won ten shillings from us. Judging by the final glance that the widow gave me from under her heavy eyelids, I had been weighed up and dismissed.
It was four in the morning when the Nubian major-domo ushered Xan and me out into the grey pre-dawn. I didn’t think about the time; I just wanted to get home again to the apartment and lie down with my lover.
Xan slept for just an hour, then slid away from me. ‘Go back to sleep. I’ll telephone you later,’ he whispered.
At seven thirty I was making myself a cup of tea and swallowing aspirin for my headache when Faria appeared in her cream silk robe, grimacing at the earliness of the hour. She did a little voluntary work for her mother, who with two other Cairo society ladies ran a charitable club for servicemen. This must have been one of Faria’s mornings for buttering toast or distributing tickets for the ENSA concert. She took the aspirin bottle out of my hand and shook two pills into her mouth, but she wasn’t too exhausted to ask questions about where I had been the night before.
I told her and she raised her eyebrows.
‘What did you think of Mrs Kimmig-Gertsch?’
‘Formidable.’
‘There is a rumour that she is a German spy.’
‘Why is Sandy running around with her?’
Faria gave me a look. ‘He is a British spy. Didn’t you know that?’
In spite of our headaches we both laughed. The idea of the two of them, an incongruous couple locked in a steely pas de deux of espionage and counter-espionage over cocktails and card tables, was irresistibly funny.
On my way out of the flat I met Sarah. She had a small suitcase in her hand and she told me that she was going to Beirut for the weekend. I said that I was pleased she was feeling better, ordered her to have a good time and kissed her goodbye. Then I walked to work with the hundreds of soldiers and civilians heading to their desks in GHQ.
It was eleven o’clock before I remembered my mother’s letter.
I had just made Roddy Boy a cup of tea and taken it in to him with two Huntley & Palmers custard creams placed in the saucer, which was exactly what he required every morning. I swallowed another aspirin with my own tea, then carefully slit open the thin folder.
My dear Iris,
I hope so much that you are well and that the heat has not been too disagreeable. By the time this reaches you there should be some relief from it.
During all my father’s Middle Eastern and African postings my mother had suffered badly from the heat. She had thin, pale skin lightly dusted with tiny freckles and hair the colour of unripened apricots, and she lived in huge hats and layers of muslin veiling and linen drapes. Then in the mid thirties they were posted to Finland, and in the middle of the first harsh winter there she developed bronchial pneumonia and nearly died. The first I heard of it was when my housemistress at school called me into her study and told me that it had been touch and go, but the doctors were now almost certain that she would pull through.
I begged them to let me go straight to Helsinki but everyone including my father declared that would not be necessary, and so it had turned out.
After that, though, my mother’s health was always fragile.
There is so little news to tell you, darling. I had a nasty cold that lingered stupidly on and on, but now I am quite well and I have been doing a little work in the garden. The day lilies were quite heavenly this year, I so wish you could have seen them.
There followed some details about our cats, and the neighbours, then about the shortages.
No eggs or sugar, and butter and meat hardly exist. Your father and I don’t find it so bad but it is very hard for young families like Evie’s.
Evie was the much younger wife of my father’s younger brother, who was away on active service. She had three children under six and had brought them down to live in a little house in the same village as my parents.
Michael and Eleanor are still in London, I don’t know how on earth they manage but of course Michael’s job keeps him there. Every night the bombs, and the blackout all the time, and everyone so careworn and anxious and exhausted.
Eleanor was my mother’s oldest friend and her husband was something important in the Ministry of Supply. My mother was not an ambitious letter writer and didn’t go in either for elaborate descriptions or – of course not – complaints, but these sparse words conjured up for me a London disfigured with smoke and rubble, trembling under the Blitz and yet still populated by determined people who were quietly and bravely doing their best. In Cairo, too much rich food and drink was taken for granted, we danced in frocks run up by local dressmakers and congratulated ourselves on being thrifty, and bought our silk stockings over the counter in Cicurel’s. This contrast made me feel my champagne headache even more sharply.
My mother signed off, as she always did,
God bless, darling. From your loving Ma
I checked the date before I refolded the blue paper. The letter had been written six weeks earlier and had come by ship the long way, round the Cape and through the Suez Canal to Port Said, the same way that I had travelled out to Cairo myself more than six months ago. I finished my tea and biscuits, and resumed typing.
It was a long day. When I emerged at eight o’clock there was the usual crowd of boyfriends and hopefuls waiting to meet their girls. To my delight, Xan’s black head was among them. I ran and he caught me in his arms and whirled me off the ground.
‘Come with me?’ he begged, after we had kissed.
I asked where, expecting that he would say Shepheard’s or another bar for a cocktail before I went home to change for dinner. But he tucked my hand under his arm and led me to the car, the same one in which Hassan had driven us out to Giza. He handed me into the passenger seat.
As we drove out into Qasr el Aini, Xan said, ‘I’m going to look in at the Scottish Hospital to see one of the men I brought in yesterday. Is that all right?’
‘Of course it is.’
The Scottish Military was just one of the places where wounded men were taken when the hospital trains and ambulance convoys finally reached Cairo. Xan parked the car and ran up the steps, and I hurried behind him. The hallways and stairwells were crowded with soldiers, bandaged and on crutches or in wheelchairs, and the wards we passed were crammed with long rows of beds. On the first floor we found a ward where most of the occupants lay prone, what was visible of their faces like sections of pale carved masks, as motionless as if they were already dead.
Xan stopped beside a bed in the middle of a row, then leaned over the man who lay in it. ‘Hullo, old chap. You look quite a bit better than you did this morning,’ I heard him say.
There was no answer. There could hardly have been, because the lower half of the soldier’s face and his neck were a white carapace of dressings. A tube led from where his mouth would have been. Xan sat down on the edge of the bed and talked in his ordinary voice, about how another soldier called Ridley had made it too, and how there was a cinema just down the road from the hospital that was air-conditioned, cool as a winter morning Xan said, with padded seats, and they would go and see a picture, the three of them, and have a gallon of iced beer afterwards.
