playing on the beach.
There were already signs of spring down in the city, the almond trees in blossom. It wasn’t so much fun as Cairo of course, but one could dine reasonably well and buy French scent and other treats, and go dancing if one was overnighting. Generally one or other of the officers took her to lunch at the French club, where they had heavenly food: there were even prawns in that delicious pinkish sauce, and sole meunière. Jimmy told her that he’d caused the most frightful embarrassment the first time he’d been to the club. British officers hadn’t been using the place then, but because he’d been doing some liaison for one of the Free French generals he didn’t see why he shouldn’t. He’d gone in and asked for a table, but once he was sitting down he noticed a deathly hush had descended. It turned out he was sitting in the Vichy half of the dining room. He’d been asked to move to the Free French side, and only then had conversation resumed at the other tables. Now the place was frequented by all the English officers. Some of them gave Iris to understand that they disapproved of the ski school. Why should Jimmy – and the Aussies he’d somehow managed to inveigle his way among – be allowed to create a private holiday camp in the mountains? Iris laughed. ‘You should come up,’ she told them. ‘Anything less like a holiday could scarcely be imagined.’
True though this may have been for the men who trained there, to Iris the place did provide a kind of extended vacation, a break from thinking about what to do with her life. Not that she didn’t work, and work hard. There was a great deal to get done: wood for the skis to be ordered from Turkey, supplies to be organised, the men’s letters to send out, reports to be typed up. The whole building smelled as if it was constantly being polished – a familiar and comfortingly English church-hall smell of beeswax and paraffin – but the floors remained scuffed, for these ingredients were used only to make wax for the skis. The furniture was anyway too makeshift to merit polishing. One of the tasks which fell to Iris was to ensure that there were always adequate supplies to make the ski wax. Graphite was another ingredient, which it eventually became impossible to track down; in the end, she’d had to request a huge pile of gramophone records, which they’d ground down, to add to the wax mixture. To Iris this seemed a pity, a waste of music. One of the officers had a wireless, which picked up music stations from Germany and Italy, and before long Jimmy managed to obtain a gramophone from somewhere. When further boxes of gramophone records arrived, Iris kept back some of the better ones to play in the evenings.
Iris often had headaches from spending so long at her desk. But she was glad to be tired and found that she no longer felt restless or on edge. She didn’t have to fret here, as she had at home, about what would happen when Edward came back, how she would explain herself. And it was better for Ruth to be with her grandmother, away from the damp foggy city, in the fresh air; and away from the danger of the city of course. Several people – including her own mother – had let it be known that they’d thought it selfish of Iris to keep the little girl in London with her during the bombing raids.
A couple of doctors had been imported to the school, since fractures and sprains were expected to be a daily occurrence, especially among men who’d never skied before. In fact hardly anyone hurt themselves: Jimmy’s theory was that it helped to actually climb up a mountain before you skied down it, because that way you were strengthening the muscles first. He believed that it was because there were no ski lifts here that people didn’t seem to get hurt as they did in the Alps. But they did get sunburn. Snow blindness too. The Australians in particular were averse to using protective cream or dark glasses. Sometimes at night Iris was kept awake by their horrible screams of pain from the hospital ward across the courtyard.
One of the doctors, Digby Richards, had a friend nearby, a naturalist who was stationed down by the coast, collecting things for the Natural History Museum in London. Digby was going to meet this friend in Tripoli when he next had a day off duty: would Iris like to join them, he wondered, and see the crusader castle? Digby didn’t say much on the drive down, but his friend Michael turned out to be excellent company. The spring weather was a delightful contrast to the snow at the Cedars. Michael had arranged an exotic picnic for them: flat bread more like Bath Olivers than the bread at home, and salty cheese – which he said was made from goat’s milk, but which Iris liked nevertheless – and some olives, with a bottle of red wine from Cyprus. After they’d eaten Michael wandered off, head bowed, while Iris and Digby sat on the coarse grass and looked at the sea, smoking in silence. Within minutes Michael returned with a posy of flowers in his hands.
‘For you,’ he said, pretending to produce the flowers from behind his back with an elaborate flourish.
‘Well, thank you,’ said Iris, smiling.
‘If you care to examine the specimens, you will note that there are several types of iris among them,’ Michael went on, as if he were a teacher and Iris his pupil.
‘Really? I wouldn’t have known. I only know the blue kind that you get in England. Oh, and those rather ugly tall brownish ones with yellow bits. I never care for them much; they look like dead leaves.’
‘These are Mediterranean ones. And wild. They’re quite different.’
‘This looks like a cornflower.’
‘Good girl! It is a close relative, yes. And this one is of course a kind of daisy.’
Iris held the flowers to her nose, inhaling their trace of scent, not floral as much as like hay and blackberries: the smell of faraway English fields in autumn.
Back in the car Michael leant forward from the back seat, telling them things. He said that one of the gorges leading down to the coast was where Adonis had lived, by the source of the river which bore his name. This was where the story of Venus and Adonis came from.
‘It’s terribly romantic, don’t you think?’ he asked Iris, his nose level with her ear so that she could feel his breath, slightly damp, tickling her neck just below her ear lobe. Iris smiled and carried on looking straight ahead.
They stopped at the crusader castle and clambered up, disturbing flicking lizards and fat black beetles as they climbed. The mossy walls were covered in honeysuckle, the honeysuckle busy with sparrows.
‘What will you do when the war’s over?’ Digby asked her, the first question he’d put to her all day.
‘I don’t know. Go home, I s’pose. Carry on as before.’ She was aware of how ungracious she sounded, but a sudden lurch of feeling made her monosyllabic: even as she spoke the words, she knew that she would not be able to continue with her old life. The idea of that life filled her now with panic. There was nothing terrible about it, it was pleasant enough: she had a kind husband, a comfortable house, a child. But to Iris it all felt terribly wrong, as if she’d caught the wrong train and was now speeding, unstoppably, towards a destination miles and miles away from where she was meant to be. She could feel the colour coming to her cheeks and hoped her companions would not notice her blushing. ‘What about you?’ she said.
‘I’d like to travel. I’ve met some super fellows from New Zealand. Might go there for a time, see if I can help out at a hospital.’
‘Nonsense!’ Michael interjected. ‘I know you, Digby. You’ll be tucked up safe and sound up north, same as ever. It’ll be a local practice: elderly ladies in narrow-brimmed hats with varicose veins, farmers with bunions. Anything for a quiet life.’
Digby grinned. ‘We’ll see.’
After the picnic she barely saw Digby for days. Two hundred Greeks arrived at the school, as well as a detachment from the SBS. The doctors had plenty to do, giving them all the once-over before they were sent out to train in the snow, and there was a lot of paperwork for Iris. When Digby appeared at the door of the room she used as an office,
