by Rosie Thomas
‘Um. What about?’
‘Whatever you like.’
‘Well. You know what? I saw the Pyramids today.’
‘You went out to Giza?’
‘No. I don’t think so. From the top of a hotel by the Nile.’
‘Ah, yes. What did you think?’
‘Amazing. I didn’t know they were in the middle of all the houses, though.’
She looks so pleased with this adventure. I reach for her hand and at once she sandwiches mine between hers.
‘They’re not, not really. When I am on my feet again, we’ll go out to Giza. I’ll show you a different view.’
‘That’ll be cool.’
We sit here, hands linked, considering our different visions of the pharaohs’ tombs.
CHAPTER FIVE
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 ack
nowledged 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 y
ou 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.
