I looked at the chipped cream paint on the metal-framed bed, and the floor that was made of mottled stone with pink and brown slabs in it like a slice of veal-and-ham pie. There was a strong, sweetish smell in the ward with a whiff of suppuration in it. At the far end of the line of beds a man began moaning, a sound that rose and fell, and seemed to drown out the rattle of metal trolleys and the swish of footsteps.
Sweat broke coldly on my forehead. It occurred to me that I was going to faint, or maybe to vomit.
I walked quickly away, heading down the ward without any idea where. I passed several nurses who were busy with dressings trays, and another who was sitting at a man’s bedside. She was holding a cigarette to his ragged mouth and he was inhaling as if the smoke were life itself. I pushed blindly through a pair of swing doors into a sluice room, past a row of sinks and into a lavatory cubicle.
When I came out again, wiping my face with my handkerchief, the cigarette nurse was there rinsing out a kidney bowl at one of the sinks. Her cuffed sleeves revealed pale arms and reddened hands with prominent wrist bones.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Thank you.’ What I felt now was shame for having responded like a swooning Victorian maiden to the spectacle of other people’s suffering.
The nurse briskly set down her metal bowl, took a glass out of a cupboard and poured water from a jug. She handed the glass to me and I sipped carefully from it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said pointlessly. I meant that I was sorry for taking up her attention when there were so many demands beyond the swing doors.
To my surprise she smiled.
‘It can take people that way at first. You get used to it, though.’ Her voice was attractive, with a distinct Scottish burr. She was a trained nurse, not a VAD like some of my friends, with a crested badge to prove it pinned on her apron next to her watch. ‘Do you want to sit down for a bit? Your friend’s still talking to Corporal Noake.’
The sluice room was relatively cool. Water groaned in the pipes and dripped from the faucets.
‘I’m fine. I will be, in a minute.’
‘I’ve seen you around town,’ the nurse said. She was taking packages of dressings out of a box and talking to me over her shoulder.
‘Me? How come?’
She laughed. ‘You’re the kind of person people do notice.’
I couldn’t remember having seen the nurse at the Gezira Club or Groppi’s, or dancing at Zazie’s. Her starched, folded cap came down low over her forehead and hid her hair.
She held out her hand, the other still clutching a pack of bandages.
‘I’m Ruth Macnamara.’
‘Iris Black.’
We shook.
‘If you’re sure you’re all right, I’d better get back to work. Sister’s got a down on me. See you around, eh?’
‘Yes,’ I said to her departing back. ‘I hope so.’
I walked slowly back up the ward. Xan was still talking to his corporal. I went round to the other side of the bed and looked down into the soldier’s eyes.
‘Hullo, there. I’m Iris, Xan’s friend.’
I didn’t know how much was left of the lower part of his face but the man himself was still there. His eyes flickered, moved, then fixed on mine. Just perceptibly, he nodded. I took his hand and sandwiched it between my two and he clung to me with his eyes.
After a minute, Xan said easily, ‘We’ll be getting along now, Noake. You get some sleep. I’ll look in again tomorrow, if they haven’t packed us off by then.’
We left him among the other carved men.
When we reached the car again we sat and lit cigarettes and stared out at the darkening sky.
‘Will you really be going tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know for sure. It won’t be long, though. There’s the big push coming.’
We all knew that. The Germans and Italians knew it too, and were waiting.
‘What happened to Corporal Noake, exactly?’
‘He was shot in the neck and jaw. His lower jawbone was partly blown away.’
‘Poor man.’
‘He was luckier than Reggie Burke,’ Xan said grimly.
‘Yes.’
We finished our cigarettes and the last of the daylight drained out of the western horizon as if the desert sand were drinking it up.
‘Where would you like to have dinner?’
I didn’t want food, or whisky or dancing. I wanted Xan, and Xan safe, and the end of the war.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
He leaned forward at once to the ignition and we drove back through the Cairo streets to Garden City.
‘Will you?’ Xan repeated.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to answer, just that happiness momentarily flooded my throat and turned me mute. White light swelled behind my eyes, spilling inside my skull and half blinding me.
We were reclining on a rug in the shade of a tree, and the high sun shining through the chinks in the leaves made them black as carved ebony. We had been watching a polo match. As well as Xan’s low voice I could hear shouting and ponies’ hooves drumming on the turf and then the sharp crack of a stick on the ball.
I turned my dazzled face to his. His head was propped on one hand and he leaned over me, waiting.
‘Yes,’ I managed to say. ‘Yes, yes, yes. I will. More than anything. For ever and ever.’
So, incoherently, I promised to marry Xan Molyneux. The leaves and the chinks of light and all the rest of the world were blotted out as he lowered his head and kissed me.
Jessie James was the first person we told. He came to meet us still in his white breeches and shirt soaked with sweat from the match, stalking over the grass with his face flushed with exertion and success.
‘Did you see that?’ he called.
‘No,’ Xan said bluntly.
‘But it was the very best goal I’ve ever scored. What kind of friend are you, Molyneux?’
‘A very happy one, you oaf. Iris says she’ll marry me. Can you believe that?’
Jessie
