fiefdoms. It was a swamp of bureaucracy, rumour and competitiveness as Headquarters expanded and the prospect of fast-track promotions encouraged ambitious officers to try to outsmart each other. Roddy Boy was always in the thick of some piece of intrigue designed to thwart his rivals.
Brigadier Denselow and his staff had four adjacent offices that opened through the servants’ back door into the villa garden, so there was daylight and fresh air. This empire was jealously guarded against all comers. Denselow’s assistant, Captain Martin Frobisher, was sitting with his feet on his desk reading a novel from the Anglo-Egyptian Club library.
‘Hullo, light of my life,’ he greeted me routinely.
I handed over the folder and Martin signed the docket for it. In answer to his entreaty I told him that no, I wasn’t free for dinner.
‘You never are,’ he sighed. ‘What’s wrong with me?’
‘Nothing. But I am in love with another man.’ Whom I had not seen, nor even heard from, in seventeen and a half days. Each of those days was a glassy structure of routine within which I contained – as patiently as I could – my longing for Xan and my constant fears for his safety. I was only one of millions of women in similar circumstances.
‘He’s a lucky devil. Lunch, then?’
I had a pile of memos composed in Roddy’s trademark verbose style to type and circulate. I shook my head, smiling at him. I liked Martin. He had been welcoming when I first arrived in the military maze of Headquarters. ‘Pressure of work,’ I explained and threaded my way back past the first-floor salon where shifts of cipherenes worked twenty-four hours a day, to my own office.
When I reached my desk I saw that Roddy’s door was firmly closed and the hand-made ‘Do not disturb’ sign hanging from the knob indicated that he was busy.
There was no window in my segment of corridor, so I worked under a metal-shaded desk lamp that gave off an acrid smell of burning dust. I switched it on and took the cover off my typewriter.
I had been painstakingly typing for perhaps half an hour before Roddy’s door opened again. I saw my boss’s knife-creased trousers emerge first. Even in the hottest weather Roddy always wore immaculate service dress, including tunic, Sam Browne, tie and long trousers.
‘Matter of morale,’ he would mutter. ‘This is GHQ. Notwithstanding, some chaps around here are reprehensibly sloppy.’
He was followed by a pair of sunburned legs in khaki shorts, very stained and dusty.
My heart lurched in my chest. I looked up at the owner of the legs and Xan smiled down at me. Behind the smile he looked exhausted.
‘You promised me a cup of GHQ tea, remember?’
‘So I did. Milk and sugar?’ I laughed because I knew perfectly well how he took his tea.
‘Let me think. Do you know, maybe it isn’t tea I want at all? Perhaps a drink instead? At Shepheard’s?’
Roddy gave us his pop-eyed stare. ‘Ah, yes. You two know each other, don’t you?’
‘We have met,’ I said demurely. The last time I had seen Xan was as he was leaving my bed, at dawn, before heading away into the desert on one of his mysterious sorties. After the first relief at seeing him alive and unhurt, I could hardly think of anything except how much I wanted us to be back in bed together.
‘It is lunchtime,’ Xan said, consulting his watch. ‘Colonel Boyce, may I take Miss Black away from you for an hour?’
Roddy could hardly say no, although it was obvious that he would have preferred to do so.
‘Hurrrmph. Well, yes, all right. Only an hour. We are extremely pressed at the moment, you know.’ He turned to me, eyes bulging. ‘Have you heard from your father lately, by the way?’
This was a not very oblique reminder that, through his acquaintance with my father, Roddy considered himself to have a paternal role to play.
‘Yes, I had a letter about two weeks ago. He’s living very quietly these days, down in Hampshire. My mother hasn’t been very well lately. He did ask to be remembered to you. I think he’s quite envious of you, Sir, being so much in the thick of the war out here.’
A reminder of his importance never went amiss with the Colonel. He tipped his head back and the shiny flesh of his jowls wobbled. ‘Yes. Please give him my regards, won’t you?’ The green telephone on his desk rang. ‘Ahhhm. The Brigadier. Excuse me, please.’
The door closed behind him and Xan immediately seized my hands and kissed the knuckles. ‘Christ. Come on, let’s get out of here.’
We went out into the thick, hot blanket of the afternoon heat. It was the beginning of October 1941, but there was no sign as yet of cooler weather. The buildings of Garden City looked dark, cut out in two dimensions against the blazing sky.
‘Xan …’
He held me back a little. ‘Wait. Are you free this evening?’
I pretended to consider. ‘Let me think. I was planning to go to the cinema with Faria …’
‘Oh, in that case …’
‘But maybe I could chuck her. What do you suggest instead?’
He raised one eyebrow. ‘Bed. Followed by dinner, and then bed again.’
‘Do you know what? I find that I am free tonight, tomorrow night and every evening for the rest of the year.’
We had been walking in a flood-tide of khaki. Fore-and-aft caps bobbed all around us, with a sprinkling of Australian broad-brimmed hats and French kepis. Xan took my elbow and we stopped at the kerbside, letting the current flow past. My apartment was only a few minutes’ walk from here and it would be empty except for Mamdooh taking his siesta in his room next to the front door.
We looked the immediate question at each other, but now I could see a haze of something like suffering as well as weariness in Xan’s eyes.
‘Let’s do what you suggested. Let’s go to Shepheard’s,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said softly. ‘I only got in about two hours ago and I’d like a beer after dealing with GHQ.’
A horse-drawn caleche came plodding up behind us. The horse was a bag of bones, its coat dark with sweat and foam-flecked under the ancient harness. Its blinkered head drooped in a nosebag. The driver spotted us and whipped up the horse to bring him alongside.
‘Sir, lady? Nice ride. Very private, no seeing, eh?’ A curtain could be drawn across the front of the carriage to make a little hideaway from the seething streets. The vehicles were known as love taxis.
‘Thanks. No,’ Xan said, but he gave the driver a coin. The man returned a broad wink and a wave of his whip as the horse clopped onwards. We walked on to Shepheard’s, past the beggars and amputees and ragged children who held out their hands to the Cairo grandees passing up and down the steps of the hotel.
Shepheard’s was out of bounds to other ranks. The bars and terraces swarmed with a lunchtime crowd of fashionably dressed civilians and officers of all the nations who
