Iris and Ruby: A gripping, exotic historical novel. Rosie Thomas
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as if she were trying to catch fish. And there had been tears in her eyes.
Didn’t framed photographs and bits of china and books help you to recollect?
Ruby frowned, trailing her finger through the grey film on a wooden chest and recalling her grandmother’s words. She had said something about capturing what you can’t bear to be without. It was the word capture that resonated.
When she was small, Ruby distanced herself, she had felt all wrong. She couldn’t read and write as well as girls in her class, and she was endlessly in trouble. A way of making sense out of her confusion had been to collect and keep things. By piling them up in her room she could make herself bigger than they were, so even if what she collected represented only a strand, a tiny filament of the world’s appalling abundance, it had still seemed to offer a measure of control. But shells and beetles were inanimate. In that, in the end, collecting had disappointed her because the world was so swarming, inchoate and threateningly living, and it had bulged and gibbered and danced outside her bedroom window, making her boxes of beetles seem nothing more than childish detritus.
‘Growing up is so very hard to do.’ Jas had yawned when they talked about this.
But if you wanted to capture memories that threatened to swim away like fish? How would you do that?
An idea came to Ruby. It was a very neat, simple and pleasing idea that would solve her problem and at the same time be valuable to her grandmother. It was the perfect solution and she was so taken with its economy that she ran up the nearest of the house’s two flights of stairs towards the door that she had worked out must be Iris’s. She hovered outside for a moment, with her ear against one of the dark panels.
Then she tapped, very gently. When there was no answer she rapped more loudly.
‘Auntie? Mamdooh?’ Iris’s voice answered.
‘It’s me. Ruby.’
There was a long silence. Then the voice, sounding much smaller, said, ‘You had better come in.’
She was sitting in the same low chair as last night. There were pillows behind her head, a rug over her knees. Ruby read bewilderment in her face.
She stooped down beside the chair and put her hand over Iris’s thin, dry one.
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘No.’
‘I went shopping with Mamdooh. I think I got in the way of his routine, but it was really interesting. He told me there’s been a market there for seven hundred years.’
‘Yes.’
The monosyllable came out on a long breath. Iris was obviously almost too tired to speak and her fragility gave Ruby a hot, unwieldy feeling that she could only just identify as protectiveness. She wanted to scoop up her grandmother and hold her in her arms. But even as she chased this thought to its logical conclusion – Iris would not appreciate being handled like a rag doll – the old woman seemed to summon up some surprising inner strength. She hoisted herself upright against the cushions and fixed Ruby with a glare.
‘Have you spoken on the telephone to my daughter?’
Ruby quailed at this sudden direct challenge. ‘Um, no.’
‘You are disobedient.’
‘I didn’t say I was definitely …’
‘Why have you not done so?’
There was now the opportunity to make up some excuse, or to try a version of the truth. Ruby understood already that it would be advisable to aim for the truth, at least where her grandmother was concerned. She withdrew her hand and took a breath. ‘It’s really because I don’t want to go home. I was hoping you wouldn’t make me.’
Iris studied her. Her gaze was very sharp now, all the weariness and confusion seemed to have evaporated. ‘Why is that?’
‘It’s quite a long story. If I could stay here with you for a while, I could maybe tell you …’
‘That is not possible.’
Ruby bent her head. The sonorous, amplified chanting that had woken her this morning suddenly filled the room again. ‘What is that?’
‘The call to prayer.’
‘Oh. All right, I’ll ring Mum and tell her where I am and there’ll be a mega fuss and outcry, and I’ll go home. But if I could stay here, just for a few days or so, not a lifetime or a year or anything, then maybe I could help you.’
There was again the steady gaze. ‘This morning, with my shawl. You did a little … almost a dance. I liked that.’ Iris smiled at the remembered image. ‘Did I?’
‘How do you think you can help me?’
Now it was Ruby who made a small unconscious gesture with her hands, as if trying to catch darting fish. ‘You told me you are sometimes forgetful.’
‘Yes. So?’ Sharply.
‘I walked round the house this afternoon, and you don’t seem to have any belongings, the kind that help you to remember the past.’
‘I have lived a long life, in different places. Most of them primitive. I have learned that so many material possessions are just that, material.’
She was saying almost the same as Jas; it’s just stuff, baby. There were connections here, twining around herself and Iris and the old house and even Mamdooh, and Nafouz and his brother, and the old men in the café. Ruby wanted to stay, more than she had wanted anything in a long time.
‘Go on.’
‘I thought, I wondered, if you told me what you want to … to capture, maybe I could be the keeper of it for you. I could be the collector of your memories. I could write them down, even. I could be your am … what’s the word?’
‘Amanuensis.’
Ruby’s pale face had been animated, but now a heavy mask descended. She turned her head and looked out of the corner of her eyes. Iris hadn’t seen her look sullen before.
‘Not that, maybe. I’m dyslexic, you know. Bit of a drawback.’
‘Are you?’
‘It’s not the same as being thick. But sometimes it might as well be. To all intents and purposes.’
‘Thank you for making that clear. You don’t seem thick to me.’
‘But maybe we could tape-record you? Like an oral history project. We did one at school, with the old ladies from the drop-in centre, about the Blitz.’
Iris laughed at that. Her hands loosened in her lap, her face lost its taut lines and her eyes shone. Ruby suddenly saw a young girl in her, and she beamed back, pleased with the effect her company was having.
‘How useful to have previous experience.’
‘I didn’t mean to compare you.’
‘Why not? I remember the Blitz. The beginning of it, anyway. Then I came out here, to Cairo, to work.’
‘Did you? How come?’
‘That’s the beginning of another long story.’
They looked at each other then, as the last notes of the muezzin crackled and died away.
It was Iris who finally broke the silence: ‘Go and talk to your mother. You may use my telephone, in the room through there. And when you have finished I will speak to her myself.’
Ruby stood up and went through the interconnecting door to Iris’s bedroom. It was very bare, containing nothing more than a bed swathed in white curtains and a couple of wooden chests. A telephone stood on the table on one side of the bed, and on the other there actually was a framed photograph of a man and a woman. Managing not to stare at it, she walked deliberately round to the opposite side and picked