Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance. Rosie Thomas
on both sides, and the lives we had lived in other places and our separate histories, as well as just Xan and me and the immediate chaotic present and the way we had fallen in love. But the war and Egypt made a separate realm, and for the time being the world outside was a shadowy place.
There was another reason too why Xan and I had not talked about a wedding day. He was going back to the desert and we both knew it would be very soon. Perhaps in only a few hours’ time.
‘I’ll be in Cairo again by Christmas, darling, at the latest.’
‘Promise?’
‘Cross my heart. We’re going to drive Rommel all the way out of Africa, I know we are. And after that you and I can make our plans.’ He was optimistic for my sake and I tried to believe him.
Betty leaned across now and tapped my arm.
‘Don’t leave it too long.’ She fluffed up her cottonball hair and winked at me. She had already told me the story of one of her MTC colleagues who carried a crumpled white satin wedding dress at the bottom of her kitbag, so as to be ready as soon as a husband came into sight.
‘James? Where’s that bloody Jessie?’ one of the Cherry Pickers shouted. ‘Some of us haven’t found ourselves a girl yet. Where are we going now?’
To begin with Jessie obligingly orchestrated the evening, but as the hours went by our party gathered momentum until it rolled under its own impetus through the Cairo nightspots. By two in the morning we were at Zazie’s again. Xan and I danced and I felt the heat of him through my satin dress, but drink and exhilaration distorted the normal sequence of minutes and hours, and we both convinced ourselves that the night was endless. There was time to laugh with our friends and time to dance, and there would still be time and time for one another. Leaving for the desert was no more than a little dark unwinking eye at the vanishing point of a long avenue of happiness.
Elvira Mursi came on and blew us both a kiss at the end of her spot.
Sandy Allardyce materialised. He held my hand, rather damply, and sat close to me on one of the little gold seats in a velvet alcove. His round red face was very serious and I realised only belatedly that he was making a confession of love.
‘… a good man. Reckless, if you like, but a fine field officer. Yes. Choice. Of course. ‘S what every woman has as her privilege. But, you know, wish it could have been different. Iris. Just wanted to tell you, you know?’
I shook my head, confusion and sympathy and a shaming desire to laugh mounting in my throat.
‘Sandy. I didn’t know, honestly. Had no idea. I never … let you believe anything I shouldn’t have done, did I?’
‘No. Never a single thing. Perfect lady, always.’
I couldn’t speak now. It was the idea of myself as a perfect lady. Sandy took my hand as if it were the Koh-i-noor diamond and pressed his mouth to the knuckles.
‘Never a word. Ssssh. Won’t speak of it again. Rest of my life. Promise you, on my honour.’
From her front-row table Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch glowered at us.
The night did end, at last, with Xan and me in a taxi going back to his flat. The sun was up and the street sweepers were working, and donkey carts loaded with vegetables plodded to the markets. I was beyond being drunk and I wasn’t tired, and the light had a hard, white, absolute brightness to it that suggested that this day was a crystallisation of everything that had gone before. I already knew that it was one of the days I would remember all my life.
Try to remember. Holding it, cupping my hands to mould the shape of it.
There was a cavalry officer in boots complete with spurs asleep on the dingy sofa.
The kitchen was a swamp of bottles and spilled drink.
The door to one of the bathrooms was jammed. I squeezed into the other, regarded my face for an instant in the clouded mirror, then hastily brushed my teeth with Xan’s toothbrush. He was already unfastening the satin-covered buttons and loops down the back of my dress.
It is the memory of making love on that airless Cairo morning, when we had drunk and danced ourselves sober again, that I hold most close. We were so sweet and shameless, and so powerful in our innocence.
Even now, when I am eighty-two and losing my mind, the recollection of it can catch me unawares and turn my limbs to water.
Xan fell asleep in the end, and I lay and watched the impression of his dreams. He twitched and winced a little and to soothe him I put my hand over the bony place where his ribs fused, feeling the slow rise and fall of his breath.
I didn’t go to work. I called Roddy Boy and told him I had Gyppy tummy, and bore the sarcastic slice in his voice when he told me that he hoped I would feel very much better before too long, and that he also hoped Captain Molyneux was taking good care of me.
In the afternoon, after we had eaten some recuperative pastries and drunk coffee in the shady garden at Groppi’s, Xan took me to a jeweller’s in the old quarter to buy a ring.
‘There is a rather pompous family diamond, actually, that belongs to my mother. I’m the only son so she’ll want you to wear it. D’you think you can bear that? But I want you to have something in the meantime. What would you like?’
We wandered hand in hand past the tiny doorways of the gem merchants. Copts and Jews called out to us, trying to urge us inside their shops. We reached an angle of a cobbled street where the way was too narrow for us to walk abreast, and Xan glanced up at a sign.
‘This is the place.’
‘I don’t need a ring, Xan. I’ve got you.’
‘It’s only a symbol, darling. But I want you to wear it.’
The merchant unlocked the safe and brought out his velvet trays for us and we let the raw stones trickle in cold droplets through our fingers. In the end, under duress, I chose a smoky purple amethyst and ordered a plain claw setting for it. Xan led me out of the shop again and tucked my hand under his arm.
‘There. Now, what would you like to do?’
‘Where is Hassan?’
‘At home with his family, I should think. Why?’
We hadn’t spoken of it but we both suspected that this might be our last day and night together before Xan was called away again. In our Garden City apartment Mamdooh would be performing some domestic routine with polishing cloths or caustic soda and at Xan’s there would be hung-over officers and the same debris of hard living that we had escaped three hours ago. We could have tried to find a hotel room, but with the endless flux of visitors and diplomats and officers washing through Cairo these were hard to come by. And I thought how perfect it would be to go out to the Pyramids again, and watch the sun setting behind Hassan’s hidden oasis.
As soon as I told Xan he smiled at me.
‘You have only to command. But I’ll have to go and beg for a car.’
We walked back towards GHQ through baked afternoon streets. We passed a crowd of Australian soldiers with huge thighs and meaty fists, sweating under full packs, and a smaller band of British squaddies who looked undersized and pale in comparison with their Antipodean counterparts. They were all recently arrived because they gazed in bewilderment at the tide of refuse and dung in the gutters, and the unreadable street signs, and the old men in rags sleeping in the shade of peeling walls. The city was full of men in transit, on their way to camps in advance of the big battle. I only knew that it was coming, I had no idea where or when. Xan almost certainly knew much more.
We came to a tall, anonymous house in a neglected street that ran westwards towards el Rhoda. I was just reaching the conclusion that this must be a headquarters of some kind for Tellforce when a figure detached itself from the shadow of the broken buildings opposite and ran towards Xan. A brown hand caught Xan’s khaki shirtsleeve and some quick words of Arabic followed. It was Hassan.
Xan