Iris and Ruby (31 page)

‘Well, nice to see you. I must go.’

‘’Bye, Iris.’ He was off round the corner before I could call goodnight.

I let myself into the flat. It was quiet and I thought everyone must be out, but then the door to the drawing room opened and I saw Sarah standing in a shaft of lamplight. She was wearing her old cashmere cardigan pulled tightly round her and her fine hair was scraped back from her face and tied with a scarf.

‘I thought it was Faria.’

‘No. It’s me.’

She went back to her usual corner of the sofa and I noticed there were two empty glasses on the drinks tray.

‘I met the poet downstairs.’

‘Did you? Yes, he dropped in.’ Sarah didn’t look at me. She pulled the ends of her scarf tighter and tucked them in, tucking in the corners of her mouth to match.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Me? Yes. Fine.’

The front door opened and closed again, and a moment later Faria appeared. Her dark slanting eyes were heavily outlined with kohl and she was wearing her diamond earrings and a little suit in jade-green soft tweed. She undid the wrist buttons of her kid gloves and peeled them off, then stalked across to the gin bottle waiting on the drinks tray. She said into the heavy atmosphere, ‘I’ve been at an endless reception for some business people of Ali’s. I don’t know why I have to go to these things, smiling and talking nonsense. I thought I would die of boredom.’

Sarah was pale and quiet, and Faria was often irritable these days. The flat wasn’t as much fun as it had been when I first came back to Cairo.

Faria flung herself into a chair. ‘Well, you two, tell me. Have you both got divine dates lined up for tonight?’

‘Not me,’ Sarah murmured.

‘I’m going to dinner with a nurse I met at the Scottish Military, and her flatmate who’s a doctor.’

Faria yawned. This sounded almost as dull to her as the afternoon she had just endured, but Sarah looked up eagerly. ‘A doctor? Is he nice?’

‘She’s a woman. I made exactly the same assumption.’ I laughed, but Sarah didn’t join in. She wasn’t interested in women; Faria and I were both engaged and what Sarah wanted now was to bag a husband of her own. ‘By the way, Iris, a package came for you. It must be something important, Mamdooh said the messenger made him sign a chit for it. It’s on the hall tray.’

‘Thanks. I’d better go and change if I’m not going to be late. Ruth and Daphne live halfway to Heliopolis.’

I knew what was in the package, but I didn’t want to open it in front of Sarah and Faria. Faria would have held up the stone to judge the quality, wondering why it wasn’t a diamond, and Sarah would have bitten her lip and told me that it was so beautiful, and I was terribly lucky to have met someone like Xan.

I took the little square box into my bedroom and closed the door. The window was open and I stood for a moment with my hand on the sill, looking out at the outline of my jacaranda and the thick leaves of a rubber tree splashed with light from the apartments overlooking the gardens. In the autumn the cocktail hour was cool, and scented with late jasmine and charcoal smoke and spices from the street food vendors. A pale-green line marked a sliver of the western horizon visible between two apartment blocks.

Xan’s amethyst was opulent in its simple claw setting. I slipped it on to my third finger and held my hand up in happy amazement.

I was an engaged woman; I was going to marry Xan
Molyneux. I wanted nothing else in the world.

When I had finished admiring my ring I pressed my forehead against the window frame and stared towards the west and the desert. I prayed wordlessly for Xan and whatever road he was watching, wherever he was hiding from the enemy convoys and spotter planes.

A knock on my door shook me back to earth.

Faria called, ‘Daddy’s car is here. Can we drop you off anywhere?’

I imagined pulling up outside Ruth’s flat in Amman Pasha’s enormous black limousine with the chauffeur in his pale-fawn livery opening the door and bowing as I stepped out.

‘No, thanks. I haven’t changed yet.’

‘Have a lovely time,’ her voice floated back to me.

I caught the Heliopolis bus. It was packed like a sardine can and smelled of tired bodies, and when we finally reached Ruth’s stop I clambered down with a puff of relief. The main road was busy with trucks and troop carriers and civilian cars but when I turned a corner, following Ruth’s directions, I found myself in a nondescript enclave of low modern houses with concrete balconies and outside staircases. The upper windows of Ruth’s house stood wide open and loud dance music boomed out. I stared in surprise, then realised that the concrete stairs led up to a separate apartment. Strips of yellow light shone between the drawn curtains downstairs. As I tapped the door knocker there was a crash and a bellow of laughter from above.

Ruth’s face appeared. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured, opening the door wider. ‘Some French officers live up there, they make a terrible racket at all hours. Come on in.’

Ruth was wearing loose khaki trousers and a white shirt. I had never seen her out of her nurse’s uniform and she looked younger with her dark-red hair undone and pushed back over one shoulder.

Their sitting room was small, but they had made it look beautiful with handwoven rugs and Bedouin cushions in the colours of the desert, and unframed abstract paintings on the white walls. The calm simplicity made a sharp contrast with the oversized, carved and inlaid furnishings of our flat in Garden City.

‘Hello,’ a voice said from behind Ruth’s shoulder. ‘I’m Daphne Erdall.’

I shook hands with Daphne. She was older than I had expected, perhaps in her early forties. She had a tanned face with broad cheekbones, a wide mouth and clear grey eyes, and her fair hair was so thick it stood out almost horizontally from the crown of her head. She was one of those people you look at and think, this is
someone
.

I had brought a bottle of whisky, a real Scottish malt that had been a present to me from Sandy Allardyce who had access to such luxuries through the embassy, and now I gave it to Ruth.

Her face lit up. ‘My God, Daph, look at this. Nectar from the god of the glens. Can we drink some, Iris?’

‘That’s pretty much what I brought it for.’

‘You’re very generous. We’ve only got local gutrot,’ Daphne said. She poured us each a measure and we held up our glasses. ‘To friendship,’ Daphne proposed in her direct way. Pleased, I echoed the toast.

‘It’s a nice flat,’ I said, looking around. Another crash sounded from above.

Daphne laughed. ‘Apart from Gaston and his cronies, that is. Actually they’re all right. Our hours don’t overlap much. I’m going to see to the food for a minute; Ruth’ll take care of you.’

‘I’ll show you the rest of the flat,’ Ruth offered.

There wasn’t much to see. In the kitchen a square table was already laid with three places and Daphne was at the
stove stirring a pan of couscous. There was a narrow bathroom with a hip bath, and a bedroom with shuttered windows. And there was one double bed, smooth under a white cotton coverlet.

Belatedly, the penny dropped.

Ruth was leaning in the doorway. ‘Are you surprised?’

I was, but I tried not to show it. ‘No. Well, yes, a bit. I haven’t met … But actually, it’s none of my business, is it?’

She raised one eyebrow. ‘You’d be surprised at how many people think it is their business. Either to be nosy or comical about.’

But her hand lightly grasped my arm as I passed, a gesture simply expressing warmth without sexual import. I understood that for some reason I was going to be accepted by Ruth and Daphne, and the realisation gave me a shock of satisfaction. The two of them seemed very glamorous to me, and free of all the conventions of upbringing and social expectation that held me in my place. I found myself wanting to be more like them and less like my conventional self.

‘It’s ready,’ Daphne called from the kitchen.

When we sat down at the table with the candles lit and Daphne poured from a jug of dark-red Lebanese wine, there was an air of celebration.

‘It’s a special occasion. You are here, and Ruth and I hardly ever get a chance to sit down and eat a proper dinner together,’ she explained.

We drank the raisin-flavoured wine, ate roast chicken and couscous spiked with fresh herbs, and we talked. My hosts were good company, but they were serious-minded. I quickly realised that I couldn’t rely on the superficial cocktail chatter that did for the rest of my social circuit.

As at every cocktail party and around every dinner table in Cairo that night, we discussed the war. But even the familiar assumption that the war itself was right and justifiable,
made automatically by all my circle, was called into question here. Although Ruth and Daphne didn’t call themselves pacifists, that is effectively what they were. Every day they saw the damage that combat did to men like Albie Noake and Private Ridley, and they spent their working hours trying to repair it.

It was easy to understand why they were sceptical about the big battle that everyone else was waiting for with nervous anticipation that sometimes tipped into excitement.

‘You’ve seen my ward,’ Ruth said quietly. ‘In a week’s time, or whenever the push for Tobruk comes, we’ll be caring for twice as many severely wounded. Or three, four, five times as many. The corridors will be full of stretchers. And it will be the same in Daphne’s and every other hospital in Cairo. The trains and ambulances will come flooding in from the desert, packed to the roofs with maimed men from both sides. Is any strategic gain, any military advantage whatsoever, worth that amount of loss and suffering?’

‘You think we should surrender to the fascists?’

‘I think the generals should consider what it is they are likely to achieve, beyond a few hundred miles of empty desert, that is to be bought with so many men’s lives.’

‘If we don’t attack, the Axis forces will push across the western desert and on to Cairo. We have to defend Egypt,’ I said.

Daphne’s clear eyes rested on my face. ‘For our own ends, not Egypt’s.’

From my father, who had worked for many years with the high commission towards the final goal of Egyptian independence, I had inherited the belief that British involvement in Egypt was largely benign.

Daphne leaned forward, pouring more wine into my glass. ‘Your father was a diplomat? Iris, don’t be offended, but we British don’t have a legacy here to be proud of, do we? This
isn’t our country, yet we behave exactly as if it were and as if the people are our servants and inferiors. Farouk is the King of Egypt, but our ambassador is the ruler. Given our history and our attitude, why should any Egyptian, from Farouk right down to the fellahin, have any regard for us?’

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?’