Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  Even Xan, whose boyhood friend and desert ally was Hassan, was inclined to talk collectively about Gyppos. All the officers did, with an amused, exasperated superiority. I remembered the scene on the steps of Shepheard’s Hotel, when the waiter had pushed the child beggar out of reach of all the masters who were striding in to enjoy lunch among their own kind.

  ‘The Europeans dug the Suez Canal, laid railway lines, built hospitals and schools and colleges,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, de Lesseps built the Canal but Egypt paid for it, and for all the other modernisations as well. The country ended up a hundred million pounds in debt because the developments were financed by money borrowed from European banks at extortionate rates of interest, and the fellahin had to be taxed to the point of starvation in order to repay it. Then Disraeli took advantage of the economic crisis to buy the khedive’s shares in the Suez Canal Company at a rockbottom price. When there was an uprising the Royal Navy bombed the harbour at Alexandria, the army massacred the rebels at Tel el Kebir and occupied the country. You know the story since then.’

  I did. The sovereign country that had finally emerged from fifty years of British control was still effectively occupied and ruled by the British.

  ‘So why are you here?’ I demanded.

  Daphne suddenly smiled. She was formidable to the point of being alarming, I thought, but she also possessed a magnetic charm. I noticed how Ruth’s eyes were continually drawn back to her.

  ‘Because I love this country. I was here before the war, working with a village medical programme. When the war is over I’ll go back to it. In the meantime I’m a surgical anaesthetist and I treat each individual on the operating table as a life we can save. There have been a lot of injured men, and you heard what Ruth said. There are soon going to be thousands more.’

  Under the tablecloth, I twisted Xan’s amethyst on my third finger.

  I turned to Ruth, pushing away the thought of a dam about to break and release a tide of blood. ‘What about you? Why are you here?’

  ‘I love Egypt too. And I love Daphne. I want to be where she is.’

  She said it simply, but Daphne quickly shook her head.

  ‘That’s a personal consideration, put that aside. You are an excellent nurse, and you’re doing an important job.’

  ‘I know she is, I’ve seen her,’ I said.

  Smiling again, Daphne refilled my glass with the last of the wine. Ruth stood up to collect the plates but she rested her cheek first on the top of Daphne’s head, and Daphne briefly encircled her wrist with her fingers. Then Ruth straightened up and went on clearing the table. Her face looked as if a light had come on beneath the translucent skin, and I swallowed my wine and looked at the wall.

  ‘And you?’ Daphne asked me.

  ‘I work at GHQ. Clerical administrator. I came from London at the beginning of the year.’

  ‘Iris has just got engaged,’ Ruth said mischievously.

  Young women like me, as the cynical wisdom of Cairo put it, came out here either to find a husband or to escape from one. I hadn’t been guilty of either intention, and Sarah and Faria had often teased me at the beginning for not being interested enough in having fun, yet in Daphne’s and Ruth’s company I couldn’t help feeling frivolous. I didn’t seem to belong on either side, although at least I was now beginning to recognise where I wanted to be.

  I was annoyed to feel my colour rising.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Daphne said. ‘What is he doing?’

  ‘He’s a cavalryman, but he’s seconded to one of the special ops groups.’ I wanted – longed – to talk about Xan, but I couldn’t say anything more about what he did.

  ‘Ah.’ There was warmth and sympathy in Daphne’s shrewd look. She knew what special ops work was likely to entail, and she left it at that.

  I cleared my throat. ‘I’ve been thinking lately about what else I could do here. I don’t feel much use any longer, pounding my typewriter in GHQ. I suppose I could try to get into uniform, ATS or MTC, but I’ve been wondering about hospital work too. Ruth suggested voluntary visiting, or maybe joining the VADs.’

  Again, there was an appraising look. Ruth put the malt whisky bottle back on the table.

  ‘You could do that.’ There was a pause. ‘Or I could ask the Director of Nursing at the QM, where I work, if she could find a niche for you. She’s a friend of mine. It’d only be voluntary work, mind, but there might be something more interesting than reading to the men or rolling bandages.’

  The Queen Mary was the biggest of the Cairo hospitals now taken over by the military.

  ‘Would you? I’d like that very much.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Daphne said. I knew she would do exactly as she promised.

  The three of us raised our whisky glasses and this time the toast was a silent one. Now not only did I have intimacy with Xan, I had the luxury of this congenial female company. Warmth, unconnected with whisky, ran through my veins. I had been lonely, I realised, and now suddenly I wasn’t.

  We sat at the table for another hour and I made the two of them laugh with stories about Roddy Boy and Sandy Allardyce and Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch, and the rest of my Cairo world.

  ‘A chauffeur.’ Ruth sighed enviously when I told them how I had recoiled from the idea of pulling up at their door with Amman Pasha’s car and driver.

  ‘Well, he’s not waiting outside for me now. And so I’d better go, or I’ll miss the last bus into town.’

  Ruth and Daphne insisted that I mustn’t walk to the main road on my own. We were at the front door when footsteps came smartly down the concrete steps from the upper floor.

  ‘Bonsoir, Docteur Erdall, Mademoiselle Macnamara.’

  There were three young Frenchmen with moustaches and evening clothes, smelling of cigarettes and brandy, heading out for a night on the town. They had a car, of course I must allow them to give me a lift home.

  ‘Good night, and thank you,’ I said to Ruth and Daphne. They stood in the light spilling from the doorway and Ruth tilted her head against Daphne’s shoulder.

  ‘Come and see us again,’ Daphne called.

  I sat in the front of the dusty Citroën next to the driver and the other two officers squeezed themselves into the back. We sped over the potholed road at high speed, the car’s worn springs banging in protest. There was a lot of laughing and gallant offering of cigarette cases.

  The driver looked sidelong at me, his profile briefly illuminated by the lights of a passing truck.

  ‘Vous êtes une amie de ces mesdames?’

  ‘Oui, certainement,’ I said flatly.

  There was an outbreak of coughing from behind my shoulder and the driver’s upper lip twitched under his moustache. The tips of his fingers patted lightly, expressively, on the wheel.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ he murmured. He insisted on dropping me right at the door of our apartment, and came round and opened the car door for me. He even kissed my hand, bending low over it as he did so.

  ‘Merci, monsieur.’

  ‘Un plaisir, Mademoiselle Black. Au revoir.’

  Sarah was climbing out of a taxi. Together we watched the tail lights of the Citroën rounding the corner.

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘Some French staff officers who gave me a lift home.’

  ‘You are leading an exciting life.’

  ‘Not really. Where have you been?’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘Just to the Anglo-Egyptian for a drink. I thought I’d look in, see who was there. But it was very quiet.’

  We let ourselves into the flat. Everywhere in Cairo was quiet, not just the bar of the Anglo-Egyptian Club. Everyone who was not in the desert was watching and waiting for the next big thing to happen.

  ‘My darling girl,’ my mother wrote. ‘Your father and I were so excited to hear your big news, and we are so very pleased for you both’

  I read her letter at my desk, in a brief lull. GHQ was in turmoil. The offensive had begun two days earlier as twenty-mile lines of Allied troop
s and armaments poured across the frontier towards Rommel’s Panzer Group Africa, and Tobruk. Roddy Boy had been wearing the same shirt for twenty-four hours because he hadn’t had time to go home and change.

  And now, what do you plan to do? You won’t think I’m too sentimental, I hope, if I tell you that I have once or twice dreamed of my girl’s wedding in an English church on a midsummer’s morning, with her father to give her away and perhaps Evie’s children as her little attendants. And her mother shedding one tear in the front pew. Of course this war has changed that for everyone, not just you and your Alexander.

  (By the way, my mother’s cousin Wilfred married a Miss Molyneux. Do you think there is already a family connection?)

  If pressed, my mother could usually unearth a remote connection by marriage to almost anyone you cared to think of.

  You do not mention a date, and it may not be your intention to wait at all. I know that ‘quick’ wartime ceremonies are quite normal nowadays – but, darling, I should so like to see you being married. Perhaps after Christmas, or even in the spring (if it ever comes, this dark winter seems to stretch ahead for ever), your father and I could somehow find a passage out to Cairo to be with you? What with coupons and everything in such short supply here, it may even be easier to put together your trousseau out there. What fun it would be to go shopping together at Cicurel’s. I wonder if my old Lebanese dressmaker still lives in her little house by the Bab al-Futuh?

  What a lot there is to think about. Daddy is well, and sends all his love, as do I. The vicar has asked me to help out with the garden effort, we are turning some of the park over to vegetables.

  God bless you both. Ever your loving Ma.

  I reread this letter several times during that week in late November.

  The original offensive by the three brigades of the Seventh Armoured Division and supporting artillery and infantry had developed into the confusion and horror of the battle of Sidi Rezegh. Thirty thousand British, German and Italian tanks and other vehicles milled and circled in a flat, exposed desert landscape of dust, thorns, smoke, burned-out tanks and dead men covering three thousand square miles. On the ground, it was often impossible to tell friend from enemy. Every vehicle that loomed in sight could be a threat or a reinforcement. Signals trucks were captured and whole formations seemed to evaporate because the next link in the chain couldn’t communicate with them. The transport systems of all three armies changed hands and then changed hands again, supply dumps and entire headquarters were lost, and men of different units formed up together and fought on in the whirling chaos of smoke and sand.

  The news at GHQ changed every hour as the chaotic skirmishes were won or lost and then forgotten as the next reversal altered everything yet again.

  Roddy Boy and the rest of the suave, gabardine cohorts of GHQ stripped to their shirtsleeves and worked round the clock. Roddy and his staff sweated to interpret and transmit back to the field commanders the Intelligence that poured in from the shattered forces, while the cups of tea I carried in to him turned cold and orange on his desk. A new admiration for him dawned in me.

  In the midst of this, in the rare moments of relative calm, I read the word trousseau and the incongruity of it made me smile before Roddy Boy appeared in front of me with yet another sheaf of paper and the order snapped over his shoulder, ‘As quick as you can, Miss Black.’

  Then, on 24 November, Rommel suddenly gathered together the remaining Panzers of his army and broke eastwards towards the thickets of wire that separated Libya from Egypt. Beyond Egypt, only time and the conquests of Palestine and Syria would separate him from the oilfields of Iraq and Persia.

  During Rommel’s dash for the wire, as the support echelons of the Allied armies fled ahead of his tanks and the front-line commanders struggled to marshal their forces, there was no time for letter reading, or even for leaving the glaring, littered GHQ offices to eat, bathe or change.

  I had no idea where Xan might be. I tried to stop myself from fitting Tellforce operations into the floods of Intelligence that washed over me. All I could do was work, snatch an hour’s sleep, and work again.

  After two days of confusion, Intelligence confirmed that in Rommel’s absence the British had taken the opportunity to attack Sidi Rezegh once more, so he reversed his momentum and pulled back to a point east of Tobruk. In his wake the Panzers rolled back from the wire to re-engage, but these were the last throes of the battle and it was hardly a victory for either side. Eighteen thousand British and Allied troops had been killed, wounded or captured. Rommel had lost all but forty of his tanks, and German shipping losses in the Mediterranean meant that it would probably be weeks before he could replace them.

  GHQ drew breath.

  Roddy sat with his pink hands loose on the desk in front of him. There were dark, grainy patches of skin under his eyes and his tight flesh now seemed to hang in creases.

  ‘You had better go home, Miss Black. Your father will complain that I am overworking you.’

  ‘I won’t mention it to him.’

  ‘Go on, off you go. Wait a minute, though. Iris?’

  ‘Yes, Sir?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  On 7 December, Axis losses around Sidi Rezegh forced Rommel to withdraw to the west of Tobruk and the 242-day siege of the harbour and garrison was lifted. On the same day Roddy came out of his office after a short telephone call and told me that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. ‘Now the Americans will be in,’ he said.

  The next evening I went to the Scottish Military again. The entrance was blocked by a line of ambulances, as it had been for days, and in the distance I saw Betty Hopwood leaning against the side of her vehicle as she waited for her cargo of stretchers to be carried off. Inside the hospital the corridors and ante-rooms were packed with lines of walking wounded.

  Albie Noake had been moved off Ruth’s ward and into one where patients shuffled about on crutches and played cards at the centre table. A man in pyjamas with bandaged hands got up from the chair at Albie’s bedside and nodded to me. ‘Evening, Miss. Noake’s the lucky one, isn’t he?’

  Yanks are in. All over soon? Albie wrote.

  ‘I don’t know. I hope so.’

  Any news from Mr M?

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  Bet there having some fun, wherever they are. I bloody hate missing it, scuse languige.

  I put my hand on his, trying to smile. ‘I know you do. They’ll be missing you too.’

  Still coming to see me off?

  Albie’s place on the next hospital ship sailing for England via the Cape had been confirmed. He would be leaving in two days’ time.

  ‘I asked my boss for an hour off to come to the station. He acted as if I’d asked for a month at the seaside, but he said yes in the end. I’ll be there.’

  They need the beds. It’s gone mad here.

  Our eyes met. ‘Yes.’

  Daphne and Ruth would be working eighteen-hour shifts. I envied them their ability to do something for all these damaged soldiers. After my visit to Albie I went home to Garden City and listened to the wireless news. Then I stood for a long time at my bedroom window, as if I might hear or glimpse something of Xan just by staring into the darkness.

  The railway station was in chaos. Egyptian railway officials dashed up and down the platforms trying to direct the medical orderlies who surged through the metal gates carrying stretcher cases. Trains waited to ferry the injured to the ships waiting in the Gulf of Suez. There were wounded men everywhere, in wheelchairs and on crutches, or slowly limping in twos and threes through the engine smoke and stale hissing steam towards their numbered carriages. Peddlers and street boys ran around between them, hawking fruit and dirty magazines and cigarettes.

  ‘Hey, Tommy! Going home? Nice pictures?’

  I couldn’t find Albie. I knew the number of the MTC transporter that would be bringing him from the hospital, but I couldn’t see it in the line. Then I almost collided with one of Betty’s friends who told me that
the vehicle had broken down, but the mechanics had repaired it and it would soon be here. Five minutes later it trundled round the corner. Two orderlies jumped out and folded down a step, and the men began to emerge. Albie was walking now, unsteadily but unsupported. Waving my arms in the air so he would see me, I ran towards him.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming, thought you’d decided to stay after all,’ I panted.

  His bandaged head nodded. I picked up his kitbag in one hand, gave him my other arm and we set off in a shuffle through the crowds.

  Then, at the end of the platform, turning from side to side as he searched through the throng, I suddenly caught sight of a man who looked like Xan. I was used to this. In every crowded street in Cairo I would catch sight of someone who resembled him, and my heart would jump into my throat. But this time, as we drew closer together, instead of the likeness disappearing he looked more and more like Xan. It was another ten seconds before I let myself believe that it really was him.

  Then I gave a shout that made all the heads bobbing around us turn to look at me: ‘Xan.’

  Albie saw him now too, and made the squawk of vowels sound that was all the speech that was left to him.

  Xan sprinted through the crowds. With one hand he caught hold of me, the other he held out to Albie.

  ‘You’re here,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘I flew up this morning with Colonel Wainwright. I heard that Corporal Noake was on the way home, so I raced across to wish him bon voyage. You look a bit better than you did when I last saw you,’ he told Albie.

  Albie gave him the double thumbs-up.

  Xan looked just himself, tired and dirty but as happy and full of laughter as he always seemed. Gratitude washed through me. Xan took the bag from me and with one of us on either side we walked Albie on down the train until we found a carriage with an empty seat in it.

  I stood back while Xan helped him up the steep step, hoisted his bag onto the luggage shelf and settled him into his place. His head bent close over Albie and he talked quickly into his ear. I knew that he was briefly telling him whatever it was he had missed, in the desert with Tellforce. Doors began slamming all down the train. A guard in a sweaty uniform held a green flag furled under his arm. I hopped quickly onto the step and leaned past the crammed soldiers to kiss the side of Albie’s face that was still there.