legs had been blown off at the knees.
‘Burke and I were commissioned on the same day. He was a cotton trader before the war. There was nothing he didn’t know about the desert. I sat in the back of the truck with him, giving him sips of water from my bottle. He kept saying, “damn nuisance, Molyneux. Damn nuisance. I need feet in this game. Damn nuisance.” Over and over again. He died with the truck bumping and skidding over the sand. Bled to death.’
Xan stubbed out his cigarette with little jabbing movements. When I was sure that he had finished I put my arms round him and made him lie down again beside me.
‘I drove back to Cairo with two other badly wounded men who needed surgery. Somehow Hassan kept them alive until we got them to hospital here.’ It was five hundred miles. ‘Then I came straight in to see Boyce.
‘Boyce said the Mark IIIs couldn’t have been where they were. There was no Intelligence relating to them, therefore they can’t have existed. All the Axis supply movements are going the other way, up towards Tobruk. It’s quite straightforward, he kept insisting. Tapping his fingers on the folders on his desk. They know we’re going to make the big push for Cyrenaica, they’re preparing for it.
‘So in the view of GHQ, half of my patrol was wiped out by a mirage, eh?’
I had never seen Xan angry like this before. But in fact he was angry not with GHQ or Roddy Boy, but with the war itself.
I held him, trying to draw some of the rage out of him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured, but I was only trying to fill the silence with the reassurance of words. There was nothing I could say that would really mean anything. ‘It will be over one day. It will be done, and it will have been worth doing.’
He closed his eyes, then forced them open again, as if he didn’t want to contemplate what lay behind the lids.
‘Will it? Will it have been worth it?’
The dance music was still playing. That, and the clatter of my typewriter, the twin sounds of my Cairo life. I felt suddenly choked with disgust at the meaninglessness of so much death and washed with grief for the men in Xan’s patrol whom I had never even known.
‘I don’t know,’ I heard myself admit.
After a moment I realised that Xan had fallen asleep, just in a second. I hadn’t realised the depth of his exhaustion. The music stopped with a sudden squawk, as if someone had irritably pushed the arm off the record.
He slept for twenty minutes, stirred in my arms, then jerked awake again. As soon as he remembered where he was a smile of pure relief broke across his face and he looked like the Xan I knew.
‘I’ve been asleep. Bloody awful manners, darling. Will you forgive me?’
I kissed his nose, then his mouth. ‘Yes.’
‘I feel better. I’m sorry about before. What’s the time? Come on, let’s go out to dinner. How about Zazie’s?’
It was ten thirty. Most of us in Cairo kept eastern Mediterranean late hours although some of the British still insisted on dining at seven thirty, as if they were at home in Surrey. I was already scrambling into my dressing gown and heading for the bathroom. If Xan wanted to go out drinking and dancing, that was exactly what we would do.
I put on the coral-pink silk I had worn for our dinner at Hassan’s oasis camp and picked up my Indian shawl.
‘You look beautiful,’ Xan breathed. ‘And you smell like heaven.’
Sarah was sitting in a corner of one of the sofas in the living room. She was wearing an old cashmere cardigan, badly pilled under the arms and down the sides, and there was a blanket drawn over her knees as if it were cold.
She smiled determinedly at us. ‘Hello, you two. Where are you off to?’
‘We thought we’d try Zazie’s.’
I glanced quickly at Xan. ‘Sare, why don’t you come with us? It’ll be fun.’
‘Yes, come with us,’ he said warmly.
She lifted one hand and twisted the strand of pearls she always wore.
‘Thanks, that’s sweet of you. I won’t, not tonight. I still feel a bit rotten.’
Her cheeks looked hollow and the rusty-looking dry ends of her hair spiked round her face.
‘Are you sure?’
‘‘Course. And I’ve already eaten. Mamdooh made me boiled eggs and soldiers.’
‘Ah.’ We smiled at each other, without needing to acknowledge that eggs in Egypt were small and had an odd, musty flavour.
‘Xan, you’re just back?’
Just back was what we all said. As if the men had strolled into a Cairo drawing room from a day’s hunting or golf.
‘Yes.’
‘The news is good, isn’t it? General Auchinleck’s going to relieve Tobruk and take back Cyrenaica. Any day now, that’s what I hear.’
Cairo was full of rumours of an imminent Allied attack under the new C.-in-C. Middle East. The besieged garrison at Tobruk would certainly be relieved. Sarah gazed imploringly at Xan, her face full of longing for a victory, for fresh news, or just for a change that would help her out of the heat and the social round and her stubborn illness. I wondered where all the eager men were who had swarmed round her when she was well.
‘Maybe,’ Xan said.
‘Are you certain you won’t come?’ I repeated.
Sarah nodded quickly, biting her lip. ‘Have a good time.’
In the hallway, on the silver salver that stood on top of a hideous carved wood and inlay-work chest, I saw a thin blue airmail letter addressed to me in my mother’s handwriting. I took it quickly and folded it into my bag to read later. Xan found a taxi to take us to Zazie’s.
The nightclub was packed, as it always was. Xan had to slip several notes into the palm of the maître d’ to secure us a table. We chose our food from the elaborate menu that came in a leather folder complete with silk tassels, and Xan ordered a bottle of champagne. French champagne was getting scarce in Cairo now, and it was brought to the table in a silver ice bucket and served with a considerable flourish. We lifted our glasses to each other in a toast that contained no words, only wishes. A pianist had been playing through the din of the club, but now he crashed out a final chord and the lights dimmed even further.
A single spot came up on the stage in the corner of the room, the dusty red velvet curtains parted and the floor show belly-dancer shimmered between them. Everyone clapped and whistled as she began a slow gyration that set her sequins flashing. The lower half of her face was veiled but her enormous almond-shaped eyes were instantly recognisable, as were the lustrous expanses of dark honey-coloured skin revealed by her diaphanous chiffon costume. Elvira Mursi was the most famous dancer in the city. She kept her real identity secret but there was a rumour that she had been born in Croydon, and was as English as Sarah Walker-Wilson.
Xan watched the dance, occasionally turning to me with a flash of
