Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance. Rosie Thomas
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the disappointing jumble inside. Among brittle newspapers and tattered books here were some playing cards and a box of dice, a couple of tarnished metal cups, a big bunch of keys and a brown envelope. There was a musty smell of forgotten times.
‘Can you carry it upstairs, or is it too heavy?’ Iris asked, turning her face up to Mamdooh.
‘I can carry,’ he said at once.
Mamdooh put the box on a low wooden table in Iris’s sitting room and closed the shutters, then turned to see that Iris was already burrowing through the contents. He gave Ruby a look that suggested she was responsible for all this disruption and backed out through the door.
Ruby settled herself among the cushions on the divan and picked up the manila envelope. A handful of curling black-and-white snapshots fell out and she examined them eagerly. This was more like it. They weren’t very interesting, though. In one, a group of white men stood in front of a low mud-brick building. In another some black men were putting a roof on what looked like the same building. In a third, two men wearing long baggy shorts with knee-length socks were shaking hands. Ruby looked a little more carefully at a picture of a young Iris in a cotton sundress. She was sitting on a low wall in front of some stone carvings with a man in an open-necked shirt. The skirt of her dress billowed over his knee, not quite hiding their linked hands.
‘Who’s this?’ Ruby asked.
‘That’s the Trevi Fountain. In Rome.’
‘Who is he?’
‘His name is Doctor Salvatore Andreotti. We worked together many years ago on a medical project in Africa.’
‘Just good friends.’ Ruby smirked.
Iris glanced up from her excavations in the box. ‘We were lovers for a time.’
‘Oh. Right. Were you? Um, what are all these others?’
‘Let me have a look. That is Nyasaland in, I suppose, nineteen fifty-eight. That building is a clinic, and those two men are the district commissioner and the regional medical director. I worked in the clinic for five, maybe six years.’
‘Lesley was four. She told me.’
Iris collected up the scattered pack of cards, snapped them with a practised hand. ‘Yes. She was born in fifty-four.’
Ruby had heard Lesley talk about how she was brought up by her father and nannies, while her mother ‘looked after black kids in Africa’. When she mentioned her childhood, which wasn’t very often, Lesley tended to look brave and cheerful.
Ruby felt suddenly curious about an aspect of her family history that had never interested her before. ‘Why did you go to work in Africa when you had a husband and a daughter in England?’
‘It was my job,’ Iris said. ‘A job that I felt very privileged to have. And I believe that I was good at it.’
‘But didn’t you miss them?’
‘I had home leave. And once she was old enough Lesley would come out to stay with me in the school holidays.’
‘She told me about that. She said her friends would be going to like Cornwall, or maybe Brittany, while she would have to make this huge journey with about three changes of plane and at the end there would be a bush village and terrible heat and bugs, and not much to do.’
‘That sounds like it, yes.’
It occurred to Ruby then that there was an unbending quality about Iris that being old hadn’t mellowed at all. She would always have been like this. Uncompromising, was that the word?
‘You remember everything,’ Ruby said, softly but accusingly.
Iris seemed to have found whatever it was she had been looking for in the depths of the tin box. She pounced and her fingers closed over something. Then she lifted her head and Ruby saw the distant expression that meant she was looking inside herself. Her pale blue eyes were foggy.
‘Do I?’
‘Nyasaland, the what’ sit fountain, men and dates, everything.’
Now Ruby saw in her grandmother’s face the grey shadow of fear.
‘Those things are only … Like so many plain cups or plates, on shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don’t matter, like what I remember of those photographs. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to pieces, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity.
‘Then you reach for a cup or a bowl that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.
‘That’s the way the important memory feels, the one you don’t want to lose. And it’s the fragment of your past that explains why you have lived your life the way you have done.’
When she spoke again Iris’s voice had sunk so low that Ruby could hardly hear her. ‘And made the mistakes that you have made. Do you understand any of this?’
Ruby hesitated. ‘A little. Maybe.’
‘You are very young. There’s not much on your shelves and you don’t know what’s going to be precious. It’s not until you’re old that you find yourself hugging the bowl all day long. Afraid to put it down.’
That’s what she’s doing, Ruby thought, when she goes into a trance and doesn’t hear what you’re saying to her.
She’s holding on to the precious bowl, in case it’s not there the next time she goes to look for it.
‘Yes,’ Iris said to herself. Her voice was no more than a whisper now.
Ruby suddenly stood up. She left the room, and Iris seemed too wrapped in her own reverie even to notice. Her head lifted in surprise when Ruby came noisily back, as if she had actually forgotten she had ever been there.
Ruby held out the framed photograph that she had taken from its place beside Iris’s bed. ‘Who is this?’
She was half expecting another reprimand or at least an evasion, because whoever he was, the man in the photograph was important. Most definitely he wasn’t Iris’s husband, Ruby’s grandfather Gordon.
Instead, something remarkable happened. Iris’s face completely changed. When she thought about it later Ruby described it to herself as melting. All the little lines round her grandmother’s mouth loosened, and the fog in her eyes vanished and left them clear blue and as sharp as a girl’s. Warm colour swelled under her crêpey skin and flushed her throat as she held out one hand for the picture. The other fist was still closed round whatever she had taken from the tin box.
Very carefully, so that there was no chance of either of them letting it fall, Ruby passed the photograph to her. Iris gazed down into the man’s face.
A long minute passed.
‘Who?’ Ruby persisted.
‘His name?’
‘Yes, you could start by telling me his name.’
Iris said nothing.
‘Do you want me to help?’
Instead of answering Iris opened her hand, the one that didn’t hold the picture. In the palm lay a toy ship carved from some dark wood. On the side a white numeral 1 was painted.
‘The first of a thousand ships.’ Iris smiled. Now even her voice sounded softer and younger, with the vinegary snap gone out of it.
Ruby had no idea what she was talking about. She knelt down and examined the ship as it lay in her grandmother’s palm. It was old, but it didn’t look remarkable. She picked it up and placed it carefully on the