you reach for a cup or a bowl that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.
‘That’s the way the important memory feels, the one you don’t want to lose. And it’s the fragment of your past that explains why you have lived your life the way you have done.’
When she spoke again Iris’s voice had sunk so low that Ruby could hardly hear her. ‘And made the mistakes that you have made. Do you understand any of this?’
Ruby hesitated. ‘A little. Maybe.’
‘You are very young. There’s not much on your shelves and you don’t know what’s going to be precious. It’s not until you’re old that you find yourself hugging the bowl all day long. Afraid to put it down.’
That’s what she’s doing, Ruby thought, when she goes into a trance and doesn’t hear what you’re saying to her.
She’s holding on to the precious bowl, in case it’s not there the next time she goes to look for it.
‘Yes,’ Iris said to herself. Her voice was no more than a whisper now.
Ruby suddenly stood up. She left the room, and Iris seemed too wrapped in her own reverie even to notice. Her head lifted in surprise when Ruby came noisily back, as if she had actually forgotten she had ever been there.
Ruby held out the framed photograph that she had taken from its place beside Iris’s bed. ‘Who is this?’
She was half expecting another reprimand or at least an evasion, because whoever he was, the man in the photograph was important. Most definitely he wasn’t Iris’s husband, Ruby’s grandfather Gordon.
Instead, something remarkable happened. Iris’s face completely changed. When she thought about it later Ruby described it to herself as melting. All the little lines round her grandmother’s mouth loosened, and the fog in her eyes vanished and left them clear blue and as sharp as a girl’s. Warm colour swelled under her crêpey skin and flushed her throat as she held out one hand for the picture. The other fist was still closed round whatever she had taken from the tin box.
Very carefully, so that there was no chance of either of them letting it fall, Ruby passed the photograph to her. Iris gazed down into the man’s face.
A long minute passed.
‘Who?’ Ruby persisted.
‘His name?’
‘Yes, you could start by telling me his name.’
Iris said nothing.
‘Do you want me to help?’
Instead of answering Iris opened her hand, the one that didn’t hold the picture. In the palm lay a toy ship carved from some dark wood. On the side a white numeral 1 was painted.
‘The first of a thousand ships.’ Iris smiled. Now even her voice sounded softer and younger, with the vinegary snap gone out of it.
Ruby had no idea what she was talking about. She knelt down and examined the ship as it lay in her grandmother’s palm. It was old, but it didn’t look remarkable. She picked it up and placed it carefully on the arm of Iris’s chair. Then she took the photograph back, noticing how Iris gave it up with infinite reluctance. She studied the two young faces and saw that they were dazzled with happiness.
Iris said slowly, in her different voice, ‘His name was Alexander Napier Molyneux, Captain in the Third Hussars, on secondment to Tell force. That picture was taken in October 1941, on the day that Xan asked me to marry him.’
Ruby was delighted with this information.
‘Really? Did he? Did you say yes?’
‘I did.’
She waited for more, but Iris was silent. Gently Ruby put the photograph aside and folded Iris’s hands in hers. The old fingers were like twigs, the tendons rigid against Ruby’s smooth palms.
‘Are you afraid of forgetting him?’
‘I never kept diaries, you see. I was so certain of my mind. And now it’s going. Sometimes I reach and there is nothing there. In the accustomed place. Most of the pieces don’t matter. But if this one breaks, there will be nothing left.’
Ruby understood that she meant nothing of value. If the precious bowl was missing or shattered, what remained was rendered worthless.
She tightened her grip on Iris’s hands, suddenly understanding what they must do together.
‘You can remember. I know you can, because of the photographs and the fountain and the ship and the travel agents. You told me about those without even thinking. You’ve just told me about Xan Molyneux, haven’t you? It’s there, Iris, I know it is. And I know what we have to do. It’s just talking. You have to tell me the stories and I will remember them for you. I’m really good at that, my friend Jas told me. I remembered all kinds of things about people we used to know back in London, and he was always amazed. But I did it automatically. I told him it was like collecting anything. I used to have these collections, you know, when I was a kid. Shells, insects. Hundreds of them. I used to know exactly what they all were and where to find them in my room, although Lesley was always going on about mess. All you have to do is tell me.
‘I’ll keep it all in my mind. And then, if you do forget, I can tell your memories back to you, like a story.’
She massaged Iris’s cold hands, trying to rub warmth and certainty into them.
‘Do you see?’
Iris’s colour had faded and the tight lines pursed her mouth again. ‘Maybe,’ she said uncertainly.
Ruby smiled. Confidence and an idea of her own value swept through her, and she leaned up to kiss her grandmother’s cheek.
‘Definitely,’ she insisted.
Before the war Colonel Boyce’s office at GHQ had been a spacious bedroom in a substantial villa. By the time I came to work there the room had been partitioned into three cubbyholes, each with one-third of a window giving a thin vertical view of the untended gardens and a checkpoint where a couple of soldiers guarded a gate in the perimeter fencing. Roddy Boy had one cubbyhole, and as his typist I occupied a walled-off slice of the corridor outside the bedroom. My desk was wedged between a pair of tall tin cabinets in which I filed the endless succession of pinks generated by interdepartmental communications.
Roddy’s head poked out of his office. ‘Miss Black? Could you take this along to Brigadier Denselow?’
I took the sealed folder marked Secret and walked down two sets of stairs and through a pair of temporary doors into what had once been the villa’s
