Читать книгу Iris and Ruby - Rosie Thomas - Страница 9

When I replace the receiver I see that my hands are shaking.

I return to the other room where the child is waiting for me.

‘What did she say?’ she asks.

The anxiety in her round face tells me how much she does not want to be packed off back to England. I sit down to collect my thoughts and she fidgets with impatience, twisting her legs and picking at the stud in her nose.

I can give her the gist of my conversation with Lesley, but there is so much else that I would find harder to put into words.

‘Leave your nose alone or you will set up an infection. Your mother has been worried about you. I told her that I thought you would be safe enough here.’

At once, the anxious expression breaks up into a smile that contains glee and satisfaction and a measure of triumph.

I am beginning to understand that Ruby’s innocence is shot through with calculation. Maybe the innocence itself is calculated. And I realise that the notion interests me more than anything has done for quite a long time.

‘So I can stay for a bit?’

Our separate conversations with Lesley have had a further curious effect, of course. That she is in opposition to both of us makes partial allies out of Ruby and me.

‘I would like a drink. A proper drink, I mean. Will you call Mamdooh?’ I say.

I am stalling for time because with part of myself I fear the loss of privacy that having her here will inevitably mean. I want to be alone to concentrate on the past, in order to hold on to it for as long as I can. Yet maybe the offer of help that Ruby made is less naïve than it sounded; maybe there is something in her idea.

Wearing his disapproval like an extra robe, Mamdooh brings in a tray with two glasses, a jug of water and a decanter with a couple of fingers of whisky in the bottom. I have no idea when I last drank Scotch.

‘Mum-reese, you will have plenty water with this?’

‘No, thank you, I’ll take it neat. And a decent measure, please. That’s better.’

Ruby accepts her glass with small enthusiasm. ‘I don’t really like whisky.’

‘What do you drink?’

‘Depends. Vodka and Red Bull?’

‘What’s that? I’m sure it’s disgusting. I don’t have anything of the kind anyway, so you’ll have to make do with Scotch.’

We both laugh and Mamdooh peers at us in surprise.

When we are alone again she draws up a stool and sits close to my chair. The sun has set, the street outside is noisy once again with shouts and music as people prepare the iftar. It is already twenty-four hours since Ruby arrived.

As I taste my drink – rolling the unaccustomed spirit in my mouth – I am thinking about Lesley.

It is some time since I have spoken to my daughter, I can’t remember how long exactly, but it must be months. Whenever we do talk there are always polite words that fail to build a bridge. And the space between us, that has always been there. From the very beginning.

Lesley was born in the middle of a grey, sad English winter. My pregnancy had been unplanned, my husband and I hastily bought a house to be a home for our unexpected family. From the windows there were views of sodden fields, and ponds mirroring the weeping skies. In this house, the baby and I spent long days alone together while my husband was working in the City.

Lesley cried unceasingly, for no reason that I could discern. I had completed my medical training by that time, and raw as I was as a doctor I knew for certain that she was not ill or even failing to thrive. I couldn’t feed her myself, although I persevered for almost a month, but she accepted a bottle. She gained weight and passed the developmental milestones at the right times, but she was never a placid or contented baby.

I don’t deny the probability that she absorbed my unhappiness and reflected it back at me. I tried to hold the infant close, tried to soothe her yelling by rocking her in my arms as I paced through the silent house, but she would not be pacified. Her tiny body went rigid and her screams were like scalpel blades slitting my skin. When Gordon came home he would take her from me and she would whimper and nuzzle and then fall asleep, exhausted. The silence came like a blessing.

As soon as I could, I found a nurse for her and took a job at the local hospital.

And from there we have gone on.

‘Well?’ Ruby demands. ‘Can I stay?’

I turn my glass, looking at the dimples of light trapped within it.

‘Can I?’ she repeats.

‘What did your mother say to you?’

An exasperated sigh and a shrug. ‘She said she was about to call the police and report me missing. She said I am irresponsible, and thoughtless, and if I can’t think of her I could perhaps consider my little brother, who was worried sick about me. I don’t think he was, by the way. Worrying about people’s so not Ed’s thing. She said I should go home and behave better and get a job and dah dahdah, be a different person. Get a personality transplant maybe. I’ve heard it all before, about five zillion times.’

‘She was worried,’ I repeat.

I’m on unsafe ground here, caught between what I know I ought to say and what I feel. Which is recognition and a certain amount of sympathy.

We look at each other over our whisky glasses.

‘You see, the trouble is that I’m crap at everything,’ Ruby quietly says. ‘At least, all the things that Lesley and Andrew rate. Not that I’d admit that to very many people, actually.’

‘I don’t think you are,’ I tell her.

‘Thanks.’ Her tone is dismissive but her eyes implore me.

‘All right,’ I say slowly, because it is dawning on me that I do rather want her to stay. At least, I don’t want her to go right now. It’s not that I am lonely, but I would like to hear her talk some more. ‘I will telephone Lesley again, and ask if you may have her permission to spend a few days with me.’

She hugs her knees and rocks on the stool. ‘Fantastic.’ She grins.

I finish my whisky first. My hands are steady now.

Lesley answers the telephone. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s Iris,’ I repeat.

‘Mummy, tell me what’s really going on?’

I never felt comfortable with mummy; it was Lesley who always insisted on it.

Into the space I say careful sentences about it being a pleasure to meet Ruby, how Lesley would be doing a favour to me if she were to allow her to stay for a few days in Cairo. Now that she’s here, I say, we might as well turn it to advantage. The Egyptian Museum. An outing to the Pyramids at Giza. Maybe even further afield, ancient history, archaeology. And so on.

Although nowadays I hardly leave the house, I find myself almost believing that Ruby and I will make these excursions together.

‘If you agree, that is, Lesley. You and …’

Her husband; second husband, not Ruby’s father. I have met this one two or three times but I find that I can remember nothing about him, not even his name. It’s impossible to work out whether it is my forgetfulness that is to blame, or his unmemorableness.

‘Mummy, what are you laughing at?’

‘I’m not laughing.’

She sounds uncertain. ‘Are you sure it won’t be too much for you, having Ruby there?’

‘I don’t think so. If it turns out to be, I promise I’ll say so.’

‘Well … it’s kind of you to do this for her. Thank you. After she’s just turned up like that, uninvited. Andrew and I had no idea, one minute she was here and the next she’d vanished. It never occurred to me … she bought an air ticket, just like that, took her passport …’

‘Enterprising of her. But she’s not a baby, is she? Young people skip around all over the world these days. And as I said, she’ll come to no harm here. Boredom will set in before too long and then you’ll have her home again.’

‘I expect so. We’ll see.’ I can hear that Lesley badly wants Ruby to go home, but she knows better than to insist on it. I find myself admiring her adroitness. ‘Thanks again for taking her in.’

‘What else would I have done?’

‘I don’t know, Mummy.’

The bridge of careful words begins to creak and sway, and we both step hastily backwards.

‘I’ll make sure she behaves herself,’ I say.

‘I’ll call again tomorrow,’ Lesley insists.

We quickly end the conversation. Now, and for the next few days, I am responsible for Ruby. When I return to the other room she is holding up the bottle that Mamdooh left on the tray.

‘Top-up?’ she asks.

Lesley looked around the quiet, lamplit room. Andrew was working on his laptop, Ed was upstairs in his bedroom.

‘She said Ruby’s not a baby anymore.’

‘Quite right.’

She wanted to explain to him something about how, in one corner of her mother’s heart, Ruby would always be an infant. That was how mothers functioned. She believed, too, that in some recess deep within themselves, daughters also yearned for childhood again.

But Andrew would not be interested in her theories about mother love. He might put his work aside to discuss the new electronic chart plotter to be installed in his boat, but not much else.

‘Are we going down to the Hamble at the weekend?’ she asked.

‘Depends on whether I get this report finished.’

Lesley put down her unopened book and wandered into the kitchen. She polished two water glasses that had been left on the sink drainer and put them away in the glassfronted cupboard. She checked the fridge to make sure there was enough juice and milk for breakfast, and glanced at Ed’s homework diary pinned to the noticeboard. The kitchen was a warm, ordered space which she had planned and laid out in every detail.

Yet she felt superfluous in it.

She wondered where Iris and Ruby were sitting now, trying to imagine the room and its decoration. It took on a Moroccan flavour, inevitably. Lesley had never been to Cairo, but in the 1970s she had run a business that imported fabrics and furniture from North Africa, mostly from Marrakesh. In those days, however, Iris had been working elsewhere and when the two of them met it was during Iris’s brief visits to England, or once or twice elsewhere in Europe. Iris travelled wherever and whenever she could, usually alone, usually with the minimum of luggage and complete disregard for her own comfort. She didn’t mind sleeping on airport benches and riding in the backs of trucks. Living as she did, in African villages where she provided basic medical care for the poorest women and children, being comfortable didn’t have as many complicated factors as it did for most people.

Lesley remembered how they had once met up in a hotel in Rome. The doorman had looked askance at Iris when she walked into the lobby. Her clothes were not dirty, but they were worn and unmatching. She carried a couple of African woven bags, her face was bare and her feet were splayed in flat leather sandals. She walked straight across the marble floor to where Lesley was waiting, and the smartly dressed Italian crowd fell back to make way for her. Nobody knew who she was, but everyone knew she was somebody.

And it was Lesley, in her Armani and Ferragamo, who felt overdressed.

On a whim, she had ordered champagne cocktails for them both. Iris seized and drank hers with such delight (‘how heavenly! Oh, what a taste of the lovely wicked world’) that Lesley suddenly understood why her mother chose a life in which a drink in a hotel bar could deliver so much pleasure.

Of course, her imagined Moroccan-style interior was probably much too elaborate and over-designed to come anywhere close to reality. Iris’s actual house would be bare, verging on uncomfortable.

Now Ruby was there with her. They had taken a distinct liking to each other, the two of them. Lesley had understood that from the telephone conversations, although no one had mentioned it.

What were they talking about? What were they telling each other?

Jealousy fluttered in her, and she did her best to ignore it.

The quiet of her own house was oppressive. It was a long time since she had spoken to Ruby’s father, Lesley realised. She resolved to give him a call.

Iris and Ruby ate dinner together, in a small room through an archway off the double-height hall. Auntie rubbed a grey veil of dust off the table and Mamdooh lit a pair of tall candles, so Ruby understood that this was an occasion. As she gazed upwards into the dim, cobwebbed heights Iris briefly explained to her that the celebration hall was where important male guests would have been entertained. The musicians would have taken their places on the dais at the end and there might also have been a belly-dancer. The women of the household would have watched the party from the upper gallery, hidden from the men’s view behind the pierced screens.

‘Why?’

Iris frowned. ‘Do you know nothing about Islamic culture?’

‘Not really.’

‘The women occupy the haramlek, a part of the house reserved for them, where men may enter only by invitation. There is a separate staircase, a whole suite of rooms including the one where you sleep. And the other half, where the men may move freely, where visitors come, is the salamlek. Respectable women and men do not mingle as they do in the West.’

Ruby wondered, is she talking about then – the past – or today?

She listened, and ate hungrily. The meal was a simple affair of flat bread and spiced beans cooked with tomatoes and onions, of which Iris hardly touched anything. Ruby noted that her skin was stretched like paper tissue over her wrists, with tea-coloured stains spilt all over the knobs and cords of her hands. She wore no rings.

Mamdooh and Auntie came softly back to remove the remains of the meal.

‘Ya, Mamdooh, Auntie. We have decided that Ruby will be staying here with us for a few days, before she goes back to her mother in England. We must make her welcome to Cairo.’

Mamdooh’s expression did not change as he nodded his head, but Auntie’s walnut face cracked into a smile that revealed inches of bare gum and a few isolated teeth.

After the shuffle of their slippers had died away Ruby sighed. ‘Mamdooh’s got a problem with me, hasn’t he?’

Iris folded her napkin and slipped it into a worn silver ring. Ruby hastily uncrumpled hers and copied her.

‘He is set in his ways, that’s all. We both are. Do you know, when I was about your age, Mamdooh’s father was our house suffragi? He looked after us. Sarah, Faria and me. The three flowers of Garden City. I remember our Mamdooh when he was a plump little boy who followed his father to work. So we have known each other for sixty years.’

Ruby waited for more, but Iris seemed to have lost herself. At last she shook her head.

‘We are set in our ways. It will do us good to have a change in our routine. Give me your arm, please. I think I will go to bed now.’

With Iris leaning on her, Ruby walked slowly through the dim rooms to the haramlek staircase. Iris was explaining that during Ramadan the faithful did not eat or drink between sun-up and sunset, and it was tiring for the old people. If Ruby wouldn’t mind helping her to bed, they could eat their meal and have an evening’s rest.

‘Sure,’ Ruby agreed.

In Iris’s bedroom she drew the white curtains and turned down the covers. She helped her grandmother to take off the striped robe and the old-fashioned camisole beneath. The creased-paper skin of her shoulders and upper arms was blotted with the same pale stains as her hands and her shoulder blades protruded sharply, like folded wings. She was as fragile as a child but at the same time there was a lack of concern in her, a disregard for her body that impressed Ruby with its simple strength. Ruby herself was prudishly modest. She hated exposing more than a calculated and obvious few inches of her own flesh. Doctors’ visits were torture, even sex was less of a major essential than it was cracked up to be. That was one of the reasons why she liked Jas. He was just as happy to lie down and hug and whisper. Without being like … like two dogs behind a wheelie bin.

They had once seen a pair of dogs at it, and although they had laughed Ruby had been disgusted.

‘Thank you,’ Iris said coolly once she was in bed. It was only eight o’clock. Ruby lingered, not knowing what she was going to do with herself for the rest of the evening. Her glance fell on the framed photograph on the bedside table. A young woman, certainly Iris herself, stood with a tall man in an army shirt. Her back curved against him, his arm circled her waist. Their bodies seemed to fit one against the other, like a carving or a sculpture. She was just going to ask about him when she saw Iris’s face and the surprising fierce flash of warning in it. She took a step away from the bedside.

‘You can turn out the light by the door,’ Iris told her.

Ruby mumbled goodnight.

In her own bedroom she knelt at the window and pressed her face to the glass. Down in the darkness she thought she saw a figure looking up, but she didn’t like the idea of anyone being able to see into her room and moved hastily aside. She sat down on the edge of the bed instead and took stock.

The upside was that she had got away, from home and Lesley and Andrew, and from London and Will and all that, and from thinking about Jas all the time. She could stay here and chill out and there would be nobody to ask her every five minutes what her plans were. She wouldn’t have to pretend that she was fine about not having any.

The downside was being here.

The house was intriguing, in its way, but it was also quite creepy. It was weird to be on her own with just three old people: one who didn’t like her, one who didn’t seem to speak a word of English, and her disconcerting grandmother who must be kept happy or she’d get sent home.

The city outside was like nowhere she’d ever been. She’d go out and see more of it when she’d consolidated herself in the house, but at this minute its crowds and its strangeness were intimidating.

Tomorrow, she told herself. It’ll feel different tomorrow.

Ruby picked absently at the piercing in her nose that was itching and weeping a little. To flatten a wave of loneliness, she went out and prowled along the corridor and looked down into the hallway through the screens that protected the haramlek. There was nothing to see except that in a bookcase against the opposite wall there was a row of books. She lifted them out one by one. They were about history and they smelled musty.

After a while she went back to her room and took out her Walkman. She found the CD that Nafouz had brought back, the one that Jas had made for her, put in her earphones and lay down on the bed.

I lie still, watching the various textures of the darkness. If I turn my head, I can just see the glint of reflected moonlight on the corner of the silver picture frame.

On the evening of his first telephone call, I scrambled to finish dressing for dinner before he arrived to pick me up. The dress was one I had had in London before the war, dark coral-pink silk with a full skirt and a low bodice. I had just enough time to pin up my hair and paint my mouth before the doorbell clanged. I looked at myself in the dressing-table mirror as Mamdooh went to answer it. My eyes looked wide and startled.

The most important time in my life was about to begin. I knew that, even if I didn’t know anything else.

Mamdooh had shown him into the dimly lit drawing room. Xan was standing with one hand on the back of a sofa, staring through the part-open shutters into the fading sunlight. He was wearing uniform, his face was deeply sunburned. He turned round when he heard me come in.

He said, ‘I came as soon as I could.’

‘I’m glad.’

Then he took my hand and led me to the window so we could see each other’s faces. I remember a Cairo sunset, a grey-green sky fading into apricot barred with indigo and gold. My heart was banging like a drum. There was a second’s silence when everything in the world seemed to stop and wait. Xan very slowly lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed it.

As I looked at him his eyebrows drew up into amused peaks. ‘Where shall we begin, Miss Black?’

I had thought I remembered everything, every single thing about him, but the fun in him struck me afresh.

I pretended to consider. ‘Let’s think. You have to ask me whether I would prefer dinner at Le Petit Coin de France or Fleurent’s. Um … then you say something about maybe looking in afterwards at the Kit Kat Club.’

‘Of course. Out in the desert, one forgets these essentials.’

‘So we might have a drink here first, while I try to make up my mind. I’ll probably decide to change my outfit at least once before we leave.’

Xan grinned. ‘I am at your service.’

I mixed gin and tonics from the tray Mamdooh always left ready for the three of us and our dates. We sat down together on the sofa and I raised my glass.

‘To wherever it is you have been, and to having come back.’

His face clouded for a moment and he took a long swallow of the gin.

‘I will tell you about it, but not this evening. Do you mind?’

‘No, don’t let’s talk about the war this evening.’

I knew nothing, then, about what he had seen or had to do, but even in my naïveté I understood that what Xan needed tonight was to forget, to be made to laugh, to put down the weight of wartime.

I said, ‘So. What will happen is that by the time I am dressed, and have decided on Fleurent’s, and we have got there in a taxi, they will have given our table away to a brigadier. Of course it’s now the only place at which I can bear to think of eating, but in any case there will be at least two tables packed with people we know, and so we will squeeze up with them. There will be a lot of laughing and even more drinking, and then we will all decide that we are having so much fun that we must go on somewhere else. We will pile into taxis with all sorts of people, losing half of the party and joining up with half of another, and in the confusion you will be in the taxi behind. When we arrive at wherever it is we are going we will be unable to find each other for at least an hour. By which time I shall be very tired and will probably insist on being taken straight home as soon as we do stumble across each other.’

Xan laughed. ‘You lead a rackety life, Miss Black. It’s not a very convincing plan of action in any case. I shall not let you get into a taxi without me, and I will not let you out of my sight for one minute, let alone a whole hour. And we are not going to Fleurent’s, or anywhere near the bloody Kit Kat Club. Why should I share you with every soldier in Cairo?’

‘Then where are we going?’

He took the glass out of my hand and set it on the red and black marble table top. ‘Wait and see.’

Mamdooh brought my Indian shawl and wished us a very good evening as we went out together.

The sky was almost dark, a heavy velvet blue with the first stars showing. I stood on the familiar Garden City street, under the thick canopy of dusty rubber leaves, and let Xan lead me. There was a car waiting a few steps away, with a driver who got out quickly and opened the door for us. He was tall and hawk-faced, dressed in Western clothes but still looking like one of the Bedouin tribesmen who lived in the desert.

‘This is my friend Hassan,’ Xan said quietly.

‘Good evening, Hassan.’

The man nodded at me.

We sat in the back of the car and I watched the shuttered streets gliding by. Excitement and anticipation chased through me and I found that I had to remind myself to breathe. But it was easy to be with Xan; he didn’t talk for the sake of it and he didn’t make me feel that I should chatter and gossip in an attempt to be entertaining.

‘I live there,’ Xan said, pointing up at some balconied windows.

I craned my neck in an effort to see more. ‘Alone?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘With some other men. You never know quite who’s going to be there. When someone comes back from a picnic in the desert it’s a matter of taking a look around to see if there’s a bed that looks more or less unoccupied. You dump your kitbag and hope for the best. It’s pretty empty at the moment, actually. Not all that surprising, if you know what I mean.’

I knew what he meant by a picnic. We were both quiet as we thought about the recent Allied defeats in Crete and Greece as well as Cyrenaica.

‘Does Jessie James live there too?’

I had liked Captain James and wanted to know what was happening to him.

‘Jess? Yes, when he’s in town. But the Cherry Pickers are away now.’

Jessie’s famous cavalry regiment had charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Now, with armoured vehicles instead of horses and cannon, they were in the line east of Tobruk.

I nodded.

Xan glanced at me as we crossed the English Bridge. We were heading towards Giza and the desert.

‘You’re at GHQ, aren’t you? Who do you work for?’

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Boyce.’

Xan’s smile broadened. ‘Small world, the army. May I drop in and see you in the office one of these days?’

‘I’ll make you a cup of HQ tea. It’s a treat not to be missed.’

His finger rested on my wrist for a second. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

We were passing through the fields and scrubby mud-brick settlements and lines of palms that marked the western edge of the delta. There was almost no traffic out here, and ahead lay the flat pans and low wind-blown dunes of the desert’s margin. Even at the height of summer the desert nights are bitterly cold, and thinking about it made me draw my shawl closer round my shoulders.

‘Don’t worry,’ Xan said.

I had thought perhaps we were heading for the Mena House Hotel, a popular destination near the Pyramids, but then the car turned in an unfamiliar direction down a narrow unmade track. There were no lights here at all and we drove with only the headlights slicing through the soft darkness. I gave up trying to work out what our destination might be and sat back instead, watching Xan’s dark head outlined against the darkness outside and letting the currents of happiness wash through me.

After a while Xan leaned forward and murmured something in Arabic to Hassan. I was surprised that he knew the language, and yet not surprised.

‘We’re nearly there.’

Directly ahead of us I could make out the smoky glow of a fire, and the black silhouettes of a handful of palm trees. There were some tents and a few people moving between us and the fire. Camels were tethered in a line. We were coming to a tiny oasis.

Hassan brought the car to a halt. Xan and I stepped out where the shingle-and-sand camel track petered out in a sea of fine, soft ripples.

‘Welcome,’ Hassan said to me. ‘Mahubbah. These are my people.’

A circle of men sat close to the fire on upturned oil drums. Through the smoke I could smell the rich scent of food and realised that I was hungrier than I had ever been on arriving at Fleurent’s. One of the men stood up and came towards us. He was old and had a white beard. He was wrapped in a coarse woven blanket.

‘Mahubbah,’ he murmured. He touched his forehead to Xan who returned the salute, then the two men embraced each other.

‘Abu Hassan,’ Xan said respectfully.

I stood in the sand, and fine cool trickles ran into my shoes. I felt strange in my coral-pink silk evening dress with the chill desert breeze blowing strands of hair across my face.

The old man bowed to me and Xan took my arm. He murmured in my ear, ‘Hassan and his father welcome you. They would like you to know that their house is your house, and they are your servants.’

I didn’t know the proper phrases to offer in return for this formal welcome and I tightened my grip on Xan’s arm.

‘Will you tell them I am unworthy of their generosity, but I am proud to be their guest?’

‘Exactly,’ he said warmly, and I listened again to the clicking of unfamiliar Arabic.

Hassan and his father bowed once more and retreated towards the circle of seats and the firelight, leaving Xan and me standing alone.

‘This way,’ he said, pointing away into the darkness. ‘Wait a minute, though.’

He reached into the boot of the car and produced a bag that he slung over his shoulder, and an army greatcoat which he held out to me.

‘Wear this for a moment or two, in case the cold gets too much. Will you take my hand?’

I did so and the warmth of his fingers enveloped mine.

The ghost of a path curved round a swelling dune, the path’s margin marked by low thorny bushes. I stumbled a little in my dancing shoes, but Xan held me tightly. After a few more yards I saw a dark smudge ahead of us, then the glow of lights caught within it.

The shape resolved itself into a tent, a little square structure made of some kind of woven animal hair. There were long tassels hanging from the four corner poles, their filaments lifting in the breeze. We plunged hand in hand through the heavy sand, and Xan drew back the tent flap and stood aside to let me in. The tent was lined with hangings in broad strips of green, black, cream and maroon, and the floor was covered with rugs and piled with embroidered cushions. Lit candles on flat stones burned everywhere, and in the centre of the little room, under a hole in the roof, stood a rough metal brazier full of glowing embers. It was as warm inside the tent as in Lady Gibson Pasha’s ballroom, and in the flickering candlelight it was a hundred times more beautiful.

I caught my breath in a sharp oh of surprise and delight, but then Xan came close behind me and put his big hands over my eyes.

‘Are you ready?’ he murmured, and his breath was warm against my ear. He turned me through a half-circle again, so that I was facing the way we had come in.

‘Ready,’ I answered and his hands lifted.

I blinked, and stared. Ahead of us, framed and cut off from the rest of the world by the dunes, lay the Pyramids. I had never seen them from this viewpoint and it was as if the three great tombs with the prickling sky unrolled behind them were ours alone. Their mass, pinned between the stars and the shapeless desert, was rendered two-dimensional and even more mysterious by the darkness. Silence shrouded the desert as time slipped out of gear and the great wheels of the universe spun free around us. I tilted my head to try to catch a whisper beyond audible range, but all I could hear was the camels coughing as they shifted in their line.

Xan took the greatcoat from my shoulders. The fire was warm on my ankles and bare arms.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

I turned my head from the view, meeting his eyes, trying to find a word. ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

He undid the canvas bag he had brought with him and took out a bottle of champagne tied up in an ice bag. He peeled off the foil and eased the cork. Then he burrowed in the bag again, produced two tin mugs and handed them to me. I held them out as he popped the cork and the silvery froth ran into the mugs. We clinked them together.

‘I’m sorry about the glasses. But this is the desert, not Shepheard’s Hotel.’

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

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

How could we not be?

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

‘Here’s to us,’ he echoed.

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

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

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Iris?’

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

‘Mm.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where d’you call home?’ I asked.

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

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

It was dreams, mostly.

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

‘Cairo?’

‘No, here.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, they don’t.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Egypt.’

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

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

‘That’s very dangerous, isn’t it?’

‘This is a war.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Stop. I’ll explode.’

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

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

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

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

‘Was it? Do you mean that?’

Once again, his eagerness touched my heart.

‘I do.’

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

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

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

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

‘I will be here,’ I said.

My eyes hurt from staring into the darkness.

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

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

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

The shivering makes my teeth rattle.