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
