IRIS AND RUBY
Rosie Thomas

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 2006

Cover design Caroline Young © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photographs © rhkamen/Getty Images (archway), Merijah Obrenovic/500px/Getty Images (background), Shutterstock.com (all other images)

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007173549

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780007460106

Version: 2020-08-27

Praise for Rosie Thomas:

‘Rosie Thomas writes with beautiful, effortless prose, and shows a rare compassion and a real understanding of the nature of love’

The Times

‘Honest and absorbing, Rosie Thomas mixes the bitter and the hopeful with the knowledge that the human heart is far more complicated than any rule suggests’

Mail on Sunday

‘A master storyteller’

Cosmopolitan

‘Thomas’s novels are beautifully written. This one is a treat’

Marie Claire

‘A lush and sweeping voyage of self-discovery’

Eithne Farry, Daily Mail

‘Prepare to be dazzled … an epic tale of sisterhood and betrayal’

Company

‘Heart-rending and beautifully written … I read it in one delicious go, tears pouring down my face. You cannot fail to be moved’

Emma Lee-Potter, Express

‘A terrific book, beautifully written … questions about identity, belonging, infidelity, dying and forgiveness make this a very moving study of the human heart’

Australian Women’s Weekly

Dedication

For Louis, Solomon and Misty. The new generation

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Rosie Thomas

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

I remember.

And even as I say the words aloud in the silent room and hear the whisper dying away in the shadows of the house, I realise that it’s not true.

Because I don’t, I can’t remember.

I am old, and I am beginning to forget things.

Sometimes I’m aware that great tracts of memory have gone, slipping and melting away out of my reach. When I try to recall a particular day, or an entire year, even a damned decade, if I’m lucky there are the bare facts unadorned with colour. More often than otherwise there’s nothing at all. A blank.

And when I can remember where I have lived, and who I was living with and why, if I try to conjure up what it was like to be there, the texture of my life and what impelled me to wake up every morning and pace out the journey of the day, I cannot do it. Familiar and even beloved faces have silently melted away, their names and the dates of precious initiations and fond anniversaries and events that once seemed momentous, all collapsed and buried beyond reach.

The disappearing is like the desert itself. Sand blows from the four corners of the earth and it builds up in slow drifts and dun ripples, and it blurs the sharpest, proudest structures, and in the end obliterates them.

This is what’s happening to me. The sands of time. (It is a no less accurate image for being a cliché.)

I am eighty-two. I am not afraid of death, which after all can’t be far away.

Nor do I fear complete oblivion, because to be oblivious means what it says.

What does frighten me is the halfway stage. I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime’s independence – yes, selfish independence as my daughter would rightly claim – I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals.

I don’t want to sit in my chair and be fed spoonfuls of pap by Mamdooh or by Auntie; much less do I want to be handed over to medical professionals who will subject me to well-intentioned geriatric care.

I know what that will be like. I am a doctor myself and as well as remembering too little, I have seen too much.

Now Mamdooh is coming. His leather slippers make a soft swish on the boards of the women’s stairway. There is nothing wrong with my hearing. The door creaks open, heavy on its hinges, so that I can see a corner of the pierced screen that hides the gallery from the celebration hall. A light shining through the screen stipples the floor and walls with crescents and stars.

‘Good evening, Ma’am Iris,’ Mamdooh softly says. The deferential form of address has become so elided, so rubbed with usage that it is a pet name now, Mum-reese. ‘Have you been sleeping perhaps?’

‘No,’ I tell him.

I have been thinking. Turning matters over in my mind.

Mamdooh puts down a tray. A glass of mint tea, sweet and fragrant. A linen napkin, some triangles of sweet pastry that I do not want. I eat very little now.

The shiny coffee-brown dome of Mamdooh’s bald head is blotched with darker patches and big brown irregular moles. Out of doors in the harsh white sun I know he always wears his tarboosh. To see him lifting it in two hands and firmly settling it on his head before going out to the market is to be taken back to the time when the red flowerpot fez was essential wear for every effendi in the city.

Mamdooh is holding out my glass of tea. I take it from him, hooking my fingers through the worn silver hoops of the holder and poking my head forward to breathe in the scent.

‘Auntie has made baklava,’ he says, encouraging me by turning back the napkin on the plate.

‘Later. Go on now, Mamdooh. You must have some food yourself.’

Mamdooh will not have eaten a mouthful or taken even a sip of water since before sunrise. It is Ramadan.

When I am alone again, I drink my tea and listen to the sounds of the city. The cobbled street outside my screened windows is narrow, barely wide enough for a single car to pass, and beyond the angle of wall that shelters my doorway there are only the steps of the great mosque. The traffic that pours off concrete ribbon roads and submerges the modern city like a tidal wave is no more than a dull rumble here. Much closer at hand are shouts and laughter as families prepare their evening meal and gather to eat in the cool dusk. There’s a rattle of wheels on the stones and a hoarse cry of warning as a donkey cart passes by, and then a few liquid notes of music as somewhere a door opens and shuts. Hearing this, it might be the same Cairo of sixty years ago.

Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise, what do I have left?

I close my eyes. The glass tips in my fingers, spilling the last drops of liquid on the worn cushions.

Sixty years ago there were soldiers in these streets. Swarms of British officers and men, New Zealanders and Australians, French, Canadians, Indians and Greeks and South Africans and Poles, all in their dusty khaki. The city was a sun-baked magnet for the troops who flooded into it, whenever the war in the desert briefly released them, in search of bars and brothels. Turning their backs on the prospect of death in the sand, they drank and fucked with all the energy of youth, and Cairo absorbed them with its own ancient indifference.

After all, this war was just another layer of history in the making, contributing its dust and debris to lie on top of thousands of years of ruins. There is more history buried along this fertile strip of Nile valley than there is anywhere else in the world.

One of those soldiers from sixty years ago was my lover. The only man I have ever loved.

His name was Captain Alexander Napier Molyneux. Xan.

He wore the same khaki bush shirt and baggy shorts as all the others, distinguished only by badges of rank and regiment, but there was a further anonymity about Xan. He was neither flamboyant nor mysterious. You wouldn’t have singled him out in a crowd of officers at the bar in Shepheard’s Hotel, or at any of the raucous parties we all went to in Garden City or Zamalek, simply because he seemed so ordinary.

The absence of peculiar characteristics was intentional. Xan worked deep in the desert and it was one of his talents to blend into the scenery wherever he happened to be. He rode a horse like the cavalry officer he really was, but if you saw him on a camel with a white kuffiyeh swathed over his head and face, you would take him for an Arab. At the Gezira Club he played tennis and fooled around beside the pool like any other ornament of the Cairo cocktail circuit, but then he would disappear for days or a week at a time, and even in the hothouse of Anglo-Egyptian smart society there would be no whisper of news or even gossip about where he might have gone. He vanished into the desert like a lizard darting under a rock.

I loved him from the moment I first set eyes on him.

I remember.

New roads and concrete tower blocks and shopping streets have obliterated much of the Cairo we knew then, but in this evening’s reverie every detail of it – and of that first evening – comes back to me. I have revisited it so many thousands of times, it seems more real than my eighty-two-year-old reality.

At least I haven’t lost this, thank God, not yet.

This is how I recall it:

It was an airless night thick with the scent of tuberoses.

There were two dozen little round tables set out in a lush garden, candle lanterns hanging in the branches of the mango and mimosa trees, and beyond tall windows a band playing in a panelled ballroom.

I was twenty-two years old, fresh from the wartime austerity of London, drunk on the glamour of Cairo as well as on champagne cocktails.

Giggling, my friend Faria led me over to a table and introduced me to a group of men in evening clothes. There was a bottle of whisky and a phalanx of glasses, cigar smoke competing with the tuberoses.

‘This is Iris Black. Stay right where you are, Jessie, please.’

But the young man with pale yellow hair was already on his feet, his head bent low as he lifted my hand to his mouth. His moustache tickled my fingers.

‘I can’t possibly sit still,’ he murmured. ‘She is too beautiful.’

Inside my head I was still the London typist, making do on a tiny wage in a basement flat in South Ken, but I had learned enough in my weeks in Cairo not to glance over my shoulder in search of whoever the beauty might be. Here, in this exotic garden with the band playing and the orchid presented by my evening’s date pinned to the bodice of my evening dress, I knew that she was me.

‘Frederick James. Captain, Eleventh Hussars,’ he murmured. And then he released my hand and stood up straight. He was slim, not very tall. ‘For some reason, everyone calls me Jessie James.’

His arm crooked and his fist, lightly clenched, rested just for a second on the smooth flank of his dinner jacket.

There were plenty of rather fey young men in Cairo. I had several times heard the RAF boys collectively described as ‘the flying fairies’, but Jessie James didn’t seem to belong in quite the same category. In spite of the hair and the well-tailored evening clothes, he looked tough. His face was sunburned and there was a shadow in his eyes that went against his playful manner.

‘How do you do?’ I said.

‘Ah, she is so nice, our Iris,’ Faria gurgled. ‘A good girl, from a diplomatic family. When she was twelve, you know, her daddy was Head of Chancery right here in Cairo. She is practically a native citizen.’

Faria was one of my two flatmates. Two years older than me, the elegant daughter of a prosperous Anglo-Egyptian family, she had taken me under her wing almost as soon as I arrived. Faria was engaged to the son of one of her father’s business associates and liked to tell everyone that as she was practically married, she was ideally placed to chaperone Sarah and me. Behind the backs of whoever we were talking to she would then deliver a huge wink. In fact, Ali was often away, on business in Alexandria or Beirut or Jerusalem, and Faria would have benefited from the attentions of a chaperone rather more than we did.

We were drawn into the group. Chairs were brought over and placed at the table as the officers eagerly made room. I accepted a glass of whisky, at the same time looking around the glimmering garden for my escort. Sandy Allardyce was one of the young men from the British embassy. He insisted to anyone who would listen that he was desperate to get into uniform, but so far he was still chained to his office desk. I guessed that he felt uncomfortable in the company of so many men who were actually fighting, and that he dealt with this by drinking too much. His pink face had turned red within an hour of our arrival at the party.

‘So you lived here as a young girl?’ one of the officers asked. The man next to him clicked his lighter to a cigarette and I glimpsed his face, briefly lit by the umber flare.

‘Just in the holidays. I was at school in England most of the time.’

Faria was laughing extravagantly at a joke made by one of the others, her head thrown back to reveal her satiny throat and the diamond and pearl drops swinging in her ears.

Jessie leaned forward to command my attention again. ‘Are you looking for Sandy? I saw you dancing with him.’ He had noticed my anxiety.

Gratefully I said, ‘Yes. He brought me to the party. I ought to go and find him. He …’ I was going to add something about the orchid, I was already fingering the waxy tip of one of the petals.

Then the man with the cigarette moved his chair so the light from one of the candle lanterns threw his face into relief. There was a blare of music from the band and a burst of applause as a dance finished. I looked at him and forgot whatever remark I had been on the point of uttering, not that it mattered. Cairo party conversation was profoundly superficial.

The man’s eyes were bright with amusement. He was dark-haired, dark-skinned. He might have appeared saturnine if there hadn’t been so much fun in his face.

He leaned across the table. I saw the way his mouth formed a smile. ‘Don’t dance with Allardyce. And if it’s a choice between Jessie and me – well, that’s not really a choice at all, is it?’

‘Alexander.’ Jessie pouted.

‘Not now, dear,’ the man said. He drew back my chair and I stood up, he put his hand under my arm.

‘Xan Molyneux,’ he said calmly. We walked across the lawn together, under the branches of the trees. The heat-withered grass smelled acrid, nothing like an English garden. I had never felt so far from home, yet so happily and entirely not homesick.

‘I’m Iris.’

‘I know. Faria did introduce you. Is she a friend of yours?’

‘Yes. We share the same flat. Sarah Walker-Wilson lives there too. I suppose you know her?’

I can’t bear it, I thought. Every man in Cairo adores Sarah. In the six weeks since I had moved in, Sarah had not spent a single evening at home.

Xan inclined his head until his cheek almost touched mine.

‘The three flowers of Garden City,’ he murmured. Garden City was the quarter of Cairo where we lived. I wasn’t sure if he was making a joke or not.

We reached the dance floor. Xan’s expression was serene and he was humming the tune as he took me in his arms. He didn’t enquire whether or not I thought it was a jolly band, or if I was going to Mrs Diaz’s shindig in Heliopolis tomorrow night. We just danced. He was a good dancer, but I had had other partners who were better. It was more that Xan gave the steps and the music and me all his attention, which made spinning round a crowded floor to the tootling of an Egyptian band seem singular, invested with a kind of magic. Laughter shone in his face and the pleasure that he was obviously taking in this precise, isolated moment radiated out of him. I felt energy beating like a pulse under the black weft of his coat, transmitting itself through my hands and arms and singing between us, and an answering rhythm began to beat in me. We both felt it and we were swept along, becoming more absorbed in the dance and each other. We looked straight into one another’s eyes, not talking but communicating in a language I had never used before.

That first dance seamlessly ran into the next, and the one after that.

I stopped being drunk on champagne and whisky, and grew intoxicated with excitement and the music and Xan Molyneux’s closeness instead. I saw the bandleader glancing over his shoulder at us, and some other couples were eyeing us too, but I didn’t care and Xan was looking only at me. We had exchanged hardly more than a dozen words but I felt that I knew him already, better than anyone I had met in Cairo.

I also felt a clear, absolute certainty that from now on all things were and would be possible. Happiness became wound up with anticipation to a point of tension that was almost unbearable, and it made me suddenly giddy. As Xan swung us in an exuberant circle I tripped and overbalanced on my high heel. A hot skewer of pain stabbed from my ankle up my calf and I would have fallen if he hadn’t wrapped his arm more tightly round my waist.

‘Are you all right?’

I drew in a breath and blew it out hard to stop myself howling.

‘Just … twisted it.’ The dancers formed a circle round us.

‘Here, I’ll carry you.’ He slid his other arm beneath my thighs, ready to lift me off my feet. At that moment I saw Sandy. He came steaming through the dancers towards us, crimson in the face, the studs popping out of his shirt front. His eyes seemed to swivel in opposite directions.

‘What’s going on?’ he shouted. ‘Molyneux. You … what d’you think you’re doing?’

‘Helping Miss Black to a chair,’ Xan drily replied, straightening up. ‘She has twisted her ankle.’

I took a step away from his side and nearly fell over, Xan immediately lunged to my rescue, and we almost toppled in a heap. As we struggled to right ourselves in a tangle of arms and legs I laughed up at him, in spite of the pain in my ankle, and I heard a wounded bellow from Sandy. He came flailing at Xan and caught the collar of his evening coat. Xan let go of me and twisted round to face Sandy who planted a wild punch on his jaw.

‘Leave my girl alone,’ Sandy shouted, but having landed his awkward blow the belligerence was visibly draining out of him. He gazed around at the circle of onlookers but he couldn’t see any ready support. His big, shiny red face seemed to crumple inwards, oozing whisky from every pore. I watched miserably, balancing on one foot, wanting to tell the sticky air – but for Xan to hear – that I wasn’t Sandy’s girl at all, and feeling ashamed of the impulse.

‘You know, I really don’t want to hit you back, Allardyce,’ Xan drawled. One hand slipped into the pocket of his coat. He sounded amused, not at all perturbed. ‘It would make such a mess.’

‘He’s right, it would,’ another voice chipped in. Jessie James had appeared, with Faria beside him. Her sharp eyes took in everything. She held out her arm and I leaned on it as Sandy caught hold of me on the other side. His hand was hot and damp, and there were little glittering rivulets of sweat running from his hairline to his stiff collar. He jerked his head at Xan and Jessie, but he was already in retreat.

‘It’s not funny.’

‘Are we laughing?’ Jessie innocently asked.

Sandy turned away from them and muttered to me, ‘C’mon, s’get another drink. Be all right.’

Faria clicked her tongue. ‘No it won’t. I’m taking Iris home. Can’t you see she’s hurt?’

The band started playing again and the other dancers turned away, losing interest.

The next minute I was hobbling into the hallway, supported on one side by Faria and with Sandy weaving on the other. A huge crystal chandelier dripped diamonds of light over our heads. I felt rather than saw Xan and Jessie at the back of our ungainly procession as Lady Gibson Pasha came surging towards us, both hands outstretched as if to catch me. Our hostess wore a gold turban and a collar of egg-sized emeralds.

‘My dear, my dear girl, you poor thing. You must put your foot up, we need an ice pack.’

She was clapping her hands, calling at a passing servant to bring ice. I wanted to stay near Xan and to get as far away from Sandy as possible. I was also longing to get home and lie in a dark room to disentangle the chaos and amazement of the evening.

‘It’s nothing, really. I’m so sorry, Lady Gibson. Just a silly sprain.’

‘Daddy’s car and driver are here,’ Faria said. ‘We’ll go home. I’ll make sure Iris is looked after.’

Sandy vehemently nodded his head. He had gone pale now. Another servant was at hand with Faria’s little swansdown bolero and my mother’s Indian shawl, which was my evening wrap. With Lady Gibson’s instructions floating after us we hobbled out of the front door. Amman Pasha’s chauffeur was waiting at the steps with the big black car. He opened the door and I was handed into the expanse of cream-coloured leather. Sandy collapsed beside me, gasping and tugging at the ends of his tie to undo the bow. Faria slipped in on the other side.

The car began to roll over the gravel. I twisted round to see through the rear window and caught a last glimpse of Xan and Jessie standing side by side at the foot of the steps, black head and blond, watching us go. I couldn’t really see Xan’s face, but I thought he was still smiling.

‘God,’ Sandy groaned. ‘Bloody hell.’ He screwed his black tie into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket before letting his head fall back against the seat cushions.

‘We’ll drop you at the embassy,’ Faria said coolly and leaned forward to give the driver instructions in Arabic. We swept over the Bulaq Bridge and I saw the broken mosaic of yellow and white lights reflected in black water as we turned south past the cathedral.

Faria yawned. ‘Oh dear. I completely forgot to tell the poet we were leaving. Whatever will he think?’

It wasn’t a question that required an answer. Jeremy – known as the poet – was the most fervent of Faria’s admirers, a thin and mournful young man who worked for the British Council. Ali was away and Jeremy had been her escort for the evening. He would think what he presumably always thought: that the exquisite and careless Faria had given him the slip again.

Sandy had passed out. I could hear the breath catching thickly in the back of his throat. Whisky fumes and Faria’s perfume mingled with the smell of leather and the uniquely Cairene stink of kerosene and incense and animal dung. Faria took a Turkish cigarette out of her bag, clicked her gold lighter and inhaled deeply. I shook my head when she held it out to me. The pain in my ankle was intense and the faint nausea it engendered made my senses keener. I let every turn of the route print itself in my mind, the black silhouette of each dome against the fractionally paler sky, the hooked profile of an old beggar patiently sitting on a step. Every detail was significant and precious. I wanted to absorb each tiny impression and hold it and keep it, because tonight was so important. I never doubted that.

We stopped near the embassy gates and shook Sandy awake. He groaned again and muttered incoherently as he flopped out into the road. The car swept on. Over the top of the embassy building, behind the flagpole with the limp folds of the Union flag, I could see the tops of huge trees shading lawns where I had been paraded for tea parties as a child. I liked to slip away and gaze at the Nile beyond, slow olive-green, flagged with the sails of feluccas.

Later I lay in bed with the wooden shutters latched open and watched the sky. My bandaged ankle throbbed but I didn’t mind that it kept me awake. All I could think of was Xan, whom Faria had hardly noticed and who had left me stricken with desire from the moment I saw him. Shivers of laughter and longing and anticipation ran through me as I lay there, slick with sweat, under my thin cotton sheet. On that first sleepless night I never doubted that Xan and I would meet again. I would tell him I wasn’t and never had been Sandy Allardyce’s girl, and we would claim each other. That was exactly how it was meant to be.

How simple, how innocent it seems. And how joyful.

Garden City was set beside the Nile, an enclave of curving streets with tall cocoa-brown and dirty cream houses and apartment blocks deep in gardens of thick, dusty greenery. Our apartment belonged to Faria’s parents who lived in a grand house nearby. There were wood-block floors and heavy furniture, and every room had a ceiling fan that lazily circulated the scalding air. There were big metal-finned radiators too, that occasionally emitted hollow clanking noises and dribbled rusty water. Faria never noticed the heat and her black hair stayed like a glossy wing instead of frizzing in the humid blast as mine did, but she was afraid of feeling cold. When she was going out at night she always slipped a little bolero of white feathers or a silk velvet cape over her bare shoulders.

My room was a narrow, high-ceilinged box at the end of a corridor away from the main part of the flat. The furniture was on a humbler scale and there was a view from the window of a jacaranda tree in the next-door garden. I didn’t know Faria and Sarah very well but they were lively company, and I was pleased to have such a comfortable place to live. It was even conveniently close to where I worked, at British Army GHQ, just off Sharia Qasr el Aini. I was clerical and administrative assistant to a lieutenant-colonel in Intelligence called Roderick Boyce, known to everyone as Roddy Boy. Colonel Boyce and my father belonged to the same London club and had hunted together before the war. A letter from my father, and an interview during which my prospective boss reminisced about my father taking a fence on his big bay mare, were enough to gain me the job.

The morning after Xan and I met I got up early to go to work, as I had done on every ordinary day since I had come back to Cairo.

In the stifling mid afternoons the streets cowered under the hammer blow of the sun out of a white sky, but at 8 a.m. it was cool enough to walk the few streets between the flat and the office. That day, with my heavily bandaged ankle, I had to take a taxi. Roddy Boy looked at me as I half hopped to my desk, supported by a walking stick belonging to Faria’s father.

‘Oh dear. Tennis? Camel racing? Or something more strenuous?’

‘Dancing,’ I replied.

‘Ah. Of course.’ Roddy Boy chose to believe that my social life was much more hectic and glamorous than it really was. ‘But I hope your injury will not impede your typing?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. I rolled a sandwich of requisition forms and carbon paper into my machine and forced myself to concentrate.

When at last I came home again Mamdooh, the suffragi who looked after us and the apartment, greeted me in his stately way: ‘Good afternoon, Miss Iris. These were delivered for you an hour ago.’

‘Oh, beautiful.’

There was a big bunch of white lilies, gardenias and tuberoses. I buried my face in the cool blooms. The intense perfume brought back last night even more vividly, candlelight and music and cigars and Xan’s face. Mamdooh beamed. He was pleased for me; usually the bouquets were for Sarah.

I sat down awkwardly and opened the envelope that came with them. There was a plain white card with the words I hope your ankle will mend soon. It was signed simply X. That was all.

Mamdooh was still standing there in his white galabiyeh, waiting for more. Faria complained that he was too familiar and that what time she came in at night was none of his business, but I liked the big man and his broad smiles that were always accompanied by a shrewd glance. Mamdooh missed nothing. Faria’s mother was probably aware of that too.

‘Just from a friend,’ I said.

‘Of course, Miss. I will put in water for you.’

The flat often looked like a florist’s shop. Sarah and Faria didn’t even ask who my bouquet was from.

I admired my flowers and waited, but a week and then another went by. The whole month of June 1941 crawled past and I heard nothing more from Xan.

In my outer office at GHQ I typed reports and delivered signals for Roddy Boy, and chatted to the staff officers who hurried in and out to see him. As a civilian I was on the lowest level of clearance, but because of my family I was judged to be safe and many of the secret plans that flew in and out of Roddy Boy’s office crossed my desk first.

The Allied troops, except for those besieged in Tobruk, had withdrawn into Egypt and the Germans were at the Libyan border. In an attempt to dislodge them, in a brief flurry of GHQ activity during which Roddy Boy didn’t withdraw for his usual long afternoon at the Turf Club, Operation Battleaxe was launched.

‘We can’t match their bloody firepower,’ Roddy groaned from behind his desk.

Almost one hundred of our armoured tanks were lost to German anti-tank guns, their smouldering wrecks lying abandoned in a thick pall of dust and smoke. Many of their crews were dead or wounded.

As July approached I began accepting every invitation that came my way. I went to cocktail parties and tennis tournaments, fancy dress balls, and poetry readings at the British Council, scanning the crowds for a glimpse of Xan. I sat beside the pool at the Gezira Club every lunchtime, always in the hope of hearing news of him.

Just once, I met one of the other officers who had been at his table at Lady Gibson Pasha’s party.

‘Xan?’ he said vaguely. ‘I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to be around, does he?’

He had simply vanished, and Jessie James with him. My certainty about us ebbed away. Maybe he had been posted elsewhere. Maybe he was married. Maybe – could that be possible? – he really did prefer other diversions.

Maybe he was dead.

I kept my fears to myself. What I felt seemed too significant and also too equivocal, too fragile, to share with Faria and Sarah.

‘You’re very sociable these days,’ Faria said with a raised eyebrow.

‘It’s as easy to go out as to stay in.’ I shrugged.

Then, at the end of the first week of July, on an evening when the heat made it an effort to dress to go out, even to move, the telephone rang in the hallway and I heard Mamdooh answer it. His big round head appeared in the doorway.

‘For you, Miss.’

‘Hello?’ I said into the receiver.

‘This is Xan,’ he said. ‘May I come and see you?’

I laid my head against the door frame, electric shocks of relief and delight chasing up my spine. I managed to answer, ‘Yes. Now?’

‘Right now.’

‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘Yes, please come.’

That was how it was.

I open my eyes on the dim, silent room. There is spilt tea on the cushions, some sticky drops dark on my front. I am overwhelmed with sleep now, too tired to sit up and tidy myself. It doesn’t matter. Who will see, except Mamdooh and Auntie?

Sleep. Dream. Always the dreams.

Shit. Double shit and fuck, Ruby said to herself as she caught a glimpse of what lay beyond the doors. Is this what it’s like?

It was dark outside. Beyond a barrier there was a heaving wall of heads and waving arms and shouting faces, harshly lit and shadowed by sickly overhead neon lights. The airport was clammily air-conditioned, but she could already feel the heat rolling towards her through the doors as they slid open and hissed shut again. The crowd of arriving passengers pushed her forward, catching her rucksack with the protruberances of their own baggage, jerking her from side to side. The doors opened once more and this time she was part of the gout of humanity they disgorged.

Hot, humid air rushed into her lungs. Sweat immediately prickled under her arms and in her hairline.

A chorus of yelling rose around her. Hands grabbed at her arms, tried to hoist the pack off her back.

‘Lady! Taxi, very good, cheap.’

‘Hotel, lady. Nice hotel.’

‘Stop it,’ Ruby shouted. ‘Leave me alone.’ She hadn’t bargained for this onslaught. Alarmed, she wrenched herself free of the clutching hands but another dozen pairs replaced them, tried to propel her in different directions.

‘Taxi here! Lady, I show you.’

She became aware of a stream of honking cars beyond the immediate crowd, a fringe of palm trees with ragged leaves outlined against a sky dimly peppered with stars, a snake of headlights along an elevated road. The noise and the heat were overwhelming. Ruby glared into the boiling sea of dark faces, moustaches, open mouths. At the back of the throng was a younger face, imploringly watching her.

She dragged an arm free, pointed at him.

‘You. Taxi?’

Instantly he dived through the scrum of bodies, grabbed her wrist with one hand and snatched her rucksack with the other. Ruby kept her smaller nylon sack tightly pressed to her side. They scuttled through the mass together and emerged into a clearer space beyond.

‘Come,’ the man shouted, pointing over the roofs of a hundred hooting black-and-white taxis. A packed bus roared in front of them, missing them by inches.

The driver’s taxi was parked under one of the palm trees. Two ragged children were sitting propped against it. The driver gave them a coin, threw her rucksack into the boot and opened the passenger door. With relief Ruby sank into the back seat. The springs had collapsed and stained foam padding bulged through a split in the brown plastic seat cover. The interior of the car smelled strongly of cigarettes and cheap air freshener.

The driver thrust the car into gear and they roared forward, then jerked to an almost immediate halt in a queue for the exit road. Even though it was dark, the heat was intense. Ruby had never encountered this phenomenon before. She closed her eyes, noticing that even her eyelids were sticky with sweat, then forced them open again. She mustn’t switch off, not yet. The driver flashed her a smile over his shoulder. His teeth were cartoon-white in his brown face. He did look young, not much older than herself.

‘Where you go?’

She unfolded the sheet of paper that she had kept in her jeans pocket all through the flight and read out the address.

‘Why you go there? I know nice hotel, very clean, cheap. I take you there instead.’

‘We’re going where I told you,’ Ruby insisted. ‘No arguing. Got that?’

This amused him. He laughed and slapped his hands on the steering wheel.

The traffic began to move. There were roads everywhere, the sodium-lit elevated sections crazily perched over complex intersections, all hemmed in by drab concrete tower blocks and hung about with giant advertisement hoardings. The faces of huge women with black eyebrows and cows’ eyelashes mooned at each other over the street lamps. Every foot of road was clogged with hooting cars and trucks and big blue buses. The road signs were written in a code of squiggles and dots.

Ruby lounged in the sagging seat and stared at it all. Her face was expressionless but inwardly she was fighting to maintain the defiance that had buoyed her up since leaving home. Now that she was actually here, she realised that she had hardly considered her destination. To get away and to stay away, that was what she had fixed on. But now all kinds of other problems reared up, competing with each other for her attention. She didn’t know how to handle this place, not at all. And nobody knew where she was; no one was looking out for her arrival. It was far from the first time in her life that she had been in the same situation, but never in quite such an alien setting.

She felt a long way from home, but she bundled up that thought and pushed it aside.

‘How much?’ she demanded. She had changed the rest of her money into Egyptian pounds at the airport exchange. It made a reassuringly thick wad, which was why she had decided to splash out on a taxi. The thought of trying to find a bus had been too much to contemplate.

The driver swung the wheel to overtake a donkey cart laden with saucepans and tin bowls that was plodding along the inner lane of the motorway. He shot the smile at her again.

‘Ah, money, no broblem. Where you from?’

‘London.’

‘Very nice place. David Beckham.’

‘Yeah. Or no. Whatever.’ At least they were moving now, presumably towards the city centre, wherever that might be. Airports were always miles away in the outer bloody suburbs, weren’t they?

‘My name Nafouz.’

‘Right.’

There was a pause. Nafouz reached under the dash and produced a pack of Marlboro, half turned to offer it to her. Ruby hesitated. She had run out and she was longing for one.

‘Thanks.’ She lit it with her own Bic, ignoring his.

‘You have boyfriend in Cairo?’

Ruby gave a snort of derisive laughter. ‘I’ve never been here in my life.’

‘I be your boyfriend.’

She had hardly looked at him, except to notice his teeth, but now she saw the creases in the collar of his white shirt, and the way the inside of his black leather jacket dirtied the fabric in crooked ribs. His black hair was long, combed back from his face. Quite nice, really.

She lifted her head. This, at least, was familiar territory. ‘In. Your. Dreams,’ she said clearly.

Nafouz’s delighted laughter filled the car. He drummed his hands on the wheel as if this was the funniest joke he had ever heard.

‘I dream always. Dreaming cheap. Cost nothing at all.’

‘Just watch the road, all right?’

She huddled in her corner, smoking and looking out at the wilderness. She had been abroad before, of course, with Lesley and Andrew to places like Tuscany and Kos and the Loire valley (how dull that one had been), but she had never seen anything like this steaming mess of concrete and metal. As they got nearer to what must be the middle of the city the traffic jam got even worse. There were long stationary intervals during which she peered down the side streets. There were tiny open-fronted shops with men sitting smoking at tin tables. Shafts of light came out of open doorways, shining on women with black shawls over their heads who sat on stone steps with children squirming around them. There were crates of globular shiny vegetables and crooked towers of coke cans, a thick litter of rubbish in the gutters, scrawny dogs nosing at it all. Men selling things from trays yelled on the street corners, other bent old men pushed hand barrows through the traffic. Neon lights blinked everywhere and there was the endless honking of horns.

‘Busy place,’ she said at last, wanting to make it smaller and less threatening with a casual phrase.

Nafouz shrugged. ‘Who your friends here?’

He was either being nosy, or he was concerned for her. Neither was welcome.

‘Family,’ she said discouragingly.

They were winding down smaller streets now, leaving the main thoroughfares behind. Ruby glanced upwards and saw onion domes and tall thin towers pasted against dark-blue sky. The street was so narrow that there was only room for one car to pass. The women sitting on their steps lifted their heads and stared as the taxi slid by. There was one great dome just ahead, cutting an arc of sky, and a trio of thin spires that rose beside it.

Nafouz stopped when he could go no further. The street had become a cobbled alley and it took a sharp-angled turn just in front of them. A stone pillar blocked the way. In the angle of a pale blank wall was a door with a small flight of stone steps leading up to it.

‘Here is place,’ Nafouz announced.

Ruby stared at the door. She could just see that it was painted blue, old paint that had bubbled to expose wood split by the sun. She hadn’t at all worked out what to expect, but it wasn’t this. There was nothing here to give any clue to what or who might be inside.

She summoned up her resolve.

‘Yeah. How much money d’you want?’ She opened up her nylon sack and her Discman and headphones and an apple and tubes of make-up rolled over the seat.

‘Fifty bounds.’

‘Fifty? D’you think I’m stupid or something? I’ll give you twenty.’ She opened her wallet and fumbled with torn filthy notes.

‘From airport, fifty.’ Nafouz wasn’t smiling any longer.

‘Get lost, right?’ Ruby gathered up her belongings and hopped out of the car but the driver was quicker. He ran round and held down the boot so she couldn’t retrieve her rucksack. They squared up to each other, faces inches apart.

‘Twenty-five,’ Ruby said.

‘Fifty.’

‘Give me my fucking bag.’ She kicked his shin as hard as she could. Unfortunately she was only wearing flipflops.

Nafouz yelped. ‘Lady, lady. You are not behaving nicely.’

‘Really? Now hand over my bag.’

‘You pay first.’ But Nafouz was relenting. This tourist’s resistance earned a glimmer of his respect. Usually they just gave in and handed over the money. ‘Thirty,’ he conceded.

‘Fuck’s sake.’ But she sighed and took another note out of her purse, crumpling it and flinging it against the sleeve of his leather jacket. Nafouz’s smile was restored. Thirty Egyptian pounds was the going rate for a ride in from the airport.

Ruby took her rucksack and hoisted it over her shoulder. With the wires of her headphones trailing and the contents of her other bag spilling in her arms she marched up the stone steps without a backward glance. She heard Nafouz reversing the car the way they had come, then a squeal of tyres as he raced away.

As soon as he was gone she regretted the loss of even this brief relationship. Maybe she should have asked him to wait. What if there was nobody here? What if the address was wrong? Where would she go, in this city where she couldn’t even read the street signs?

Then she lifted her head and straightened her shoulders again.

There was no door knocker, nothing. She knocked on the blistered paint. There was a smell of dried piss in this alleyway, competing with all the other stinks.

There was no sound from within.

Ruby clenched her fist and hammered even harder. Some poem that they had all been made to learn at school floated into her head and, without thinking, she yelled the words in time to the banging: ‘“Is there anybody there,” said the Traveller?’

The door suddenly creaked open, revealing a six-inch slice of dim light. Ruby was so startled that her voice trailed away in a squeak. She could just see a big fat man in a white dress.

She said, ‘I am Ruby Sawyer.’

Having taken one look at her, the man was already trying to close the door again. Ruby’s foot flew out and wedged itself in the crack. She wished for the second time that she was wearing proper shoes. She repeated her name, louder this time, but it clearly wasn’t enough.

She added loudly, ‘I am here to see my grandmother. Let me in, please.’

The resistance diminished a little. Immediately she put her shoulder to the door and pushed hard. It swung open and she fell inwards with a clatter of spilled belongings. The man’s face was a dark purplish moon of disapproval. He frowned, but he did help her to her feet.

Ruby looked around. Her first impression was of the inside of a church. There was a stone floor, musty wood panelling, a pale, weak light suspended on chains inside a glass vessel. A smell of incense, too, and some kind of spicy cooking.

‘Madam is resting,’ the man said frigidly.

The best course was obviously to be conciliatory.

‘I don’t want to disturb her. Or disturb anyone. I’m sorry if I made a noise. But, you know …’ The man didn’t help her out. He went on impassively staring at her. ‘I … I have come all the way from London. My mother, you see … Um, my mother is Madam’s daughter. You know?’

There was another silence. Whether he knew or not, the connection didn’t seem to impress him. But at last he sighed heavily and said, ‘Follow me, please. Leave this here.’ He pointed to her bags. She relinquished them with pleasure.

He led the way beneath an arch and through a bare room. Behind a heavy door there was a flight of enclosed wooden stairs. The lights were very dim, just single bulbs in the angles of walls, shaded with metal grilles. They went up the stairs and along a panelled corridor. It was a big house, Ruby thought, but it was dusty and bare, and all the stairs and corners and screens made it secretive. A place of shadow and whispers. It was much cooler in here than it was outside. A faint shiver twitched her skin.

The man stopped at a closed door. He bent his head and listened. She noticed that his face had turned soft and concerned. There was no sound, so he lifted a latch and eased the door open. There was a light burning in a teardrop of crimson glass, a carved divan seat piled with cushions under a shuttered window. In a low cushioned chair with a padded footstool a very old woman was propped up with her eyes closed. A spilled glass lay on the kelim rug.

Ruby took a step forward and she opened her eyes.

Dream? Someone I used to know who was buried beneath the sand while I was looking elsewhere?

I am afraid of these spectres who loom up out of the past. I fear them because I can’t place them …

Fear makes me angry.

‘Mamdooh, who is this? What do you think you are doing? Don’t let people walk in here as if it’s a public library. Go away.’

The woman, apparition, whoever she is, doesn’t move.

Mamdooh kneels down, picks up the glass, puts it back on the tray. I can see the blotches on his old, bald skull. At once I feel sorry, and confused. I put my hand out to him and it’s shaking. ‘Forgive me. Who is she?’

The woman – very young, strange-looking – comes closer.

‘I’m Ruby.’

‘Who?’

‘Your granddaughter. Lesley’s daughter.’

‘You are not.’

Lesley’s daughter? A memory disinters itself. A pale, rather podgy child, dressed in a wool kilt and hairslides. Silent, yet somehow mutinous. Have I got that right?

‘Yes, I am. You are Granny Iris, my mother’s mother, Cairo Granny. Last time I saw you I was ten. You came for a holiday.’

I am tired. The effort of recall is too much. Poor Lesley, I think.

‘Does she know you are here?’

The child blinks. Now I look at her, I can see that she is hardly more than a child. She has made the effort to appear otherwise, with startling face paint and extraordinary metal rings and bolts driven into nose and ears, and with a six-inch slice of pale abdomen revealed between the two halves of her costume, but I would put her age at eighteen or nineteen.

‘Your mother. Does she know?’

‘No, actually.’

Her answer is deadpan but, to my surprise, the way she delivers it makes me want to smile. Mamdooh has picked up the tea glass, tidied the tray. Now he stands over me, a protective mountain.

‘Ma’am Iris, it is late,’ he protests.

‘I know that.’ To the child I say, ‘I don’t know why you are here, Miss. You will go straight back where you came from. I’m tired now, but I will speak to you in the morning.’

‘Shall I send Auntie to you?’ Mamdooh asks me.

‘No.’ I don’t want to be undressed and put to bed. I don’t want to reveal to the child that sometimes this happens. ‘Just get her to make up a bed for, for … what did you say your name is?’

‘Ruby.’

It’s a prostitute’s name, which goes well enough with her appearance. What was Lesley thinking?

‘A bed and some food, if she wants it. Thank you, Mamdooh. Good night, Ruby.’

The girl gives a sudden smile. Without the glower she looks even younger.

I make my way to my own room. When at last I am lying down with the white curtains drawn around the bed, the longing for sleep of course deserts me. I lie staring at the luminous folds of muslin, seeing faces and hearing voices.

Majestically disapproving, Mamdooh led Ruby downstairs again. A little old woman, about five feet tall, with a white shawl wrapped round her head and neck, appeared in the hallway. They spoke rapidly to each other.

‘You would like to eat some food?’ Mamdooh asked stiffly.

‘No, thanks very much. Had some on the plane.’

‘Go with Auntie, then.’

Ruby hoisted her luggage once more and followed the old woman up the enclosed stairs and through the shadowy galleries to a small room with a divan under an arched window. Auntie, if that was the name she went by, showed her a bathroom across the way. There was an overhead cistern with a chain, and the bowl was patterned with swirling blue and white foliage. There was an old-fashioned shower head as big as a dinner plate and a slatted wooden board over the drain, and a blue-painted chair with some folded towels.

‘Thank you,’ Ruby said.

‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ Auntie murmured.

When she had gone, Ruby peeled off her clothes and dropped them on the floor. She got under the thin starched sheet just as she was, and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

‘No, no, don’t worry at all. I just wondered if she and Chloe might be together … Yes, of course. Is she? In Chile? How marvellous. Give her my best wishes, won’t you? Yes, that would be lovely. I’ll give you a call. ’Bye.’

Lesley replaced the receiver. ‘She’s not there either.’

Her neat leather address book lay open on the side table, but there were no more numbers left to try. She had been through them all and none of Ruby’s friends or their parents had seen her recently. None of Ruby’s friends who were also known to her mother, at least. There weren’t all that many of them.

Andrew was sitting in an armchair in a circle of lamplight, a pile of papers on his lap. A vee of wrinkles formed in the centre of his forehead as he stared at her over his reading glasses.

‘She’s nineteen. It’s really time she started taking responsibility for herself. You can’t stand in the firing line for her for ever.’

‘I don’t think I do,’ Lesley answered mildly. ‘Do I?’

Andrew exhaled sharply through his nose, pulling down the corners of his mouth to indicate disagreement without bothering to disagree, and resumed his reading.

Looking away from him, at the pleasant room that was arranged just how she wanted it, with the duck-egg blue shade of the walls that was restful without being cold and the cushion and curtain borders exactly matching it, Lesley felt anxiety fogging the atmosphere. Concern about Ruby distorted the room’s generous proportions and made it loom around her, sharp with threatening edges. The air itself tasted thin, as if she couldn’t draw enough of it into her lungs to make her heart beat steadily. Lesley knew this feeling of old, but familiarity never lessened the impact.

Where was Ruby? What was she doing this time, and who was she with?

One day, Lesley’s inner voice insisted, the unthinkable will happen. She shook her head to drive away the thought.

She never experienced the same anxiety about Edward, Ruby’s half-brother. Edward was always in the right place, doing the right thing. It was only for Ruby that she feared.

Justifiably, Andrew would snap.

Lesley closed her address book and secured it with a woven band. They had eaten dinner and she had cleared it away. The dishwasher was purring in her granite-and-maplewood kitchen, the central heating had come on, the telephone obstinately withheld its chirrup. Ruby had been gone since yesterday afternoon. She had slipped out of the house without a word to anyone.

Just to break the silence she asked, ‘Would you like a drink, darling? A whisky, or anything?’

‘No thanks.’ Andrew didn’t even look up.

‘I’ll go and … see if Ed’s all right with his homework.’

Lesley went slowly up the stairs. At the top she hesitated, then tapped on her son’s door: ‘Hello?’

Ed was sitting at his table. The television was on at the foot of his bed, but he had his back to it and she saw an exercise book and coloured pencils and an encyclopaedia open in front of him.

‘How’s it going?’

‘OK.’ His thick fair hair, the same colour as his father’s, stuck up in a tuft at the front and made him look like a placid bird. He was the opposite of Ruby in every single respect. He rolled a pencil between his thumb and forefinger now and Lesley was aware that he was politely waiting for her to go away and leave him in peace.

‘No word from Ruby,’ she said. ‘I really thought she’d ring this evening.’

Ed nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘You know, I don’t think we should worry. She’s probably staying in town with one of her mates. It’s not like it’s the first time she’s just forgotten to come home, is it?’

For an eleven-year-old, Edward was remarkably well thought-out.

‘No,’ Lesley agreed.

‘Have you tried her mobile again?’

Only a dozen times. ‘Still turned off.’

‘Well, I think we should just tell ourselves that no news is good news. She’ll probably ring you tomorrow.’

‘Yes. All right, darling. I’ll pop in later and say goodnight.’

‘OK.’ He had his nose in his book again before the door closed.

Lesley went along the landing to another door at the far end. The thick sisal matting, expensively rubber-backed, absorbed the sound of her footsteps. She leaned against the handle for a moment, then walked into the room.

It was dark and stuffy, and the room’s close smell had a distinctly brackish quality to it.

Lesley had already looked in here two or three times during the day but the otherness of Ruby’s bedroom, the way it seemed to rebuff her, never failed to take her by surprise. She felt cautiously along the wall for the light switch, then clicked it on.

The smell was from Ruby’s collection of shells. She had lost interest in adding to it at least eight years ago but the cowries and spindles never quite gave up the traces of fish and salt locked in their pearly whorls. The wall cabinets that Lesley had had put up to display them contained a jumbled, teetering mass of sandy jars and broken conches. The collection had never been properly organised or catalogued. Ruby had just wanted to get specimens and keep them, piling up her acquisitions greedily but carelessly, as if she were building a dam.

She moved on to shells after her enthusiasm for collecting autographs had waned, and after shells lost their fascination she became obsessed with beetles. There were boxes and cases of preserved specimens on every flat surface.

Lesley crouched down beside a row of mahogany display cases and peered through the dusty glass fronts. These had cost Ruby all her pocket money and every Christmas and birthday present for years, and the contents still made Lesley smile and suppress a faint shudder at the same time. Some of the beetles were two-inch monsters with stiff jointed legs, minutely articulated antennae and folded wings with an iridescent polish. Lesley had always recognised that they were exquisite as well as interesting, these skewered trophies of Victorian entomologists that had so fascinated her twelve-year-old daughter.

Other items in the collection were just matchboxes containing tiny shrivelled items that Ruby had pounced on in the garden, trapped and kept. Lesley smiled again at the memory of absorbed Ruby crouching beside a bush of artemisia, her latest discovery caught in her cupped hands.

‘What are they all? Do you know?’ Andrew used to ask.

‘Yes,’ Ruby would answer flatly, offering nothing more.

‘Why do you like them?’

‘They’re beautiful. Don’t you think?’ She would turn away then, not looking for an answer, as if she had already said too much.

‘At least it’s not spiders,’ Lesley had said appeasingly to her husband once she was out of earshot.

The beetle passion eventually faded like its precursors, but Ruby would never consider selling any of her acquisitions or even allowing them to be stored up in the loft. Almost everything, including the shoeboxes full of autographs, was in this room.

Lesley kept her eyes averted now from the case containing a single enormous conker-brown insect that looked like a giant cockroach. There was hardly room to place her feet among the boxes and cartons, the scribbled drawings and pages torn from magazines, discarded clothes and spilt tubes of make-up. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, Ruby had taken with her. She stepped gingerly across the floor and sat down on the rucked-up bed. She placed her hand in the hollow of the pillow, but no warmth lingered there.

Every corner of the room, every shelf and cupboard and drawer, spilled hoarded belongings. Nothing was in any order. The collecting seemed to have little to do with quality, only quantity. To having and holding, Lesley guessed, maybe as a way of shoring up a world that might otherwise crumble. But for all the random, chaotic and overwhelming material clutter, the impression that it now held was of emptiness.

Ruby had gone.

Lesley placed her feet together and rested her hands in her lap as if to offer up her own composure in response to the room’s disorder.

Ruby hadn’t gone like her contemporaries were going, on well-planned gap year travels to Asia and South America or amid clouds of A-level glory to good universities. Not mutinous, truanting, dyslexic and serially expelled Ruby. She hadn’t passed any exams, or spent a summer raising money to fund a year’s work with children in Nepal or wildlife in Namibia. Ruby had left the family house in Kent to lodge with Andrew’s brother and his family in central London, supposedly while she was attending sixth-form college. But college hadn’t lasted long and in Camden Town, Ruby had spent her days hanging out with new friends that none of the Ellises approved of. Then, just recently, she had abruptly moved back home again. She passed long hours closeted in her room and when she emerged she spoke only when spoken to. Andrew chivvied her for decisions about a career. Making a contribution to the world, as he called it.

Ruby had lifted her black-painted eyes and stared at him as if he belonged to a species she didn’t recognise.

Nothing could have enraged him more.

And now, she had simply removed herself altogether. The absence of Ruby swelled to fill her bedroom and bled outwards, hollowing the comfortable house.

‘I love you,’ her mother said to the motionless, smelly air.

Tenderness and longing sprang from the marrow in her bones. The feeling was turbulent, baffled, nothing like the calm, sturdy love she had for Edward, or her regularly thwarted affection for Andrew.

Her love for Ruby was the deepest passion in Lesley’s life.

The silence deepened. There was no ready explanation to be found, in this room or anywhere else, for what had gone wrong with her daughter. Or with me, Lesley added meticulously. It wasn’t that she blamed Ruby for being difficult. She took all the responsibility for that on herself, which further irritated Andrew. In their late-night conversations or in the car on the way to deal with another of Ruby’s situations she had asked the same questions over and over: what have I done wrong? Have I been a bad mother?

‘You have lacked a role model,’ Andrew tended to say.

One thing did strike her with peculiar certainty now: this time the departure was final. Wherever she had gone, by her own choice or – please, let it not be that – under compulsion, Ruby wouldn’t be coming back.

Lesley bent her head. She examined her knees in their second skin of smooth nylon mesh. She picked at a loose thread in the grosgrain hem of her skirt and, to her shame even though there was no one to see, tears suddenly ran out of her eyes and dripped on the fabric.

Ruby opened her eyes.

White light poured in through the arched window, filling the bare room until the air seemed almost solid with floating particles of dust. It wasn’t the sunshine that had woken her, however, but a burst of chanting. The words were incomprehensible, delivered in a rich sing-song voice distorted by heavy amplification. She pushed back the sheet and scrambled to look outside. Her eyes widened in amazement.

In the street below, rows of men were kneeling on mats laid over the cobbles, with their foreheads pressed to the ground. They made a patient sea of white- and grey-clad fish backs, the soles of their feet turned innocently upwards like so many pairs of fins.

The city was stilled. Ruby rested her own forehead against the thick greenish glass and tried to hear the prayers.

A few minutes later a wave broke across the sea as the men kneeled upright and then stood up. The mats were casually whisked away and movement flowed back into the street again. Two little boys chased each other up some steps and scuttled through a doorway. A handcart loaded with fruit trundled past, pushed by two men. Realising that she was hungry, Ruby reluctantly turned from the inviting view.

The house was so quiet. The stone walls must be very thick, she thought, as she wandered along the outside corridor. She couldn’t remember which way Auntie had brought her last night and the layout of interconnecting rooms was confusing. Here was a broader corridor with seats facing a carved screen with little hinged trapdoors in it. She peered casually through one of the propped-up hatches and was surprised by the grand double-height space it overlooked. This big hall was almost unfurnished except for a long table and some high-backed chairs pushed against the walls. At the far end was a low dais backed by a wall painting of entwined flowers and fruit and exotic foliage. Huge lamps of iron and glass were suspended on chains from the arched roof. It would be a pretty good space for a party, she reflected. If you half closed your eyes as you peered through the screen you could see the whirling dancers and hear the beat of the drums.

After another full circuit of the gallery Ruby opened a low door and found a staircase. She ran down the steps and peered into the big room from this lower level. From down here the gallery was completely concealed.

She suddenly sensed that there was someone behind her. Whirling round, she came face to top of head with Auntie.

‘Hello,’ Ruby said brightly.

Auntie peered up at her. ‘Sabah il-kheer,’ she murmured. Her face was like a walnut. She didn’t smile, but there were quite kindly-looking creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

‘I’m looking for my grandmother.’

‘Mum-reese,’ Auntie agreed, nodding. She indicated with a small hand movement that Ruby should follow her.

The house wasn’t really as big as it appeared. Just a few steps round a corner brought another surprise.

Ruby said, ‘Oh. It’s lovely.’

At the heart of the old house was a little open courtyard. It was enclosed by terracotta walls pierced by simple rounded arches faced with grass-green and turquoise glazed tiles. In the four corners were big square tubs of trailing greenery and to one side a waterspout splashed into a green glazed bowl. The trickle of water was loud in the small space. A lemon-sharp slice of sunlight obliquely bisected the courtyard and in the shady portion was a padded chair. Iris was sitting there watching her. Her thin grey hair was held up with a pair of combs and she was wearing an elegant silk robe with a faint pearly stripe. She appeared less tired than she had done the night before. But she also looked displeased.

Ruby considered. She wanted to find a way to stay, not just because to come here at all had been a last resort and she had no intention of being sent back home, but because it was so intriguing. Therefore she must say something appropriate, find a way to ingratiate herself. A shadow of a thought passed through her head – an acknowledgement that she was quite out of practice at making herself agreeable. She didn’t even know what to call this disconcerting old lady. She was way too unfamiliar and beady for ‘Granny’, which was how Lesley referred to her at home. Not that Ruby’s mother talked about her own mother very often.

‘Hi,’ she said in the end, shuffling her feet.

Mamdooh had to remind me when he brought my morning tea that we have a visitor. The night was a long one, and it was after dawn when I finally slept. And then, dreams.

Now here is the girl. She wears peculiar, ugly clothes. Are they the same ones as last night? A pair of dusty black trousers, safety-pinned in the front across her plump belly. The legs billow out from the knee like sails, and they are so long that they drag on the ground. The hems are all dusty and torn. When she takes a step I see that her huge shoes have soles four inches thick, so she isn’t quite as tall as she seems. On the top half, or third because the garment is so shrunken that it exposes six inches of white midriff, is a little grey thing with some black motif on the front. She has so many silvery rings on her fingers that they reach up to her knuckles, more rings in her ears, one in her nose, and a silver stud pierces her top lip. She hasn’t washed this morning, there is black stuff smudged round her eyes. Her face is round, pale as the moon, and innocent.

She slouches forward and utters some monosyllable I can’t hear.

Why is she here?

I search the layers, broken layers, of memory. Piecing together.

Lesley’s daughter.

‘Don’t you have any proper clothes?’

She sticks her chin out at me.

‘These are proper.’

‘They are not decent.’

Her eyes meet mine. She scowls, then thinks better of it. Her metal-cased fingers pluck at the bottom of the vest garment.

‘Too short?’

I am already tired of this exchange. There is a white shawl across the arm of my chair and I hold it out to her. She shakes out the folds and twirls it like a matador’s cape, and I am struck by the grace of the sudden movement and, yes, the happy exuberance of it. It’s pretty to see. Then she seems to remember herself. She knots my shawl awkwardly over her breasts so it veils her stomach.

‘Sit down.’

Obediently, she perches on a wooden stool and leans forward.

‘Y’know, I don’t know what to call you. You’re my grandmother and everything, but it doesn’t seem right to say Granny. D’you know what I mean?’

It hardly matters what she calls me. It’s a long time since I have been anything except Mum-reese or Doctor Black. ‘My name is Iris.’

‘Is that what you want me to say?’

I rest my head on the cushions and close my eyes.

After a minute, maybe more, she murmurs, ‘Iris?’

The line of sunlight is creeping towards us. I rouse myself again.

‘Have you told your mother where you are? You’ll have to go back home right away. You do realise that, don’t you? It’s very inconvenient, this … this appearance in my house. You must telephone her at once, tell her where you are, and say I told you, to …’

A shadow crosses the child’s face.

‘Yeah. I know, I know. Thing is …’ she half stands and rummages under the shawl in the tight pocket of her trousers. She produces a small silvery object. ‘My mobile doesn’t work out here.’

‘Is that a telephone? You can use the one here, I suppose. It’s through there. Mamdooh will show you.’

‘Right. OK. Um … I’m really hungry, though. Is there something to eat, maybe, before I call home and tell them everything’s cool?’

‘Auntie is bringing it.’

Auntie and Mamdooh arrive together. Auntie’s quite lively with curiosity now but Mamdooh is offended, I can see from the way he puts down the tray with exaggerated care and doesn’t look at the girl. It doesn’t matter. She’ll be going back where she came from, maybe not today but certainly tomorrow. What was her name?

It comes back to me surprisingly easily. Ruby.

Ruby’s eyes lit up at the sight of breakfast. She was very hungry indeed, and here was a bowl of fat purple figs and – lifting a little beaded cloth that covered a bowl – thick creamy yoghurt. There was a basket of coarse bread, a glass dish of honey and a plate of crumbly, sticky little cakes. There was also a battered silver pot, a tiny wisp of steam rising from the spout.

‘Thank you, Mamdooh. Thank you, Auntie,’ Iris said. ‘We’ll look after ourselves now.’

Ruby drew her stool closer.

‘Pour me some tea, please,’ Iris ordered. Ruby did as she was told and put the glass on the table beside her. The tea smelled of summertime.

‘Mm,’ Ruby said, after a long swallow. ‘That’s so good. What is it?’

‘Don’t you know? Mint tea.’

‘I like it. We don’t have it at home. Well, maybe Mum does. She drinks those herb tea things, but I shouldn’t think they’re like yours. Can I try some of this?’

Iris nodded. She watched as the girl spooned honey onto bread and ate, biting off thick chunks and chewing with strong white teeth. Honey dribbled down her chin and she wiped it off with her fingers before greedily licking them too. After the bread and honey she turned her attention to the figs.

‘How do you eat these?’

Iris showed her, slicing open the skin to reveal the velvet and seed-pearl interior. Ruby ate, her smudged eyes screwed up in a comical spasm of pleasure. She followed the figs with most of the bowl of yoghurt and then drank more tea.

‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’ she asked.

‘I’ll have one of those.’ Iris pointed to the triangles of baklava. Ruby put the pastry on a plate, handling it as if it were burning hot so as to be seen to limit the contact from her own fingers, and set it next to Iris’s glass of tea. Then she stretched out her legs, sighing with satisfaction as she looked around the little courtyard.

‘It’s like another world. Well, it is another world, of course. Glorious Araby.’

‘What did you say?’

‘When? Oh, that. I dunno, it’s from a poem or something, isn’t it? Don’t ask me who wrote it or anything. I suppose I read it or heard it. Probably bloody Radio 4, it’s always on in our house. You know how some things you don’t try to remember, quite weird things like bits of poems or whatever, they just stay in your mind? And other things you’re supposed to remember, however hard you try it’s just like, phhhhht, and they’re gone? Stuff you’re supposed to learn for exams, mainly?’

‘If it matters, you will remember it. You have to hope for that.’

‘Depends on what you reckon matters.’ Ruby laughed, then caught sight of her grandmother’s face. It had fallen suddenly into lines of anguish and the powdery skin under her eyes looked damp with tears.

She bit her lip. ‘Did I say something wrong?’

Iris reached a hand inside the sleeve of her robe and brought out a handkerchief. She dried her eyes carefully and tucked the hanky away again.

‘I am becoming forgetful myself,’ she said. She made a little gesture with her hands, swimming them through the air and then closing them on nothing. It made Ruby think that memories were slippery, like fish.

‘That must be frightening, sometimes,’ she ventured.

‘It is.’

‘What can you do?’

Iris turned her head to look full at her. ‘Try to … try to capture what you can’t bear to be without.’

Ruby didn’t understand this but she nodded anyway. The sound of water splashing from the little spout filled the courtyard. The sun had crept closer and now the thin stream sparkled like a diamond necklace.

‘Well,’ Iris said in a different voice. ‘Have you had quite enough to eat?’

‘Maybe one more of these.’

She bit into another pastry. Sugary flakes stuck to her lips and she darted her tongue to retrieve them.

Mamdooh came through one of the arches and stooped beside Iris’s chair. It was time to move it further into the shade. As she watched him helping her grandmother and settling her again Ruby noticed he wore the same tender expression as last night, as if Iris were a little child.

While they were talking quietly together, Ruby stared up into the parallelogram of sapphire-blue sky. She could just see the tips of towers, topped with slim bulbs of stone and spikes bearing crescent moons. There was a whole city on the other side of these walls, the teeming place she had seen out of the taxi windows last night. Now that she had found her feet she was longing to explore it.

‘Mamdooh is going to the market now,’ Iris said.

Ruby leapt up so eagerly that her stool tipped over. ‘Can I go with him?’

Iris lifted her hand. ‘You will have to ask Mamdooh.’

‘Please may I come with you?’

He had round cheeks, rounded eyelids, full lips the colour of the breakfast figs, but his bald head was all speckled and his eyes were milky. His stomach made a sizeable mound under his long white robe. He didn’t look as old as Iris or Auntie, but he wasn’t young by any means. He looked Ruby up and down as she stood there with Iris’s shawl knotted round her midriff.

‘To the market, Miss?’ He sounded doubtful.

‘I’ll, um, put a cover-up shirt thing on? I’ve got one in my bag. I could help carry the shopping, couldn’t I?’

‘I do this for many years, thank you.’

‘I’d really like to come.’

Iris closed her eyes. ‘Show her the market, Mamdooh, please. She will be going home to England tomorrow.’

He bowed. ‘Of course.’

When she came downstairs again with a man’s shirt buttoned up over her vest, Mamdooh was waiting for her. He had a woven rush basket over his arm, and a faded red flowerpot hat set squarely on his head. A black tassel hung down towards his left eye. Ruby felt a giggle rising in her throat, but Mamdooh’s expression quelled it.

‘Is this OK?’ she meekly asked, indicating her cover-up.

His nod was barely perceptible.

‘If you are ready, Miss?’

They went out through the blue-painted door and the sun’s heat struck the top of Ruby’s head. She took the few steps to the corner and looked up at an ancient crenellated wall, a cluster of smaller domes surrounding the large one and the three slender towers.

‘What is this place?’ she called to Mamdooh who was making stately progress in the other direction.

‘It is the mosque of al-Azhar. We are going this way, please.’

‘It’s very old.’

‘Cairo is a place of history.’ The way he said it told Ruby that he was proud of his native city and his reverence made her want to know more of it. She quickened her pace to catch him up again, and they swung down a narrow street and out into a much broader, almost Western-looking one. Out here there was a roar of traffic and hooting and tinny amplified music, and they were caught in a slow tide of people before Mamdooh ducked down into a tiled modern subway not much different from the one beneath Oxford Circus. When they surfaced again Ruby blinked.

Mamdooh beckoned her. ‘Khan al-Khalili bazaar. Follow close to me, it is easy to be lost here.’

He was right. It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose yourself in this maze of tiny alleys leading away from the almost-familiarity of the main street. There were canvas awnings looped overhead, and in their welcome shade the brightness of the crammed-together shops and stalls was dazzling. The merchandise was piled up and hung in tiers so it seemed to drip stalactites of hectic colour. One shop was crammed with interesting-looking brass and ceramic hookahs, another niche was festooned with belly dancers’ costumes gaudy with nylon fringing and glass beads. Another little recess was shelved from top to bottom with hundreds of glass jars containing oils in all the shades of precious stones. Next door open-mouthed hessian sacks spilled ochre- and saffron- and pearl-coloured grains.

The footpaths between the stalls were choked with people and wooden carts and porters with boxes piled on their heads. There were men in Western clothes, and others in galabiyeh and tarboosh like Mamdooh. There were women robed in black from head to toe, others in trousers and sturdy blouses with just a scarf wound over their hair. Ruby was startled and slightly affronted to see that there were numbers of Western tourists, pink-faced and too tall, uncertain in response to the urgent demands of the stallholders. In Iris’s secluded house she had felt as if they were the only two of their kind in the whole of Cairo.

The shopkeepers competed for Ruby’s attention as she went by.

‘Lady, look-see. Just looking, no charge. Very good prices.’

Urchins plucked at her shirt, holding up novelty lighters and boxes of tissues and bottles of water. Even in the shade it was hot, and the air felt saturated with moisture. Her shirt was soon sticking to her back and thick hanks of hair plastered themselves to her forehead and the nape of her neck. There was a continuous ssss-ssss of warning at her back as porters and carters hauled and pushed their loads into the depths of the bazaar.

She followed Mamdooh’s bobbing tarboosh, realising that if she lost sight of him she had no idea which way to turn. A memory came back to her of being a small child, shopping with Lesley in a department store. She had lost herself in a forest of legs and bulging bags, and she fought her way between them, stumbling forward and then back again, a wail of panic and outrage forming in her throat. Big faces had bloomed over her head, and hands reached out to catch her as she screamed and screamed. It could only have been a minute or two before Lesley found her, but it had seemed like hours. She resisted the impulse now to catch and hold tight onto Mamdooh’s white skirts.

An even smaller capillary led away from the alley of shops, this one enclosed by rickety houses with overhanging upper storeys that reduced the visible sky to a thin strip. There were wooden benches lining the house walls, all heaped high with vegetables and fruit. One stall was a mound of figs with skin as smooth and matte as the softest kid leather, another was a tangle of bitter-looking green leaves. Mamdooh stopped, planting his legs apart and surveying the merchandise.

Stallholders surrounded him at once, thrusting up polished aubergines and bunches of white onions for his attention. Some of the offerings he waved away, others he condescended to pinch or to sniff at. Once an item had received his approval, there was a convoluted exchange obviously relating to the price. Finally, at length and with ceremony, a purchase was wrapped in a twist of paper in exchange for some coins and Mamdooh stowed it in his straw basket before moving a couple of paces onwards.

Ruby had never seen shopping taken as seriously as this. She found a space against a dusty wall and watched in fascination.

Mamdooh glanced back once or twice to check on her. When he realised that she wasn’t going to interrupt him, or wander off and cause trouble, he gave her a small nod of approval. And then, when his shopping was complete he tilted his head to indicate that she was to follow him. At the corner he spoke to an old man sitting on a stool beside a couple of rough sacks. Another coin changed hands and now Mamdooh passed the twist of paper straight to Ruby. She bit into a sweet, creamy white nut kernel.

Mamdooh treated her just as if she were a kid, she thought. It was quite annoying, but at the same time – well, it was restful, in a way.

They threaded their way back through the porters and tourists and stallholders and customers, a slow mass of hot humanity that made urgency impossible. Ruby tucked herself behind Mamdooh and watched the faces as they bobbed towards her and were borne past.

Slanting sunlight just ahead revealed an open square. There were walls of sepia-coloured stone, the dust-coated leaves of rubber trees casting patches of shade on broken pavements, and a pair of faded sun umbrellas rooted in pillars of concrete. At two tin tables, bare except for ashtrays and a folded newspaper, sat a handful of old men.

They raised their hands or mumbled greetings to Mamdooh, who responded with two or three brief words. Several pairs of eyes, red-rimmed or milky, turned towards Ruby.

She understood the situation at once. Mamdooh came out to do the household’s shopping, then retired to this café or whatever it was for an hour’s talk with his friends, and her presence was an impediment to this pleasant interval in his day. She lifted her hands and raised her shoulders in apology as Mamdooh prepared to move on.

She said hastily, ‘I can find my way back, you know, if you want to stay with your friends for a bit. I found my way last night, didn’t I?’ She remembered Nafouz and his taxi.

Mamdooh looked genuinely shocked at this suggestion.

‘That would not be at all right, Miss. We will be going home at once. Mum-reese will look for you, perhaps.’

The perhaps, and the pinch of the lips that went with it, betrayed more hope than conviction, but Ruby knew there was nothing more to be said about going back by herself. Farewells were exchanged with the old men and Mamdooh sailed across the square. But now, Ruby sensed, she was walking with him rather than in his wake. The impression was confirmed when he remarked in a conversational voice, ‘Market, very old also.’

‘How old?’

‘Seven hundred year.’

‘Ha. Just think of all the buying of things.’ Centuries, Ruby thought, of leather and herbs and perfume and figs. The notion made her shiver a little.

‘Selling,’ Mamdooh corrected her. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Selling, very important.’

They both laughed at that. Mamdooh’s shoulders shook and his head tipped back, but his tarboosh didn’t fall off.

They came to the wide street from a completely unexpected direction and ducked through the stream of buses and cars. They were walking companionably towards Iris’s house when an extra-loud volley of hooting caught their attention. There was a black-and-white taxi parked where the alley finally became impassable to cars. The faded blue of the door was just behind it.

‘Lady, lady! We look for you!’ a voice shouted.

Nafouz was leaning out of the driver’s window and banging with his fist on the car door.

Mamdooh moved fast for a man of his bulk. He streaked across to the taxi and shouted at Nafouz, flapping his big hand towards the open end of the alley. From the passenger side of the car another young man climbed out and hung on the lintel. He looked like Nafouz, but a little younger. He was grinning and shouting back at Mamdooh, thumping on the car roof, clearly enjoying the scene. Two or three small children gathered to stare.

Nafouz slid out of the car. He appealed direct to Ruby. ‘We are friends, yes? I bring you, last night.’

‘No.’

‘Lady?’ Nafouz’s eyes were wide, hurt pools.

‘Yes, I mean, you drove me from the airport. That doesn’t make us friends, does it?’ She had kicked him, for one thing.

Nafouz turned away to burrow inside the car. Ruby looked at the other young man. He had the same slicked-back hair as Nafouz and a similar white shirt, but cleaner. He smiled at her.

‘I come all the way, bring this for you.’ Nafouz had re-emerged. He was holding out a CD case with a hand-coloured insert, a pattern of swirls and tendrils in red paint and black ink. Ruby looked at it. Her name was spelled out among the tendrils. Jas had painted the insert, and he had burned the CD inside it for her. It was one of his own mixes, just about the last thing he had made for her before … Before he …

She held out her hand. The CD must have fallen out of her bag as she scrambled into or out of the taxi. She would have been sad to lose it.

‘It’s only a thing, baby,’ Jas would have said. ‘Things don’t matter, people do.’

But she had so little of him.

‘Right. Well, thanks,’ she muttered.

She was about to take the case but Nafouz drew his hand back, teasing her. Her fingers closed on thin air, but Mamdooh was quicker. The case was tweaked out of Nafouz’s grasp and slipped into the deep pocket in the seam of Mamdooh’s galabiyeh.

There was a sharp exchange of words before Mamdooh turned back to Ruby. ‘If you like, Miss, you give him a little money. But it is not if you do not want.’

Ruby looked at the two young men and they stared back at her. An awkward flush of colour crept up her face as she felt the space of cobbled alleyway widen between them. She wished she hadn’t denied being Nafouz’s friend; she would have much preferred to be that now rather than the possessor or otherwise of a few Egyptian pounds.

‘How much?’ she muttered, in shame.

Nafouz was equal to the moment. ‘Twenty bounds,’ he said brightly.

Mamdooh clicked his tongue but Ruby rummaged under her shirt for her purse as the two young men watched with interest. She took out a note and Nafouz whisked it away. He winked at her.

‘You take a tour? I show you Cairo. Special Cairo, my brother and me. Not tourist places. Real city.’

Ruby hesitated. She would have loved to pile into the taxi and go cruising through the streets with them. She could smell cigarettes and the plastic seats of the car, and feel the hot diesel-scented air blowing in through the windows.

Mamdooh had already mounted the steps and produced a key for the blue door.

‘Another time, maybe,’ she said lamely. There were priorities, other matters she had to deal with first.

The younger brother came round to Nafouz’s side of the car.

‘I am Ashraf.’

‘Hi.’

The door was open, Mamdooh was waiting with the basket of vegetables at his side. The brothers were waiting too.

‘My name’s Ruby.’

Their faces split into identical white smiles. ‘Nice name.’

‘I’ve got to go now. But I’d like to take a tour, yeah. Have you got a …’ She made a scribble movement in the air for a pen, but Nafouz dismissed it.

‘We find you.’

‘Miss?’ Mamdooh said, holding the door open wide. His forehead was serrated with disapproval once more.

‘See you, then.’

Ruby marched up the steps. The taxi noisily reversed down the street in a cloud of acrid fumes.

In the cool hallway Mamdooh blocked her way. ‘It is important to have some care, Miss. You are young, in this city there are not always good people. Not all people are bad, you must understand, it is just important that you make no risks. Do you understand what it is I am saying to you?’

He was treating her like a child. In London, Ruby did what she wanted. Lesley and Andrew didn’t know what that involved, nor did Will and Fiona who were Andrew’s brother and his wife. She was supposed to be their lodger, but – well, after a while they had given up on telling her what to do and what not to do. That was because of Will. Even though Fiona didn’t know about him, the three of them had ended up in this kind of silent contract, where nobody saw anything or said anything in case it led to somebody seeing and saying everything. That was how Ruby summed it up for herself, at least.

And there had been some bad interludes. Ruby had seen and once or twice done things that she didn’t like to remember. The memories came back anyway, in the night, and they made her sweat and feel sick. The memories had a way of changing and speeding up so that they were like horror films of what might have happened to her. Her skin crawled, and she would twist and turn under the covers to try to make them stop and go away. She even wished for Lesley to come and tell her it was all right and she was safe.

But usually in the end she fell asleep somehow, or the daylight would come and she’d wonder what she had been so afraid of. The important thing to remember was that she had survived. Going back to people’s places when she shouldn’t have done. Doing too much stuff, or just drinking. Not knowing where she was or where she had been. Feeling like nothing, less than nothing. But that happened to plenty of people, didn’t it? Not just her.

Luck or cunning, Jas had said. That’s what you need to survive, in this day and age. It was important to have both. She could just hear his words, see him breathing out a snaky ring of blue smoke as he spoke.

So Ruby was sure she understood exactly what Mamdooh was saying and was certain that she could deal with whatever might happen to her here. She was impressed by her own cunning and her luck wouldn’t desert her.

‘Yes,’ she said stonily. She stood and faced him, giving no ground.

Mamdooh tucked the handles of the basket over his arm.

‘Mum-reese resting now. Later, she will speak to you.’

And order her home. Ruby knew what he meant her to hear, but she gave no sign of it.

Left to herself, she wandered through the house.

It was less opulent than it had looked in last night’s incense-scented darkness, and even more neglected. The great lamps that hung from the vaulted roofs were thickly furred with dust, and more dust lay on the stairs and on the broad sills of the windows. Cobwebs spanned the dim corners. The rooms were barely furnished with odd, unmatching chairs and tables that looked as if they had been brought in by an incoming tide and just left where they landed. There were no books, ornaments, or photographs – none of the cosy decorator’s clutter that Lesley arranged in her own house and those of her clients. There was nothing, Ruby realised, that told any stories of Iris’s past. Nothing accumulated, even after such a long life. She was quite curious to know why.

This morning, Iris had told her that she was becoming forgetful. She had made a swimming movement with her old hands, as if she were trying to catch fish. And there had been tears in her eyes.

Didn’t framed photographs and bits of china and books help you to recollect?

Ruby frowned, trailing her finger through the grey film on a wooden chest and recalling her grandmother’s words. She had said something about capturing what you can’t bear to be without. It was the word capture that resonated.

When she was small, Ruby distanced herself, she had felt all wrong. She couldn’t read and write as well as girls in her class, and she was endlessly in trouble. A way of making sense out of her confusion had been to collect and keep things. By piling them up in her room she could make herself bigger than they were, so even if what she collected represented only a strand, a tiny filament of the world’s appalling abundance, it had still seemed to offer a measure of control. But shells and beetles were inanimate. In that, in the end, collecting had disappointed her because the world was so swarming, inchoate and threateningly living, and it had bulged and gibbered and danced outside her bedroom window, making her boxes of beetles seem nothing more than childish detritus.

‘Growing up is so very hard to do.’ Jas had yawned when they talked about this.

But if you wanted to capture memories that threatened to swim away like fish? How would you do that?

An idea came to Ruby. It was a very neat, simple and pleasing idea that would solve her problem and at the same time be valuable to her grandmother. It was the perfect solution and she was so taken with its economy that she ran up the nearest of the house’s two flights of stairs towards the door that she had worked out must be Iris’s. She hovered outside for a moment, with her ear against one of the dark panels.

Then she tapped, very gently. When there was no answer she rapped more loudly.

‘Auntie? Mamdooh?’ Iris’s voice answered.

‘It’s me. Ruby.’

There was a long silence. Then the voice, sounding much smaller, said, ‘You had better come in.’

She was sitting in the same low chair as last night. There were pillows behind her head, a rug over her knees. Ruby read bewilderment in her face.

She stooped down beside the chair and put her hand over Iris’s thin, dry one.

‘Am I disturbing you?’

‘No.’

‘I went shopping with Mamdooh. I think I got in the way of his routine, but it was really interesting. He told me there’s been a market there for seven hundred years.’

‘Yes.’

The monosyllable came out on a long breath. Iris was obviously almost too tired to speak and her fragility gave Ruby a hot, unwieldy feeling that she could only just identify as protectiveness. She wanted to scoop up her grandmother and hold her in her arms. But even as she chased this thought to its logical conclusion – Iris would not appreciate being handled like a rag doll – the old woman seemed to summon up some surprising inner strength. She hoisted herself upright against the cushions and fixed Ruby with a glare.

‘Have you spoken on the telephone to my daughter?’

Ruby quailed at this sudden direct challenge. ‘Um, no.’

‘You are disobedient.’

‘I didn’t say I was definitely …’

‘Why have you not done so?’

There was now the opportunity to make up some excuse, or to try a version of the truth. Ruby understood already that it would be advisable to aim for the truth, at least where her grandmother was concerned. She withdrew her hand and took a breath. ‘It’s really because I don’t want to go home. I was hoping you wouldn’t make me.’

Iris studied her. Her gaze was very sharp now, all the weariness and confusion seemed to have evaporated. ‘Why is that?’

‘It’s quite a long story. If I could stay here with you for a while, I could maybe tell you …’

‘That is not possible.’

Ruby bent her head. The sonorous, amplified chanting that had woken her this morning suddenly filled the room again. ‘What is that?’

‘The call to prayer.’

‘Oh. All right, I’ll ring Mum and tell her where I am and there’ll be a mega fuss and outcry, and I’ll go home. But if I could stay here, just for a few days or so, not a lifetime or a year or anything, then maybe I could help you.’

There was again the steady gaze. ‘This morning, with my shawl. You did a little … almost a dance. I liked that.’ Iris smiled at the remembered image. ‘Did I?’

‘How do you think you can help me?’

Now it was Ruby who made a small unconscious gesture with her hands, as if trying to catch darting fish. ‘You told me you are sometimes forgetful.’

‘Yes. So?’ Sharply.

‘I walked round the house this afternoon, and you don’t seem to have any belongings, the kind that help you to remember the past.’

‘I have lived a long life, in different places. Most of them primitive. I have learned that so many material possessions are just that, material.’

She was saying almost the same as Jas; it’s just stuff, baby. There were connections here, twining around herself and Iris and the old house and even Mamdooh, and Nafouz and his brother, and the old men in the café. Ruby wanted to stay, more than she had wanted anything in a long time.

‘Go on.’

‘I thought, I wondered, if you told me what you want to … to capture, maybe I could be the keeper of it for you. I could be the collector of your memories. I could write them down, even. I could be your am … what’s the word?’

‘Amanuensis.’

Ruby’s pale face had been animated, but now a heavy mask descended. She turned her head and looked out of the corner of her eyes. Iris hadn’t seen her look sullen before.

‘Not that, maybe. I’m dyslexic, you know. Bit of a drawback.’

‘Are you?’

‘It’s not the same as being thick. But sometimes it might as well be. To all intents and purposes.’

‘Thank you for making that clear. You don’t seem thick to me.’

‘But maybe we could tape-record you? Like an oral history project. We did one at school, with the old ladies from the drop-in centre, about the Blitz.’

Iris laughed at that. Her hands loosened in her lap, her face lost its taut lines and her eyes shone. Ruby suddenly saw a young girl in her, and she beamed back, pleased with the effect her company was having.

‘How useful to have previous experience.’

‘I didn’t mean to compare you.’

‘Why not? I remember the Blitz. The beginning of it, anyway. Then I came out here, to Cairo, to work.’

‘Did you? How come?’

‘That’s the beginning of another long story.’

They looked at each other then, as the last notes of the muezzin crackled and died away.

It was Iris who finally broke the silence: ‘Go and talk to your mother. You may use my telephone, in the room through there. And when you have finished I will speak to her myself.’

Ruby stood up and went through the interconnecting door to Iris’s bedroom. It was very bare, containing nothing more than a bed swathed in white curtains and a couple of wooden chests. A telephone stood on the table on one side of the bed, and on the other there actually was a framed photograph of a man and a woman. Managing not to stare at it, she walked deliberately round to the opposite side and picked up the receiver. After two or three attempts, she was listening to her mother’s mobile ringing.

Lesley answered immediately, of course.

‘Ruby? Ruby, are you all right? Thank God you’ve called. Tell me, what’s happened? Where are you?’

Ruby spoke, briefly.

Her mother’s voice rose. ‘You are where?’

She closed her eyes.

CHAPTER THREE

When I replace the receiver I see that my hands are shaking.

I return to the other room where the child is waiting for me.

‘What did she say?’ she asks.

The anxiety in her round face tells me how much she does not want to be packed off back to England. I sit down to collect my thoughts and she fidgets with impatience, twisting her legs and picking at the stud in her nose.

I can give her the gist of my conversation with Lesley, but there is so much else that I would find harder to put into words.

‘Leave your nose alone or you will set up an infection. Your mother has been worried about you. I told her that I thought you would be safe enough here.’

At once, the anxious expression breaks up into a smile that contains glee and satisfaction and a measure of triumph.

I am beginning to understand that Ruby’s innocence is shot through with calculation. Maybe the innocence itself is calculated. And I realise that the notion interests me more than anything has done for quite a long time.

‘So I can stay for a bit?’

Our separate conversations with Lesley have had a further curious effect, of course. That she is in opposition to both of us makes partial allies out of Ruby and me.

‘I would like a drink. A proper drink, I mean. Will you call Mamdooh?’ I say.

I am stalling for time because with part of myself I fear the loss of privacy that having her here will inevitably mean. I want to be alone to concentrate on the past, in order to hold on to it for as long as I can. Yet maybe the offer of help that Ruby made is less naïve than it sounded; maybe there is something in her idea.

Wearing his disapproval like an extra robe, Mamdooh brings in a tray with two glasses, a jug of water and a decanter with a couple of fingers of whisky in the bottom. I have no idea when I last drank Scotch.

‘Mum-reese, you will have plenty water with this?’

‘No, thank you, I’ll take it neat. And a decent measure, please. That’s better.’

Ruby accepts her glass with small enthusiasm. ‘I don’t really like whisky.’

‘What do you drink?’

‘Depends. Vodka and Red Bull?’

‘What’s that? I’m sure it’s disgusting. I don’t have anything of the kind anyway, so you’ll have to make do with Scotch.’

We both laugh and Mamdooh peers at us in surprise.

When we are alone again she draws up a stool and sits close to my chair. The sun has set, the street outside is noisy once again with shouts and music as people prepare the iftar. It is already twenty-four hours since Ruby arrived.

As I taste my drink – rolling the unaccustomed spirit in my mouth – I am thinking about Lesley.

It is some time since I have spoken to my daughter, I can’t remember how long exactly, but it must be months. Whenever we do talk there are always polite words that fail to build a bridge. And the space between us, that has always been there. From the very beginning.

Lesley was born in the middle of a grey, sad English winter. My pregnancy had been unplanned, my husband and I hastily bought a house to be a home for our unexpected family. From the windows there were views of sodden fields, and ponds mirroring the weeping skies. In this house, the baby and I spent long days alone together while my husband was working in the City.

Lesley cried unceasingly, for no reason that I could discern. I had completed my medical training by that time, and raw as I was as a doctor I knew for certain that she was not ill or even failing to thrive. I couldn’t feed her myself, although I persevered for almost a month, but she accepted a bottle. She gained weight and passed the developmental milestones at the right times, but she was never a placid or contented baby.

I don’t deny the probability that she absorbed my unhappiness and reflected it back at me. I tried to hold the infant close, tried to soothe her yelling by rocking her in my arms as I paced through the silent house, but she would not be pacified. Her tiny body went rigid and her screams were like scalpel blades slitting my skin. When Gordon came home he would take her from me and she would whimper and nuzzle and then fall asleep, exhausted. The silence came like a blessing.

As soon as I could, I found a nurse for her and took a job at the local hospital.

And from there we have gone on.

‘Well?’ Ruby demands. ‘Can I stay?’

I turn my glass, looking at the dimples of light trapped within it.

‘Can I?’ she repeats.

‘What did your mother say to you?’

An exasperated sigh and a shrug. ‘She said she was about to call the police and report me missing. She said I am irresponsible, and thoughtless, and if I can’t think of her I could perhaps consider my little brother, who was worried sick about me. I don’t think he was, by the way. Worrying about people’s so not Ed’s thing. She said I should go home and behave better and get a job and dah dahdah, be a different person. Get a personality transplant maybe. I’ve heard it all before, about five zillion times.’

‘She was worried,’ I repeat.

I’m on unsafe ground here, caught between what I know I ought to say and what I feel. Which is recognition and a certain amount of sympathy.

We look at each other over our whisky glasses.

‘You see, the trouble is that I’m crap at everything,’ Ruby quietly says. ‘At least, all the things that Lesley and Andrew rate. Not that I’d admit that to very many people, actually.’

‘I don’t think you are,’ I tell her.

‘Thanks.’ Her tone is dismissive but her eyes implore me.

‘All right,’ I say slowly, because it is dawning on me that I do rather want her to stay. At least, I don’t want her to go right now. It’s not that I am lonely, but I would like to hear her talk some more. ‘I will telephone Lesley again, and ask if you may have her permission to spend a few days with me.’

She hugs her knees and rocks on the stool. ‘Fantastic.’ She grins.

I finish my whisky first. My hands are steady now.

Lesley answers the telephone. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s Iris,’ I repeat.

‘Mummy, tell me what’s really going on?’

I never felt comfortable with mummy; it was Lesley who always insisted on it.

Into the space I say careful sentences about it being a pleasure to meet Ruby, how Lesley would be doing a favour to me if she were to allow her to stay for a few days in Cairo. Now that she’s here, I say, we might as well turn it to advantage. The Egyptian Museum. An outing to the Pyramids at Giza. Maybe even further afield, ancient history, archaeology. And so on.

Although nowadays I hardly leave the house, I find myself almost believing that Ruby and I will make these excursions together.

‘If you agree, that is, Lesley. You and …’

Her husband; second husband, not Ruby’s father. I have met this one two or three times but I find that I can remember nothing about him, not even his name. It’s impossible to work out whether it is my forgetfulness that is to blame, or his unmemorableness.

‘Mummy, what are you laughing at?’

‘I’m not laughing.’

She sounds uncertain. ‘Are you sure it won’t be too much for you, having Ruby there?’

‘I don’t think so. If it turns out to be, I promise I’ll say so.’

‘Well … it’s kind of you to do this for her. Thank you. After she’s just turned up like that, uninvited. Andrew and I had no idea, one minute she was here and the next she’d vanished. It never occurred to me … she bought an air ticket, just like that, took her passport …’

‘Enterprising of her. But she’s not a baby, is she? Young people skip around all over the world these days. And as I said, she’ll come to no harm here. Boredom will set in before too long and then you’ll have her home again.’

‘I expect so. We’ll see.’ I can hear that Lesley badly wants Ruby to go home, but she knows better than to insist on it. I find myself admiring her adroitness. ‘Thanks again for taking her in.’

‘What else would I have done?’

‘I don’t know, Mummy.’

The bridge of careful words begins to creak and sway, and we both step hastily backwards.

‘I’ll make sure she behaves herself,’ I say.

‘I’ll call again tomorrow,’ Lesley insists.

We quickly end the conversation. Now, and for the next few days, I am responsible for Ruby. When I return to the other room she is holding up the bottle that Mamdooh left on the tray.

‘Top-up?’ she asks.

Lesley looked around the quiet, lamplit room. Andrew was working on his laptop, Ed was upstairs in his bedroom.

‘She said Ruby’s not a baby anymore.’

‘Quite right.’

She wanted to explain to him something about how, in one corner of her mother’s heart, Ruby would always be an infant. That was how mothers functioned. She believed, too, that in some recess deep within themselves, daughters also yearned for childhood again.

But Andrew would not be interested in her theories about mother love. He might put his work aside to discuss the new electronic chart plotter to be installed in his boat, but not much else.

‘Are we going down to the Hamble at the weekend?’ she asked.

‘Depends on whether I get this report finished.’

Lesley put down her unopened book and wandered into the kitchen. She polished two water glasses that had been left on the sink drainer and put them away in the glassfronted cupboard. She checked the fridge to make sure there was enough juice and milk for breakfast, and glanced at Ed’s homework diary pinned to the noticeboard. The kitchen was a warm, ordered space which she had planned and laid out in every detail.

Yet she felt superfluous in it.

She wondered where Iris and Ruby were sitting now, trying to imagine the room and its decoration. It took on a Moroccan flavour, inevitably. Lesley had never been to Cairo, but in the 1970s she had run a business that imported fabrics and furniture from North Africa, mostly from Marrakesh. In those days, however, Iris had been working elsewhere and when the two of them met it was during Iris’s brief visits to England, or once or twice elsewhere in Europe. Iris travelled wherever and whenever she could, usually alone, usually with the minimum of luggage and complete disregard for her own comfort. She didn’t mind sleeping on airport benches and riding in the backs of trucks. Living as she did, in African villages where she provided basic medical care for the poorest women and children, being comfortable didn’t have as many complicated factors as it did for most people.

Lesley remembered how they had once met up in a hotel in Rome. The doorman had looked askance at Iris when she walked into the lobby. Her clothes were not dirty, but they were worn and unmatching. She carried a couple of African woven bags, her face was bare and her feet were splayed in flat leather sandals. She walked straight across the marble floor to where Lesley was waiting, and the smartly dressed Italian crowd fell back to make way for her. Nobody knew who she was, but everyone knew she was somebody.

And it was Lesley, in her Armani and Ferragamo, who felt overdressed.

On a whim, she had ordered champagne cocktails for them both. Iris seized and drank hers with such delight (‘how heavenly! Oh, what a taste of the lovely wicked world’) that Lesley suddenly understood why her mother chose a life in which a drink in a hotel bar could deliver so much pleasure.

Of course, her imagined Moroccan-style interior was probably much too elaborate and over-designed to come anywhere close to reality. Iris’s actual house would be bare, verging on uncomfortable.

Now Ruby was there with her. They had taken a distinct liking to each other, the two of them. Lesley had understood that from the telephone conversations, although no one had mentioned it.

What were they talking about? What were they telling each other?

Jealousy fluttered in her, and she did her best to ignore it.

The quiet of her own house was oppressive. It was a long time since she had spoken to Ruby’s father, Lesley realised. She resolved to give him a call.

Iris and Ruby ate dinner together, in a small room through an archway off the double-height hall. Auntie rubbed a grey veil of dust off the table and Mamdooh lit a pair of tall candles, so Ruby understood that this was an occasion. As she gazed upwards into the dim, cobwebbed heights Iris briefly explained to her that the celebration hall was where important male guests would have been entertained. The musicians would have taken their places on the dais at the end and there might also have been a belly-dancer. The women of the household would have watched the party from the upper gallery, hidden from the men’s view behind the pierced screens.

‘Why?’

Iris frowned. ‘Do you know nothing about Islamic culture?’

‘Not really.’

‘The women occupy the haramlek, a part of the house reserved for them, where men may enter only by invitation. There is a separate staircase, a whole suite of rooms including the one where you sleep. And the other half, where the men may move freely, where visitors come, is the salamlek. Respectable women and men do not mingle as they do in the West.’

Ruby wondered, is she talking about then – the past – or today?

She listened, and ate hungrily. The meal was a simple affair of flat bread and spiced beans cooked with tomatoes and onions, of which Iris hardly touched anything. Ruby noted that her skin was stretched like paper tissue over her wrists, with tea-coloured stains spilt all over the knobs and cords of her hands. She wore no rings.

Mamdooh and Auntie came softly back to remove the remains of the meal.

‘Ya, Mamdooh, Auntie. We have decided that Ruby will be staying here with us for a few days, before she goes back to her mother in England. We must make her welcome to Cairo.’

Mamdooh’s expression did not change as he nodded his head, but Auntie’s walnut face cracked into a smile that revealed inches of bare gum and a few isolated teeth.

After the shuffle of their slippers had died away Ruby sighed. ‘Mamdooh’s got a problem with me, hasn’t he?’

Iris folded her napkin and slipped it into a worn silver ring. Ruby hastily uncrumpled hers and copied her.

‘He is set in his ways, that’s all. We both are. Do you know, when I was about your age, Mamdooh’s father was our house suffragi? He looked after us. Sarah, Faria and me. The three flowers of Garden City. I remember our Mamdooh when he was a plump little boy who followed his father to work. So we have known each other for sixty years.’

Ruby waited for more, but Iris seemed to have lost herself. At last she shook her head.

‘We are set in our ways. It will do us good to have a change in our routine. Give me your arm, please. I think I will go to bed now.’

With Iris leaning on her, Ruby walked slowly through the dim rooms to the haramlek staircase. Iris was explaining that during Ramadan the faithful did not eat or drink between sun-up and sunset, and it was tiring for the old people. If Ruby wouldn’t mind helping her to bed, they could eat their meal and have an evening’s rest.

‘Sure,’ Ruby agreed.

In Iris’s bedroom she drew the white curtains and turned down the covers. She helped her grandmother to take off the striped robe and the old-fashioned camisole beneath. The creased-paper skin of her shoulders and upper arms was blotted with the same pale stains as her hands and her shoulder blades protruded sharply, like folded wings. She was as fragile as a child but at the same time there was a lack of concern in her, a disregard for her body that impressed Ruby with its simple strength. Ruby herself was prudishly modest. She hated exposing more than a calculated and obvious few inches of her own flesh. Doctors’ visits were torture, even sex was less of a major essential than it was cracked up to be. That was one of the reasons why she liked Jas. He was just as happy to lie down and hug and whisper. Without being like … like two dogs behind a wheelie bin.

They had once seen a pair of dogs at it, and although they had laughed Ruby had been disgusted.

‘Thank you,’ Iris said coolly once she was in bed. It was only eight o’clock. Ruby lingered, not knowing what she was going to do with herself for the rest of the evening. Her glance fell on the framed photograph on the bedside table. A young woman, certainly Iris herself, stood with a tall man in an army shirt. Her back curved against him, his arm circled her waist. Their bodies seemed to fit one against the other, like a carving or a sculpture. She was just going to ask about him when she saw Iris’s face and the surprising fierce flash of warning in it. She took a step away from the bedside.

‘You can turn out the light by the door,’ Iris told her.

Ruby mumbled goodnight.

In her own bedroom she knelt at the window and pressed her face to the glass. Down in the darkness she thought she saw a figure looking up, but she didn’t like the idea of anyone being able to see into her room and moved hastily aside. She sat down on the edge of the bed instead and took stock.

The upside was that she had got away, from home and Lesley and Andrew, and from London and Will and all that, and from thinking about Jas all the time. She could stay here and chill out and there would be nobody to ask her every five minutes what her plans were. She wouldn’t have to pretend that she was fine about not having any.

The downside was being here.

The house was intriguing, in its way, but it was also quite creepy. It was weird to be on her own with just three old people: one who didn’t like her, one who didn’t seem to speak a word of English, and her disconcerting grandmother who must be kept happy or she’d get sent home.

The city outside was like nowhere she’d ever been. She’d go out and see more of it when she’d consolidated herself in the house, but at this minute its crowds and its strangeness were intimidating.

Tomorrow, she told herself. It’ll feel different tomorrow.

Ruby picked absently at the piercing in her nose that was itching and weeping a little. To flatten a wave of loneliness, she went out and prowled along the corridor and looked down into the hallway through the screens that protected the haramlek. There was nothing to see except that in a bookcase against the opposite wall there was a row of books. She lifted them out one by one. They were about history and they smelled musty.

After a while she went back to her room and took out her Walkman. She found the CD that Nafouz had brought back, the one that Jas had made for her, put in her earphones and lay down on the bed.

I lie still, watching the various textures of the darkness. If I turn my head, I can just see the glint of reflected moonlight on the corner of the silver picture frame.

On the evening of his first telephone call, I scrambled to finish dressing for dinner before he arrived to pick me up. The dress was one I had had in London before the war, dark coral-pink silk with a full skirt and a low bodice. I had just enough time to pin up my hair and paint my mouth before the doorbell clanged. I looked at myself in the dressing-table mirror as Mamdooh went to answer it. My eyes looked wide and startled.

The most important time in my life was about to begin. I knew that, even if I didn’t know anything else.

Mamdooh had shown him into the dimly lit drawing room. Xan was standing with one hand on the back of a sofa, staring through the part-open shutters into the fading sunlight. He was wearing uniform, his face was deeply sunburned. He turned round when he heard me come in.

He said, ‘I came as soon as I could.’

‘I’m glad.’

Then he took my hand and led me to the window so we could see each other’s faces. I remember a Cairo sunset, a grey-green sky fading into apricot barred with indigo and gold. My heart was banging like a drum. There was a second’s silence when everything in the world seemed to stop and wait. Xan very slowly lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed it.

As I looked at him his eyebrows drew up into amused peaks. ‘Where shall we begin, Miss Black?’

I had thought I remembered everything, every single thing about him, but the fun in him struck me afresh.

I pretended to consider. ‘Let’s think. You have to ask me whether I would prefer dinner at Le Petit Coin de France or Fleurent’s. Um … then you say something about maybe looking in afterwards at the Kit Kat Club.’

‘Of course. Out in the desert, one forgets these essentials.’

‘So we might have a drink here first, while I try to make up my mind. I’ll probably decide to change my outfit at least once before we leave.’

Xan grinned. ‘I am at your service.’

I mixed gin and tonics from the tray Mamdooh always left ready for the three of us and our dates. We sat down together on the sofa and I raised my glass.

‘To wherever it is you have been, and to having come back.’

His face clouded for a moment and he took a long swallow of the gin.

‘I will tell you about it, but not this evening. Do you mind?’

‘No, don’t let’s talk about the war this evening.’

I knew nothing, then, about what he had seen or had to do, but even in my naïveté I understood that what Xan needed tonight was to forget, to be made to laugh, to put down the weight of wartime.

I said, ‘So. What will happen is that by the time I am dressed, and have decided on Fleurent’s, and we have got there in a taxi, they will have given our table away to a brigadier. Of course it’s now the only place at which I can bear to think of eating, but in any case there will be at least two tables packed with people we know, and so we will squeeze up with them. There will be a lot of laughing and even more drinking, and then we will all decide that we are having so much fun that we must go on somewhere else. We will pile into taxis with all sorts of people, losing half of the party and joining up with half of another, and in the confusion you will be in the taxi behind. When we arrive at wherever it is we are going we will be unable to find each other for at least an hour. By which time I shall be very tired and will probably insist on being taken straight home as soon as we do stumble across each other.’

Xan laughed. ‘You lead a rackety life, Miss Black. It’s not a very convincing plan of action in any case. I shall not let you get into a taxi without me, and I will not let you out of my sight for one minute, let alone a whole hour. And we are not going to Fleurent’s, or anywhere near the bloody Kit Kat Club. Why should I share you with every soldier in Cairo?’

‘Then where are we going?’

He took the glass out of my hand and set it on the red and black marble table top. ‘Wait and see.’

Mamdooh brought my Indian shawl and wished us a very good evening as we went out together.

The sky was almost dark, a heavy velvet blue with the first stars showing. I stood on the familiar Garden City street, under the thick canopy of dusty rubber leaves, and let Xan lead me. There was a car waiting a few steps away, with a driver who got out quickly and opened the door for us. He was tall and hawk-faced, dressed in Western clothes but still looking like one of the Bedouin tribesmen who lived in the desert.

‘This is my friend Hassan,’ Xan said quietly.

‘Good evening, Hassan.’

The man nodded at me.

We sat in the back of the car and I watched the shuttered streets gliding by. Excitement and anticipation chased through me and I found that I had to remind myself to breathe. But it was easy to be with Xan; he didn’t talk for the sake of it and he didn’t make me feel that I should chatter and gossip in an attempt to be entertaining.

‘I live there,’ Xan said, pointing up at some balconied windows.

I craned my neck in an effort to see more. ‘Alone?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘With some other men. You never know quite who’s going to be there. When someone comes back from a picnic in the desert it’s a matter of taking a look around to see if there’s a bed that looks more or less unoccupied. You dump your kitbag and hope for the best. It’s pretty empty at the moment, actually. Not all that surprising, if you know what I mean.’

I knew what he meant by a picnic. We were both quiet as we thought about the recent Allied defeats in Crete and Greece as well as Cyrenaica.

‘Does Jessie James live there too?’

I had liked Captain James and wanted to know what was happening to him.

‘Jess? Yes, when he’s in town. But the Cherry Pickers are away now.’

Jessie’s famous cavalry regiment had charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Now, with armoured vehicles instead of horses and cannon, they were in the line east of Tobruk.

I nodded.

Xan glanced at me as we crossed the English Bridge. We were heading towards Giza and the desert.

‘You’re at GHQ, aren’t you? Who do you work for?’

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Boyce.’

Xan’s smile broadened. ‘Small world, the army. May I drop in and see you in the office one of these days?’

‘I’ll make you a cup of HQ tea. It’s a treat not to be missed.’

His finger rested on my wrist for a second. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

We were passing through the fields and scrubby mud-brick settlements and lines of palms that marked the western edge of the delta. There was almost no traffic out here, and ahead lay the flat pans and low wind-blown dunes of the desert’s margin. Even at the height of summer the desert nights are bitterly cold, and thinking about it made me draw my shawl closer round my shoulders.

‘Don’t worry,’ Xan said.

I had thought perhaps we were heading for the Mena House Hotel, a popular destination near the Pyramids, but then the car turned in an unfamiliar direction down a narrow unmade track. There were no lights here at all and we drove with only the headlights slicing through the soft darkness. I gave up trying to work out what our destination might be and sat back instead, watching Xan’s dark head outlined against the darkness outside and letting the currents of happiness wash through me.

After a while Xan leaned forward and murmured something in Arabic to Hassan. I was surprised that he knew the language, and yet not surprised.

‘We’re nearly there.’

Directly ahead of us I could make out the smoky glow of a fire, and the black silhouettes of a handful of palm trees. There were some tents and a few people moving between us and the fire. Camels were tethered in a line. We were coming to a tiny oasis.

Hassan brought the car to a halt. Xan and I stepped out where the shingle-and-sand camel track petered out in a sea of fine, soft ripples.

‘Welcome,’ Hassan said to me. ‘Mahubbah. These are my people.’

A circle of men sat close to the fire on upturned oil drums. Through the smoke I could smell the rich scent of food and realised that I was hungrier than I had ever been on arriving at Fleurent’s. One of the men stood up and came towards us. He was old and had a white beard. He was wrapped in a coarse woven blanket.

‘Mahubbah,’ he murmured. He touched his forehead to Xan who returned the salute, then the two men embraced each other.

‘Abu Hassan,’ Xan said respectfully.

I stood in the sand, and fine cool trickles ran into my shoes. I felt strange in my coral-pink silk evening dress with the chill desert breeze blowing strands of hair across my face.

The old man bowed to me and Xan took my arm. He murmured in my ear, ‘Hassan and his father welcome you. They would like you to know that their house is your house, and they are your servants.’

I didn’t know the proper phrases to offer in return for this formal welcome and I tightened my grip on Xan’s arm.

‘Will you tell them I am unworthy of their generosity, but I am proud to be their guest?’

‘Exactly,’ he said warmly, and I listened again to the clicking of unfamiliar Arabic.

Hassan and his father bowed once more and retreated towards the circle of seats and the firelight, leaving Xan and me standing alone.

‘This way,’ he said, pointing away into the darkness. ‘Wait a minute, though.’

He reached into the boot of the car and produced a bag that he slung over his shoulder, and an army greatcoat which he held out to me.

‘Wear this for a moment or two, in case the cold gets too much. Will you take my hand?’

I did so and the warmth of his fingers enveloped mine.

The ghost of a path curved round a swelling dune, the path’s margin marked by low thorny bushes. I stumbled a little in my dancing shoes, but Xan held me tightly. After a few more yards I saw a dark smudge ahead of us, then the glow of lights caught within it.

The shape resolved itself into a tent, a little square structure made of some kind of woven animal hair. There were long tassels hanging from the four corner poles, their filaments lifting in the breeze. We plunged hand in hand through the heavy sand, and Xan drew back the tent flap and stood aside to let me in. The tent was lined with hangings in broad strips of green, black, cream and maroon, and the floor was covered with rugs and piled with embroidered cushions. Lit candles on flat stones burned everywhere, and in the centre of the little room, under a hole in the roof, stood a rough metal brazier full of glowing embers. It was as warm inside the tent as in Lady Gibson Pasha’s ballroom, and in the flickering candlelight it was a hundred times more beautiful.

I caught my breath in a sharp oh of surprise and delight, but then Xan came close behind me and put his big hands over my eyes.

‘Are you ready?’ he murmured, and his breath was warm against my ear. He turned me through a half-circle again, so that I was facing the way we had come in.

‘Ready,’ I answered and his hands lifted.

I blinked, and stared. Ahead of us, framed and cut off from the rest of the world by the dunes, lay the Pyramids. I had never seen them from this viewpoint and it was as if the three great tombs with the prickling sky unrolled behind them were ours alone. Their mass, pinned between the stars and the shapeless desert, was rendered two-dimensional and even more mysterious by the darkness. Silence shrouded the desert as time slipped out of gear and the great wheels of the universe spun free around us. I tilted my head to try to catch a whisper beyond audible range, but all I could hear was the camels coughing as they shifted in their line.

Xan took the greatcoat from my shoulders. The fire was warm on my ankles and bare arms.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

I turned my head from the view, meeting his eyes, trying to find a word. ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

He undid the canvas bag he had brought with him and took out a bottle of champagne tied up in an ice bag. He peeled off the foil and eased the cork. Then he burrowed in the bag again, produced two tin mugs and handed them to me. I held them out as he popped the cork and the silvery froth ran into the mugs. We clinked them together.

‘I’m sorry about the glasses. But this is the desert, not Shepheard’s Hotel.’

‘I would rather be here with you, looking at the Pyramids and drinking champagne from a tin mug, than anywhere else in the world.’

‘Really?’ His face suddenly glowed in the candlelight.

‘Yes.’

I was amazed that Xan had taken such pains to surprise me, and that this evening was so important to him. He had planned it so that we stepped straight from the Cairo cocktail circuit into another world, and in my limited experience no one had ever done anything so deft, or so perfectly judged. At the same time he was as eager for my approval as a young boy.

In actual years Xan couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or -six, just three or four years older than me, and I guessed that in other important ways we were contemporaries.

He was probably more experienced with women than I was with men, but neither of us had ever felt anything as dazzling, as momentous as this.

We were not-quite children together. And we were also immortal.

How could we not be?

I lifted the tin mug to my lips. ‘Here’s to us,’ I said and drank my champagne.

‘Here’s to us,’ he echoed.

He took my arm and drew me to the heap of cushions next to the brazier. ‘Are you warm enough? Are you comfortable?’

Ripples of coral-pink silk were crushed between us. I rested my head partly against the cushions and partly against Xan’s shoulder, and saw how the Great Pyramid of Cheops sliced an angle of pitch blackness out of the desert sky.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Iris?’

This was the first time he had spoken my name, rather than teasingly calling me Miss Black.

‘Mm.’

‘Talk to me. Tell me. Let me listen to your voice.’

This moment was a part of Xan’s dreams. Perhaps when he lay in a scraped shelter in the desert, hungry and cold and suspended between remembered horrors and stalking danger, with a pair of boots for a pillow and the butt of his handgun close against his ribs, this was what he had allowed himself to imagine. It was the intimacy of talking with nothing held back, the sharp pang of desire mingled with the sweetness of trust. It was a dream that had become real tonight for both of us.

I reached up and touched his temple. A thin blue vein was just visible beneath the sun-darkened skin.

I told him about growing up as a diplomat’s daughter, shuttled between embassies around the world with loving but distant parents who insisted, when the time came, that boarding school back home was best for me and that homesickness – for a home that I couldn’t quite locate – was to be overcome by people like us, never yielded to.

In his turn, Xan told me about his father who had been a distinguished and decorated commander in the first war. In the years afterwards he had come out to Egypt to expand the family textiles empire, but business had never been his strong point and the Molyneux family set-up had been an eccentric one. Xan had spent much of his boyhood playing with the children of the family servants.

‘So that’s how you know Arabic so well.’

‘Kitchen Arabic, yes. Then I was sent home to school, and after that on to Sandhurst. My father insisted that I was going to be a regular soldier and I was commissioned in 1938. Until I was eighteen or so I used to come out to Alexandria or Cairo for summer holidays. My family weren’t nearly enough the thing to be invited to embassy parties, but maybe you and I saw each other somewhere else? Maybe I sat at the next table to you at Groppi’s one afternoon and envied your ice cream.’

‘You wouldn’t have spared me a glance. I was a plump child and my mother made me wear tussore pinafore dresses and hair ribbons.’

Xan spluttered with laughter. ‘And look at you now.’

‘Where d’you call home?’ I asked.

It was a question that I asked myself often enough, without ever being able to supply a proper answer. It wasn’t the Hampshire village where my parents had lived since my father was invalided out of the Diplomatic Service, or the London that I hardly knew and which in any case was now being flattened by the Luftwaffe. Nor was it the Middle East, and the starchy embassy compounds of my childhood.

Home was a strange, evanescent complex of spicy cooking smells and my mother’s French perfume, the brown arms of my nursemaids, shimmering heat hazes, and jacaranda blooms outlined against a sun-bleached sky.

It was dreams, mostly.

‘Home?’ Xan mused. The candle flames were reflected in his eyes. ‘It’s here,’ he said at length.

‘Cairo?’

‘No, here.’

I understood that he meant our tent with its coloured hangings, the starry night outside and the two of us. I explored the significance of this, allowing it to swell and flower in my mind. I wanted the exact same thing but I was afraid that it was too much to ask. I had lived all my life effectively alone and the prospect of not being alone, the luxury of it, made me feel giddy.

‘Why?’ I ventured to ask and hated the break in my voice. A burning log broke up in the brazier and a shower of powdery sparks flew into the air.

Xan propped himself on one elbow, his face just two inches from mine. ‘Don’t you know why, Iris?’

‘I am not sure. I want to hear you say it.’

He smiled then, lazily confident of us. ‘I saw you walking under the trees at that party, with Sandy Allardyce. I looked at you and I thought that I would give anything to be in Sandy’s place. Then Faria Amman brought you across to our table and I felt so damned triumphant, as if it was the sheer force of my will-power that had brought you there.

‘When I heard your voice, it was exactly how I knew it would be. Your smile was familiar too. It’s not that I think I know you – that would be presumptuous – it’s more that I have dreamed you. You have stepped straight out of a fantasy and become real. Does that sound idiotic? I expect every man who takes you out to dinner says the same thing.’

‘No, they don’t.’

I wanted to tell him that I understood what he meant, if I could have found a way of saying it that didn’t sound conceited. And I wanted to be Xan’s dream.

The night was so perfect, I even believed that I could be.

‘And now I see you aren’t a phantom. It turns out that you have warm skin, and eyes brighter than stars. Your hair’ – he twisted a lock of it round his finger – ‘smells of flowers. So this is where I want to be. This is what I want home to mean.’

His mouth was almost touching mine. As I closed my eyes, I heard several sets of footsteps scuffing through the sand outside the tent.

Xan sat up, grinning, and poured more champagne into the tin mugs.

‘Sayyid Xan?’ a voice said, and Hassan’s head appeared at the tent flap. I sat up straighter and smoothed my skirt over the cushions.

Two young boys followed Hassan into the tent, and they began setting out dishes and bowls. Hassan lifted the earthenware lid of the biggest pot and a cloud of fragrant steam escaped.

‘Are you hungry?’ Xan asked me and I remembered that I was ravenous.

After the men had withdrawn again, bowing and smiling, Xan put a bowl into my hands and ladled out the food. It was a thick stew of lamb with beans and tomato, and we sat turned towards each other on our bank of cushions and devoured it. I tore up chunks of bread and mopped the spicy sauce, then Xan took hold of my wrist and licked my fingers clean for me. He kissed each knuckle in turn and I noticed how his hair grew in different directions at the crown of his head. This tiny detail, more than anything else, made me want to touch him. And want him to touch me. I was almost frightened by how much I wanted it.

‘Who is Hassan?’ I asked. ‘What is this place?’

‘We played together when we were boys. His father taught me to ride. Now we work together, if you understand what I mean. Hassan knows the desert better than anyone else in

Egypt.’

One of Xan’s eyebrows lifted as he told me this.

‘Work’, I guessed, would probably be for one of the secret commando raiding groups that operated between and behind enemy lines. In my months with Roddy Boy I had glimpsed a few reports of their missions.

‘That’s very dangerous, isn’t it?’

‘This is a war.’

Both statements were true. There was nothing either of us could add, so we just looked at each other in the candlelight.

Then Xan leaned forward. ‘I’m here now,’ he whispered. ‘We are here.’

I put my hand to his head as he kissed me, drawing him closer, and the whorl of unruly hair felt springy under the flat of my hand.

‘We weren’t going to talk about the war,’ I said at last.

‘It would be a mistake to do so. It would be a mistake of profound dimensions. It would even be a blunder of historic proportion and therefore I candidly advise against it. Most certainly I advise against it.’

I spluttered with surprised laughter. The voice was Roddy Boy’s, his plump circumlocutions captured to perfection.

‘And I concur. What’s more, the ambassador agrees with me.’

This time it was Sandy Allardyce’s faintly self-important drawl. I laughed even harder. Xan was an excellent mimic.

‘Good.’ Xan smiled. ‘That’s better.’ He knelt upright and rummaged among the dishes. ‘What have we got here?’

There was a glazed bowl of dates, and a little dish of plump shelled almonds. He made me open my mouth and popped the food in piece by piece.

‘Stop. I’ll explode.’

In an old Thermos flask there was strong black coffee, and when everything else was finished we drank that from our tin mugs. I saw Xan glance at his watch and I felt a cold draught at the back of my neck. I shivered a little and immediately he put his arm round me.

‘Hassan and I have to leave again very early in the morning. I’ll take you home now.’

I smiled at him, pushing the meaning of tomorrow out of my thoughts, then leaned forward and gave him a lingering kiss. It took a serious effort of will to pull back again.

‘That was the very best evening of my life,’ I said.

‘Was it? Do you mean that?’

Once again, his eagerness touched my heart.

‘I do.’

‘There will be more,’ he promised. ‘Hundreds, no, thousands more. A lifetime of evenings, and mornings and nights.’

I touched my fingers to his lips, stalling him for now. I couldn’t ask where he was going, or when he would be back. All I could do was to send him off with the certainty that I would wait for him.

We blew out the candles together and untied the tent flap. We stood side by side and looked across to the Pyramids. And then we turned away from the tent and the view, and walked back hand in hand to the tiny oasis. The men who had been sitting around the fire were gone and the fire itself had burned down to a heap of ash with a heart of dull red embers. Hassan was waiting for us, sitting with his back against the trunk of a palm tree.

We drove back into the City. At the door to the apartment Xan touched my face. ‘I will be back soon,’ he promised.

‘I will be here,’ I said.

My eyes hurt from staring into the darkness.

My body aches, deep in the bones, and I am shivering as if with a fever. A little while ago I heard the child wandering about, but the street outside and the house are silent now. She must have fallen asleep. I long for the same but instead there is the patchy, piebald mockery of recall, and fear of losing even that much.

Always fear. Not of death, but of the other, a living death.

I think of Ruby’s offer to help me, innocent and calculating, and instead of finding her interesting I am suddenly overwhelmed with irritation, discomfort at the invasion of my solitude, longing for peace and silence.

The shivering makes my teeth rattle.

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