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
