by Rosie Thomas
Iris undid a bolt and threw back the lid. Ruby glanced at the disappointing jumble inside. Among brittle newspapers and tattered books here were some playing cards and a box of dice, a couple of tarnished metal cups, a big bunch of keys and a brown envelope. There was a musty smell of forgotten times.
‘Can you carry it upstairs, or is it too heavy?’ Iris asked, turning her face up to Mamdooh.
‘I can carry,’ he said at once.
Mamdooh put the box on a low wooden table in Iris’s sitting room and closed the shutters, then turned to see that Iris was already burrowing through the contents. He gave Ruby a look that suggested she was responsible for all this disruption and backed out through the door.
Ruby settled herself among the cushions on the divan and picked up the manila envelope. A handful of curling black-and-white snapshots fell out and she examined them eagerly. This was more like it. They weren’t very interesting, though. In one, a group of white men stood in front of a low mud-brick building. In another some black men were putting a roof on what looked like the same building. In a third, two men wearing long baggy shorts with knee-length socks were shaking hands. Ruby looked a little more carefully at a picture of a young Iris in a cotton sundress. She was sitting on a low wall in front of some stone carvings with a man in an open-necked shirt. The skirt of her dress billowed over his knee, not quite hiding their linked hands.
‘Who’s this?’ Ruby asked.
‘That’s the Trevi Fountain. In Rome.’
‘Who is he?’
‘His name is Doctor Salvatore Andreotti. We worked together many years ago on a medical project in Africa.’
‘Just good friends.’ Ruby smirked.
Iris glanced up from her excavations in the box. ‘We were lovers for a time.’
‘Oh. Right. Were you? Um, what are all these others?’
‘Let me have a look. That is Nyasaland in, I suppose, nineteen fifty-eight. That building is a clinic, and those two men are the district commissioner and the regional medical director. I worked in the clinic for five, maybe six years.’
‘Lesley was four. She told me.’
Iris collected up the scattered pack of cards, snapped them with a practised hand. ‘Yes. She was born in fifty-four.’
Ruby had heard Lesley talk about how she was brought up by her father and nannies, while her mother ‘looked after black kids in Africa’. When she mentioned her childhood, which wasn’t very often, Lesley tended to look brave and cheerful.
Ruby felt suddenly curious about an aspect of her family history that had never interested her before. ‘Why did you go to work in Africa when you had a husband and a daughter in England?’
‘It was my job,’ Iris said. ‘A job that I felt very privileged to have. And I believe that I was good at it.’
‘But didn’t you miss them?’
‘I had home leave. And once she was old enough Lesley would come out to stay with me in the school holidays.’
‘She told me about that. She said her friends would be going to like Cornwall, or maybe Brittany, while she would have to make this huge journey with about three changes of plane and at the end there would be a bush village and terrible heat and bugs, and not much to do.’
‘That sounds like it, yes.’
It occurred to Ruby then that there was an unbending quality about Iris that being old hadn’t mellowed at all. She would always have been like this. Uncompromising, was that the word?
‘You remember everything,’ Ruby said, softly but accusingly.
Iris seemed to have found whatever it was she had been looking for in the depths of the tin box. She pounced and her fingers closed over something. Then she lifted her head and Ruby saw the distant expression that meant she was looking inside herself. Her pale blue eyes were foggy.
‘Do I?’
‘Nyasaland, the what’ sit fountain, men and dates, everything.’
Now Ruby saw in her grandmother’s face the grey shadow of fear.
‘Those things are only … Like so many plain cups or plates, on shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don’t matter, like what I remember of those photographs. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to pieces, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity.
‘Then you reach for a cup or a bowl that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.
‘That’s the way the important memory feels, the one you don’t want to lose. And it’s the fragment of your past that explains why you have lived your life the way you have done.’
When she spoke again Iris’s voice had sunk so low that Ruby could hardly hear her. ‘And made the mistakes that you have made. Do you understand any of this?’
Ruby hesitated. ‘A little. Maybe.’
‘You are very young. There’s not much on your shelves and you don’t know what’s going to be precious. It’s not until you’re old that you find yourself hugging the bowl all day long. Afraid to put it down.’
That’s what she’s doing, Ruby thought, when she goes into a trance and doesn’t hear what you’re saying to her.
She’s holding on to the precious bowl, in case it’s not there the next time she goes to look for it.
‘Yes,’ Iris said to herself. Her voice was no more than a whisper now.
Ruby suddenly stood up. She left the room, and Iris seemed too wrapped in her own reverie even to notice. Her head lifted in surprise when Ruby came noisily back, as if she had actually forgotten she had ever been there.
Ruby held out the framed photograph that she had taken from its place beside Iris’s bed. ‘Who is this?’
She was half expecting another reprimand or at least an evasion, because whoever he was, the man in the photograph was important. Most definitely he wasn’t Iris’s husband, Ruby’s grandfather Gordon.
Instead, something remarkable happened. Iris’s face completely changed. When she thought about it later Ruby described it to herself as melting. All the little lines round her grandmother’s mouth loosened, and the fog in her eyes vanished and left them clear blue and as sharp as a girl’s. Warm colour swelled under her crêpey skin and flushed her throat as she held out one hand for the picture. The other fist was still closed round whatever she had taken from the tin box.
Very carefully, so that there was no chance of either of them letting it fall, Ruby passed the photograph to her. Iris gazed down into the man’s face.
A long minute passed.
‘Who?’ Ruby persisted.
‘His name?’
‘Yes, you could start by telling me his name.’
Iris said nothing.
‘Do you want me to help?’
Instead of answering Iris opened her hand, the one that didn’t hold the picture. In the palm lay a toy ship carved from some dark wood. On the side a white numeral 1 was painted.
‘The first of a thousand ships.’ Iris smiled. Now even her voice sounded softer and younger, with the vinegary snap gone out of it.
Ruby had no idea what she was talking about. She knelt down and examined the ship as it lay in her grandmother’s palm. It was old, but it didn’t look remarkable. She picked it up and placed it carefully on the arm of Iris’s chair. Then she took the photograph back, noticing how Iris gave it up with infinite reluctance. She studied the two young faces and saw that they were dazzled with happiness.
Iris said slowly, in her different voice, ‘His name was Alexander Napier Molyneux, Captain in the Third Hussars, on secondment to Tell force. That picture was taken in October 1941, on the day that Xan asked me to marry him.’
Ruby was delighted with this information.
‘Really? Did he? Did you
say yes?’
‘I did.’
She waited for more, but Iris was silent. Gently Ruby put the photograph aside and folded Iris’s hands in hers. The old fingers were like twigs, the tendons rigid against Ruby’s smooth palms.
‘Are you afraid of forgetting him?’
‘I never kept diaries, you see. I was so certain of my mind. And now it’s going. Sometimes I reach and there is nothing there. In the accustomed place. Most of the pieces don’t matter. But if this one breaks, there will be nothing left.’
Ruby understood that she meant nothing of value. If the precious bowl was missing or shattered, what remained was rendered worthless.
She tightened her grip on Iris’s hands, suddenly understanding what they must do together.
‘You can remember. I know you can, because of the photographs and the fountain and the ship and the travel agents. You told me about those without even thinking. You’ve just told me about Xan Molyneux, haven’t you? It’s there, Iris, I know it is. And I know what we have to do. It’s just talking. You have to tell me the stories and I will remember them for you. I’m really good at that, my friend Jas told me. I remembered all kinds of things about people we used to know back in London, and he was always amazed. But I did it automatically. I told him it was like collecting anything. I used to have these collections, you know, when I was a kid. Shells, insects. Hundreds of them. I used to know exactly what they all were and where to find them in my room, although Lesley was always going on about mess. All you have to do is tell me.
‘I’ll keep it all in my mind. And then, if you do forget, I can tell your memories back to you, like a story.’
She massaged Iris’s cold hands, trying to rub warmth and certainty into them.
‘Do you see?’
Iris’s colour had faded and the tight lines pursed her mouth again. ‘Maybe,’ she said uncertainly.
Ruby smiled. Confidence and an idea of her own value swept through her, and she leaned up to kiss her grandmother’s cheek.
‘Definitely,’ she insisted.
CHAPTER SIX
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.
