Magpies looked showy but they were thieves, they took songbirds’ eggs and they made a horrid noise that sounded like mockery. Plumage wasn’t everything.
At half past four tea would be waiting for them: paste sandwiches, bread and butter spread with red jam; or sometimes, as a treat, extra thinly sliced and sprinkled with demerara sugar. Then there would be a piece of the sponge cake which was baked once a fortnight; only a small piece, because it used up such a lot of fat and sugar. It was a matter of pride to Ruth’s grandmother that there should be cake despite the shortages, as if she was not bowing to the Enemy by allowing standards to fall.
A few chickens were kept in an outhouse behind the shrubbery, and once the warmer weather came there was never a shortage of eggs. This was meant to be tremendously lucky, but Ruth had secretly gone off eggs, since being given the task of collecting them, most mornings. She hated the sweetly rotting smell in the henhouse, and covered her nose with her elbow when she went in. She thought she detected something almost snakelike in the furtive sideways glances of the chickens. Once, she found a hen with a dead mouse in its beak, shaking the little corpse as if to loosen its skin, like someone impatient to take a damp overcoat from a guest. After that she found it hard to swallow the runny boiled eggs she was given for breakfast once or twice a week. An egg fluffed up and hidden in a cake was not so bad.
And then two letters came from Iris. She was in Cairo, which gave Ruth a shock. One was addressed to her grandmother, who did not open it at breakfast, but went into her husband’s study with it afterwards, shutting the door quietly behind her. The other was for Ruth.
Darling girl,
It is all the greatest fun here with people from all over the place, New Zealand and Australia and goodness knows where else. I think I may be able to stay on and do my bit to help out, so I hope you will settle nicely with Granny for the time being and be a good girl. I know you will.
One can find all sorts of things in the market, which they call a souk. Queer kinds of fruits like pomegranates and also great vats of powdered dyes in bright colours. Lots of odd-smelling spices in big sacks. Such a change from dreary old London! They drink a kind of tea which is made of mint leaves, rather good.
I’ve seen several camels! Close to they have the longest eyelashes, and when they stand up they make a complaining noise, rather like an old drawer being opened.
Darling, it will do you good, being in the country. I’m sure your uncle will teach you all about nature while you are there, so that you’ll have lots to tell me when I get home. On no account let him take you to watch cricket when the summer begins! It is absolutely deadly, tell him I absolutely forbid it.
When you write, Granny will address the envelope for you to be extra sure your letter reaches me, I’ve sent her the poste restante.
With lots of love,
Mummy
For the time being. What did that mean? Did it mean weeks, or months? She had mentioned cricket and the summer: did that mean Ruth might be here until the summer, or throughout the summer, until autumn came? What could she possibly be doing that would help the war? Iris could type and she was quick at things, but she hadn’t had a job in London. Ruth wasn’t sure that her mother had ever worked at anything. And most importantly she didn’t say whether she’d found Edward. The fact that she didn’t, Ruth reasoned, must mean that she had not. But surely that was why her mother had gone away in the first place, to look for him? So why was she staying on? Why didn’t she carry on travelling, looking for him? Or simply come home?
Ruth didn’t like to ask her grandmother about these things because she thought, although her grandmother didn’t show it, she must have been fearfully worried to have a son missing in the war: so worried that it was never mentioned. Instead she waited until after school, when she was alone with her uncle Christopher. But unusually for Christopher, who was so good at explaining things, he offered no clarification. ‘I really couldn’t say,’ he told her. ‘I’m sure your mother has her reasons.’ Ruth felt a thin trickle of disappointment spreading down her body. It lodged in her chest, like a boiled sweet swallowed the wrong way. That night in bed, she curled the side of her mattress back, so as to reveal the words she had written on the wallpaper. She looked and looked at them, until the letters blurred.
Even before she had opened her eyes, Iris could sense the brightness at the window, a weight to the light which could only come from snow. The room was cold, much colder than the nights in Cairo had been, but Iris didn’t feel the cold despite her slender frame. The old hotel had been quite empty when they’d first taken it over a few months earlier, hadn’t even had the benefit of electricity or running water. During the big snowstorm, before she’d arrived, they’d run out of kerosene for the lamps. But supplies had begun to arrive and the place was taking shape. They had furnished her room adequately, even if the furniture was shabby. There was a writing table in front of the window, which would do as a dressing table too; and a good comfortable chair with a footstool, set by a low table with a rather dingy lamp; and plenty of clothes hangers in a cupboard which smelled vaguely of cloves. Not that she had all that many clothes with her, certainly not enough warm things for up here in the mountains. She’d have to write to Jocelyn, the friend with whom she’d left a key to the London house, and get her to send some things out: jerseys and her tweed coat and perhaps a couple of dresses for the evenings. One of the things Jimmy was keen for her to do, once they got the place fully established, was to organise entertainments for the men, music and suchlike. It wouldn’t hurt to have a frock or two.
Jimmy was a friend of Edward and Bunny’s, from Cambridge days. It had been pure chance running into him in Cairo. Iris had had no idea he was out in the M.E., although one came across so many familiar faces out here – people one used to run into, for ever ago, at London parties – that she hadn’t been the least bit surprised to see him. Jimmy had always been one for the most tremendous schemes, and mad on skiing of course. Terrifically good at it too. In Cairo he’d told her that he was recruiting for a mountain-training school in the Lebanon. It was just the sort of ambitious, almost foolhardy scheme one would have expected of him. When he mentioned that he was looking for someone to help with the office side of things – to go through lists of men with experience of cold-weather conditions, get in touch with them, order equipment – she at once proposed herself. ‘Done,’ he’d said straight away, grinning. He didn’t enquire as to the particulars of why or how Iris had got to Cairo, nor what she was doing there in the first place. He didn’t ask if she’d ever done this sort of work before, or any work. He wasn’t that sort of person.
The Cedars was on a plateau surrounded by a horseshoe of mountains, all covered in snow. Far in the distance, six thousand feet down beyond the valley, was a glimpse of the Mediterranean. The old hotel took its name from a wood nearby, where some of the trees were said to be more than a thousand years old. There was a wall around it to protect the trees. If Iris had thought of the Lebanon at all before now, it would always have been in connection with the cedars which reached their long wide arms across familiar English lawns, shading the grass, their branches the colour of green baize. But here, in their homeland, nearly all the trees had been cut down, all but this small wood near the hotel. Great swathes of snow collected in their outstretched branches, then fell when the weight became too much for the trees to support. The sound was just like bombs, exploding in the distance. Iris had thought it was a raid the first time she’d heard it, until Jimmy put her right.
Jimmy told her that you could spend the morning skiing up here and then drive down to the coast to bathe in the sea that very afternoon. Not that his notion had much opportunity to be tested, when he and the men were out for almost eight hours a day, sometimes overnighting in tents further up in the mountains, coming back exhausted and frozen. Iris did get down to Beirut
