on naked skin, a plangent chord. I cannot capture these things and dictate them to another person. I am a doctor, not a poet. There is nothing I can say.
After more silence Ruby’s eyes meet mine.
‘Are you stuck? What about starting with a day? Just pick a random day that you remember. How old were you?’
‘Twenty-two,’ I say without thinking.
‘What happened?’
Only a week after our dinner overlooking the Pyramids, Xan took me to a fancy dress party. We had seen each other every day, for swimming at the Gezira Club and cocktails at Shepheard’s, and for dinners in restaurants that we both agreed came nowhere near our tent in the desert for food or ambience. We went dancing, and we met one another’s friends who turned out either to know each other already or to know people who knew them. We also sat for hours in quiet corners, holding hands and telling each other our histories.
Everything happened very quickly in those days. We were young and it was wartime. Within a week I was Xan Molyneux’s acknowledged girl.
Sarah Walker-Wilson pursed her lips. ‘Who is he? Does anyone at home know him?’
Sarah’s and Faria’s opinions meant nothing to me. I was in love with Xan and I was drunk with happiness, spinning with it, whirling like a cork caught in an eddy.
Xan and I decided to go to the costume party as Paris and Helen of Troy. Xan went to the toy department at Cicurel’s and acquired a tin breastplate, a shield and a helmet with a stiff red horsehair plume. They were more Roman than Greek and they were far too small for him. The spectacle of the little helmet perched on his black hair, the shield dangling from his wrist and the breastplate barely covering his diaphragm was irresistibly funny. He completed the outfit with sandals, a toga made from a bedsheet and a cavalryman’s dress sword. He put his hands on his hips, striking a pose with the hardware clanking, and demanded to know how classical and heroic he looked.
My costume was a white strapless evening gown borrowed from Faria and accessorised with the long metal pole that Mamdooh used to open the top shutters in our flat. From one end of the pole I hung a little carved wooden ship with the number 1 painted on either side. At the other end was a much bigger model launch, also borrowed via Faria from one of her numerous nephews and labelled 999. I wore a huge hat made of two cardboard cut-outs of the Queen Mary that Xan had spotted in the window of a travel agent’s near Shepheard’s, with 1000 painted on the sides.
Every time we looked at each other we almost collapsed with laughter. Xan collected me from Garden City in a taxi and when he tried to kiss me the Queen Mary knocked off his tin helmet. He pushed the thousandth ship out of the way and our mouths met. His profile was dark and then lit by the street lights, and his hair was standing up in a crest where the helmet had dragged on it. I ran my fingers through it as I pulled him greedily closer.
The party was given by three of his friends in a flat in Zamalek, quite near where Xan himself lived. It was a tall, awkwardly shaped apartment in which the sparse furniture had been pushed back into the corners. The walls were stained where people had leaned or rested their heads against them, and one was almost covered with scribbled names and telephone numbers and cryptic messages. The packed rooms heaved with Caesars and Charlie Chaplins and Clara Bows, there was a lot of drink and, just as at most Cairo parties, there was kissing and shouting, no food at all and very loud music from a gramophone on a sideboard forested with bottles. Xan took my hand as we were swept into the thick of it.
We were surrounded by familiar faces. Sarah was there, dressed as Little Bo Peep with her blonde hair in ringlets and ribbons, and brandishing a shepherd’s crook adorned with a blue satin bow. Sandy Allardyce wore a cardinal’s robes and I wondered whether they were hired or if he had simply borrowed them from a passing monsignor. In Cairo anything was possible. Even Roddy Boy loomed into view, wearing an eyepatch and with one arm tucked inside an admiral’s coat that had probably belonged to his great-grandfather who had almost certainly been with Nelson at Trafalgar.
‘Hello, there,’ my boss greeted me, dodging the shutter pole and the dangling ships, and wedging his telescope down the front of his coat so he could kiss my hand. ‘Most appropriate costume, Miss Black, if I may be so bold.’
‘Thank you, Colonel.’
If I may be so bold was the way my boss actually talked. Xan’s meticulous imitations of him came into my head and I chewed the corners of my mouth to contain the laughter, so unsuccessfully that I choked into my champagne glass and sent froth spilling over Faria’s gown. Roddy Boy was drunk enough not to notice.
‘Are you a friend of David’s?’ he boomed. David was one of our hosts, an associate of Xan’s with a mysterious war job. I had heard about Major David and tonight Xan had briefly introduced us.
‘I’ve only just met him. Xan Molyneux brought me along.’
Roddy Boy’s eyes flicked over me. He wasn’t so very drunk, then. ‘Ah. Yes,’ was all he said.
Jessie James floated up.
From somewhere, somehow, in the middle of Cairo in the midst of a war, he had acquired a choirboy’s white surplice and starched ruff. His pale yellow hair was parted and plastered flat to his head and he was carrying Hymns Ancient and Modern. Looking at him, you could almost hear an English cathedral choir singing the ‘Coventry Carol’.
‘Darling, beautiful Helen of the thousand ships. Can’t we run away together and leave that bastard Molyneux behind? Or at least come and dance with me to this vile music?’
‘Evening, James,’ Roddy Boy said.
‘Hello, there,’ Jessie murmured as he swept me away. We propped my pole of dangling ships in the corner and edged into the throng of dancers.
So Xan and I were surrounded by friends and people we knew, but we were in another place too. It was a small, sweet, vivid and waiting world that contained only the two of us. As the party separated us and then washed us together again, we would catch one another’s eyes and everything else faded into monochrome.
Once, when I had battled my way to the kitchen for a glass of water – the locally made gin and whisky ran like rivers, but quenching your thirst with anything else was more of a problem – Xan came up behind me. His hands slid down on my hips and his breath fanned my neck.
‘I want to touch you all over. I want to taste every inch of you. Are you going to make me wait, Iris?’ He was a little drunk, too.
I turned round to face him, stretching on tiptoe to bring our eyes level. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t wait.’
But we did wait, just a few hours longer, teasing ourselves with the anticipation of what we both knew would happen.
I danced again with Jessie, then with Sandy Allardyce who had forgiven me for the night at Lady Gibson Pasha’s. Faria arrived very late, wearing one of her Paris evening gowns and not the smallest attempt at fancy dress, with her faithful poet in tow. At the end of the evening we sat in the kitchen with the soldiers and the Cairene beauties and the men from the British Council, drinking whisky and playing silly games as if nothing mattered in the world.
This was what Xan and the other officers wanted: to wipe out one existence for just a few days or hours, and substitute another that was ripe with noisy laughter and perfume and girls.
Xan and I were almost the last to leave.
