Arabic, yes. Then I was sent home to school, and after that on to Sandhurst. My father insisted that I was going to be a regular soldier and I was commissioned in 1938. Until I was eighteen or so I used to come out to Alexandria or Cairo for summer holidays. My family weren’t nearly enough the thing to be invited to embassy parties, but maybe you and I saw each other somewhere else? Maybe I sat at the next table to you at Groppi’s one afternoon and envied your ice cream.’
‘You wouldn’t have spared me a glance. I was a plump child and my mother made me wear tussore pinafore dresses and hair ribbons.’
Xan spluttered with laughter. ‘And look at you now.’
‘Where d’you call home?’ I asked.
It was a question that I asked myself often enough, without ever being able to supply a proper answer. It wasn’t the Hampshire village where my parents had lived since my father was invalided out of the Diplomatic Service, or the London that I hardly knew and which in any case was now being flattened by the Luftwaffe. Nor was it the Middle East, and the starchy embassy compounds of my childhood.
Home was a strange, evanescent complex of spicy cooking smells and my mother’s French perfume, the brown arms of my nursemaids, shimmering heat hazes, and jacaranda blooms outlined against a sun-bleached sky.
It was dreams, mostly.
‘Home?’ Xan mused. The candle flames were reflected in his eyes. ‘It’s here,’ he said at length.
‘Cairo?’
‘No, here.’
I understood that he meant our tent with its coloured hangings, the starry night outside and the two of us. I explored the significance of this, allowing it to swell and flower in my mind. I wanted the exact same thing but I was afraid that it was too much to ask. I had lived all my life effectively alone and the prospect of not being alone, the luxury of it, made me feel giddy.
‘Why?’ I ventured to ask and hated the break in my voice. A burning log broke up in the brazier and a shower of powdery sparks flew into the air.
Xan propped himself on one elbow, his face just two inches from mine. ‘Don’t you know why, Iris?’
‘I am not sure. I want to hear you say it.’
He smiled then, lazily confident of us. ‘I saw you walking under the trees at that party, with Sandy Allardyce. I looked at you and I thought that I would give anything to be in Sandy’s place. Then Faria Amman brought you across to our table and I felt so damned triumphant, as if it was the sheer force of my will-power that had brought you there.
‘When I heard your voice, it was exactly how I knew it would be. Your smile was familiar too. It’s not that I think I know you – that would be presumptuous – it’s more that I have dreamed you. You have stepped straight out of a fantasy and become real. Does that sound idiotic? I expect every man who takes you out to dinner says the same thing.’
‘No, they don’t.’
I wanted to tell him that I understood what he meant, if I could have found a way of saying it that didn’t sound conceited. And I wanted to be Xan’s dream.
The night was so perfect, I even believed that I could be.
‘And now I see you aren’t a phantom. It turns out that you have warm skin, and eyes brighter than stars. Your hair’ – he twisted a lock of it round his finger – ‘smells of flowers. So this is where I want to be. This is what I want home to mean.’
His mouth was almost touching mine. As I closed my eyes, I heard several sets of footsteps scuffing through the sand outside the tent.
Xan sat up, grinning, and poured more champagne into the tin mugs.
‘Sayyid Xan?’ a voice said, and Hassan’s head appeared at the tent flap. I sat up straighter and smoothed my skirt over the cushions.
Two young boys followed Hassan into the tent, and they began setting out dishes and bowls. Hassan lifted the earthenware lid of the biggest pot and a cloud of fragrant steam escaped.
‘Are you hungry?’ Xan asked me and I remembered that I was ravenous.
After the men had withdrawn again, bowing and smiling, Xan put a bowl into my hands and ladled out the food. It was a thick stew of lamb with beans and tomato, and we sat turned towards each other on our bank of cushions and devoured it. I tore up chunks of bread and mopped the spicy sauce, then Xan took hold of my wrist and licked my fingers clean for me. He kissed each knuckle in turn and I noticed how his hair grew in different directions at the crown of his head. This tiny detail, more than anything else, made me want to touch him. And want him to touch me. I was almost frightened by how much I wanted it.
‘Who is Hassan?’ I asked. ‘What is this place?’
‘We played together when we were boys. His father taught me to ride. Now we work together, if you understand what I mean. Hassan knows the desert better than anyone else in
Egypt.’
One of Xan’s eyebrows lifted as he told me this.
‘Work’, I guessed, would probably be for one of the secret commando raiding groups that operated between and behind enemy lines. In my months with Roddy Boy I had glimpsed a few reports of their missions.
‘That’s very dangerous, isn’t it?’
‘This is a war.’
Both statements were true. There was nothing either of us could add, so we just looked at each other in the candlelight.
Then Xan leaned forward. ‘I’m here now,’ he whispered. ‘We are here.’
I put my hand to his head as he kissed me, drawing him closer, and the whorl of unruly hair felt springy under the flat of my hand.
‘We weren’t going to talk about the war,’ I said at last.
‘It would be a mistake to do so. It would be a mistake of profound dimensions. It would even be a blunder of historic proportion and therefore I candidly advise against it. Most certainly I advise against it.’
I spluttered with surprised laughter. The voice was Roddy Boy’s, his plump circumlocutions captured to perfection.
‘And I concur. What’s more, the ambassador agrees with me.’
This time it was Sandy Allardyce’s faintly self-important drawl. I laughed even harder. Xan was an excellent mimic.
‘Good.’ Xan smiled. ‘That’s better.’ He knelt upright and rummaged among the dishes. ‘What have we got here?’
There was a glazed bowl of dates, and a little dish of plump shelled almonds. He made me open my mouth and popped the food in piece by piece.
‘Stop. I’ll explode.’
In an old Thermos flask there was strong black coffee, and when everything else was finished we drank that from our tin mugs. I saw Xan glance at his watch and I felt a cold draught at the back of my neck. I shivered
