I can only strive for what is important; my memories of Xan.
Ruby is standing up, looking at me, a little perplexed. ‘Iris?’
I collect myself. ‘Yes? What is it?’
‘We’ve got to go. Ash is late.’
They are waiting in the doorway. On the way back to the taxi the boys take my arms, as if I am their own grandmother. I am glad of the support because I am very tired. On the way home, I look out at the lights and the thick crowds in the streets. Nafouz has yet another cigarette clenched between his teeth.
Behind me, I can hear Ruby and Ash whispering on the back seat. When we reach the house they say goodbye to each other offhandedly, in the way that the young do, not making another arrangement because they don’t need to. It’s understood that they will meet again just as soon as possible. I feel a thin stab of envy, and then amusement at the nonsense of this.
Mamdooh and Auntie seem actually to have been waiting in the hallway for our return. At any rate, they spring from nowhere as soon as Ruby and I come in.
With the afternoon’s change of perspective I notice how we have become interdependent, the three of us, over the years. I need them and they need me to need them.
‘We have had an excellent outing. A drive, then Groppi’s.’
An idea has just formed in my head and I keep it fixed there as I unpin my headscarf and hand it to Auntie. ‘We’ll have some tea later, upstairs. Ruby, Mamdooh, will you come with me?’
Ruby shuffled in their wake back down the passageway to Iris’s study. Mamdooh was trying to insist that Mum-reese should rest, Iris sailed ahead with the absent but intent look on her face that Ruby was beginning to recognise.
‘I think there is a box in there.’ Iris pointed to a pair of cupboard doors painted with faded white birds and garlands of leaves.
‘A box?’ Mamdooh frowned.
‘Exactly. If you open the doors for me?’
Ruby yawned. It had been OK, going out in the car with Iris, but now Ash had gone to work and she wouldn’t see him until tomorrow. She would have liked to spend a bit more time on her own with him.
‘There it is.’ Iris pointed.
Mamdooh lifted a pile of dusty books, some sheaves of printed music and an old-fashioned clothes brush off the lid of a dark-green tin box. It had handles on the sides and he stooped and puffed a little as he hauled it off the shelf. The dust that rose when he dumped it on the desk next to the old typewriter indicated that it hadn’t been disturbed for a very long time.
Iris undid a bolt and threw back the lid. Ruby glanced at the disappointing jumble inside. Among brittle newspapers and tattered books here were some playing cards and a box of dice, a couple of tarnished metal cups, a big bunch of keys and a brown envelope. There was a musty smell of forgotten times.
‘Can you carry it upstairs, or is it too heavy?’ Iris asked, turning her face up to Mamdooh.
‘I can carry,’ he said at once.
Mamdooh put the box on a low wooden table in Iris’s sitting room and closed the shutters, then turned to see that Iris was already burrowing through the contents. He gave Ruby a look that suggested she was responsible for all this disruption and backed out through the door.
Ruby settled herself among the cushions on the divan and picked up the manila envelope. A handful of curling black-and-white snapshots fell out and she examined them eagerly. This was more like it. They weren’t very interesting, though. In one, a group of white men stood in front of a low mud-brick building. In another some black men were putting a roof on what looked like the same building. In a third, two men wearing long baggy shorts with knee-length socks were shaking hands. Ruby looked a little more carefully at a picture of a young Iris in a cotton sundress. She was sitting on a low wall in front of some stone carvings with a man in an open-necked shirt. The skirt of her dress billowed over his knee, not quite hiding their linked hands.
‘Who’s this?’ Ruby asked.
‘That’s the Trevi Fountain. In Rome.’
‘Who is he?’
‘His name is Doctor Salvatore Andreotti. We worked together many years ago on a medical project in Africa.’
‘Just good friends.’ Ruby smirked.
Iris glanced up from her excavations in the box. ‘We were lovers for a time.’
‘Oh. Right. Were you? Um, what are all these others?’
‘Let me have a look. That is Nyasaland in, I suppose, nineteen fifty-eight. That building is a clinic, and those two men are the district commissioner and the regional medical director. I worked in the clinic for five, maybe six years.’
‘Lesley was four. She told me.’
Iris collected up the scattered pack of cards, snapped them with a practised hand. ‘Yes. She was born in fifty-four.’
Ruby had heard Lesley talk about how she was brought up by her father and nannies, while her mother ‘looked after black kids in Africa’. When she mentioned her childhood, which wasn’t very often, Lesley tended to look brave and cheerful.
Ruby felt suddenly curious about an aspect of her family history that had never interested her before. ‘Why did you go to work in Africa when you had a husband and a daughter in England?’
‘It was my job,’ Iris said. ‘A job that I felt very privileged to have. And I believe that I was good at it.’
‘But didn’t you miss them?’
‘I had home leave. And once she was old enough Lesley would come out to stay with me in the school holidays.’
‘She told me about that. She said her friends would be going to like Cornwall, or maybe Brittany, while she would have to make this huge journey with about three changes of plane and at the end there would be a bush village and terrible heat and bugs, and not much to do.’
‘That sounds like it, yes.’
It occurred to Ruby then that there was an unbending quality about Iris that being old hadn’t mellowed at all. She would always have been like this. Uncompromising, was that the word?
‘You remember everything,’ Ruby said, softly but accusingly.
Iris seemed to have found whatever it was she had been looking for in the depths of the tin box. She pounced and her fingers closed over something. Then she lifted her head and Ruby saw the distant expression that meant she was looking inside herself. Her pale blue eyes were foggy.
‘Do I?’
‘Nyasaland, the what’ sit fountain, men and dates, everything.’
Now Ruby saw in her grandmother’s face the grey shadow of fear.
‘Those things are only … Like so many plain cups or plates, on shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don’t matter, like what I remember of
