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
