip as the horse clopped onwards. We walked on to Shepheard’s, past the beggars and amputees and ragged children who held out their hands to the Cairo grandees passing up and down the steps of the hotel.

Shepheard’s was out of bounds to other ranks. The bars and terraces swarmed with a lunchtime crowd of fashionably dressed civilians and officers of all the nations who had forces in Egypt. We found a table on the veranda overlooking the street and ordered buffalo steak sandwiches and Stella beer from one of the waiters, then sat back in our wicker chairs without immediate expectation. The service at Shepheard’s was even slower than the bureaucratic processes at GHQ.

From two tables away Martin Frobisher lifted his hand to us in an ironic greeting. Xan gave him a nod and I studied Xan’s face from behind the shield of my sunglasses. He had shaved this morning, but he had missed several patches and the stubble glinted in the sun. I imagined him in the dawn light, somewhere between here and the wire, with a tin bowl of warm water and a tiny mirror balanced on the bonnet of a truck. The faint white rims of old sweat stains marked his khaki shirt and dust caked in the eyelets of his boots. When he took off his socks and underclothes, a miniature sand shower would patter round his feet. I had seen that happen.

It felt strange to be sitting on the veranda at Shepheard’s with him, patiently waiting for our beer, when only an hour ago I had no way of knowing even if he was alive or dead.

And if it was strange for me, I reflected, how much more disorientating must it be for him?

I said quietly, ‘Am I allowed to ask where you have been?’

He jumped, as if his thoughts had been a long way off. He did smile at me, then rubbed his jaw with one hand. ‘On a patrol.’

‘Was it bad?’

‘I have had better experiences.’ He spoke lightly but the taut muscles round his mouth revealed his distress.

Surprisingly, the waiter was back with us. He put the beers down and Xan’s had hardly touched the table before he swept it up and finished it in two long gulps. The desert left your mouth parched and your skin so leached of moisture that it felt as stiff as paper. And yet here was Xan now, surrounded by chic French and Egyptian women, and the pink-faced, well-fed officers from GHQ who directed the background to war operations from behind their desks.

I couldn’t know what he had seen in the course of the last seventeen days but the likely images gnawed at me, jarring with the cosmopolitan scenes on the veranda.

‘Sorry,’ Xan said after a moment. ‘I promise I’ll liven up once I’ve had something to eat.’

I leaned forward and touched his hand. ‘It’s all right.’

He did revive when he had eaten his sandwich and most of mine. He sat back again in his chair and grinned at me. ‘Now all I need is a bath and some sleep, and you.’

‘All three shall be yours. Xan, it wasn’t a social call you were paying on Roddy Boy this morning, was it?’

In the weeks that I had known him I had tried not to press Xan with too many questions. Up until now we had done our best to live in the present, and the present was always parties and joking and a blind determination to have fun. But today I found it very hard to accept that I should know so little. I also knew that he wasn’t volunteering any more information because he didn’t want to make me afraid for him.

He looked around at the nearest tables before answering. Everyone was talking and gesticulating or trying to catch the attention of the waiters. No one was taking any notice of us.

‘No, it wasn’t.’ And then, after a pause, ‘How much do you actually know about what he does?’

In theory, I was only supposed to handle routine typing, filing and administration. All confidential signals and memos were dealt with by army personnel, and collected and delivered by me in sealed folders marked Secret. But Roddy had long ago decided that I was trustworthy and he also liked to impress me by letting drop how key his role was. Quite often, he asked me to collect or deliver signals in clear to the cipher clerks because the junior staff officer whose job it should have been was inclined to be too busy for this menial task.

I had lately started reading everything that passed through my hands, greedy for the smallest crumb of information, good or bad, that might have anything to do with Xan. So I now knew the names and quite often the general whereabouts of most of the commando forces who supplied us with intelligence from deep behind enemy lines. I was almost certain that he was with one of these highly secret groups, criss-crossing the remote desert in order to pick up information on enemy troop and supply movements.

‘A fair amount,’ I said cautiously.

‘And so you have heard of Tellforce.’

The sun struck splinters of light off Xan’s empty glass and cast hard shadows over the white field of the tablecloth.

A child with sores all over his scalp had been leaning against the steps and grasping imploringly at the legs that went up and down in front of his eyes, but now one of the waiters went over and pushed him roughly aside. A thick wash of panic and dismay and revulsion rose in my throat, against Egypt and against the war.

‘Iris?’

‘Yes. Yes, I have heard of Tellforce.’

Another shadow fell across the table. We both looked up and there was Jessie James.

The two men exchanged a glance that excluded me.

‘I didn’t know you were back,’ Jessie murmured.

‘I got in a couple of hours ago.’

Then Xan was on his feet and they exchanged a brief handshake. Jessie hauled over a chair and sat down beside me, telling me that I shouldn’t hide myself away just because Xan was always off fooling around in the desert.

The sombre mood that had descended on Xan and me lifted again. Xan and Jessie drank more beer and I ordered a tiny thimbleful of thick, sweet coffee. Jessie was full of the latest gossip and funny stories about people we knew. One of his fellow Cherry Pickers had won a mule in a poker game with a group of Egyptian traders. He had ridden the mule home from the card game and installed it in the garden of his rented house, and now insisted that the mule thought it was a human being and therefore he had to humour it. He had bought it a straw hat with a hatband in the regimental colours, and he took the animal and its hat with him to polo games and race meetings at the Gezira Club. Whenever he smoked one of his Sobranie cigarettes he lit another for the mule and blew the smoke up the animal’s nostrils.

‘No,’ I protested.

Xan laughed and Jessie blinked at me. ‘D’you think he should make the mule smoke Woodbines? The two of them are very happy together. I’d call it a marriage made in heaven.’

I finished my coffee and looked at my watch. Roddy might have gone off for one of his prolonged lunches, but he might equally be sitting at his desk and waiting for me to reappear.

‘I’d better go,’ I said reluctantly.

Xan lightly touched my wrist. ‘What time will you be free?’

‘About eight.’

The two men stood up and Jessie drew back my chair. I kissed them both on the cheek and left them.

I walked slowly back to GHQ through the stale mid-afternoon heat. Dogs lay beneath carpets of flies in the bands of slate-grey shade at the foot of high walls, and beggars slept with their galabiyehs tucked between their scrawny legs. I was remembering what I knew about Tellforce.

Later that day, after we had made love, Xan and I lay in my bed. My head rested on his chest and I listened to the slow rhythm of his breathing. Faria had gone to a big dinner that was being given by Ali’s parents for some cousins from Alexandria, and Sarah was in her room. Lately she had shown less energy and enthusiasm for her social life. She had been ill a month earlier with one of the debilitating stomach complaints that were Cairo’s special weapon, and was taking a long time to recover. Her skin looked yellow and she complained that the heat was relentless. Faria and I were worried about her.

It was dark outside. I could hear dance music being played on a gramophone somewhere nearby.

‘Are you awake?’ Xan murmured. His voice set up minute vibrations inside the drum of his chest.

‘Yes.’

He sighed and shifted position, combing his fingers through my hair and adjusting the position of my head so that it rested more comfortably in the hollow of his shoulder. I felt the weight of happiness, almost tangible, defined even more sharply by the constant counter of anxiety and by the certainty that we would have to part again very soon.

‘I love you,’ he said simply.

I smiled dazedly, my mouth moving against his skin. We lay and listened to the tinny scratching of the music, the small noises of the apartment.

‘Before Jessie arrived this afternoon you mentioned Tellforce,’ I began at last.

The name of the secret force had been in my head all afternoon. I didn’t want to hear how closely Xan was associated with it, but I couldn’t unlearn what I already knew. Once we had acknowledged his involvement, I reasoned, maybe we could jointly put the thought of it aside until it was time for him to leave again. And if I knew more, it might be easier for me to help Xan to forget it as far as possible.

‘This is between us,’ Xan murmured.

I twisted my head so I could look into his eyes. ‘I swear.’

‘Do you know what we do?’

From what he told me that night, which was only the bare facts, together with what I knew already, I was able to put together the picture.

Tellforce was an irregular group of officers and men who had been recruited for their knowledge of the desert and the ways of the desert. They knew the shifting contours of the sand seas, and the extreme heat and cold, and the brutal force of sandstorms. Before the war the officers might have been mining engineers or hydrologists or Arabists, but now their job was one of the most demanding of all the special operations. They drove patrols of heavy specially adapted trucks deep into the desert, moving far behind enemy lines and spying on their manoeuvres. They kept twenty-four-hour roadside watches from the sparse shelter of wadis or patches of scrub, and from these uncomfortable hideouts they counted every single truck, tank and car that passed, noted their numbers, and estimated the numbers of occupants. Collecting these snippets of information meant that Tellforce patrols were always at risk of being spotted by enemy convoys or aircraft.

They were also known as the desert taxis because they delivered commando raiders to their targets and then searched for the survivors and brought them out again. And they made their own lightning strikes on trucks, fuel and supply dumps and parked aircraft whenever an opportunity for sabotage presented itself.

‘I see,’ I said at last.

I had always understood that Xan must be involved in special ops of some kind, but the reality was even more daunting. The desert taxi service was always busy, and by definition in the most dangerous places. I passed my tongue over my lips, feeling them as dry and cracked as if we were out in the desert now.

‘Don’t worry,’ Xan said.

‘I won’t,’ I lied.

‘Hassan is always with me.’

I remembered the impassive tribesman who had driven us out to the oasis beyond Giza, and instead of the car I pictured him and Xan perched in the cab of one of Tellforce’s 30 cwt Ford trucks.

I imagined the truck driving full tilt at a wall of yellow sand and ploughing up the face of the dune above a bow wave of dust, then rocking for an instant on the sharp crest. The monochrome immensity of the Libyan desert would stretch ahead, maybe with a tell-tale flash of sun reflected off metal or the dust plume of an enemy convoy in the distance, before the truck plunged under its own momentum down the cliff on the other side. There would always be the risk that the vehicle might tip over itself and cartwheel to the bottom.

‘We have been at Kufra,’ Xan continued.

‘We were out on a patrol alongside the Palificata and we happened to spot some unexpected enemy tank movements. Mark III Panzers. They just materialised out of nowhere, fifteen of them.’

I listened, keeping my breathing even to counter the swell of apprehension.

‘We were a half-patrol, just five trucks and a command car. We had been moving mostly at night and were about to leaguer under camouflage for the day when the forward vehicle signalled a halt. Luckily we had dune cover so we held up and watched them go by.’

Xan slid his arm from under my head and fumbled for a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his discarded shirt. He lit one and leaned back against the pillows. I waited for what seemed like a long time.

‘That was what I had to tell Boyce.’

Relevant SIGINT and HUMINT, information gleaned from enemy signals traffic or human intelligence reports from reconnaissance patrols like Xan’s were Roddy’s raw materials. It was his job to assess and collate them, then build up a picture for the central command of our section of Intelligence. The work was done as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Eventually the information was passed for encoding and onward transmission to commanders in the field.

‘Yes. Then what happened?’

Xan exhaled.

‘We watched them go by,’ he repeated. The lines drawn in his face told me that wasn’t all.

‘We waited. I started to hope that they must have missed the other half of the patrol too, even though they were in a much more exposed section than we were. Then after fifteen or twenty minutes we heard the Panzer cannons start up.’

I understood, then. Tellforce trucks and a command car would stand no chance against the armoured tanks’ high explosives and armour-piercing shells.

‘I gave the order to the men to hold off. We could have pushed forward after the tanks and done what we could, but …’

The silence uncurled between us. Doing what they could would have meant only one possible outcome.

‘The firing stopped after a few minutes and then we did move in.’

Xan described the scene in only the barest and most unemotive words. At first it was impossible to see anything through the smoke and churned-up dust. Then, as his little convoy crawled in the tank tracks, they came upon all that was left of the second half of the Tellforce patrol. Three of the trucks were on fire, the incinerated occupants spilling out of the doors or lying huddled in the sand. Most of the men were dead, the others badly wounded. The tank commanders probably assumed that they were coming up to the outposts of a more significant force. They had smashed straight through the isolated patrol and rolled on in search of bigger objectives.

The dust began to settle and the sun appeared as a pale disc above the eastern horizon. Xan left one detachment of men to dig graves for their dead companions and with Hassan and the wounded survivors he set off towards the distant first aid outpost at Kufra. Among the injured was the captain, whose legs had been blown off at the knees.

‘Burke and I were commissioned on the same day. He was a cotton trader before the war. There was nothing he didn’t know about the desert. I sat in the back of the truck with him, giving him sips of water from my bottle. He kept saying, “damn nuisance, Molyneux. Damn nuisance. I need feet in this game. Damn nuisance.” Over and over again. He died with the truck bumping and skidding over the sand. Bled to death.’

Xan stubbed out his cigarette with little jabbing movements. When I was sure that he had finished I put my arms round him and made him lie down again beside me.

‘I drove back to Cairo with two other badly wounded men who needed surgery. Somehow Hassan kept them alive until we got them to hospital here.’ It was five hundred miles. ‘Then I came straight in to see Boyce.

‘Boyce said the Mark IIIs couldn’t have been where they were. There was no Intelligence relating to them, therefore they can’t have existed. All the Axis supply movements are going the other way, up towards Tobruk. It’s quite straightforward, he kept insisting. Tapping his fingers on the folders on his desk. They know we’re going to make the big push for Cyrenaica, they’re preparing for it.

‘So in the view of GHQ, half of my patrol was wiped out by a mirage, eh?’

I had never seen Xan angry like this before. But in fact he was angry not with GHQ or Roddy Boy, but with the war itself.

I held him, trying to draw some of the rage out of him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured, but I was only trying to fill the silence with the reassurance of words. There was nothing I could say that would really mean anything. ‘It will be over one day. It will be done, and it will have been worth doing.’

He closed his eyes, then forced them open again, as if he didn’t want to contemplate what lay behind the lids.

‘Will it? Will it have been worth it?’

The dance music was still playing. That, and the clatter of my typewriter, the twin sounds of my Cairo life. I felt suddenly choked with disgust at the meaninglessness of so much death and washed with grief for the men in Xan’s patrol whom I had never even known.

‘I don’t know,’ I heard myself admit.

After a moment I realised that Xan had fallen asleep, just in a second. I hadn’t realised the depth of his exhaustion. The music stopped with a sudden squawk, as if someone had irritably pushed the arm off the record.

He slept for twenty minutes, stirred in my arms, then jerked awake again. As soon as he remembered where he was a smile of pure relief broke across his face and he looked like the Xan I knew.

‘I’ve been asleep. Bloody awful manners, darling. Will you forgive me?’

I kissed his nose, then his mouth. ‘Yes.’

‘I feel better. I’m sorry about before. What’s the time? Come on, let’s go out to dinner. How about Zazie’s?’

It was ten thirty. Most of us in Cairo kept eastern Mediterranean late hours although some of the British still insisted on dining at seven thirty, as if they were at home in Surrey. I was already scrambling into my dressing gown and heading for the bathroom. If Xan wanted to go out drinking and dancing, that was exactly what we would do.

I put on the coral-pink silk I had worn for our dinner at Hassan’s oasis camp and picked up my Indian shawl.

‘You look beautiful,’ Xan breathed. ‘And you smell like heaven.’

Sarah was sitting in a corner of one of the sofas in the living room. She was wearing an old cashmere cardigan, badly pilled under the arms and down the sides, and there was a blanket drawn over her knees as if it were cold.

She smiled determinedly at us. ‘Hello, you two. Where are you off to?’

‘We thought we’d try Zazie’s.’

I glanced quickly at Xan. ‘Sare, why don’t you come with us? It’ll be fun.’

‘Yes, come with us,’ he said warmly.

She lifted one hand and twisted the strand of pearls she always wore.

‘Thanks, that’s sweet of you. I won’t, not tonight. I still feel a bit rotten.’

Her cheeks looked hollow and the rusty-looking dry ends of her hair spiked round her face.

‘Are you sure?’

‘‘Course. And I’ve already eaten. Mamdooh made me boiled eggs and soldiers.’

‘Ah.’ We smiled at each other, without needing to acknowledge that eggs in Egypt were small and had an odd, musty flavour.

‘Xan, you’re just back?’

Just back was what we all said. As if the men had strolled into a Cairo drawing room from a day’s hunting or golf.

‘Yes.’

‘The news is good, isn’t it? General Auchinleck’s going to relieve Tobruk and take back Cyrenaica. Any day now, that’s what I hear.’

Cairo was full of rumours of an imminent Allied attack under the new C.-in-C. Middle East. The besieged garrison at Tobruk would certainly be relieved. Sarah gazed imploringly at Xan, her face full of longing for a victory, for fresh news, or just for a change that would help her out of the heat and the social round and her stubborn illness. I wondered where all the eager men were who had swarmed round her when she was well.

‘Maybe,’ Xan said.

‘Are you certain you won’t come?’ I repeated.

Sarah nodded quickly, biting her lip. ‘Have a good time.’

In the hallway, on the silver salver that stood on top of a hideous carved wood and inlay-work chest, I saw a thin blue airmail letter addressed to me in my mother’s handwriting. I took it quickly and folded it into my bag to read later. Xan found a taxi to take us to Zazie’s.

The nightclub was packed, as it always was. Xan had to slip several notes into the palm of the maître d’ to secure us a table. We chose our food from the elaborate menu that came in a leather folder complete with silk tassels, and Xan ordered a bottle of champagne. French champagne was getting scarce in Cairo now, and it was brought to the table in a silver ice bucket and served with a considerable flourish. We lifted our glasses to each other in a toast that contained no words, only wishes. A pianist had been playing through the din of the club, but now he crashed out a final chord and the lights dimmed even further.

A single spot came up on the stage in the corner of the room, the dusty red velvet curtains parted and the floor show belly-dancer shimmered between them. Everyone clapped and whistled as she began a slow gyration that set her sequins flashing. The lower half of her face was veiled but her enormous almond-shaped eyes were instantly recognisable, as were the lustrous expanses of dark honey-coloured skin revealed by her diaphanous chiffon costume. Elvira Mursi was the most famous dancer in the city. She kept her real identity secret but there was a rumour that she had been born in Croydon, and was as English as Sarah Walker-Wilson.

Xan watched the dance, occasionally turning to me with a flash of amusement. When the champagne was finished we started drinking whisky. He was determined to enjoy the evening to the utmost. He clapped Elvira to the last rippling bow, then kept up a flow of talk that made me laugh so much that I forgot the day. That was his intention for both of us.

By 1 a.m. the club was a hot, smoky mass of people who had come in from dinners and other more sedate parties. Xan and I shuffled in the crowd packed onto the tiny dance floor. I spotted Sandy Allardyce at a table with a handsome much older woman. She fitted a cigarette into a long holder and as he lit it for her her heavily ringed fingers rested on the sleeve of his coat.

‘Who is that with Sandy?’ I murmured in Xan’s ear.

‘Haven’t you met her? That’s Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch. She is Swiss, or claims to be. A widow. Her husband was in armaments, I believe.’

‘What does she do in Cairo?’

‘Oh, she lives here. She has a lovely house in the old city, right beside the al-Azhar mosque.’

‘And what is she doing with Sandy?’

Xan grinned.

There was a small commotion in the crowd at my shoulder and a girl’s loud laughter. I turned in Xan’s arms and saw Betty Hopwood. She had fallen over and was now being helped to her feet by her partner, who was one of Jessie’s fellow Cherry Pickers. Betty caught sight of me, tottered back to the more or less vertical on her high heels and waved extravagantly.

‘Cooeee, Iris. Hello, Xan. Come and join us.’

Betty was an immensely tall South African girl with cotton-ball white-blonde hair. She was an ambulance driver with the Motorised Transport Corps. After these women drivers had worked five consecutive days of twenty-four-hour shifts meeting ambulance trains and transporting wounded men, they were entitled to one precious day off. And all they wanted on that day, after they had slept and been to the hairdresser’s, was to cram in as much fun as possible. Xan and I found ourselves being hustled to Betty’s table where our glasses were refilled with whisky. The Cherry Picker Major winked at Xan.

‘What a scream,’ Betty yelled at me. ‘Look at my dress.’

She was wearing a tight sheath of silver lamé and she swivelled to show me the back of it where a long rent in the fabric was roughly fastened with safety pins. The MTC girls were required to live in barracks, and as late passes were impossible to obtain they were all experts at breaking and entering.

‘I hitched my frock up under my khaki, but the barbed wire came down so low that I had to take off my coat to squirm underneath and then rrrrip!’

Betty found this so funny that we all dissolved into laughter in sympathy with her. Another bottle of local whisky materialised on the table. While the men were talking Betty leaned over and rested a hot hand on my arm. ‘He’s rather heaven, isn’t he?’

I looked in slight surprise at the Major, but Betty nudged me sharply.

‘No, I mean your Captain Molyneux.’

‘Yes, he is,’ was all I could think of to say.

Those endless hot, scented Cairo nights. The men never wanted the parties to end. For them, going to sleep just meant that the desert was one day closer. Betty and I and all the women we knew had learned to keep dancing and laughing long past the moment when we should have dropped with exhaustion.

At 2 a.m., when we emerged from Zazie’s, the night air was full of the reedy smell of the Nile. Taxi and caleche drivers jostled for a fare. My head spun and I leaned on Xan’s arm, watching the reflections of lights swaying in the black water. We were now part of a big, laughing group of people that contained Sandy Allardyce and his widowed lady, and it soon became apparent that we were heading back to the widow’s house to continue the party. Betty and the Major and Xan and I squeezed up in the back of a taxi and we sped through the dark streets. When we stepped out again I looked up and saw three fine minarets like black needles against the stars.

We streamed up some worn stone steps, following behind Sandy and Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch. An anonymous door in a blank wall swung open and an immense Nubian in a snow-white galabiyeh with a royal-blue sash bowed to us as we marched in.

Xan had been right, the house was beautiful.

Most of the rich people’s houses I had visited in Cairo belonged to people like Faria’s family, or to British and French hostesses like Lady Gibson. They tended either to be decorated with heavy, dark family antiques, or to be theatrically done up in the modern style with white carpets and grand pianos and too much Venetian glass. But Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch’s house was left to speak for itself.

It was very old. The windows were set in deep embrasures that revealed the thickness of the walls, and the stone floors were gently hollowed by centuries of slippered footfalls. We were shown by bowing servants into a grand double-height hall, panelled in wood. Between the arched roof beams, the ceiling was painted dark blue with silver and gold suns and moons and signs of the Zodiac scattered across it. A huge wrought-metal and crimson glass lamp in the Moorish style hung on chains from the central boss of the roof. Way above our heads a gallery circled the upper part of the hall, with exquisitely carved and pierced hinged wooden screens that would have shielded the women of the household from the eyes of male visitors. The room was simply furnished with low carved tables and divans piled with kelims and embroidered velvet cushions.

The party spread itself out and settled on the cushions, with Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch sitting in a slightly higher chair at the end of the room. Someone found a gramophone behind a door in the panelling and put on a recording of a plaintive Arabic love song that rose and fell as a background to the talk and laughter. The servants brought in silver pots of mint tea and little brass cylinders of Turkish coffee, and set them out beside crystal decanters of whisky and brandy.

Sandy led me across to Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch and formally introduced me.

‘How do you do, Miss Black?’

She held out her hand for me to shake, the diamond and sapphire rings cold and sharp against my fingers. In perfect English with a heavy Swiss-German accent she told me that I was very welcome and I must make myself at home in her house.

Her eyes were hooded, but her gaze was very sharp and quick. I didn’t think Sandy’s friend missed much.

I thanked her and went back to my seat next to Xan.

After a while, I wandered out of the room in search of a bathroom. None of the servants was in sight so I chose a likely doorway, but found that it led out into a little loggia that gave in turn onto a courtyard garden. There was a scent of flowers and damp earth, and the sound of trickling water. By the light from the open doorway behind me I could just see the turquoise and emerald tiles lining the walls. Above was a quadrilateral of dark velvet sky, and the triple towers of the mosque. It was the most perfect and peaceful little garden I had ever seen.

I stood there, admiring and – yes – coveting it, until one of the servants coughed discreetly behind me and asked in Arabic if I was in need of anything. I murmured my request and was shown the way.

When I returned to the party, cards had been brought out. Xan and I were commanded to make up a four for bridge with Sandy and our hostess.

My head was swimming with champagne followed by too much whisky, and I wanted to go to bed with Xan much more than I wanted to play any card game, let alone bridge. As we played I answered gently probing questions about what I did, who I was acquainted with in Cairo. I didn’t distinguish myself either in the conversation or at cards, and Sandy and Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch won ten shillings from us. Judging by the final glance that the widow gave me from under her heavy eyelids, I had been weighed up and dismissed.

It was four in the morning when the Nubian major-domo ushered Xan and me out into the grey pre-dawn. I didn’t think about the time; I just wanted to get home again to the apartment and lie down with my lover.

Xan slept for just an hour, then slid away from me. ‘Go back to sleep. I’ll telephone you later,’ he whispered.

At seven thirty I was making myself a cup of tea and swallowing aspirin for my headache when Faria appeared in her cream silk robe, grimacing at the earliness of the hour. She did a little voluntary work for her mother, who with two other Cairo society ladies ran a charitable club for servicemen. This must have been one of Faria’s mornings for buttering toast or distributing tickets for the ENSA concert. She took the aspirin bottle out of my hand and shook two pills into her mouth, but she wasn’t too exhausted to ask questions about where I had been the night before.

I told her and she raised her eyebrows.

‘What did you think of Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch?’

‘Formidable.’

‘There is a rumour that she is a German spy.’

‘Why is Sandy running around with her?’

Faria gave me a look. ‘He is a British spy. Didn’t you know that?’

In spite of our headaches we both laughed. The idea of the two of them, an incongruous couple locked in a steely pas de deux of espionage and counter-espionage over cocktails and card tables, was irresistibly funny.

On my way out of the flat I met Sarah. She had a small suitcase in her hand and she told me that she was going to Beirut for the weekend. I said that I was pleased she was feeling better, ordered her to have a good time and kissed her goodbye. Then I walked to work with the hundreds of soldiers and civilians heading to their desks in GHQ.

It was eleven o’clock before I remembered my mother’s letter.

I had just made Roddy Boy a cup of tea and taken it in to him with two Huntley & Palmers custard creams placed in the saucer, which was exactly what he required every morning. I swallowed another aspirin with my own tea, then carefully slit open the thin folder.

My dear Iris,

I hope so much that you are well and that the heat has not been too disagreeable. By the time this reaches you there should be some relief from it.

During all my father’s Middle Eastern and African postings my mother had suffered badly from the heat. She had thin, pale skin lightly dusted with tiny freckles and hair the colour of unripened apricots, and she lived in huge hats and layers of muslin veiling and linen drapes. Then in the mid thirties they were posted to Finland, and in the middle of the first harsh winter there she developed bronchial pneumonia and nearly died. The first I heard of it was when my housemistress at school called me into her study and told me that it had been touch and go, but the doctors were now almost certain that she would pull through.

I begged them to let me go straight to Helsinki but everyone including my father declared that would not be necessary, and so it had turned out.

After that, though, my mother’s health was always fragile.

There is so little news to tell you, darling. I had a nasty cold that lingered stupidly on and on, but now I am quite well and I have been doing a little work in the garden. The day lilies were quite heavenly this year, I so wish you could have seen them.

There followed some details about our cats, and the neighbours, then about the shortages.

No eggs or sugar, and butter and meat hardly exist. Your father and I don’t find it so bad but it is very hard for young families like Evie’s.

Evie was the much younger wife of my father’s younger brother, who was away on active service. She had three children under six and had brought them down to live in a little house in the same village as my parents.

Michael and Eleanor are still in London, I don’t know how on earth they manage but of course Michael’s job keeps him there. Every night the bombs, and the blackout all the time, and everyone so careworn and anxious and exhausted.

Eleanor was my mother’s oldest friend and her husband was something important in the Ministry of Supply. My mother was not an ambitious letter writer and didn’t go in either for elaborate descriptions or – of course not – complaints, but these sparse words conjured up for me a London disfigured with smoke and rubble, trembling under the Blitz and yet still populated by determined people who were quietly and bravely doing their best. In Cairo, too much rich food and drink was taken for granted, we danced in frocks run up by local dressmakers and congratulated ourselves on being thrifty, and bought our silk stockings over the counter in Cicurel’s. This contrast made me feel my champagne headache even more sharply.

My mother signed off, as she always did,

God bless, darling. From your loving Ma

I checked the date before I refolded the blue paper. The letter had been written six weeks earlier and had come by ship the long way, round the Cape and through the Suez Canal to Port Said, the same way that I had travelled out to Cairo myself more than six months ago. I finished my tea and biscuits, and resumed typing.

It was a long day. When I emerged at eight o’clock there was the usual crowd of boyfriends and hopefuls waiting to meet their girls. To my delight, Xan’s black head was among them. I ran and he caught me in his arms and whirled me off the ground.

‘Come with me?’ he begged, after we had kissed.

I asked where, expecting that he would say Shepheard’s or another bar for a cocktail before I went home to change for dinner. But he tucked my hand under his arm and led me to the car, the same one in which Hassan had driven us out to Giza. He handed me into the passenger seat.

As we drove out into Qasr el Aini, Xan said, ‘I’m going to look in at the Scottish Hospital to see one of the men I brought in yesterday. Is that all right?’

‘Of course it is.’

The Scottish Military was just one of the places where wounded men were taken when the hospital trains and ambulance convoys finally reached Cairo. Xan parked the car and ran up the steps, and I hurried behind him. The hallways and stairwells were crowded with soldiers, bandaged and on crutches or in wheelchairs, and the wards we passed were crammed with long rows of beds. On the first floor we found a ward where most of the occupants lay prone, what was visible of their faces like sections of pale carved masks, as motionless as if they were already dead.

Xan stopped beside a bed in the middle of a row, then leaned over the man who lay in it. ‘Hullo, old chap. You look quite a bit better than you did this morning,’ I heard him say.

There was no answer. There could hardly have been, because the lower half of the soldier’s face and his neck were a white carapace of dressings. A tube led from where his mouth would have been. Xan sat down on the edge of the bed and talked in his ordinary voice, about how another soldier called Ridley had made it too, and how there was a cinema just down the road from the hospital that was air-conditioned, cool as a winter morning Xan said, with padded seats, and they would go and see a picture, the three of them, and have a gallon of iced beer afterwards.

I don’t know if the soldier understood or even heard him, because he gave no sign. Xan just went on talking.

I looked at the chipped cream paint on the metal-framed bed, and the floor that was made of mottled stone with pink and brown slabs in it like a slice of veal-and-ham pie. There was a strong, sweetish smell in the ward with a whiff of suppuration in it. At the far end of the line of beds a man began moaning, a sound that rose and fell, and seemed to drown out the rattle of metal trolleys and the swish of footsteps.

Sweat broke coldly on my forehead. It occurred to me that I was going to faint, or maybe to vomit.

I walked quickly away, heading down the ward without any idea where. I passed several nurses who were busy with dressings trays, and another who was sitting at a man’s bedside. She was holding a cigarette to his ragged mouth and he was inhaling as if the smoke were life itself. I pushed blindly through a pair of swing doors into a sluice room, past a row of sinks and into a lavatory cubicle.

When I came out again, wiping my face with my handkerchief, the cigarette nurse was there rinsing out a kidney bowl at one of the sinks. Her cuffed sleeves revealed pale arms and reddened hands with prominent wrist bones.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Thank you.’ What I felt now was shame for having responded like a swooning Victorian maiden to the spectacle of other people’s suffering.

The nurse briskly set down her metal bowl, took a glass out of a cupboard and poured water from a jug. She handed the glass to me and I sipped carefully from it.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said pointlessly. I meant that I was sorry for taking up her attention when there were so many demands beyond the swing doors.

To my surprise she smiled.

‘It can take people that way at first. You get used to it, though.’ Her voice was attractive, with a distinct Scottish burr. She was a trained nurse, not a VAD like some of my friends, with a crested badge to prove it pinned on her apron next to her watch. ‘Do you want to sit down for a bit? Your friend’s still talking to Corporal Noake.’

The sluice room was relatively cool. Water groaned in the pipes and dripped from the faucets.

‘I’m fine. I will be, in a minute.’

‘I’ve seen you around town,’ the nurse said. She was taking packages of dressings out of a box and talking to me over her shoulder.

‘Me? How come?’

She laughed. ‘You’re the kind of person people do notice.’

I couldn’t remember having seen the nurse at the Gezira Club or Groppi’s, or dancing at Zazie’s. Her starched, folded cap came down low over her forehead and hid her hair.

She held out her hand, the other still clutching a pack of bandages.

‘I’m Ruth Macnamara.’

‘Iris Black.’

We shook.

‘If you’re sure you’re all right, I’d better get back to work. Sister’s got a down on me. See you around, eh?’

‘Yes,’ I said to her departing back. ‘I hope so.’

I walked slowly back up the ward. Xan was still talking to his corporal. I went round to the other side of the bed and looked down into the soldier’s eyes.

‘Hullo, there. I’m Iris, Xan’s friend.’

I didn’t know how much was left of the lower part of his face but the man himself was still there. His eyes flickered, moved, then fixed on mine. Just perceptibly, he nodded. I took his hand and sandwiched it between my two and he clung to me with his eyes.

After a minute, Xan said easily, ‘We’ll be getting along now, Noake. You get some sleep. I’ll look in again tomorrow, if they haven’t packed us off by then.’

We left him among the other carved men.

When we reached the car again we sat and lit cigarettes and stared out at the darkening sky.

‘Will you really be going tomorrow?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know for sure. It won’t be long, though. There’s the big push coming.’

We all knew that. The Germans and Italians knew it too, and were waiting.

‘What happened to Corporal Noake, exactly?’

‘He was shot in the neck and jaw. His lower jawbone was partly blown away.’

‘Poor man.’

‘He was luckier than Reggie Burke,’ Xan said grimly.

‘Yes.’

We finished our cigarettes and the last of the daylight drained out of the western horizon as if the desert sand were drinking it up.

‘Where would you like to have dinner?’

I didn’t want food, or whisky or dancing. I wanted Xan, and Xan safe, and the end of the war.

‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

He leaned forward at once to the ignition and we drove back through the Cairo streets to Garden City.