Iris and Ruby

by Rosie Thomas

  After Xan died I went through the motions of living, although I felt hardly alive myself. On what would have been our wedding day and for two weeks afterwards I did my job for Roddy Boy, went to the hospital for my voluntary shift and came home again to Garden City. It was a meaningless triangle and at each point of it I longed to be at either of the others because surely the pain there would be more bearable than at the present one. But it never was and so there was nothing to do but continue.

  I told Roddy Boy and Sarah and Daphne and Ruth that I was all right.

  By the middle of June Rommel was once more within reach of Tobruk, and after days of fierce fighting and huge losses on both sides the city fell to the Germans. The Panzer Army moved on towards el Alamein and the Egyptian frontier, driving the tattered remains of the Eighth Army ahead of it. The threat to Alexandria was imminent and Cairo was in uproar. It seemed inevitable that Axis forces would reach the delta within days.

  Ruth and Daphne did their best to look after me. Daphne drove me out to the flat on the Heliopolis road one evening, and I sat in the same chair as on my first visit and accepted the last of the malt whisky that I had brought them as a present. I tried to think back to the happiness that had suffused everything then, but I couldn’t grasp it. All that remained was darkness.

  ‘Come on,’ Daphne insisted. ‘Try to eat some of this.’

  I took the plate of their good food and lifted a forkful to my mouth.

  When I set out for the evening I had not bothered to distinguish one pain from another, but now I realised that I was ill.

  I reached across and caught Daphne’s arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  My friends looked at me, then at each other. A belt of pain tightened round my middle.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I heard myself mumble as I put my head down and tried to assimilate the pain.

  Ruth and Daphne were talking in low voices. Daphne put one hand to my forehead and held my wrist in the other. When I could stand up, I went into the bathroom and found blood. There was a thin seam of blood running down the inside of my leg and dark droplets on the tile floor.

  My friends made me lie down on their bed. I was very thirsty, burning up with thirst.

  Ruth sits beside me and strokes my hair again, but there is nothing to drink and I am too parched to ask for water. The stroking soothes me, but I am cold, shivering. It’s dark and my arms and legs are bent and hooked in a narrow space.

  Ruby did not sleep. Between wishing for and dreading the dawn it was the longest night she had ever known. The moon set and in the darkest hours there were not even any planes to offer a link with the friendly world.

  At last the stars began to fade and a pearl-grey line touched the horizon. As the light came again Iris stirred and moaned. Ruby helped her to sit up, then held her face between her two hands.

  ‘Iris, listen. Look at me. I’ve got to go for help, otherwise we are going to die.’

  Iris’s cracked lips twitched as she tried to speak. No sound came out, but her eyes held Ruby’s and she seemed to understand what she was saying.

  ‘I don’t want to leave you, but I don’t know what else to do.’

  Then Iris nodded, very slowly but definitely.

  ‘I’m going to set out as soon as it’s properly light.’

  Again the nod.

  ‘Let’s share this,’ Ruby said. The hoarded pomegranate half was dull with dust. She tore the peel, careful in case of spilling even a drop of juice, but the fruit was almost dry. She gave two-thirds to Iris and dug her teeth into the remaining third. There was an ecstatic second as the seeds split on her tongue and yielded a few drops of liquid, but then it was gone and she chewed on the stiff pulp that was left. Iris did the same.

  The sun was not yet up and the air was still cold, but it was light. Ruby climbed out of the car and sank up to her ankles in chilly sand.

  ‘Let me make you comfortable before I go.’

  She took Iris’s hands and helped her from the car to sit in the sand beside it, putting one arm round her waist and lowering her gently. Iris was very weak now. Ruby knew that if she didn’t go immediately, she would not be able to leave her. She leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I love you,’ she told her. ‘I’ll be back very soon. Just wait for me, all right?’

  She was straightening up when Iris grasped her wrist. Ruby had to bend down again with her ear close to her grandmother’s mouth to catch the words.

  ‘Just go. Don’t worry.’

  She knew what Iris was telling her.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ she repeated angrily. She pulled herself away and began to walk.

  She didn’t look back until she reached the crest of the nearest dune. The Beetle looked even more like a chunk of the desert than it had done yesterday.

  Only yesterday.

  She did her best to memorise the shape of the surrounding dunes, searching for a single feature anywhere in the landscape that would help her to fix this place and lead the rescuers back again. But the dun-coloured curves and hollows were all the same, implacable.

  Ruby turned her back on the car and her grandmother, and trudged eastwards through the sliding sand, as fast as she could, while the sun still told her which way to go.

  Daphne called a taxi, and she and Ruth took me to the Cairo Hospital for Women and Children, run by the nuns. In a shuttered white room there I miscarried my sixteen-week pregnancy, Xan’s son.

  The placid, smooth-faced nuns nursed me. For two days I wouldn’t see anyone except Ruth, who came after she finished work and sat with me for a few silent minutes. I lay and stared at the white walls and waited to die.

  Xan was dead and now I had lost the precious link to him. I remembered his delight when I told him that I was pregnant and I grieved twice over, for myself and for Xan too because it was his child as well as mine that was lost. It seemed beyond bearing that I could not share my desolation with him. It was incomprehensible that I would never share anything else with him, and I lay and wept until no more tears would come. Death would have been a welcome solution but my body refused to oblige; rather than letting me sink into oblivion it began obstinately to recover.

  On the third day one of the sisters made me sit up and wash my face and comb my hair.

  ‘There’s a different visitor to see you,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want a visitor.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ she told me. The door opened and Sarah came in. She had a bunch of marigolds and cosmos in her hand, flowers that made me think of my mother’s garden.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ she cried. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  She put the flowers in a toothmug, then sat down in the chair beside my bed and took my hand.

  I stared at her as if she had walked in from another world. A minute passed in silence, but then I squeezed her hand in mine.

  To see Sarah made me feel, for the first time since I had lost the baby, that there was a chink of light in the world. As well as the flowers, her pale complexion and pale eyebrows and even the neat collar of her starched blouse all seemed to stand for Englishness, and a distant, quiet normality separate from this present agony. The continuity that she represented gave me an inkling that I might be able to go on living.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ I whispered finally. Her fingers tightened on mine.

  Sarah let me weep again, and in the end I shouted and sobbed at her, ‘If I can’t have him, why couldn’t I at least have had his son?’

  Sarah bent her head. ‘It’s cruel,’ she agreed.

  I thought she couldn’t possibly know how cruel it felt. Sobs of self-pity racked me, until she raised her head and looked me in the eye.

  ‘Listen to me, Iris. It’s hard, but you do know that Xan loved you. You have that memory and the certainty will always stay with you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

  ‘The tragedy is that he was killed. The double tragedy is that you lost the baby too. That’s terrible, almost unbearable, but in some ways you are lucky.�
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  I stared at her, wondering where this was leading.

  ‘In what ways?’

  ‘You were loved. Loved passionately and with all his being, by a man you deeply loved and admired in return. You may only have had a few months, but you did have that much. You conceived a child together, out of love and hope, and now it’s ended you can at least mourn them both without feeling ashamed.’

  The grief that had blinded me shifted a little and I was able to take a glance beyond it.

  It was suddenly plain to me that she had suffered a loss too, although I had never seen as much before now. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I wasn’t loved,’ she said simply.

  ‘Who didn’t?’

  ‘Jeremy.’

  Jeremy the poet, shabby and blinking, Faria’s helpless and hopeless admirer.

  ‘But he was in love with Faria …’

  ‘I know that. It didn’t make any difference. When she was too busy for him, didn’t require him as an escort – well, then there I was. It was much better than nothing, for me. Iris, can you understand that?’

  I hesitated. ‘In a way.’

  ‘Faria wouldn’t sleep with him, of course. But I did. That was better than nothing for him, do you see?’

  Her sadness cut my heart. ‘You love him.’

  ‘Yes. Terribly. And then, I was pregnant.’

  The white coif of one of the nuns nodded at the little observation window in the door of my room, then passed on down the corridor. The marigolds in the glass mug bled their colour into the dim room. The louvred shutters were closed but I knew that outside the afternoon heat would be at its white, blinding height. Cairo was a cruel city.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘I told him, of course.’

  Her hand that was not holding mine tapped out the words on the folded bedsheet.

  ‘What was I hoping for? That he would say to me that this changed everything, ask me to marry him, announce the glad tidings to all our friends, as you and Xan did?’

  Your friends would have greeted the news with frank disbelief, I thought and immediately felt ashamed of myself.

  ‘He didn’t, in any case. Of course. He just said that he was very sorry and he would do everything he could to help me. So I had an abortion. I went to Beirut, do you remember? Jeremy gave me some money towards it. Not much, because he doesn’t have much. I had some savings, luckily.’

  In my self-absorbed happiness I had been quite ready to accept the story that Sarah had had Gyppy tummy and had gone to Lebanon for a holiday in order to recover.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  She looked at me. ‘Are you shocked? Disgusted?’

  ‘No. Surprised, that’s all, although I really shouldn’t be. I could have worked the whole thing out for myself, if I had bothered. I wish you’d felt that you could tell me. And I wish that I had been a better friend, when you needed one.’

  ‘I couldn’t tell a soul,’ Sarah whispered. ‘I am only saying this now because I can’t bear to see you so stricken and I’d admit to worse if I thought it might help. The truth is that I wasn’t loved and I didn’t even have the courage to keep my child. Now that it’s too late, I wish I had kept it. I dream that I’m cradling it, then I wake up and my arms are empty. That is what I did.

  ‘So I’d trade my place for yours, you know. You have no reason in the world to feel ashamed, at least.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Sarah was right.

  We held each other and cried, and I hoped that I was not only crying for myself. Then she sat upright in the chair and wiped her eyes.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she said. Her Anglo-Saxon stoicism made me think of my mother again. My mother, who didn’t yet know that she had lost a son-in-law and a grandchild before they had even existed.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Sarah asked, taking a powder compact and a lipstick out of her handbag. She snapped open the compact and began to repair her face.

  I might have replied that I didn’t know, or care, but I stopped myself. ‘I’m going to come home to the flat as soon as I can. Could you bring me some clean clothes, perhaps?’

  ‘Of course.’ Sarah liked to be given a defined job. ‘There’s a bit of a flap on, even more than usual, actually. Have you heard the BBC?’

  Since my miscarriage I had almost forgotten about the war. I hadn’t heard the wireless news, but one of the sisters who spoke some English had told me that Alexandria was likely to fall to the enemy in a matter of hours. The threat of air raids on the harbour was so strong that British Navy ships moored there had been suddenly withdrawn to Haifa and Beirut, leaving the busy harbour deserted and causing panic in the city. Alexandrians were packing up their belongings and flooding out into the delta to avoid the coming enemy invasion.

  ‘Battle for Egypt, BBC is saying,’ the nun told me. Her long, pale face was calm and resigned under the folds of the coif.

  ‘Women and children are being evacuated. The embassy’s in charge of allocating places on the Palestine train. People are pulling strings all over the shop, just to get a seat,’ Sarah went on. ‘It’s chaotic. What do you think you’ll do?’

  I had no idea. I had no sense of purpose and I couldn’t think where I would go if I were to leave Cairo. Heavily I said, ‘Go back to work again, if Roddy Boy wants me, I suppose. What about you?’

  ‘I’d like to get out to Palestine. Why sit here and wait to be invaded? Mamdooh says half the shopkeepers in town have got German swastikas and bunting all ready, to welcome the troops when they arrive.’

  ‘They would do.’ I smiled, against the odds.

  Sarah promised that she would bring in my clothes the next day. We clung briefly to each other before she left.

  ‘Thank you for coming.’

  She patted my shoulder. ‘Got to stick together, eh?’

  I suddenly wanted very much to be back at the Garden City flat, the nearest approximation I had to home, but if Sarah was leaving Cairo and Faria’s parents wanted us to move out in any case, I would have to look for somewhere else to live. The effort involved seemed insurmountable.

  That evening, when Ruth visited me, she told me that I was looking much better.

  ‘I want to get out of here. Tomorrow, if I can.’

  ‘That can only be a good thing.’ The Hospital for Women and Children was a sepulchral place, scented with iodine and boiled vegetables.

  We walked slowly down the corridor to the patients’ sitting room to listen to the BBC news together. Alexandria had been heavily bombed the night before and Cairo itself was reported to be braced for an aerial invasion. It was 30 June.

  At the end of the bulletin Ruth switched off the wireless and we stood out on the veranda at the far end of the room. The hot night was unnaturally quiet. A curfew had been imposed on all the troops, making the city out of bounds during the hours of darkness, and the streets were deserted. The cafés and nightclubs must all have been empty too. A horse-drawn gharry clopped beneath us, the driver’s whip trailing at an angle.

  ‘He’s probably thinking about how he’ll be taking some German staff officer to Shepheard’s in a couple of days’ time,’ I said.

  Ruth laughed. ‘The service at Shepheard’s will slow Rommel down, if nothing else does.’

  Ruth told me that Daphne intended to stay and work in Cairo for as long as she could be useful. ‘And where Daphne is, that’s where I want to be.’

  I nodded. Ruth was devoted to Daphne, and Daphne was devoted to her work. Neither of them lacked a sense of purpose. I thought again about returning to London, after the war, to study medicine. I would not be Xan’s wife, but I could make myself useful somewhere.

  After Ruth had gone I lay on my hospital cot, half expecting to hear air raid sirens, but no German bombers reached Cairo that night.

  Sarah brought in my clothes, and offered to wait with me and see me back to the flat, but I told her to go off to work. I didn’t know how
long it would be before the French doctor came to discharge me.

  In the end, I was free to leave hospital by the middle of the morning. The doctor examined me once more and told me that I should rest, but that I was a strong young woman and he did not think there was any reason why I should not have a healthy baby in due course. I knew the reassurance was kindly intended, but I ignored it. I didn’t want another baby, or another lover to give me one. Only the ones I had lost.

  As soon as I walked out through the hospital gates I understood that there was a flap on unlike any that had gone before. I had told Sarah that I would take a taxi back to Garden City, but Sharia Port Said was a solid, hooting mass of motionless traffic. The few taxis I could see were all taken, and in any case were going nowhere. Wedged into the jam I could see at least two dozen dust-caked lorries packed with troops. Their weary faces and dejected postures told the story of what had been happening in the desert. The nearest lorry was only a few feet away from where I stood. Several of the men were asleep, their heads lolling against the camouflage canvas. Others were wounded, and their field dressings were caked with blood and dust. All of them looked too exhausted and too dejected to move.

  An Egyptian street vendor came along the pavement under the banyan trees, pushing a cart packed with ice and bottles of lemonade. As he drew level with the lorry he suddenly stopped, looking up at the rows of soldiers. Then he twisted the stopper out of a bottle and handed it up to the nearest man, who nudged the wounded soldier slumped next to him. The other man’s hands were bandaged, so his friend tilted the frosted bottle to his mouth for him.

  The vendor went on unstoppering his bottles and the big, dirty hands reached down and gratefully took them, until the vendor’s cart was empty and the dust at his feet was spattered with melted ice.

  ‘Ta, mate,’ one of the men called. ‘Rommel ain’t getting anywhere near Cairo, don’t yer worry.’

  Revived by the lemonade, the soldiers at the back of the lorry caught sight of me and waved.

  ‘Hello, Miss. Want a ride?’

  ‘Come on, hop up here with us.’

  I waved back at them and smiled.

  The column briefly shuddered and the lorry edged forward in a cloud of exhaust fumes. I took some folded notes out of my purse and gave them to the street vendor, the money disappeared into the folds of his galabiyeh and I crossed the road through the stalled traffic. I decided that I would head for GHQ because it was nearer than the flat.