the evening to the utmost. He clapped Elvira to the last rippling bow, then kept up a flow of talk that made me laugh so much that I forgot the day. That was his intention for both of us.
By 1 a.m. the club was a hot, smoky mass of people who had come in from dinners and other more sedate parties. Xan and I shuffled in the crowd packed onto the tiny dance floor. I spotted Sandy Allardyce at a table with a handsome much older woman. She fitted a cigarette into a long holder and as he lit it for her her heavily ringed fingers rested on the sleeve of his coat.
‘Who is that with Sandy?’ I murmured in Xan’s ear.
‘Haven’t you met her? That’s Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch. She is Swiss, or claims to be. A widow. Her husband was in armaments, I believe.’
‘What does she do in Cairo?’
‘Oh, she lives here. She has a lovely house in the old city, right beside the al-Azhar mosque.’
‘And what is she doing with Sandy?’
Xan grinned.
There was a small commotion in the crowd at my shoulder and a girl’s loud laughter. I turned in Xan’s arms and saw Betty Hopwood. She had fallen over and was now being helped to her feet by her partner, who was one of Jessie’s fellow Cherry Pickers. Betty caught sight of me, tottered back to the more or less vertical on her high heels and waved extravagantly.
‘Cooeee, Iris. Hello, Xan. Come and join us.’
Betty was an immensely tall South African girl with cotton-ball white-blonde hair. She was an ambulance driver with the Motorised Transport Corps. After these women drivers had worked five consecutive days of twenty-four-hour shifts meeting ambulance trains and transporting wounded men, they were entitled to one precious day off. And all they wanted on that day, after they had slept and been to the hairdresser’s, was to cram in as much fun as possible. Xan and I found ourselves being hustled to Betty’s table where our glasses were refilled with whisky. The Cherry Picker Major winked at Xan.
‘What a scream,’ Betty yelled at me. ‘Look at my dress.’
She was wearing a tight sheath of silver lamé and she swivelled to show me the back of it where a long rent in the fabric was roughly fastened with safety pins. The MTC girls were required to live in barracks, and as late passes were impossible to obtain they were all experts at breaking and entering.
‘I hitched my frock up under my khaki, but the barbed wire came down so low that I had to take off my coat to squirm underneath and then rrrrip!’
Betty found this so funny that we all dissolved into laughter in sympathy with her. Another bottle of local whisky materialised on the table. While the men were talking Betty leaned over and rested a hot hand on my arm. ‘He’s rather heaven, isn’t he?’
I looked in slight surprise at the Major, but Betty nudged me sharply.
‘No, I mean your Captain Molyneux.’
‘Yes, he is,’ was all I could think of to say.
Those endless hot, scented Cairo nights. The men never wanted the parties to end. For them, going to sleep just meant that the desert was one day closer. Betty and I and all the women we knew had learned to keep dancing and laughing long past the moment when we should have dropped with exhaustion.
At 2 a.m., when we emerged from Zazie’s, the night air was full of the reedy smell of the Nile. Taxi and caleche drivers jostled for a fare. My head spun and I leaned on Xan’s arm, watching the reflections of lights swaying in the black water. We were now part of a big, laughing group of people that contained Sandy Allardyce and his widowed lady, and it soon became apparent that we were heading back to the widow’s house to continue the party. Betty and the Major and Xan and I squeezed up in the back of a taxi and we sped through the dark streets. When we stepped out again I looked up and saw three fine minarets like black needles against the stars.
We streamed up some worn stone steps, following behind Sandy and Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch. An anonymous door in a blank wall swung open and an immense Nubian in a snow-white galabiyeh with a royal-blue sash bowed to us as we marched in.
Xan had been right, the house was beautiful.
Most of the rich people’s houses I had visited in Cairo belonged to people like Faria’s family, or to British and French hostesses like Lady Gibson. They tended either to be decorated with heavy, dark family antiques, or to be theatrically done up in the modern style with white carpets and grand pianos and too much Venetian glass. But Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch’s house was left to speak for itself.
It was very old. The windows were set in deep embrasures that revealed the thickness of the walls, and the stone floors were gently hollowed by centuries of slippered footfalls. We were shown by bowing servants into a grand double-height hall, panelled in wood. Between the arched roof beams, the ceiling was painted dark blue with silver and gold suns and moons and signs of the Zodiac scattered across it. A huge wrought-metal and crimson glass lamp in the Moorish style hung on chains from the central boss of the roof. Way above our heads a gallery circled the upper part of the hall, with exquisitely carved and pierced hinged wooden screens that would have shielded the women of the household from the eyes of male visitors. The room was simply furnished with low carved tables and divans piled with kelims and embroidered velvet cushions.
The party spread itself out and settled on the cushions, with Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch sitting in a slightly higher chair at the end of the room. Someone found a gramophone behind a door in the panelling and put on a recording of a plaintive Arabic love song that rose and fell as a background to the talk and laughter. The servants brought in silver pots of mint tea and little brass cylinders of Turkish coffee, and set them out beside crystal decanters of whisky and brandy.
Sandy led me across to Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch and formally introduced me.
‘How do you do, Miss Black?’
She held out her hand for me to shake, the diamond and sapphire rings cold and sharp against my fingers. In perfect English with a heavy Swiss-German accent she told me that I was very welcome and I must make myself at home in her house.
Her eyes were hooded, but her gaze was very sharp and quick. I didn’t think Sandy’s friend missed much.
I thanked her and went back to my seat next to Xan.
After a while, I wandered out of the room in search of a bathroom. None of the servants was in sight so I chose a likely doorway, but found that it led out into a little loggia that gave in turn onto a courtyard garden. There was a scent of flowers and damp earth, and the sound of trickling water. By the light from the open doorway behind me I could just see the turquoise and emerald tiles lining the walls. Above was a quadrilateral of dark velvet sky, and the triple towers of the mosque. It was the most perfect and peaceful little garden I had ever seen.
I stood there, admiring and – yes – coveting it, until one of the servants coughed discreetly behind me and asked in Arabic if I was in need of anything. I murmured my request and was shown the way.
When I returned to the party, cards had been brought out. Xan and I were commanded to make up a four for bridge with Sandy and our hostess.
My head was swimming with champagne followed by too much whisky, and I wanted to go to bed with Xan much more than I wanted to play any card game, let alone bridge. As we played I answered gently probing questions about what I did, who I was acquainted with in Cairo. I didn’t
